Automated longwall guidance and control vertical control subsystem, volume 2

Software documentation and a computer program listing for a horizon control of a longwall shearer are presented

Tail risk and systemic risk of US and Eurozone financial institutions in the wake of the global financial crisis

We evaluate multiple market-based measures for US and eurozone individual bank tail risk and bank systemic risk. We apply statistical extreme value analysis to the tails of bank equity capital losses to estimate the likelihood of individual institutions' financial distress as well as individual banks' exposure to each other (“spillover risk”) and to global shocks (“extreme” systematic risk). The estimation procedure presupposes that bank equity returns are “heavy tailed” and “tail dependent” as identifying assumption. Using both US and eurozone banks allows one to make a cross-Atlantic comparison of tail risks and systemic stability. We also assess to what extent magnitudes of tail risk and systemic risk have been altered by the global financial crisis. The results suggest that both tail risk and systemic risk in the US are higher than in the eurozone regardless of the considered sample period

The impact of corporate social responsibility disclosure on financial performance : evidence from the GCC Islamic banking sector.

This paper examines the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and financial performance for Islamic banks in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region over the period 2000–2014 by generating CSR-related data through disclosure analysis of the annual reports of the sampled banks. The findings of this study indicate that there is a significant positive relationship between CSR disclosure and the financial performance of Islamic banks in the GCC countries. The results also show a positive relationship between CSR disclosure and the future financial performance of GCC Islamic banks, potentially indicating that current CSR activities carried out by Islamic banks in the GCC could have a long-term impact on their financial performance. Furthermore, despite demonstrating a significant positive relationship between the composite measure of the CSR disclosure index and financial performance, the findings show no statistically significant relationship between the individual dimensions of the CSR disclosure index and the current financial performance measure except for ‘mission and vision’ and ‘products and services’. Similarly, the empirical results detect a positive significant association only between ‘mission and vision’ dimension and future financial performance of the examined banks

The 'Risk-Adjusted' Price-Concentration Relationship in Banking

Price-concentration studies in banking typically find a significant and negative relationship between consumer deposit rates (i.e., prices) and market concentration. This relationship implies that highly concentrated banking markets are "bad" for depositors. It also provides support for the Structure-Conduct-Performance hypothesis and rejects the Efficient-Structure hypothesis. However, these studies have focused almost exclusively on supply-side control variables and have neglected demand-side variables when estimating the reduced form price-concentration relationship. For example, previous studies have not included in their analysis bank-specific risk variables as measures of cross-sectional derived deposit demand. The authors find that when bank-specific risk variables are included in the analysis the magnitude of the relationship between deposit rates and market concentration decreases by over 50 percent. They offer an explanation for these results based on the correlation between a bank’s risk profile and the structure of the market in which it operates. These results suggest that it may be necessary to reconsider the well-established assumption that higher market concentration necessarily leads to anticompetitive deposit pricing behavior by commercial banks. This finding has direct implications for the antitrust evaluations of bank merger and acquisition proposals by regulatory agencies. And, in a more general sense, these results suggest that any Structure-Conduct-Performance-based study that does not explicitly consider the possibility of very different risk profiles of the firms analyzed may indeed miss a very important set of explanatory variables. And, thus, the results from those studies may be spurious

Accounting: A General Commentary on an Empirical Science

Many researchers have questioned the view of accounting as a science. Some maintain that it is a service activity rather than a science, yet others entertain the view that it is an art or merely a technology. While it is true that accounting provides a service and is a technology (a methodology for recording and reporting), that fact does not prevent accounting from being a science. Based upon the structure and knowledge base of the discipline, this paper presents the case for accounting as an empirical science