How Financial Slack Affects Corporate Performance

Bernadette Gral examines the relationship between financial slack and corporate performance in the European pharmaceutical industry during the financial crisis of 2007 to 2010. Her investigation includes correlational and regression analyses as well as the qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles. The results show that financial slack influences corporate performance measured as ROA based on net income, thus implying that firms use slack resources to enhance performance during crises. The findings support the arguments for a beneficial effect of financial slack on performance according to the resource based view and behavioral theory of the firm.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the efficiency with which energy resources are extracted and converted into work has played a prominent role in the accumulation of material wealth. The prominent role of energy resources, in conjunction with their scarcity and their uneven geographic distribution, has had significant repercussions. Collaboration, competition and conflict among nation states for energy resources have created global, geopolitical and market risks. In this volume, academic scholars and practitioners assess these risks from global, geopolitical and market perspectives. They do so by presenting empirical research and discussing our current understanding of this quickly changing and developing field. This is the third volume in a series on energy organized by the Centre for Energy and Value Issues (CEVI). The previous volumes in the series were Financial Aspects in Energy (2011) and Energy Economics and Financial Markets (2012).

The intertwining of family relationships with business imperatives provides a fascinating but complex arena for study. This Encyclopedia is a valuable resource because family business studies are necessarily multi-disciplinary and wide-ranging, drawing on entrepreneurship, management, governance, economics, ethics, business history, as well as family studies.

Managing major or strategic change now demands the ability to visualise the future, to see what might happen, and to estimate how the organization might respond. Through a selection of key articles on strategic change from authors such as Senge, Handy, Argyris and Prahalad and Doz, Carnall examines how we can understand the process of change and how we can use this knowledge to create the future. These articles look at: *networked organizations *market induced changes for internal and external markets *culture change *learning organization *globalisation This book also includes new material on how to create programmes of change to maximise learning as well as topical approaches such as process re-engineering, time-based management and corporate bench-marking. Students on MBA and other post-graduate business courses, and practitioners in the field of strategic change will find this book essential reading. Colin Carnall is Professor of Management Studies and Director of Programmes at Henley Management College. Top-flight editor from one of the best British Business Schools Includes articles from leading authors -Senge, Handy, Argyris and Prahalad and Doz to name a few Includes new material on how to create programmes of change to maximise learning

As global concerns grow surrounding the environment, climate, and sustainability, International Perspectives on Sustainability Reporting presents business case studies from different sectors across different regions, highlighting the changing institutional contexts and laws in each country regarding sustainability reporting.

Advances in Strategic Management is dedicated to communicating innovative, new research that advances theory and practice in Strategic Management. This volume focuses on organization design and collaborative ways of working.

Volume 37 of Research in Finance, Contemporary Issues in Financial Economics, presents an extensive collection of chapters that combine real world studies and theories of finance to investigate a variety of topics.

The relationship between ownership structure and firm performance has been studied extensively in corporate finance and corporate governance literature. Nevertheless, the mediation (path) analysis to examine the issue can be adopted as a new approach to explain why and how ownership structure is related to firm performance and vice versa. This approach calls for full recognition of the roles of agency costs and corporate risk-taking as essential mediating variables in the bi-directional and mediated relationship between ownership structure and firm performance. Based on the agency theory, corporate risk management theory and accounting for the dynamic endogeneity in the ownership–performance relationship, this book develops two-mediator mediation models, including recursive and non-recursive mediation models, to investigate the ownership structure–firm performance relationship. It is demonstrated that agency costs and corporate risk-taking are the ‘missing links’ in the ownership structure–firm performance relationship. Hence, this book brings into attention the mediation and dynamic approach to this issue and enhances the knowledge of the mechanisms for improving firm’s financial performance. This book will be of interest to corporate finance, management and economics researchers and policy makers. Post-graduate research students in corporate governance and corporate finance will also find this book beneficial to the application of econometrics into multi-dimensional and complex issues of the firm, including ownership structure, agency problems, corporate risk management and financial performance.