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The path-to-profitability of Internet IPO firms ☆Bharat A.Jain a,1,Narayanan Jayaraman b,2,Omesh Kini c,⁎aCollege of Business and Economics,Towson University,Towson,MD 21044,United States b College of Management,Georgia Institute of Technology,Atlanta,GA 30332,United Statesc Robinson College of Business,Georgia State University,Atlanta,GA 30303,United StatesReceived 1October 2006;received in revised form 1December 2006;accepted 1February 2007AbstractExtant empirical evidence indicates that the proportion of firms going public prior to achieving profitability has been increasing over time.This phenomenon is largely driven by an increase in the proportion of technology firms going public.Since there is considerable uncertainty regarding the long-term economic viability of these firms at the time of going public,identifying factors that influence their ability to attain key post-IPO milestones such as achieving profitability represents an important area of research.We employ a theoretical framework built around agency and signaling considerations to identify factors that influence the probability and timing of post-IPO profitability of Internet IPO firms.We estimate Cox Proportional Hazards models to test whether factors identified by our theoretical framework significantly impact the probability of post-IPO profitability as a function of time.We find that the probability of post-IPO profitability increases with pre-IPO investor demand and change in ownership at the IPO of the top officers and directors.On the other hand,the probability of post-IPO profitability decreases with the venture capital participation,proportion of outsiders on the board,and pre-market valuation uncertainty.©2007Published by Elsevier Inc.Keywords:Initial public offerings;Internet firms;Path-to-profitability;Hazard models;SurvivalJournal of Business Venturing xx (2007)xxx –xxxMODEL 1AJBV-05413;No of Pages 30☆We would like to thank Kalpana Narayanan,Raghavendra Rau,Sankaran Venkataraman (Editor),Phil Phan (Associate Editor),two anonymous referees,and participants at the 2002Financial Management Association Meetings in San Antonio for helpful comments.We thank Paul Gilson and Sandy Lai for excellent research assistance.The usual disclaimer applies.⁎Corresponding author.Tel.:+14046512656;fax:+14046522630.E-mail addresses:bjain@ (B.A.Jain),narayanan.jayaraman@ (N.Jayaraman),okini@ (O.Kini).1Tel.:+14107043542;fax:+14107043454.2Tel.:+14048944389;fax:+14048946030.0883-9026/$-see front matter ©2007Published by Elsevier Inc.doi:10.1016/j.jbusvent.2007.02.004Please cite this article as:Jain,B.A.et al.The path-to-profitability of Internet IPO firms.Journal of Business2 B.A.Jain et al./Journal of Business Venturing xx(2007)xxx–xxx1.Executive summaryThere has been an increasing tendency for firms to go public on the basis of a promise of profitability rather than actual profitability.Further,this phenomenon is largely driven by the increase in the proportion of technology firms going public.The risk of post-IPO failure is particularly high for unprofitable firms as shifts in investor sentiment leading to negative market perceptions regarding their prospects or unfavorable financing environments could lead to a shutdown of external financing sources thereby imperiling firm survival. Therefore,the actual accomplishment of post-IPO profitability represents an important milestone in the company's evolution since it signals the long-term economic viability of the firm.While the extant research in entrepreneurship has focused on factors influencing the ability of entrepreneurial firms to attain important milestones prior to or at the time of going public,relatively little is known regarding the timing or ability of firms to achieve critical post-IPO milestones.In this study,we construct a theoretical framework anchored on agency and signaling theories to understand the impact of pre-IPO factors such as governance and ownership structure,management quality,institutional investor demand,and third party certification on firms'post-IPO path-to-profitability.We attempt to validate the testable implications arising from our theoretical framework using the Internet industry as our setting.Achieving post-issue profitability in a timely manner is of particular interest for Internet IPO firms since they are predominantly unprofitable at the time of going public and are typically characterized by high cash burn rates thereby raising questions regarding their long-term economic viability.Since there is a repeated tendency for high technology firms in various emerging sectors of the economy to go public in waves amid investor optimism followed by disappointing performance,insights gained from a study of factors that influence the path-to-profitability of Internet IPO firms will help increase our understanding of the development path and long-term economic viability of entrepreneurial firms in emerging, high technology industries.Using a sample of160Internet IPO firms that went public during the period1996–2000, we estimate Cox Proportional Hazards(CPH)models to analyze the economic significance of factors that influence the post-IPO path-to-profitability.Consistent with agency explanations,we find that a higher proportion of inside directors on the board and the change in pre-to-post-IPO ownership of top management are both significantly positively related to the probability of attaining post-IPO profitability.These results support arguments in the governance literature pointing to the beneficial impact of the presence of more insiders on the boards of high technology companies as well as the signaling value of the ownership stake of top management in the post-IPO firm.Additionally,we find evidence to indicate that higher institutional investor demand serves as an effective signal of the ability of Internet firms to attain post-IPO profitability,while greater pre-IPO valuation uncertainty reflects higher divergence of opinion about the future prospects of the IPO firm, and serves as a negative signal of the ability to achieve post-IPO profitability.Finally,we find that while underwriter prestige is unrelated to the probability of post-IPO profitability, VC participation decreases the probability of post-IPO profitability.Our results regarding the impact of VC participation on the probability of post-IPO profitability support arguments in the literature that VCs during the Internet boom period had incentives to grandstand by Please cite this article as:Jain,B.A.et al.The path-to-profitability of Internet IPO firms.Journal of Businesstaking their companies public prematurely and that their monitoring role in the post-IPO period was rather limited since they cashed out earlier due to shorter lock-up periods.Our study makes several contributions.First,we construct a theoretical framework based on agency and signaling theories to identify factors that may influence the path-to-profitability of IPO firms.Second,we provide empirical evidence on the economic viability (path-to-profitability and firm survival)of newly public Internet firms.Third,our study adds to the theoretical and empirical literature that has focused on factors influencing the ability of entrepreneurial firms to achieve critical milestones during the transition from private to public ownership.While previous studies have focused on milestones during the private phase of firm development such as receipt of VC funding and completion of a public offering,our study extends this literature by focusing on a post-issue milestone such as attaining profitability.2.IntroductionThe past few decades have witnessed the formation and development of several vitally important technologically oriented emerging industries such as disk drive,biotechnology,and most recently the Internet industry.Entrepreneurial firms in such knowledge intensive industries are increasingly going public earlier in their life cycle while there is still a great deal of uncertainty and information asymmetry regarding their future prospects (Janey and Folta,2006).A natural consequence of the rapid transition from founding stage firms to public corporations is an increasing tendency for firms to go public on the basis of a promise of profitability rather than actual profitability.3Although sustained profitability is no longer a requirement for firms in order to go public,actual accomplishment of post-IPO profitability represents an important milestone in the firm's evolution since it reduces uncertainty regarding the long-term economic viability of the firm.In this paper,we focus on identifying observable factors at the time of going public that have the ability to influence the likelihood and timing of attaining post-IPO profitability by Internet firms.We restrict our study to the Internet industry since it represents a natural setting to study the long-term economic viability of an emerging industry where firms tend to go public when they are predominantly unprofitable and where there is considerably uncertainty and information asymmetry regarding their future prospects.4The attainment of post-IPO profitability assumes significance since the IPO event does not provide the same level of legitimizing differentiation that it did in the past as sustained profitability is no longer a prerequisite to go public particularly in periods where the market is favorably inclined towards investments rather than demonstration of profitability (Stuart et al.,1999;Janey and Folta,2006).During the Internet boom,investors readily accepted the mantra of “growth at all costs ”and enthusiastically bid up the post-IPO offering prices to irrational levels (Lange et al.,2001).In fact,investor focus on the promise of growth rather than profitability resulted in Internet start-ups being viewed differently from typical 3For example,Ritter and Welch (2002)report that the percentage of unprofitable firms going public rose form 19%in the 1980s to 37%during 1995–1998.4Schultz and Zaman (2001)report that only 8.72%of the Internet firms that went public during January 1999to March 2000were profitable in the quarter prior to the IPO.3B.A.Jain et al./Journal of Business Venturing xx (2007)xxx –xxx Please cite this article as:Jain,B.A.et al.The path-to-profitability of Internet IPO firms.Journal of Business4 B.A.Jain et al./Journal of Business Venturing xx(2007)xxx–xxxnew ventures in that they were able to marshal substantial resources virtually independent of performance benchmarks(Mudambi and Treichel,2005).Since the Internet bubble burst in April2000,venture capital funds dried up and many firms that had successful IPOs went bankrupt or faced severe liquidity problems(Chang, 2004).Consequently,investors'attention shifted from their previously singular focus on growth prospects to the question of profitability with their new mantra being“path-to-profitability.”As such,market participants focused on not just whether the IPO firm would be able to achieve profitability but also“when”or“how soon.”IPO firms unable to credibly demonstrate a clear path-to-profitability were swiftly punished with steeply lower valuations and consequently faced significantly higher financing constraints.Since cash flow negative firms are not yet self sufficient and,therefore,dependent on external financing to continue to operate,the inability to raise additional capital results in a vicious cycle of events that can quickly lead to delisting and even bankruptcy.5Therefore,the actual attainment of post-IPO profitability represents an important milestone in the evolution of an IPO firm providing it with legitimacy and signaling its ability to remain economically viable through the ups and downs associated with changing capital market conditions.The theoretical framework supporting our analysis draws from signaling and agency theories as they relate to IPO firms.In our study,signaling theory provides the theoretical basis to evaluate the signaling impact of factors such as management quality,third party certification,institutional investor demand,and pre-IPO valuation uncertainty on the path-to-profitability.Similarly,agency theory provides the theoretical foundations to allow us to examine the impact of governance structure and change in top management ownership at the time of going public on the probability of achieving the post-IPO profitability milestone.Our empirical analysis is based on the hazard analysis methodology to identify the determinants of the probability of becoming profitable as a function of time for a sample of160Internet IPOs issued during the period1996–2000.Our study makes several contributions.First,we construct a theoretical framework based on agency and signaling theories to identify factors that may influence the path-to-profitability of IPO firms.Second,we provide empirical evidence on the economic viability of newly public firms(path-to-profitability and firm survival)in the Internet industry.Third, we add to the theoretical and empirical entrepreneurship literature that has focused on factors influencing the ability of entrepreneurial firms to achieve critical milestones during the transition from private to public ownership.While previous studies have focused on milestones during the private phase of firm development such as receipt of VC funding and successful completion of a public offering(Chang,2004;Dimov and Shepherd,2005; Beckman et al.,2007),our study extends this literature by focusing on post-IPO milestones. Finally,extant empirical evidence indicates that the phenomenon of young,early stage 5The case of E-Toys an Internet based toy retailer best illustrates this cyclical process.E-Toys was successful in developing an extensive customer base and a strong brand.However,the huge investment in technology, advertising,and promotion to sustain their activities as well as increased competition from both new entrants and old economy firms adopting the Internet to sell toys resulted in depressed profit margins and a longer than expected post-IPO time-to-profitability.Investors discouraged by the firm not reaching profitability within the expected time frame reacted negatively,leading to a steep drop in stock prices and consequently drying up of additional sources of external financing.As a result,the firm was forced to file for bankruptcy within a short period of time after its highly successful IPO.Please cite this article as:Jain,B.A.et al.The path-to-profitability