This paper assesses the impact of the geographic diversification of bank holding company (BHC) assets across the United States on their market valuations. Using two new identification strategies based on the dynamic process of interstate bank deregulation, we find that exogenous increases in geographic diversity reduced BHC valuations. We also find that the geographic diversification of BHC ass...

In this paper, we consider some non-standard renewal risk models with some dependent claim sizes and stochastic return, where an insurance company is allowed to invest her/his wealth in financial assets, and the price process of the investment portfolio is described as a geometric Lévy process. When the claim-size distribution belongs to some classes of heavy-tailed distributions and a constrai...

The title actually assigned to me for discussion on this occasion had a slightly more academic ring than the one I have chosen. I see no reason why, even before this group, a “spade” need be defined as “an elongated instrument by which perspiration and energy are applied to the movement of loose material from one place to another”; let’s just call it a “spade.” Let’s recognize that the Public U...

The web site of Taylor & Francis, the publisher of the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Arti® cial Intelligence, notes that the foundations of the company were laid in 1798 when Richard Taylor launched the Philosophical Magazine. It thus gives me a thrill to be able to write, more than two centuries later, the introduction to a JETAI special issue highlighting philosophical foundations o...

Recent financial liberalization in Taiwan has caused local banks to face major structural changes. This paper examines the cost structure of 36 local banks in Taiwan using the translog cost function and attempts to identify suitable operating strategies for cost reduction and performance improvements. Results indicate scale economies for small and large-sized banks and scope economies for all b...

More and more data about consumer-behaviour is becoming available through the use of database systems and electronic-banking systems. In this paper we describe a NN-based technique to extract some useful information from a database holding data about customers of an insurance-company. Using this NN, we try to learn more about the needs and wishes that lead consumers towards speciic behaviour, s...