Pejman Abedifar, Seyed Javad Kashizadeh, Steven Ongena, Flood, farms and credit: The role of branch banking in the era of climate change, Journal of Corporate Finance, Vol. 85, 2024. (Journal Article)
Using Iran’s unexpected flood in April 2019 as a natural experiment, we show that local branches bridge the time gap between the disaster and governmental aids by immediately increasing their lending for two months following the flood. Analyzing proprietary information on more than 53,000 farmers, we find that farmers with a stronger relationship with their branch - particularly younger and females - are more likely to receive a recovery loan. Our findings underscore that despite recent technological advancements, relationship-based branch banking is still important for agrarian societies during catastrophic events. |
|
Lucia Alessi, Stefano Battiston, Virmantas Kvedaras, Over with carbon? Investors’ reaction to the Paris Agreement and the US withdrawal, Journal of Financial Stability, Vol. 71, 2024. (Journal Article)
How financial investors may react to policy events related to sustainability and climate change mitigation in particular, is a key question with implications for sustainable finance and financial stability. We address this question by carrying out a multi-period difference-in-difference approach on a confidential database of securities holdings of the European Central Bank, and we provide evidence of several effects related to the Paris Agreement. In aggregate, investors reduced their participation in the equities of high-carbon firms in response to the agreement, and the trend reverted after the US’s announcement of withdrawal from the agreement. However, the reaction varies across categories and geographies of the securities holders, their ownership size, and the emissions of owned firms. In particular, transition risk has been taken up by less regulated financial institutions and the BRIC countries. Our results highlight that the redirection of global financial flows towards climate action requires clear and unanimous signals from the global community of policy makers. |
|
Henrik Cronqvist, Tomislav Ladika, Elisa Pazaj, Zacharias Sautner, Limited attention to detail in financial markets: Evidence from reduced-form and structural estimation, Journal of Financial Economics, Vol. 154, 2024. (Journal Article)
We show that firm valuations fell after a key expense became more visible in financial statements. FAS 123-R required firms to deduct option compensation costs from earnings, instead of disclosing them in footnotes. Firms that granted high option pay experienced earnings reductions, while fundamentals remained unchanged. These firms were more likely to miss earnings forecasts, and they experienced recommendation downgrades and valuation declines. Our findings suggest that market participants exhibited limited attention to option costs before FAS 123-R. As we reuse the FAS 123-R natural experiment, we show how one can address confounding channels by integrating reduced-form and structural estimation. |
|
Grzegorz Hałaj, Serafin Martinez-Jaramillo, Stefano Battiston, Financial stability through the lens of complex systems, Journal of Financial Stability, Vol. 71, 2024. (Journal Article)
In this cover paper, we introduce a Special Issue (SI) published after the fourth edition of a series of financial stability conferences organized by Bank of Mexico, CEMLA, Bank of Canada, Zurich University and the Journal of Financial Stability in November 2021. Before providing our perspective on why the research papers included into the SI are of great relevance, we give a brief and personal overview of recent directions in financial stability research in general, esp., related to topics accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic or post-pandemic economic and financial conditions and their complexity. Papers published in the SI cover four topics of research in the financial stability field, featuring some outstanding and innovative projects presented during the conference. The first topic is on interconnectedness and shock transmission in the financial system, diving deep into asset fire sales, interconnectedness of various segments of the financial system, in addition to banks, on the optimality of systemic risk capital buffers, and on how risks are priced in the interbank market network. The second one touches upon climate change risks looking at investors’ reactions to international climate policy developments, in particular on the Paris Agreement front and how to jointly model physical and transition risk in the banking system, including the important concept of double materiality. The third topic is represented by projects focused on policy analysis for systemic risk mitigation, specifically dealing with macroprudential policy instruments and crisis mitigation policies. Finally, research papers in the last topic on big data and market data focus on the innovative ways to explore the growing body of data sources, such as data collected by regulators, including credit register data, supervisory data and market data on financial transactions, to better understand sources and implications of systemic risk. |
|