of Internet IPO firms.Journal of Businessfirms belonging to relatively new industries being taken public amid a wave of investor optimism fueled by the promise of growth rather than profitability tends to repeat itself over time.6However,profitability tends to remain elusive and takes much longer than anticipated which results in investor disillusionment and consequently high failure rate among firms in such sectors.7Therefore,our study is likely to provide useful lessons to investors when applying valuations to IPO firms when this phenomenon starts to repeat itself.This articles proceeds as follows.First,using agency and signaling theories,we develop our hypotheses.Second,we describe our sample selection procedures and present descriptive statistics.Third,we describe our research methods and present our results.Finally,we discuss our results and end the article with our concluding remarks.3.Theory and hypothesesSignaling models and agency theory have been extensively applied in the financial economics,management,and strategy literatures to analyze a wide range of economic phenomena that revolve around problems associated with information asymmetry,moral hazard,and adverse selection.Signaling theory in particular has been widely applied in the IPO market as a framework to analyze mechanisms that are potentially effective in resolving the adverse selection problem that arises as a result of information asymmetry between various market participants (Baron,1982;Rock,1986;Welch,1989).In this study,signaling theory provides the framework to evaluate the impact of pre-IPO factors such as management quality,third party certification,and institutional investor demand on the path-to-profitability of Internet IPO firms.The IPO market provides a particularly fertile setting to explore the consequences of separation of ownership and control and potential remedies for the resulting agency problems since the interests of pre-IPO and post-IPO shareholders can diverge.In the context of the IPO market,agency and signaling effects are also related to the extent that insider actions such as increasing the percentage of the firm sold at the IPO,percentage of management stock holdings liquidated at the IPO,or percentage of VC holdings liquidated at the IPO can accentuate agency problems with outside investors and,as a consequence,signal poor performance (Mudambi and Treichel,2005).We,therefore,apply agency theory to evaluate the impact of board structure and the change in pre-to-post IPO ownership of top management on the path-to-profitability of Internet IPO firms.ernance structureIn the context of IPO firms,there are at least two different agency problems (Mudambi and Treichel,2005).The first problem arises as a result of opportunistic behavior of agents to 6Interestingly,just a few years after the bust,technology companies have again started going public while they are still unprofitable (Lashinsky,2006).7For instance,in the biotechnology industry where the first company went public a quarter century ago,public companies have taken in close to $100billion dollars from stock market investors but have delivered cumulative losses of more than $40billion (Hamilton,2004).Similarly,the disk drive industry in the early 1980s passed through phases similar to the Internet industry in terms of high firm founding rates,explosive growth,overoptimistic investors,IPO clusters,and high post-IPO failure rate (Lerner,1995).5B.A.Jain et al./Journal of Business Venturing xx (2007)xxx –xxx Please cite this article as:Jain,B.A.et al.The path-to-profitability of Internet IPO firms.Journal of Business6 B.A.Jain et al./Journal of Business Venturing xx(2007)xxx–xxxincrease their share of the wealth at the expense of principals.The introduction of effective monitoring and control systems can help mitigate or eliminate this type of behavior and its negative impact on post-issue performance.The extant corporate governance literature has argued that the effectiveness of monitoring and control functions depends to a large extent on the composition of the board of directors.We,therefore,examine the relationship between board composition and the likelihood and timing of post-IPO profitability.The second type of agency problem that arises in the IPO market is due to uncertainty regarding whether insiders seek to use the IPO as an exit mechanism to cash out or whether they use the IPO to raise capital to invest in positive NPV projects.The extent of insider selling their shares at the time of the IPO can provide an effective signal regarding which of the above two motivations is the likely reason for the IPO.We,therefore,examine the impact of the change in ownership of officers and directors around the IPO on the likelihood and timing of attaining post-issue profitability.3.1.1.Board compositionThe corporate governance literature has generally argued that a greater proportion of outside directors on the board increases board independence and results in better monitoring of management and thereby lowers agency costs(Fama,1980;Fama and Jensen,1983; Williamson,1984).Therefore,a greater proportion of outside directors on the board of Internet IPO firms is likely to lead to a more effective monitoring and control environment, thus ensuring that managers pursue shareholder value maximizing strategies.In addition, due to their short operating history,management of Internet IPO firms are unlikely to have developed the necessary links with customers,suppliers,bankers,and other important stakeholders of the firm.Outside directors can be instrumental in facilitating the establishment of such links,thereby allowing these firms to better compete in the product market as well as capital market.On the basis of the above discussion,we would expect Internet IPO firms with more independent boards to be on a faster path-to-profitability. Hypothesis1:The proportion of outsiders on the board of Internet IPO firms is positively related to the probability of profitability and negatively related to time-to-profitability during the post-IPO period.The extant empirical evidence on the positive relation between board composition and performance,however,has been mixed,both for IPO firms as well as more seasoned corporations(Dalton et al.,1998;Baker and Gompers,2003).The ambiguous results can be partly attributed to the tradeoff between the benefits from the presence of outside directors such as more effective monitoring and control,greater objectivity,and assistance in resource acquisitions versus the benefits provided by inside directors such as detailed knowledge of the firm's operations,customer requirements,and technology that in turn can help the strategic planning process.Viewed through the innovation and technology prism, high technology Internet IPO firms may actually benefit more from in-depth technological knowledge,expertise,commitment,and innovative thinking that insiders bring to the board,rather than from the monitoring and control benefits provided by outside directors.In support of this argument,Zahra(1996)points out that boards comprised of a higher proportion of insiders may be more innovative and better positioned to serve management Please cite this article as:Jain,B.A.et al.The path-to-profitability of Internet IPO firms.Journal of Businessas knowledgeable sounding boards in the formulation of strategy.Further,since high technology Internet firms are unlikely to generate substantial free cash flows in the period immediately after the IPO,the potential for wasteful expenditure is lower,and therefore,the benefits of monitoring and control provided by outsiders is less likely to be substantive.If there is a greater need for creative thinking and decision-making in high technology knowledge-based industries that only insiders are uniquely qualified to provide,we expect a negative relation between the proportion of outsiders on the board and the probability of profitability and a positive relation with time-to-profitability.Hypothesis 1A:The proportion of outsiders on the board of Internet firms is negatively related to the probability of profitability and positively related to time-to-profitability during the post-IPO period.3.1.2.Ownership of officers and directorsCorporate governance studies have also focused extensively on corporate ownership and its impact on performance,both in isolation and in conjunction with board composition.Both agency and signaling theories provide similar predictions regarding the relationship between the extent of insider ownership and post-issue performance.Agency theory suggests that high insider ownership reduces agency conflicts and enhances organizational performance,while signaling theory argues that higher insider ownership is a credible signal of insider's confidence regarding the future prospects of the firm.The change in the ownership of the top managers and directors around the offering can be viewed as an important signal of the issuing firm's future prospects (Leland and Pyle,1977).In the context of the IPO market,a large post-IPO decline in top management ownership can be interpreted as a signal of their lack of confidence in the ability of the firm to generate sufficient cash flows to reach the profitability milestone.Additionally,any decline in the ownership stakes of owners/managers is likely to adversely affect post-IPO performance due to higher agency costs (Jensen and Meckling,1976).While the extent of the change in ownership of insiders around the IPO is an informative signal for all types of IPO firms,it is particularly relevant in the context of Internet firms that go public while predominantly unprofitable and where the informational and incentive problems are particularly acute.For instance,Mudambi and Treichel (2005)find that a substantial reduction in equity holdings of the top management of Internet firms signals an impending cash crisis.We,therefore,argue that the greater the decline in the pre-to-post IPO ownership of top managers and directors,the lower the probability of attaining profitability,and consequently the longer the time-to-profitability.Hypothesis 2:The decline in ownership of officers and directors from pre-to-post-IPO is negatively related to the probability of attaining profitability and positively related to time-to-profitability after the IPO.3.2.Management qualityAn extensive body of research has examined the impact of top management team (TMT)characteristics on firm outcomes for established firms as well as for new ventures by drawing from human capital and demography theories (Eisenhardt and Schoonhoven,7B.A.Jain et al./Journal of Business Venturing xx (2007)xxx –xxx Please cite this article as:Jain,B.A.et al.The path-to-profitability of Internet IPO firms.Journal of Business8 B.A.Jain et al./Journal of Business Venturing xx(2007)xxx–xxx1990;Finkelstein and Hambrick,1990;Wiersema and Bantel,1992;Hambrick et al.,1996; Beckman et al.,2007).For instance,researchers drawing from human capital theories study the impact of characteristics such as type and amount of experience of TMTs on performance(Cooper et al.,1994;Gimeno et al.,1997;Burton et al.,2002;Baum and Silverman,2004).Additionally,Beckman et al.(2007)argue that demographic arguments are distinct from human capital arguments in that they examine team composition and diversity in addition to experience.The authors consequently examine the impact of characteristics such as background affiliation,composition,and turnover of TMT members on the likelihood of firms completing an IPO.Overall,researchers have generally found evidence to support arguments that human capital and demographic characteristics of TMT members influence firm outcomes.Drawing from signaling theory,we argue that the quality of the TMTof IPO firms can serve as a signal of the ability of a firm to attain post-IPO profitability.Since management quality is costly to acquire,signaling theory implies that by hiring higher quality management,high value firms can signal their superior prospects and separate themselves from low value firms with less capable managers.The beneficial impact of management quality in the IPO market includes the ability to attract more prestigious investment bankers,generate stronger institutional investor demand,raise capital more effectively,lower underwriting expenses, attract stronger analyst following,make better investment and financing decisions,and consequently influence the short and long-run post-IPO operating and stock performance (Chemmanur and Paeglis,2005).Thus,agency theory,in turn,would argue that higher quality management is more likely to earn their marginal productivity of labor and thus have a lower incentive to shirk,thereby also leading to more favorable post-IPO outcomes.8 We focus our analyses on the signaling impact of CEO and CFO quality on post-IPO performance.We focus on these two members of the TMT of IPO firms since they are particularly influential in establishing beneficial networks,providing legitimacy to the organization,and are instrumental in designing,communicating,and implementing the various strategic choices and standard operating procedures that are likely to influence post-IPO performance.3.2.1.CEO characteristicsCEOs play a major role in designing and implementing strategic choices and policies for their firms.Their actions can have long-term significance since they typically define long-term policies of the firm(Parrino,1997).While the role and influence of CEOs on strategic choices,incentive mechanisms,accountability issues,and consequently performance is vital for all types of organizations,their impact is especially relevant for newly public firms that face significant competitive,product market,and financing challenges during the post-IPO phase.The role and impact of CEOs can be even more critical for the subset of technology related IPO firms since they may require fundamentally different skill sets and competencies from CEOs compared to those required to run companies in more traditional industries.We assess CEO quality by focusing on variables that capture the extent of general and specific human capital developed by them through their prior work experience and their risk propensity and decision-making behavior.In distinguishing between general and specific8We thank the Associate Editor,Phil Phan for suggesting this explanation.Please cite this article as:Jain,B.A.et al.The path-to-profitability of Internet IPO firms.Journal of Business。

