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This paper aims to show that information asymmetry plays a vital role in the post-M&A performance-time until deal completion nexus. The findings are that the due diligence hypothesis and the overdue hypothesis proposed and tested in Thompson and Kim (2020) are influenced by the information asymmetry of the target during the negotiation process. Thus, mergers that involve more opaque targets that take a shorter time to close perform better, whereas those that take too long to close experience poor post-M&A performance. Conversely, there is no such effect when the mergers involve targets that are transparent and not plagued with large information asymmetry problems. These results hold for the short-term supporting the evidence that information asymmetry problems are severe before the merger is consummated and become attenuated post-merger.

Economic integration in the 21st century is driven largely by market signals, rather than by inter-governmental trading arrangements. It also means much more than “free trade.” Integration needs to consider all of the ways economies are connected in international markets, including trade in goods, services ideas and information, along with essential and complementary international movements of people and capital.

Except for a small number of sensitive products, especially in agriculture, most goods and services face no, or very low, formal trade barriers. Reducing border protection of the remaining sensitive products will certainly require negotiations, but they are no longer the most strategic obstacles to economic integration.

These days, the problems of most concern of those engaged in international commerce are logistics, communications, coping with security concerns and with different regulations in other economies. The effective constraint to designing and implementing cooperative arrangements to reduce such costs or risks of international commerce is the capacity to do so, rather than political resistance. Inter-governmental negotiations are not always necessary to deal with these practical issues.

Therefore, it should be possible to have a logical division of effort between APEC and the WTO in the Asia Pacific with the WTO dealing with those issues that do need to be negotiated; and APEC dealing with the many other issues where negotiations are not needed. In the longer term, an efficient division of labour could also emerge between the G20 and the WTO.

This study aims to investigate the impact of international diversification on the value and operating efficiency of European real estate firms.

The study is conducted using a panel fixed effects regression model to estimate the relationship of international diversification with firm value and operating efficiency. International diversification is mainly measured via the negative of the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) using property-level data. Firm value and operating efficiency are proxied by financial ratios observed annually from 2002 to 2021 at the firm level.

The results demonstrate that international diversification has a negative effect on firm value. Additionally, it lowers operating efficiency by weakening a firm's ability to generate operating earnings from its assets. By examining whether the reduction in operating efficiency is due to the rental income channel or the capital gains channel, the authors find strong statistical evidence that international diversification negatively impacts capital gains. International diversification is negatively associated with net gains from property valuations (unrealized capital gains) and net profits from property disposals (realized capital gains).

The empirical analysis is limited to Europe.

This paper extends the geographical diversification literature. While existing literature focuses on domestic diversification within the United States, this paper explores the effects of international diversification on European real estate firms. To the extent of the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper to examine the impact of geographical diversification on capital gains.

Bureaucracy to a large extent entrenches orderliness and productive means of achieving goals in both public and private organisations across the world. However, bureaucracy is not suitable in the management of hospitals due to its peculiar nature of operations. This study investigates the conundrum of bureaucratic processes and health-care service delivery in government hospitals in Nigeria.

The study surveyed 600 outpatients and attendees visiting tertiary and government hospitals in Nigeria using descriptive design to obtained data from the respondents. A research instrument, questionnaire, was used to gather data. Out of the 600 outpatients visiting the 20 hospitals in government and tertiary hospitals, 494 responses were returned from the attendees. The study employed random sampling strategy to collect the information.

The findings of this study were that service delivery in government hospitals were in adverse position on all the four constructs of bureaucratic dimensions as against quality of service delivery in hospitals in Nigeria. It discovered that bureaucratic impersonality cannot impact on the quality of service delivery in government hospitals in Nigeria. Separation and division of labour among health workers have no significant effect on quality service delivery in government hospitals. Formal rules and regulations (administrative procedure, rules, and policies) prevent quality service delivery in government hospitals in Nigeria. Also, patient’s waiting time was not significant to the quality of service delivery in government hospitals.

The results are constrained with dimensions of bureaucratic processes. Thus, the implication of this study is that bureaucracy in the Nigerian public hospitals is an unnecessary marriage which should be carefully separated and de-emphasised for quality service delivery in the hospitals to thrive.

Largely, this study is practical essential as it unearths the irrelevant operations procedure that hinder progress in Nigerian hospitals.

The study accomplishes recognised importance to survey how bureaucracy impedes quality service delivery in government hospitals. This study has provided a vital clue to elements that will bring rapid attention to patients’outcome in Nigerian hospitals and health-care facilities which hitherto has not been emphasised. The study has contributed to the existing body of knowledge associated to healthcare service quality in developing country.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

The division of labor of e-commerce transaction system is an important research topic. However, there is a certain disparity between the current mainstream research model and the reality, which leads to a biased result. This paper aims to find the effects of transaction efficiency on the evolution of e-commerce transaction system’s division of labor and the relationships between the results and other parameters.

