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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.

This research aims to use the Oriental Institute of Technology Library (the OIT Library) in Taiwan as a case to introduce some of the mobile web services which can be provided by a library, as well as to investigate and discuss the first two mobile web services offered by the OIT Library, the due‐day reminder and renewal‐request services, at length. Furthermore, the performance evaluation of the two services is conducted.

This research employs system logs and patron questionnaires to understand the effectiveness of, and patron satisfaction toward, the two services.

Results of system log analysis show that the usage of the two services improves the average number of overdue occurrences, average amount of overdue fines, average amount of overdue fines per transaction, and average overdue rate; furthermore, the use of the services also indirectly increases the number of items borrowed by patrons, which corresponds with the questionnaire analysis as well. Results of questionnaire analysis show that 71.3 per cent and 87.5 per cent of the respondents are strongly satisfied with the due‐day reminder and renewal‐request services, respectively.

As a case study, this research provides a direction on designing mobile web services for a library. In addition, it points out how to evaluate the performance and patron satisfaction of mobile web services through system log analysis and patron questionnaire.

This research increases the understanding of what mobile web services can be offered by a library. In addition, many previous studies only describe certain kinds of mobile web services without showing their efficacy; however, this research evaluates the efficacy of two mobile web services in the OIT Library by an unobtrusive system log analysis, which is then complemented by a patron questionnaire.

The purpose of this paper is to consider borrower-specific characteristics to understand the factors affecting both the probability and quantum of loan default by individual borrowers under Islamic and conventional banking.

Borrower-specific characteristics that explain the probability of default may not necessarily be similar factors that determine the quantum of default. The authors therefore apply a Box-Cox double hurdle model to treat both the probability and quantum of default in a two-step approach. The authors also explain the differences in default risk and quantum of default between Islamic and conventional banking borrowers from their behavioral perspectives following the Sharia principles in financial transactions between lenders and borrowers. The authors use borrower-specific information of two separate bank branches of the United Arab Emirates that solely deal with either Islamic or conventional banking products.

The paper demonstrates that the probability of default and the quantum of default appear to be influenced by different set of client-specific factors. The results suggest that the probability of default does not vary significantly between Islamic and conventional banking borrowers. The evidence also shows that Islamic banking defaulters, compared to those in conventional banking, repay a large quantum of overdue when their financial leverage improves. However, they do not tend to reduce their outstanding quantum of overdue faster than conventional banking defaulters.

Availability of data from only two bank branches may limit the explanatory power of empirical findings.

The study findings will enable the Islamic and conventional banks to appropriately address Basel Capital requirements based on the borrowers’ behavior.

The study findings have the potential for Islamic and conventional financing institutions to be more flexible with equity in their lending practices.

Religious beliefs are crucial in borrower’s default behavior in Islamic banking.

Statistics in libraries are commonplace, but they are usually enumerative and not statistically analysed. Demonstrates three practical applications of statistical analysis: using correlation with data about overdue and loan periods, significance testing of issue figures, and regression with age and use of documents.

Although phone calls are widely used by debt collection services to persuade delinquent customers to repay, few financial services studies have analyzed the unstructured voice and text data to investigate how debt collection call strategies drive customers to repay. Moreover, extant research opens the “black box” mainly through psychological theories without hard behavioral data of customers. The purpose of our study is to address this research gap.

The authors randomly sampled 3,204 debt collection calls from a large consumer finance company in East Asia. To rule out alternative explanations for the findings, such as consumers' previous experience of being persuaded by debt collectors or repeated calls, the authors selected calls made to delinquent customers who had not been delinquent before and were being called by the company for the first time. The authors transformed the unstructured voice and textual data into structured data through automatic speech recognition (ASR), voice mining, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning analyses.

The findings revealed that (1) both moral appeal (carrot) and social warning (stick) strategies decrease repayment time because they arouse mainly happy emotion and fear emotion, respectively; (2) the legal warning (stick) strategy backfires because of decreasing the happy emotion and triggering the anger emotion, which impedes customers' compliance; and (3) in contrast to traditional wisdom, the combination of carrot and stick fails to decrease the repayment time.

The findings provide a valuable and systematic understanding of the effect of carrot strategies, stick strategies and the combinations of them on repayment time. This study is among the first to empirically analyze the effectiveness of carrot strategies, stick strategies and their joint strategies on repayment time through unstructured vocal and textual data analysis. What's more, the previous studies open the “black box” through psychological mechanism. The authors firstly elucidate a behavioral mechanism for why consumers behave differently under varying debt collection strategies by utilizing ASR, NLP and vocal emotion analyses.

The accounts receivable pool (ARP) is an e-invoice management system that provides suppliers with easy access to financial service. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the strength and weakness of ARP mechanism and suggest efficient methods to identify creditworthy borrowers.

By decomposing the sales records of 348 ARP borrowers and predicting the occurrence of overdue incidences, this study first portrays the creditworthy borrowers by sales features. Then, content analysis was applied to measure the loadings of soft and hard information, and examined the effectiveness of different information structures in creditworthiness assessment.

For ARP borrowers, upward trend and low volatility reveal their creditworthiness. In order to identify creditworthy borrowers beforehand, ARP financiers who have elaborated more soft information and less hard information can perform better.

This study first discussed ARP finance from a critical perspective and underlines borrower assessment to eliminate the defect of loose recourse. The empirical evidence presents the sales features of creditworthy borrowers. Moreover, the results suggest an efficient approach for ARP financiers to conduct better assessment.

The purpose of this study is to empirically test how problem-solving lean practices, along with leaders as learning facilitators in an action learning approach, can be transferred from a production context to a knowledge work context for the purpose of becoming a learning organization while enhancing performance. This is important to study because many organizations struggle to enhance efficiency in the short term while still trying to be long-term learning oriented (i.e. learning organization development).

