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This paper examines and updates an earlier study of the liquidity of an extensive array of common stocks traded on NYSE/ASE/NML‐NASDAQ. It reports apparent variances in liquidity due to trading location and other variables. The paper suggests causes for these differences.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

Five hundred financial executives from North American companies were surveyed by means of a mailed questionnaire to gain a view from outside the operations functions of the basis on which aggregate inventory decisions are taken. The response indicated that more functions than might have been expected were involved in the process of determining inventory levels and, partly because of this, policy tended to be of a shorter rather than longer term nature.

This study explores the potential benefits and costs of bank entry into venture capital investing. Data are obtained from a survey of banking organizations regarding their perceptions of the effects of such venture capital investing. Also, evidence on the portfolio diversification effects of such investments is provided using stock price data. These data are consistent with the existence of net benefits from bank entry into this industry. The implications for entrepreneurs are also discussed. Venture capital firms (professionally managed organizational investors) and business angels (private individual investors) invest in new and growing businesses. Their aim is to maximize their risk‐adjusted return on investment through the ex ante assessment of risk and the ex post monitoring of their client entrepreneurs. Because they invest in businesses that are inherently newer and smaller, often without substantial collateral, their deals are riskier than the loan packages that are funded by commercial banks. However, by investing in risk‐ reducing information and sharing it among coinvestors, these venture capitalists often generate returns that are the envy of many bankers. Many venture capitalists expect to earn more than 30% annually on their investments. At a time when banks have been experiencing earning problems, particularly those located in the West and Southwest, there are at least four possible benefits that could come to them and also to entrepreneurs from the entrance of banking organizations into venture capital financing. First, if banks were able to manage the increased risk, they might be successful in improving their earnings. The increased earnings would contribute to the elimination of the capital deficiency facing the banking industry. Second, if they funded entrepreneurs, the total supply of venture capital would increase and it could become much easier to locate seed money. Third, participation by banks would also contribute to the elimination of the widely reported capital gap that may exist for funding new ventures. Fourth, in the long run, if they provided venture capital, they might find that they were providing start‐up financing for future customers, customers that would not otherwise exist. This study contemplates a future role for commercial banks as a potentially huge source of funding for new ventures. It explores the possibility that under certain conditions commercial banks may be able to effectively manage the greater risk associated with venture capital investing. It concentrates on the potential effects of bank entry into venture financing on the risk of failure of the bank, a concern that underlies the existing prohibition for U.S. banks. The proposal to allow U.S. commercial banking organizations to enter the arena of venture capital investments may seem somewhat questionable in a period of massive numbers of bank failures. Yet there are reasons to believe that the potential effects of these activities may not be risk‐increasing as often argued and may, under certain circumstances, even be risk‐reducing. To understand this view, consider the reaction of commercial banks to the changes in their external environment that accompanied financial deregulation during the 1980's. The elimination of deposit rate ceilings that accompanied deregulation increased sharply the cost of bank funds. Banking organizations reacted to that increase in costs by reaching for higher‐risk loans. But, in the United States, these banks were unable through regulatory and market constraints to obtain complete compensation for the increased risk. If these banks had been able to take equity positions in venture capital investments, the upside potential from these commitments of funds to more risky undertakings could be realized, a potential that is impossible with the conventional loan contract. If commercial banks become major players in the market for venture capital, it seems likely that they will rely upon different strategies for controlling risk than those used by venture capital firms and business angels. Basic differences in their approaches to risk management could be a reflection of their costs of access to risk‐reducing information, their visibility in the community, and their tendencies to coinvest with similar types of investors. This study examines the possibility that the size of a bank will largely determine whether it views venture capital investing as a prudent means of doing business. This expectation is based on the assumption that the larger a bank, the more likely it will be to hold a portfolio of diversified venture capital investment. Thus, we would expect to find greater enthusiasm for venture capital investing among large banks than among small banks. If commercial banks were to be permitted to make venture capital investments in the United States, such a move could be so influential that no entity that depends upon this market for its survival would be unaffected. Business angels and venture capital firms could be overshadowed by the resources that banks would have at their disposal, while entrepreneurs and public policy makers would find it difficult to ever again suggest that there was insufficient capital available to fund deserving ventures. This study reviews the roles of venture capital firms and business angels and compares them to the role that could be played by banks. It also compares the perceptions of large bankers (assets >$1 billion) and small bankers (assets <$1 billion) regarding their institution's competence in managing different types of risk. This research will first examine how venture capital firms and business angels emphasize managing different types of risk. Hypotheses related to bank strategies for reducing venture capital risk will be proposed and tested. Finally, implications for entrepreneurs and public policy makers will be discussed.

