Formation of supply chain collaboration and firm performance in the Thai automotive and electronics industries

This paper examines factors that encourage firms to go into supply chain collaborations (SCC) and relationships between SCC and supply chain performances (SCP), using a questionnaire survey on Thai automotive and electronics industries in 2012. OLS regression results show firms established supplier evaluation and audit system, system of rewards for high-performance supplier and long-term transactions with their supply chain partners under a competitive pressure are more closely cooperate with these partners on information sharing and decision synchronization. Instrumental variables regression indicates SCC arisen from competitive pressure, supplier evaluation and audit, a system of rewards for high-performance supplier and long-term relationship causally influence SCP such as on-time delivery, responsiveness to fast procurement, flexibility to customer need, and profit.

Estimating the effect of chemical safety standards on firm performance in Malaysia and Vietnam

This paper uses firm-level data to examine the impact of chemical safety regulations imposed by importing countries such as RoHS and REACH on the production costs and export performance of firms in Malaysia and Vietnam. We find that in addition to the initial setup costs for compliance, EU RoHS and REACH implementation causes firms to incur additional variable production costs by requiring additional labor and capital expenditures of around 12% of the variable costs, respectively. We also find that compliance with RoHS and REACH significantly increases the probability of export. Furthermore, we find that compliance with EU RoHS and REACH helps firms to penetrate into a greater variety of countries. Also, we find that multinational enterprises and firms participating in global value chains generally exhibit better export performance and their costs rise less steeply.

Boards of directors and bank performance in United Arab Emirates

This study presents an empirical analysis about corporate governance of financial institutions in United Arab Emirates (UAE). The purpose of this research is to analyze the influence of the structure of board of directors on the performance of these institutions. To examine the effect of control exerted by particular families on bank management, we estimated models where the dependent variable is return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE), independent variables are board of directors variables, and control variables are bank management variables. Our results show that the control of corporate governance by a ruler's family within a board of directors has a positive effect on bank profitability. Our results indicate that control by a ruler's family through a bank's board of directors compensates for the inadequacy of UAE's corporate governance system.