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The banking sectors in the Scandinavian countries are highly concentrated, typically undercapitalised and they have suffered through several crises since the 1990s. This article analyses the systemic risk in Denmark, Norway and Sweden focusing on the co‐dependence in the tails of equity returns of an individual bank and the overall banking system. We use, partly in a new way, conditional cross‐quantilograms (CQs) for this purpose. We find that the CQs are positive and statistically significant in the low and high quantiles indicating that the Scandinavian banks are systemically linked. The low‐quantile dependence is relatively stronger compared with the magnitude of dependence in the other quantiles. These results hold even after controlling for equity market volatility and economic policy uncertainty. We further observe that the systemic risk was insignificant from the early—2000 to the outbreak of the global financial crisis (GFC). However, after the GFC and the euro zone crisis, the systemic risk has increased substantially. Finally, we find that bank size has a positive relationship with systemic risk (low‐quantile dependence) while return on asset and loan to deposit ratio exhibit a negative influence. Furthermore, these relationships are asymmetric across quantiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: In many studies of self-care assessments for children, cultural differences in age-norm values have been shown. No study has evaluated whether there are cross-cultural differences in ADL motor and/or process skills in children when measured with the Assessment of Motor and Process Skills (AMPS). Aim: To investigate if there were systematic differences in ADL ability measured with the AMPS between children from the Nordic countries and North America and to evaluate the applicability of the existing international age-normative values for children from these two regions. Methods: Values from a total of 4 613 children, 3-15 years old, without known disabilities, from these geographical regions were compared with ANOVA. The difference in logits between each region and the mean values for each age group were calculated. Results: No differences of relevance in age-related ADL ability measures between children from the two geographical regions were found, and the age-norm values are applicable to both regions. Implications: The AMPS may be considered free from cultural bias and useful in both clinical practice and research concerned with children in both the Nordic countries and North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In all of Scandinavia, and particularly in Sweden, the growth of the disability pensioning program gave rise to an intense debate. The opponents of the program traced the rise in disability pensioning to a supposed shift in the labor market-less unskilled jobs, more physical and mental job strain, etc., forcing a growing number of people out of the open labor market. According to these critics, a large proportion of those forced out of the market ended up as disability pensioners. All Swedish citizens and most foreign citizens living in Sweden are covered by the National Pension Plan which provides a disability pension for individuals 16-64 years old. The number of disability pensioners in Sweden was stable at around 150,000 until the mid-1960s. At that time the first increase could be observed. But the real surge started in the beginning of the 1970s, and by 1976 about 300,000 people of working age were retired with a disability pension. Retirement is always associated with certain costs for the individual: a narrowing sphere of influence, loss of work identity, severance from friends at the workplace, etc. For an individual to retire voluntarily, these costs must be balanced out by the rewards of retirement. The impact of the steady rise in pension benefits should not be underestimated.