Sustainable development and financial institutions: Do banks' environmental policies influence customer deposits?

This paper investigates the relationship between the environmental policies taken by financial institutions and the choice of depositors on where to save their money. Prior research has shown that increases in the number of customers making deposits are driven by bank pricing policy and switching costs for depositors. By employing a dynamic panel data model, this study empirically tests how environmental performance influences the depositors' choice on where to put their money in a sample of worldwide financial institutions from 2011 to 2018. The main results suggest that there is a negative relationship between banks' environmental performance and customers' deposits. Furthermore, the banks that are the best at managing carbon emissions and at pursuing sustainable development pay lower interest rates on customer deposits.     

Regional Integration and the Co-ordination of Capital Income Taxation

This paper addresses the question of the need for income tax harmonization in the context of regional integration. It analyses the international distortions and fiscal interdependence arising in the presence of tax rate differentials both under a theoretical and an empirical perspective, and with reference to actual experiences of harmonization attempts. Attention is also paid to the influence of the countries' size on the results, to the strategic behaviour of countries under different international taxations rules, and to the relationships with the countries excluded by the integration process. International tax uniformity does not appear to be the preferable solution, even if some form of concerted agreements might help in reducing inefficiencies deriving from taxation differentials. For instance, in the case of highly mobile factors, like financial capital, if the integrating countries apply the source principle and the interest rate is the same across them, the source-based tax rate on non residents must equal the residence country tax rate on residents. Such a rule would allow the countries to set autonomously their tax rate and, at the same time, eliminate cross-border effects. If there are more than two integrating countries, the tax rates on non residents should discriminate according to the internal tax rate of the residence country.
(J.E.L.: H87, F20, H20).     

How state influence on project work organization both drives and mitigates gendered precarity in cultural and creative industries

This article develops an understanding of gendered precarity in project work by considering how the transfer of risk from employer to worker is shaped by the contextual pressures of state policy and the organization of the industrial field. The focus is the organization of project work as a condition underpinning the shifting of this risk in a mature field of precarious employment, the cultural and creative industries (CCIs). Our empirical exploration in Film/TV in the UK and Germany, and Dance in Sweden and the Netherlands, examines the dynamic interplay between state policy domains (cultural, social and regulatory), industry-level funding bodies or ‘transaction organizers’ and the cultural processes of CCI project networks. We argue that state-led influences both drive and mitigate the transfer of risk in project work as gendered, racialized and classed. Our framework contributes to broadening employment literature on risk and the disadvantaging capacity of networks to hoard opportunities in project-based labour markets.     

Where does return and volatility come from? The case of Asian ETFs

We analyze return and volatility of Asian iShares traded in the U.S. The difference in trading schedules between the U.S. and Asia offers a unique market setting that allows us to distinguish various return and volatility sources. We find Asian ETFs have higher overnight volatility than daytime volatility, explained by public information released during each local market's trading session. Local Asian markets also play an important role in determining each Asian ETF return. Nonetheless, returns for these funds are highly correlated with U.S. markets, indicative of the effects of investor sentiment and location of trade. Finally, returns in the U.S. market Granger-cause returns in all six Asian markets are analyzed.     

Detecting Common Longevity Trends by a Multiple Population Approach

Recently the interest in the development of country and longevity risk models has been growing. The investigation of long-run equilibrium relationships could provide valuable information about the factors driving changes in mortality, in particular across ages and across countries. In order to investigate cross-country common longevity trends, tools to quantify, compare, and model the strength of dependence become essential. On one hand, it is necessary to take into account either the dependence for adjacent age groups or the dependence structure across time in a single population setting—a sort of intradependence structure. On the other hand, the dependence across multiple populations, which we describe as interdependence, can be explored for capturing common long-run relationships between countries. The objective of our work is to produce longevity projections by taking into account the presence of various forms of cross-sectional and temporal dependencies in the error processes of multiple populations, considering mortality data from different countries. The algorithm that we propose combines model-based predictions in the Lee-Carter (LC) framework with a bootstrap procedure for dependent data, and so both the historical parametric structure and the intragroup error correlation structure are preserved. We introduce a model which applies a sieve bootstrap to the residuals of the LC model and is able to reproduce, in the sampling, the dependence structure of the data under consideration. In the current article, the algorithm that we build is applied to a pool of populations by using ideas from panel data; we refer to this new algorithm as the Multiple Lee-Carter Panel Sieve (MLCPS). We are interested in estimating the relationship between populations of similar socioeconomic conditions. The empirical results show that the MLCPS approach works well in the presence of dependence.     

Banks' business strategy and environmental effectiveness: The monitoring role of the board of directors and the managerial incentives

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how banks' climate strategies affect environmental performance. To extend this line of research, the carbon disclosure of worldwide banks is examined. In particular, we focus on specific governance strategies: board of director monitoring and managerial incentives. Panel data are employed on a sample taken from 330 bank-year observations in the period after the financial crisis. The results show an increase in environmental performance through the implementation of managerial incentives related to climate change, associated with the highest level of responsibility of the board of directors. Overall, the present study contributes to both the academic literature and corporate governance, highlighting the importance of banks' business strategy on climate change risks and opportunities with respect to environmental performance goals.