This paper aims to empirically investigate the effects of various components of net working capital on the profitability of European firms in the retail industry. A balanced panel sample of 19 retail companies listed on Euronext was selected over a period of six years, from 2016 to 2021 to assess the relationship. Results indicate that profitability and inventory turnover in days have a significant positive relationship, while the average collection period has a significant negative relationship. Therefore, if these retail enterprises effectively manage the cash conversion cycle and maintain optimal levels of accounts receivables and inventories, their profitability will increase. This paper provides two recommendations for practitioners. First, the retail companies’ management should lower the number of days’ account receivable, which increases the actual profit and consequently increase profitability. Second, the company should keep a reasonably large inventory level to lower the risk of product scarcity and to cut expenses when prices are fluctuating, both of which lead to higher profitability.
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This book is a journey through coexisting, emerging or speculated about, types of digital value transfer infrastructures. Using digital value transfer infrastructures as a central case study, this thesis is concerned with unpacking the negotiation processes that shape the governance, design and political purposes of digital infrastructures that are closely linked to the public interest and state sovereignty. In particular, the papers that are assembled in this manuscript identify and inspect three main socio-technical developments occurring in the domain of value transfer technologies: a) the privatization and platformization of digital payment infrastructures; b) the spread of blockchain-based digital value transfer infrastructures; c) the construction of digital value transfer infrastructures as public utilities, from the part of public institutions or organizations. Concerned with the relationship between law, discourse and technological development, the thesis explores four transversal issues that strike differences and peculiarities of these three scenarios: i) privacy; ii) the synergy and mutual influence of legal change and technological development in the construction of digital infrastructures; iii) the role of socio-technical imaginaries in policy-making concerned with digital infrastructures; iv) the geography and scale of digital infrastructures. The analyses lead to the argument that, in the co-development of legal systems and digital infrastructures that are core to public life, conflicts are productive. Negotiations, ruptures and exceptions are constitutive of the unending process of mutual reinforcement, and mutual containment, in which a plurality of agencies – expressed through legal institutions, symbolic systems, as well as information and media structures – are entangled.
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MoneyLab is a network of artists, activists, and geeks experimenting with forms of financial democratization. Entering the 10th year of the global financial crisis, it still remains a difficult yet crucial task to distinguish old wine from its fancy new bottles. The MoneyLab network questions persistent beliefs, from Calvinist austerity, growth, and up-scaling, to trustless, automated decision making and (anarcho-)capitalist dreams of cybercurrencies and blockchained solutionism.We consider experiments with digital coops, internet-based payment and network-based revenue models as spaces of political imagination, with an equally important aesthetic program. In this second MoneyLab Reader the network delves into topics like the financialization of art; love as a binary proposition on the blockchain; the crowdfunding of livelihood; the cashless society; financial surveillance of the poor; universal basic income as the real McCoy or a real sham; the cooperative answer to Airbnb and Uber; the history of your financial dashboard; and, Hollywood’s narration of the financial crisis. Fintech rushes through our veins, causing a whirlwind of critical concepts, ideas and imaginaries. Welcome to the eye of the storm.
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Het aantal personen dat onder bewind staat is tussen 2009 en 2018 ruim verdubbeld van 97.000 naar 242.000 personen. Het probleem is dat bewindvoerders per cliënt 17 uren per jaar hebben, wat vaak net voldoende is om de financiële zaken te regelen. De sociale cohesie en het aanleren van financiële competenties schiet hierdoor te kort, waardoor dit grote gevolgen heeft voor de relatie onderling. Bewindvoerders en financiële hulpverleners zijn opzoek naar nieuwe manieren om personen onder bewind/financiële problemen in beweging te krijgen, te motiveren en het gedrag positief te beïnvloeden. Dit tot doel dat ze de drie kerncompetenties voor financieel zelfredzaamheid die door het Nibud zijn vastgelegd stap voor stap aanleren en in de praktijk kunnen toepassen. In de afgelopen 2,5 jaar hebben de projectpartners verschillende onderzoeken uitgevoerd. Tijdens de Take-off hbo is de doelstelling om de resultaten en onderzoeken met bewindvoerders en personen onder bewind, uit te werken tot de prototype Talking Money dat kan worden getest met bewindvoerders en overige belanghebbende.