Rafael Ballester-Ripoll, Gaudenz Halter, Renato Pajarola, High-dimensional scalar function visualization using principal parameterizations, Visual Computer, Vol. 40, 2024. (Journal Article)
Insightful visualization of multidimensional scalar fields, in particular parameter spaces, is key to many computational science and engineering disciplines. We propose a principal component-based approach to visualize such fields that accurately reflects their sensitivity to their input parameters. The method performs dimensionality reduction on the space formed by all possible partial functions (i.e., those defined by fixing one or more input parameters to specific values), which are projected to low-dimensional parameterized manifolds such as 3D curves, surfaces, and ensembles thereof. Our mapping provides a direct geometrical and visual interpretation in terms of Sobol’s celebrated method for variance-based sensitivity analysis. We furthermore contribute a practical realization of the proposed method by means of tensor decomposition, which enables accurate yet interactive integration and multilinear principal component analysis of high-dimensional models. |
|
Anand van Zelderen, Nicky Dries, Jochen Menges, The curse of employee privilege: harnessing virtual reality technology to inhibit workplace envy, Frontiers in virtual reality, Vol. 5, 2024. (Journal Article)
In many workplaces, managers provide some employees with unique privileges that support their professional development and stimulate productivity and creativity. Yet with some employees more deserving of a privileged status than others, co-workers feeling left out of the inner circle may begin to exhibit feelings of envy. With workplace envy and intergroup conflicts going hand in hand, the question arises whether co-worker acceptance of employee privileges—where conflict can be constrained through an affirmative re-evaluation of co-workers’ privileged status—may lower the envy experienced by employees. Using virtual reality technology, 112 employees participated in a virtual employee meeting at a virtual organization where they were exposed to a new workforce differentiation practice. We show through our experiment that co-worker acceptance of employee privileges negatively influences workplace envy, which was partially mediated by the anticipated ostracism of employees. Moreover, we show that this effect is only found for employees with privileges, who worry more about being ostracized than their non-privileged co-workers. We anticipate that our findings will enable managers to conscientiously differentiate between their employees, using virtual reality simulations to steer employees’ thoughts and feelings in a direction that benefits both employees and organizations. |
|
Manuel Mariani, Dario Mazzilli, Aurelio Patelli, Dries Sels, Flaviano Morone, Ranking species in complex ecosystems through nestedness maximization, Communications Physics, Vol. 7 (102), 2024. (Journal Article)
Identifying the rank of species in a complex ecosystem is a difficult task, since the rank of each species invariably depends on the interactions stipulated with other species through the adjacency matrix of the network. A common ranking method in economic and ecological networks is to sort the nodes such that the layout of the reordered adjacency matrix looks maximally nested with all nonzero entries packed in the upper left corner, called Nestedness Maximization Problem (NMP). Here we solve this problem by defining a suitable cost-energy function for the NMP which reveals the equivalence between the NMP and the Quadratic Assignment Problem, one of the most important combinatorial optimization problems, and use statistical physics techniques to derive a set of self-consistent equationswhose fixed point represents the optimal nodes’ rankings in an arbitrary bipartite mutualistic network. Concurrently, we present an efficient algorithm to solve the NMP that outperforms state-ofthe- art network-based metrics and genetic algorithms. Eventually, our theoretical framework may be easily generalized to study the relationship between ranking and network structure beyond pairwise interactions, e.g. in higher-order networks. |
|
Lorenzo Casaburi, Jack Willis, Value chain microfinance, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Vol. 40 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
We study the provision of financial services to small firms, consumers, and workers in developing countries as part of value chain relationships: value chain microfinance (VCMF). We first explore how VCMF can both overcome barriers to financial access—including asymmetric information, enforcement, and behavioural biases—and strengthen value chains, but also how it can introduce new challenges. We then review a recent empirical literature at the intersection of value chains and microfinance, studying the demand for and effects of VCMF in credit, insurance, and savings markets. We conclude by highlighting promising directions for future work. |
|
Andreas G F Hoepner, Ioannis Oikonomou, Zacharias Sautner, Laura T Starks, Xiao Y Zhou, ESG Shareholder Engagement and Downside Risk, Review of Finance, Vol. 28 (2), 2024. (Journal Article)
