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Crude oil is an indispensable resource for the world economy and European Union (EU) countries are strongly dependent on oil imports. In a framework defined by generally positive correlations between oil and stock prices, the paper investigates the relationship between financial companies’ stock prices and crude oil price using a sample of major financial companies headquartered in the EU. The link between stock prices and oil price risk is modelled using a set of macroeconomic variables that includes local stock market indices, the EUR/USD exchange rate, the oil imports dependency, inflation rate, and global volatility indices. We employ panel data as the base econometric model and an ARDL extension that is more appropriated for our research objectives. Our findings show that the EU financial sector is pervasively exposed to oil price changes over the long-run and this exposure is a component of financial companies’ exposure to real economy risk factors, which points towards the key role of the financial sector in the EU economy in transmitting systemic shocks. At the same time, we detect signs of a different behavior of market investors over the short-versus the long-run concerning the valuation of financial companies’ stock prices in relation to oil price and other macroeconomic variables, which raises distressing challenges for financial authorities.

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Our paper addresses the relevance of a set of continuous and categorical variables that describe industry characteristics to differences in performance between foreign versus locally owned companies in industries with dissimilar levels of technological intensity. Including data on manufacturing sector performance from 20 European Union member countries and covering the 2009–2016 period, we used the random forests methodology to identify the best predictors of EU manufacturing industries’ a priori classification based on two main attributes: ownership (foreign versus local) and technological intensity. We found that EU foreign-owned businesses dominate locally owned ones in terms of size, which gives them an edge in obtaining higher profits, cash flow and investments and coping with higher personnel costs. Furthermore, ownership is a more important differentiator of performance at the industry level than the industry’s technological level. The performance of foreign-owned high-tech manufacturing industry units across the EU is the most heterogeneous compared to the other four categories, indicating particularities linked to technological level, ownership, and even location. Our findings suggest that multinational enterprises in high-tech industries transfer to eastern EU countries’ activities and processes with lower technological intensity and higher labour intensity, but also that locally owned businesses, even within high-tech industries, have lower technological levels.

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