The determinants of net interest margins & net interest spreads in the Russian & Japanese Commercial Banking sectors

This study presents an empirical investigation of the determinants of net interest margins and spreads in the Russian and Japanese banking sectors with a particular focus on commercial banks. Net interest mar-gins and spreads serve as indicators of financial intermediation efficiency. This paper employed a bank-level unbalanced panel dataset prolonging from 2005 to 2014. My main empirical results show that bank characteristics explain the most of the variation in not only net interest margins but also in spreads. Capi-talization, liquidity risk, inflation, economic growth, private and government debt are important determi-nants of margin in Russia. In Japan to the contrary loan and deposit market concentration along with bank size do predominate. Common significant variables in both countries are the substitution effect, cost effi-ciency and profitability. Turning to net interest spreads, micro- and macro-specific variables are the main significant drivers in Russia. I reach the conclusion that there are no significant determinants of net interest spreads in Japan within the original selection of variables, but operating efficiency and deposits to total funding seem to prevail. In both countries, there are solid differences in the net interest margins as well as spreads once the pre- and the post-crisis periods are considered.

A arte ao serviço do império e das colónias: o contributo de alguns programas expositivos e museológicos para o discurso de legitimação territorial

Artigo escrito no âmbito da realização de tese de doutoramento em História da Arte financiado por bolsa FCT (SFRH/BD/63763/2009)

Cidadania pós-nacional

In the midst of changes of the world political order fostered mainly by the very debated phenomenon of globalization, the nation-state is confronted with new paradigms regarding their identification with society. Citizenship, as was defined up to the latter decades of the last century, rooted in nationalist ideals that tend to condition it full exercise on exclusionary policies oriented criteria, is not consistent with the human needs of present days. One can observe, mainly in Europe with the establishment of European citizenship, certain propensity towards a relative detachment between nationality and citizenship. It is expected with the present research to expose some of the arguments invoked by those who defend the possibility of a post-national conception of citizenship, i.e., decoupled from the concept of nationality and national boundaries, in order to develop a grounding for a necessary re-articulation of this institute. This assumption is based mainly on the movement of universal human rights and the revaluation of human dignity, especially through participatory policies on citizenship and respect for ethnic and cultural diversity.