London Business School

About: London Business School is a education organization based out in London, England, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Portfolio & Equity (finance). The organization has 1138 authors who have published 5118 publications receiving 437980 citations. The organization is also known as: LBS.

Enterprise logic: explaining corporate attention to stakeholders from the ‘inside-out’

Abstract: Why are some firms more effective than others at addressing stakeholder concerns? Conventional stakeholder theories focus on variables in the external environment and cannot adequately explain variance across firms operating in the same context. Our matched-pair study of eight global corporations goes inside the firm and investigates the role of managerial cognition on corporate attention to stakeholders. We find that top management's conceptualization of the firm's relationship with society—which we name enterprise logic—prompts distinct foci of attention and potentially constrains how well a single firm can simultaneously attend to multiple stakeholders. These findings highlight the value of an ‘inside-out’ perspective, centered on managerial cognition, in explaining why some firms address stakeholder concerns more effectively than their peers. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Getting 360 degrees feedback right.

Abstract: Over the past decade, 360-degree feedback has revolutionized performance management. But one of its components--peer appraisal--consistently stymies executives and can exacerbate bureaucracy, heighten political tensions, and consume lots of time. For ten years, Maury Peiperl has studied 360-degree feedback and has asked: under what circumstances does peer appraisal improve performance? Why does peer appraisal sometimes work well and sometimes fail? And how can executives make these programs less anxiety provoking for participants and more productive for organizations? Peiperl discusses four paradoxes inherent to peer appraisal: In the Paradox of Roles, colleagues juggle being both peer and judge. The Paradox of Group Performance navigates between assessing individual feedback and the reality that much of today's work is done by groups. The Measurement Paradox arises because simple, straightforward rating systems would seem to generate the most useful appraisals--but they don't. Customized, qualitative feedback, though more difficult and time consuming to generate, is more helpful in improving performance. During evaluations, most people focus almost exclusively on reward outcomes and ignore the constructive feedback generated by peer appraisal. Ironically, it is precisely this overlooked feedback that helps improve performance--thus, the Paradox of Rewards. These paradoxes do not have neat solutions, but managers who understand them can better use peer appraisal to improve their organizations.

Cross-border mergers and acquisitions and European integration

Abstract: Cross-border mergers and acquisitions activities (MA (2) joining the EU favoured both horizontal and vertical mergers; (3) policy-makers can help attract capital by reducing the corporate tax rates and the degree of product market regulations and by improving the country's financial systems; (4) the service industry has not yet fully benefited from European integration because the level of protection and barriers to entry in the services sector act as a strong deterrent to cross-border M&As in services. — Nicolas Coeurdacier, Roberto A. De Santis and Antonin Aviat

Portfolio Manager Ownership and Fund Performance

Abstract: This paper documents the level of portfolio manager ownership in the funds they manage and examines whether higher ownership is associated with improved future performance. Almost half of all managers have ownership stakes in their funds, though the absolute investment is modest. Future risk-adjusted performance is positively related to managerial ownership, with performance improving by about three basis points for each basis point of managerial ownership. These findings persist after controlling for various measures of fund board effectiveness. Fund manager ownership is higher in funds with better past performance, lower front-end loads, smaller size, funds affiliated with smaller families, and where the manager has been in charge for a longer period of time. It is also higher in funds with higher board member compensation and in equity funds relative to bond funds. Future performance is positively related to the component of ownership that can be predicted by other variables, as well as the unpredictable component. Our findings support the notion that managerial ownership has desirable incentive alignment attributes for mutual fund investors, and indicate that the disclosure of this information is useful in making portfolio allocation decisions.

Evolving U.S. Monetary Policy and the Decline of Inflation Predictability

Abstract: Using a structural VAR with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility on post-WWII U.S. data, we document a striking negative correlation between the evolution of the long-run coefficient on inflation in the monetary rule and the evolution of the persistence and predictability of inflation relative to a trend component. Using a standard sticky-price model, we show that a more aggressive policy stance towards inflation causes a decline in inflation predictability, providing a possible interpretation for the findings of the structural VAR.