We show that engagement on environmental, social, and governance issues can benefit shareholders by reducing firms’ downside risks. We find that the risk reductions (measured using value at risk and lower partial moments) vary across engagement types and success rates. Engagement is most effective in lowering downside risk when addressing environmental topics (primarily climate change). Further, targets with large downside risk reductions exhibit a decrease in environmental incidents after the engagement. We estimate that the value at risk of engagement targets decreases by 9% of the standard deviation after successful engagements, relative to control firms. |
|
Hui Chen, Alexander Wenning, Higher-Order Beliefs, Market-Based Incentives, and Information Quality, European Accounting Review, Vol. 33 (2), 2024. (Journal Article)
We investigate how interdependence among investors' beliefs affects the reliance on market prices as a performance measure and how this in turn affects the firm's preference for financial reporting quality. When investors want to align their values more with other investors' beliefs, optimal contracts become more reliant on the accounting report and less on the market price, emphasizing the stewardship role of accounting in a herding market. If the baseline accounting quality required by a reporting standard is high enough, the firm prefers to increase its accounting quality for the sake of contracting efficiency. However, if the baseline quality is low, the firm further lowers accounting quality for the same reason. The benchmark level that determines whether the firm prefers to increase accounting quality increases with the interdependence of investors' beliefs, implying that it is difficult to align the information and stewardship roles of accounting in a herding market. |
|
Piotr P Brud, Jan Cieciuch, Temperamental underpinnings of borderline personality disorder and its facets, Personality and Mental Health, 2024. (Journal Article)
Temperament is claimed to be the basis for personality; therefore, discovering the temperamental underpinnings of borderline personality disorder and its facets is crucial for understanding this personality disorder. In this article, we explore these underpinnings by using a new model of temperament, based on the Regulative Theory of Temperament, the Big Two of temperament, and the Circumplex of Personality Metatraits. Two studies were conducted on adults—the first was in a general population sample (N = 315) and the second was in a clinical sample (N = 113) in people with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. The following measurements were used: The Screening Instrument for Borderline Personality Disorder (SI‐Bord), the Five‐Factor Borderline Inventory‐Short Form (FFBI‐SF), and the Temperament Metadimensions Questionnaire (TMQ). General borderline was explained by Reactivity (high Sensitivity) and Activity (high Dynamism). At the facet level, the Borderline Internalizing Facet was mainly explained by Reactivity (high Sensitivity), while the Borderline Externalizing Facet was explained by Activity (high Dynamism) in addition to Reactivity (high Sensitivity). The results of our study revealed specific temperamental underpinnings of borderline and its facets. Reactivity underlies all borderline facets, while Activity differentiates between the Borderline Externalizing Facet and Borderline Internalizing Facet. |
|
Lauren Howe, Laura M Giurge, Alexander Wagner, Jochen Menges, CEOs Showing Humanity: Seemingly Generic Human Care Statements in Conference Calls and Stock Market Performance during Crisis, Academy of Management Discoveries, 2024. (Journal Article)
Conference calls provide opportunities for CEOs to inform market participants (i.e., financial analysts and investors) about their companies’ prospects. Much research has focused on how CEOs speak about business-related topics in these calls, yet surprisingly the literature has not considered how statements that go beyond financial information affect market participants. When we explored archival data of how CEOs of publicly traded U.S.-based companies from the Russell 3000 Index spoke about COVID-19 in conference calls as the pandemic began in 2020, we noticed that about half of CEOs made human care statements that expressed a concern for people, with seemingly little direct financial relevance. However, although these statements were largely generic, vague expressions rather than clear plans, we discovered that the more such statements CEOs made, the better their companies fared on the stock market when stock prices tumbled globally. Follow-up explorations unveiled a negative association between CEO human care statements and stock volatility, meaning that market participants discounted these companies’ future earnings less. Our explorations suggest that it pays off for CEOs to go beyond mere financial information and show some humanity, with implications for downstream theorizing about CEO impression management. |
|
Christian Ewerhart, Marco Serena, On the (im-)possibility of representing probability distributions as a difference of i.i.d. noise terms, Mathematics of operations research, 2024. (Journal Article)
