One explanation for firms' inventory cycles is that they are tied to the calendar year, reflecting fundamental demand seasonality. But we find that these cycles are also tied to the fiscal year, an accounting artifact constructed by firms themselves. Specifically, inventory is lower at fiscal...

How important are local country conditions to firms' operations performance, as revealed in their inventory levels? Under a "flat world" hypothesis, differences in firms' inventory levels are explained more by differences among industries and firms themselves, rather than differences among...

Sebastian de la Fuente is the sixth largest supermarket chain in the Basque region of Spain. It has a novel dataset of 108,605 observations on 3,745 SKUs, collected for almost 2 1/2 years. I find the bullwhip effect in the data: at least 80% of the SKUs have a bigger variance in supplies than...

The discipline of operations management is rarely studied with an eye on public policies. Yet, it is glaring to even the casual observer that public infrastructure is very different in different countries. How does public infrastructure affect private sector inventory levels? I develop as a...

Sebastian de la Fuente is the sixth largest supermarket chain in the Basque region of Spain. It has a novel dataset of 108,605 observations on 3,745 SKUs, collected for almost 2 1/2 years. I find the bullwhip effect in the data: at least 80% of the SKUs have a bigger variance in supplies than...

How different are retailers' inventory levels around the world? Specifically, are retailers' inventories constant across countries, converging, or at least co-integrating? These might be viewed as various forms of global determinism. To see which of these forms hold, I use a novel dataset...

How important are local country conditions to firms' operations performance, as revealed in their inventory levels? Under a “flat world” hypothesis, differences in firms' inventory levels are explained more by differences among industries and firms themselves, rather than differences among...

We consider jointly replenishing n ex--ante identical firms that operate under an EOQ like setting using a non-cooperative game under asymmetric information. In this game, each firm, upon being privately informed about its demand rate (or inventory cost rate), submits a private contribution to...

An approximation for the fill rate, i.e. the percentage of demand being delivered from inventory on hand immediately, is derived for items in a periodic review inventory control system with lost sales. We assume demand is stochastic and discrete, lead times are positive and replenishments are...

The basic financial purpose of a firm is to maximize its value. An inventory management system should also contribute to the realization of this basic aim. Many current asset management models found in financial management literature were constructed with the assumption of book profit...