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附录【原文】Upgrading in Global Value ChainsThe aim of this paper is to explore how small- and medium-sized Latin American enterprises ( SMEs) may participate in global markets in a way that provides for sustainable growth. This may be defined asthe ‘‘highroad’’　to competitiveness, contrasting with the ‘‘low road,’’ typical offirms from developing countries, which often compete by squeezing wages and profit margins rather than by improving productivity, wages, and profits. Thekey difference between the high and the low road to competitiveness is often explained by the different capabilities of firms to ‘‘upgrade.’　In this paper, upgrading refers to the capacity of a firmto innovate to increase the value added of its products and processes (Humphrey & Schmitz, 2002a; Kaplinsky&Readman, 2001; Porter, 1990).Capitalizing on one of the most productive areas of the recent literature on SMEs, we restrict our fieldof research to small enterprises located in clusters.There is now a wealth ofempirical evidence (Humphrey, 1995; Nadvi &Schmitz, 1999; Rabellotti, 1997) showing that small firms in clusters, both indeveloped and developing countries, are able to over come some of the major constraints they usually face:lack of specialized skills, difficult access to technology, inputs, market, information, credit, andexternal services.Nevertheless, the literature on clusters, mainlyfocused on the local sources ofcompetitiveness coming from intracluster vertical and horizontal relationshipsgenerating ‘‘collective efficiency’’　(Schmitz, 1995), has often neglected theincreasing importance of external link ages. Due to recent changes in productionsystems, distribution channels, and financial markets, and to the spread of informationtechnologies, enterprises and clusters are increasingly integrated in value chains thatoften operate across many different countries. The literature on global value chains(GVCs) (Gereffi, 1999; Gereffi& Kaplinsky, 2001) calls attention to the opportunitiesfor local producers to learn from the global leadersof the chains that may be buyers or1producers. The internal governance of the value chain has an importanteffect on the scope of local firms’ upgrading (Humphrey& Schmitz, 2000).Indeed, extensive evidence on Latin America reveals that both the local and the global dimensions matter, and firms often participate in clustersas well as in value chains (Pietrobelli& Rabellotti, 2004). Both forms of organization offer opportunities to foster competitiveness via learning and upgrading. However, they also have remarkable drawbacks, as, for instance, upgrading may be limited in some forms of value chains, andclusters with little developed external economies and joint actions may h ave no influence on competitiveness.Moreover, both strands of literature were conceived and developed toovercome the sectoral dimension in the analysis of industrial organization and dynamism. On the one hand, studies on clusters, focusing on agglomerations of firms specializing in different stages of the filie′re, moved beyond the traditional units of analysis of industrial economics: the firm and the sector. On the other hand, according to the value chain literature, firms from different sectors may all participate in the same value chain (Gereffi, 1994). Nevertheless, SMEs located in clusters and involved in value chains, may undertake a process of upgrading in order toincrease and improve their participation in the global economy, especially as the industrial sector plays a role and affects the upgrading prospectsof SMEs.The contribution this paper makes is by taking into accountall of these dimensions together. Thus, within this general theoretical background, this study aims to investigate the hypothesis that enterpriseupgrading is simultaneously affected by firm-specific efforts and actions, and by the environment in which firms operate. The latter is crucially shaped by three characteristics: (i) the collective efficiency of the clusterin which SMEs operate, (ii) the pattern of governance of the value chainin which SMEs participate, and (iii) the peculiar features that characterize learning and innovation patterns in specific sectors.The structure of the paper is the following: in Section 2, we brieflyreview theconcepts of clustering and value chains, and focus on theiroverlaps andcomplementarities. Section 3 first discusses the notion of SMEs’　upgrading and then2introduces a categorization of groups of sectors, based on the notionsunderlying the Pavitt taxonomy, and applied to the present economicreality of Latin America. Section 4reports the original empirical evidence on a large sample of Latin American clusters, and shows that the sectoral dimension matters to explain why clustering and participating in globalvalue chains offer different opportunities for upgrading in differentgroups of sectors. Section5 summarizes and concludes.2. CLUSTERS AND VALUE CHAINSDuring the last two decades, the successful performance of industrialdistricts in the developed world, particularly in Italy, has stimulatednew attention to the potential offered by this form of industrial organization for firms of developing countries. The capability of clustered firms to be economically viable and grow has attracted a great deal ofinterest in development studies. 1In developing countries, the sectoral and geographical concentration of SMEs israther common, and a wide range of cases has since been reported. 2 Obviously, theexistence of acritical mass of specialized and agglomerated activities,in a number ofcases with historically strong roots, does not necessarily imply thatthese clustersshare all the stylized facts which identify the Marshall type ofdistrict, as firstlydefined by Becattini (1987). 3 Nonetheless, clustering may be consideredas a majorfacilitating factor for a number of subsequent developments (which mayor may notoccur): division and specialization of labor, the emergence of a widenetwork ofsuppliers, the appearance of agents who sell to distant national and internationalmarkets, the emergence of specialized producer services, the materialization of a poolof specialized and skilled workers, and the formation of business associations.To capture the positive impacts of these factors on the competitivenessof firmslocated in clusters,Schmitz (1995)introduced the concept of ‘‘collective efficiency’’　(CE) defined as the competitive advantage derived from local externaleconomies andjoint action. The concept of external economies 4 was first introducedby Marshall inhis Principles of Economics(1920). According to Schmitz (1999a), incidental externaleconomies (EE) are of importance in explaining the competitivenessof industrialclusters, but there is also a deliberate force at work: consciously pursued joint action3(JA).Such joint action can be within vertical or horizontal linkages. 5The combination of both incidental external economies and the effectsof activecooperation defines the degree of collective efficiency of a cluster and, dynamically,its potential for fostering SMEs’ upgrading. Both dimensions are crucial: Onlyincidental, passive external economies may not suffice without jointactions, and thelatter hardly develop in the absence of external economies. Thus, ourfocus is on therole of intracluster vertical and horizontal relationships generating collectiveefficiency.However, recent changes in production systems, distribution channels and financial markets, accelerated by the globalization of product markets and the spread of information technologies, suggest that more attention needs to be paid to external linkages. 6 Gereffi’s global value chain approach (Gereffi, 1999) helps us to take into account activities takingplace outside the cluster and, in particular, to understand the strategicrole of the relationships with key external actors.From an analytical point of view, the value chain perspective is useful because (Kaplinsky,2001; Wood, 2001) the focus moves f rom manufacturing only to the other activities involved in the supply of goods and services,including distribution and marketing. All these activities contributeto add value. Moreover, the ability to identify the activities providing higher returns along the value chain is key to understanding the global appropriation of the returns to production.Value chain research focuses on the nature of the relationships among t he various actors involved in the chain, and on their implications fordevelopment (Humphrey & Schmitz, 2002b). To study these relationships, the concept of ‘‘governance’’ is central to the analysis.At any point in the chain, some degree of governance or coordination isrequired inorder to take decisions not only on ‘‘what’’　should be, or ‘‘how’’　something shouldbe, produced but sometimes also ‘‘when,’’　‘‘how much,’’　and even ‘‘at what price.’’　Coordination may occur through arm’ｓ-length market relations ornon marketrelationships. In the latter case, following Humphrey and Schmitz (2000), wedistinguish three possible types of governance:(a) network implying cooperation4between firms of more or less equal power which share their competencieswithin the chain; (b) quasi-hierarchy involving relationships between legally independent firms in which one is subordinated to the other, witha leader in the chain defining the rules to which the rest of the actorshave to comply; and (c) hierarchy when a firm is owned by an external firm.Also stressed is the role played by GVC leaders, particularly by thebuyers, intransferring knowledge along the chains. For small firms in less developed countries(LDCs), participation in value chains is a way to obtain information onthe need andmode t o gain access to global markets. Yet, although this information has high valuefor local SMEs, the role played by the leaders of GVCs in fostering andsupportingthe SMEs’　upgrading process is less clear.Gereffi (1999), mainly focusing on EastAsia, assumes a rather optimistic view, emphasizing the role of the leaders that almostautomatically promote process, product, and functional upgrading amongsmall localproducers.Pietrobelli and Rabellotti (2004)present a more differentiated picture forLatin America.In line with the present approach, Humphrey and Schmitz (2000) discuss the prospects of upgrading with respect to the pattern of valuechain governance. They conclude that insertion in a quasi-hierarchical chain offers very favorable conditions for process and product upgrading, buthinders functional upgrading. Networks offer ideal upgrading conditions,but they are the least likely to occur for developing country producers.In addition, a more dynamic approach suggests that chain governanceis not given forever and may change because(Humphrey & Schmitz, 2002b): (a) power relationships may evolve when existing producers, or their spinoffs, acquire new capabilities;(b) establishing and maintaining quasi-hierarchical governance is costly for the lead firm and leads to inflexibility because of transaction specific investments; and (c) firms and cluster soften do not operate only in one chain but simultaneously in several types of chains, and they may apply competencies learned in one chainto supply other chains.In sum, both modes of organizing production, that is, the cluster and the valuechain, offer interesting opportunities for the upgrading and modernization of local5firms, and are not mutually exclusive alternatives. However, in order toassess their potential contribution to local SMEs’ innovation and upgrading, we need to understand their organization of inter firmlinkages and their internal governance. Furthermore, as we explain in the following section, the nature of their dominant specialization also plays a role and affects SMEs’ upgrading prospects.’ UPGRADING3. THE SECTORAL DIMENSION OFSMEs(a) The concept of upgradingThe concept of upgrading—making better products, making them more efficiently, or moving in to more skilled activities—has often been used in studies on competitiveness (Kaplinsky,2001; Porter, 1990), and is relevant here.Following this approach, upgrading is decisively related to innovation. Here wedefine upgrading as innovating to increase value added. 7 Enterprisesachieve this invarious ways, such as, for example, by entering higher unit value market niches ornew s ectors, or by undertaking new p roductive (or service) functions. The concept ofupgrading may be effectively described for enterprises working within avalue chain,where four types of upgrading are singled out (Humphrey & Schmitz, 2000): —Process upgrading is transforming inputs into outputs moreefficiently by reorganizing the production system or introducing superiortechnology (e.g., footwear producers in the Sinos Valley; Schmitz, 1999b). —Product upgrading is moving into more sophisticated product lines interms of increased unit values (e.g., the apparel commodity chain inAsia upgrading from discount chains to department stores; Gereffi,1999).—Functional upgrading is acquiring new, superior functions in the chain, such as design or marketing or abandoning existing low-value added functions to focus on higher value added activities (e.g., Torreon’s blue jeans industry upgrading from maquila to ‘‘full-package’’　manufacturing; Bair&Gereffi, 2001).