STRATEGIC DECISIONS OF FAMILY FIRMS ON CASH ACCUMULATION

ABSTRACTGiven the particular strengths, weaknesses, and peculiarities of family firms as well as the importance of liquidity in today’s marketplace, we analyze the distinct characteristics and strategies of family businesses related to the amount of cash a firm holds. We look beyond the traditional factors that influence decisions related to cash management to examine factors that are particularly important for family firms. Specifically, we outline the relevance of strategic decisions guided by family firms’ conservatism, flexibility, long-term view, and the active control that they have over family members. To our knowledge, no prior studies exist regarding family firms and their strategic adjustment of cash holding. Therefore, we investigate whether the ownership structure of the firm (through the presence of a controlling family) moderates decisions on cash holding. We found that family firms tend to accumulate cash for strategic reasons and as a result of their own idiosyncrasies. Thus, family firms can achieve optimal cash accumulation more efficiently than non-family firms.

A comunicação de informações nas instituições públicas e privadas: o caso XBRL - eXtensible Business Reporting Language no Brasil

O XBRL - eXtensible Business Report Language - é uma linguagem que está sendo implementada em vários países para divulgação das informações contábil-financeiras pela internet. Este artigo mostra o estado-da-arte do XBRL e como se deu sua evolução, bem como avalia o estágio atual do Brasil na divulgação de informações contábil-financeiras pela internet. Foi realizada uma pesquisa do tipo survey com empresas de capital aberto no Brasil. A pesquisa revelou uma forte aceitação do meio eletrônico para divulgação de informações financeiras e também que ainda é muito pequeno o conhecimento da linguagem XBRL no país e, conseqüentemente, menor ainda o número de entidades que já iniciaram formalmente os estudos para sua implementação. Mostrou ainda a inexistência de um padrão de divulgação de informações eletrônicas, tendo predominado os formatos PDF, HTML e DOC, o que dificulta a análise e comparação de informações entre órgãos reguladores e com o público em geral.

Web 2.0 and its impact on knowledge and business organizations

Today, information overload and the lack of systems that enable locating employees with the right knowledge or skills are common challenges that large organisations face. This makes knowledge workers to re-invent the wheel and have problems to retrieve information from both internal and external resources. In addition, information is dynamically changing and ownership of data is moving from corporations to the individuals. However, there is a set of web based tools that may cause a major progress in the way people collaborate and share their knowledge. This article aims to analyse the impact of ‘Web 2.0’ on organisational knowledge strategies. A comprehensive literature review was done to present the academic background followed by a review of current ‘Web 2.0’ technologies and assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. As the framework of this study is oriented to business applications, the characteristics of the involved segments and tools were reviewed from an organisational point of view. Moreover, the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ paradigm does not only imply tools but also changes the way people collaborate, the way the work is done (processes) and finally impacts on other technologies. Finally, gaps in the literature in this area are outlined.

On the Suitability of Suffix Arrays for Lempel-Ziv Data Compression

Lossless compression algorithms of the Lempel-Ziv (LZ) family are widely used nowadays. Regarding time and memory requirements, LZ encoding is much more demanding than decoding. In order to speed up the encoding process, efficient data structures, like suffix trees, have been used. In this paper, we explore the use of suffix arrays to hold the dictionary of the LZ encoder, and propose an algorithm to search over it. We show that the resulting encoder attains roughly the same compression ratios as those based on suffix trees. However, the amount of memory required by the suffix array is fixed, and much lower than the variable amount of memory used by encoders based on suffix trees (which depends on the text to encode). We conclude that suffix arrays, when compared to suffix trees in terms of the trade-off among time, memory, and compression ratio, may be preferable in scenarios (e.g., embedded systems) where memory is at a premium and high speed is not critical.

Framework genérica de business intelligence para suporte financeiro

Actualmente, não existem ferramentas open source de Business Intelligence (BI) para suporte à gestão e análise financeira nas empresas, de acordo com o sistema de normalização contabilística (SNC). As diferentes características de cada negócio, juntamente com os requisitos impostos pelo SNC, tornam complexa a criação de uma Framework financeira genérica, que satisfaça, de forma eficiente, as análises financeiras necessárias à gestão das empresas. O objectivo deste projecto é propor uma framework baseada em OLAP, capaz de dar suporte à gestão contabilística e análise financeira, recorrendo exclusivamente a software open source na sua implementação, especificamente, a plataforma Pentaho. Toda a informação contabilística, obtida através da contabilidade geral, da contabilidade analítica, da gestão orçamental e da análise financeira é armazenada num Data mart. Este Data mart suportará toda a análise financeira, incluindo a análise de desvios orçamentais e de fluxo de capitais, permitindo às empresas ter uma ferramenta de BI, compatível com o SNC, que as ajude na tomada de decisões.