The authors draw on theory on learning interventions to show how lean practices for problem-solving can foster learning and help an organization to become adaptive. This study’s subject is a non-production department of 100 employees at the LEGO corporation. The authors applied survey results from a natural experiment lasting 18 months between a pre-measurement survey and a post-measurement survey. The results were compared to a control department of 50 employees who were not exposed to the lean practices intervention. The authors’ focus was on the individual level as individuals have different perceptions of lean practices, performance, and learning.

Using repeated-measures tests, difference-in-difference regressions analyses, and structural equation models, the authors find that a package of contemporary lean practices for problem-solving, along with leaders who function as learning facilitators, significantly improved learning organization dimensions while also enhancing efficiency and quality and that learning organizations positively mediate the relationship between the lean intervention and quality-related performance, while efficiency is directly affected by the lean interventions. Data from LEGO's key performance indicators (KPIs), benefit trackers, on-site observations and more than 40 interviews with managers provided results that were consistent with the survey data. A detailed description of the lean practices implemented is provided to inspire future implementations in non-operations environments and to assist educators.

The authors contribute to the learning literature by showing that a learning-to-learn approach to lean management can serve as an active and deliberate intervention in helping an organization becoming a learning organization as perceived by the individual organizational members. The authors also add to the lean literature by showing how a learning approach to lean, as used by LEGO, can positively affect short-term efficiency and quality and create a foundation for a longer-term competitive advantage (i.e. a learning organization) in a non-production context. By contrast, most of the lean literature streams treat efficiency separately from a learning organization and mainly examine lean in a production context.

The extant literature shows three research streams on lean, learning, and performance. The authors built on these streams by trying to emphasize both learning and efficiency. Prior research has not empirically tested whether and how the application of problem-solving lean practices combined with leaders as learning facilitators helps to create a comprehensive learning organization while enhancing performance in a non-production context.

The Imo State Supervised Agricultural Credit Loans Board (ISACLB) has outright default rates of more than 50 percent. Thus, the purpose of this study is to identify the major characteristics of the Board's beneficiaries who completely failed to honour their repayment commitment as opposed to those who partially repaid.

Data on 36 potential causes of delinquency were collected through questionnaires distributed to 182 defaulters across ISACLB's three regional zones from 1987 to 1997; ISACLB's only completed loan cycle. Descriptive statistics were obtained using the odds ratio technique. Thereafter, a binary logistic regression estimated the marginal effect on the outright default probabilities of each factor.

ISACLB's large overdue problem was strongly linked to four key factors: age of borrowers, frequency of visits by loan officers‐cum‐extension agents, amount of savings deposits with informal clubs and total annual savings.

The primary drawback is the small size of the sample study, as well as the failure to correctly classify the partial defaulters in terms of the stage in the loan cycle at which they actually ceased to repay.

In general, initiatives to attract young entrepreneurs, as well as to incorporate a FINCA‐type savings scheme into the design of ISACLB's future lending programme should help to resolve its overdue dilemma.

Older traditional farmers are the principal defaulters. A targeted monitoring, training and information provision appears to be required.

There are very few econometric studies dealing specifically with the characteristics of outright and partial microcredit defaulters.

Small-scale farmers in developing countries are undersupplied with capital. Although microfinance institutions (MFIs) have become well established in developing countries, they have not significantly extended their services to farmers. It is generally believed that this is partly due to the riskiness of lending to farmers. The purpose of this paper is to combine original data from a Madagascan MFI with weather data to estimate the effect of rainfall on the repayment performance of loans granted to farmers.

The basis of the empirical analysis is a unique data set of a commercial MFI in Madagascar and weather data provided by the German Meteorological Service. The repayment performance of loans granted to small-scale farmers is estimated using a two-step estimation approach based on linear probability models (LPMs) and a sequential logit model (SLM).

The results reveal that an excessive amount of rain in the harvest period of rice increases the credit risk of loans granted to small-scale farmers in Madagascar. Furthermore, the results confirm that credit features affect the repayment performance of loans.

Since the returns from weather index-based insurance (at least as a future contract) are perfectly correlated with weather events, the authors can set the effect of weather events on the repayment performance of loans equal to the effect of the returns of weather index-based insurance on the repayment performance of loans. Thus, the results imply that weather index-based insurance might have the potential to mitigate a certain part of the risk in agricultural lending.

The focus and results of the present study are very relevant for MFIs, potential providers of weather index-based insurances as well as for farmers. The results confirm that weather events are a primary reason for the risk perception of lenders in developing countries toward small-scale farmers. Future research should, hence, concentrate on the development of index-based insurances in agricultural lending and consider interventions on different levels, e.g., insurance on the farm and the bank level.

To the knowledge, this is the first study that combines original loan repayment data from a Madagascan MFI with weather data in order to estimate the effect of weather events on the repayment performance of loans granted to farmers. Furthermore, to the knowledge, this is the first study that uses a two-step estimation approach based on LPMs and a SLM to investigate the repayment performance in agricultural lending.

VINE is produced at least four times a year with the object of providing up‐to‐date news of work being done in the automation of library housekeeping processes, principally in the UK. It is edited and substantially written by the Information Officer for Library Automation based in Southampton University Library and supported by a grant from the British Library Research and Development Department. Copyright for VINE articles rests with the British Library Board, but opinions expressed in VINE do not necessarily reflect the news and policies of the British Library. The subscription for VINE in 1981 will be £20 for UK subscribers and £23 for overseas subscribers — the subscription year runs from January to December and VINE is available in either paper or microfiche format.