—Inter sectoral upgrading is applying the competence acquired ina particularfunction to move i nto a new s ector. For instance, in Taiwan, competence in producingTVs was used to make monitors and then to move into the computer sector (Guerrieri& Pietrobelli,2004; Humphrey & Schmitz,2002b). In sum, upgrading withina value6chain implies going up on the value ladder, moving away from activitiesin which competitionis of the ‘‘low road’’ type and entry barriers are low.Our focus on upgrading requires moving a step forward and away fromRicardo’s static concept of ‘‘Comparative Advantage’’ (CA). While CA registers ex-post gaps in relative productivity which determine international trade flows, success in firmlevel upgrading enables thedynamic acquisition of competitiveness in new market niches, sectors orphases of the productive chain (Lall, 2001; Pietrobelli, 1997). In sum, the logic goes from innovation, to upgrading, to the acquisition offirm-level competitiveness(i.e., competitive advantage). 8In this paper, we argue that the concept of competitive advantageincreasinglymatters. In the theory of comparative advantage, what matters is relative productivity,determining different patterns of inter industry specialization.Within such atheoretical approach, with perfectly competitive markets, firms need to target onlyproduction efficiency. In fact, this is not enough, and competitiveadvantage is therelevant concept to analyze SMEs’　performance because of (i) the existence of formsof imperfect competition in domestic and international markets and (ii)the presenceof different degrees of (dynamic) externalities in different subsect or sand stages ofthe value chain.More specifically, in non perfectly competitive market rents and nichesof ‘‘extra-normal’’ profits often emerge, and this explains the efforts to enterselectively specificsegments rather than simply focusing on efficiency improvements, regardless of theprevailing productive specialization (as advocated by the theory of CA). Moreover,different stages in the value chain offer different scope for dynamic externalities.Thus, for example, in traditional manufacturing, the stages ofdesign, productinnovation, marketing, and distribution may all foster competitivenessincreases inrelated activities and sectors. The advantage of functional upgrading isin reducing thefragility and vulnerability of an enterprise’s productive specialization. Competitionfrom new entrants—i.e., firms from developing countries with lower production costs,crowding out incumbents—is stronger in the manufacturing phases of thevalue chainthan in other more knowledge and organization-intensive phases (e.g.,product design7and innovation, chain management, d istribution and retail, etc.).Therefore, functionalupgrading may bring about more enduring and solid competitiveness.For all these reasons, the concept of production efficiency is encompassed withinthe broader concept of competitiveness, and the efforts to upgradefunctionally andinter sectorally (and the policies to support these processes) are justifiedto reap largerrents and externalities emerging in specific stages of the value chain,market niches,or sectors.An additional element that crucially affects the upgrading prospectsof firms and clusters is the sectoral dimension. Insofar as we have defined upgrading as innovating to increase value added, then all the factorsinfluencing innovation acquire a new relevance. This dimension is often overlooked in studies on clusters, perhaps due to the fact that most of these studies are not comparative but rather detailed intra industry case studies.In order to take into account such a sectoral dimension, and the effectthis may have on the firms’ pattern of innovation and learning, we need to introduce the concept of ‘‘tacit knowledge.’’　This notion was first introduced by Polanyi(1967)and then discussed in the context of evolutionary economics by Nelson and Winter(1982). It refers to the evidence that some aspects of technological knowledge are wellarticulated, written down in manuals and papers, and taught. Others arelargely tacit, mainly learned through practice and practical examples. Inessence, this is knowledge which can be freely used by its owners, butthat can not be easily expressed and communicated to anyone else.The tacit component of technological knowledge makes its transfer and applicationcostly and difficult. As a result, the mastery of a technologymay require anorganization to be active in the earlier stages of its development,and a close andcontinuous interaction between the user and the producer—or transfer—of suchknowledge. Inter firm relationships are especially needed in thiscontext. Tacitknowledge is an essential dimension to define a useful groupingof economicactivities.(b) Sectoral specificities in upgrading and innovation: a classification for Latin8American countriesThe impact of collective efficiency and patterns of governance on thecapacity of SMEs to upgrade may differ across sectors. This claim is based upon the consideration that sectoral groups differ in termsof technological complexity and in the modes and sources of innovationand upgrading. 9 As shown by innovation studies, in some s ectors, vertical relations with suppliers of inputs may b e particularly important sources of product and process upgrading (as in the case of textiles and the mosttraditional manufacturing), while in other sectors, technologyusers, organizations such as universities or the firms themselves (as, for example, with software or agro industrial products) may provide majorstimuli for technical change (Pavitt,1984; Von Hippel, 1987).Consistently with this approach, the properties of firm knowledge bases acrossdifferent sectors (Malerba & Orsenigo, 1993) 10 mayaffect the strategic relevance ofcollective efficiencyfor the processes of upgrading in clusters. Thus,for example, intraditional manufacturing sectors, technology has important tacit and idiosyncraticelements, and therefore, upgrading strongly depends on the intensity of technologicalexternalities and cooperation among l ocal actors (e.g., firms, research centers, andtechnology and quality diffusion centers), in other words, upgradingdepends on thedegree of collective efficiency. While in other groups (e.g., complexproducts or largenatural resource-based firms) technology is more codified and the access to externalsources of knowledge such as transnational corporations(TNCs,or researchlaboratories located in developed countries become more critical forupgrading.Furthermore, the differences across sectoral groups raise questions onthe role ofglobal buyers in fostering (or hindering) the upgrading in differentclusters. Thus, forexample, global buyers may be more involved and interested intheir providers’　upgrading if the technology required is mainly tacit and requires intense interaction.Moreover, in traditional manufacturing industries, characterized by alow degree oftechnological complexity, firms are likely to be included in GVCs evenif they havevery low technological capabilities. Therefore, tight supervision anddirect supportbecome necessary conditions for global buyers who rely on the competencies of their9local suppliers and want to reduce the risk of non compliance(Humphrey & Schmitz,2002b). The situation is at the opposite extreme in the case of complex products,where technology is often thoroughly codified and the technological complexityrequires that firms have already internal technological capabilities to be subcontracted,otherwise large buyers would not contract them at all.In order to take into account the above-mentioned hypotheses, wedevelop asectoral classification, adapting existing taxonomies to the Latin American case. 11On the basis of Pavitt’s seminal work (1984), we consider that in Latin America, in-house R&D activities are very low both in domestic and foreign firms(Archibugi&Pietrobelli, 2003), domestic inter sectoral linkages have beendisplaced by tradeliberalization(Cimoli & Katz, 2002), and university-industry linkagesappear to bestill relatively weak (Arocena & Sutz, 2001). 12 Furthermore, in the past10 years,Latin America has deepened its productive specialization in resource based sectors and has weakened its position in more engineering intensive industries (Katz,2001), reflecting its rich endowment o f natural resources, relatively more than human and technical resources (Wood & Berge,1997).Hence, we retain Pavitt’s key notions and identify four main sectoral groups for Latin America on the basis of the way l earning and upgrading occur, and on the related industrial organization that most frequently prevails.13The categories are as follows:1. Traditional manufacturing, mainly labor intensive and ‘‘traditional’’　technology industries such as textiles, footwear, tiles, and furniture;2. Natural resource-based sectors (NRbased),implying the direct exploitation of natural resources, for example, copper, marble, fruit, etc.;3. Complex products industries (COPs), including, among others, automobiles,autocomponents and aircraft industries, ICT and consumer electronics;4. Specializedsuppliers, in our LA cases, essentially software.Each of these categories tends to havea predominant learning and innovating behavior, in terms of main sourcesof technicalchange, dependence on basic or applied research, modes of in-house innovation (e.g.,‘‘routinized’’ versus large R&D laboratories), tacitness orcodified nature ofknowledge, scale and relevance of R&D activity, andappropriability of10innovation(Table 1).Traditional manufacturing and resource-based sectors are by far the mostpresent in Latin America, and therefore especially relevant toour presentaims of assessing SMEs’ potential for upgrading within clustersand value chains. Traditional manufacturing is defined as supplierdominated, because major process innovations are introduced by producersof inputs (e.g., machinery, materials, etc.). Indeed, firm shave room toupgrade their products (and processes)by developing or imitating newproducts’ designs, often interacting with large buyers that increasinglyplay a role in shaping the design of final products and hence thespecificities of the process of production (times, quality standards, andcosts).Natural resource-based sectors crucially rely on the advancement ofbasic and applied science, which, due to low appropriabilityconditions, is most often undertaken by public research institutes,possibly in connection with producers (farmers, breeders, etc.). 14 Inthese sectors, applied research is mainly carried out by input suppliers(i.e., chemicals, machinery, etc.) which achieve economies of scale andappropriate the results of their research through patents.Complex products are defined as ‘‘high cost, engineering-intensive products,subsystems, or constructs supplied by a unit of production’’　(Hobday,1998), 15where the local network is normally anchored to one ‘‘assembler,’’　whichoperates asa leading firm characterized by high design and technologicalcapabilities. To ouraims, th e relationships of local suppliers with these ‘‘anchors’’　may be crucial tofoster (or hinder) firms’　upgrading through technology and skill transfers(or the lackof them).Scale-intensive firms typically lead complex product sectors (Bell& Pavitt,1993), where the process of technical change is realized within an architectural set(Henderson & Clark, 1990), and it is often incremental and modular.Among the Specialized Suppliers, we only consider software, which istypicallyclient driven. This is an especially promising sector for developingcountries’ SMEs,due to the low transport and physical capital costs and the high information intensityof the sector, which moderates the importance of proximity to finalmarkets andextends the scope for a deeper international division of labor.Moreover, the11disintegration of some productive cycles, such as for example of telecommunications,opens up new m arket niches with low entry barriers(Torrisi, 2003). However, at thesame time, the proximity of the market and of clients may cruciallyimprove thedevelopment of design capabilities and thereby foster product/process upgrading.Thus, powerful pressures for cluste ring and globalization coexist in thissector.The different learning patterns across these four groups of activities are expected to affect the process of upgrading of clusters in value chains.This paper also aims at analyzing with original empirical evidencewhether—and how—the sectoral dimension influences this process in Latin America.4. METHODOLOGY: COLLECTIONAND ANALYSIS OF DATAThis study is based on the collection of original data from 12 clusters in LatinAmerica that have not hitherto been investigated, and on an extensivereview of cluster studies available. The empirical analysis was carried out from September 2002 to June 2003 with the support of the Inter American Development Bank. An international team of 12 experts in Italy andin four LA countries collected and reviewed the empirical data.Desk and field studies were undertaken following the same methodology,whichinvolved field interviews with local firms, institutions, and observers,interviews withforeign buyers and TNCs involved in the local cluster, and secondary sources such as。

