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How do actors on financial markets transform the plethora of informational signals into concrete valuations of traded assets? How do they make decisions in an environment characterized by fundamental uncertainty? Although there is a rich tradition in economic sociology suggesting that emotions and other subjective factors play a decisive role in this regard, empirical studies of their relevance for economic action have remained rare. The present study seeks to fill this void. It investigates the emotional underpinnings of the practices of financial valuation in the German financial sector. Drawing on in-depth interviews with, and ethnographic observations of day traders and fund managers, the study shows that emotions are essential ingredients of their collective calculative practices. Results of the present study yield three empirically grounded key concepts that advance understanding of emotions in financial valuation: First, subjectively experienced market feelings enable traders and managers to imagine imminent market futures. Second, market sentiments reflect traders' attributions of specific emotional qualities to financial markets and facilitate their understanding of market behaviour. Third, floor emotions are collective emotions in which traders become involved in organizations and on trading floors that help mitigate situational uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study has the aim to determine empirically the contagion effect that occurs through the changes in the market’s expectations and the transmission of the subprime crisis in the USA on a group of developed and emerging economies for the period of time between 2000 and 2015 using the GARCH statistical method. The study concluded that there is an impact of transmission of the financial crisis from the USA market to the other markets under study, but there is a clear discrepancy. However, while the European and Asian markets are deeply affected by the crisis, the Latin American markets have known resilience to this crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that financial repression played a key role in the emergence of credit unions (CUs) in Costa Rica, along with other institutional factors. Credit unions took advantage of the opportunity to serve borrowers whose requests had been refused by banks. Given the sweeping reforms of the Costa Rican financial system aimed at reducing the scope of financial repression, this article poses the question of how those reforms impacted the competitiveness of CUs. Previous literature suggests that financial reform may lead to concentration in the financial sector, and not to the promotion of a more competitive environment. This article presents data showing that CUs in Costa Rica exhibited an enhanced ability to gain market share and also provides an explanation for the observed trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the presence of market failures, people need to find acceptable mechanisms to reduce uncertainty and maximize potential benefits. Because the principal failure is the asymmetry of information available, people resort to channels that transmit information to compensate for these drawbacks. These channels are networks of social relationships. This phenomenon is referred to as Social Capital, the network of people that an individual possesses, and whose use could bring about benefits. In the case of the financial market (especially the credit market), people make use of Social Capital when making decisions within the market. Through a series of linear models, drawing on data from wvs-2010 and enigh-2010, it was found that credit demand responds to a few variables that indicate individuals' perceptions of their environment (information). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this article is to emphasize the counter-cyclical nature of public commercial banking. This study will provide a historical analysis of the banking crises in Argentina and Uruguay at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In Argentina, this type of bank encompassed a variety of crucial actors involved in policies that successfully resolved the crisis and led to financial restructuring. In Uruguay, public commercial banking had a lesser role during the crisis resolution phase, but played a fundamental part in minimizing financial system risks that had contributed to the 2002 crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]