Professional Services

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Partnership under pressure
Author(s): Laura Empson, Cass Business School
Topic: Organisation and Leadership Industry: Professional Services Type: Commentary/Analysis

As recently as twenty years ago, partnership was the pre-eminent form of governance in most major professional sectors. But in the 1980s the incidence of partnership began to decline in areas such as accounting, management consulting, actuarial consulting, and investment banking, to the extent that most major consulting firms and almost all investment banks are now organised as privately-held or publicly-quoted corporations.

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Updated: 10/09/2010 | Comments: 0 | Rating: Not yet rated | Views: 193

Managing the pain of knowledge-based mergers
Author(s): Laura Empson, Cass Business School
Topic: Organisation and Leadership Industry: Professional Services Type: Commentary/Analysis

Mergers and acquisitions are supposed to create value. For professional service firms (PSFs), which are knowledge-based organizations, this value is created through gaining access to and making effective use of new sources of knowledge. It can be the technical knowledge needed to deliver a professional service or the client knowledge required to tailor that service to a client’s needs – and ideally it should be both.

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Updated: 08/09/2010 | Comments: 0 | Rating: Not yet rated | Views: 219

What are professional service firms and why do we study them?
Author(s): Laura Empson, Cass Business School
Topic: Organisation and Leadership Industry: Professional Services Type: Commentary/Analysis

The word 'professional' is often used rather loosely: the lay person will as easily apply it to footballers, actors, and hairdressers as to lawyers and accountants. In the altogether more precise language of academics it is still a highly contested term - as, by extension, is the expression professional service firm (PSF).

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Updated: 08/09/2010 | Comments: 0 | Rating: Not yet rated | Views: 247

Underpricing and ex post value uncertainty
Author(s): Sonia Falconieri, Cass Business School, Albert Murphy, State University of New York, Daniel Weaver, The State University of New Jersey
Topic: Finance Industry: Banking Type: Research Papers

Recent theoretical papers propose that not all value uncertainty is resolved prior to the start of trading, but rather continues to be resolved in the beginning of the after market.

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Updated: 10/09/2010 | Comments: 0 | Rating: Not yet rated | Views: 56

Strategic versus financial investors: the role of strategic objectives in financial contracting
Author(s): Sonia Falconieri, Cass Business School, Stefan Arping, Amsterdam Business School
Topic: Finance Industry: Professional Services Type: Research Papers

We argue that while strategic objectives make it more worthwhile for an investor to elicit high entrepreneurial effort, they can also undermine his commitment to penalize poorly performing entrepreneurs by terminating their projects.

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Updated: 04/09/2010 | Comments: 0 | Rating: Not yet rated | Views: 21

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