At Last the Internationalization of Retail Banking? The Case of the Spanish Banks in Latin America

Since 1995 two Spanish banks -- Banco Santander Central Hispano and Banco Bilbao Vizcaya -- have become the largest foreign banks in retail banking in Latin America. This recent development merits careful analysis because foreign direct investment is rare in retail banking. We find that the Spanish banks are exhibiting asset-seeking, asset-exploiting, and oligopolistic behaviors, thus posing no serious challenge to established theories of foreign investment. We discuss the implications for research on cross-border banking.

Rapid internationalization and long-term performance: The knowledge link

Drawing on the knowledge-based view and organizational learning theory, we develop and test a set of hypotheses to provide a first attempt at analyzing the effect of speed of internationalization on long-term performance. Using a panel-data sample of Spanish listed firms (1986-2010), we find that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between speed of internationalization and long-term performance. We also find that whereas technological knowledge steepens this relationship, the diversity of prior international experience flattens it. Our results contribute to the existing IB literature on the performance of FDI, cross-country knowledge transferability, and nonsequential entry

Bit-interleaved coded modulation in the wideband regime

The wideband regime of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) in Gaussian channels is studied. The Taylor expansion of the coded modulation capacity for generic signal constellations at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is derived and used to determine the corresponding expansion for the BICM capacity. Simple formulas for the minimum energy per bit and the wideband slope are given. BICM is found to be suboptimal in the sense that its minimum energy per bit can be larger than the corresponding value for coded modulation schemes. The minimum energy per bit using standard Gray mapping on M-PAM or M^2-QAM is given by a simple formula and shown to approach -0.34 dB as M increases. Using the low SNR expansion, a general trade-off between power and bandwidth in the wideband regime is used to show how a power loss can be traded off against a bandwidth gain.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation Revisited: A Mismatched Decoding Perspective

We revisit the information-theoretic analysis of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) by modeling the BICM decoder as a mismatched decoder. The mismatched decoding model is well-defined for finite, yet arbitrary, block lengths, and naturally captures the channel memory among the bits belonging to the same symbol. We give two independent proofs of the achievability of the BICM capacity calculated by Caire et al. where BICM was modeled as a set of independent parallel binary-input channels whose output is the bitwise log-likelihood ratio. Our first achievability proof uses typical sequences, and shows that due to the random coding construction, the interleaver is not required. The second proof is based on the random coding error exponents with mismatched decoding, where the largest achievable rate is the generalized mutual information. We show that the generalized mutual information of the mismatched decoder coincides with the infinite-interleaver BICM capacity. We also show that the error exponent -and hence the cutoff rate- of the BICM mismatched decoder is upper bounded by that of coded modulation and may thus be lower than in the infinite-interleaved model. We also consider the mutual information appearing in the analysis of iterative decoding of BICM with EXIT charts. We show that the corresponding symbol metric has knowledge of the transmitted symbol and the EXIT mutual information admits a representation as a pseudo-generalized mutual information, which is in general not achievable. A different symbol decoding metric, for which the extrinsic side information refers to the hypothesized symbol, induces a generalized mutual information lower than the coded modulation capacity.Comment: submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Conference version in 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, Toronto, Canada, July 200

Europe, Spain, and the Future of Spanish Multinational Firms

The last fifteen years or so have witnessed a major transformation of Spanish businesses. After decades of protectionism and isolation, virtually all of them are now exposed to the winds of international competition; nearly a thousand have invested abroad in order to exploit the opportunities inherent in operating across borders. As a result, Spain has become one of the ten largest foreign direct investors in the world, with key consequences for the country\u27s economy, financial system, diplomacy, image and society, as well as for Europe

Analysis of a chemo-repulsion model with nonlinear production: The continuous problem and unconditionally energy stable fully discrete schemes

We consider the following repulsive-productive chemotaxis model: Let $p\in (1,2)$, find $u \geq 0$, the cell density, and $v \geq 0$, the chemical concentration, satisfying \begin{equation}\label{C5:Am} \left\{ \begin{array} [c]{lll} \partial_t u - \Delta u - \nabla\cdot (u\nabla v)=0 \ \ \mbox{in}\ \Omega,\ t>0,\\ \partial_t v - \Delta v + v = u^p \ \ \mbox{in}\ \Omega,\ t>0, \end{array} \right. \end{equation} in a bounded domain $\Omega\subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$, $d=2,3$. By using a regularization technique, we prove the existence of solutions of this problem. Moreover, we propose three fully discrete Finite Element (FE) nonlinear approximations, where the first one is defined in the variables $(u,v)$, and the second and third ones by introducing ${\boldsymbol\sigma}=\nabla v$ as an auxiliary variable. We prove some unconditional properties such as mass-conservation, energy-stability and solvability of the schemes. Finally, we compare the behavior of the schemes throughout several numerical simulations and give some conclusions.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1807.0111