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A Conversation with John “Jack” Wadsworth, Jr., Honorary Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. Wadsworth talks about Morgan Stanley’s experiences in doing business in Asia, both historically and currently, and talks about the different approaches in different regions of Asia.

Investor trust in the mutual fund industry has been undermined seriously in recent months by the wide range of abuses brought to light by federal and state regulators. While NASD does not have jurisdiction or authority over mutual funds or their advisors, it does regulate the sales practices of broker‐dealers that sell mutual funds to investors. It also has jurisdiction over the broker‐dealer affiliates of mutual fund complexes that are part of the underwriting and distribution chain for investment company securities. Accordingly, broker participation in illegal or unethical sales practices is a very direct concern of NASD. The organization has approached these problems on two different fronts. The first is in the area of rulemaking proposals for better and more extensive disclosure. The second is through tough and swift enforcement in the areas of compensation arrangements, revenue sharing, breakpoints, and after‐hours trading and market timing.

This paper aims to review prior studies and presents a synthesis of the takeover prediction literature spanning the period 1968–2018.

The paper adopts a narrative review approach. It explores prior studies on takeover target prediction from a historical perspective, focusing on the evolution and development of the literature over the 50-year period.

From a historical development perspective, prior studies in the area can be partitioned into four distinct eras. Studies in the first era (1968–1985) mainly established that takeover targets share common characteristics which can be captured with financial ratios. Studies in the second era (1986–2002) developed and extended formal target prediction hypotheses. These studies concluded that it was impossible to build a successful investment strategy around takeover target prediction. Studies in the third era (2003–2009) explored similar questions using alternative modelling techniques but arrive at similar results – targets can be predicted with limited accuracy and target prediction is unlikely to lead to abnormal returns. Studies in the fourth era (2010–2018) explore implications of M&A predictability on share valuation, governance and bond prices (amongst others), but most importantly, provide some evidence that takeover prediction can lead to abnormal returns when combined with appropriate screening strategies.

This presents the first in-depth review of the literature on takeover target prediction. It highlights the development of the literature over four distinct eras and identifies several limitations, research gaps and opportunities for future research. Given the recent decline in the literature (i.e. fourth era), this study may stimulate new research in the area.

This paper has two purposes: to identify and explain the major forces that are causing the increasing need for operational reporting and intellectual capital (IC) reporting for European companies; and to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for operational and intellectual capital reporting if such reporting is to be meaningful for information users.

The approach for this paper has been to examine relevant papers, reports, guidelines, compendiums, annual reports, opinions, submissions and legislation.

Eight determining forces are identified that make the basis of the case for the provision of operating and IC information: the long‐standing global dominance and growth of the US economy; the emergence of business models other than the value chain (especially the emergence of network businesses); the changing nature of stock exchanges; the influence of different investment fund types (mutual, pension and hedge funds); the roles of buy‐side and sell‐side analysts; global and European investment index development; rating agency activity; and financial reporting and corporate governance regime development.

The eight forces are interdependent and immutable. Comprehensive operational and IC reporting are unavoidable. Accordingly, the authors propose that the necessary and sufficient conditions for adequate enterprise information reporting are: a legal requirement for mandatory operational and IC reporting and attendant regulatory framework(s) where the legal framework is based on the concept of neglect; key operating and IC resource status and activity performance definitions and metrics that reflect the enterprise's underlying business model(s); and (3) a mapping of the capitalized operational and IC investments that are by definition normally expensed to the financial report accounts.

The authors believe that no one has previously formally proposed a mandatory operational and IC reporting requirement; a legal reference frame of reference based on the legal concept of neglect; standard definitions for operational and IC performance metrics; a reference framework for information quality that is, inter alia, based on the consistency, comparability and comprehensiveness of reported metrics; and the requirement to map all capitalized IC resources back to the financial reports of the company.

