18,787 research outputs found
Universal banks and relationships with firms : [Version Mai 2003]
Some of the most widely expressed myths about the German financial system are concerned with the close ties and intensive interaction between banks and firms, often described as Hausbank relationships. Links between banks and firms include direct shareholdings, board representation, and proxy voting and are particularly significant for corporate governance. Allegedly, these relationships promote investment and improve the performance of firms. Furthermore, German universal banks are believed to play a special role as large and informed monitoring investors (shareholders). However, for the very same reasons, German universal banks are frequently accused of abusing their influence on firms by exploiting rents and sustaining the entrenchment of firms against efficient transfers of firm control. In this paper, we review recent empirical evidence regarding the special role of banks for the corporate governance of German firms. We differentiate between large exchangelisted firms and small and medium sized companies throughout. With respect to the role of banks as monitoring investors, the evidence does not unanimously support a special role of banks for large firms. Only one study finds that banks´ control of management goes beyond what nonbank shareholders achieve. Proxyvoting rights apparently do not provide a significant means for banks to exert management control. Most of the recent evidence regarding small firms suggests that a Hausbank relationship can indeed be beneficial. Hausbanks are more willing to sustain financing when borrower quality deteriorates, and they invest more often than arm´s length banks in workouts if borrowers face financial distress
Geo-Spotting: Mining Online Location-based Services for Optimal Retail Store Placement
The problem of identifying the optimal location for a new retail store has
been the focus of past research, especially in the field of land economy, due
to its importance in the success of a business. Traditional approaches to the
problem have factored in demographics, revenue and aggregated human flow
statistics from nearby or remote areas. However, the acquisition of relevant
data is usually expensive. With the growth of location-based social networks,
fine grained data describing user mobility and popularity of places has
recently become attainable.
In this paper we study the predictive power of various machine learning
features on the popularity of retail stores in the city through the use of a
dataset collected from Foursquare in New York. The features we mine are based
on two general signals: geographic, where features are formulated according to
the types and density of nearby places, and user mobility, which includes
transitions between venues or the incoming flow of mobile users from distant
areas. Our evaluation suggests that the best performing features are common
across the three different commercial chains considered in the analysis,
although variations may exist too, as explained by heterogeneities in the way
retail facilities attract users. We also show that performance improves
significantly when combining multiple features in supervised learning
algorithms, suggesting that the retail success of a business may depend on
multiple factors.Comment: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on
Knowledge discovery and data mining, Chicago, 2013, Pages 793-80
End-to-End Feasible Optimization Proxies for Large-Scale Economic Dispatch
The paper proposes a novel End-to-End Learning and Repair (E2ELR)
architecture for training optimization proxies for economic dispatch problems.
E2ELR combines deep neural networks with closed-form, differentiable repair
layers, thereby integrating learning and feasibility in an end-to-end fashion.
E2ELR is also trained with self-supervised learning, removing the need for
labeled data and the solving of numerous optimization problems offline. E2ELR
is evaluated on industry-size power grids with tens of thousands of buses using
an economic dispatch that co-optimizes energy and reserves. The results
demonstrate that the self-supervised E2ELR achieves state-of-the-art
performance, with optimality gaps that outperform other baselines by at least
an order of magnitude
Universal Banks and Relationships with Firms
Some of the most widely expressed myths about the German financial system are concerned with the close ties and intensive interaction between banks and firms, often described as Hausbank relationships. Links between banks and firms include direct shareholdings, board representation, and proxy voting and are particularly significant for corporate governance. Allegedly, these relationships promote investment and improve the performance of firms. Furthermore, German universal banks are believed to play a special role as large and informed monitoring investors (shareholders). However, for the very same reasons, German universal banks are frequently accused of abusing their influence on firms by exploiting rents and sustaining the entrenchment of firms against efficient transfers of firm control. In this paper, we review recent empirical evidence regarding the special role of banks for the corporate governance of German firms. We differentiate between large exchange-listed firms and small and medium sized companies throughout. With respect to the role of banks as monitoring investors, the evidence does not unanimously support a special role of banks for large firms. Only one study finds that banks’ control of management goes beyond what non-bank shareholders achieve. Proxy-voting rights apparently do not provide a significant means for banks to exert management control. Most of the recent evidence regarding small firms suggests that a Hausbank relationship can indeed be beneficial. Hausbanks are more willing to sustain financing when borrower quality deteriorates, and they invest more often than arm’s-length banks in workouts if borrowers face financial distress.relationship lending, Hausbank, universal banking, corporate finance, corporate governance
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