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Our purpose is to explore how culture’s impact on investment is depending on uncertainty levels.

This study investigates the interplay between national culture, uncertainty, and corporate investment decisions. Focusing on the uncertainty avoidance dimension (HUA) from Hofstede’s culture framework and utilizing the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) as a measure of uncertainty, this research explores how culture’s impact on investment is depending on uncertainty levels.

Our results reveal that high HUA countries lower long-term investment during periods of heightened uncertainty, particularly in riskier investments like R&D, rather than capital expenditure. This relation is more pronounced for smaller firms. The findings suggest that HUA is associated with less risk taking, primarily when uncertainty is high. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the interaction between HUA and uncertainty exerts more significant and consistent effects on corporate investment than other cultural dimensions, religion, and various formal institutions, contrary to prevailing literature.

This study looks at the relationship between national culture and corporate investment under ambiguity, and what are the implications for risk taking. If national culture is related to riskier investments, such as R&D, relative to safer investments, like capital expenditure this would imply that risk taking is explaining the relationship between national culture and corporate investment. This relation should be clear during uncertain times. This is the first study to include the moderating effects of the level of uncertainty on the relation between national culture and corporate investment (or financial decisions in general).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of bank mergers on systemic and systematic risks on the relative merits of product and market diversification strategies. It also observes determinants of M&A deals criteria, product and market diversification positioning, crisis threshold and other regulatory and market factors.

This research examines the impact and association between merger announcements and regulatory reforms at bank and system levels by investigating the impact of various bank consolidation strategies on firms’ risks. We estimate beta(s) as an index of financial institutions’ systematic risk. We then develop an index of the estimated equity value loss as the long-rum marginal expected shortfall (LRMES). LRMES contributes to compute systemic risk (SRISK) contribution of these firms, which is the capital that a firm is expected to need if we have another financial crisis.

Large acquiring banks decrease systemic risk contribution in cross-border M&As with a non-bank financial institution, and witness profitability (ROA) gains, supporting geographic diversification stability. Capital requirements, activity restrictions and bank concentration increase systemic risk contribution in national mergers. Bank mergers with investment FIs targets enhance productivity but impair technical efficiency, contrary to bank-real estate deals where technical efficiency change accompanied lower systemic risk contribution.

Financial institutions are recommended to avoid trapped capital and liquidity by efficiently using local balance sheet and strengthening them via implementing models that clearly set diversification and netting benefits to determine capital reserves and to drive capital efficiency through the clarity on product–activity–geography diversification and focus. This contributes to successful ringfencing, decreases compliance costs and maximises returns and minimises several risks including systemic risk.

Policy implications: the adversative properties of bank mergers in respect of systemic risk require strict and innovative monitoring of bank mergers from the bidding level by both acquirers and targets and regulators and competition supervisory bodies. Moreover, emphasis on regulators/governments intervention and role, as it provides a stabilising factor of the markets and consecutively lower systemic risk even if the systematic idiosyncratic risk contribution was significant. However, such roles have to be well planned and scaled to avoid providing motives for banks to seek too-big-too-fail or too-big-to-discipline status.

This research contributes to the renewing regulatory debate on banks sustainable structures by examining the risk effect of bank diversification versus focus. The authors aim to address the multidimensional impacts and risks inherent to M&A deals, by examining the extent of the interconnectedness of M&A and its implications within and beyond the banking sector.

This study Investigates Shareholders' value adjustment in response to financial institutions (FIs) merger announcements in the immediate event window and in the extended event window. This study also investigates accounting measures performance, comparison of post-merger to pre-merger, including several cash flow measures and not just profitability measures, as the empirical literature review suggests. Finally, the authors examine FIs mergers orientations of diversification and focus create more value for shareholders (in the immediate announcement window and several months afterward) and/or generates better cash flows, profitability and less credit risk.

This study examines FIs merger effect on bidders’ shareholder’s value and on their observed performance. This examination deploys three techniques simultaneously: a) an event study analysis, to estimate and calculate abnormal returns (ARs) and cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) in the narrow windows of the merger announcement, b) buy and hold event study analysis, to estimate ARs in the wider window of the event, +50 to +230 days after the merger announcement and c) an observed performance analysis, of financial and capital efficiency measures before and after the merger announcement; return on equity, liquidity, cost to income ratio, capital to total assets ratio, net loans to total loans, credit risk, loans to deposits ratio, other expenses and total assets, economic value addition, weighted average cost of capital and return on invested capital. Deal criteria of value, mega-deals, strategic orientation (as in Ansoff (1980) growth strategies), acquiring bank size and payment method are set as individually as control variables.

Results show that FIs mergers destroy share value for the bidding firms pursuing a market penetration strategy. Market development and product development strategies enable shareholders’ value creation in short and long horizons. Diversification strategies do not influence bidding shareholders’ value. Local bank to bank mergers create shareholders’ value and enhance liquidity and economic value in the short run. Bank to bank cross border mergers create value for bidders’ in the long term but are associated with high costs and higher risks.

A significant advancement over the current literature is in assessing mergers, not only for bank bidders but also for the three pillars FIs of the financial sector; banks, real-estate companies and investment companies mergers. It is an improvement over current finance literature because it deploys two different strategies in the analysis. At a univariate level, shareholder value creation and market reaction to merger announcements are examined over short (−5 or +5 days) and long (+230 days) windows of the event. Followed by regressing, the resultant CARs and BHARs over financial performance variables at the multivariate level.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether the 2007 identification of commonality in liquidity by Galariotis and Giouvris for the UK is robust to different methodological approaches; to find whether commonality is priced; and to identify how changes in trading regimes, hence liquidity provision, affect the relationship between commonality and excess returns.

The paper builds on the 2001 methodology of Huberman and Halka. In addition it extracts common factors using principal component analysis to test the effect of commonality on excess returns.

The findings of this paper confirm the presence of a systematic time‐varying component in UK spreads (under a different approach) even after controlling for well‐known spread determining variables.

The paper provides original evidence on the presence and the effect of systematic liquidity on asset pricing in the UK, showing that it is sensitive to the nature of trading regimes. It is concluded that in order‐driven regimes the effect of commonality on asset pricing is reduced, hence policy makers should consider this when deciding on trading systems