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This paper examines the effects of contract award announcements on the stock returns of successful grantees. Contract awards are identified using Lexis/Nexis and classified according to whether the grantor is another corporation or government body. The government grantors are further classified according to the type of government entity granting the contract. Four subsamples emerge: federal (non-military), military, municipal, and foreign. The results suggest that contract awards granted by foreign governments are more lucrative than contract awards granted by corporations or American governmental bodies. This finding endures even after controlling for potentially confounding factors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the stock market reactions at the time of new construction contract winning announcements to explore whether the managements made wise bidding decisions and thus create values.

A total of 813 new contracts awarded to publicly traded US construction firms for the years 2000 through 2009 are screened and these are analyzed by applying event study methodology. This paper estimates the effect of an event on stock market’s responses, using cumulative abnormal returns (CARs), and the CAR values are estimated for four types of windows: days 0 (i.e. the day of the event announcement), (−1, +1), (−2, +2), and (−3, +3). The market responses are further subdivided according to such variables as the project type, owner type, project location, work scope, and bidder size.

The results of this study show that the stock market did not curse contract winners by positively responding to the announcements of new contract awards. The sample firms’ market value, on average, is increased by 1.168 percent during the seven-day window period, and is highly significant. In addition, the followings are observed: first, the stock market tends to favor larger contracts over smaller ones; second, small firms’ events receive better market responses than those of large ones; and third, the level of returns varies considerably across the project types. Meanwhile, no statistical differences are observed in CARs for the owner type, work scope, and project location variables.

This study has several limitations. First, potential factors that may have effects on CAR could not be incorporated in the analysis, because a contract award announcement provides only limited information. Second, the level of consistency between stock market responses and the contract’s actual outcomes could not be assessed.

Wise bidding decision has critical implication considering the impact of a new contract award on a firm; a new contract increases the backlog of a firm while it may harm/improve the operating performance or decrease/increase the stockholders’ wealth. Although the overall success level of the current sample, in terms of CARs, is positive and significant, CAR values vary significantly depending on the window period and/or variables. Therefore, managements should exercise careful discretion in selecting a target project and arriving at a bidding decision.

While event study has been widespread for assessing the effect of numerous event types, project award received scarcely any attention. Moreover, it has widely been believed that cost/pricing and contract value are the primary sources for winners’ curse argument. Accordingly, this study can be considered as a seminal work assessing stock market responses to validate winners’ curse argument. This study contributes to the body of knowledge of decision-making discipline. In addition, from a strategic management perspective, the evidence and implications drawn from the analysis results will be valuable resources for bid or no-bid decision making in the project-based industry.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the nature of staff/employee (i.e. learning and teaching, curriculum support and administrative staff) perceptions, anxieties and worries about early merger change in the UK further education (FE) sector.

Survey data were collected from 128 out of 562 employees to examine perceptions of psychological contract (post-merger announcement) on an FE college in England. Paired t-tests were used to analyse quantitative data. Additionally, a content analysis of open-ended questions was incorporated as part of a combined methods survey evaluation approach for discussion and triangulation purposes.

Quantitative results from t-tests showed there had been a decrease in the perception of fulfilled obligations in nine of the ten areas of the psychological contract. Qualitative results indicated that communications, job security and uncertainty were common negative outcomes post-merger announcement. Implications for education managers from the case study include: a need for improved organizational communication; developing trust and mentorship for greater employee support, as well as; promoting further employee training and new opportunities for teamwork.

Psychological contract theories for evaluating organizational change are useful given the recent interest in sharing public services and institutional mergers in the UK. This research demonstrates the benefits of using psychological contract, as well as how to apply such an evaluation for understanding staff concerns.

The paper demonstrates a usable (psychological contract) survey evaluation approach for studying the impact of early merger change on staff in the FE, or higher education sectors in the UK (or elsewhere).

The purpose of this paper is to assess how sponsorships affect firm values in professional cycling. Both the effect of entering a sponsorship contract and reactions to good or bad news during the contract period are investigated. Doping scandals are used as examples of bad news and race wins as examples of good news.

The well-known event-study methodology of analyzing stock prices is used. In order to avoid unnecessary noise, the main emphasis is on short-term stock market effects.

The main original finding is a significant negative reaction to doping scandals within the sponsored team, indicating that the outcome of sponsoring agreements is important for investors. There are no significant stock market reactions to the announcement of sponsorships, hence sponsoring cycling teams in general are perceived as value neutral to the sponsor.

The paper encourages sponsors and cycling teams to focus on anti-doping measures as doping scandals are perceived as value destructive. This contradicts previous studies with smaller data samples. The negative impact of doping scandals outweighs the potential positive effects of winning cycling races.

