Differences between bank employees' perceptions towards implications of electronic banking in Greece

This paper aims to identify both the Greek branch and the central division employees' perceptions towards implications of electronic banking adoption and explore whether there are any differences between them. To this end, based on 14 potential implications recognised in the literature review, a questionnaire was designed and completed by 613 bank employees. The analysis showed that perceptions vary in relation to respondents' working position. Additionally, there are indications that the identified differences are greater if they are linked with the respondents' working experience and educational qualifications, as well as the size of the financial institution. In conclusion, the paper discusses the strategic implications of the findings.     

Pensions and poverty traps: Is saving worthwhile for women?

Present policy means that a private pension, unless it is substantial, may fail to bring financial gain in retirement due to means testing: the pensions poverty trap. This paper examines women's acquisition of private (occupational and personal) pensions and their risk of facing this trap. Because of the loosening link between marriage and motherhood, previous patterns of pension advantage according to marital status are shifting. The employment and pension impact of motherhood varies with socio-economic status but the pension prospects of the majority of women are poor. It is concluded that women's need for financial advice to avoid the pensions poverty trap is greater than men's. An improved basic pension, indexed to national income, would reduce the risk of mis-selling and restore confidence that saving for a pension is worthwhile.     

Thought leadership in investment banking: The beginning of a new era

The paper argues that although considerations such as industry consolidation, the role of lending and the effects of technology are still important in shaping the future of investment banking, sustainable competitive advantage necessitates that emphasis is also placed on thought leadership. This entails quite a radical change in terms of the way in which the industry approaches the problem of competition and requires emphasis on value creation for all the constituent parts of the industry: corporations, investors, the banks themselves and research departments. Accordingly, the paper provides a rationale for this change and provides inter alia a range of examples to illustrate how thought leadership could lead to a fundamental change in the future of the investment banking industry.     

A play-the-winner-type urn design with reduced variability

We propose a new adaptive allocation rule, the drop-the-loser, that randomizes subjects in the course of a trial comparing treatments with dichotomous outcomes. The rule tends to assign more patients to better treatments with the same limiting proportion as the randomized play-the-winner rule. The new design has significantly less variable allocation proportion than the randomized play-the-winner rule. Decrease in variability translates into a gain in statistical power. For some values of success probabilities the drop-the-loser rule has a double advantage over conventional equal allocation in that it has better power and assigns more subjects to the better treatment. Acknowledgments. I thank Stephen Durham, the associate editor, and the referees for their helpful suggestions.     

Predicting Household Poverty: A Methodological Note with a Kenyan Example

Household surveys provide data that is used for identifying and measuring the poverty status of households and individuals. However, carrying out such surveys is expensive, especially in poor developing countries. Thus it is important to make maximum use of the available survey data in developing countries, especially in sub‐Saharan Africa, where such data are expensive to collect and analyse. This paper develops a simple method for using poverty indices derived from survey data for a given year, to predict poverty rates for subsequent periods without having to conduct a new household survey. We illustrate the workings of the method with data from Kenyan household surveys for 1994 and 1997.     

The Local Whittle Estimator of Long-Memory Stochastic Volatility

We propose a new semiparametric estimator of the degree of persistencein volatility for long memory stochastic volatility (LMSV) models.The estimator uses the periodogram of the log squared returnsin a local Whittle criterion which explicitly accounts for thenoise term in the LMSV model. Finite-sample and asymptotic standarderrors for the estimator are provided. An extensive simulationstudy reveals that the local Whittle estimator is much lessbiased and that the finite-sample standard errors yield moreaccurate confidence intervals than the widely-used GPH estimator.The estimator is also found to be robust against possible leverageeffects. In an empirical analysis of the daily Deutsche Mark/USDollar exchange rate, the new estimator indicates stronger persistencein volatility than the GPH estimator, provided that a largenumber of frequencies is used.