Flavio Pichler

Crowdfunding as a New Phenomenon: Origins, Features and Literature Review

Crowdfunding is a relatively new funding practice that is undergoing strong growth based on the predominance of such Web 2.0 technologies as social media in the past few years and the opening created by the credit squeeze that has continued since the global financial crisis that broke out in the summer of 2007. To gain an understanding of the role crowdfunding can play within the financial system, this chapter starts with its origins, highlights its main characteristics and draws attention to the associated risks and financial return crowdfunding in particular. Due to its novelty, literature on crowdfunding is quite scarce, but the chapter reviews the most important studies on success factors for crowdfunding campaigns and suggests paths for future research.

Islamic and Conventional Exchanges: A Performance Analysis and Governance Perspectives

Over the last two decades the securities industry has undergone a process of rapid transformation which has been accelerating over the last few years. The backbone of such a process is the demutualization and self-listing of a large part of stock exchanges around the world. Subsequently, a widespread consolidation process, which gathered speed at the beginning of the century, lead to the polarization of trading and gave rise to a very few large conglomerates operating on a transatlantic basis, with highly diversified business models, and managing vast pools of liquidity. Apart from these more dominant players, regional exchanges still exist (operating, however, with far lower levels of liquidity) and new rivals (electronic communication networks — ECNs) are prospering.

Value Creation Drivers in European Banks: Does the Capital Structure Matter?

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the main value creation drivers in European banks. We start by identifying three business models using balance-sheet characteristics of a large sample of European banks. We then seek to analyse the most important accounting profit and capital absorption drivers. In particular for retail- funded banks we try to assess the impact of loan-loss provisioning (LLP) together with a wide array of credit-risk exposure on value creation measured by EVA. We also endogenise the effect of growth opportunities. Our results suggest that provisioning policies are positively and significantly related to EVA through the impact on asset returns volatility and equity betas. We also account for a relation between betas and growth opportunities.

Credit Quality, Bank Provisioning and Systematic Risk in Banking Business

Managerial behaviour and accounting policies have a huge impact on corporate earnings and their information content. Reporting of non-performing loans and loan-loss provision (LLP) practices are among the major concerns in the banking industry. Asset quality, exposure to credit risk and provisioning bear great implications in relation to earnings volatility and capital adequacy. Managers may rely on discretionary provisioning as a means of smoothing earnings. While there is a large debate in literature about the incentives to discretionary LLP, there is no doubt that such a practice might hinder the true riskiness of the bank and distort market perceptions. In the same vein, discretionary provisioning may be regarded as a tool for optimizing a bank’s capital.

Does ‘Political Bias’ Undermine the Korea Investment Corporation?

In recent years sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) have become increasingly important as institutional investors, both in numerical terms and in terms of assets under management (Aizenman and Glick, 2007; Jen, 2007; Kern, 2007, 2008). In particular, since 2007, when many banks needed to recapitalize because of the subprime financial crisis, the number of SWFs has continuously increased to reach 65 investment vehicles in December 2012, with total assets under management equal to more than

Asset Management Issues in Sovereign Wealth Funds: An Empirical Analysis

5 trillion (Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, 2013).

Bank size, Consolidation and Operational Risk

The aim of this chapter is to analyze certain fundamental characteristics of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) to contribute to a better understanding of these investment vehicles. SWFs have in recent years become increasingly important, both in numerical terms and in terms of assets under management. As the importance of SWFs in the global financial system has increased academic research has investigated the specific features and implications of SWFs for financial markets, but on the other hand debate has focused on regulatory issues relating to the rise of SWFs.

The Funding Gap and The Role of Financial ReturnCrowdfunding: Some Evidence From European Platforms

With the accord entitled International Convergence of Capital Measurement and Capital Standards, issued by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in June 2006 (Basel II) and transposed into EU and member states legislation by Directives 2006/48/EC and 2006/49/EC, operational risk in the banking sector came to be defined and regulated for the first time. In particular, operational risk was no longer considered a residual risk with respect to credit and market risk, but was defined explicitly as the risk of ‘loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems or from external events’.