Explaining Union Organising During Corporate Mergers

With the emergence of transnational corporations and the resulting internationalisation of union co-determination, unions are found to organise themselves ineffectively in order to deal with this development. This paper attempts to offer a preliminary explanation as to why unions organise themselves in any given way during corporate mergers. A major literature review as well as an in depth case study constitute the basis for the explanation provided in this paper. Our literature study identify five major ideals of union organising, shaping the ways in which unions organise themselves in order to maintain legitimacy. Our in depth case study reveal how these ideals come into play in practice and how actors in a union organising process (re)produce these ideals in resolving issues regarding organisational identity and governance. We integrate our findings in presenting a conceptual model of union organising within transnational corporations, highlighting the diverse interrelationship between ideals as well as between ideals and actors.Union; transnational corporation; industrial relations; co-determination; corporate democracy

Market Access Strategies in the EU Banking Sector - Obstacles and Benefits towards an integrated European Retail Market

The integration process in the European banking sector considerably differs with regard to product types. Deep integration can be observed in the money market as well as the market for wholesale products. In contrast to that, a strong segmentation of national markets still exists in the field of retail products. In this context, the paper analyses market access strategies of European banks. The analysis is based both on aggregate sectoral data and on four company case studies (BSCH, Nordea Group, BNP Paribas and HSBC). It is explored to which extent different market access strategies contribute to the integration of the European retail markets. A clear result is that mergers and acquisition as well as cooperations and strategic alliances form the most important market access strategies. Direct cross-border sales and the establishment of branches and subsidiaries are of minor importance. All strategies are complicated by considerable natural and politically induced barriers to market access. In particular, such politically induced barriers are different national supervision of banks, different tax legislation, as well as national accounting and take-over principles. Here, further harmonizations are suited to accelerate the integration of European retail markets and thus to increase consumer benefits by lower prices and a higher product variety for financial services.European integration; cross-border banking; mergers and acquisitions

The Impact of News Releases on Trade Durations in Stocks -Empirical Evidence from Sweden

This paper studies the impact of news announcements on trade durations in stocks on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The news are categorized into four groups and the impact on the time between transactions is studied. Times before, during and after the news release are considered. Econometrically, the impact is studied within an autoregressive conditional duration model using intradaily data for six stocks.The empirical results reveal that news reduces the duration lengths before, during and after news releases as expected by the theoretical litterature on durations and information flow.Finance; transaction data; intraday; market microstructure; ACD

Extreme-Value Characteristics in Daily Time Series of Swedish Stock Returns

The paper studies Swedish stock series using extreme-value theoretical approaches. In a univariate setting support is found for the Fréchet family of distributions for minima and maxima. Pairs of return series are found to be asymptotically independent throughout. The results render support for joint modelling based on flexible moment specifications or, e.g., copulas.Value-at-Risk; minimum/maximum return; crossing

Regional perspectives on office service accessibility in Finnish banking markets: are there differences in service accessibility between the regions?

In Finland there was huge reduction in number of bank branches during the 1990?s which seems to be stabilized during last few years and even some new bank branches has been founded. In this paper I analyze the locations of bank branches in Finland by using municipality level data containing both economic and geographic variables. At first I analyze banks? entry/exit by the area-basis. Then the concentration in analysis moves to branch network strategies of bank groups, i.e. what is the typical office network strategy of centrally managed bank groups and how bank groups with decentralized decision-making differ from that, and what are the geographic core market areas of the bank groups. At last the differences in bank office service availability between Finnish provinces is analyzed in the light of previous results. Data used in analysis is panel containing bank branch numbers for each bank group in municipality, and population, geographic and economic features of municipalities in years 1995, 1997, 1999 and 2001.

The lender of last resort in the european single financial market

The paper examines challenges in effectively implementing the lender-of-last-resort function in the EU single financial market. Briefly highlighted are features of the EU financial landscape that could increase EU systemic financial risk. Briefly described are the complexities of the EU’s financial-stability architecture for preventing and resolving financial problems, including lender-of-last-resort operations. The paper examines how the lender-of-last-resort function might materialize during a systemic financial disturbance affecting more than one EU Member State. The paper identifies challenges and possible ways of enhancing the effectiveness of the existing architecture

Regional differences in bank office service accessibility: an entry approach

Structural changes in retail banking markets and development of remote access technologies have reduced the number of bank branches in many developed countries. That makes close-downs of bank branches and service accessibility in rural/peripheral regions interesting topics of public discussion. This paper uses an empirical entry approach in order to analyze whether the peripheral regions have suffered from the development branch networks in general, or are some specific regions faced more closedowns that one can expect? The analysis shows that there are some differences between the regions in accessibility of the services measured both by the number of bank groups and number of branches located in the municipality. Commutation directed to the municipality increased the accessibility as well as the increase in average taxable income. These characteristics are typically related to the local centers but also the administrative city-status had additional positive effect. When it comes to the development of accessibility, the analysis shows no differences between the regions.banking, accessibility, regional differences, technological development, concentration

Bank Networks from Text: Interrelations, Centrality and Determinants

In the wake of the still ongoing global financial crisis, bank interdependencies have come into focus in trying to assess linkages among banks and systemic risk. To date, such analysis has largely been based on numerical data. By contrast, this study attempts to gain further insight into bank interconnections by tapping into financial discourse. We present a text-to-network process, which has its basis in co-occurrences of bank names and can be analyzed quantitatively and visualized. To quantify bank importance, we propose an information centrality measure to rank and assess trends of bank centrality in discussion. For qualitative assessment of bank networks, we put forward a visual, interactive interface for better illustrating network structures. We illustrate the text-based approach on European Large and Complex Banking Groups (LCBGs) during the ongoing financial crisis by quantifying bank interrelations and centrality from discussion in 3M news articles, spanning 2007Q1 to 2014Q3.Comment: Quantitative Finance, forthcoming in 201

Ethical vs. Non-Ethical – Is There a Difference? Analyzing Performance of Ethical and Non-Ethical Investment Funds

Ethical investments have become increasingly popular over the past years. Ethical funds restrict their investment based on environmental, social and/or ethical criteria. Prior research on the performance of ethical versus non-ethical funds yields mixed results. This paper investigates the differences in risk profiles and realized returns between ethical and non-ethical funds. A sample of 23 ethical funds and 152 non-ethical funds covering the time period between 2000 and 2007 is investigated. The analysis of the portfolio composition shows that there are small differences in the structure of portfolios concerning industry composition and company size. However, the ethical funds tend to hold more stocks in their portfolios than non-ethical ones. The results provide some evidence on the underperformance of ethical funds; this underperformance is stronger in years of poor stock market performance, which indicates that systematic risk of ethical funds may be higher.ethical, social responsible investment, SRI, investment, funds, portfolio, returns, risk, screening, Sweden