Regulating Complexity in Financial Markets

As the financial crisis has tragically illustrated, the complexities of modern financial markets and investment securities can trigger systemic market failures. Addressing these complexities, this Article maintains, is perhaps the greatest financial-market challenge of the future. The Article first examines and explains the nature of these complexities. It then analyzes the regulatory and other steps that should be considered to reduce the potential for failure. Because complex financial markets resemble complex engineering systems, and failures in those markets have characteristics of failures in those systems, the Article‟s analysis draws on chaos theory and other approaches used to analyze complex engineering systems

Impact of European Data Protection Reform on direct marketing

This study explored the influence of the legislation adopted under the EU Data Protection Reform on the direct marketing. Since the introduction of the previous data protection legislation, the amount of data collected, processed and stored has grown exponentially, resulting in the increased risk to the data security of an individual. Thereby, introduction of new rules is a necessity in order to achieve proper execution of data subject’s rights in the digital age and create efficient and simplified rules for the companies to apply. Direct marketing is based on the actions connected to personal information – data is gathered via cookies, stored for the purposes of communication and analyzed in order to provide targeted advertising. Thus, it is necessary for companies and especially direct marketers to understand the provisions of the enforced and upcoming legislation and adjust their marketing strategies and overall company structure to them in order to achieve compliance

Private Equity\u27s Governance Advantage: A Requiem

Private equity’s original purpose was to optimize companies’ governance and operations. Reuniting ownership and control in corporate America, the leveraged buyout (or the mere threat thereof) undoubtedly helped reform management practices in a broad swath of U.S. companies. Due to mounting competitive pressures, however, private equity is finding relatively fewer underperforming companies to fix. This is particularly true of U.S. public companies, which are continuously dogged by activist hedge funds and other empowered shareholders looking for any sign of slack. In response, private equity is shifting its center of gravity away from governance reform, towards a dizzying array of new tactics and new asset classes. Large private equity firms now simultaneously run leveraged buyout funds, credit funds, real estate funds, alternative investments funds, and even hedge funds. The difficulty is that some of the new money-making strategies are less likely to be value increasing than governance and operational improvements. Moreover, they introduce conflicts of interest and complexities that alter private equity’s role in corporate governance. Private equity’s governance advantage has always been to ensure that companies are the servant of only one master. Yet today the master itself may have divided loyalties and attention. With few gains left to be had from governance reforms, private equity is quietly distancing itself from the corporate governance revolution that it helped bring about

A Simplified Energy Management System Towards Increased Energy Efficiency in SMEs

  Swedish companies have since 2003 been able to get certified by an energy management system (EEMS) and companies that have been certified, can now show savings in energy use. The downside of today's EEMs is that too few small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have chosen to certify such a system in the organization. To increase awareness and interest among SMEs, a simplified version of the EEMS would be desirable. This article presents a simplified EEMs for SMEs developed from the original European standard (SSEN 16 001). The article describes how the simple EEMS was developed and how the system was validated, i.e. how different companies responded to test-runs of the developed simplified EEMS. By testing the simplified EEMS in practice among various SMEs, different needs from the industry have been documented. The requests that were of greatest importance was how different incentives can be designed to increase the certification level, e.g. tax exemptions etc. The Swedish LTA for energy-intensive industries includes tax exemptions, as well as the certification of the European EEMS standard, and has shown to lead to large energy savings. An examples of a future energy policy could thus be a Long-Term Agreement (LTA)s program for SMEs including the simplified EEMS