Suchergebnisse

In today's world where fewer and fewer barriers and borders limit relationships, interactions between things, people, services, it is no wonder that in a globalized economy like ours, interests, connections, needs of various aspects from people all around the world, happen to coexist and working their way out in certain defined places. There are indeed, some places which more than others, for various reasons ranging from political situation, location, economy rather than taxation, have the ability to attract capital and resources from other countries, giving rise to international financial hubs. One on all in Europe is definitively the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg which with an area of 2,586 km² and a population of only 602,005 people, it is home to more than 130 international banks, Europe's number one investment fund centre, World's top ten largest Private Equity houses, Europe's number one cross-border insurance center, and EU-regulatory framework and EU-wide licensing of financial services. The following chapters, indeed, aim to disclose the main features which bring Luxembourg to be that leading financial center in Europe, the reasons why so many international banks and firms choose the Grand Duchy as their home, the most relevant aspects of the country economy with a focus on the leading sectors. The first two chapters will give a global overview of what the situation is in Luxembourg in order to have a picture of today business and highlighting the strength of the grand duchy economy, bringing on aspects and achievements globally acknowledged. The second chapter however will give more insights on the specific of Luxembourg tax system, detailing the appealing tax regime and even so, the support and protection of the double tax conventions signed with countries worldwide, strengthen the business climate in this country. The analysis will go through the key factors that make Luxembourg so attractive, like favourable tax treaty agreements with 57 countries, a very competitive company taxation at 28.59%, no withholding taxes on dividends, paid to EU or double tax treaty resident, lowest VAT rate in Europe at 15%. Will together be analysed, the most used incentives for the entities, as the investment tax credits (Luxembourg tax law, indeed provides a tax credit available and amounts to 13% of the increase in investments in tangible depreciable assets made during the tax year), or the new regime of the intellectual properties which give the possibility to have on a net income from qualifying IP assets, a benefits of an 80% exemption from income taxes. The essay will continue with the coverage of the core business of Luxembourg financial activity; the third chapter will give a detailed analysis of banking and wealth management, asset management services offered, the corporate finance services required by all the entities which are created and have the registered office in the Grand Duchy, followed by the analysis pf private equity and venture capital investments, real estate investment vehicles, and hedge funds which can be considered the main features of the country financial activity. The last two chapters will analyze and emphasize the international character of the system and the future prospective on how the economy, the activities and the services may evolve, giving more insights on which the priorities will be in the near futures and where the efforts will be made in other achieve some certain standard of sustainability. The fourth chapter indeed will focus on the constantly growing relationship established with the Chinese economic world the Arabic world, which both play a very important role in the today economy and happen to be two of the main actors of Luxembourg financial system. The fifth and last chapter will highlight how Luxembourg has a comprehensive domestic climate finance agenda which since 2015, have seen the government and the financial services industry, working together in a dedicated climate finance task force to implement a coherent and fully integrated climate finance strategy. The Luxembourg government contributes to the technical support facility of the Amundi Planet Emerging Green One, the largest green bond fund in the world. This Luxembourg based investment fund targets green bonds emitted by banks in developing countries and at the same time helps develop green bond policies, training programs, and best practices in such markets through the technical support facility.

Social impact finance has emerged in recent years in response to the crisis of traditional welfare systems and the gradual decrease in public funding to the Third Sector, by offering new financial instruments to convey private capital to social entrepreneurship in order to create positive social impact combined with economic returns (Agrawal and Hockerts, 2019; Daggers and Nicholls, 2016; Hochstadter and Scheck, 2015). The debate on the effective application of these instruments has so far focused on social impact as a measurement for return on invested capital, neglecting the role of motivations driving involved agents (investors and social entrepreneurs). In this work, we investigate the impact of different financial instruments on governance structures and on the motivations of social enterprise stakeholders, both from a theoretical point of view and through pilot experiments that mimic the main features of social impact finance. Our experimental design aims to recreate in the laboratory the relationship between social enterprise, beneficiaries and financiers, including the following characteristics: extremely diversified/personalized goods/services (complexity); quality of the good/service; risk (linked to the effectiveness of the intervention provided) and components related to: information asymmetries, evaluation (impact), parameters of the financial instrument. Starting from this setting, we intend to evaluate the effect on motivations of alternative evaluation methods (input, output, outcome) linked to the financial instrument.

L'articolo evidenzia come nell'ultimo decennio si è sviluppato un diverso modo di intendere la politica finanziaria all'interno di un mercato comunque invariato nelle sue caratteristiche. Essa integra la finanza sostenibile che intende realizzare, nel contempo, utilisociali e azioni a tutela dell'ambiente e dei diritti delle generazioni future. Tra le nuove tipologie di strumenti finanziari, si sono distinti i green bonds (detti anche climate bonds), vere e proprie obbligazioni che finanziano progetti sostenibili. Questi ultimi hanno in sé grandi potenzialità di sviluppo e rappresentano uno strumento ritenuto efficace per realizzare azioni concrete nel campo dell'ecologia facendo convergere interessi politici, finanziari e sociali. ; The paper shows how in the last decade a different way of understanding financial policy has developed within a market, that, however, remains unchanged in its basic characteristics. It implements sustainable finance which aims at promoting social profits and actions towards environmental protection and the rights of future generations. They have a great market potential and represent an effective means to implement concrete actions in the field of ecology. Green bonds are also able to combine political, financial and social interests.

The financial crisis affecting European Monetary Union (EMU) since late 2008 led to the deterioration of credit quality of several countries in the Eurozone. The thesis explores both financial and macroeconomic issues of such debt crisis. The goal is to infer a cross-country sovereign risk measure in order to monitor and anticipate perilous recessive spirals which might lead to default. In the first part, results on risk-neutral pricing of defaultable claims are applied to government bonds, so that idiosyncratic risk premia decompositions are available for any EMU country. The sovereign risk portion is detachable with the use of standardized Credit Default Swaps (CDS) contracts. Dynamic term structures of hedging portfolios are coherently retrievable in this new standard market, bringing forth a set of default-free sovereign term structures. A comparison of these latter to money-market rates induces an alternative definition of the CDS-bond basis. The determinants of synthetic-cash credit market arbitrage opportunities are to be investigated within a full macro-financial environment.This motivates the second part of this work. The well-known prociclicality of the banking sector in real business cycle plays a central role in the exacerbation of economic crises. In this sense, credit crunch and increase in global risk aversion of investors may induce both safe-haven (liquidity floods) and default (liquidity dries-up) phenomena, attributable to shifts in sovereign debt demand curves. The aim becomes thus to construct a dynamic score which allows to detect the 'point of no return', beyond which target country cannot increase its debt level whatever the premium provided in yields, because of a lack of investors willing to buy it. A pure econometric approach is unsatisfacory, so the analysis evolves with the economic backdrop provided by the analysis of Ponzi borrowing schemes. Positive growth rates of debt-to-gdp ratios evaluated at market yields induce a dynamic scoring which can be compared to risk-neutral hazard rates, and be used to compute a physical default metric. Cointegration analysis shows long-run equilibria between the two default probability measures in non-core countries. This proves that both macroeconomic and financial conditions pace a common long-term path as instructed by the joint macro-financial situation of target distressed country.