A random variable is difference-form decomposable (DFD) if it may be written as the difference of two i.i.d. random terms. We show that densities of such variables exhibit a remarkable degree of structure. Specifically, a DFD density can be neither approximately uniform, nor quasiconvex, nor strictly concave. On the other hand, a DFD density need, in general, be neither unimodal nor logconcave. Regarding smoothness, we show that a compactly supported DFD density cannot be analytic and will often exhibit a kink even if its components are smooth. The analysis highlights the risks for model consistency resulting from the strategy widely adopted in the economics literature of imposing assumptions directly on a difference of noise terms rather than on its components. |
|
Francesco Barile, Tim Draws, Oana Inel, Alisa Rieger, Shabnam Najafian, Amir Ebrahimi Fard, Rishav Hada, Nava Tintarev, Evaluating explainable social choice-based aggregation strategies for group recommendation, User modeling and user-adapted interaction, Vol. 34 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
Social choice aggregation strategies have been proposed as an explainable way to generate recommendations to groups of users. However, it is not trivial to determine the best strategy to apply for a specific group. Previous work highlighted that the performance of a group recommender system is affected by the internal diversity of the group members’ preferences. However, few of them have empirically evaluated how the specific distribution of preferences in a group determines which strategy is the most effective. Furthermore, only a few studies evaluated the impact of providing explanations for the recommendations generated with social choice aggregation strategies, by evaluating explanations and aggregation strategies in a coupled way. To fill these gaps, we present two user studies (N=399 and N=288) examining the effectiveness of social choice aggregation strategies in terms of users’ fairness perception, consensus perception, and satisfaction. We study the impact of the level of (dis-)agreement within the group on the performance of these strategies. Furthermore, we investigate the added value of textual explanations of the underlying social choice aggregation strategy used to generate the recommendation. The results of both user studies show no benefits in using social choice-based explanations for group recommendations. However, we find significant differences in the effectiveness of the social choice-based aggregation strategies in both studies. Furthermore, the specific group configuration (i.e., various scenarios of internal diversity) seems to determine the most effective aggregation strategy. These results provide useful insights on how to select the appropriate aggregation strategy for a specific group based on the level of (dis-)agreement within the group members’ preferences. |
|
Sergei Ketkov, A study of distributionally robust mixed-integer programming with Wasserstein metric: on the value of incomplete data, European Journal of Operational Research, Vol. 313 (2), 2024. (Journal Article)
This study addresses a class of linear mixed-integer programming (MILP) problems that involve uncertainty in the objective function parameters. The parameters are assumed to form a random vector, whose probability distribution can only be observed through a finite training data set. Unlike most of the related studies in the literature, we also consider uncertainty in the underlying data set. The data uncertainty is described by a set of linear constraints for each random sample, and the uncertainty in the distribution (for a fixed realization of data) is defined using a type-1 Wasserstein ball centered at the empirical distribution of the data. The overall problem is formulated as a three-level distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problem. First, we prove that the three-level problem admits a single-level MILP reformulation, if the class of loss functions is restricted to biaffine functions. Secondly, it turns out that for several particular forms of data uncertainty, the outlined problem can be solved reasonably fast by leveraging the nominal MILP problem. Finally, we conduct a computational study, where the out-of-sample performance of our model and computational complexity of the proposed MILP reformulation are explored numerically for several application domains. |
|
Pedro Miguel Sánchez Sánchez, Alberto Huertas Celdran, Timo Schenk, Adrian Lars Benjamin Iten, Gérôme Bovet, Gregorio Martínez Pérez, Burkhard Stiller, Studying the Robustness of Anti-Adversarial Federated Learning Models Detecting Cyberattacks in IoT Spectrum Sensors, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Vol. 21 (2), 2024. (Journal Article)
