THE GENERAL OWNERSHIP STRUCTURE OF THE EUROPEAN AEROSPACE INDUSTRY A STATISTICAL AND NETWORK ANALYSIS

In this paper, we investigate the ownership structure of the 3143 EU28 aerospace companies in 2019, and extend the analysis to the 2428 neighbor partners outside EU28 and/or aerospace. Different from the previous studies, we consider all equity capital flows regardless of their size, and their monetary value instead of the corresponding ownership share. We further innovate by applying new methods to measure degree of influence power and hierarchical structure. The resulting picture shows that between the pure EU28 aerospace companies: (i) ownership relationships concern only relatively few companies (10%), which trigger horizontal and vertical structures; (ii) density is extremely low; (iii) relationships are fully hierarchical with no cross-ownership; (iv) capital is seldom transferred across business groups; (v) most of the main topological parameters have a typically polarized scale-free structure. When including also the ownership neighbors, some of those traits change substantially: (i) the share of connected companies substantially grows up to 63%; (ii) size and length of the largest pyramidal structures will grow remarkably, reaching a top of 874 companies; (iii) the industry becomes a full small-world structure, thus allowing huge capital transfer across business groups. Finally, a dramatic financialization, meant as a pivotal and quantitatively heavy role of financial operators, emerges also as a clear characteristic of the extended network.

10. Distributions and maintenance of capital

This chapter examines the controls imposed on return of a company’s capital to its members, first by considering the common law general principle that return of capital to shareholders is illegal unless permitted by statute. It then discusses the problem of how to distinguish between a legal distribution of profits and an illegal return of capital; transfer of profits to a capital redemption reserve and use of profits to pay up bonus shares; company’s issuance and redemption of redeemable shares or purchase of its own shares; purchased shares as treasury shares; and how a company may reduce its issued share capital by special resolution. The chapter also looks at capitalisations and employees’ share schemes. It includes analysis of three court cases that are particularly significant to distributions and the maintenance of capital.

EKATERINBURG MERCHANTS: THE PROBLEM OF SUCCESSION (THE SECOND HALF OF THE 19TH — EARLY 20TH CENTURIES)

The article analyzes the problem of succession in the ranks of Ekaterinburg’s merchant class and the variants of its solution used in the second half of the 19th — early 20th centuries. Succession is considered as a process of capital transfer by Ekaterinburg merchants to their heirs in order to continue the commercial and industrial affairs of the testator. The article discusses the methods of training merchants’ successors, including their use as employees and their inclusion in family companies as partners. Considerable attention is paid to studying the mechanism of inheritance transfer in emergency situations and conflicts that arose during inheritance process. The author explores the cases when the heirs on a female line (widows, daughters) acted as the successors of commercial and industrial affairs, the examples of involvement of sons-in-law in the management of family capital are also given. The article uses documents from the funds of the State Archive of the Sverdlovsk region (GASO), as well as the periodical press (newspapers “Permskie gubernskie vedomosti”, “Ekaterinburgskaya nedelya” and others). From archival materials, documents from the funds of the Ekaterinburg City Duma and the Ekaterinburg District Court are mainly used. The following conclusions are made. The procedure of transferring the inheritance by Ekaterinburg merchants to their successors was a complex and ambiguous process. Not all Ekaterinburg merchants managed to solve the problem of succession: for this reason, a number of family firms existed only during one generation. At the same time, many representatives of the city merchant class managed to solve the problem of succession by various ways, at least for 2–3 generations. The instability of merchant capital was largely a consequence of state policy, and to a lesser extent, the result of the unresolved problem of succession.

Importance of Proper Monetary Liquidity: Sustainable Development of the Housing and Stock Markets

In this paper, we infer that when no excess monetary liquidity exists, people tend to invest available capital in assets associated with a high return or low risk. However, when excess monetary liquidity occurs, capital may successively boost asset markets, and the stock market wealth is thus likely to spill into housing markets, resulting in bubbles in these two markets and therefore in the unsustainable development of both the housing and stock markets. This paper uses relevant data from the United Kingdom from January 1991 to March 2020 to verify whether excess monetary liquidity is a crucial factor determining the relationship between the housing and stock markets. Continuous and structural changes are found to exist between housing price and stock price returns. This paper employs the time-varying coefficient method for estimation and determines that the influence of stock price returns on housing returns is dynamic, and an asymmetrical effect can occur according to whether excess monetary liquidity exists. An excessively loose monetary policy increases asset prices and can thus easily result in a mutual rise in asset markets. By contrast, when excess monetary liquidity does not exist, capital transfer among markets can prevent autocorrelation during excessive market investment and thereby aggravate market imbalance.