Family expectation, social adjustment and gender differences in a sample of schizophrenic patients

A case series to study factors related to family expectation regarding schizophrenic patients was conducted in an out-patient setting in the city of S. Paulo, Brazil. Patients diagnosed as presenting schizophrenia by the ICD 9th Edition and having had the disease for more than four years were included in the study. Family Expectation was measured by the difference between the Katz Adjustment Scale (R2 and R3) scores based on the relative's expectation and the socially expected activities of the patient (Discrepancy Score), and social adjustment was given by the DSM-III-R Global Assessment Scale (GAS) . Outcome assessments were made independently, and 44 patients comprised the sample (25 males and 19 females). The Discrepancy mean score was twice as high for males as for females (p < 0.02), and there was an inverse relationship between the discrepancy score and social adjustment (r =-0.46, p < 0.001). Moreover, sex and social adjustment exerted independent effects on the discrepancy score when age, age at onset and number of psychiatric admissions were controlled by means of a multiple regression technique. There was an interaction between sex and social adjustment, the inverse relationship between social adjustment and discrepancy score being more pronounced for males. These findings are discussed in the light of the potential association between the family environment, gender and social adjustment of schizophrenic patients, and the need for further research, i.e. ethnographic accounts of interactions between patient and relatives sharing households particularly in less developed countries.

Validation of a measurement scale for the relationship between the orientation to corporate social responsibility and other business strategic variables

The importance of Social Responsibility (SR) is higher if this business variable is related with other ones of strategic nature in business activity (competitive success that the company achieved, performance that the firms develop and innovations that they carries out). The hypothesis is that organizations that focus on SR are those who get higher outputs and innovate more, achieving greater competitive success. A scale for measuring the orientation to SR has defined in order to determine the degree of relationship between above elements. This instrument is original because previous scales do not exist in the literature which could measure, on the one hand, the three classics sub-constructs theoretically accepted that SR is made up and, on the other hand, the relationship between SR and the other variables. As a result of causal relationships analysis we conclude with a scale of 21 indicators, validated scale with a sample of firms belonging to the Autonomous Community of Extremadura and it is the first empirical validation of these dimensions we know so far, in this context.

The impact of family control on firm's return

Family firm is a field of growing interest. The aim of this article is to understand whether CEOs identity impacts family firm’s stock returns. From a sample of Portuguese and Spanish family firms findings show that who manages the firms result in significantly different risk exposure. Moreover, we find that the abnormal return found by Fahlenbrach (2009) to founder-controlled firms disappear when we use valueweighted portfolios and include two new factors: market aggregate illiquidity and debt intensity to the four-factor Carhart model. Finally, our results explain why the majority of family firm is controlled by its founder.

An architecture for an effective usage of data mining in business intelligence systems

Business Intelligence (BI) is one emergent area of the Decision Support Systems (DSS) discipline. Over the last years, the evolution in this area has been considerable. Similarly, in the last years, there has been a huge growth and consolidation of the Data Mining (DM) field. DM is being used with success in BI systems, but a truly DM integration with BI is lacking. Therefore, a lack of an effective usage of DM in BI can be found in some BI systems. An architecture that pretends to conduct to an effective usage of DM in BI is presented.

General Insights into Word Choice in Business Communication

Words are the smallest units of messages. Attention should be given to each word used to be sure it is the most effective one. An effective word is one that the receiver will understand and that will elicit the wanted response. The ability to choose words by (a) using a dictionary and a thesaurus and (b) following some of the principles of business communication described in this text can be improved.

