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Strategic Motives (strategic + motive)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences60%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting40%

Selected Abstracts

Human Rights Violations, Corruption, and the Policy of Repression

POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL, Issue 1 2008
Alok K. Bohara
Quantitative cross-national research on human rights violations and repression has made considerable progress in identifying and eliminating economic and political factors that influence the use of torture and killing by governments. Warfare tends to increase violations, democracy,notably full democracy,and trade tends to inhibit violations. Where motives have been considered, this research has generally assumed a strategic motivation for government use of repression. Repression is employed to counter threats from the opposition as represented by the presence of warfare. Less attention has been given to the effect of implementation on levels of repression. Theory suggests that agents are likely to make a substantial independent contribution to the level of repression, if given the opportunity. In this article we develop this argument and present cross-country comparative evidence that suggests that agents' opportunities for hidden action measured by perceived levels of financial corruption substantially influences the incidence of torture in a political system, after controlling for the strategic motive of governments and the other factors found influential in earlier research. We show that the results are robust and not sensitive to alternative modeling, measurement, and research-design decisions. [source]

Evidence on Value Creation in the Financial Services Industries through the Use of Joint Ventures and Strategic Alliances

FINANCIAL REVIEW, Issue 2 2003
Kimberly C. Gleason
G21/G29/G14 Abstract While an extensive body of literature has examined merger, acquisition, and consolidation activity in commercial banks and other financial services firms, little attention has been paid to examining how these institutions use the cooperative activities of joint ventures and strategic alliances to accomplish their growth objectives. We analyze the effects of the use of joint ventures and strategic alliances by a sample of firms in the banking, investment services, and insurance industries. Our results show that commercial banks, investment services firms, and insurance companies experience significant abnormal returns of 0.66% on average when they announce their participation in a joint venture or strategic alliance. These abnormal returns are significantly positive across the four strategic motives of domestic, international, horizontal, and diversifying cooperative activities. Using a matched sample, we also show that our sample firms enjoy significant, positive, abnormal returns for holding periods of six, 12, and 18 months after the announcement of the cooperative activity. [source]

Strategic bias and professional affiliations of macroeconomic forecasters

JOURNAL OF FORECASTING, Issue 2 2009
Masahiro AshiyaArticle first published online: 19 SEP 200
Abstract This paper investigates strategic motives of macroeconomic forecasters and the effect of their professional affiliations. The ,wishful expectations hypothesis' suggests that a forecaster predicts what his employer wishes. The ,publicity hypothesis' argues that forecasters are evaluated by both accuracy and ability to generate publicity, and that forecasters in industries that emphasize publicity most will make most extreme and least accurate predictions. The ,signaling hypothesis' asserts that an extreme forecast signals confidence in own ability, because incompetent forecasters would mimic others to avoid public notice. Empirical evidence from a 26-year panel of annual GDP forecasts is con-sistent with the publicity hypothesis. This indicates that conventional tests of rationality are biased toward rejecting the rational expectations hypothesis. Copyright ? 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

The Dilemma of Double Standards in U.S. Human Rights Policy

PEACE & CHANGE, Issue 4 2003
Scott Turner
In May 2000 the United States was voted off of the United Nations Human Rights Commission. This reflected the frustration of much of the international community with the United States' increasingly obstructionist approach to international institutionalism. The United States' opposition to the proposed International Criminal Court (ICC) reflects its pursuit of double standards in human rights policy. Double standards are manifest in U.S. support for Israel and Turkey with their records of gross human rights violations. They likewise are discernable in the strategic motives behind the 1999 Kosovo intervention. The proposed ICC challenges the United States' use of human rights rhetoric to pursue unilateral objectives by forging a more neutral means of prosecuting international justice. If the United States is to recover its status as the world's human rights leader, it must renew its commitment to multilateral institutionalism and must avoid double standards that undermine the legitimacy of human rights discourse. [source]

THE GLOBAL BANK MERGER WAVE: IMPLICATIONS FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

THE DEVELOPING ECONOMIES, Issue 4 2002
GARY A. DYMSKI
This paper reconsiders causes and implications of the global bank merger wave, especially for developing economies. Previous studies of the global bank mergers,that is, mergers between banks from different nations,had assumed that these combinations are efficiency-driven, and that the U.S. case defines the paradigm for all other nations' banking systems. This paper argues that the U.S. experience is unique, not paradigmatic, and that bank mergers are not efficiency-driven; instead, this merger wave has arisen because of macrostructural circumstances and because of shifts over time in banks' strategic motives. This paper argues that large, offshore banks often engage in cross-border mergers because they want to provide financial services to households and firms that have reached minimal threshold wealth levels. For developing economies, this suggests that cross-border acquisitions of local banks by offshore banks will have mixed effects; and it cannot be assumed that the net social impact is positive. [source]