Placing the Production of Investment Returns: An Economic Geography of Asset Management in Public Pension Plans

Finance, Globalization, and Urban Primacy

“…Financial firms, including banks, insurance firms, and asset managers, tend to locate close to each other in order to share information, financial infrastructure (for payments and trading, see, e.g. Agnes 2000), and labor market (Clark 2002;Urban 2019). As Krugman (1996, 404) puts it "a banking center might do best if it contains practically all of a nation's financial business."…”

Luxembourg and Ireland in global financial networks: Analysing the changing structure of European investment funds

“…Prior to 1985, cross-border asset management in Europe was a relatively small industry, focusing mainly on private wealth management, with London, Switzerland, and Luxembourg as its key centres. The management of assets of retail investors, however, was a domestic affair, with IFs and associated functions located in the same country as the country of their investors (Story & Walter, 1997). The 1985 UCITS Directive was path-breaking in this respect and a milestone of European financial integration.…”

“…Geographers have made major contributions to understanding asset management, its position in global finance, and impacts on economy and society. Key studies have focused on the behaviour of institutional (Clark, 2000a, 2000b; Clark et al, 2013) and individual investors (Clark & Knox‐Hayes, 2007), relationships among various groups of actors in the investment chains (Clark & Monk, 2017; Urban, 2019), the geography of command and control functions of asset management firms (Bodenman, 2000; Haberly et al, 2019), the structures of the asset management industry in international financial centres (IFCs) (Dörry, 2015), employment structure (Urban, 2018; Wójcik & Cojoianu, 2018), as well as impacts of asset management on everyday life (Langley, 2008). This literature shows how geography is present on both the production and consumption side of asset management, through IFCs and their networks, national and international regulations and institutions, as well as national, local, and corporate cultures.…”

Connectivity and growth: Financial centres in investment banking networks

“…The provision of FABS is highly concentrated in the world's leading FCs (Wójcik et al, 2019b). Firms located in these FCs have been documented to benefit from co-location with potential clients as well as co-producers and competitors (Clark, 2002;Cook et al, 2007;Urban, 2019). Clustering of financial services firms in FCs has been linked to higher firm growth (Pažitka and Wójcik, 2019) and market entry (Pandit et al, 2001).…”