1,721,253 research outputs found
The economic rationales for the usage of derivatives by banks and their related riskiness
No full textCo-operative Banking Networks in Europe. Models and Performance
No full textOver the past 20 years, the increasing dominance of the shareholder ownership model in banking, with its main purpose of maximizing financial returns to shareholders, has proved to be a toxic combination with the financial deregulation, the creation of new financial instruments and the concomitant rising levels of bank leverage that have taken place. Despite the growing role of private joint-stock banks around the world, co-operative banking is still a credible and high-performing alternative way of doing banking. This is especially true in Europe where co-operative institutions have historical roots dating back to the nineteenth century.
This book focuses on a sample of European co-operative banks (CBs), that nowadays perform universal banking activities, adopting a business model which is fundamentally based on mutuality, community development, not-for-profit and stakeholder orientation. This book presents a survey of the characteristics of different forms of integration of CB networks across several European countries and provides an assessment of their impact on several performance measures for the networks and their co-operative components. With a few exceptions, the existing empirical studies neglect to examine the features of the networks to which the banks belong. Surprisingly, there is little evidence on the extent to which diverse organizational forms of networks determine differences in individual banks’ and networks’ performances across different countries. The principal objective of this book is to fill this gap in the literature. The European countries investigated are Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. In all of these countries CBs have a significant presence, while the organizational forms of their networks vary widely. Therefore, focusing on this sample of European countries may allow us to draw out some insights and policy implications about the role that network organizations play in determining the performance of CBs
Ownership dispersion and performance in cooperative banking
Full text linkDifferent methodological approaches and hypotheses relative to the relationship between ownership structure and performances in cooperative banking generate contrasting findings, so motivating this innovative study which is grounded on an estimation approach allowing for the potential endogeneity of the membership base. Based on a sample of 241 Italian small cooperative banks over the 2013–2018 period, we find that bank profitability is positively affected by the membership as in the study conducted by Jones and Kalmi (2015) on Finnish cooperative banking and different from the comparable Austrian empirical research of Gorton and Schmid (1999). Unlike the latter we did not find an increasing exposure to agency costs as ownership dispersion grows and showed that greater membership raises individual bank financial stability, lowering the cost of credit risk
La stretta sul credito che frena lo sviluppo
No full textChe cos’è il credit crunch, ma soprattutto come può esser superato?
Serve un recupero di fiducia nel “sistema Paese”: se le
banche migliorano la raccolta di fondi sui mercati domestici ed
esteri, devono anche “restituire” liquidità a imprese e famiglie
Ejaculates in competition: a sperm race influenced by the seminal fluid?
Full text linkABSTRACT
In the last forty years, the historical notion of monogamous females has been gradually eroded away, and female multiple mating is now look as a common and ubiquitous phenomenon in nature, triggering theoretical and experimental attention to its biological implications and evolutionary consequences. Sexual selection is the evolutionary process that favours the increase in frequency of the genes that confer a reproductive advantage to the individuals carrying them. Polyandry implies that sexual selection may persist even after the copulation up to the point of fertilization, and in some cases beyond. In this scenario, male mating not necessarily results in successful insemination, but depends on the outcome of post-copulatory sexual mechanisms influencing the fertilization success, namely cryptic female choice and sperm competition. Female choice is the possibility for females to non-randomly bias paternity, favouring the ejaculate of the best quality male, in order to maximize their fitness. On the other hand, male-male competition results in sperm competition when the ejaculates of two or more males compete to fertilize the same set of eggs, as it has been firstly defined by Geoffrey Parker. When ejaculates overlap in space and time, differences in characteristics that are key factors for the fertilization success may lead one ejaculate to overcome the rivals, generating differential males’ reproductive success. This mechanism, investigated in both externally and internally fertilizing species, is a powerful evolutionary force moulding an amazing variety of behavioural, morphological and physiological traits. Ejaculates are costly to produce and, thus, sperm expenditure drawns the attention for how males, to increase their reproductive success, may modulate their investment in response to different sperm competition levels. Sperm competition is expected to influence those traits driving sperm fertilization capabilities in a specific context. To date, theoretical and empirical studies have primarily and only focused on how sperm characteristics, i.e. number and quality, affect the fertilization success of competing males.
Increasing evidence are suggesting that predictions on the outcome of sperm competition should not revolve only around the sperm component of the ejaculate. The seminal fluid often makes up a large part of an ejaculate and it may influence paternity success both directly and indirectly. Indeed, seminal fluid is already known to enhances sperm performance in several species as well as to indirectly influence paternity success, by decreasing female receptivity, increasing oviposition rate and forming mating plugs. Seminal fluids may also play a frontline role in sperm competition by directly affecting rivals’ sperm performance. For instance, in promiscuous ants and bees, seminal fluid incapacitates the sperm of rival males, while in other insects, it improves equally the survival of own and other sperm. This suggests that, unless a self/non-self-recognition mechanism evolves, the function of seminal fluid to enhance own sperm performance can be exploited by the sperm of rival males. In particular, when a male can his reproductive role while mating with a female, if advantaged or disadvantaged, he could strategically allocate his ejaculate to maximize the reproductive success. Theoretical analyses, still waiting for experimental tests, posit that selection should favour phenotypic plasticity in male expenditure on both sperm and seminal fluid components, specifically influencing that/those that affect more the ejaculate competitive weight. Clear evidence still lack, likely because, up to the present study, models and experimental works considered mostly internal fertilizers, where it is difficult to attribute sperm and seminal fluid to a specific individual.
