Behind the push for a merger lay a belief that a bigger, more diversified firm would not be so easily bullied by retailers.Yet it is far from clear that Northern's main problem is insufficient scale.
Morgan Stanley, on the other hand, is a more diversified firm and can rely on areas like investment banking, hedge fund servicing and equities trading that are doing very well.
If the Federal Reserve Board continues to cut interest rates, Mr. McVey said, the more diversified firms "will outperform the retail on a sustained basis".
"We believe it is important to be free to choose the best firm for the job when referring work on behalf of a client," says Chris Swinson, the firm's senior partner and a former president of the ICA, the British accountants' professional body.The more diversified that firms become, the more they are exposed to potential conflicts of interest.
"Bank earnings are economically sensitive, while brokerage earnings are market sensitive," said Mr. Soifer, who, like many analysts, is recommending the stocks of bigger and more diversified brokerage firms such as Merrill Lynch & Company and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Company.
The more diversified the firms is in terms of products, the lower their incentive to adoption and continue HACCP because: (i) it is harder to control for cross contamination due to multiple product lines and (ii) greater diversification in products would allow the firms flexibility to continue business even without the HACCP system required by some markets.
The more diversified the firms is in terms of products, the lower their incentive for earlier initial adoption and likely earlier decertification because: (i) it is harder to control for cross contamination due to multiple product lines and (ii) greater diversification in products would allow the firms flexibility to continue business even without the HACCP system required by some markets.
Returning to the introductory discussion, given that divestitures involve the removal of one or more of a diversified firm's existing lines of business, these deals have important implications for divesting firms.
(European insurers, which tend to have both life and non-life businesses, are generally more diversified than American firms).The emphasis on size and diversity is likely to fuel further industry consolidation.
Due to the rapid technological development and more diversified customer needs, firms can no longer dominate the market with only one product for a long period of time.
We find that ties with distant suppliers improve productivity (as measured by sales per worker) more than ties with neighboring suppliers, which is likely because distant firms' intermediates embody more diversified knowledge than those from neighboring firms.
