Common Ownership Patterns in the European Banking Sector—The Impact of the Financial Crisis1

We provide a description of ownership patterns in the top 25 European banks for the period 2003–2015, where we especially focus on the global financial crisis. Investment managers, such as Blackrock, are dominant in terms of number of blockholdings in different banks, maintaining fairly stable “common ownership” networks throughout our sample. However, the financial crisis led to capital injections by governments in several banks in trouble, which in turn led to a jump in holdings by governments, which typically are “non-common owners” (i.e., they hold only shares in only one bank). This jump translated into these investors temporarily being the top investor with a large share, and non-common owners being the majority among large shareholders. A brief comparison with US banks uncovers large ownership differences between the European and US banking sectors. We briefly discuss what these ownership patterns might imply for competition, stability and performance in the banking industry.

Fiscal Incentives for Economic Development in the World under the Condition of the COVID-19

The article describes the fiscal stimulus, which used in the world to overcome the negative effects of the recession in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors used historical and static methods, a combination of methods of analysis and synthesis, etc. Based on the statist analysis of the dynamics of macroeconomic indicators, the authors confirmed that the main development trend of most countries and Ukraine in 2020 is a significant economic decline (falling production, rising public debt, growing fiscal deficit, etc.) caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The article summarizes that in the recession in 2020, countries use measures to fiscally stimulate households and business units through additional government expenditures and lost budget revenues. The size and structure of fiscal stimulus measures vary among different groups of countries. The main fiscal stimulus during this period are: deferrals and reductions in taxes, a moratorium on the payment of certain types of obligations, various forms of cash surcharges and subsidies, partial unemployment, capital injections into enterprises, loans and guarantees. The debt burden is a significant threat to low-income countries, as debt restructuring and public spending cuts will be relevant in the long run to stabilize debt in such countries. This means limited use of fiscal stimulus to exit the recession and stimulate economic development in the country. The results can have practical application within the framework of the formation of the state fiscal policy to overcome the recession and stimulate economic development in the country. In Ukrainian practice, during the pandemic, the main measures of fiscal stimulus were the use of reduced working day schemes and the expansion of unemployment benefits; changes in taxation; financial support for retirees; subsidies; social and economic support of households and enterprises. JEL classіfіcatіon: H2, H5, H6

The Reduction of Initial Reserves Using the Optimal Reinsurance Chains in Non-Life Insurance

The aim of the paper is to propose, and give an example of, a strategy for managing insurance risk in continuous time to protect a portfolio of non-life insurance contracts against unwelcome surplus fluctuations. The strategy combines the characteristics of the ruin probability and the values VaR and CVaR. It also proposes an approach for reducing the required initial reserves by means of capital injections when the surplus is tending towards negative values, which, if used, would protect a portfolio of insurance contracts against unwelcome fluctuations of that surplus. The proposed approach enables the insurer to analyse the surplus by developing a number of scenarios for the progress of the surplus for a given reinsurance protection over a particular time period. It allows one to observe the differences in the reduction of risk obtained with different types of reinsurance chains. In addition, one can compare the differences with the results obtained, using optimally chosen parameters for each type of proportional reinsurance making up the reinsurance chain.

Shafted

This chapter is devoted exclusively to Alamán’s efforts between the early 1820s and about 1830 to revive the Mexican silver mining industry on the basis of massive capital injections by British investors. The company he managed in Mexico between about 1825 and 1830 was the United Mexican Mining Association, one of the largest among a flock of such companies. The managerial, financial, and technical aspects of this company are discussed in detail, embracing Alamán’s relations with the British brokers of the company’s stock and his fellow managers, all Englishmen. His hopes of making a personal fortune from the enterprise did not materialize, and he left the concern over managerial differences in 1830, probably disillusioned by the experience with the idea that a revived silver-mining industry would restore Mexican economic prosperity after the destruction wrought by the decade of insurgency.

