Mobile banking and consumer behaviour: New insights into the diffusion pattern

Technological advancement has challenged the providers of financial services; the very nature of selling and buying financial services has changed. Mobile devices are among the newest channels to conduct banking electronically. This paper focuses on studying diffusion and adopters of mobile banking services. Previous research has identified the typical characteristics of a potential adopter in the electronic services era; this paper explores some contradictory empirical findings drawn from a mobile banking survey. The results provide an indication of the characteristics of potential subsequent adopters of mobile banking, and of differences between user segments. Consequently, the authors are able to comment on the influence of certain demographic characteristics and the preferred communication mode of customers on the adoption and future usage of mobile banking services. The quantitative survey that sheds more light on this researched issue employed a traditional method of postal questionnaire. The data were collected in Finland during May–July 2002 and include 1,253 survey responses.     

Pair-copulas modeling in finance

This paper concerns itself with applications of pair-copulas in finance, and bridges the gap between theory and application. We provide a broad view of the problem of modeling multivariate financial log-returns using pair-copulas, gathering together for this purpose theoretical and computational results from the literature on canonical vines. From the practitioner’s viewpoint, the paper shows the advantages of modeling through pair-copulas and makes clear that it is possible to implement this methodology on a daily basis. All the necessary steps (model selection, estimation, validation, simulations, and applications) are discussed at a level easily understood by all data analysts.     

A methodology for cluster analysis of citation histories

Citations to all the papers (558) published from 1955 to 1964 by a multidisciplinary (natural sciences) research institute within a ‘scientific periphery’ were collected for the 11-year period after a 10-year lapse since the publication years. All the papers were grouped into 31 research topics, three of which had no such late citations at all. For the remaining 28 groups of papers three indicators were defined: ALPHA, the ratio of the number of papers with citations, to the number of all papers of the particular research topic, indicating thus an overall CITATION EFFICACY; BETA, the ratio of the sum of all citations, to the number of the cited papers, indicating CITATION INTENSITY, and GAMMA, expressing the CITATION LONGEVITY for a given research topic as the incidence (number) of cited papers (irrespective of the number of citations) within the 11-year citing period. In addition, three normalized transformations of the indicator BETA were checked. Two-dimensional (without ALPHA) and three dimensional (with ALPHA, GAMMA, and one of the BETA variants) graphical representations together with a pairwise correlation analysis served as preliminary guidance in the latter statistical analyses by (a) Ward's Hierarchical Cluster Analysis and (b) Polar Taxons Analysis. Both of them resulted in good agreement. Thus, the 28 research topics were found to belong to three clusters. Their composition varied slightly for the original BETA and its three normalized values. It was concluded that ALPHA is not a redundant but quite useful indicator, and that one of the normalized BETA-variants appears most suitable for this kind of studies. In the three-dimensional graphs the clusters may be related to scientific merit as judged in a composite way by all the three indicators. This is done with regard to the diagonal joining the indicators' maximal with their minimal values. The citation LONGEVITY (GAMMA) appears to be most important. Cluster stability tests showed fluctuations of few research topics, which was related to their specific features within the given research setting. It emerges on the whole that the research merit of this (peripheral) scientific production is determined neither by the journals status the papers were published in, nor by the authors' institutional status. Rather, it is the very scientific quality of individual papers within a given research topic that is decisive for the citation ‘survival’.     

The economic impact of migration: productivity analysis for Spain and the UK

Over the past 20?years labour has become increasingly mobile and whilst employment and earnings effects in host countries have been extensively analysed, the implications for firm and industry performance have received far less attention. This paper explores the direct economic consequences of immigration on host nations?? productivity performance at a sectoral level in two very different European countries, Spain and the UK. Whilst the UK has traditionally seen substantial immigration, for Spain the phenomenon is much more recent. Our findings from a growth accounting analysis show that migration has made a negative contribution to labour productivity growth in Spain and a negative but negligible contribution in the UK. This difference is driven by a positive impact from migrant labour quality in the UK. This finding broadly holds across all sectors, but we note considerable variation in magnitudes. Labour productivity growth has a neutral contribution from migrant labour in construction and personal services in the UK, whilst in every case in Spain the effect is negative, most strongly in agriculture. Using an econometric approach to production function estimation we observe a positive long term effect on total factor productivity from migrant workers in the UK and a negative effect in Spain. Our findings suggest that either the UK is better at assimilating migrants or is more selective in terms of who is permitted to migrate.     

Ethical Life Cycle of an Innovation

Product safety has always been one of the main problems in engineering ethics. At times it has been discussed as primarily a problem of engineering ethics. However the right to safety is one of the four fundamental consumer rights and so it is an important theme also in business ethics. At the same time the problem of product safety is inseparably connected with business effectiveness: how much can we spend on product safety without making our production unprofitable? Below we will present a possible treatment of the safety problem in teaching business ethics to post-graduate industrial engineering students – as we deal with the problem in Tallinn Technical University.     

Social Norms and Private Provision of Public Goods

The formation of social norms for voluntary contributions to a public good is analyzed in a game in which people have preferences for private consumption, a public good, and social approval. Each person chooses to be one of the two types: a contributor or a non‐contributor. Thereafter, each person meets people who can observe his type. A non‐contributor feels disapproval, whereas a contributor feels approval if he believes that a contributor observes his type. The game has two asymptotically stable states: one in which everybody is a contributor, and one in which nobody is a contributor. Governmental subsidization of the public good can move the society to the former state, whereas a governmental contribution to the public good can move the society to the latter. Indeed, this crowding in or crowding out prevails even after policy reversal.