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How people assess their prospects and act accordingly is anchored in time and space. But context is only half the story. Human beings share predispositions in favour of the here and now, discounting the future, and risk aversion. This paper provides a framework for integrating cognition with context in economic geography focusing upon agency, resources, and risk and uncertainty in European labour markets. In doing so, it seeks to avoid essentialising the individual while ensuring that the resulting framework does not leave individuals as cyphers of time and place. The framework is illustrated by reference to individual’s assessments of the consequences of technological change for their employment prospects in a multicountry European setting. Implications are drawn for a behavioural economic geography that is policy relevant.

Understanding observed geographical patterns in financial behaviour requires an analytical approach that joins global forces with national institutions and behavioural practices to account for similarities and differences in key explanatory variables. Patterns of home-related expenditures are regressed against individuals’ attributes including age, gender, income, and employment status along with measures of individual’s financial acumen. It is shown that there are differences in the statistical significance of individual attributes and financial factors (competence and risk tolerance) by jurisdiction, and between groups of jurisdictions distinguishing between Anglo-American and European countries. Implications are drawn for research at intersection of global finance, jurisdictional context and individual decision-making.

At the heart of UK pension fund regulation are quasi-compulsory codes of practices and tests of pension fund trustees’ competence. This regime of ‘soft’ regulation focuses upon the ‘performance’ of governance and is intrusive in terms of expected behaviour and board decision-making. Framed by defined benefit pension obligations in the private sector, it lacks rigorous standards of value when applied to defined contribution pensions. As such, pension ‘adequacy’ is discounted by the premium placed on performing governance in the market for financial services. The UK pension regime has hit a dead-end being neither fit-for-purpose in a world of technological disruption and financial turmoil nor capable of empowering those funds willing and able to innovate in the best interests of participants.

ESG metrics are increasingly important in the global investment management industry. Why this came to pass given the limited appetite for responsible investing in the industry is the subject of this paper. Although the business case for ESG provides an explanation for its increasing uptake whereby market actors are increasingly convinced of the merits of ESG as a profit centre, this explanation is insufficient. By contrast, the adoption the ESG programme offers a means of rewriting the terms of risk management and value creation that while grounded in the business case also serve to address challenges to the legitimacy of the global asset management industry. These developments are illustrated in a case study of the establishment and growth of TruCost and its purchase by S&P Global in 2016.

This article explores whether increasing fossil fuel divestment commitments are related to the reduction of capital flows into the oil and gas sector, based on an analysis of syndicated lending, equity and bond underwriting across 33 countries from 2000 to 2015. We find that increasing oil and gas divestment pledges in a country are associated with lower capital flows to domestic oil and gas companies. This effect is enhanced in more stringent environmental policy regimes and diminished in countries which heavily subsidise fossil fuels. However, the divestment movement may have an unintended effect, insofar as domestic banks situated in countries with high divestment commitments and stringent environmental policies provide more finance to oil and gas companies abroad. We explain these findings through the lens of institutional theory and show how both regulatory and socially normative elements of institutions shape this dynamic.

This article focuses on asset owners, such as pension funds, and their models of investment management and describes the choice between insourcing, outsourcing, and re-intermediation. Drawing on the principal-agent problem and emphasizing the challenges facing asset owners when attempting to realize value from asset managers, the authors identify the dimensions of the management “problem.” Implications are drawn for the management practices of asset owners and the implementation of investment strategy combining in-house capabilities with external relationships. The authors also identify a set of metrics of performance that is consistent with superior long-term investment performance metrics to a range of asset owners, large and small.

In an era of rising national indebtedness, the public sector is increasingly reliant upon private financial interests for the provision and maintenance of infrastructure. The focus of this paper is...

