Demographic market segmentation on short banking movement descriptions applying Natural Language Processing

Xunta de Galicia | Ref. GRC2018/05

Choosing lobbying sides : the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union

Despite the impressive amount of empirical research on lobbying, a fundamental question remains overlooked. How do interest groups choose to lobby different sides of an issue? We argue that how groups choose sides is a function of firm-level economic activity. By studying a highly salient regulatory issue, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, and using a novel dataset of lobbying, we reveal that a group’s main economic sector matters most. Firms operating in finance and retail face unique costs and are incentivized to lobby against the GDPR. However, these groups are outgunned by a large, heterogeneous group of firms with superior lobbying firepower on the other side of the issue

From Government to Regulatory Governance: Privatization and the Residual Role of the State

This paper reviews the state of thinking on the governance role of public ownership and control. We argue that the transfer of operational control over productive assets to the private sector represents the most desirable governance, due to the inherent difficulty for citizens to constrain political abuse relative to the ability of governments to regulate private activity. However in weak institutional environments the process needs to be structured so as to avoid capture of the regulatory process. The speed of transfer should be timed on the progress in developing a strong regulatory governance system, to which certain residual rights of intervention must be vested. After all, what are “institutions” if not governance mechanisms with some degree of autonomy from both political and private interests? The gradual creation of institutions partially autonomous from political power must become central to the development of an optimal mode of regulatory governance. We advance some suggestions about creating accountability in regulatory governance, in particular creating an internal control system based on a rotating board representative of users, producers and civil society, to be elected by a process involving frequent reporting and disclosure.Regulatory Governance, Privatization

States, Markets, the Finance Lobby and the European Union Savings Tax Directive

Only abstract. Paper copies of master’s theses are listed in the Helka database (http://www.helsinki.fi/helka). Electronic copies of master’s theses are either available as open access or only on thesis terminals in the Helsinki University Library.Vain tiivistelmä. Sidottujen gradujen saatavuuden voit tarkistaa Helka-tietokannasta (http://www.helsinki.fi/helka). Digitaaliset gradut voivat olla luettavissa avoimesti verkossa tai rajoitetusti kirjaston opinnäytekioskeilla.Endast sammandrag. Inbundna avhandlingar kan sökas i Helka-databasen (http://www.helsinki.fi/helka). Elektroniska kopior av avhandlingar finns antingen öppet på nätet eller endast tillgängliga i bibliotekets avhandlingsterminaler.The thesis analyses, from an international policy perspective, the negotiations and lobbying to achieve the European Union Savings tax Directive. The theoretical approach is mainly based on professor Susan Strange"s doctrinal framework of the four structures of power. Some of the primary documents from and a number of newspaper reports on the negotiations have functioned as the main sources for the research. The analysis is concentrated on structural factors that on one hand have facilitated and on the other hand constrained the negotiation process. These are described on three different analytical levels - the world systemic, the inter- and transnational and the national. Special and equal emphasis is put on the analysis of states and international organizations, as well as market forces and private actors. The thesis argues that the juxtapositions of the negotiations originate primarily in historical factors and the different market conditions of the national financial industry. The disparities are most noticeable between high-tax industrialized countries and tax havens. But countries like Belgium, UK and USA have also slowed down the process by taking principled positions in certain matters. One of the most important conclusions of the thesis is that agreement on the directive was finally achieved because perseverant positions were discarded in favour of relevant transfers of resources for security, production, finance and knowledge justifiable to all parties. The necessary compromises have tended to limit equality between the parties and to accentuate the structurally strong position of the richest. Smaller investors suffer from more negative effects of the directive than big ones and some of the strongest financial centres - London, New York and Switzerland - have seen the claws of EU miss the target