工程管理专业外文文献翻译(中英文)【精选文档】

xxxxxx 大学本科毕业设计外文翻译Project Cost Control: the Way it Works项目成本控制：它的工作方式学院（系）: xxxxxxxxxxxx专业: xxxxxxxx学生姓名: xxxxx学号： xxxxxxxxxx指导教师： xxxxxx评阅教师：完成日期：xxxx大学项目成本控制：它的工作方式在最近的一次咨询任务中，我们意识到对于整个项目成本控制体系是如何设置和应用的,仍有一些缺乏理解。

所以我们决定描述它是如何工作的.理论上，项目成本控制不是很难跟随。

首先，建立一组参考基线。

然后，随着工作的深入，监控工作,分析研究结果,预测最终结果并比较参考基准。

如果最终的结果不令人满意，那么你要对正在进行的工作进行必要的调整，并在合适的时间间隔重复。

如果最终的结果确实不符合基线计划，你可能不得不改变计划.更有可能的是，会 (或已经) 有范围变更来改变参考基线，这意味着每次出现这种情况你必须改变基线计划。

但在实践中，项目成本控制要困难得多，通过项目数量无法控制成本也证明了这一点。

正如我们将看到的，它还需要大量的工作，我们不妨从一开始启用它。

所以，要跟随项目成本控制在整个项目的生命周期.同时，我们会利用这一机会来指出几个重要文件的适当的地方。

其中包括商业案例，请求（资本)拨款（执行），工作包和工作分解结构，项目章程（或摘要),项目预算或成本计划、挣值和成本基线。

所有这些有助于提高这个组织的有效地控制项目成本的能力。

业务用例和应用程序（执行）的资金重要的是要注意，当负责的管理者对于项目应如何通过项目生命周期展开有很好的理解时,项目成本控制才是最有效的。

这意味着他们在主要阶段的关键决策点之间行使职责。

他们还必须识别项目风险管理的重要性，至少可以确定并计划阻止最明显的潜在风险事件。

在项目的概念阶段•每个项目始于确定的机会或需要的人.通常是有着重要性和影响力的人,如果项目继续,这个人往往成为项目的赞助。

财务管理或会计专业论文外文文献

原文：Introduction to Financial ManagementSourse:Ryan Allis.Zero to one million.February 2008Business financial management in the small firm is characterized, in many different cases, by the need to confront a somewhat different set of problems and opportunities than those confronted by a large corporation. One immediate and obvious difference is that a majority of smaller firms do not normally have the opportunity to publicly sell issues of stocks or bonds in order to raise funds. The owner-manager of a smaller firm must rely primarily on trade credit, bank financing, lease financing, and personal equity to finance the business. One, therefore faces a much more severely restricted set of financing alternatives than those faced by the financial vice president or treasurer of a large corporation.On the other hand, when small business financial management is concern, many financial problems facing the small firm are very similar to those of larger corporations. For example, the analysis required for a long-term investment decision such as the purchase of heavy machinery or the evaluation of lease-buy alternatives, is essentially the same regardless of the size of the firm. Once the decision is made, the financing alternatives available to the firm may be radically different, but the decision process will be generally similar.One area of particular concern for the smaller business owner lies in the effective management of working capital. Net working capital is defined as the difference between current assets and current liabilities and is often thought of as the "circulating capital" of the business. Lack of control in this crucial area is a primary cause of business failure in both small and large firms.The business manager must continually be alert to changes in working capital accounts, the cause of these changes and the implications of these changes for the financial health of the company. One convenient and effective method to highlight the key managerial requirements in this area is to view working capital in terms of its major components:(1) Cash and EquivalentsThis most liquid form of current assets, cash and cash equivalents (usually marketable securities or short-term certificate of deposit) requires constant supervision. A well planned and maintained cash budgeting system is essential to answer key questions such as: Is the cash level adequate to meet current expenses as they come due? What are the timing relationships between cash inflows and outflows? When will peak cash needs occur? What will be the magnitude of bank borrowing required to meet any cash shortfalls? When will this borrowing be necessary and when may repayment be expected?(2) Accounts ReceivableAlmost all businesses are required to extend credit to their customers. Key issues in this area include: Is the amount of accounts receivable reasonable in relation to sales? On the average, how rapidly are accounts receivable being collected? Which customers are "slow payers?" What action should be taken to speed collections where needed?(3) InventoriesInventories often make up 50 percent or more of a firm's current assets and therefore, are deserving of close scrutiny. Key questions which must be considered in this area include: Is the level of inventory reasonable in relation to sales and the operating characteristics of the business?How rapidly is inventory turned over in relation to other companies in the same industry? Is any capital invested in dead or slow moving stock? Are sales being lost due to inadequate inventory levels? If appropriate, what action should be taken to increase or decrease inventory?(4) Accounts Payable and Trade Notes PayableIn a business, trade credit often provides a major source of financing for the firm. Key issues to investigate in this category include: Is the amount of money owed to suppliers reasonable in relation to purchases? Is the firm's payment policy such that it will enhance or detract from the firm's credit rating? If available, are discounts being taken? What are the timing relationships between payments on accounts payable and collection on accounts receivable?(5) Notes PayableNotes payable to banks or other lenders are a second major source of financing for the business. Important questions in this class include: What is the amount of bank borrowing employed? Is this debt amount reasonable in relation to the equity financing of the firm? When will principal and interest payments fall due? Will funds be available to meet these payments on time?(6) Accrued Expenses and Taxes PayableAccrued expenses and taxes payable represent obligations of the firm as of the date of balance sheet preparation. Accrued expenses represent such items as salaries payable, interest payable on bank notes, insurance premiums payable, and similar items. Of primary concern in this area, particularly with regard to taxes payable, is the magnitude, timing, and availability of funds for payment. Careful planning is required to insure that these obligations are met on time.When small business financial management is concern, many financial problems facing the small firm are very similar to those of larger corporations. For example, the analysis required for a long-term investment decision such as the purchase of heavy machinery or the evaluation of lease-buy alternatives, is essentially the same regardless of the size of the firm. Once the decision is made, the financing alternatives available to the firm may be radically different. Manager must continually be alert to changes in working capital accounts, the cause of these changes and the implications of these changes for the financial health of the company.As a final note, it is important to recognize that although the working capital accounts above are listed separately, they must also be viewed in total and from the point of view of their relationship to one another: What is the overall trend in net working capital? Is this a healthy trend? Which individual accounts are responsible for the trend? How does the firm's working capital position relate to similar sized firms in the industry? What can be done to correct the trend, if necessary?Of course, the questions posed are much easier to ask than to answer and there are few "general" answers to the issues raised. The guides which follow provide suggestions, techniques, and guidelines for successful management which, when tempered with the experience of the individual owner-manager and the unique requirements of the particular industry, may be expected to enhance one's ability to manage effectively the financial resources of a business enterprise.企业财务管理在中小企业的特点是，在许多不同的情况下，需要面对有所不同的一系列问题和机会比那些面临一个大公司。

