Corporate Decision Making With Macroeconomic Uncertainty

Macroeconomic turbulence and volatility in financial markets can fatally affect firm's performance. Very few firms make serious attempts to inform market participants and other outsider stakeholders about the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations--manifested as changes in exchange rates, interest rates, inflation rates and stock market returns-- on performance. These stakeholders, as well as financial analysts, must make their own assessments but they generally lack both the required tools and the information to do so. Worse, top management in most firms do not themselves possess the tools to identify whether a change in performance represents a change in the firm's intrinsic competitiveness or a reflection of macroeconomic conditions outside their influence. Corporate Decision-Making with Macroeconomic Uncertainty: Performance and Risk Management develops and presents in an easily comprehensible way the essential elements of a corporate strategy for managing uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment. This Macroeconomic Uncertainty Strategy, or MUST, enhances firm value by allowing management and external stakeholders to become better informed about the development of corporate competitiveness in a turbulent macroeconomic environment. The MUST also provides guidelines for how to develop a successful risk management program. This research based book includes methods to identify the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on cash flows and value, to develop strategies for macroeconomic risk management, to provide informative reports to external stakeholders, to evaluate the relative performance of subsidiaries and business units in multinational companies, and to evaluate performance for purposes of setting executive compensation and of fulfilling the due diligence requirements in an M & A context. The authors' use of value-based management, various performance measurements, the concept of real options, and risk management from the perspective of shareholder wealth maximization, makes the book rich and compelling. They address researchers and students in the field of international business, finance and corporate governance. On the business side, executives with strategic responsibilities, chief financial officers, and bankers who analyze corporate performance and give advice on risk management will benefit from reading this book.

Macroeconomic turbulence and volatility in financial markets can fatally affect firm's performance. Very few firms make serious attempts to inform market participants and other outsider stakeholders about the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations--manifested as changes in exchange rates, interest rates, inflation rates and stock market returns-- on performance. These stakeholders, as well as financial analysts, must make their own assessments but they generally lack both the required tools and the information to do so. Worse, top management in most firms do not themselves possess the tools to identify whether a change in performance represents a change in the firm's intrinsic competitiveness or a reflection of macroeconomic conditions outside their influence. Corporate Decision-Making with Macroeconomic Uncertainty: Performance and Risk Management develops and presents in an easily comprehensible way the essential elements of a corporate strategy for managing uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment. This Macroeconomic Uncertainty Strategy, or MUST, enhances firm value by allowing management and external stakeholders to become better informed about the development of corporate competitiveness in a turbulent macroeconomic environment. The MUST also provides guidelines for how to develop a successful risk management program. This research based book includes methods to identify the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on cash flows and value, to develop strategies for macroeconomic risk management, to provide informative reports to external stakeholders, to evaluate the relative performance of subsidiaries and business units in multinational companies, and to evaluate performance for purposes of setting executive compensation and of fulfilling the due diligence requirements in an M & A context. The authors' use of value-based management, various performance measurements, the concept of real options, and risk management from the perspective of shareholder wealth maximization, makes the book rich and compelling. They address researchers and students in the field of international business, finance and corporate governance. On the business side, executives with strategic responsibilities, chief financial officers, and bankers who analyze corporate performance and give advice on risk management will benefit from reading this book.

A much needed bridge between financial and commercial decision making is provided by this comprehensive coverage of macroeconomic uncertainty.

Financial Dec Making under Uncertainty

The Inside Ring is the first novel in Mike Lawson’s critically acclaimed series of political thriller starring Joe DeMarco, fixer for the Speaker of the House. It opens with an assassination attempt on the president. He is only wounded, but his best friend and a Secret Service Agent are killed. It turns out that the attack wasn't without warning. General Andrew Banks, the Secretary of Homeland Security, received a note that the president was in danger, and even more alarming, that Secret Service agents guarding the president had been compromised. General Banks is reluctant to tell the FBI about the note, partly for self-serving political reasons, and partly because he doesn’t want to damage the Secret Service’s reputation based on something that might very well be a hoax. So he requests help from his friend, Speaker Mahoney, and Mahoney assigns his man DeMarco to determine if the Secret Service was really involved. Moving at a breakneck pace, and packed with plenty of humor and suspense, The Inside Ring is a must-read for fans of political thrillers.

The strategic importance of risk-management is a concern at the forefront of most organisations. Increasingly, uncertainty about macroeconomic environment of the firm is a major concern. It is essential for top management to formulate new strategies to deal with such uncertainty (in terms of uncertainty about exchange rates, interest rates, prices etc.) as traditional financial management is not sufficient. This book deals with the broad management issues related to the uncertain environment in which we operator. The authors look at industry-analysis in order to assess competitiveness based on firms' intrinsic skills.

At its core, economics is about making decisions. In the history of economic thought, great intellectual prowess has been exerted toward devising exquisite theories of optimal decision making in situations of constraint, risk, and scarcity. Yet not all of our choices are purely logical, and so there is a longstanding tension between those emphasizing the rational and irrational sides of human behavior. One strand develops formal models of rational utility maximizing while the other draws on what behavioral science has shown about our tendency to act irrationally. In Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty, George G. Szpiro offers a new narrative of the three-century history of the study of decision making, tracing how crucial ideas have evolved and telling the stories of the thinkers who shaped the field. Szpiro examines economics from the early days of theories spun from anecdotal evidence to the rise of a discipline built around elegant mathematics through the past half century’s interest in describing how people actually behave. Considering the work of Locke, Bentham, Jevons, Walras, Friedman, Tversky and Kahneman, Thaler, and a range of other thinkers, he sheds light on the vast scope of discovery since Bernoulli first proposed a solution to the St. Petersburg Paradox. Presenting fundamental mathematical theories in easy-to-understand language, Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty is a revelatory history for readers seeking to grasp the grand sweep of economic thought.