Search results

We address an interesting case – the predictability of excess US asset returns from macroeconomic factors within a flexible regime-switching VAR framework – in which the presence of regimes may lead to superior forecasting performance from forecast combinations. After documenting that forecast combinations provide gains in predictive accuracy and that these gains are statistically significant, we show that forecast combinations may substantially improve portfolio selection. We find that the best-performing forecast combinations are those that either avoid estimating the pooling weights or that minimize the need for estimation. In practice, we report that the best-performing combination schemes are based on the principle of relative past forecasting performance. The economic gains from combining forecasts in portfolio management applications appear to be large, stable over time, and robust to the introduction of realistic transaction costs.

In 2009 and 2010, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) adopted new accounting standards for nonprofit mergers and acquisitions. The new accounting standards are an example of the constitutive role accounting can play in how people think about economic events, since the FASB defined a new concept (the “inherent contribution”) and required valuation of intangible assets that were often previously unrecognized.

The FASB’s stated goals included minimizing “pooling” accounting and maximizing transparency regarding fair value information, acquired identifiable intangible assets, and the relation between consideration paid and the fair values of identifiable assets acquired. The FASB expected many combinations would involve little or no consideration. It also expressed concern that some organizations would undervalue assets acquired, especially intangible assets.

For a sample of 2012–2017 nonprofit hospital combinations, we find general agreement with the FASB’s expectations. Almost all combinations were accounted for as acquisitions, not mergers, even though there was frequently no consideration paid. More acquirers recorded “inherent contributions” than goodwill, because the net fair value of the acquired hospital’s identifiable assets exceeded the consideration paid. Acquirers ascribed value to assets, such as intangible assets, that would have gone unreported under the prior accounting rules, although lower levels of intangible assets were recognized in nonprofit business combinations, relative to total non-goodwill assets acquired, than in public companies’ acquisitions.

The authors develop a novel forecast combination approach based on the order statistics of individual predictability from panel data forecasts. To this end, the authors define the notion of forecast depth, which provides a ranking among different forecasts based on their normalized forecast errors during the training period. The forecast combination is in the form of a depth-weighted trimmed mean. The authors derive the limiting distribution of the depth-weighted forecast combination, based on which the authors can readily construct prediction intervals. Using this novel forecast combination, the authors predict the national level of new COVID-19 cases in the United States and compare it with other approaches including the ensemble forecast from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The authors find that the depth-weighted forecast combination yields more accurate and robust predictions compared with other popular forecast combinations and reports much narrower prediction intervals.

Our meta-analysis of 92 international samples, with a total sample size of 8,491, demonstrates that firms following internationalization strategies by means of external growth modes can realize a significant positive performance impact on firm performance (r=0.156). This performance effect is significantly stronger than for firms using external growth strategies in their home country (117 samples, with a total sample size of 29,998, r=0.077). Moderating effects are found for the type of international business combination (mergers and acquisitions versus alliance) and the internationalizing firm's region of origin, whereas the relatedness of the firms and the region entered show no moderating impact.

This paper deals with the organizing of interactive product development. Developing products in interaction between firms may provide benefits in terms of specialization, increased innovation, and possibilities to perform development activities in parallel. However, the differentiation of product development among a number of firms also implies that various dependencies need to be dealt with across firm boundaries. How dependencies may be dealt with across firms is related to how product development is organized. The purpose of the paper is to explore dependencies and how interactive product development may be organized with regard to these dependencies.

The analytical framework is based on the industrial network approach, and deals with the development of products in terms of adaptation and combination of heterogeneous resources. There are dependencies between resources, that is, they are embedded, implying that no resource can be developed in isolation. The characteristics of and dependencies related to four main categories of resources (products, production facilities, business units and business relationships) provide a basis for analyzing the organizing of interactive product development.

Three in-depth case studies are used to explore the organizing of interactive product development with regard to dependencies. The first two cases are based on the development of the electrical system and the seats for Volvo’s large car platform (P2), performed in interaction with Delphi and Lear respectively. The third case is based on the interaction between Scania and Dayco/DFC Tech for the development of various pipes and hoses for a new truck model.

The analysis is focused on what different dependencies the firms considered and dealt with, and how product development was organized with regard to these dependencies. It is concluded that there is a complex and dynamic pattern of dependencies that reaches far beyond the developed product as well as beyond individual business units. To deal with these dependencies, development may be organized in teams where several business units are represented. This enables interaction between different business units’ resource collections, which is important for resource adaptation as well as for innovation. The delimiting and relating functions of the team boundary are elaborated upon and it is argued that also teams may be regarded as actors. It is also concluded that a modular product structure may entail a modular organization with regard to the teams, though, interaction between business units and teams is needed. A strong connection between the technical structure and the organizational structure is identified and it is concluded that policies regarding the technical structure (e.g. concerning “carry-over”) cannot be separated from the management of the organizational structure (e.g. the supplier structure). The organizing of product development is in itself a complex and dynamic task that needs to be subject to interaction between business units.