I overcame these problems by using as model species two fishes with external fertilization, the grass goby (Zosterisessor ophiocephalus) and the black goby (Gobius niger) as they show a similar mating system and comparable levels of sperm competition, but potentially differ in the likelihood for seminal fluid to influence competition contexts. In both species males display territorial-sneaker mating tactics, where sperm competition risk varies according to the tactic adopted, with sneaker males experiencing the highest level producing a great number of sperm and less seminal fluid than territorial males. In the grass goby, sperm quality, in terms of velocity, viability and ATP content, does not vary between tactics, whereas, black goby sneakers produce sperm that are faster, more viable and richer in ATP than territorial males. In these two species, the dynamics of mating are potentially a crucial factor influencing the role of seminal fluid on the outcome of ejaculates competition. Indeed, grass goby sneakers enter inside the nest and may release their ejaculates in close proximity to those of the territorial male and to eggs. Thus, in this species I expected that the seminal fluid might have a competitive weigh, mediating sneaker and territorial ejaculates interplay. By contrast, in the black goby, sneakers are forced to release their ejaculate at the nest entrance and, thus, the opportunity for the mixing of territorial males’ and sneakers’ ejaculates does not occur or it is rare.
On the basis of these preconditions, my PhD project pointed to i) verify in both species when and how the seminal fluid affects sperm performances, in terms of velocity, viability of own and rival sperm, making combinations of sperm and seminal fluid within and between males adopting different tactics; ii) deepen, in the grass goby, the proximate mechanisms driving sperm and seminal fluid interplay; iii) evaluate if the results from sperm performance give reliable insights on their fertilization ability and on the outcome of ejaculates competition in nature. Therefore, I performed in vitro fertilization tests, applying the same experimental design used in sperm performance trials. Secondly, considering that the paternity success of the grass goby has been already investigated from natural nests in a previous work, I concentrated on the black goby. I evaluated the fertilization success in the field through artificial nests located in natural breeding sites, by using molecular parentage analyses.
In the grass goby, I found that sneaker’s sperm increase their performance, both in terms of velocity and fertilization rate, in presence of territorial male’s seminal fluid, while the performance of territorial male’s sperm is decreased in presence of sneaker’s seminal fluid. Appropriate control experiments demonstrate that this effect is not mediated by a self/non-self recognition mechanism.
Investigating the proximate mechanisms driving sperm-seminal fluid cross interactions, we found that sneaker’ and territorial male’s ejaculates differ in seminal fluid protein content (quantitatively and qualitatively) and even in sperm quality, with sneaker sperm showing an higher oxygen consumption rate, a parameter rarely measured in sperm quality analyses. The deepening of sperm-seminal fluid proximate mechanisms is just at the beginning but I highlighted how the non-protein fraction of the seminal fluid (<3kDa) is crucial for sperm performance (velocity), despite even the protein fraction indicate a minor influence.
In this species, sperm velocity results are perfectly mirrored by in vitro fertilization tests, hence sperm velocity is a reliable indicator of ejaculate fertilization ability. Considering the paternity success recorded in the field during a previous work, it seems that it is the territorial males nest guarding that finally determines their fertilization success, and thus, the distance at which sneakers are forced to release their ejaculates. Indeed, territorial males fertilization success positively correlate with their body size.
In the black goby, where the ejaculates of competing males are released far from each other, seminal fluid does not affect the sperm performances of rival males, as expected. Despite the seminal fluid of territorial males significantly enhances their sperm speed, still sneaker sperm are significantly faster, regardless the seminal fluid present.
Results from in vitro fertilization tests, apparently do not mirror sperm performance, since sneaker and territorial males fertilization rates do not significantly differ, probably because the low number of trials. However, I evidenced that sneaker and territorial males sperm differ in their swimming mode, with territorial male sperm moving in a significantly more linear trajectory. As a consequence, it could take the same time to sneaker and territorial male sperm to travel the same distance, even if those of sneaker have an higher speed.
The analysis of the paternity distribution of territorial males in the field suggests that the distance at which sneakers are forced to release their ejaculates determines the number of eggs they fathered, as in the grass goby. Indeed, preliminary results from artificial nests in the field indicate that snakers stole more fertilizations close to the nest principal entrance, lowering the territorial male fertilization success in that area, but less in the rest of nest ceiling. However, territorial males parentage success is unexpectedly low, respect to that registered in the grass goby and across other fish species with a similar mating system. In addition, we found in two of four analysed nests few embryos sired by a neighbour territorial male. If the result would be confirmed by further analysis, it implies that territorial males may occasionally adopt sneaking behaviours, probably depending on the level of ejaculates competition determined by nests availability and male density. The territorial mating role would not appear as favoured as in other species with alternative mating tactics, especially considering that sneakers visits more than one nest. Further studies should be addressed to the investigation of territorial male paternity success along the breeding season.
In both species, the spatial context in which the competition between ejaculates occurs proved to be important. The distance at which rival ejaculates are released determines the opportunity for the rival seminal fluid exploitation, and, consequently influences the strategy to maximize the fertilization success: through the number and/or the quality of the sperm, or taking advantage of the seminal fluid of a rival-tactic male.
The seminal fluid proven itself to be one of the factor that may tip the balance in the ejaculates competition scenarios, that need to be investigated with a comprehensive multidisciplinary approach
L'espansione internazionale delle banche italiane: gli ambiti operativi interessati, le aree geografiche presidiate e le forme di entry nei paesi esteri
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