Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

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Dry beans are an important crop in the Mexican agricultural sector. Production, commercialization and consumption of dry beans are part of the Mexican culture. Though, the situation of the producers in many cases is challenging. Climatic, structural and cultural factors difficult profitable operations. / This paper analyzes the situation of a specific group of producers in a village in the state of Puebla. The paper is part of a project intending to analyze and to improve the situation of these producers. It is realized in cooperation between the Universidad de las Américas Puebla (UDLAP) and the Foundation PRODUCE, an organization for agricultural development. / The analyses are based on the findings of precedent reports on dry bean production in Mexico and in Puebla. Principals and methods of strategic planning and management are the basis for the design of the investigation. / After the formulation of mission and vision statements, concrete strategic objectives and indicators to measure their achievement are defined in the form of a Balanced Scorecard. / (cont.) Subsequently, the internal and external circumstances are described and evaluated using SWOT analysis and the analysis of Porter?s Five Forces. The findings of these analyses provide a basis for crafting a strategic plan for the producers. This plan consists firstly, of a general strategic approach and secondly, of a list of concrete strategic initiatives and measures to be taken by the different functional areas:  operations/production, marketing, finance, and human resources. / The paper concludes that the producers face a difficult situation and need to approach the achievement of their objectives comprehensively taking advantage of all the support available. Important conditions for success are cooperation, entrepreneurial spirit and flexibility. / .

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Insurance companies transfer parts of the risk, they assume from their policyholders, to reinsurers. Underwriting reinsurance business is the process of relocating risks from an insurer to a reinsurer. A reinsurance business is considered to be in run-off, if the reinsurer discontinues to underwrite it. Various active run-off management approaches address the issue of such legacy business. The content of this paper covers the development and implementation of a specific run-off management project at the reinsurance company, Swiss Re, called the commutation initiative for small reserve value business in Latin America. In general terms, commutations are an instrument to prematurely terminate contracts. To reach a commutation agreement, the contractual counterparts negotiate a compensative payment, derived from the remaining contract value. By transferring this commutation payment, all contractual obligations are ceased and the contract reaches finality. This paper describes the prioritization of the initiative within the Swiss Re project landscape, the definition of the project scope, the estimated impact of macroeconomic factors and the valuation technique used for the calculation of commutation offers. / (cont.) Based on the mentioned aspects, the paper contains reasonable expectations on the project performance and potential. Finally the paper contains the evaluation of the initiative, discussing the reasonableness of the project targets and the adequacy of the project approach for the specific situation at Swiss Re as well as the suitability of the process structure and the performance measures. The content of this paper also includes the assessment of the project´s impact on operations, especially concerning run-off administration costs. A final judgement on the project performance cannot be rendered yet, as the project is still in progress. The indications displayed in this paper suggest, that further research and future initiatives should focus on improving the accounting system and contract structuring in order to reduce the occurrence of run-off contracts. .

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

 Setting up a new business that can successfully cater to international markets is a dream of many entrepreneurs. In the search for guidelines that would help potential entrepreneurs to grow and survive in global markets, research on international new ventures has been developing extensively in the last fifteen years. Social networks and unique knowledge resources spurring from them have been recognized as essential to the development of new ventures. However, our knowledge is still fairly limited as to how international new ventures make use of their social capital on the path to success. The concept of dynamic capabilities that make network-originated resource acquisition and transformation possible has mostly been absent from the international entrepreneurship research. This study is based on the assumption that it is not the access to unique knowledge resources provided by social networks that makes new ventures competitive and market-fit. It is rather how international new ventures assimilate and leverage these resources into evolutionary fitness, or growth and survival. The two distinctive roles are fulfilled by a hierarchy of classes of dynamic capabilities. A new research framework in the international entrepreneurship field, based on dynamic capability and on social capital theories, is introduced to uncover the influence and interaction effects of classes of capabilities in assimilating and leveraging knowledge originating from firms’ social capital. This dissertation is an attempt to provide an explanation of complementary, substitutive, and joint roles that social capital and dynamic capabilities play in achieving evolutionary fitness and sustainability in international new ventures. A very distinctive pattern of structural, cognitive, and relational social capital is identified as enhancing the chances of survival of international new ventures. Accounting for differences in growth, firms achieving higher evolutionary fitness are found to benefit from the joint role of two classes of dynamic capabilities and from the simultaneous pursuit of multiple paths to success. On the other hand, firms with lower evolutionary fitness are limited by their extensive deployment of assimilative capabilities and use fewer paths to evolutionary fitness. In consequence, the study also discusses the negative impact of dynamic capabilities that is related to the diminishing returns from their deployment in the pursuit of evolutionary fitness. A multi-method and multi-stage approach that combines retrospective and real-time investigations of international new ventures from the low-tech industry was used to evaluate 3 propositions and an additional observation. The empirical analysis involved 6 in-depth longitudinal case studies, social network data, survey and electronic communication data. The findings provide strong support and a significant extension to the propositions in addition to offering theoretical and managerial implications. / published_or_final_version / Business / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation is presented in the form of three essays on International Business studies. The purpose of the dissertation is to address the interdependence between the macroeconomy and finance at three levels of analysis: the conceptual level, the economic policy level, and the corporate policy level. Each essay addresses one of these levels. The empirical focus is on developing countries in general---and Latin America in particular---because in recent history these countries have experienced large economic fluctuations and major regime shifts. The introduction surveys the literature on the relationship between the financial sector and economic growth. The first essay synthesizes the literature concerning the benefits, risks, and costs of financial liberalization in developing countries and presents illustrative data on its recent implementation and outcomes. The second essay investigates the causal relationships between real activity, inflation, and financial assets' returns in seven major Latin American economies (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela) over the period 1976--1999, using vector autoregression analysis to explore the puzzling negative relationship observed elsewhere between real stock returns and inflation. The third essay investigates whether macroeconomic factors are as important as traditional firm-specific and country-specific factors as determinants of capital structure for a sample of firms from the seven Latin American countries mentioned above in the period 1986--2000 using panel data analysis. Empirical comparisons are drawn with industrial economies: the G-7 economies in the second essay and a subset of United States firms in the third. The final chapter presents the conclusions of this dissertation. The main finding is that differences between advanced and emerging economies in the relationship among economic variables do not seem as clear-cut as often assumed by academicians, policy