Contenu du sommaire : Concilier finance et management

Time is at the same time an economic resource and a valuable characteristic of choices. When taking an economic decision, time preference for immediacy questions how to give a psychological value to time. This article recalls that the value of time is a common dimension to finance and management theories. Economic choices refer to time when considering individual consumption or saving decisions or corporate organisational choices. We know that time horizons are not similar and time preferences complex. The concept of a decreasing subjective time value opens new perspectives to explain the influence of far long term in decision making. This possibility is counterbalanced by the traditional vision of short-termism attached to financial market valuation process. This bias does not imply a similar short term bias in corporate manager's decisions. At last, we will recall that the strategic pace of choice is genuine to each firm and introduces a new time dimension in the firm's decision process.

We undertake a bi-disciplinary approach (law and finance) to analyse corporate transparency as a means of conciliation between investors and management. While transparency can instil investor confidence by reducing information asymmetries, transparency may also become the source of tension between the managerial and financial spheres. Tensions arise, in particular, in the fields of ongoing disclosure obligations, disclosure of subjective information, and legal obligations of companies facing market rumours.

This paper focuses on shareholder horizons, the length of time that an investor keeps a stake in a firm. Using results from the Finance literature, the article discusses the reasons for heterogeneity in investor horizons, shows their theoretical consequences for corporate performance, and summarizes the empirical evidence about them. Conclusions for managerial practice are drawn, namely on the difficulty to manage a firm's shareholder structure.

Managerial and governance practices inspired by contractual theories – i.e. transaction cost economics and agency theory – have an exclusive focus on calcul. This article argues that uncertainty appeals ex ante the use of three forms of human's rationality – calcul, mimetism and exemplarity – and that none of these forms can be privileged without damage. This framework justifies important implications, neither for the corpus of finance nor for management and governance practices, research and teaching.

In this paper, the author draws on a genealogy of managment and finance conciliation, such a relation being revealed in the three Monotheisms. Indeed, in Protestantism, finance and management serve to count and multiply resources entrusted by God, whereas Catholcism sees in their relationship a way of making God's gifts perennial. Lastly, Judaism and Islam rely on finanace as an device for social justice management.

This article deals with the impact of the financial crisis on the relation between finance and strategy in business practices but also for the both academic fields. The crisis process is used as an heuristic which enables to argue the responsibility of finance, but also the weakness of strategic management which did not offer sufficient resistance and sensemaking in corporate building. These lenses invite to see the relation between finance and strategy as necessary but also as a guided dialogical stretching.

Human Ressources managers are now required to report the economic and financial contribution of the decisions and politics they make. But performance measures are full of traps and misunderstandings. Still, more than costs analysis and budgets, risk/return evaluation can be accorded with HR objectives. These difficult liaison could be made easier if reliability and its HR determinants were better known and measured.

Finance and management may appear as completely synonymous. For others the former is the very opposite of the latter with the dominant rigor on one side and the definite uncertainty of the human matters on the other side. The article confronts the two notions in presenting how finance has been a model for managerial approaches before discussing the idea that management is invading the field of finance.

The author discuss the difficulty of reconciling the management system and the bank risk management. After having pointed out the place of the risks in the management of a financial institution, the objective will be to show in what the organisational structures and the managerial behaviours that one observes in banks today support the emergence of risks or risky behaviours. In a second time one will explore the necessary evolutions to truly integrate risks in management practices.

Value based management was considered as the major managerial innovation of the nineties : managers were to supposed to be turned into owners through redesigned compensation packages including value creation metrics such as EVA and the like, increased influence of shareholders on firms' strategies... Ten years later it is about time to come back. This article indeed revisits a study made at the time by the authors on the implementation of VBM and analyzes the evolutions observed since then. It identifies the main achievements such as the better management of assets and cost of capital, and the difficulties encountered in the alignment of managers' compensation on market value. It discusses the current trend towards more operational performance indicators in that respect.

