Vincenzo Farina

The efficiency of cooperative banks: the impact of environmental economic conditions

This article analyses the cost and profit efficiencies of cooperative banks. Cooperative banks are small financial institutions providing financial services in several local geographical areas, and they play a fundamental role in various European banking systems. Even though these small financial institutions present a homogeneous business model, their performance is strongly influenced by the economic conditions of their local markets. The efficiency measurement has to account for the heterogeneity of the environmental conditions. By using a large sample of Italian cooperative banks (2683 year observations) collected between 2000 and 2005, we estimated the cost and profit efficiency using Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) and including various environmental variables accounting for disparities among Italian regions. We show that environmental conditions substantially influence efficiency estimates: banks in the Northeast of Italy are shown to be the more cost efficient, benefiting from a favourable environment, while banks in the South of Italy display a higher profit efficiency, probably due to lower competitive pressures. We show that the coefficients for branches and the concentration of cooperative banks with respect to other banks are important both on the cost side and the profit side.

The impact of corporate governance press news on stock market returns

Stock market prices reflect information regarding firms business environments, operations and, in general, their fundamentals. Recently, various studies have analysed the link between news coverage and stock prices but no evidence exists on how channels and ways of communication of information affect investors behaviour. We analyses these aspects focussing on a large sample of corporate governance news published between 2003 and 2007 in Il Sole 24 Ore, Italys major financial newspaper. We show that before news is made public investors are only able to assess the type of corporate governance event underlying it. After publication, investors are influenced by the content (positive or negative) and the tone of communication (strong or weak) of the news.

Politicians ‘On Board’: Do Political Connections Affect Banking Activities in Italy?

In this article, we provide an empirical analysis to investigate whether politicians serving on the board of directors for banks influence performance, lending, and risk taking behaviours. We refer our analysis to all politicians (almost 160,000) belonging to a political body in Italy. Overall, our dataset contains 1,808 board members referring to 123 cooperative banks. Our results suggest that politicians who hold executive roles on the board of directors seem to exert a negative impact on banking activity. Therefore, in the current debate on the reform of the statutes of the Italian cooperative banks, we argue that the problem is not having politicians on the board of directors for banks, but rather allowing politicians to hold executive positions.

Assessing effectiveness and compliance of banking boards

Purpose - This paper aims to develop a model to assess the effectiveness and compliance of bank boards, taking into account their unique characteristics, financial industry standards and regulations. Design/methodology/approach - The literature on the roles and effectiveness of boards and directors in the financial industry is reviewed. Findings - The main finding in the literature suggests that evaluating the effectiveness of a board must include characteristics of the entire board as well as individual contributions of directors. Practical implications - Banking boards, more than in the past, must proactively evaluate their effectiveness and compliance with existing rules. Originality/value - The paper proposes a model for assessing the effectiveness and compliance of boards and directors of banking organizations, considering their characteristics, financial industry standards and regulations.

The “day after” Basel 2: do regulators comply with banking culture?

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to measure the cultural fit between supervisory authorities and banks, considering cultural gaps as possible stumbling blocks for effective supervision. Design/methodology/approach - The paper uses a text-analysis approach. The methodological assumption is that the analysis of culture is closely connected to the analysis of the type of language used by the members of an organization. To this aim, a cultural survey was developed in order to compare cultures of Bank of Italy, Italian banks, and Basel Committee during the years 1999 and 2004. Findings - The results highlight several significant, but decreasing, cultural gaps relating to important issues for banks, such as risk, disclosure, change, and innovation. Practical implications - The evidence and the measurement of cultural gaps are useful elements for the identification of change actions by supervisors and banks. In fact, identified gaps could be detrimental for an effective supervision and could be a source of regulatory risk for regulated banks. Originality/value - This paper focuses on an evolutionary aspect of text analysis, concerning standardization in the treatment of data, combined with the use of standard vocabularies. This allows a greater comparability of the output of the various studies, enabling us to further refine the methodology. The analysis model includes the definition of several concepts – such as “risk” and “disclosure” – at the base of the development of banking culture and representing basic goals of prudential regulation.