公司多元化经营外文文献及文献综述

本份文档包含：关于该选题的外文文献、文献综述一、外文文献标题: The effects of institutional ownership on the value and risk of diversifiedfirms 作者: Mohammad Jafarinejada, Surendranath R. Joryb, Thanh N. Ngoc, 期刊: International Review of Financial Ana lys is (Volume 40 2015): 207-219年份: 2015The effects of institutional ownership on the value and risk of diversified firmsAbstractWe study the link between institutional ownership and firms' diversification strategy, value and risk. Our sample includes US-listed firms with segment data from 1998 to 2012. We find that not a ll kinds of diversification are value-destroying; unlike industria lly-diversified firms, global single-segment firms are trading at a premium relative to their imputed va lue. The presence of institutional investors and the stability of their shareholdings positively influence the likelihood that a firm is diversified. The proportion (volatility) of institutional ownership is higher (lower) among diversified firms compared to domestic s ingle-segment firms. More importantly, the higher the proportions of institutional shareholdings, the higher the excess value of the diversified firm and the lower the firm idiosyncratic risk. Institutional ownership volatility, on the other hand, is inversely related to a firm excess value but positively related to its idiosyncratic risk. Thus, the presence of long-term stable institutional investors enhances the value of diversified firms. Our findings remain robust to various model specifications and estimation techniques. Ke yw or ds: Institutional ownership; Corporate diversification; Diversification discount;1.IntroductionThe effect of diversification on firm value continues to attract considerable research interest. There are two main types of diversification: product- and geographic diversification (Vachani, 1991 and Martin, 2008). Product diversification refers to the degree to which firms are involved in different industries (we refer to them asbusiness segments). Geographic diversification refers to the extent to which firms are involved in different countries (we refer to them as geographic segments). Bodnar, Tang, and Weintrop (1997) find that global diversification is associated with higher firm value. In contrast, Denis, Denis, and Yost (2002) find that diversification decreases firm value. Other studies that suggest that diversification adversely affects firm value include Berger and Ofek (1995), Fauver, Houston, and Naranjo (2004); a nd Kim and Mathur (2008).Corporate diversification is appealing to investors. Under the premise that corporations are better at diversification than shareholders, corporate diversification should lower shareholders' investment risk at a fraction of the cost incurred by individual investors (see Agmon and Lessard (1977); Doukas and Travlos (1988); Harris and Ravenscraft (1991);Sanders and Carpenter (1998)). However, the diversity of operations at conglomerate firms makes it harder for ordinary investors to monitor them (Fatemi, 1984), opening the possibility for management to pursue self-interest objectives at the expense of the shareholders (Palich, Cardinal, & Miller, 2000). Such agency problems will reduce shareholders' return on investment and/or increase their risk. As a consequence, if there is a group out there who is better at monitoring managers, it is better to follow their lead. Jensen and Meckling (1976),and Shleifer and Vishny (1986) suggest that large investors could well be that group. We propose to consider the contribution to firm value and risk brought about by such an important group of investors at diversified firms, i.e., institutional investors.Institutional investors —inc luding mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, banks and insurance companies —are leading players in the financial markets as well as the primary owners of US corporate equity (Gillan & Starks, 2000). Estimates of their shareholdings at US firms range from 35% in the 1980s and 60% in the 2000s to 66% by the end of 2010. Given the size of their equity investments, they tend to exert considerable pressure on management to create wealth for investors (see also, Shleifer and Vishny (1986)). Jarrell and Poulsen (1987), Brickley, Lease, and Smith (1988); Agrawal and Mandelker (1990) suggest a direct link between institutional investors and shareholders' wealth. Consequently, managers pay a lot of attention tomeet the financial targets set by these investors (Easley and O'hara, 1987, Kyle, 1985 and Clay, 2002). Actions taken by the investors tend to generate a lot of press and media attention, especially at large and diversified firms. Many institutional investors believe that diversified firms can generate more profit by restructuring their divis ions; examples include campaigns by investors demanding restructuring at big firms like PepsiCo, Sony, Timken, and McGraw-Hill.Do institutional investors —as effective monitors of firm performance —support diversification and add value to diversified firms by virtue of their presence? We attempt to answer the question and analyze the importance of two measures of institutional ownership on diversified firms' value and risk, i.e., the proportion of the shares held by the institutional investors (IOPr) and the institutional ownership volat ility (IOV). The first measure is extensively used in the literature, though mostly focused on domestic firms. An emerging literature on the effects of institutional ownership on firm value suggests that in addition to the proportion of shares held by investors, it is equally important to consider institutional ownership stability. They argue that not all institutional investors stay with a firm for the long-term. Some are short-term and would leave at the first s ign of trouble. E lyasiani and J ia (2010),and Ca lle n and Fa ng (2013)ar gue that ―stable‖institutiona l inves tor s are m ore incentivized to monitor target firms and improve shareholder welfare.To the extent that diversification destroys value while institutional investors add value, we test whether their presence at diversified firms adds value. We hypothesize that diversified firms w ith higher proportions of shares held by institutional investors(IOPr) and lower variability in the proportions (IOV) are associated with higher excess values. Similar ly, we posit that firm risk is inversely related to IOPr and positively related to IOV. Managers would be under scrutiny not to cripple the firm with non-value added diversifications when more shares are held by institutional investors (IOPr). Conversely, if a firm pursues the wrong type of diversification, then there is little reason for the investors to hold onto their shares. Thus, we should observe a higher volatility in institutional shareholdings (IOV) among this subgroup of firms.We examine the universe of firms listed in COMPUSTAT from 1998 to 2012. We break the universe of COMPUSTAT firms into four groups: (i) domestic single-segment firms (DS), (ii) domestic multi-segment firms (DM), (iii) global single-segment firms (GS) and (iv) global mult i-segment firms (GM). We find that unlike domestic firms, the trend is to go global, i.e., we observe a fall in the number of domestic firms and a rise in the number of global firms over time. We find that not all kinds of diversification are associated with negative excess values. As opposed to industrially-diversified firms, global single-segment firms trade at a premium relative to their matched domestic s ingle-segment firms. The idiosyncratic risk levels are l ower for diversif ied firms compared to domestic s ingle-segment firms.The proportion of shares held by institutional investors (IOPr) is higher and the volatility in those proportions (IOV) is lower at diversif ied firms compared to domestic single-segment firms. Using probit regressions, we find that the likelihood to diversify is pos itively associated with the proportion of shares held by institutional investors (IOPr) and inversely related to its volatility (IOV).Univariate analyses suggest the existence of a positive relationship between IOPr and firm's excess value and an inverse relationship between IOPr and firm's idiosyncratic risk. Conversely, IOV is inversely related to excess value and positively related to idiosyncratic risk. The evidence suggests that there exists a significant relationship between the presence of long-term stable institutional investors and the ability of diversified firms to create wealth.Consistent with the univariate findings, the coefficient of IOPr is positive and that of IOV is negative in panel f ixed-effect regressions of firms' excess values. The coefficients of DMand GM, representing domestic multi-segment firms and globally diversified multi-segment firms, respectively, are both negative and highly significant. On the other hand, globa l single segment (GS) firms are associated with higher excess values.In regressions of firms' idiosyncratic risk, the coefficients of IOV and IOPr are positive and negative, respectively, suggesting that firms with lower proportions of equity held by institutional investors and higher volatility in that proportion areperceived as riskier and carrying more idiosyncratic risk. Overall, the empirical evidence suggests that diversified firm value is linked to investors with considerable and stable shareholdings. Furthermore, the absence of stable, long-term institutional investors increases the idiosyncratic risk of diversified firms. Our empirical findings are robust to alternative control variables, various model specifications and estimation techniques.Beyond complementing and extending the literature on the diversification discount, this study also contributes to the emerging literature on the role of institutional ownership stability on firm governance and performance. To the bestof our knowledge, our study is the first to assess the impact of institutional ownership stability among diversified firms. We consider the effect of institutional investors in lessening the diversification discount. We also examine the link between institutional investors and firm risk. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the literature and formulates the hypotheses. Section 3presents the data. Section 4 presents the methods used. We present and discuss the findings in Section 5, and conclude the paper in the final section.2.Literature review and hypotheses developmentAt the firm leve l, institutional investors tend to resist counterproductive strategies while supporting beneficial ones, especially shareholder driven ones (Bethel and Liebeskind, 1993, Hill and Snell, 1988, Holderness and Sheehan, 1985 and Mikkelson and Ruback, 1991). They tend to lobby senior executives to implement restructuring strategies that are beneficial to all the shareholders (see also Bethel and L iebeskind (1993)). Attig et al. (2012)argue that long-term institutional investors have greater incentives and efficiencies —economies of scale in the collection and processing of corporate information —to engage in effective monitoring, which in turn mitigate the asymmetric information dilemma and a ssociated agency problems.Barclay, Holderness, and Pontiff (1993) find that investors va lue the skills and demands of block purchasers and that firm value increases follow ing a block trade.They document a high turnover in management following these trades and a decline in firm va lue when the block holders either fail to achieve control and/or face resistance from management. Navissi and Naiker (2006) find that shareholding by active institutional investors of up to 30% positively influences corporate value. Beyond30%, the ownership tends to reduce firm value, which suggests that there exists a non-linear relationship between the two. When these shareholders become too large, there exists a signif icant risk that they will join forces with management to safeguard their common interests at the expense of the other shareholders, especially minority/individual ones. The authors find that passive investors do not affect firm value. Cornett et a l. (2007) find that the percentages of institutional investor involvement in a firm, as well as their numbers, are associated with better operating cash flow returns. However, the findings only hold when the investors have no business relation w ith the firm; else there is no significant relationship between institutional investors and firm performance.In theory, a conglomerate firm with multiple business segments should trade at the same price as the sum of the individual segments as standalone businesses. Yet, the literature finds that this is rarely the case. This inequality is due to asymmetric information and agency conflicts along the lines explained by M yers (1984); Myers and Majluf (1984). However, recent studies on institutional ownership and stability suggest that institutional investors can help solve such problems. We study whether the involvement of institutional investors can turn the fortunes of diversified firms given the evidence of a diversification discount (Fauver et al., 2004, Jory & Ngo,2012).H1.There exists a positive relationship between diversified firms' value and the proportion of the shares held by institutional investors.Nonetheless, not all institutional investors are equally motivated to ensure the long-term well-being of a firm. There exist some investors with an interest in short-term trading, quick profits and turnaround. They are not w illing to incur long-term monitoring costs and are not interested in monitoring firm'smanagement. Callen and Fang (2013) review some scenarios suggestive of a short-term bias. In the first case, the cost of monitoring far exceeds the combined costs of selling the shares and investing in another company. Second, many institutional investors hold well-diversif ied portfolios that do not require them to monitor actively every company in their portfolio. Third, the benefits of short-term gains far exceed those of long-term investing. With their constant buying and selling, these investors cause a lot of variability/volatility in the proportion of shares held by them in the company. Thus, we hypothesize that for value creation, stable institutional investors are more desirable than transient ones.H2.There exists an inverse relationship between firm value and institutional ownership volatility.Institutional investors tend to be large ones buying signif icant stakes in the companies they invest. Given the size of their investments, they pay particular attention to the risk-taking activity at target firms, and they have sufficient influence to lobby senior executives to sway risk-taking decisions in their favor. We hypothesize that the presence of these investors would dissuade managers from taking excessive idiosyncratic risks —for instance, engaging in unrelated diversification abroad where the managers have little know ledge of, thus increasing the risks the firm faces.Institutional investors have their own stakeholders to satisfy —for instance, pension funds and insurance companies have to make regular payments to their subscribers — and they would resist changes that would disrupt those relationships. To the extent that their required return on investment is linked to changes in the value of the firm, they would withstand actions that would increase the variance of the firm returns and adversely affect its ability to pay dividend. This would also be true for institutional investors who have selected targets based on their current business strategies and are satisfied with the status quo; those who lack the expertise and/or incentives to monitor new ventures and risky undertakings; and, investors whose wealth is concentrated in the target company.There are two types of risks faced by a firm, i.e., market and idiosyncraticrisks.Management can more directly affect the latter. Thus, for the purpose of our study, we consider a firm's idiosyncratic risk. To minimize its impact on the value of their equity investment, we test the hypothesis that the presence of institutional investors helps to m inimize idiosyncratic risk.H3.There exists an inverse relationship between firm idiosyncratic risk and the proportion of shares held by institutional investors.Financial markets comprise investors and traders of different time horizons (Malagon, Moreno, & Rodriguez, 2015). Investors engaging in frequent trading are more interested in short- rather than long-term gains. They could lobby for makeshift corporate changes at the expense of changes that would have benefited all the shareholders in the long run. Their presence will a lso do little in alleviat ing the risks associated with misalignment of objectives, opportunistic behavior and earnings management at the investee firm and, consequently, accentuate the firm's idiosyncratic risk. Frequent trading in the shares of a firm — caused by short-term traders — will lead to an increase in the volatility of the proportions of shares held by its investors. Conversely, long-term investors — those who are more like ly to buy and hold and cause less volatility in the proportions of shares held by investors —are more incentivized to monitor firm activities and improve shareholder value. Thus, we test the hypothesis that there exists a positive association between the volatility in the p roportions of shares held by investors and a firm's idiosyncratic risk.H4.There exists a positive association between firm idiosyncratic risk and institutional ownership volatility.3.DataOur sample of firms is from the COMPUSTAT database and our sample period starts in 1998 and ends in 2012. We define a diversified firm as one that reports data on the industry and/or geographic segments in the COMPUSTAT segment data tapes. Similar to He (2009), we start the sample period in 1998 because the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issued SFAS 131 in 1997, which significantlyaffects the way businesses report segment data.Following, we exclude the follow ing firms from our sample: (i) firms with SIC codes 4900–4999 (i.e., utility firms) and 6000–6999 (i.e., financial firms) since they are heavily regulated; (ii) firm-year observations with segment sales less than $20 million; and (iii) firm-year observations where the difference between the total sales of all its segments and the reported total sales for the entire firm i s greater than 1%. We further obtain accounting and financial data from COMPUSTAT, ownership data from Thomson Financial and stock price data from the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) databases. The Thomson Financial database reports institutional 13F common stock holdings and transactions. It includes common stock holdings and transactions of institutional money managers where holdings of the managing company /filer's level are as per the 13F filing itself. It covers all NYSE,AMEX, NASDAQ common stocks and includes all managers filing 13F reports w ith the SEC.We present the sample descriptives in Table 1. We break the sample into four groups as follows: domestic single-segment (DS, i.e., not diversified), domestic multi-segment (DM, i.e., industrially diversified only), global single-segment (GS, i.e., geographically diversified only) and global mult i-segment (GM, i.e., both industrially and geographically diversified). The trend is toward more globally diversif ied firms; from 18% in 1998, their proportion as a percentage of the entire sample increases to 33% by 2012. We have 53,481 firm-year observations obtained from 11,882 firmsdistributed as follows, 63% DS, 12% DM, 15% GSand 10% GM firms.4.Methodology4.1.Measuring excess valueTo explore the valuation consequences of diversification, we use the same measure of excess value as in Berger and Ofek (1995); and Bodnar et al. (1997). The excess value of firm i is calculated as the natural log of the ratio of the firm's market v alue to its imputed value.4.2.Measuring idiosyncratic riskTo compute a fir m's idios yncra tic risk we use the Fama and French,1992 and Fama and French, 1993 model and add the excess return on a world portfolio to the equation as follows (see also Stulz (1999)):5.Results5.1.Probit regressionsWe model a firm's propensity to diversify as a function of the characteristics of the firm, its industry, its macroeconomic environment and, more importantly, the institutional ownership variables of IOPr and IOV. Table 2 reports the probit estimates from two different models. Model (1) contains the IOPr variable while Model (2) c ontains both the IOPr and the IOVvariables.value of the coefficient representing the variable IOPr is positive and statistically significant. Conversely, the value of the coefficient IOV is negative and statistically signif icant. The margina l effects of IOPr and IOV are positive and negative,respectively. Thus, diversified firms are associated with higher proportions of institutional ownership and lower volatility in that ratio over time.We also find that the odds that a firm is diversified are positively associated to: firm size (ln(AT)), profitability (EBITS), being listed on a major US stock exchange (MAJOR), the number of diversified firms in the industry (NUMDIVF), the proportion of sales generated by diversified firms (PrINDS), and the number of M&As occurring in the industry (NUMA). Conversely, capital-intensive firms (CAPX), growth firms as measured by the Q ratio, as well as growth industries (INDUSTRYQ), growth in GDP (GDPGr) and the industry's dollar amount of deals (VOLMA) are inversely related to a firm's propensity to diversify.5.2.Excess value and idiosyncratic risk of diversified firmsWe present the mean and median excess values of industrially- (i.e., DM, GM) and geographically diversified (i.e., GS, GM) firms in Table 3. We compare the excess values to that of the sample of DS (i.e., domestic single-segment) firms and various portfolios comprising DS firms. More precisely and following Villalonga (2004), we calculate each firm's predicted probability to diversify using the probit model of Eq. For each diversified firm, we form a portfolio comprising domestic single-segment firms w ith probability values from the same quartile. Since we run two versions of theprobit model, we present our findings based on two portfolios of matched domestic single-segment firms (i.e., portfolios 1 and 2, respectively) for every diversified firm.The excess values of DM (mean of − 8.20% in Panel A) and GM (mean of 16.20% in Panel C) firms are significantly lower than the corresponding values of both portfolios of matched domestic single-segment firms. Thus, industrial diversification is associated with lower excess values. Conversely, the excess values of global single segment firms (GS firms in Panel B) are positive and significantly higher than those of domestic single-segment firms. Our findings are consistent with Denis et a l. (2002), Kim and Mathur (2008); and Jory and Ngo (2012).We also compare the idiosyncratic risks of the four groups of firms. The idiosyncratic risk measures of the diversified firms (i.e, DM, GS and GM firms) are all significantly lower compared to either the sample of domestic single-segment firms or matching portfolios of domestic s ingle-segment firms. The combination of different business and/or geographic units leads to a portfolio effect that dampens the individual risk of each unit causing a diversified firm to report lower risk measures.5.3.The percentage of shares owned by institutional shareholders (IOPr) and the volatility of institutional ownership (IOV)We present the values of IOPr and IOV by diversification type in Table 4. We compare the figures with various subsamples of DM firms. The mean and median IOPr figures are 21% and 7%, respectively for domestic single-segment firms, i.e., non-diversified firms. In contrast, the proportion of company shares held by institutional investors is higher among diversified firms (both industria lly- and geographically-diversified firms). For instance, the mean values of IOPr at DM, GS and GM firms are 39%, 52% and 56%, respectively. The corresponding median figures are 38%, 57% and 64%, respectively. Thus, institutional investors hold a higher proportion of the shares at diversified firms when compared to non-diversified ones.6 ConclusionWhile single-segment domestic firms still dominate the corporate landscape, we observe a gradual decline in their numbers and an increase in the frequency ofglobally-diversified firms. We find that not all kinds of diversification are value-destroying and that global single-segment firms trade at a premium compared to matched domestic single-segment firms. Industrially-diversified firms though (either domestic or global) are associated with lower excess values. Nonetheless, the combination of the different business and/or geographic units exerts a portfolio effect that causes the overall enterprise risk to decline causing diversified firms to report lower risk measures compared to domestic single-segment firms.We provide empirical evidence that institutional ownership is a core value driver of diversified firms. They are associated with higher levels of institutional shareholdings and more stable shareholdings over time. The proportion and stability of institutional ownership are positively related to firm value and inversely related to its idiosyncratic risk. Our results indicate that the presence of long-term stable institutional investors is a source of value for diversified corporations.二、文献综述公司多元化经营文献综述摘要公司多元化经营的相关问题是近年来公司战略管理、产业经济学和公司金融领域的一个研究热点，也是一个在理论界颇具争议的话题。