Improving management skills through business simulation

A survey was conducted among students of the Accounting and Administration undergraduate degree at ISCAP – IPP (School of Accounting and Administration of Polytechnic Institute of Porto) in order to understand their perception value of their course Business Simulation (BS). This course is provided in a business environment where students can learn by doing through the management of a company as they were in the real life, but risk-free. The learning tasks are provided in an action-oriented format to maximize the learning process. Students learn by doing a set of tasks every session and have also to produce reports and presentations during the course. BS is part of the undergraduate degree of Accounting and Administration at ISCAP – IPP since the beginning of 2003. The questionnaire we used captured the students’ perception about general and specific skills and competencies considered important for managers and accountants in the real life, about the methodology used in the course, which is totally different from the traditional form, and also about the adequacy of the course included as part of the undergraduate degree. The results showed that students’ perception is highly positive and almost all of them think they improve the skills needed for a job during the course. These results are consistent with [1] Adler and Milne’s research in which the authors found that students agree with the use of action-oriented learning tasks in order to provide them the needed attitudes, skills, and knowledge. The improvement of group skills is the most important issue for students, which can be understandable as BS is the only course from the degree in Accounting and Administration they really have to work in groups.

Learning business strategies for competitive electronic marketplaces

This paper presents a Multi-Agent Market simulator designed for developing new agent market strategies based on a complete understanding of buyer and seller behaviors, preference models and pricing algorithms, considering user risk preferences and game theory for scenario analysis. This tool studies negotiations based on different market mechanisms and, time and behavior dependent strategies. The results of the negotiations between agents are analyzed by data mining algorithms in order to extract rules that give agents feedback to improve their strategies. The system also includes agents that are capable of improving their performance with their own experience, by adapting to the market conditions, and capable of considering other agent reactions.

Leptonic mixing, family symmetries, and neutrino phenomenology

Tribimaximal leptonic mixing is a mass-independent mixing scheme consistent with the present solar and atmospheric neutrino data. By conveniently decomposing the effective neutrino mass matrix associated to it, we derive generic predictions in terms of the parameters governing the neutrino masses. We extend this phenomenological analysis to other mass-independent mixing schemes which are related to the tribimaximal form by a unitary transformation. We classify models that produce tribimaximal leptonic mixing through the group structure of their family symmetries in order to point out that there is often a direct connection between the group structure and the phenomenological analysis. The type of seesaw mechanism responsible for neutrino masses plays a role here, as it restricts the choices of family representations and affects the viability of leptogenesis. We also present a recipe to generalize a given tribimaximal model to an associated model with a different mass-independent mixing scheme, which preserves the connection between the group structure and phenomenology as in the original model. This procedure is explicitly illustrated by constructing toy models with the transpose tribimaximal, bimaximal, golden ratio, and hexagonal leptonic mixing patterns.

Geometric picture of generalized-CP and Higgs-family transformations in the two-Higgs-doublet model

In the two-Higgs-doublet model (THDM), generalized-CP transformations (phi(i) -> X-ij phi(*)(j) where X is unitary) and unitary Higgs-family transformations (phi(i) -> U-ij phi(j)) have recently been examined in a series of papers. In terms of gauge-invariant bilinear functions of the Higgs fields phi(i), the Higgs-family transformations and the generalized-CP transformations possess a simple geometric description. Namely, these transformations correspond in the space of scalar-field bilinears to proper and improper rotations, respectively. In this formalism, recent results relating generalized CP transformations with Higgs-family transformations have a clear geometric interpretation. We will review what is known regarding THDM symmetries, as well as derive new results concerning those symmetries, namely how they can be interpreted geometrically as applications of several CP transformations.

Mergers and acquisitions as strategies of business expansion in the pharmaceutical industry

Introduction: The present paper deals with the issue of the increasing usage of corporation mergers and acquisitions strategies within pharmaceutical industry environment. The aim is to identify the triggers of such business phenomenon and the immediate impact on the financial outcome of two powerful biopharmaceutical corporations: Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, which have been sampled due to their successful approach of the tactics in question. Materials and Methods: In order to create an overview of the development steps through mergers and acquisitions, the historical data of the two corporations has been consulted, from their official websites. The most relevant events were then associated with adequate information from the financial reports and statements of the two corporations indulged by web-based financial data providers. Results and Discussions: In the past few decades Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline have purchased or merged with various companies in order to monopolize new markets, diversify products and services portfolios, survive and surpass competitors. The consequences proved to be positive although this approach implies certain capital availability. Conclusions: Results reveal the fact that, as far as the two sampled companies are concerned, acquisitions and mergers are reactions at the pressure of the highly competitive environment. Moreover, the continuous diversification of the market’s needs is also a consistent motive. However, the prevalence and the eminence of mergers and acquisition strategies are conditioned by the tender offer, the announcer’s caliber, research and development status and further other factors determined by the internal and external actors of the market.