The effect of distribution channels on mutual fund flows

The Morningstar fund rating has been reported to affect mutual fund flows in the US markets. This paper finds that flow patterns in Finnish bank-managed funds are significantly different from the patterns in the US. Specifically, non-bank funds attract flows in a manner similar to the US markets, that is Morningstar ratings affect fund flows. In contrast, Finnish bank-managed funds do not exhibit the same relationship between star ratings and flows. The results suggest that in Finland, five-star Morningstar ratings are not regarded as highly as in the US, where good performance attracts significantly higher flows. More significantly, our findings demonstrate the importance of banks' distribution channels in the Finnish financial market.     

Wie man die Auswirkungen eines Gasembargos berechnen könnte

Wirtschaftsdienst - In this essay, I outline a method to compute the economic impact of a sudden stop of natural gas imports from Russia. First, I estimate the reduction in the short-run supply of...     

Businessmen and land ownership in the late nineteenth century

This article analyses the proportions of personal to real estate wealth for a group of 295 businessmen profiled in the Dictionary of business biography . It shows that businessmen who owned land on a large scale in the late nineteenth century were a comparatively small group who retained a small proportion of their total wealth in landed assets. Low levels of social mobility are identified as a function of land purchase, and new insights are given into the relationship between wealth, status, and land ownership. Any integration of business and landed wealth in this period was not a consequence of businessmen becoming landowners.     

Deconstruction of Inherent Goodwill Generated in Owner-Managed Companies in the Czech Republic

International Advances in Economic Research -     

Causal and Corrective Organisational Culture: A Systematic Review of Case Studies of Institutional Failure

Journal of Business Ethics - Organisational culture is assumed to be a key factor in large-scale and avoidable institutional failures (e.g. accidents, corruption). Whilst models such as...     

Did bank distress stifle innovation during the Great Depression?

We find a negative relationship between bank distress and the level, quality and trajectory of firm-level innovation during the Great Depression, particularly for R&D firms operating in capital intensive industries. However, we also show that because a sufficient number of R&D intensive firms were located in counties with lower levels of bank distress, or were operating in less capital intensive industries, the negative effects were mitigated in aggregate. Although Depression era bank distress was associated with the stifling of innovation, our results also help to explain why technological development was still robust following one of the largest shocks in the history of the U.S. banking system.     

Agricultural sustainability of small-scale farms in Lacluta,Timor Leste

Despite the trend of dwindling productivity, tribal people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) still practise shifting cultivation as a dominant hill farming system to support their livelihood. Drawing on an empirical study in Khagrachari district of the CHT, this research examined how far the production from present shifting cultivation supports the tribal people's livelihood and what alternative livelihood strategies they have adopted for subsistence by using data on input/output and income/expenditures, and analysing current government policies. The findings showed that productivity declined markedly, yields were almost equal to input values and farmers experienced food shortages for at least two to six months in a year. To make a living, farmers have adopted new occupations such as wage labour, animal husbandry, cultivation of annual monocrops and extraction and selling of forest products. Policy analysis indicates that previous policies were unable to reduce shifting cultivation intensity or improve tribal people's livelihoods or the region's forest resources. Reorientation of government policies, easy access to institutional support and the active participation of local people in development intervention are of the utmost importance in order to find alternative land uses for sustainable hill farming, to improve the farmer's living standards and to conserve forests and protect watersheds.     

Stabilization Effects of Narrative-based Monetary Policy in Jamaica

The study constructs a monetary policy indicator (MPI) from monetary policy documents and the actions of the Bank of Jamaica and Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, and uses it to estimate four variants of an analytical narrative-vector error correction model (AN-VECM) with cointegration as the identifying restriction. In AN-VECMs 1 and 2, the cointegration is estimated in level form with respective short-term interest rate and the MPI as regressands. The first difference forms of respective models are re-estimated in AN-VECMs 3 and 4. The results are mixed, with AN-VECM 1 yielding the least results. However, in all cases, the impulse response functions indicate that the MPI yields slightly superior results in both AN-VECMs 2 and 4. A positive shock in the MPI produces price and exchange rate results which are consistent with a priori expectations from economic theory, and mixed liquidity effect and real output results. Thus, the MPI provides an important policy tool alternative for policymakers in small open economies to consider in the implementation of monetary policy.     

The urban–rural divide,regional disaggregation and the convergence of crime

Potential regional variation in crime rates has been recognized as an issue of clear importance given its implications for the development and evaluation of theories of criminal activity, determining the appropriate level of disaggregation at which to undertake empirical analyses of crime and whether crime fighting policies should be constructed at a national or local level. Consequently, a literature has evolved examining the similarities in US regional crime rates and whether a national trend exists or is emerging. The present article extends the recent research into the emergence of a national trend by considering convergence in alternative classifications of crime using a data set subject to a higher degree of disaggregation than considered hitherto. The results obtained overturn previous findings obtained using more highly aggregated data, indicating the detection of convergence to be dependent upon the level of disaggregation considered. In addition, the extent of convergence detected is shown to vary across classifications of criminal activity and reflect anecdotally noted changes in the evolution of crime at a national level. The implications of the observed regional variation in crime for the urban–rural divide and theoretical, empirical and policy analyses are noted.