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This study focuses on intra-industry determinants of acquisition performance. Seven years of printed research on acquisitions from 10 top-tier business journals is categorized on the basis of R&D intensity – that is, per industry classification: high-, medium-, and low-technology – and determinants of acquisition performance. Instead of broadly generalizing acquisition performance determinants across industries, this study focuses on how the practice of enhancing acquisition performance is different per industry classification and what acquiring firms need to take into account.

This paper examines the profitability and performance measurement of U.S. regional banks during the period 1994–2011, using the GMM estimator technique. Our study extends prior research by including several factors not previously considered using U.S. data.

We use bank-specific, industry-specific, and macroeconomic determinants of profitability contemporaneous with our performance indicators. We follow the accounting fundamental analysis path in explaining the bank performance.

Among the performance measures, the efficiency ratio and provisions for credit losses are negatively and equity scaled by assets is positively related to profitability. However, these relationships either reverse (efficiency ratio and provisions for credit losses) or become insignificant (equity scaled by assets) when the target becomes change in profitability. The level of nonperforming assets is negatively related to profitability across all measures of profitability used. Macroeconomic variables are largely unrelated to profitability during the year they are measured. However, they have a significant relationship with earnings change measures, suggesting they have a lagged effect on profitability. The slope of the yield curve is especially strong in this regard.

We use our determinants to model changes in bank profitability one year ahead, in addition to including several factors not previously considered, using the predictive focus of the fundamental analysis research.

We propose a research design involving the use of Bloom’s taxonomy both in facilitating the teaching–learning process and in the educator assessing students’ final grades. The latter are compared with students’ self-acknowledged grades. Testing is done by considering a sample of accounting students enrolled for the Controlling course in Romania.

The employed research methodology relies on two instruments: a questionnaire and the examination process. Cluster analysis is used in analyzing students’ grades. Determinants of students’ academic performance are discussed by using factor analysis.

Comparing students’ self-acknowledged grades with those assessed by the educator, we document the necessity of further work in enhancing students’ ability to better assess their academic performance. Questions belonging to the application and analysis levels seem to be preferred by students.

We raise a series of theoretical questions in the area of examination performance. The obtained results in relation to the assessment of accounting students’ academic performance and its determinants offer useful insights for accounting educators.

Our chapter tests the use of Bloom’s taxonomy in the context of an emerging country’s educational system that lacked consistency and faced significant challenges throughout history. We also consider two measures for students’ academic performance as perceptions upon what should be the same result of the teaching–learning process. The chapter addresses the evolutions and particularities of the Romanian academic environment in the area of economics, developing a brief analysis meant to position the testing of the proposed research design.

Introduction: Interest and action concerning fiscal accountability have surged around the world in recent years, especially among Sub-Saharan African countries, because decision-making in the region has traditionally been shrouded in secrecy, with the general public having almost no access to knowledge on the management of public funds. Limited fiscal transparency has led to government fiscal crises where citizens have begun to call for better governance and participation in public funds.

Purpose: This study examines the impact of e-governance on the overall fiscal performance in SSA, while the specific objectives include the effect of e-governance on the central government’s primary balance and public external debt stock.

Methodology: The study employs annual data across 43 SSA countries to analyse the study from 2000 to 2018 using the panel-corrected standard error (PCSE) method for estimating the models. Overall fiscal performance is generated through principal component analysis (PCA), which involves a linear combination of public external debt stock and central government primary balance.

Findings: The results reveal that there is clear evidence of the effectiveness of e-governance on the overall fiscal performance, even though this is not the same for the public external debt stock in SSA, despite the success recorded in the region’s ICT and telecommunication sectors in recent times. In addition, all other control variables impact fiscal performance except population growth.

Data from samples of managers from eight countries, Thailand, Nigeria, Philippines, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, Spain, and the United States, are used to explore cross-national differences in how individuals make judgments about an individual's pay. A policy-capturing instrument is used to elicit judgments about the ways that variations in individual employee job performance, business unit performance, seniority, schooling, and need affect judgments about pay fairness. Significant between-country differences are found in the sensitivities of pay fairness judgments. However, these differences are not well explained by differences in individualism/collectivism reflected either by a priori categorizations of national culture or direct measures of horizontal/vertical collectivism. Implications for the explanation of cross-national differences are explored.