This paper puts forward a definition of transaction efficiency based on transaction services and establishes a model of middleman’s specialized production decision of transaction services on this basis.

The research results show that the transaction efficiency plays an important role on the change of middlemen’s division of labor level. The degree of economic specialization, price of commodities and transaction services and other associated factors also affect middlemen’s division of labor.

This paper is of great significance for evaluating the development level and forecast the development direction of e-commerce.

Lean implementations in hospitals tend to be lengthy or lack the desired results. In addressing the question, how can lean be implemented effectively in a hospital-wide setting, this paper aims to examine two opposing approaches.

The authors studied two Dutch university hospitals which engaged in different lean implementation approaches during the same four-year period: top-down vs bottom-up. Inductive qualitative analyses were made of 49 interviews; numerous documents; field notes; 13 frontline meeting observations; and objective hospital performance data. Longitudinally, the authors depict how the sequential events unfolded in both hospitals.

During the six implementation stages, the roles played by top, middle and frontline managers stood out. While the top managers of one hospital initiated the organization-wide implementation and then delegated it to others, the top managers of the other similar hospital merely tolerated the bottom-up lean activities. Eventually, only the hospital with the top-down approach achieved high organization-wide performance gains, but only in its fourth year after the top managers embraced lean in their own daily work practices and had started to co-create lean themselves. Then, the earlier developed lean infrastructure at the middle- and frontline ranks led to the desired hospital-wide lean implementation results.

Change-management insights, including basic tenets of social learning and goal-setting theory, are shown to advance the knowledge of effective lean implementation in hospitals. The authors found lean implementation “best-oiled” through role-modeling by top managers who use a phase-based process and engage in close cross-hierarchical or co-creative collaboration with middle and frontline managerial members.

This paper examines the cointegration of wheat market prices in Northern Bangladesh. Results are based on weekly wholesale price data on wheat collected from the Department of Agricultural Marketing (DAM) in eight markets in the Rangpur division of Northern Bangladesh. The data has 208 observations for wheat in each of the eight markets ranging over a period of January 2006 to December 2009. Johansen’s cointegration test reveals that most of the wholesale markets of wheat in the Rangpur division are co-integrated which indicates that price signals and information are transmitted smoothly across the markets. The discovery of the market integration appears to be quite significant for the success of price policy and market liberalization programs which are being undertaken in Bangladesh.

Deepening supply-side structural reform is the main objective of the economic work since the Chinese economy entered a new stage of development. By adopting the fundamental principles and methodologies of Marxist political economy, the authors can provide clarifications on the three basic theoretical issues concerning the supply-side structural reform. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

First, the essential starting point for understanding the supply-side structural reform is the primacy of production, as well as the organic connection between production and consumption in social reproduction, rather than the supply and demand as superficially seen in exchanges. By identifying the right starting point, the authors can avoid alternating between demand and supply management, and between liberalism and interventionism.

Structural problems, which are closely related to the institutional structure of production and the purpose and nature of production, cannot be solely attributed to the imbalance caused by market failures. Chinese economy has suffered prolonged structural contradictions and structural problems.

To decide whether the financial and the real estate sectors are real economy or virtual economy, the key is to examine whether the monetary capital used in financial activities and real estate commodity (capital) go through the capital circulation process of from monetary capital to productive capital and further to commodity capital, and whether the capital gain is generated by the value appreciation of capital or the value transfer and distribution as a result of the transfer of ownership. With its emphasis on developing the real economy, the supply-side structural reform should foster both development of manufacturing, and parts of financial and real estate sectors that are the real economy.

While existing literature extensively explores manufacturing firms expanding into services, little is known about the modes of servitisation, the means by which they carry it out. This paper concentrates on acquisitions as a mode of servitisation. Post-acquisition integration is when the potential of an acquisition is realised. The paper therefore aims to categorise types of integrations following the acquisition of servitised firms and discusses their consequences for servitisation.

The empirical part of the paper is based on two case studies, each involving the acquisition of servitised firms. Both acquirers changed their integration approach over time.

The paper conceptualises three types of integrations: rhetorical, insulated and transformative integrations, indicating whether and how the acquirer becomes servitised following the integration. These highlight the analysis of integration based on business models and customer orientation in relation to servitisation.

This paper contributes to research on servitisation by emphasising acquisitions as a mode of servitisation and conceptualising three integration types related to business models and customer orientations. Furthermore, the paper highlights how an acquirer's servitisation leads to new offerings targeting new customers, as opposed to strengthening existing relationships.