Mikael Lönnborg

Regulatory Regimes and Multinational Insurers before 1914

At the end of the twentieth century, the global diffusion of one important financial service, insurance, was encouraged by deregulation, but it also encountered difficulties where deregulation remained incomplete and where there were many nonregulatory barriers to entry. International insurance was already well developed before 1914. The growth in the global insurance trade, however, occurred against a background of increasing national regulation and fiscal burdens in many countries, making international business affordable only for the largest companies with the deepest reserves. This paper offers some preliminary estimates of the extent of the international insurance trade during the half-century before the First World War, and assesses the impact of national regulatory regimes and nonregulatory factors on the development of this business. The analysis is placed within the framework of modern theories of regulation and multinational enterprise.

FDI in the post-EU accession Baltic Sea Region: A global or a regional concern?

Abstract This paper investigates the dynamics of FDIs in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) by applying the Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood estimation method on a gravity model. In particular, we analyze the influence of macro and spatial factors on investment stock changes and discuss whether the origin of these investments and the 2004 EU enlargement have had any effects on BSR FDIs. Our results suggest that EU enlargement has been significant for FDI activity in the region, and that FDI is basically a regional issue as it tends to be bilateral within the region. However, the same results also suggest that geographic distance is not a significant factor. We conclude that while being traditional in nature, the BSR FDI pattern is undergoing changes towards a lesser degree of geographic bias.

Banks and Swedish financial crises in the 1920s and 1930s

Financial crises occur at regular and unpredictable moments in capitalist economies. However, an absence of shared theoretical approaches to and even definitions of the subject still plague the analysis of financial crises. This situation makes historical analysis even more important. This article compares two Swedish financial crises, one in the 1920s and the other in the 1930s. The comparison shows that despite their temporal and spatial proximity, the crises seemed to have had quite different underlying causes, links to international circumstances, severity, and government responses. The 1920s crisis in Sweden was for instance much deeper than the crisis in the 1930s, a marked contrast to the experience of most countries during these two periods. In focusing on the driving forces behind the crises, their development and governmental policies, the article also provides an opportunity to reflect on both financial crisis theories, on the current crisis and on recent historical research concerning crises.

The Swedish Financial Revolution and the Insurance Industry

The financial sector is, of course, a complex nexus of markets, organizations and institutions. The aim of this chapter is to highlight the insurance industry and its role as a supplier of external finance, but also its role as part of an emerging financial sector. Initially though, it bears pointing out that insurance as a phenomenon has played an essential role in the formation of modern society: the reduction of risks connected to large-scale industrial investments and the enhancement of individual safety being two of the more prominent advances connected to the evolution of insurance.1 However, in this chapter we concentrate on the evolvement of the industry primarily as a source of external finance in supporting the industrial revolution in Sweden and the related question of whether the emergence of a domestic insurance market was part of a financial revolution.

Drømmen om tryghed. Tusind års dansk forsikring [The Dream of Safety. Thousand Years of Danish Insurance]

Drommen om tryghed. Tusind ars dansk forsikring [The Dream of Safety.Thousand Years of Danish Insurance]