Under which conditions do social movements receive extensive attention from the mainstream news media? We develop an institutional mediation model that argues that combinations of the news-heightening characteristics of movements, including their disruptive capacities, organizational resources, and political orientation, and political contexts, including partisan regimes and benefiting from national policies, bring extensive attention to movements. It also holds that investigations will draw extensive media attention to movements, and those that have achieved prominence in the news will remain prominent under specific conditions. We appraise these combinational arguments by examining 29 social movements across 100 years in four national newspapers using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Researchers typically use QCA to study the consequences of movements when they hypothesize outcomes to result from multiple combinations of conditions. This raises our second main question: How should scholars best address combinational hypotheses using QCA? Here we employ Venn diagrams to identify and illustrate key analytical issues and anomalies, including constrained diversity in observational data, empirical instances when combinations of conditions do not produce the expected outcome, and instances when unexpected combinations of conditions produce a consistent result. We also demonstrate the value of broad comparisons across movements and over time in these analyses.

Scanning both the academic and popular business literature of the last 40 years puzzles the alert reader. The variety of prescriptions of how to be successful (effective, performing, etc.) 1 Organizational performance, organizational success and organizational effectiveness will be used interchangeably throughout this paper.1 in business is hardly comprehensible: “Being close to the customer,” Total Quality Management, corporate social responsibility, shareholder value maximization, efficient consumer response, management reward systems or employee involvement programs are but a few of the slogans introduced as means to increase organizational effectiveness. Management scholars have made little effort to integrate the various performance-enhancing strategies or to assess them in an orderly manner.

This study classifies organizational strategies by the importance each strategy attaches to different constituencies in the firm’s environment. A number of researchers divide an organization’s environment into various constituency groups and argue that these groups constitute – as providers and recipients of resources – the basis for organizational survival and well-being. Some theoretical schools argue for the foremost importance of responsiveness to certain constituencies while stakeholder theory calls for a – situation-contingent – balance in these responsiveness levels. Given that maximum responsiveness levels to different groups may be limited by an organization’s resource endowment or even counterbalanced, the need exists for a concurrent assessment of these competing claims by jointly evaluating the effect of the respective behaviors towards constituencies on performance. Thus, this study investigates the competing merits of implementing alternative business philosophies (e.g. balanced versus focused responsiveness to constituencies). Such a concurrent assessment provides a “critical test” of multiple, opposing theories rather than testing the merits of one theory (Carlsmith, Ellsworth & Aronson, 1976).

In the high tolerance level applied for this study (be among the top 80% of the industry) only a handful of organizations managed to sustain such a balanced strategy over the whole observation period. Continuously monitoring stakeholder demands and crafting suitable responsiveness strategies must therefore be a focus of successful business strategies. While such behavior may not be a sufficient explanation for organizational success, it certainly is a necessary one.

This chapter explores how hybrid organizations navigate the challenges (and opportunities) associated with advancing unconventional logic combinations. It draws from a study of the 180-year history of sheltered workshops in the United States. Sheltered workshops are hybrids that combine social and commercial logics to provide gainful employment to individuals with disabilities. This chapter theorizes a connection between the governance system – that is, country-based social norms and regulatory settlements – framing hybrids and the agency that allows them the discretion required to advance unconventional combinations. It introduces the term hybrid agency to describe this connection and identifies four types: upstream, midstream, downstream, and crosscurrent. Upstream agency draws from the entrepreneurial vision of charismatic founders. It allows hybrids the discretion to advance unconventional logic combinations in unsupportive times, but it also requires them to observe certain dominant cultural norms. Midstream agency draws from hybrids’ adaptation and advocacy skills and resources in periods of historical change. It allows access to resources and legitimacy for unconventional combinations. Downstream agency draws from organizational slack possible in supportive times. Slack eases tensions and tradeoffs between conflicting logics but may also fuel mission drift. Finally, crosscurrent agency also draws from hybrids’ adaptation and advocacy skills and resources. It provides hybrids with the opportunity to grapple with challenges in periods of contestation.

Several official institutions (NBER, OECD, CEPR, and others) provide business cycle chronologies with lags ranging from three months to several years. In this paper, we propose a Markov-switching dynamic factor model that allows for a more timely estimation of turning points. We apply one-step and two-step estimation approaches to French data and compare their performance. One-step maximum likelihood estimation is confined to relatively small data sets, whereas two-step approach that uses principal components can accommodate much bigger information sets. We find that both methods give qualitatively similar results and agree with the OECD dating of recessions on a sample of monthly data covering the period 1993–2014. The two-step method is more precise in determining the beginnings and ends of recessions as given by the OECD. Both methods indicate additional downturns in the French economy that were too short to enter the OECD chronology.