营运资金管理中英双语文献

营运资金管理中英双语文献营运资金是企业用于日常运营的资金，包括现金、存货、应收账款等。

良好的营运资金管理可以确保企业正常运转和资金充足，同时还能减少财务风险和成本。

以下是关于营运资金管理的中英双语文献：1. 《营运资金管理的重要性及其对企业运营的影响》(The Importance of Working Capital Management and Its Impact on Business Operations)本文介绍了营运资金管理的概念和重要性，探讨了如何优化营运资金管理以提高企业效率和盈利能力。

2. 《营运资金管理策略的选择与实施》(Selection and Implementation of Working Capital Management Strategies) 该文讨论了不同的营运资金管理策略，并提供了实施这些策略的具体步骤和技巧，以帮助企业实现资金最大化利用。

3. 《营运资金管理与企业绩效》(Working Capital Management and Firm Performance)该研究探讨了营运资金管理与企业绩效之间的关系，并证实了营运资金管理对企业绩效的重要性。

4. 《营运资金管理中的财务风险与控制》(Financial Risk and Control in Working Capital Management)该文描述了营运资金管理中的财务风险，并提出了相应的控制措施，以帮助企业降低财务风险并增强资金管理能力。

5. 《营运资金管理中的现金流预测与控制》(Cash Flow Forecasting and Control in Working Capital Management) 本文介绍了现金流预测在营运资金管理中的重要性，并提供了现金流预测的方法和技巧，以帮助企业更好地管理资金。

以上是关于营运资金管理的中英双语文献，这些文献可以帮助企业了解营运资金管理的重要性和实施方法，提高企业的资金使用效率和管理能力。

管理会计报告体系外文文献

管理会计报告体系外文文献管理会计报告体系是一个涉及多个学科领域的复杂系统，因此，相关的外文文献也相当丰富。

以下是一些可能相关的外文文献：1. Management Accounting: Decision-Making and Control（第4版）by Robin Ballantyne这本书是管理会计领域的经典教材，详细介绍了管理会计报告体系的基本概念、原则和实践。

2. Advanced Management Accounting（第4版） by Ray Ball and David Naranjo-Huebl这本书是一本关于高级管理会计的教材，重点介绍了管理会计报告体系在战略管理、业绩评价和风险管理等方面的应用。

3. Management Accounting: Information for Strategy, Decision-Making, and Control（第4版） by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton这本书是管理会计领域的权威著作，详细介绍了管理会计报告体系在企业战略、决策和控制系统中的应用。

4. The Essentials of Management Accounting（第5版） by R. Kent Jackson and James L. Heskett这本书是一本管理会计领域的入门教材，介绍了管理会计报告体系的基本概念、原则和实践。

5. Management Accounting: A Strategic Emphasis（第4版） by Jerry J. Weygandt, Terry D. Warfield, and Paul C. Nystrom这本书是一本关于管理会计的教材，重点介绍了管理会计报告体系在战略管理、决策和绩效评价等方面的应用。

以上文献仅供参考，具体选择还需根据您具体的研究方向和需求进行筛选。

建议您在使用这些文献前，先查阅相关的学术期刊、会议论文集和专题研究报告等资源，以获取更全面和准确的信息。

关于营运能力的外文参考文献

关于营运能力的外文参考文献以下是一些关于营运能力的外文参考文献："Operations Management: Sustainability and Supply Chain Management" by Jay Heizer and Barry Render. This book provides a comprehensive overview of operations management, including discussions on sustainability and supply chain management. It covers topics such as facility location, capacity planning, inventory management, and more."Introduction to Operations Research" by Frederick S. Hillier and Gerald J. Lieberman. This textbook introduces the fundamental concepts and techniques of operations research, which are essential for analyzing and improving the efficiency of operational systems. It covers a range of topics including linear programming, network models, simulation, and decision analysis."Operations Management: Processes and Supply Chains" by Lee J. Krajewski, Larry P. Ritzman, and Manoj K. Malhotra. This book offers a broad perspective on operations management, focusing on both manufacturing and service operations. It covers various topics such as process analysis, quality management, lean operations, and supply chain management."Managing Operations: A Focus on Excellence" by Nigel Slack, Alistair Brandon-Jones, and Robert Johnston. This textbook provides a practical guide to managing operations, emphasizing the importance of achieving excellence in all areas of the business. It covers topics such as strategy, process design, performance measurement, and continuous improvement."Operations Strategy" by Nigel Slack, Stuart Chambers, and Robert Johnston. This book explores the role of operations strategy in creating competitive advantage. It discusses how operations can be aligned with the overall business strategy and how to design and implement effective operations strategies."Supply Chain Management: A Logistics Perspective" by John J. Coyle, Edward J. Bardi, and C. John Langley Jr. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to supply chain management, focusing on the integration of logistics activities across the entire supply chain. It covers topics such as demand forecasting, inventory management, transportation, and warehousing."Operations and Supply Chain Management: The Core" by F. Robert Jacobs and Richard B. Chase. This textbook offers a concise and practical introduction to operations and supply chain management, covering the key concepts and techniques necessary for managing and improving operational performance."Service Operations Management: Improving Service Delivery" by John A. Fitzsimmons and Mona J. Fitzsimmons. This book focuses on the unique challenges and opportunities of managing service operations, providing a practical guide to improving service delivery and enhancing customer satisfaction. It covers topics such as service design, capacity planning, queueing theory, and service recovery."Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation" by James P. Womackand Daniel T. Jones. This book introduces the concept of lean thinking, which aims to maximize value and minimize waste in all aspects of business operations. It provides practical guidance on how to implement lean principles and tools to improve operational efficiency and profitability."The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement" by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox. This novel-style business book introduces the Theory of Constraints (TOC), a methodology for identifying and addressing the most significant constraints to achieving a desired goal in an organization. It provides insights into how to improve operational performance by focusing on the key constraints that limit the flow of value through the system.这些书籍涵盖了营运能力的不同方面，包括供应链管理、服务运营管理、精益思维等，可以为您提供更全面的了解和参考。