Device fingerprinting combined with Machine and Deep Learning (ML/DL) report promising performance when detecting spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attacks. However, the amount of data needed to train models and the scenario privacy concerns limit the applicability of centralized ML/DL. Federated learning (FL) addresses these drawbacks but is vulnerable to adversarial participants and attacks. The literature has proposed countermeasures, but more effort is required to evaluate the performance of FL detecting SSDF attacks and their robustness against adversaries. Thus, the first contribution of this work is to create an FL-oriented dataset modeling the behavior of resource-constrained spectrum sensors affected by SSDF attacks. The second contribution is a pool of experiments analyzing the robustness of FL models according to i) three families of sensors, ii) eight SSDF attacks, iii) four FL scenarios dealing with anomaly detection and binary classification, iv) up to 33% of participants implementing data and model poisoning attacks, and v) four aggregation functions acting as anti-adversarial mechanisms. In conclusion, FL achieves promising performance when detecting SSDF attacks. Without anti-adversarial mechanisms, FL models are particularly vulnerable with > 16% of adversaries. Coordinate-wise-median is the best mitigation for anomaly detection, but binary classifiers are still affected with > 33% of adversaries. |
|
Reint Gropp, Thomas Mosk, Steven Ongena, Ines Simac, Carlo Wix, Supranational Rules, National Discretion: Increasing versus Inflating Regulatory Bank Capital?, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 59 (2), 2024. (Journal Article)
We study how banks use "regulatory adjustments" to inflate their regulatory capital ratios and whether this depends on forbearance on the part of national authorities. Using the 2011 EBA capital exercise as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that banks substantially inflated their levels of regulatory capital via a reduction in regulatory adjustments — without a commensurate increase in book equity and without a reduction in bank risk. We document substantial heterogeneity in regulatory capital inflation across countries, suggesting that national authorities forbear their domestic banks to meet supranational requirements, with a focus on short-term economic considerations. |
|
Julia Wamsler, Denis Vuckovac, Martin Natter, Alexander Ilic, Live shopping promotions: which categories should a retailer discount to shoppers already in the store?, OR Spektrum, Vol. 46 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
Digitalization allows retailers to target customers with personalized promotions when they enter the store. Although traditional promotional retailer objectives, such as store visit, become obsolete once the shopper is already in the store, retailers still tend to target customers based on indicators that drive store visit, such as recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM). In order to improve promotional efficiency, the authors propose targeting shoppers based on information derived from regularity patterns in individual interpurchase times at the point of sale. When compared to RFM-based targeting, the proposed live targeting approach translates into higher redemption rates (+ 10.5 percentage points), revenues (+ 42.3 percentage points), and purchase frequencies (+ 44.2 percentage points). The findings emphasize the importance of promotional timing and of considering customers’ outside potential for dynamic in-store targeting. |
|
Tobias Schimanski, Andrin Reding, Nico Reding, Julia Bingler, Mathias Kraus, Markus Leippold, Bridging the gap in ESG measurement: Using NLP to quantify environmental, social, and governance communication, Finance Research Letters, Vol. 61, 2024. (Journal Article)
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria take a central role in fostering sustainable development in economies. This paper introduces a class of novel Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to assess corporate disclosures in the ESG subdomains. Using over 13.8 million texts from reports and news, specific E, S, and G models were pretrained. Additionally, three 2k datasets were developed to classify ESG-related texts. The models effectively explain variations in ESG ratings, showcasing a robust method for enhancing transparency and accuracy in evaluating corporate sustainability. This approach addresses the gap in precise, transparent ESG measurement, advancing sustainable development in economies. |
|
Thomas Puschmann, Marine Huang-Sui, A taxonomy for decentralized finance, International Review of Financial Analysis, Vol. 92, 2024. (Journal Article)
Decentralized Finance (‘DeFi’) has gained tremendous momentum over the past three years by using novel approaches to disintermediating financial institutions in the provision of financial services. However, empirical research in this field is still rare, and a more comprehensive understanding of the domain is a missing component in academic research. This paper develops a taxonomy based on a comprehensive literature analysis to structure this emerging field systematically. The taxonomy includes three perspectives (strategy, organization, technology) and seven dimensions (blockchain, value proposition, token type, business process, price mechanism, protocol type, integration type) as well as thirty-six characteristics. The application of the taxonomy to 278 DeFi start-ups reveals that most of the DeFi start-ups focus on Ethereum (36.3%) and have a focus on analytics and automation (52%), while, surprisingly only a few incorporate decentralized governance approaches (3.3%), provide decentralized exchanges (14%) or integrate off-chain data. |
|