Does state ownership of banks matter?

This article examines the effects of state ownership and government interventions on lending behaviour and capitalisation of banks over the period 2005–2011. Using data from the highly state-influenced Russian banking sector, it is documented that the relationship between state ownership and lending is nonlinear. While overall loan growth decreased and interest rates rose, it was found that fully state-controlled banks increased lending and charged lower interest rates during the crisis of 2008–2010. Moreover, fully state-owned and state-supported banks demonstrated counter-cyclical lending behaviour during the crisis. However, while state-owned banks were better protected against asset default, there is weak evidence to suggest that government interventions may result in increased riskiness of banks.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Diversity of the Cyanoprokaryota in polar deserts of Innvika cove North-East Land (Nordaustlandet) Island, Spitsbergen

The study of polar deserts cyanoprokaryotes up to now is few. Foremost this is connected with difficulty visiting of the area. The paper presents the results of a study of сyanoprokaryota on the southern coast of Innvika cove (Fotherbyfjorden bay, North-East Land Island, Spitsbergen archipelago). A total of 74 taxa were observed in various habitats of investigated area. Nine species are reported for the first time for Spitsbergen flora. Gloeocapsopsis magma (20 observations), Nostoc commune (19), Microcoleus autumnalis (17) were the most common species in the investigated samples. The most number of species (42) was found on wet rocks. The similarity Sorensen index between wet rock species, seepage species and pools species is very high. It can mean that for many species the only necessary preference in habitat is a rock substrate and wetting. Most similar are the flora of the Innvika area and flora of the west part of Oscar II Land (61%)

Essays on debt financing, firm performance, and banking in emerging markets

fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Does the choice between bank loans and bonds affect firm performance? Evidence from the Russian Federation.

This study aims to examine the relationship between the choice of debt sources and firm performance. The financial data for the sample of 100 companies that are listed on the Russian stock exchanges was manually gathered and examined for the period from the 1st of January of 2004 until the 31st of December 2007. Cross-sectional analysis of the gathered data showed that debt structure affects firm value. Thus firms with public debt perform better than firms with private debt based on the market measure of performance – Tobin’s q. Additional analysis showed that firms with previous public history outperform those that initially make public offerings and those which rely on private debt, while another finding suggests that firms with initial public debt offerings experiencing higher return on equity. Finally, the estimation of the effect of switching from private bank loans to publicly placed debt reveled that after such substitution firms became much more leveraged and showed sustainable growth. However, based on the market measure of performance there appeared to be that these companies experienced a decline in their performance.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Cyanoprokaryotes of the west part of Oscar II Land, West Spitsbergen Island, Spitsbergen archipelago

The present study provides new information about the diversity of freshwater and terrestrial cyanoprokaryotes of the western part of the Oscar II Land, Spitsbergen (Svalbard) archipelago. Altogether, and 51 taxa were found in different habitats (29 species was found on wet rocks, 21 on the seepages, 18 on the lakes, 11 on the moss tundra), mainly in wet ones. Nostoc commune, Gloeocapsa kuetzingiana, Microcoleus autumnalis, and Microcoleus vaginatus dominated almost all types of habitats. Aphanocapsa rivularis and Woronichinia karelica are reported for the first time for Spitsbergen flora. The studied flora is most similar to the flora of the vicinity of settlement Pyramiden. Since all these areas are dominated by carbonate rocks, it can assume that this might be due to the similarity of the geological conditions. In general, the cyanobacterial (cyanoprokaryotes) flora of western part of the Oscar II Land includes widespread, frequent and typical Spitsbergen species

Algorithms and data structures for matrix-free finite element operators with MPI-parallel sparse multi-vectors

Traditional solution approaches for problems in quantum mechanics scale as $\mathcal O(M^3)$, where $M$ is the number of electrons. Various methods have been proposed to address this issue and obtain linear scaling $\mathcal O(M)$. One promising formulation is the direct minimization of energy. Such methods take advantage of physical localization of the solution, namely that the solution can be sought in terms of non-orthogonal orbitals with local support. In this work a numerically efficient implementation of sparse parallel vectors within the open-source finite element library deal.II is proposed. The main algorithmic ingredient is the matrix-free evaluation of the Hamiltonian operator by cell-wise quadrature. Based on an a-priori chosen support for each vector we develop algorithms and data structures to perform (i) matrix-free sparse matrix multivector products (SpMM), (ii) the projection of an operator onto a sparse sub-space (inner products), and (iii) post-multiplication of a sparse multivector with a square matrix. The node-level performance is analyzed using a roofline model. Our matrix-free implementation of finite element operators with sparse multivectors achieves the performance of 157 GFlop/s on Intel Cascade Lake architecture. Strong and weak scaling results are reported for a typical benchmark problem using quadratic and quartic finite element bases.Comment: 29 pages, 12 figure

Managing bank liquidity hoarding during uncertain times : The role of board gender diversity

This paper examines the effect of executive board gender diversity on the relationship between economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and bank liquidity hoarding (LH). We focus on the Russian banking sector, which, relative to most of the world, has a high share of women on bank executive boards. Using the news-based EPU index developed by Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016) and LH measures proposed by Berger, Guedhami, Kim, and Li (2022), we exploit a unique dataset from the Russian banking sector. While higher economic policy uncertainty tends to increase liquidity hoarding, we find that this effect diminishes as the gender diversity of the board increases. We attribute this finding to the moderating influence of gender diversity on stability and overreaction in decision-making. Additionally, we find that the channel through which board gender diversity affects the impact of economic policy uncertainty on liquidity hoarding takes place via the hoarding of liquid assets. Our findings are robust to the use of alternative measures for economic policy uncertainty and gender diversity and hold after addressing endogeneity concerns. As women are still significantly under-represented on bank boards in most countries, these results argue for policies to promote gender diversity on bank boards as a means of limiting the detrimental effects of economic policy uncertainty.© 2024 New York University Salomon Center. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Cyclicality of bank liquidity creation

This paper investigates the cyclicality of bank liquidity creation. Since liquidity creation is a major economic function of banks, their liquidity creation behavior may amplify business cycle fluctuations. Using the methodology of Berger and Bouwman (2009) to compute liquidity creation measures, we analyze the relation between GDP growth and liquidity creation of Russian banks from 2004 to 2015. Detailed quarterly data on a very large sample of banks and coexistence of different bank ownership types (state-owned, domestic private and foreign banks), makes Russia an ideal natural laboratory for study of cyclicality of liquidity creation for banks. We find that liquidity creation of banks is procyclical. We show that the liquidity creation behavior of state-owned banks and foreign-owned banks is similar to that of domestic private banks in terms of procyclicality. We further find that the magnitude of procyclicality is higher for liquidity creation than for lending. Thus, while ownership of banks does not influence the cyclicality of bank liquidity creation, liquidity creation behavior of banks can amplify business cycle fluctuations.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed