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A financial perspective of farmer cooperative performance is assumed by conceptualizing the cooperative as an independent firm. The purpose of this paper is to explore variability in the financial performance of the largest 1,000 US farmer cooperatives with emphasis on efficiency, productivity, and leverage.

Cooperative performance is analyzed by means of the extended DuPont identity, an accounting tool which decomposes return on equity into five ratios of efficiency, productivity, and leverage. The extended DuPont identity is applied empirically with quantile regression, which allows estimation of the statistical interrelationship of the DuPont components across the full response distribution.

Per the results, variability in the financial performance of US farmer cooperatives is for the most part associated with the operating profit margin, which confirms prior findings of cost inefficiency in the empirical literature. Therefore, US farmer cooperatives may improve financial performance by emphasizing sales and operating costs. Specifically, recommendations include placing emphasis on bargaining power, product differentiation, and scale economies. Supply cooperatives may also consider issuing non-qualified equity and securing long-term debt access as additional possibilities to improve financial performance.

The empirical application of the extended DuPont identity with quantile regression facilitates a novel investigation of cooperative performance by placing emphasis on the efficiency, productivity, and leverage of cooperatives with various degrees of performance.

This study aims to investigate the relations between long-window stock returns and prior years’ increases in DuPont identity components: profit margin and asset turnover. In particular, the authors examine the relative effectiveness of profit margin and asset turnover to predict years ahead stock returns.

To test the assertions, the authors regress raw, Capital Asset Pricing Model and Fama-French returns on controls and variables of interest, profit margin and asset turnover, lagged years t − 1, t − 2 and t − 3. To control for factors that could affect returns over the long windows, they also include returns lagged over years t − 1, t − 2 and t − 3 to coincide with the lagged profit margin and asset turnover variables of interest.

Results show a negative (positive) relation between returns and increases in lagged profit margin (asset turnover). However, the negative returns-profit margin relation is mitigated when increases in profit margin and asset turnover occur in the same lagged year.

This study adds to the existing body of research on the DuPont identity by temporally evaluating the relative long-run contributions of profit margin and asset turnover to firm value.

Successful farm business managers must understand the determinants of profitability and have an overall long‐term or strategic management focus. The objective of this research was to explore the use of an e‐learning tool to help producers understand the impacts of different production, pricing, cost control, and investment decisions on their farm’s financial performance. This objective was accomplished by developing and testing a computer‐based training and application tool to facilitate determination of the financial health of farm businesses using the DuPont profitability analysis model. The results of the two experiments indicate that the computer software was effective for teaching techniques of profitability analysis contained within the DuPont model.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the drivers of economic financial success of US cow-calf operations.

This research uses a system of equations (DuPont analysis) in conjunction with 2008 farm-level data from the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Resource Management Survey to evaluate the factors driving cow-calf profitability, namely net profit margins, asset turnover ratio, and asset-to-equity ratio.

The study finds that the main drivers of return on equity are region, number of harvested acres on the farm, diversification of the farm, operator off-farm work, spousal off-farm work, and adoption of technologies. Of these factors, those for which producers can make short-term adjustments include off-farm work decisions and adoption of technologies. Longer-term adjustments can be made for farm diversification.

To the authors’ knowledge, no existing research has used farm-level data across US production regions to examine the factors affecting returns to equity of US cow-calf operations. These research results may be used to identify strategies producers can use to improve their farm's economic viability, areas where extension services can assist farmers in making better financial decisions and economic factors that are likely to lead to structural changes in the beef industry.

There is little reason a priori to expect that a cooperative firm’s capital needs are different from a non-cooperative firm’s needs if the two firms are otherwise similar in function and size and operate within similar market economies. However, the notion that cooperatives face capital constraints that investor-owned firms (IOFs) do not is a persistent theme in the literature. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors revisit this hypothesis with an empirical examination of capital constraints in a panel data set of US agricultural supply and grain cooperatives and IOFs.

The findings are mixed. While the authors find little to suggest that cooperatives face financial constraints on borrowing in the short run, relative to IOFs, the authors do find some evidence that for long-term investments, a capital constraint may exist.

These short and long run differences have implications for the survival and growth of agricultural cooperatives. While in the short run, access to debt financing allows these firms to operative profitably, ultimately long-term large investments in technology and fixed assets will be required to maintain competitiveness in this industry.

Job satisfaction along with a work–life balance of attorneys in law firms has become an important issue to the legal industry. This paper examines the relationship between strategic positioning of law firms and the job satisfaction of their associates.

Using 1,108 firm year observations of US law firms from 2007 to 2016, this paper examines how a firm's strategic positioning affects the job satisfaction of its associates. The strategic positioning is measured with two financial ratios derived from modified DuPont analysis: revenue per lawyer (RPL) and leverage (LEV). To compare the level of associates' job satisfaction depending on law firms' RPL and LEV, this paper uses t-tests. In addition, this paper adopts OLS regression and simultaneous equations to examine the relation between law firms' strategic positioning and their associates' job satisfaction.

