Suomen Pankin Julkaisuarkisto
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Did taxes, decrees or credibility drive money? Early nineteenth century Finland from a Chartalist perspective
No full textChartalist theories assume the government determines the currency used by the public. Finland’s experience following the Russo-Swedish war in 1808–1809 would seem to contradict the chartalist view. Having become a Grand Duchy under Russia, the Finnish Government sought to replace Swedish riksdalers in circulation with roubles. However, due to a resilient trade surplus with Sweden and the resulting flood of Swedish money into Finland, bans on the riksdaler were largely ineffective. Taxation proved a particularly clumsy tool for leveraging the switch to roubles. Taxpayers almost forced the government to accept payments in a foreign currency. Even the government had to use Swedish money. Issuing roubles was of limited use. As a result, the rouble failed to establish itself as Finland’s main currency until the introduction of a silver standard in 1840–1842
State enforceability of noncompete agreements : Regulations that stifle productivity!
No full textNoncompete agreements (also known as covenants not to compete [CNCs]) are frequently used by many businesses in an attempt to maintain their competitive advantage by safeguarding their human capital and the associated business secrets. Although the choice of whether to include CNCs in employment contracts is made by firms, the real extent of their restrictiveness is determined by the state laws. In this article, we explore the effect of state‐level CNC enforceability on firm productivity. We assert that an increase in state level CNC enforceability is detrimental to firm productivity, and this relationship becomes stronger as comparable job opportunities become more concentrated in a firm's home state. On the other hand, this negative relationship is weakened as employee compensation tends to become more long‐term oriented. Results based on hierarchical linear modeling analysis of 21,134 firm‐year observations for 3,027 unique firms supported all three hypotheses.Available also as Bank of Finland Research Discussion Papers 24/2017http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:bof-20170816155
Corporate Social Responsibility and Firm Financial Performance : The Mediating Role of Productivity
No full textThis study treats firm productivity as an accumulation of productive intangibles and posits that stakeholder engagement associated with better corporate social performance helps develop such intangibles. We hypothesize that because shareholders factor improved productive efficiency into stock price, productivity mediates the relationship between corporate social and financial performance. Furthermore, we argue that key stakeholders’ social considerations are more valuable for firms with higher levels of discretionary cash and income stream uncertainty. Therefore, we hypothesize that those two contingencies moderate the mediated process of corporate social performance with financial performance. Our analysis, based on a comprehensive longitudinal dataset of the U.S. manufacturing firms from 1992 to 2009, lends strong support for these hypotheses. In short, this paper uncovers a productivity-based, context-dependent mechanism underlying the relationship between corporate social performance and financial performance.Published in Bank of Finland Research Discussion Papers 7/2016
Predicting Banking Crises with Artificial Neural Networks: The Role of Nonlinearity and Heterogeneity
No full textStudies of the early warning systems (EWSs) for banking crises usually rely on linear classifiers, estimated with international datasets. I construct an EWS based on an artificial neural network (ANN) model, and I also account for regional heterogeneity in order to improve the generalization ability of EWS models. All of the banking crises in my test set are then predictable at a 24-month horizon, using information from earlier crises. For some countries, estimation with a regional dataset significantly improves the predictions. The ANN outperforms the usual logit regression, assessed by the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve
Private benefits of control and bank loan contracts
No full textThis paper investigates whether or not private benefits of control by managers and large shareholders influence the financing cost of firms. Evidence shows that lending banks demand a significantly higher loan spread, higher fees, shorter loan maturity, smaller loan size, stricter covenants, and greater collateral on firms with greater private benefits of control. Results are stronger for firms with weak corporate governance quality, supporting the agency cost viewpoint. Such evidence implies that banks consider higher private benefits of control as a type of agency problem when they make lending decisions
Cyclicality of bank liquidity creation
No full textThis paper investigates the cyclicality of bank liquidity creation. Since liquidity creation is a major economic function of banks, their liquidity creation behavior may amplify business cycle fluctuations. Using the methodology of Berger and Bouwman (2009) to compute liquidity creation measures, we analyze the relation between GDP growth and liquidity creation of Russian banks from 2004 to 2015. Detailed quarterly data on a very large sample of banks and coexistence of different bank ownership types (state-owned, domestic private and foreign banks), makes Russia an ideal natural laboratory for study of cyclicality of liquidity creation for banks. We find that liquidity creation of banks is procyclical. We show that the liquidity creation behavior of state-owned banks and foreign-owned banks is similar to that of domestic private banks in terms of procyclicality. We further find that the magnitude of procyclicality is higher for liquidity creation than for lending. Thus, while ownership of banks does not influence the cyclicality of bank liquidity creation, liquidity creation behavior of banks can amplify business cycle fluctuations
Level, distribution and long-term development of market power in Finland
No full textThis study examines the level, distribution and development of market power in Finland between 1975 and 2016. The paper applies the methods proposed by Hall (2018a) and Hall (2018b). In contrast to some other international evidence, the aggregate level of market power has not risen in Finland during the last decades. The estimate of country level markup ratio in Finland is 1,25. The paper also analyses the distribution of markup ratios across industries. About 90 per cent of industry level markup ratios are between 1 and 1,5. The results suggest that markups are typically higher in exporter firms than in non-exporter firms
Migration Effects on Municipalities’ Expenditures
No full textIn this paper we examine how Finnish municipalities’ expenditures depend on the demographic structure of the population. More precisely, we scrutinize the role of foreign citizens: how does the share of citizens with foreign background out of the total population manifest itself in total expenditures and some key expenditure categories. The study makes use of Finnish panel data from 249 municipalities for the period 2000–2014. Empirical analyses show that foreign population tends to increase per capita expenditures up to the point where the respective semi-elasticity is about one. The result seems robust in terms of different control variables, subsamples of the data and different estimation techniques. Also, it is found that the unemployment rate of foreign citizens tends to increase municipalities’ expenditures. Thus, opposite to standard assumptions, per capita public consumption expenditures do depend on migration and that should be taken into account when making assessments on overall fiscal effects of migration. From political economy point of view, these results seem to be at variance with the “non-willingness to pay other ethnic groups’ expenditures” hypothesis that has been put forward by e. g. Alberto Alesina and Assaf Razin