In Portfolio: Market attachments, money and capital in private wealth management

Unequivocally tied to the protection and accumulation of private fortunes over time, the wealth management industry has mostly been portrayed in media and academic accounts in terms of exotic practices taking place in unreachable, offshore worlds. This thesis seeks to explore this sector of finance as a market that targets and serves the super-rich and as a key site where capital is reproduced, but by attending to the more ordinary practices, procedures and experiences typically obscured in those accounts. More precisely, this is a market that seeks to capture and retain private wealth in the form of a portfolio of financial market products. Doing so, as a tradition of research on marketization has shown, involves multiple processes whereby suppliers and their products/services adapt and co-evolve with clients and their worlds. Through a range of qualitative and ethnographic methods and materials collected across different wealth management contexts (i.e. Lisbon, London, Geneva and Zurich), the aim is to account for those adaptations and attachments as pragmatic, situated lived experience that demands forms of cognitive and calculative engagement but always exceed it in significant ways. Namely, this is a market for financial products and services that clients become attached to by seeing them as adequate ways of holding and growing money. In this sense, this thesis is also about money – and how modes of qualifying products/services for holding and growing money reveal something constitutive of what money is that unsettles dominant theories. A market that is all about the money reveals – performs - money not as a means for lubricating exchange, but as the embodiment of a nexus between value and future. Thus, accounting for the ways in which private wealth becomes attached in the financial portfolio, and animated by the ‘spirit’ of money, is ultimately a story about capital - how it is provoked, accomplished and demonstrated in and through the financial portfolio but also a variety of other services, and how its mark is inscribed in lifeworlds attached thereby

Anti-Terrorist Finance in the United Kingdom and United States

This article adopts a two-tiered approach: it provides a detailed, historical account of anti-terrorist finance initiatives in the United Kingdom and United States—two states driving global norms in this area. It then proceeds to a critique of these laws. The analysis assumes—and accepts—the goals of the two states in adopting these provisions. It questions how well the measures achieve their aim. Specifically, it highlights how the transfer of money laundering tools undermines the effectiveness of the states\u27 counterterrorist efforts—flooding the systems with suspicious activity reports, driving money out of the regulated sector, and using inappropriate metrics to gauge success. This article recognizes that both states consider the fight against terrorism to be partly military but also a matter of bringing certain democratic principles to bear. Critics have been quick to condemn some of the measures for their encroachments into civil liberties. My goal is not to measure the success of the laws according to any particular ideology but rather, accepting the governments\u27 democracy-promoting goals, and the role these play in generating domestic and international support, to clarify which components do not appear to serve the states\u27 aims

A Regional Innovation Impact Assessment Framework for universities

This report provides a framework to assess the impact of universities on their regional innovation ecosystem. The policy context for this work is provided by: a) the Renewed EU agenda for higher education which argued that universities do not attain their full potential; and b) the report by the High Level Group chaired by Pascal Lamy which called for an additional funding stream to support universities to modernise and increase their innovation impact. This report explores what the assessment framework underpinning such an innovation performance based funding instrument could look like. However, it acknowledges that the final form of such a framework would heavily depend on the regional, national or EU level instrument through which it is implemented. The report proposes a system in which universities draft a case study supported by indicators, through which they present evidence of their contribution to regional innovation. It identifies four impact categories and identifies a list of associated indicators. In this "narrative with numbers the universities can both explain how they reach this impact and contextualise their performance with reference to the development level of their region.JRC.B.7-Knowledge for Finance, Innovation and Growt

Privatisation Methods and Economic Growth in Transition Economies

We investigate the impact of differences in privatisation method on national economic performance in transition economies. Our approach is to estimate, using dynamic panel data methods, a growth equation over 23 countries for the period 1990-2001. Among our results, we find that mass privatisation has significant positive effect on growth across a wide variety of definitions and specifications. This result holds with particular force after 1995, i.e., once the period of early transition and recession was over. Our analysis suggests that an advantage of mass privatisation was that it led spontaneously to development of the capital market, which is significantly correlated with economic growth.Privatization, Method, Economic Growth, Transition