Business and Management

This book presents a detailed and scholarly historical study of the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC), which prepared the way for the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). The IASB holds the dominant influence over the financial reporting of thousands of listed companies in the European Union as well as in many other countries.

This book tackles crucial issues regarding the emerging global market for corporate governance. The authors describe and explain the transformation of European corporate governance in the light of the imperatives driving global financial markets, using an innovative analytical framework. They chart the response of corporate managers to the interest of global portfolio managers in transparent and accountable modes of corporate governance. In doing so, the authors provide an innovative perspective on a rapidly changing environment, and a challenge to those who ignore the gathering momentum of global financial markets.

This book explores the geographical constitution and footprint of stock markets to contribute to broader debate on the role of stock markets in the global economy. Mainstream financial economics treats stock markets as consisting of anonymous actors interacting in space with no friction of distance or any other significance of geography. This book challenges this view, focusing on stock markets consisting of issuers, investors, and intermediaries that have locations and relate to each other in a real space of regions, cities, and countries. It uses insights from economic geography, financial economics, sociology, history, and globalization studies. The book offers a theory of stock market centres as concentrations of stock market intermediaries, investors, and issuers' headquarters, connected through a global network. Empirically, the book documents the rise of emerging markets, the impact of the global financial crisis, the revolution in the stock exchange business model, and the continued dominance of London and New York as stock market centres. The book argues that stock markets exhibit multiple biases, and their footprint is highly uneven. There is a core‐periphery pattern in stock market development at global and national levels. The book suggests that despite the recent boom, there remains a large potential for the future development of stock markets. Thus, the book shows how the map of stock markets is being redrawn at the start of the twenty‐first century, and how central this map is to understanding the structure and dynamics of the world economy.

Despite decades of practice and research, many mergers and acquisitions (M&A) findings remain contested and inconclusive. M&A scholars have voiced concern about this state of affairs, and have lamented the lack of integrative perspectives and theories on M&A. This book argues that the field is in need of ‘re-rooting’. The book stresses the need to reconcile the strategic, financial, and sociocultural aspects of M&A. To break the silo mentality through which scholars have traditionally approached the study of M&A, the book presents a three-dimensional model of M&A management, founded on the strategic, financial, and sociocultural dimensions of M&A. Throughout the book, eminent scholars and practitioners offer thought-provoking, state-of-the-art analyses of M&A as seen through strategic, financial, sociocultural, and sectorial lenses. Based on these findings, the book argues that the difficulty of making M&A transactions work stems from the multiplicity of drivers, disciplines, contexts, levels of analysis, and actors involved. The book concludes with a set of dynamic syntheses which portray M&A in terms of the changing characteristics and drivers of this activity since the end of the 19th century, the ways in which M&A transactions differ from one another, and a contextual phase-based framework of M&A execution. It concludes with an allusion to future trends in M&A, as well as pointers for future research.

Increased engagement by investors with the companies in which they invest has been a major change in Western economies since the 1980s. Shareholder value provides rationale and incentive for investor engagement. The book summarizes the basic principles of shareholder value, and explains the reasons for its growth, especially in the UK and the USA. The authors outline a spectrum of investor engagement ranging from indirect/laissez-faire influence via (threat of) exit to direct intervention in specific areas of management practice. The book focuses on two types of investor, institutional investors and private equity/venture capital investors. Different types of institutional investors have different incentives for engagement, and adopt different methods. ‘Universal investors’ with long time horizons, such as pension funds, have especially strong incentives for engagement, as illustrated by USS Limited. The book distinguishes between institutional investors' routine and extraordinary engagement, and shows how collaboration amongst investors through organizations such as the Institutional Shareholders' Committee offsets the high costs of monitoring and provides means for ensuring compliance with ‘best City practice’. The engagement of private equity funds is illustrated through case studies of equity funds and the portfolio firms in which they invested. But corporate managers are not simply passive reactors to investors' interventions: managers seek to influence investors, for example through managing market expectations. Shareholder value conceptions are not universal: they are strong in the UK and the USA, but are weaker in coordinated market economies such as Germany. The book concludes by evaluating the normative case for shareholder value and investor engagement, arguing that conventional analyses overestimate the efficiency arguments for shareholder value and the equity arguments against shareholder value. The future development of corporate governance is seen to require greater openness and the inclusion of a wider range of interests, not the further enhancement of the protection accorded to shareholder interests.

London and Paris, the world's two leading financial centres in the 19th century, experienced differing fortunes during the 20th century. While London remained an international financial centre, Paris' influence declined. Yet over the last twenty years, deregulation, internationalization, and the advent of the single currency have reactivated their competition in ways reminiscent of their old rivalry before the First World War. This book provides a long-term perspective on the development of each centre, with special attention devoted to the pre-1914 years and to the last decades of the 20th century, and contrasts these two eras of globalization. The chapters include both archive-based and synthetic surveys. This comparison between Europe's two leading capital cities provides insights into two important subjects: the political economy of Britain and France in the 20th century and the history of two major international financial centres. As much as a comparison between London and Paris as international financial centres, this book is an Anglo-French comparison; in other words, it considers, through the prism of finance, several aspects of the two countries' economic, business, social, and political histories.

As economic growth in Western countries shows signs of fatigue, companies are battling hard to discover how to generate and sustain corporate growth. The restructuring and reengineering processes of the early 1990s, and the massive lay-offs they brought about, have only given an additional boost to the need for expansion. Corporate efficiency is indispensable, but is not a sufficient condition for corporate survival. Firms need to think about their future growth. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon of corporate growth, offering a multi-functional, general management approach and a full discussion of main theories and approaches.

Recent market turmoil, bank runs, global equities sell-off, and the ‘credit crunch’ have demonstrated the sophisticated and interconnected nature of financial markets today — seemingly localized problems have quickly spread, putting at risk the solvency of both local and global financial institutions. As these markets are increasingly complex, interconnected, and embedded in the daily lives of individuals, there is a pressing need to unravel and understand the complexities and prospects of this new and transformative social, political, and geographical paradigm. This book brings together a group of scholars from a range of disciplines to formulate a more holistic understanding of financial risk by rooting it in different environments, spatial scales, and disciplines.

This is a book about traders in financial markets: what they do, the kind of people they are, how they perceive the world they inhabit, how they make decisions and take risks. This is also a book about how traders are managed — the best and the worst examples — and about the institutions they inhabit: firms, markets, cultures, and theories of how the world works. How these institutions function, how traders are managed, and how traders view the world, all have profound effects on the wider financial environment. This book explores these relationships and their implications theoretically and empirically. The data discussed in this book draw on a three-year project researching the psychological and social influences on the behaviour and performance of traders in investment banks. 118 traders and managers in four leading organizations participated. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews supplemented by questionnaires, measures of personality, risk propensity and a novel computer based measure designed to assess illusion of control and other cognitive biases. The book draws on sociology, psychology, and economics in order to illuminate the work of traders and the world they inhabit.