In estimating desired inventory holdings business organizations must use some estimate of their cost of funds. While conceptually the overall or weighted average cost of capital would seem to be the appropriate measure, survey of senior U.S. and Canadian financial executives at large firms revealed that most of the responding firms used their cost of borrowed funds. As is demonstrated in the paper, use of the cost of borrowed funds rather than the overall cost of funds can cause inventory positions to be excessive during certain periods and deficient during other periods.

Using data from a top-five global executive placement firm, the authors explore how an organization's financial misconduct may affect pay for former employees not implicated in wrongdoing. Drawing on stigma theory, they hypothesize that although such alumni did not participate in the financial misconduct and they had left the organization years before the misconduct, these alumni experience a compensation penalty. The stigma effect increases in relation to the job function proximity to the misconduct, recency of the misconduct, and an employee's seniority. Collectively, results suggest that the stigma of financial misconduct could reach alumni employees and need not be confined to executives and directors that oversaw the organization during the misconduct.

The available evidence is partly consistent and partly inconsistent with a negative association of branching restrictions and the number of banking offices. In this paper, I present evidence that the failure to consistently find such a negative association of branching restrictions and banking offices is quite robust. I suggest that the endogeneity of the banking restrictions and regulators' unmodeled behavior are the basic source of the inconsistency. I conclude that there is no evidence that suggests substantial changes in the number of banking offices with the introduction of interstate branching.

The paper uses annual and pooled data on Australian banks for the years 1994 to 1996 to test the two competing hypotheses of market structure and performance; namely, the structure‐conduct‐performance hypothesis (in concentrated markets firms derive higher profits due to collusion) and the efficiency hypothesis (firms derive higher profits because they are efficient). We test these two and other two intervening hypothesis in the context of the Australian banking market. The results reject the efficiency hypothesis and also the two intermediate hypotheses but there is a lack of strong evidence to reject the structure‐conduct‐performance hypothesis. The results are important because such an empirical investigation has not been conducted in Australia to date. The results suggest that it may be hard to defend abolishing the Four‐pillar Policy (which was a major recommendation of Wallis Report 1997) on efficiency grounds.

This is a troubled age for democracy, but the nature of that trouble and why it is a problem for democracy is an open question, not easy to answer. Widespread wishing for responsible leaders who respect democratic norms and pursue policies to benefit people and protect the vulnerable don’t help much. The issue goes well beyond library contexts, but it is important that those in libraries think through our role in democracy as well. Micro-targeting library-centric problems won’t be effective and don’t address the key issue of this volume. The author can only address the future if we recover an understanding of the present by building up an understanding of actually-existing democracy: (1) the scope must be narrowed to accomplish the task; (2) the characteristics of the retreat from democracy should be established; (3) core working assumptions and values – what libraries are about in this context – must be established; (4) actually-existing democracy should then be characterized; (5) the role of libraries in actually-existing democracy is then explored; (6) the source and character of the threat that is driving the retreat from democracy and cutting away at the core of library assumptions and values is analyzed; (7) the chapter concludes by forming a basis of supporting libraries by unpacking their contribution to building and rebuilding democratic culture: libraries are simultaneously less and more important than is understood.