In the last 20 years there has been considerable discussion about the transformation of the media industry and its relation with telecommunications, bringing these industries closer and making them more convergent – mostly in terms of content management and distribution.
This may be the time to ask an impertinent but crucial question. What exactly is media management? Does it really exist?
After all, is managing a media company different from managing a beer brewery? An airline? A bank? Every business is run on similar functions - strategic planning, financing, HR, production, marketing, distribution, accounting, government relations, etc. So the question we need to address is whether media management is different from management in general.
We develop a theoretical framework in which political and economic cycles are jointly determined. These cycles are driven by three political economy frictions: policymakers are non-benevolent, they cannot commit to policies, and they have private information about the tightness of the government budget and rents. Our first main result is that, in the best sustainable equilibrium, distortions to production emerge and never disappear even in the long run.
We use panel data to examine the prediction of Merton's intertemporal CAPM that time varying risk premiums arise from the conditional covariances of returns on assets with the return on the market. We find a positive and significant risk-return tradeoff that is driven by the time series variation in the conditional covariances, and the risk-premium on the market remains positive and significant after controlling for additional state-variables. Our estimation method allows us to estimate the risk-return tradeoff in the ICAPM using a large number of test assets.
We study the optimal composition of corporate boards. Directors can be either monitoring or advisory types. Monitoring constrains the empire-building tendency of chief executive officers (CEOs). If shareholders control the board nomination process, a non-monotonic relation ensues between agency problems and board composition. To preempt CEO entrenchment, shareholders may assemble an adviser-heavy board. If a powerful CEO influences the nomination process, this may result in a more monitor-heavy board.
Recent findings of low societal consensus in cultural values suggest that our field’s dominant paradigm — culture as shared values — is a fallacy. The perennial persistence of this illusion may come from the fact that it appeals to the human brain’s hardwired capacity for essentialism. Evidence against value consensus, however, does not doom all shared-meaning models of culture (pace Schwartz, 2013).
Using country index returns from 8 developed countries and 8 emerging market countries, we re-explore the benefits to international diversification over the past 30 years. To examine various theories in a comparable way, we intentionally limited ourselves to an examination of country index returns and a limited number of types of investments.