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Retailers have long been aware that weather affects the sales of a myriad of products, but until now, most were not in a position to manage the risks weather presents. Rising weather variability combined with advances in weather-index financial instruments have prompted new interest in investigating the relationship between sales and weather. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of changes in weather on UK retail sales, to estimate the contribution of weather to sales, and evaluate the maximum potential loss caused by adverse weather, for each season and retail sector.

The authors present a methodology to identify and quantify the extent to which a company is exposed to weather risks, in order to incorporate them into its risk management policy and take actions to mitigate these risks. For each season and each retail category, the authors provide a measure of the impact of weather on sales that can be used as a benchmark to analyse sales performance.

The authors propose a new risk assessment indicator to evaluate the potential losses caused by adverse weather (WeatherRisk). The authors show that intra-annual changes in weather significantly affect retail sales. The exposure of retail categories to weather are not the same depending on the season, and the response of individual retail categories to the same change in weather varies considerably. Although temperature is a predominant explanatory variable, the authors show that weather-sensitivity analysis should include precipitation, humidity rate and wind.

One limitation of this study is that the authors individually compute WeatherRisk for each significant weather variable. Further research could explore new approaches to evaluate Total WeatherRisk, which take into account potential multicollinearity issues between weather variables.

The methodology allows retailers to measure the effects of weather on sales performance, evaluate the risks at stake, and protect sales and margins from weather risks, with newly available index-based financial instruments. Managers may now actively use weather as a differential advantage, and at the same time focus their efforts on improving resiliency to increasing climate variability.

In this paper, the authors produce a detailed analysis of the exposure of each retail sectors to unseasonal weather. This is the first time all retail sectors are analysed and ranked per season at a national level. The authors provide managers with actionable information to improve their understanding of how weather impact sales over each season, and to allow them to structure weather-index-based instruments with financial partners.

Strategic decisions taken during financial instability periods are directly influenced by the competitive environment in which actors are evolving. In the highly financialized context in which they proceed, firms are moving in a half light. The rational expectations hypothesis no longer stands relevant when the information made available to actors is incomplete. The aim of this paper is to discuss how in such a situation, firms and banks interact using uncertain profit expectations, and then feed financial crises.

The paper pinpoints the key role played by a competitive environment on firms' and banks' strategic governance, by discussing a cognitive or experience linked expectations model. It then focuses on the free play of behavior in these enhanced competitive spaces.

Once admitted the irrelevancy of the rational expectations hypothesis, an optimal way of characterizing expectations under uncertainty is proposed. This solution helps to illustrate how the free play of banks and firms in today's enhanced competitive spaces generate systematic escalations on the markets.

Financial governance would gain more from being steered towards a more explicit consideration of speculative behaviors: the cognitive or experience linked expectations model proposed in this paper is a first attempt to discuss this question.

This paper aims to explore how banks have modified their behaviours since the subprime crisis and their influence on credit access for SMEs.

This paper aims to explore how banks have modified their behaviours since the subprime crisis and their influence on credit access for SMEs.

We provide evidence that strategic orientations adopted by banks (both fragile and robust) are quite voluntary and not simply the result of following regulations. Unfortunately, these orientations have hampered SMEs' access to credit.

The core result of the paper is to emphasize that banking behaviours have considerably changed just after the subprime crisis and that SMEs have to deal with this new reality. These findings could be of interest for regulators and banking authorities to control liquidity constraints and guarantee both the stability of the global banking system and sustainable economic growth.

Using an original data reduction method and balance sheet analysis, this paper found evidence of key changes in banking behaviours during the subprime crisis.