Describimos y fundamentamos la tendencia creciente a utilizar medidas no financieras para la medición del rendimiento empresarial (business performance measurement), así como una taxonomía de estas medidas y el impacto del movimiento de la calidad total en las prácticas de medición. Las medidas que presentamos se caracterizan por (1) medir la productividad y la calidad desde la perspectiva del cliente; (2) estar orientadas a las operaciones, más que al control contable; y (3) ser desagregadas y específicas de cada función de la empresa.

Presentamos la Parte I de una introducción al management japonés, basada en una revisión de la literatura, que describe conceptos y teorías. Examinamos “los tres tesoros”: el empleo vitalicio, el seniority system y los sindicatos por empresa; también mencionamos otros rasgos del sistema, como las decisiones por consenso y los mecanismos de ‘voice’ (antes que de ‘exit’), junto a características institucionales del país y sus empresas. Hacemos referencia entre otros temas a la estructura industrial del Japón, al rendimiento de sus empresas y a la política industrial.

This paper sets forth that governance brokerage can be regarded as a natural outgrowth of the actual practice of Corporate Governance. To lay the foundations of our subject, firstly we delve into the dual nature of any transaction. Then we move on to define what the expression “governance broker” means, underlining five professional arrangements from which governance intermediation can be achieved. Next, it is shown how trade splits up economic agents’ information sets, giving rise to the brokerage of asymmetric information.

Este trabajo analiza las características básicas del derecho argentino de defensa de la competencia y el modo en el cual ha sido aplicado en varios casos importantes. Empieza con una sección sobre la evolución del derecho antitrust argentino, seguida de otra sobre los principios económicos y jurídicos básicos que están detrás de dicho derecho.

Loan and bond finance during 1985-2005 can be divided into three sub-periods. After the 1982 debt crisis, which mainly involved domestic and foreign bank loans to both the corporate and government sectors, there was practically no credit. This situation of lack of credit persisted until the domestic economy was stabilized in 1991 with the Convertibility Plan, and foreign debt renegotiation was completed in 1993 with the Brady Plan.

 This document describes the construction of a database of corporate bonds issued by firms in Argentina between 1989 and 2005. The database draws on two main sources, the Bolsa de Comercio de Buenos Aires and the Comisión Nacional de Valores, while some additional information comes from the Mercado Abierto Electrónico. In all, we collected information on 1356 corporate bonds, though there are some bonds that have fields with missing information. Our data basically covers the characteristics of the bonds at time of issue.

Conventional theory leads to expect bonds to be a financing vehicle for large firms because of economies of scale and contracting costs. In this paper we present the results for Argentina of a survey of firms and of investors on the use of corporate bonds. The result of these surveys supports the idea that for Argentine firms, bonds are a financing vehicle of choice only for firms above a certain (large) size. This is independent of the criteria used for firm size. This result is similar to results in other countries such as the United Sates. 

In this paper we put forward an alternative approach to dealing with the Charter of any organization, that essential document which ought to be regarded as the mainstay of governance. In the first place, we show that an organization carries out its tasks by becoming a responsive mechanism to fulfill stakeholders’ demands as well as costly restraints stemming from transactional environments.

We describe the evolution of three types of corporate securities in Argentina, namely, corporate bonds, asset-backed securities and deferred checks. Corporate bonds (obligaciones negociables) were legally authorized in 1988, and after a tax reform in 1991 they became an important financing vehicle. Asset backed securities (fideicomisos), legally created in 1995, have been issued since 1996. They typically bundle together small credits of a similar category. Deferred checks (cheques de pago diferido) exist since 1993, alongside standard checks.

Conventional theory leads to expect bonds to be a financing vehicle for large firms because of economies of scale and contracting costs. We find both in our econometric evidence for firms quoted on Latin American stock exchanges, and in our survey results for Argentina, that size of assets is a robust determinant of the use of bond finance. This result, together with the fact that there are few firms that are large in terms of market value, can help understand why Argentina, as well as Latin America, has small bond markets in terms of the ratio of the stock of bonds to GDP.