In this article, we investigate the relationship between volatility in the stock market and the trading behaviour of employees in defined-contribution (DC) pension schemes. We found that 10 per cent of our sample exhibited compulsive gambling behaviour; in other words, they both ‘fed’ and ‘fed-off’ volatility, and that their individual attributes such as gender, experience in the firm and age clearly influenced their trading behaviour. Our findings shed new light on the behavioural drivers of financial decision-making in a saving-for-retirement setting, and on the crucial importance of the need for the financial industry and policy makers to address the growing onus put on ill-equipped non-professional financial decision makers. JEL Codes. G12, G41, J26, C38

We report results from a study of superannuation member advice‐seeking within their plan, explaining observed patterns by member age, gender, issue salience and size‐of‐bet effect. Inquiry mode, frequency and volume of contact with the advice‐provider, and sensitivity of members to legislative change and macroeconomic events are considered. Results show that gender (female more likely than male), age (older rather than younger), balance (larger rather than smaller) and experience (longer rather than shorter) are the strongest advice‐seeking predictors, consistent over time. Findings suggest member engagement around retirement planning may be more effective when considering the factors affecting advice‐seeking behaviour in general.

Utilising a large comparative survey across 11 countries, it is shown that country effects condition the individual uptake of income protection insurance and that shared attributes, including labour market status, are important factors in determining the take-up of income protection insurance, whatever the respondents' country of residence. We observed differences in the respondents' coping strategies, including self-reliance, and were able to distinguish between migrant workers and those who work in their country of origin, along with the “special” case of the Australian respondents. These findings have implications for the ongoing debate on the labour market effects of globalisation and the significance of national institutions and regulatory practices.

This paper explores how fossil fuel divestment commitments and environmental policies have shaped the geography of capital flows into the oil and gas sector, based on the analysis of syndicated len...

Long-term investors (LTIs), such as pension funds, super funds, sovereign funds, and endowments, are increasingly engaging in innovative investment activities. Many have sought to use their time horizon and their scale as comparative advantages in order to access financial markets on better terms, aligning their own interests and those of their beneficiaries with external service providers. While these innovative approaches to investing have seemingly come with successful outcomes, they have led to a new problem: The objective assessment of the performance of these new long-term investment strategies. The risk-adjusted rate of return, relative to some benchmark by asset class and/or asset manager, is no longer sufficient for judging bespoke inputs with long-term outcomes. Boards of directors, and the senior managers they hold accountable, require new kinds of metrics to assess performance. In this paper, we provide a principles-based model of investment management relevant to all long-term investors, which we then use to formulate a set of measurements and metrics of performance appropriate for even new and innovative investment processes. We argue that our metrics of performance are superior for long-term investors than existing methods to assess investment performance.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, new financial technology (fintech) start-ups have emerged to challenge the long-established position of financial services incumbents. Drawing on resource-based theory and institutional theory, we investigate how the emergence of fintech start-ups and their financing is shaped by new regional knowledge creation and the lack of trust in financial institutions across 21 OECD countries, 226 regions and over the 2007 – 2014 period. While we find that knowledge generated in the IT sector is much more salient for fostering new fintech start-ups than knowledge generated in the financial services sector, we also find an increasing (decreasing) importance of new knowledge created in the financial services sector (IT sector) as fintech start-ups grow and seek financing. Our paper unveils that in the years where the level of trust in financial institutions falls within a region, there is an increase in the financing provided to fintech start-ups, however regions with historically low average levels of trust in financial institutions attract less fintech investment overall.

This paper explores whether increasing fossil fuel divestment commitments are related to the reduction of capital flows into the oil & gas sector, based on an analysis of syndicated lending, equity and bond underwriting across 33 countries from 2000 to 2015. We find that increasing oil & gas divestment pledges in a country are negatively related with new capital flows to domestic oil & gas companies. This effect is enhanced in more stringent environmental policy regimes and diminished in countries which heavily subsidise fossil fuels. However, the divestment movement may have an unintended effect, insofar as domestic banks situated in countries with high divestment commitments and stringent environmental policies provide more finance to oil & gas companies abroad. We explain these findings through the lens of institutional theory, and show how both regulatory and socially normative elements of institutions shape this dynamic.