酪農協の経営問題と合併効果

Consolidation on Aisle Five: Effects of Mergers in Consumer Packaged Goods

The law of large-scale retail stores (LSs) had economically regulated their new location and operation until 2000, and a completely new law for the location of LSs came into effect from June 2000. The study analyzes the location ofLSs and consumers' shopping behavior during 1990's in Niigata Prefecture, and assesses traffic and living environment around some of LSs as a case study. The number of newly opened LSs grew very high during 1990's throughout Niigata Prefecture. Vitality of central shopping areas declined in most of cities. Inhabitants around the LSs revealed a unsatisfactory opinion mostly towards traffic jams of access route and traffic noise, particularly during operating hours late at night. The paper discusses several enforcement and operation issues to be faced by the new location law which are to environmentally assess impacts of the location of LSs.

On the Effects of the Traffic Irregularity between Island and Mainland for Islanders Lives―A Case Study in Awashima Island, Niigata Prefecture

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on innovation and profitability in large European firms.Design/methodology/approachUsing information from a unique micro-longitudinal database of top European R&D investors and information from the European Commission (EC) Merger Control Authority, dynamic panel estimations with firm-level fixed effects are performed. Moreover, the paper presents a qualitative case study of a merger in the European electronic and electrical equipment industry.FindingsThe analysis of a sample of 562 M&As authorized by the EC Merger Control Authority shows that mergers positively influence the R&D intensity and profitability of top companies in the European Union over the period 2004–2012. Furthermore, empirical evidence shows that the timing and magnitude of these effects differs. In particular, the positive effect of mergers on R&D intensity is found for the short and large term while they influence profitability only in the large term.Originality/valueThis paper makes several contributions. First, unlike other studies on this topic, it investigates the effects of M&As using firm-level panel data on the top 1,000 European R&D companies instead of only examining a case study. Second, a unique data set has been used, which collects information on large European firms from the European Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard and the EC antitrust authority. Finally, the paper accounts for the casual link between innovation effort and profitability when evaluating the potential effect of M&As on the R&D intensity and profitability of large European firms.

This article analyses rural depopulation in Japan and its implications by means of a case study of Niigata Prefecture and Sado Island. In the first part of the article, we present population maps to show that rural demographic shrinkage is both deepening as well as broadening to include urban centres. We focus initially on Niigata Prefecture in the national context and then discuss migratory patterns in Sado. The data show that Sado, and now Niigata Prefecture as a whole, have entered what we call a ‘double-negative population disequilibrium’, whereby both the migratory and natural reproduction population contributions have turned negative. Recent evidence indicates that Niigata City itself may also have begun to shrink. In the second part, we discuss the implications of depopulation for Sado Island via extracts from qualitative interviews gathered from local residents. We found that many residents now accept the inevitability of continued shrinkage and, rather than seeking to re-establish growth, many institutional and social and environmental entrepreneurs are instead working towards achieving community stability and sustainability. We conclude by suggesting that the example of Japan's rural communities presents Japan's regional cities with the occasion to consider life ‘beyond growth’, as their populations also begin to shrink in the years to come.

This paper aims to clarify the effects of direct payment in hilly and mountainous areas for maintaining ecological functions of farmlands. Two villages in the upstream district of Tokamachi-shi, Niigata Prefecture were selected as study sites for a comparison of land use and farmland management.First, patterns of land use and aspects of the local environment that made farming difficult were analyzed by using GIS. Topographic differences between still-cultivated farmlands and abandoned ones were compared in terms of two of these aspects: distance from managed farm roads and degrees of slope. We found that abandoned farmlands were further from roads and steeper than cultivated ones. Maintenance of the levees around the farmlands ceased completely after cultivation was abandoned.Secondly, we conducted a survey to determine how the local farmlands were managed and how the subsidy was affecting the maintenance of farmlands. We found that the scheme was having little effect on the re-cultivation of once-abandoned farmlands or the maintenance of farmlands. However, the subsidy was being used for joint activities by the villagers and was having a positive effect on village revitalization.It was apparent that a clear vision of those measures that could help promote the ecological functions of local farmlands was needed for the effective use of the subsidy.In conclusion, we made the following points on the maintenance and promotion of the ecological functions of farmlands and woodlands. 1) To maintain the ecological functions of farmlands, and as an alternative to the current scheme, we need a new scheme that has clear objectives with regard to the management of both abandoned farmlands and still-cultivated ones. 2) Farmers need to receive assistance in the management of woodlands, because afforestation is a legitimate way to prevent decline in the ecological functions of abandoned farmlands in areas where re-cultivation is difficult and where shrubs and trees have already begun to invade.

134 Sedimentological relation between shelf turbidite & submarinefan turbidite : from a case study in the southern part of the Higashiyama Hills, Niigata Prefecture

This study uses an ex ante data envelopment analysis approach to examine potential gains that US agricultural cooperatives may accrue from mergers. Empirical estimations utilize data from CoBank, a lender to cooperatives, consisting of 749 midwestern agricultural cooperative observations from 2011 to 2015. Potential overall merger effects are decomposed into learning effects, scope effects, and scale effects. Findings show that less other unique merger costs such as legal fees, there are significant overall potential gains in profits from mergers. Relatively smaller merged cooperatives will accrue more gains in profits compared with their larger counterparts [EconLit Citations: Q13, D20, G34].

