The institutional environment and the number of bank relationships: an empirical analysis of European SMEs

This article examines the association between creditor protection, as measured by the nature of legal rules and the quality of law enforcement, and multiple bank relationships using a unique survey sample of SMEs from 19 European countries. We find that the likelihood of multiple banking is the highest for SMEs in French-civil-law countries, next highest for German-civil-law countries, and the lowest in Scandinavian-civil-law and English-common-law countries. We also find that SMEs in countries with low legal efficiency are more likely to establish multiple bank relationships. These results seems to confirm the underlying idea in the law and finance literature that relevant loan risk for banks also arises from low quality of laws and institutions and not just from firm-specific characteristics. Banks in countries where protection of creditor rights is poor may resort to multiple banking to share this additional risk. Policy makers can use our findings to justify the necessity of improving their institutions by reducing legal formalisms and thereby, lowering the enforcement costs in the courts. This would lead to better loan contracting and enhance the flow of debt capital, which is required for a healthy and dynamic economy.     

Consumer Insolvency in the European Legal Context

Consumer credit, as an important aspect of the free movement of capital, has for a long time now been subject to European Union regulations. However, one important aspect of consumer credit, over-indebtedness, has not been acknowledged in the Consumer Credit directives of 1978 and 2009, nor is there any other European Union law instrument that addresses over-indebtedness or insolvency of consumers. The only European-level document addressing the problem of over-indebtedness of ordinary people is the Council of Europe Recommendation of 2007. In European Union law, over-indebtedness can and should be approached from several angles. The Insolvency Regulation (2000) does not directly address situations facing the consumer debtor and leaves it up to the discretion of the Member States to include or exclude insolvency proceedings for consumer debtors regarding the scope of the Regulation. There can be little doubt that the European Union has a legal basis for action in this field, and it has also used its competence in a number of related issues, such as general insolvency law and enforcement of judgments. Case C-461/11, in which Advocate General delivered her opinion on Sept 13^th, 2012 shows that national insolvency procedures for natural persons may constitute a restriction on the freedom of movement. This article argues that, even in the absence of a European Union law instrument, the Member States should recognize debt adjustment judgments made in another Member State and that there is a need for a regulation in the European Union law in this field.     

Changing Directions in Consumer Bankruptcy Law and Practice in Europe and USA

The consumer bankruptcy or, rather, consumer debt adjustment, is a fairly recent phenomenon in continental Europe. In the nineties, a number of European countries introduced judicial institutions in order to alleviate an excessive debt burden carried by consumer debtors. In addition to the court proceedings, the European jurisdictions often provide the debtor with debt counselling services, supervision, and payment requirements. In the United States, on the other hand, discharge of debt has been an established principle of bankruptcy law since the late 19th century, and bankruptcy is frequently used by consumer debtors. However, in the US, as well as in Canada, debtors are increasingly encouraged to opt for a payment plan. There seems to be a certain convergent trend between the two different legal cultures. Paradoxically, at the same time scholars have pointed out that the variance in local cultures seems to be a main factor in explanations of how debtors choose either a direct discharge or a payment plan. This finding gives us reason to consider the interplay of counselling and other pre-trial measures and its effect upon the rights and duties of debtors.     

A systemic evaluation framework for futures research

Evaluation of futures studies is a topic that has frequently aroused discussion. Futures studies often deal with great societal or strategic business issues, and thus the validity and reliability of the results is of great interest to stakeholders. Existing literature contains discussions of such important issues as ethics of futures studies, the nature of knowledge about the future, and futures methodology, which together contribute to the quality, validity and credibility of futures studies, but discussion on the evaluation of futures studies is more scant.Thus, the main research question that guides our study is: “how should we evaluate futures studies to ensure the reliability and credibility of the results?” We answer the question by deriving a systemic framework for evaluation following the input-process-output schema to ensure that the whole chain from the data to reporting and implementation contributes to the quality and impact of the study.The main contribution is the systemic evaluation framework. The framework will contribute to the evaluation of existing and ongoing studies by offering guidelines for evaluation, and as a net effect, we propose, it will increase the impact of futures studies by making the practices more transparent and thus generating more confidence in the results.     

COHERENCE AND ELICITABILITY

The risk of a financial position is usually summarized by a risk measure. As this risk measure has to be estimated from historical data, it is important to be able to verify and compare competing estimation procedures. In statistical decision theory, risk measures for which such verification and comparison is possible, are called elicitable. It is known that quantile‐based risk measures such as value at risk are elicitable. In this paper, the existing result of the nonelicitability of expected shortfall is extended to all law‐invariant spectral risk measures unless they reduce to minus the expected value. Hence, it is unclear how to perform forecast verification or comparison. However, the class of elicitable law‐invariant coherent risk measures does not reduce to minus the expected value. We show that it consists of certain expectiles.     

Is more capability always beneficial for firm performance? Market orientation,core business process capabilities and business environment

This study examines the role of capabilities in core marketing-related business processes–product development management (PDM), supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM)–in translating a firm’s market orientation (MO) into firm performance. The study is the first to examine the interplay of all three business process capabilities simultaneously, while investigating how environmental conditions moderate their performance effects. A moderated mediation analysis of 468 product-focused firms finds that PDM and CRM process capabilities play important mediating roles, whereas SCM process capability does not mediate the relationship between MO and performance. However, the relative importance of the capabilities as mediators varies along the degree of environmental turbulence, and under certain conditions, an increase in the level of business process capability may even turn detrimental.     

Gender Diversity in the Governance of Sport Associations: The Sydney Scoreboard Global Index of Participation

This paper examines gender diversity in sport governance globally. Theoretically, the study draws on gender dynamics in organisations, in particular on Kanter’s concepts of gender ratios and critical mass. An audit of the gender ratio on boards of National Sport Organisations (n = 1,600) was conducted in 45 countries. Data were collected through the Sydney Scoreboard, an interactive website that tracks women’s presence on sport boards internationally. Findings show that women remain under-represented on three key indicators: as board directors (global mean 19.7 %), board chairs (10.8 %) and chief executives (16.3 %). Few countries have achieved a critical mass of 30 % representation and no continent has achieved the critical mass on any of the three indicators. Women’s under-representation in sport governance is due to complex gender dynamics. Gender diversity on sport boards is associated with four interwoven dimensions of gender relations: production, power, emotion and symbolism. The combination of the four dimensions produces an environment that may or may not be conducive to gender diversity.