This paper is a contribution to the ongoing debate on the benefits and drawbacks of bank revenue diversification. Revenue diversification may benefit banks if diversified activities are inherently less risky and possess high returns, while it may hurt banks if diversified activities are more risky and have low returns. Analyzing a panel dataset of 200 commercial banks from all South Asian countries, we found that overall revenue diversification into non-interest income has a positive impact on the profitability and stability of South Asian commercial banks. We further observed that different types of non-interest income-generating activities have different impacts on bank performance and stability. While fees and commission incomes have a negative impact on the profitability and stability of South Asian commercial banks, other non-interest income has a positive impact. Our results imply that banks can benefit from revenue diversification if they diversify into specific types of non-interest income-generating activities. Our findings are robust and relevant to the use of alternative measures of revenue diversification, profitability and stability.

No abstract

SUMMARY This paper examines how market microstructure variables can be used to forecast foreign exchange (FX) rates at frequencies of one to several minutes. We use a unique FX dataset of global inter‐dealer electronic transactions and applied the artificial neural network (ANN) as the predicting model. The immediately preceding bid and ask prices are significant factors in these predictions, which is in keeping with market microstructure theory. These microstructure factors have not been tested in an ANN model before. High‐frequency trading strategies based on the ANN model are shown to be profitable even when transaction costs are included. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

<p>This study grants empirical support to the fact that profitability of the Pakistani banking sector was reduced during 2008-2009 and among other factors this reduction was attributed to the global financial crisis and resulting increased investments portfolio in total assets. We have used panel data of all Pakistani scheduled banks during 2005-2012. We proved theoretically and empirically that fixed effects model is appropriate for this study. <em>Second </em>stage analysis confirms the above results and shows that the profitability of Pakistani banking sector was higher in pre and post crisis years than, in financial crisis period. Profitability was relatively lower in the after crisis years then in before crisis years because of the residual effects of the global financial crisis. In <em>third stage</em> analysis we found that private and foreign banks were more affected by financial crisis than public sector, specialized and Islamic banks. Our results are robust to alternate measures of profitability. In context of developing countries this study will help bank managers and the regulators to stay better prepared to face any financial crisis in future.  </p>

No abstract

BackgroundProtecting and improving the personal health of healthcare workers is critical to improving the efficiency and quality of care. To effectively meet the needs of the emergency service system, emergency physicians need to be in a good state of health. However, due to the special characteristics of work in the emergency department, emergency physicians have to face various psychosocial pressures, which may bring them physical and mental distress. Therefore, this study aims to explore the emergency physicians' self-rated health status and its related factors, to provide an empirical study for the improvement of emergency physicians' self-rated health status.MethodA cross-sectional survey of emergency physicians was conducted in China between July and August 2018. The questionnaires contained items on demographic characteristics, behavioral lifestyle and job-related factors, as well as self-rated health. The generalized ordinal logistic model was used to identify related factors of emergency physicians' self-rated health status.ResultsOnly 14.4% of Chinese emergency physicians considered themselves in good health status. Results showed that emergency physicians who never exercised (β = 0.76, p &lt; 0.001) and exercised &lt;2 times per week (β = 0.34, p &lt; 0.001) were more likely to report poor health status. In addition, emergency physicians with good sleep quality (β = −3.84, p &lt; 0.001), fewer night work shifts (β = −0.47, p &lt; 0.001), less frequency of visiting patients (β = −0.33, p &lt; 0.001), never suffered the workplace violence (β = −0.47, p &lt; 0.001) and never perceived effort-reward imbalance (β = −0.68, p &lt; 0.001) were more likely to report good self-rated health.ConclusionChinese emergency physicians' self-rated health status was not optimistic. Self-rated health is associated with multiple domains of work-related factors and personal lifestyle. Feasible measures should be taken to improve the working environment of emergency physicians, develop acceptable shift schedules for employees, monitor and maintain the health status of emergency department physicians.

The volatility risk premium (VRP) has long been the core issue in option pricing and risk management. The VRP is usually defined as a linear function of volatility which ignores the time-varying property of VRP and limits the degree of freedom of the model. In this paper, we adopt a CIR process in the stochastic volatility model (VRP-CIR-SV) to incorporate the mean-reverting and time-varying properties of VRP. We show that the decomposition of VRP is consistent to investor’s behaviour. Our Monte Carlo simulation results show that, compared with the traditional linear VRP model, the VRP-CIR-SV model can better depict the rich shapes of implied volatility curve. Our paper innovatively models the time-varying VRP with mean-reverting property, which may provide new thoughts for VRP estimation.

BackgroundOrganizational commitment is important for job performance and employee retention. However, studies on the level of organizational commitment and its related factors among emergency physicians in China are scarce. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the factors associated with organizational commitment among emergency physicians in China.MethodsA national cross-sectional study was conducted in 2018 among emergency physicians in China. Data were collected from 10,457 emergency physicians using a standard structured anonymous questionnaire, including demographic characteristics, organizational structure factors and work environment factors. A generalized linear model was used to explore the correlation between the independent variables and organizational commitment.ResultsIn this study, 55.3% of emergency physicians reported a moderate level of organizational commitment. The physicians who were male, younger than 40 years old, had a mid-level title and had a lower average monthly income were more likely to show lower organizational commitment levels. Conversely, the organizational commitment was higher among physicians who perceived that promotion is easy and the number of emergency physicians meet their daily work or had not experienced workplace violence in the last year.ConclusionsThe study showed that organizational commitment among Chinese emergency physicians was moderate and related to gender, age, monthly income, frequency of daily visits, departmental promotion mechanism and workplace violent. Targeted interventions are needed to improve the organizational commitment of emergency physicians in a comprehensive way.