Microseismic data and production logs in our study area have confirmed an asymmetric development of the stimulation rock volume, while severe casing deformation problems have been reported frequently in this area. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of casing failure due to strong shear stresses developed by asymmetric stimulated zones. Overlapping stimulation zones in adjacent stages may intensify asymmetry of the pore pressure distribution and resultant shear forces. Although induced shearing may have a positive impact on fracture permeability, but it may also cause operational problems by inducing severe casing deformations. While most of the casing deformation models only consider rock deformations very close to the wellbore, we developed a 3D coupled model for fracture network growth and stress re-distribution during hydraulic fracturing to achieve a more realistic model for casing deformation. This reservoir-scale model is tied to a more detailed near-wellbore model including the casing and cement sheath to simulate casing deformations. Case studies were conducted using data from a shale gas well that experienced severe casing deformation during hydraulic fracturing. Impact of stage spacing, and pumping rate are incorporated to investigate their potential impacts on casing and well integrity. Multi-stage hydraulic fracturing considering the development of complex fracture network is simulated at the reservoir scale based on the microseismic events. Continuous re-distribution and re-orientation of stress field near the borehole are tracked during the development of the fracture network which reveals some pocket of tensile stresses along the casing. Asymmetric fractures are observed to generate strong shear stress on the suspended casing. These shear forces result in deflection and S-shape deformations. Some regions receive repeating treatments, which leads to increase formation stress heterogeneity and worsen casing deformation severity. Our analysis has indicated that simply increasing the flexural strength by increasing thickness of casing cannot radically mitigate casing deformation problems. This paper provides a novel workflow for a coupled modelling of casing deformation during hydraulic fracturing operations, while current modelling efforts assume symmetric fracture geometries.

Several recent articles have studied the competitive effects of horizontal mergers by examining rival firms' stock price reactions to the merger announcement and subsequent antitrust challenge. These articles have consistently failed to find any evidence of anticompetitive effects. This article considers two alternative explanations for the previous findings, and it sheds some new light on the issue by presenting a case study of the merger that resulted in the formation of the Northern Securities Company in 1901.

This study examines the merger effect of Japanese Agricultural cooperatives. In a comparison of 58 merging and 12 non-merging cooperatives, a negative merger effect is seen in four financial ratios.A general comparison of financial ratios between merging and non-merging agricultural cooperatives shows that non-merging cooperatives are superior to merging cooperatives on several ratios.KeywordsCurrent RatioFinancial RatioFixed AssetOperating ProfitAgricultural CooperativeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Effect of mergers and acquisitions on drug discovery: perspective from a case study of a Japanese pharmaceutical company

This article explores a growing paradoxical aspect of research in U.S. correctional systems: On the one hand, the need to know what is being done and "what works" inside our prisons, which now command an annual outlay of $20 billion; conversely, there is the apparent cloak of secrecy surrounding these closed, "total institutions" (using Goffman's definition). The article discusses the tremendous need for cooperation between correctional practitioners and researchers, especially in light of the widespread notion spawned in the mid-1970s that "nothing works" inside prisons to change inmates. Primary differences between the methods, goals, and personalities of practitioners and researchers are discussed; and the Supreme Court's removal of the 'iron curtain' between prisons and society, Wolff v. McDonnell (1974), is examined in relation to research. For future correctional researchers, several political and operational problems actually encountered in a recent national survey of prisons are outlined. This case study provides considerable insight regarding the extent of difficulty and even paranoia the prison researcher should expect to encounter, as much or more on the part of the central office (state department of corrections) staff as with grass roots employees.

This article presents the framework of a two-stage optimization model for the optimal planning of smart home renewable energy resources (RERs) and battery integration with the association of prosumer-based energy management. The optimal sizing problem of in-house RERs and battery is addressed in the first-stage optimization with the objective function of RERs and battery's total life-cycle cost minimization. The smart home daily energy operation problem is formulated in the second stage with the help of multiobject home energy management (MOHEM). In the second-stage operation problem, the MOHEM is implemented with two different objective functions such as minimization of consumer's daily energy cost and maximization of consumer's total comfort level index. The particle swarm optimization algorithm and a mixed-integer linear programming technique are, respectively, used in this article to optimize the proposed two-stage optimization model. A typical smart home which consists of various controllable appliances is considered in this analysis to evaluate the performance of the proposed two-stage optimization model. Three different case studies are considered in the simulation to assess the effectiveness of the proposed model. Finally, an economic analysis is also done in this article to examine the smart home consumer's capital investment benefits.

With the integration of distributed generators (DGs) and multiple types of loads, it is increasingly difficult to cope with the uncertainties of DGs, which brings challenges to the secure operation of distribution networks (DNs). Source and load cannot obtain the power balance locally, which may cause operational problems such as line power overload and node voltage violation. However, the methods for quantitatively analyzing the operating status of DNs have not yet formed a unified standard. For which reason, the concept of operating margin is proposed in this study, to represent the distance from the operating point to the boundary. In this study, to generally evaluate the operating status of DNs, the concept of node power margin is proposed first. Then the evaluation indexes including line power margin (LPM) and node voltage margin (NVM) are introduced. The quantitative calculation method for system operating margin (SOM) is further elaborated, which is supposed to be the evaluation indexes on system level. After that, the analysis process of evaluation methods for SOM is discussed. Finally, case studies are performed on the modified IEEE 33-node system to evaluate the operating margin of DNs and verify the enhancement brought by the energy storage system (ESS) and soft open point (SOP) through the flexible adjustment of power flow. The simulation results show that the distance between the DN and the security boundary is effectively quantified through the proposed method, the value can be easily calculated, and the change can be clearly reflected.