The Find: According to one professor, the secret sauce that sets today's most innovative companies apart has one key ingredient: play. The Source: A podcast from the London Business School. The Takeaway: Assistant professor of organizational behavior Babis Mainemelis uses a London Business School...
The Find: One professor thinks you don't need a good reason to reorganize your departments -- a reshuffle is an end unto itself. The Source: The "Random Rantings" blog of Freek Vermeulen, Associate Professor of Strategic & International Management at the London Business School. ...
London Business School: Re-org is its Own RewardNeither NorI don't think it's lunacy, if it's done in an educated, planned manner. Unhappy workers is the biggest reason for lack of productivity. It'd be a good idea to at least let them know THEY are not the reason, that it is,...
Governments are known for procrastinating when it comes to resolving painful policy problems. Whatever the political motives for waiting to decide, procrastination distorts economic decisions relative to what would arise with early policy resolution. In so doing, they engender excess burden. This paper posits, calibrates, and simulates a life cycle...
Money managers are rewarded for increasing the value of assets under management. This gives a manager an implicit incentive to exploit the well-documented positive fund-flows to relative-performance relationship by manipulating her risk exposure. The misaligned incentives create potentially significant deviations of the manager's policy from that desired by fund investors....
This paper explores the indirect inflationary mechanism allowed by loss leaders banning laws. In a double duopoly model where producers compete to sell differentiated products through differentiated retailers, the authors show that the ban paradoxically allows the use of floor prices, a per se banned vertical restraint. When they face...
The purpose of this paper is to comment on the challenges that Corporations find when deciding to setup an equity investment arm: Corporate Ventures CVs. This paper will focus on three different challenges, covering the reasons why Corporations decide initiate CVs, the main structural differences between CVs and Venture Capital...
Economic institutions set a framework within which businesses develop their strategies. Variations in institutions thus explain differences in the organizational forms. This applies in particular in emerging economies with institutional frameworks differ not only fundamentally from industrialized economies, but also vary greatly amongst each other. This paper investigate the impact...
"Outsourcing" is the process of transferring responsibility for the execution of any of a company's recurring internal activities or processes to another company. The outsourcing company ceases to use its own employees to undertake certain activities while continuing to use the results of those activities. This paper explains seven common...
The Resource-Based View of strategy RBV seeks to explain why some firms consistently outperform rivals in the same industry by acquiring a unique set of strategic assets or resources. The authors' suggest firms achieve competitive advantage through 'cognitive asymmetries' differences between dominant managerial mental models that lead rival management teams...
Working off ideas from his forthcoming book, Michael Payne paints a dramatic picture of the business turnaround of the Olympic Games by the International Olympic Committee IOC. Payne explores the IOC's use of corporate brand management as well as 8 key lessons involving leadership, fiscal discipline and, what he terms,...
We develop a theoretical model that relates a firm's capital-structure choice to the bankruptcy code under which it operates. We show that optimal capital-structure choices depend on not only the bankruptcy code but also the firm's asset-specificity: firms with high asset-specificity will use a higher degree of leverage under an...
Standard setters generally oppose capitalization of the cost of acquiring customers and enhancing their satisfaction due to uncertainty of future benefits. This paper studies the value relevance of customer relationship information. Using a comprehensive database of the wireless industry, a metrics of key performance indicators is compiled to measure customer...
This article investigates the foreign investment strategies in four emerging markets, their determinants, and their implications for the local economy and for public policy. The outcomes of FDI in terms of both corporate and social performance are highly dependent on how the operation is initially set-up. Entry strategies concern the...
This paper reports a study that examined this assertion more directly through surveying 95 corporate venture units across 3 continents (Europe, South East Asia and North America) and examining the association between their organizational structures, management practices and investment practices, and multiple measures of venture unit performance. Regression analyses found...
Hedge funds specify significant lockup periods; this paper investigates persistence in the performance of hedge funds using a multi-period framework in which the likelihood of observing persistence by chance is lower than that in the traditional two-period framework. Under the null hypothesis of no manager skill no persistence, the theoretical...
Poland is regarded as the country which has made the greatest progress following the economic liberalisation of Eastern Europe. This paper examines the strength of the relationship between the new Western context and the understanding of the methods which Polish enterprises need to address their current difficulties. The study was...
This paper investigates how bond dealers manage their core business risk with interest-rate futures and the extent to which market quality is affected by their selective risk taking. The paper observes that dealers use futures to take directional bets and to hedge the changes in their spot exposure. However, this...
This paper discusses the issue of how non-financial corporations should report the results of their use of derivative financial instruments. Using the recently issued SFAS 133 a framework, it introduces three possible accounting regimes (mark to market, mark to market hedge and deferral hedge) and characterizes the information provided to...
Hedge fund strategies typically generate option-like returns. Linear-factor models using benchmark asset indices have difficulty explaining them. This article shows how to model hedge fund returns by focusing on the popular "trend-following" strategy. It uses look back straddles to model trend-following strategies, and show that they can explain trend-following funds'...