This paper shows that associates in the law firms with a high LEV strategy have lower job satisfaction because these firms provide a more demanding work environment than in the firms with a high RPL strategy.

This paper first documents empirical evidence that a firm's strategic positioning significantly influences job satisfaction of its employees, using data on the legal industry which is human-capital-intensive and is considered one of the sectors that provide the most notorious work environments.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the application of sustainable growth challenge (SGC) model in agricultural finance as a conceptual paradigm and then uses the model to measure sustainable growth rates for Illinois grain and livestock farmers. The SGC concept is used to understand the economic conditions and business decisions made by farmers in certain episodes of the time period analyzed.

A seemingly unrelated regression approach is used to analyze the interrelationships of the four levers of growth using a panel data of Illinois farm‐level financial and operating information. The second analysis flows from the first and examines aggregate US farm data to provide an historical perspective of changes in the SGC over time.

Econometric results indicate the relevance of the SGC model in explaining farm financial and operating decisions. The farms’ tendencies to attain balanced growth seem to be more influenced by asset productivity and leverage decisions, which are given different emphasis by grain and livestock farms due to differing operational structures and constraints. This study's estimation and analysis of the USA farm sector's actual and sustainable growth rates from 1981 to 2001 data generally show that the industry has adapted to positive or negative SGCs in a manner consistent with the model.

This paper explores the relevance of the SGC model as a business, policy and teaching tool for understanding issues surrounding farmers’ financial and operating decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to show the applicability of data envelopment analysis (DEA) in arriving at an unbiased account of relative performance in a set of companies, using the pharmaceutical industry as an example.

A DEA‐based income efficiency measure of business performance for the pharmaceutical industry is computed. The pharmaceutical industry, which includes many multinational corporations with complex governance problems, and the strategies that allowed firm efficiency rankings to change over time, over ten recent years, are analyzed.

The analyses indicate that the inclines and declines in DEA efficiency rankings are related to the strategic choices made by the upper management.

The paper attempted to trace firm behavior post hoc to validate the DEA rankings. All relevant firm behavior may not have been captured; the paper only attempted to capture behavior reported in the respectable business press, which may introduce a bias.

The approach may be ideal to evaluate strategic managers (CEOs, general managers, and presidents) by board of directors, since it relates multiple performance indices to a meta‐measure of performance. Another group of beneficiaries include sector financial analysts. The approach adds a new dimension to sector analysis, to compare specific industries and identify the relative rankings of firms on multiple performance indices.

The paper demonstrates the usefulness of DEA in performance governance measurement by applying it to the pharmaceuticals industry.

Farm businesses in England are under pressure to intensify production sustainably while managing costs and meeting market demands. Commodity prices and support from Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) payments are important determinants of profitability. With the United Kingdom (UK) leaving the European Union (EU), revised policy will see farming more exposed to fluctuating commodity prices and financial support from Government more focused on encouraging environmental land management. The research reported here, investigated whether business management practices of farmers influences financial performance, and how policy could be tailored to better meet the needs of farm businesses.

Regression models were estimated for 862 Cereals, Dairy and Livestock farms in England using official data for 2011–2012, in order to assess whether different farm characteristics, business management practices (identified from a systematic review of 102 studies), knowledge acquisition indicators and manager experience had an effect on four different financial performance ratios. The financial performance of the top 25% of the sample was also compared to the bottom 25% in terms of use of business management practices.

The results show that business planning and benchmarking had a positive, statistically significant, effect on financial performance, as do business size and knowledge acquisition, albeit to a lesser extent.

The research reported here is the most extensive examination, to date, of the impact of management practices on the financial performance of farms. Thus, it sends strong policy recommendations.

Previous studies have suggested that one may trace the factors (i.e. sources of the competitive advantage) that cause the firm performance by examining the performance itself. Financial ratios have been used to trace the sources of competitive advantage, that is, the resource configuration, but the key resources driving superior performance remained undiscovered. The present study seeks to reduce the number of dimensions in the resource configuration to a two‐dimensional map to capture firms' relative resource positions and identify the resources and capabilities that lead to the superior performance.

Factor analysis is used to extract the resource bundles and management capabilities of the online game industry in Taiwan from financial ratios included in the expanded Du Pont identity. These resource and capability bundles are subsequently verified by discriminant analysis to distinguish firms with competitive advantage from firms with competitive disadvantage. Factor scores are then used as inputs for multidimensional scaling to draw the resource positioning of the competitive firms.

The competitive advantage of online firms can be determined using two dimensions of intellectual property and relationship assets. In addition, firms with advantage in upstream (game developers) and downstream (channels) relationships perform better than other firms.

Private online game firms are excluded from the empirical study because their financial data are not available.

Using financial ratios, the present research identified the resource and capability bundles essential to the superior performance of the online game firms.