This article raises the question as to whether the growth in the financial sector will be sustainable. In part I, this article describes the functions of the financial system and what its development owes to the scientific progress in risk measurement made over past centuries. Then, the article describes the causes and consequences of the growth in the financial industry. It shows that its development has been cyclical. It reached a peak in 2007 as it did in 1929. Finally, the author answers the question of the perennity of the financial sector in light of the current financial crisis.

LBO funds occupy a central position in the debate on the growing role that finance is supposed to assume in firm governance and are also particularly studied by researchers. This is explained by the major role the Private equity industry played in the economy and also by theoretical stakes linked to its development (Jensen 1989, etc.). The first part of this article presents how LBO funds have built their competitive advantage. The second part exposes 1) the limits of the LBO fund economic model and 2) major conflicts between stakeholders that emerge from the current private industry crisis.

The aim of this paper is to present the main anti-takeover mechanisms in order to question their usefulness for shareholders and managers through a literature review. By confronting the entrenchment and the shareholders interest theories, we show that most of anti-takeover mechanisms are more beneficial for managers than for shareholders, because they allow to increase their power and their personal benefits. The conclusions of this paper should reinforce the vigilance of shareholders because antitakeover mechanisms would result in wealth destruction.

This article examines the respective role of finance (shareholders) and management (board of directors) in annual meetings by examining votes on shareholder proposals. The empirical study of French companies from the SBF 250 between 2005 and 2008 provides the structural elements explaining the adoption and the approval of shareholder sponsored resolutions. In line with the theoretical analysis, we find evidence for the role of outside observers such as the French Asset Management Association in facilitating shareholder coalitions ; moreover, the majority rule does not influence the results of voting on resolutions.

`titreb Proxy contests : when shareholders are fighting management `/titreb `alinea/b Minority shareholders have heterogeneous expectations : employees or suppliers, who hold shares, are not only concerned with dividends or an increase in the value of the shares, unlike “financial” shareholders. Sometimes, these shareholders are unsatisfied by certain strategic or operational decisions taken by managers. Then, they have to decide how to protect their interests. This article focus on a special mechanism of protection : the proxy fight. We emphasize the main difficulties faced by shareholders who are engaged in such battles, the key factors of success, as well as the consequences of these battles on the financial performance of companies.

The evolution of the relationship between shareholders and managers in the large firms is regarded over the last fifty years. From a state in which the managers dominate the firm with dispersed shareholders to a state in which they become subjugated to the cult of shareholder value, the various factors driving the evolution of the governance systems are considered. The power of the financial actors have been considerably extended, opening a gap with the aspirations of the other stakeholders in the firm, but raising the question of a possible reversal of the swing, fostered by the recent financial mayhem. The analysis raises the issue of the nature of the firm and the role of informational asymmetries as a cohesive factor for a company.

This article has two objectives. On the one hand, it aims to explain the disturbances brought by finance to management as a problem of inconsistency of organizational architecture. On the other hand, it suggests some ways of reconciliation between finance and the other management functions. This reconciliation could be based on an evolution of the financial theory in order to be closer to the other management sciences, and on a subordination of financial performance objectives and indicators in the management of the firm.

In this paper, we argue that the current financial crisis was not the result of bad behaviors of practitioners or politicians regarding the neoliberal rules of governance. The author shows that, from the outset, the shareholder value oriented theory of governance was not compatible with the economic and financial context of the last two decades since his theory of governance requires restrictive hypotheses that were not met. The author analyses the discrepancy between the assumptions of the theory and the real world characterizing by mass shareholding. As a consequence, we suggest that the shareholders oriented theory has been used as an ideological screen for concealing dramatic changes in corporate control.

What makes family firms so specific is their ambivalence : one family, one firm. Both universes have needs, goals, life and beliefs of their own. Two competing universes : on one hand, the family where feelings rule and on the other hand, the firm, governed by rationality. The subtle coexistence of each leads to conflicts, some of them threatening the survival of the firm and, indeed generate agency costs that diminish its performance. The problem is to know how conciliation between finance and management is possible. This paper tries to demonstrate the proper answer depends on the way those companies are managed and, more widely the way they are governed.