Blockchains, also known as “distributed ledger technologies” (DLT) are perhaps the emerging innovation that, in the years leading up to and including 2019, is raising the highest expectations for HRM in the 4.0 business environment. In essence, a blockchain is a very specific type of database, with characteristics that made it the ideal application for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Within the context of digital- or e-HRM, there is potential to improve human resource management (HRM) processes using blockchains for employment screening, credential and educational verification, worker contracts and payments, among others, notwithstanding questions about its efficiency vis-à-vis conventional alternatives (Maurer, 2018; Zielinski, 2018). The research questions examined in this chapter include the following: What are the main characteristics of blockchains? Will they be adopted in a widespread form, specifically by HRM departments? Constructs from Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) theory (Rogers, 2003) are used to inform the Human Resources scholarly and practitioner communities; this robust theory may help companies allocate resources (e.g., budgets, personnel, managerial time, etc.) in an evidence-informed manner. As of this writing, very few blockchain applications, such as credential verification and incident reporting, seem to hold a strong potential for adoption.

The purpose of this paper is to examine programs designed to support the commercial paper market during the financial crisis.

The paper analyzes the participants in the two programs to determine why domestic financial institutions chose one program over the other.

Domestic financial institutions chose the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program over the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF) while foreign financial institutions chose the CPFF.

The analysis is intended to support future policy debate on how to address a liquidity crisis in the money markets.

The authors are the first paper to examine the participants in these two programs. The value is the policy implications of this study.

On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and nearly caused a meltdown of the financial system. This article looks at the situation before Lehman went bankrupt and how this event came to trigger a financial panic during the fall of 2008 and early 2009. Two key ideas inform the analysis. The first is that what triggers financial panics are typically hidden losses. The second is that confidence plays a key role in financial panics and that confidence can be conceptualized as a belief that action can be based on proxy signs, rather than on direct information about the situation itself.

On September 3, 2003, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced what quickly became the gravest scandal in the mutual fund industry in the 65 years since Congress passed the Investment Company Act of 1940. Spitzer’s office discovered that some hedge funds had been permitted to trade shares of open‐end mutual funds after that day’s net asset value (NAV) for those mutual funds had been set (typically at 4:00 PM eastern time). This practice allowed the hedge funds to profit based on corporate news announcements released after that time, and therefore not reflected in the mutual funds’ daily NAV. Moreover, Spitzer disclosed that some mutual fund advisers had only selectively enforced the stated limits in their prospectuses on frequent trading, or market timing, of those mutual funds. In some cases, mutual fund advisers had permitted selected investors to conduct frequent trading in mutual funds in return for investments (sometimes referred to as “sticky assets”) in other investment vehicles, or had permitted frequent trading by officers of the adviser itself. And some mutual fund advisers had selectively disclosed information about portfolio holdings of the funds to hedge funds that used that information to arbitrage the mutual funds’ positions. This was the second major securities industry scandal uncovered by Spitzer’s office in just two years. In 2002, Spitzer’s office uncovered the research analyst independence scandal that culminated in a global settlement with the country’s major investment banks. Spitzer’s 15‐person Securities Bureau appeared more nimble and better informed than the thousands of staff members at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency charged with regulating the mutual fund industry. The SEC ‐ already under fire for the unprecedented wave of corporate and brokerage industry scandals that led to adoption of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act ‐ had to endure yet another round of vocal public criticism.

Customer experience is increasingly recognized as a source of competitive advantage. Customer experience refers to customers' responses and reactions to cues within touchpoints along customer journeys. Nowadays, customers often interact with online touchpoints – such as social media, websites, or e-commerce – in their customer journeys. Given that customer experience is multidimensional, this chapter addresses the following question: How can sensorial experiences be triggered in online touchpoints? Based on a review of the literature on customer experience and sensory marketing, four challenges in triggering sensorial experiences in online touchpoints are identified: (1) limited sensorial cues, (2) lack of thematic congruence between online and offline touchpoints, (3) sensory overload, and (4) lesser control over sensorial cues. Then, two routes through which organizations can trigger sensorial experiences in online touchpoints are proposed: (1) directly influencing sensations through sensory-enabling technologies, and (2) indirectly influencing sensorial perceptions through the use of sensory and nonsensory cues. The chapter closes with a presentation of a model that describes the process of triggering sensorial experiences in online touchpoints as well as a checklist of relevant questions for practitioners who wish to do so.