Equity Cost Induced Dichotomy for Optimal Dividends with Capital Injections in the Cramér-Lundberg Model

We investigate a control problem leading to the optimal payment of dividends in a Cramér-Lundberg-type insurance model in which capital injections incur proportional cost, and may be used or not, the latter resulting in bankruptcy. For general claims, we provide verification results, using the absolute continuity of super-solutions of a convenient Hamilton-Jacobi variational inequality. As a by-product, for exponential claims, we prove the optimality of bounded buffer capital injections (−a,0,b) policies. These policies consist in stopping at the first time when the size of the overshoot below 0 exceeds a certain limit a, and only pay dividends when the reserve reaches an upper barrier b. An exhaustive and explicit characterization of optimal couples buffer/barrier is given via comprehensive structure equations. The optimal buffer is shown never to be of de Finetti (a=0) or Shreve-Lehoczy-Gaver (a=∞) type. The study results in a dichotomy between cheap and expensive equity, based on the cost-of-borrowing parameter, thus providing a non-trivial generalization of the Lokka-Zervos phase-transition Løkka-Zervos (2008). In the first case, companies start paying dividends at the barrier b*=0, while in the second they must wait for reserves to build up to some (fully determined) b*>0 before paying dividends.

Optimal Surplus-Dependent Reinsurance Under Regime-Switching in a Brownian Risk Model

In this paper, we consider a company that wishes to determine the optimal reinsurance strategy minimising the total expected discounted amount of capital injections needed to prevent the ruin. The company’s surplus process is assumed to follow a Brownian motion with drift, and the reinsurance price is modelled by a continuous-time Markov chain with two states. The presence of regime-switching substantially complicates the optimal reinsurance problem, as the surplus-independent strategies turn out to be suboptimal. We develop a recursive approach that allows to represent a solution to the corresponding Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB) equation and the corresponding reinsurance strategy as the unique limits of the sequence of solutions to ordinary differential equations and their first- and second-order derivatives. Via Ito’s formula, we prove the constructed function to be the value function. Two examples illustrate the recursive procedure along with a numerical approach yielding the direct solution to the HJB equation.

Investor Information and Bank Instability During the Euro Crisis

Outside of financial crises, investors have little incentive to produce private information on banks’ short-term liabilities held as information-insensitive safe assets. The same does not hold true during crises. We measure daily information production using data from credit default swap spreads during the global financial crisis and the subsequent European debt crisis. We study abnormal information production around major events and interventions during these crises and find that, on average, capital injections reduced abnormal information production while early European stress tests increased it. We also link information production to outcomes: high levels of information production predict bank balance sheet contraction and higher government expenditures to support financial institutions. In an addendum, we show information production on nonfinancials dramatically increased relative to financials at the height of the COVID-19 crisis, reflecting the nonfinancial nature of the initial shock.

Small Business COVID-19 Lending Programs: Fostering Social Capital and Financial Stability

In times of crisis, investment in entrepreneurial ventures tends to decline. Early data suggest the decline in small business investments due to the pandemic will be historic in scope and depth. Community development lending practices aim to sustain small firms until they can resume their normal course of business. Affordable financing provides capital injections into small businesses which can help to cushion against COVID-19 induced economic shocks. Using Carolina Small Business Development Fund’s lending data as a case study, this analysis considers the effect of COVID-19 response programs. These activities are oriented towards creating a “social safety net” of Main Street businesses that boost social capital development, community trust, and financial stability. We believe the findings are likely generalizable to lending activities by other community development financial institutions.

Major changes affecting EU funded loan and equity scheme management in 2021-2027 budgetary period

Approximately ten percent of support from the European Union structural funds sources was utilised as financial instruments in the 2014-2020 EU budgetary period. The term ‘financial instruments’ represents support in the form of loans and capital injections in Hungary. Programmes for 2021-2027 have not been finalised yet, but major amounts of money are expected to be used in the form of financial instruments. Therefore, one should review the changes affecting the criteria to use EU structural funds, which determine development policies in the next period regarding loan and equity schemes. Both the EU and the Hungarian regulatory framework have been established, they can be studied and used as the starting point of further planning. In this paper the major components of the relevant regulatory framework including its practical conclusions to be expected are discussed.