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Following the cultural distance and the acquisition cultural risk propositions, I study the impact of organizational culture differences among merging companies on their short-term stock performance following merger announcement. I assume that on announcement the market cannot access companies’ organizational culture detailed information, that it focuses on its exposure risk, and that it is inefficient. Using public information available prior to merger announcement, I construct proxies of organizational culture differences among the merging companies and a proxy of a factor mitigating the acquisition cultural risk. Analyzing 6,742 merger announcements released by publicly traded U.S. companies between 1984 and 2005, I show that following merger announcement the market prices a factor mitigating the acquisition cultural risk rather than the magnitude of specific organizational culture differences. Moreover, the market prices stocks of companies involved in high-risk mergers lower than of companies in low-risk mergers. Results are robust to size and period controls.

The recent development of the European debt sovereign crisis showed that sovereign debt is not “risk free.” The traditional index bond management used during the last two decades such as the market-capitalization weighting scheme has been severely called into question. In order to overcome these drawbacks, alternative weighting schemes have recently prompted attention, both from academic researchers and from market practitioners. One of the key developments was the introduction of passive funds using economic fundamental indicators.

In this chapter, the authors introduced models with economic drivers with an aim of investigating whether the fundamental approaches outperformed the other models on risk-adjusted returns and on other terms.

The authors did this by constructing five portfolios composed of the Eurozone sovereigns bonds. The models are the Market-Capitalization RP, GDP model RP, Ratings RP model, Fundamental-Ranking RP, and Fundamental-Weighted RP models. These models were created exclusively for this chapter. Both Fundamental models are using a range of 10 country fundamentals. A variation from other studies is that this dissertation applied the risk parity concept which is an allocation technique that aims to equalize risk across different assets. This concept has been applied by assuming the credit default swap as proxy for sovereign credit risk. The models were run using the Generalized Reduced Gradient (GRG) method as the optimization model, together with the Lagrange Multipliers as techniques and the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions. This led to the comparison of all the models mentioned above in terms of performance, risk-adjusted returns, concentration, and weighted average ratings.

By analyzing the whole period between 2006 and 2014, it was found that both the fundamental models gave very appealing results in terms of risk-adjusted returns. The best results were returned by the Fundamental-Ranking RP model followed by the Fundamental-Weighting RP model. However, better results for the mixed performance and risk-adjusted returns were achieved on a yearly basis and when sub-dividing the whole period in three equal periods. Moreover, the authors concluded that over the long term, the fundamental bond indexing triumphed over the other approaches by offering superior return and risk characteristics. Thus, one can use the fundamental indexation as an alternative to other traditional models.

In this chapter, we perform more detailed analyses and present the distribution characteristics and risk-return relationships of accounting-based financial returns (ROA) across different industry contexts and between periods with different economic conditions. We first display the frequency diagrams of the return measure (ROA) and its two components, net income and total assets, that show entirely different contours in the density graphs that must be reconciled. This is partially accomplished by analyzing the skewness, kurtosis, cross-sectional, and longitudinal risk-return characteristics of each of the three variables. The analyses further considers potential effects of accounting manipulation, and different organizational and executive traits, that identifies significant effects on the accounting-based return measures. We find extremely left-skewed return distributions with high negative correlations between the average return and risk measures, which reproduces the “Bowman paradox” as originally conceived. The same analysis is performed on net income and operating cash flows, the latter being less susceptible to accounting manipulation, which should display similar effects even though these performance distributions show positive skewness. We find negative but insignificant cross-sectional risk-return relations that nevertheless reappear in analyses performed within the specific industry contexts. The study further uncovers effects from prevailing economic conditions where left-skewness and kurtosis as well as negative risk-return correlations are much more significant during periods of high economic growth and business expansion where competition is more pronounced.

Integrating interdisciplinary studies with Human Capital Management Accounting (HCMA) refers to the dynamics of organized interdisciplinary action that are transversal or cross-cutting. This approach requires the mastery of a certain number of technical skills and disciplines, as well as the capacity to use them in a process to solve problems of financial performance. This is accomplished through the specific interaction tasks that are performed by each management function and operational unit, which act in real time with others, in the same direction as an organizational team, using a selected risk appetite threshold base.

Putting business fields side by side, (i.e., business disciplines silos, as is normally the case in MBA programs), is not enough to create the transversal interaction dynamic needed for firms to achieve expected financial performance goals. As a result, few graduates today have the cross-cutting or vertical skills required to act, in real time, from their workstation in accordance with the pyramid shape of the organization chart in order to create value.

This chapter presents the results of the interface established by a faculty member in the Accounting Department of the University of San Francisco with a “seasoned leader in the FinTech industry.” It proposes a single portal for employers and HRMs to which the continuing education services of professional training associations, executive education departments of colleges, and MBA schools and universities, can connect to issue the HCMA certificate supplementing their training offerings focused on “Leadership Development”.

In this paper, we search to evaluate the systemic risk of the Moroccan banking sector. Indeed, we concentrate on the analysis and the evaluation on transverse dimension of the systemic. From this point of view, two approaches were used. First is based on the estimate on value at risk conditional allowing to measure the systemic importance of each banking institution. In addition, the second approach uses the heteroscedasticity models in order to consider the conditional correlations, making it possible, to measure the dependence between the Moroccan banks and with the whole of the financial system. The results obtained with through these two approaches confirm that ATW, BMCI and the BMCE are the most systemic banks in Moroccan banking system and who can initiate a systemic crisis. On another register and by using the conditional correlations of each bank we built an index of systemic risk. Moreover, a macrofinancial model was developed, connecting the index of the systemic risk and the principal macroeconomic variables. This model affirmed that the contagion dimension of systemic risk is procyclical.

We investigate how career disruptions in terms of job loss may impact morbidity for individuals diagnosed with type 2 diabetes (T2D). Combining unique, high-quality longitudinal data from the Swedish National Diabetes Register (NDR) with matched employer–employee data, we focus on individuals diagnosed with T2D, who are established on the labor market and who lose their job in a mass layoff. Using a conditional difference-in-differences evaluation approach, our results give limited support for job loss having an impact on health behavior, diabetes progression, and cardiovascular risk factors.

This study sets out to shed light on those infrastructures underlying the ubiquitous, yet contested nature of governing by numbers. Investigating the 30-year long emergence of Germany’s “external quality assurance system” for hospitals, the authors show how methods for quantifying quality align with broader institutional and ideational shifts to form a calculative infrastructure for governance. Our study focuses on three phases of infrastructural development wherein methods for calculating quality, institutions for coordinating data and reform ideals converge with one another. The authors argue that the succession of these phases represents a gradual layering process, whereby old ways of enacting quality governance are not replaced, but augmented by new sets of calculative practices, institutions and ideas. Thinking about infrastructures as multi-layered complexes allows us to explore how they construct possibilities for control, remain stable over time and transform the fields in which they are embedded. Rather than governance being enacted according to a singular goal or value, we see an infrastructure that is flexible enough to support multiple modalities of control, including selective intervention, quality-based competition and automatized budgeting. Infrastructural change, instead of revolving around crises in measurement, is shaped by incubation periods – times of relative calm when political actors, medical practitioners, mathematicians, and many others explore and reflect past experiences, rather than follow erratic reforms fads. Finally, analysing infrastructures as multi-layered constructs underlines how they produce multiple images of care quality, which not only shift existing power relations, but also change the ways we understand and make sense of public services.