Recognising the significance of international trade in economic growth, this research explores the drivers of exports in South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation countries from 2008 to 2021. The study employs the export demand model and the augmented exports supply model and utilises pooled time-series data. This study questions whether export supply decisions are based on traditional trade model factors, emerging trading realities or macroeconomic variables. The model based on fixed effects evaluates the connection between exports and their possible drivers. Traditional export supply models suggest determinants like production capacity, variable cost and relative pricing influencing South Asian export supply performance substantially. Changes in trade, for example, have a substantial impact on export supply, demonstrating that the trade liberalisation procedure promotes growth in exports, compression in imports and technological advancement. The worsening state of the energy industry and growing levels of corruption have proved to be significant deterrents to export supply decisions. The results verify foreign direct investment's positive and medium influence on the expansion of exports. Other variables, however, such as GDP and its growth, Official Development Assistance (ODA), development expenditure, indirect taxation, labour supply and the exchange rate of currencies, have a positive impact on the flow of exports. Furthermore, the data corroborate the notion that increased savings have a significant beneficial influence on the flow of exports. The study proposes that concerned governments examine their export policies and adopt new policies adapted in accordance with changing circumstances with the goal of increasing and enhancing the performance of exports.

Although interfunctional coordination plays a key role in the performance of the firm, the literature has largely ignored it compared to the other two market orientation components: customer orientation and competitor orientation. The question of whether our current knowledge can be generalized to firms from the developing world has also been neglected since most studies have been conducted in developed countries. To address these issues, a model was developed here to empirically examine the relationship between interfunctional coordination and export performance as well as to identify the key determinants of both constructs. A sample of 201 senior managers of export firms in Brazil was used to test the hypotheses. The results suggest that the legal regulations and technical requirements, competitive intensity, and technological orientation of the product are positively related to interfunctional coordination. Contrary to expectations, the results also confirm that the difference in the stage of the product life cycle is negatively related to interfunctional coordination. In turn, interfunctional coordination has a positive effect on firms' export performance.

This chapter proposes the development of a compound personality trait termed “goal propensity”. Motivation is a key determinant of performance in virtually all contexts, and personality has long been viewed as an important influence on motivation. Despite the long history of exploring how personality influences motivation, we do not have a clear understanding of the linkage between individual differences in personality and work motivation or the tools to reliably and accurately predict individual differences in motivation. Advances in our understanding of personality and the convergence of motivation theories around models of self-regulation present the opportunity to achieve that understanding and predictive efficacy. Goal propensity would be a theoretically derived trait that would explain the role of personality in self-regulation models of motivation as well as allow the prediction of tendencies to engage in self-regulation. This chapter provides the rationale for the development of this construct, articulates the nature of the proposed goal propensity construct, and explores the value of such a construct for theory, future research, and human resource practice.

The study this chapter reports focuses on how network theory contributes to the understanding of the internationalization process of SMEs and measures the effect of network capability on performance in international trade and has three research objectives.

The first objective of the study relates to providing new insights into the international market development activities through the application of a network perspective. The chapter reviews the international business literature to ascertain the development of thought, the research gaps, and the shortcomings. This review shows that the network perspective is a useful and popular theoretical domain that researchers can use to understand international activities, particularly of small, high technology, resource-constrained firms.

The second research objective is to gain a deeper understanding of network capability. This chapter presents a model for the impact of network capability on international performance by building on the emerging literature on the dynamic capabilities view of the firm. The model conceptualizes network capability in terms of network characteristics, network operation, and network resources. Network characteristics comprise strong and weak ties (operationalized as foreign-market entry modes), relational capability, and the level of trust between partners. Network operation focuses on network initiation, network coordination, and network learning capabilities. Network resources comprise network human-capital resources, synergy-sensitive resources (resource combinations within the network), and information sharing within the network.

The third research objective is to determine the impact of networking capability on the international performance of SMEs. The study analyzes 11 hypotheses through structural equations modeling using LISREL. The hypotheses relate to strong and weak ties, the relative strength of strong ties over weak ties, and each of the eight remaining constructs of networking capability in the study. The research conducts a cross-sectional study by using a sample of SMEs drawn from the telecommunications industry in Ireland.

The study supports the hypothesis that strong ties are more influential on international performance than weak ties. Similarly, network coordination and human-capital resources have a positive and significant association with international performance. Strong ties, weak ties, trust, network initiation, synergy-sensitive resources, relational capability, network learning, and information sharing do not have a significant association with international performance. The results of this study are strong (R2=0.63 for performance as the outcome) and provide a number of interesting insights into the relations between collaboration or networking capability and performance.

This study provides managers and policy makers with an improved understanding of the contingent effects of networks to highlight situations where networks might have limited, zero, or even negative effects on business outcomes. The study cautions against the tendency to interpret networks as universally beneficial to business development and performance outcomes.

As operational environments become increasingly fluid, organizations are turning to teams as a proven performance arrangement to structure complex work. Teams are ubiquitous in modern organizations because they can be used to create synergies, streamline workflow, deliver innovative services, satisfy incumbent needs, maximize the benefits of technology connecting distributed employees, and seize market opportunities in a global village. Teams are also increasingly used because coordinating the “…activities of individuals in large organizations is like building a sand castle using single grains of sand” (West, Borrill, & Unsworth, 1998, p. 6).