In a recent article Aharony and Swary considered the synchronous nature of earnings and dividends announcements in examination of the information content of dividend hypothesis. They concluded that their results support the information content of dividends hypothesis—that announcements of changes in dividends provide information beyond that contained in quarterly earnings announcements. A shortcoming of the Aharony and Swary study is that it considers only dividend and earnings announcements that occur at least 11 trading days from each other. In fact, as their Table I indicates the majority of such pairs of announcements occur within ten days of each other. Further, approximately one‐half of their observations of earnings and dividends announcements are separated by at least 21 trading days (close to one calendar month). These considerations lead one to wonder how synchronous their announcements are and whether their results can be generalized to earnings and dividend announcements that actually occur in close proximity to each other.

Strategic alliances have a low success rate despite the profusion of literature on this topic in the last 20 years. To understand the factors that determine performance of partnership relations, the purpose of this paper is to study the roles of control and the strength of interorganizational ties in businesses ability to manage strategic alliances.

The authors have examined 10,377 partnership relations formed as part of strategic alliances to analyze the capacity of a business to manage its alliances. The authors built a structural equations model (PLS) based on observation of 4,242 alliances.

This research identifies two determinants of the success of alliance management. First, the impact of weak ties and strong ties is identical when the business does not control the alliance. Second, weak ties are a more effective means than strong ties when a business controls the alliance.

The main contribution of this study thus lies in our analysis of interorganizational relations and of their tangible impact on strategic trade-offs. The field of public procurement is particularly well-suited to evaluating this phenomenon, given the subtlety of alliances at play.

The legislation in the European Union (EU) regarding contracts to be awarded to third parties allows for a free choice by public agencies between the open and restricted procedure. Empirical evidence shows a high variance in the preference for one of the procedures exists between countries. This preference may be based on cultural phenomena only. Here we develop a quantitative model to calculate which procedure is the most economic. With insights from this model guidelines are given for an efficient policy regarding the choice for the open or restricted award procedure.

Signalling theory suggests how “strong” or “weak” the signal quality detected by a receiver (defined as signalling strength) is distorted by noisy factors (defined as noise). Although corporate cooperation signals are known to lead to receiver reaction, the effects of distortion factors on signal credibility are generally unexplored in signalling process. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

After analysing 264 contract announcements in 2013–2015 that befall publicly listed firms in China, the authors explore the signalling impact of contract value. the authors also incorporate the signalling noises, namely, signalling environment, external referents and other signallers, into the contracting context and investigate their effects on distorting the relationship between signal strength and receiver reaction.

Results indicate that firms’ contract-signing announcement conveys an effective signal to investors: the larger the contract scale is, the more investor reaction the firms experience. The signalling effects of contract scale on investor reaction are moderated by the three distorting factors.

The findings contribute to the signalling theory literature on the effects of signalling noise on receivers’ perception of signal observability.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of 51 sponsorship announcements upon the stock prices of firms sponsoring in Australia. The research examines the broader question of whether sponsorship has the potential to transcend cultural boundaries and contribute to financial performance in regional markets.

The methodology is based on the event study technique which is applied to the estimation of excess returns that arise in response to announcements of corporate sponsorship made by leading industrial stocks trading on the Australian Stock Exchange. Regressions examine whether the cost and duration of sponsorship signal information of importance to investors regarding the financial prospects of sponsoring firms.

A small, fleeting positive increase in wealth effects is observed indicating that economically, sponsorship expenditure in Australia is more or less value neutral. While investors appear indifferent to sponsorship cost, they value short‐term sponsorships of less than two years in particular.

Future research needs to examine the role of associated variables such as contract size and length, and the type and level of sponsorship investment.

For firms, the study indicates that sponsorship in smaller regional markets should be valued by investors especially when firms keep the duration of the sponsorship as short. As stock prices tend to rise briefly following sponsorship announcements, marketers should leverage sponsorships immediately to gain the attention of investors. For a regional market, short and sharp sponsorships appear to be the optimal approach.

This study empirically examines the impact of announcements on supply chain strategic collaboration (SCSC) on companies' shareholder value.

This study analyzes changes in shareholder value of companies listed in China based on data of 208 SCSC announcements. The signaling theory is applied to determine correlation among SCSC announcements and the market. An event study is used to estimate the stock market reaction to SCSC announcements. The common market model estimates stock abnormal returns after the event. The least squares method and regression model calculate the model parameter value.

There is a positive and statistically significant relationship between SCSC announcement and shareholder value. Market reaction to product development collaboration is significantly higher than to technology-sharing collaboration, market collaboration, and other SCSC types. The market reacts more positively to suppliers and companies with greater supply chain control power than to buyers and companies with lower control power. Announcements from the service supply chain can lead to stronger market reactions than those from manufacturing supply chains.

The findings provide a systematic assessment of how SCSC announcements contribute to firms' shareholder value. The result provides a benchmark of value promotion that can be expected from SCSC announcements.

This study fills the research gap that using secondary data to assess changes in companies’ shareholder value caused by SCSC announcements and firstly examines these changes by constructing the signaler–signal–receiver progress based on signaling theory. The research results provide a new reference and inspiration for deeper understanding of the impact mechanism of SCSC. Furthermore, this study contributes to the development of the signaling theory using an empirical study in an emerging market, China.