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Thomas M. Krueger. University of Wisconsin-La CrosseGreg Filbeck. Schweser Study Program2009-09-28An Analysis of Working Capital Management Results Across IndustriesABSTRACT：Firms are able to reduce financing costs and/or increase the funds available for expansion by minimizing the amount of funds tied up in current assets. We provide insights into the performance of surveyed firms across key components of working capital management by using the CFO magazine’s annual Working Capital Management Survey. We discover that significant differences exist between industries in working capital measures across time. In addition. we discover that these measures for working capital change significantly within industries across time.Key words: capital management; measures ;funds analysisIntroductionThe importance of efficient working capital management is indisputable. Working capital is the difference between resources in cash or readily convertible into cash (Current Assets) and organizational commitments for which cash will soon be required (Current Liabilities). The objective of working capital management is to maintain the optimum balance of each of the working capital components. Business viability relies on the ability to effectively manage receivables. inventory. and payables. Firms are able to reduce financing costs and/or increase the funds available for expansion by minimizing the amount of funds tied up in current assets. Much managerial effort is expended in bringing non-optimal levels of current assets and liabilities back toward optimal levels. An optimal level would be one in which a balance is achieved between risk and efficiency.A recent example of business attempting to maximize working capital management is the recurrent attention being given to the application of Six Sigma® methodology. Six Sigma® methodologies help companies measure and ensure quality in all areas of the enterprise. When used to identify and rectify discrepancies. inefficiencies and erroneous transactions in the financial supply chain. Six Sigma® reduces Days Sales Outstanding (DSO). accelerates the payment cycle. improves customer satisfaction and reduces the necessary amount and cost of working capital needs. There appear to be many success stories. including Jennifer Towne’s (2002) report of a 15 percent decrease in days that sales are outstanding. resulting in an increased cash flow of approximately $2 million at Thibodaux Regional Medical Center. Furthermore. bad debts declined from $3.4 million to $600.000. However. Waxer’s (2003) study of multiple firms employing Six Sigma® finds that it is really a “get rich slow”technique with a rate of return hovering in the 1.2 – 4.5 percent range.Even in a business using Six Sigma® methodology. an “optimal” level of working capital management needs to be identified. Industry factors may impact firm credit policy. inventory management. and bill-paying activities. Some firms may be better suited to minimize receivables and inventory. while others maximize payables. Another aspect of “optimal” is the extent to which poor financial results can be tied to sub-optimal performance. Fortunately. these issues are testable with data published by CFO magazine. which claims to be the source of “tools and information for the financial execut ive.” and are the subject of this research.In addition to providing mean and variance values for the working capital measures and the overall metric. two issues will be addressed in this research. One research question is. “are firms within a particular industry clustered together at consistent levels of working capital measures?” For instance. are firms in one industry able to quickly transfer sales into cash. while firms from another industry tend to have high sales levels for the particular level of in ventory . The other research question is. “does working capital management performance for firms within a given industry change from year-to-year?”The following section presents a brief literature review. Next. the research method is described. including some information about the annual Working Capital Management Survey published by CFO magazine. Findings are then presented and conclusions are drawn.The importance of working capital management is not new to the finance literature. Over twenty years ago. Largay and Stickney (1980) reported that the then-recent bankruptcy of W.T. Grant. a nationwide chain of department stores. should have been anticipated because the corporation had been running a deficit cash flow from operations for eight of the last ten years of its corporate life. As part of a study of the Fortune 500’s financial management practices. Gilbert and Reichert (1995) find that accounts receivable management models are used in 59 percent of these firms to improve working capital projects. while inventory management models were used in 60 percent of the companies. More recently. Farragher. Kleiman and Sahu (1999) find that 55 percent of firms in the S&P Industrial index complete some form of a cash flow assessment. but did not present insights regarding accounts receivable and inventory management. or the variations of any current asset accounts or liability accounts across industries. Thus. mixed evidence exists concerning the use of working capital management techniques.Theoretical determination of optimal trade credit limits are the subject of many articles over the years (e.g.. Schwartz 1974; Scherr 1996). with scant attention paid to actual accounts receivable management. Across a limited sample. Weinraub and Visscher (1998) observe a tendency of firms with low levels of current ratios to also have low levels of current liabilities. Simultaneously investigating accounts receivable and payable issues. Hill. Sartoris. and Ferguson (1984) find differences in the way payment dates are defined. Payees define the date of payment as the date payment is received. while payors view payment as the postmark date. Additional WCM insight across firms. industries. and time can add to this body of research.Maness and Zietlow (2002. 51. 496) presents two models of value creation that incorporate effective short-term financial management activities. However. these models are generic models and do not consider unique firm or industry influences. Maness and Zietlow discuss industry influences in a short paragraph that includes theobservation that. “An industry a company is located in may have more influence on that company’s fortunes than overall GNP” (2002. 507). In fact. a careful review of this 627-page textbook finds only sporadic information on actual firm levels of WCM dimensions. virtually nothing on industry factors except for some boxed items with titles such as. “Should a Retailer Offer an In-House Credit Card” (128) and nothing on WCM stability over time. This research will attempt to fill this void by investigating patterns related to working capital measures within industries and illustrate differences between industries across time.An extensive survey of library and Internet resources provided very few recent reports about working capital management. The most relevant set of articles was Weisel and Bradley’s (2003) article on cash flow management and one of inventory control as a result of effective supply chain management by Hadley (2004).The CFO RankingsThe first annual CFO Working Capital Survey. a joint project with REL Consultancy Group. was published in the June 1997 issue of CFO (Mintz and Lezere 1997). REL is a London. England-based management consulting firm specializing in working capital issues for its global list of clients. The original survey reports several working capital benchmarks for public companies using data for 1996. Each company is ranked against its peers and also against the entire field of 1.000 companies. REL continues to update the original information on an annual basis.REL uses the “cash flow from operations”value located on firm cash flow statements to estimate cash conversion efficiency (CCE). This value indicates how well a company transforms revenues into cash flow. A “days of working capital” (DWC) value is based on the dollar amount in each of the aggregate. equally-weighted receivables. inventory. and payables accounts. The “days of working capital”(DNC) represents the time period between purchase of inventory on acccount from vendor until the sale to the customer. the collection of the receivables. and payment receipt. Thus. it reflects the company’s ability to finance its core operations with vendor credit. A detailed investigation of WCM is possible because CFO also provides firm and industry values for days sales outstanding (A/R). inventory turnover. and days payables outstanding (A/P).Working capital management component definitions and average values for the entire 1996 –2000 period . Across the nearly 1.000 firms in the survey. cash flow from operations. defined as cash flow from operations divided by sales and referred to as “cash conversion efficiency” (CCE). averages 9.0 percent. Incorporating a 95 percent confidence interval. CCE ranges from 5.6 percent to 12.4 percent. The days working capital (DWC). defined as the sum of receivables and inventories less payables divided by daily sales. averages 51.8 days and is very similar to the days that sales are outstanding (50.6). because the inventory turnover rate (once every 32.0 days) is similar to the number of days that payables are outstanding (32.4 days). In all instances. the standard deviation is relatively small. suggesting that these working capital management variables are consistent across CFO reports.CFO magazine provides an overall working capital ranking for firms in its survey. using the following equation:Industry-based differences in overall working capital management are presented for the twenty-six industries that had at least eight companies included in the rankings each year. In the typical year. CFO magazine ranks 970 companies during this period. Industries are listed in order of the mean overall CFO ranking of working capital performance. Since the best average ranking possible for an eight-company industry is 4.5 (this assumes that the eight companies are ranked one through eight for the entire survey). it is quite obvious that all firms in the petroleum industry must have been receiving very high overall working capital management rankings. In fact. the petroleum industry is ranked first in CCE and third in DWC (as illustrated in Table 5 and discussed later in this paper). Furthermore. the petroleum industry had the lowest standard deviation of working capital rankings and range of working capital rankings. The only other industry with a mean overall ranking less than 100 was the Electric & Gas Utility industry. which ranked second in CCE and fourth in DWC. The two industries with the worst working capital rankings were Textiles and Apparel. Textiles rank twenty-second in CCE and twenty-sixth in DWC. The apparel industry ranks twenty-third and twenty-fourth in the two working capital measures.ConclusionsThe research presented here is based on the annual ratings of working capital management published in CFO magazine. Our findings indicate a consistency in how industries “stack up” against each other over time with respect to the working capital measures. However. the working capital measures themselves are not static (i.e.. averages of working capital measures across all firms change annually); our results indicate significant movements across our entire sample over time. Our findings are important because they provide insight to working capital performance across time. and on working capital management across industries. These changes may be in explained in part by macroeconomic factors. Changes in interest rates. rate of innovation. and competition are likely to impact working capital management. As interest rates rise. there would be less desire to make payments early. which would stretch accounts payable. accounts receivable. and cash accounts.The ramifications of this study include the finding of distinct levels of WCM measures for different industries. which tend to be stable over time. Many factors help to explain this discovery. The improving economy during the period of the study may have resulted in improved turnover in some industries. while slowing turnover may have been a signal of troubles ahead. Our results should be interpreted cautiously. Our study takes places over a short time frame during a generally improving market. In addition. the survey suffers from survivorship bias – only the top firms within each industry are ranked each year and the composition of those firms within the industry can change annually.Further research may take one of two lines. First. there could be a study of whether stock prices respond to CFO magazine’s publication of working capital management ratings. Second. there could be a study of which. if any. of the working capital management components relate to share price performance. Given our results. these studies need to take industry membership into consideration when estimating stock price reaction to working capital management performance托马斯M克鲁格.威斯康星大学拉克罗斯格雷格Filbeck.Schweser学习计划对整个行业中营运资金管理的研究摘要:企业能够降低融资成本或者尽量减少绑定在流动资产上的成立基金数额来用于扩大现有的资金。