Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Making Cost Reductions Stick, Mark E. Pickering

Mark E Pickering

In tough economic times it is important to keep control of costs. Inappropriate and poorly executed cost reduction exercises can destroy competitive advantage and result in costs creeping back. This article outlines common cost reduction pitfalls and examines four popular approaches to cost reduction.

European Banking After The Euro: Progress And Problems, William Templeton, Robert Clark

William K. Templeton

Note: full-text not available due to publisher restrictions. Link takes you to an external site where you can locate the article at your local library.

Discusses the changes in European banking since the introduction of the euro, providing statistics on mergers and acquisitions (mostly domestic) and their effects on assets both inside and outside the eurozone. Considers the factors which make cross-border mergers less attractive, the effect of consolidation on costs, and the impact of the euro on foreign exchange earnings, debt markets and cash management systems. Concludes that although banks are becoming more competitive with each other and with …

Chaos In Oil Prices? Evidence From Futures Markets, Bahram Adrangi, Arjun Chatrath, Kathy Dhanda

Kathy K Dhanda

No abstract provided.

The Political Economy Of Distress In East Asian Financial Institutions, Paola Bongini, Stijn Claessens, Giovanni Ferri

Paola Bongini

The 1997±1999 East Asian crisis is an interesting case for studying the determinants of distress and closure of ®nancial institutions. Of a sample of 283 ®nancial institutions from Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand, 120 experienced distress, and by July 1999, 38 were closed. We ®nd that traditional, CAMEL-type ®nancial data for 1996 help predict distress and closure. ``Connections''Ðwith industrial groups or in¯uential familiesÐincreased the likelihood of distress, however, suggesting that supervisors had granted selective prior forbearance from prudential regulations. Since closure was more, not less, likely with connections, the closure processes themselves appear transparent. We also ®nd evidence …

Waves And Persistence In Merger And Acquisition Activity, Atreya Chakraborty

Atreya Chakraborty

Markov regime-switching and sine-wave models have been used to capture the apparent wave-like behavior in aggregate U.S. merger and acquisition (M and A) activity. In this paper we offer an alternative characterization of the dynamic structure in M and A activity as a strongly dependent or long-memory process.

Mahatma Gandhi’S Legacy: Liberation Through Non-Violence, Mohan Limaye

Mohan Limaye

These pages are the notes of a one-hour talk (followed by a 20-minute Q and A period) I gave at Boise State University during a Martin Luther King weeklong anniversary celebration in 2001 (later slightly revised). The last section (about a controversy in India) was not a part of my speech; I added it later on.

Takeover Defenses And Dilution: A Welfare Analysis, Atreya Chakraborty

Atreya Chakraborty

Existing theory suggests that, in an unregulated market for corporate control, the level of takeovers is suboptimal because shareholders do not receive the full benefit from them. However, existing theory neglects that the threat of takeover may divert managerial effort from productive to defensive activities. This paper shows that, when this is considered, takeovers may, in fact, be excessive.

An Evaluation Of Financial Globalisation Under Fund-Manager Capitalism: The Case Of The Uk Unit Trust Industry', Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

Drawing upon evidence from the UK unit trust industry, this paper evaluates the extent and nature of financial globalisation. It finds that despite this rapidly growing and prominent form of fund-manager capitalism operating with increasingly mobile capital in a more inter-connected de-regulated world, this does not signal the advent of homeless capital and the end of geography.