Corporate Culture and Shareholder Value in Banking Industry

This paper analyses the casual relationship between corporate culture and shareholder value using a sample of large banks in the French, German, Italian and U.K. banking systems over the 2000 to 2003 period. Firstly, we measure shareholder value using an Economic Value Added estimated through a procedure tailored to account for banking peculiarities. Secondly, we measure corporate culture using language as its particular artifact and developing a cultural survey based on the application of a text-analysis model to a corpus of reference texts produced by the sample of banks. We posit six hypotheses regarding the relationship between corporate culture and bank profits and shareholder value. Our results noticeably show that bank profits and shareholder value benefit from different orientations of banking corporate culture.

M&A and Post Merger Integration in Banking Industry: The Missing Link of Corporate Culture

The intense concentration process taking place in the financial systems of the major countries has attracted substantial attention from stakeholders and academics. The impact of M&A on value creation and efficiency / effectiveness improvements of banks involved appears, on the whole, disappointing and still hard to create benefits for customers. The reason seems to lie in the difficulty of governing a post-merger integration process, which generally requires good governance and management practices, significant experience and attention to cultural profiles and individuals’ behavior. More in detail, management literature recognizes the importance of corporate culture, considered as the set of values and decisions that drive individuals’ behaviors within organizations, for explaining alliance success in M&A operations. In fact cultural clashes could determine conflicts and negative effects, on one hand, on the timing and the effectiveness of the post-merger integration process and, on the other hand, on motivation and turnover of individuals. Set in Italian banking industry, this paper proposes a framework, applied to a representative sample of cases (about 78,2% of market share, based on total assets), for assessing cultural similarity of actors involved in M&A operations. Corporate culture is measured using an ethnographic approach focusing on language as its special artifact. The assessment is based on the definition of some key concepts that are relevant for the banking industry (e.g., competencies, competition, customer, disclosure, human resources, innovation, risk) and on a text-analysis model applied to a corpus of reference texts produced by the surveyed banks three years before M&A. The elaboration of data uses Wordsmith 4, a text analysis software developed by Oxford University. The paper is organized as follows: at first, we analyze and explain how low levels of cultural compatibility before M&A could limit the success of post-merger integration processes of banks. After, we propose and describe the measurement procedure of the cultural fit among bidder and target banks, based on text analysis. Lastly, we conclude with the discussion of the results obtained for each couple of banks involved in M&A and with suggestions for future applications of our framework.

Banks’ centrality in corporate interlock networks: evidences in Italy

The idea that the governance mechanisms affect firms’ performance is well acknowledged in management literature. The settings prevailing in governance studies explain board’s roles at the light of the agency theory framework. However, a complementary perspective is focused on the acquisition of critical resources closely related to activation of external relations with the most influential actors of firm’s environment. One such kind of external relationship is called interlocking directorates and occur when an individual simultaneously sits on the board of two companies. Moreover, since banks control financial capital, that is a resource that has a universal value for all firms, they are more likely to be very important actors inside corporate networks. By analyzing interlocking directorates among listed banks and non financial firms in Italy, using the methods and theory of social network analysis (SNA), I find that banks are the most influential actors in the network and that centrality in the network enhances financial performance.

Network Embeddedness, Specialization Choices and Performance in Investment Banking Industry

The idea that network structure and embeddedness affect firms’ competitive behaviour and performance is not new both in network literature and in strategic management literature. This study recognizes that the possibility to fully exploit network opportunities is depending on firm specialization choices. By analyzing network embeddedness within the European investment banking industry, I find that banks enhance performance by having a central position in their network and that specialization reduces bank’s benefits of having a central position in the network.

Does Investor Attention Influence Stock Market Activity? The Case of Spin-Off Deals

This paper investigates empirically the nature of the interactions between mass media, investor attention and the stock market using data from a sample of 16 spin-off deals traded on NYSE and published between 2004 and 2010 in “Wall Street Journal”, the US’s second-largest newspaper by circulation. The results show that: i) the impact of media sentiment on the stock market reactions is enhanced / moderated by the level of attention of investors; ii) individual investors’ attention is grabbed by stocks experiencing high trading volumes on the previous day; iii) high attention could result in downward pressure on stock market returns.