1,720,958 research outputs found
Sustainable disclosure versus ESG intensity: Is there a cross effect between holding and SRI funds?
No full textSustainable and Responsible Investment (SRI) funds – the largest component of the fast-expanding sustainable financial investment industry – apply environmental, social and governance (ESG) analyses to manage their investment portfolios and are particularly demanding in terms of issuers' disclosure. In this paper we take a step forward and ask whether adopting high-quality sustainability disclosure is important also for SRI funds' holding companies. Specifically, we introduce a novel metrics on the extent of holding companies' sustainability disclosure based on the quality of their Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) reporting. In parallel, we use a standard approach to measure a fund's ESG intensity, that is, the weighted ESG average of a fund's investments. Indeed, we find that an SRI fund's ESG intensity systematically improves when the associated holding company improves its GRI sustainability disclosure. Moreover, we show that this positive effect of holdings' disclosure on a fund's ESG intensity is larger in jurisdictions with less stringent regulation on disclosure, where the signaling value of GRI disclosure is supposedly heightened. Our results do not seem to be driven by endogeneity between a fund's ESG intensity and its holding company's GRI reporting. First, a fund's ESG investment policy and its holding company's sustainability disclosure policy lie on separate decision ladders. Second, we show that the two variables are empirically uncorrelated. Third, our results prove resilient to a battery of robustness checks. The implication of our finding is that holding companies' sustainability disclosure engagement can reap a benefit for their managed SRI funds – provided ESG ratings are reliable –, whose enhanced credibility might prove a key competitive factor
Lending quality and contracts enforcement reforms
No full textWe investigate the causal relationship between the efficiency of country's judicial system and the quality of bank lending, using the contracts enforcement reforms implemented in four European countries as a quasi‐natural experiment. We find that strengthening contracts enforcement determines large, significant and persistent reductions in banks' nonperforming loans. Our results have important policy implications: they
point at judicial efficiency as a critical determinant of the stability of the banking sector and its resilience to adverse shocks such as the recent Covid‐19 pandemic
Benchmarking non-performing loans
No full textThis paper provides a new perspective to evaluate the economic role played by banks in non-performing loans (NPLs) accumulation. We estimate benchmark NPL levels on the judicial inefficiency dimension, controlling for country- and bank-specific factors. To this aim, we first empirically establish whether judicial inefficiency is a key determinant of NPLs in the European banking system for the period 2006–2017. Using the dynamic-Generalized Method of Moments estimations, we show that higher contract enforcement inefficiency increases NPLs. Then, we estimate NPLs benchmark levels using a dose response function based on judicial inefficiency. Our results show that Norway, Sweden, and Italy performed better than the European countries, while Austria, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Cyprus, and Greece performed worse than the European mean. Our results have several policy implications
Lending quality and contracts enforcement reforms
Full text linkWe investigate the causal relationship between the efficiency of country's judicial system and the quality of bank lending, using the contracts enforcement reforms implemented in four European countries as a quasi-natural experiment. We find that strengthening contracts enforcement determines large, significant and persistent reductions in banks' nonperforming loans. Our results have important policy implications: they point at judicial efficiency as a critical determinant of the stability of the banking sector and its resilience to adverse shocks such as the recent Covid-19 pandemic
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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