44,543 research outputs found

    Addressing Risk Challenges in a Changing Financial Environment:the Need for Greater Accountability in Financial Regulation and Risk Management

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    The need for continuous monitoring and regulation is particularly attributed to, and justified by, the inevitable presence of risks and uncertainty – both in terms of certain externalities and indeterminacies which are capable of being reasonably quantified and those which are not. Amongst other goals, this paper aims to address complexities and challenges faced by regulators in identifying and assessing risk, problems arising from different perceptions of risk, and solutions aimed at countering problems of risk regulation. It will approach these issues through an assessment of explanations put forward to justify the growing importance of risks, well known risk theories such as cultural theory, risk society theory and governmentality theory. “Socio cultural” explanations which relate to how risk is increasingly becoming embedded in organisations and institutions will also be considered as part of those factors attributable to why the financial environment has become transformed to the state in which it currently exists. A consideration of regulatory developments which have contributed to a change in the way financial regulation is carried out, as well as developments which have contributed to the de formalisation of rules and a corresponding “loss of certainty”, will also constitute focal points of the paper. To what extent are risks capable of being quantified? Who is able to assist with such quantification – and why has it become necessary to introduce other regulatory actors and greater measures aimed at fostering corporate governance and accountability into the regulatory process? These questions constitute some of the issues which this paper aims to address

    Uncertainty quantification for kinetic models in socio-economic and life sciences

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    Kinetic equations play a major rule in modeling large systems of interacting particles. Recently the legacy of classical kinetic theory found novel applications in socio-economic and life sciences, where processes characterized by large groups of agents exhibit spontaneous emergence of social structures. Well-known examples are the formation of clusters in opinion dynamics, the appearance of inequalities in wealth distributions, flocking and milling behaviors in swarming models, synchronization phenomena in biological systems and lane formation in pedestrian traffic. The construction of kinetic models describing the above processes, however, has to face the difficulty of the lack of fundamental principles since physical forces are replaced by empirical social forces. These empirical forces are typically constructed with the aim to reproduce qualitatively the observed system behaviors, like the emergence of social structures, and are at best known in terms of statistical information of the modeling parameters. For this reason the presence of random inputs characterizing the parameters uncertainty should be considered as an essential feature in the modeling process. In this survey we introduce several examples of such kinetic models, that are mathematically described by nonlinear Vlasov and Fokker--Planck equations, and present different numerical approaches for uncertainty quantification which preserve the main features of the kinetic solution.Comment: To appear in "Uncertainty Quantification for Hyperbolic and Kinetic Equations

    Boltzmann-type models with uncertain binary interactions

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    In this paper we study binary interaction schemes with uncertain parameters for a general class of Boltzmann-type equations with applications in classical gas and aggregation dynamics. We consider deterministic (i.e., a priori averaged) and stochastic kinetic models, corresponding to different ways of understanding the role of uncertainty in the system dynamics, and compare some thermodynamic quantities of interest, such as the mean and the energy, which characterise the asymptotic trends. Furthermore, via suitable scaling techniques we derive the corresponding deterministic and stochastic Fokker-Planck equations in order to gain more detailed insights into the respective asymptotic distributions. We also provide numerical evidences of the trends estimated theoretically by resorting to recently introduced structure preserving uncertainty quantification methods

    Actors and factors - bridging social science findings and urban land use change modeling

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    Recent uneven land use dynamics in urban areas resulting from demographic change, economic pressure and the cities’ mutual competition in a globalising world challenge both scientists and practitioners, among them social scientists, modellers and spatial planners. Processes of growth and decline specifically affect the urban environment, the requirements of the residents on social and natural resources. Social and environmental research is interested in a better understanding and ways of explaining the interactions between society and landscape in urban areas. And it is also needed for making life in cities attractive, secure and affordable within or despite of uneven dynamics.\ud The position paper upon “Actors and factors – bridging social science findings and urban land use change modeling” presents approaches and ideas on how social science findings on the interaction of the social system (actors) and the land use (factors) are taken up and formalised using modelling and gaming techniques. It should be understood as a first sketch compiling major challenges and proposing exemplary solutions in the field of interest

    Addressing risk challenges in a changing financial environment: the need for greater accountability in financial regulation and risk management

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    The need for continuous monitoring and regulation is particularly attributed to, and justified by, the inevitable presence of risks and uncertainty – both in terms of certain externalities and indeterminacies which are capable of being reasonably quantified and those which are not. Amongst other goals, this paper aims to address complexities and challenges faced by regulators in identifying and assessing risk, problems arising from different perceptions of risk, and solutions aimed at countering problems of risk regulation. It will approach these issues through an assessment of explanations put forward to justify the growing importance of risks, well known risk theories such as cultural theory, risk society theory and governmentality theory. “Socio cultural” explanations which relate to how risk is increasingly becoming embedded in organisations and institutions will also be considered as part of those factors attributable to why the financial environment has become transformed to the state in which it currently exists. A consideration of regulatory developments which have contributed to a change in the way financial regulation is carried out, as well as developments which have contributed to the de formalisation of rules and a corresponding “loss of certainty”, will also constitute focal points of the paper. To what extent are risks capable of being quantified? Who is able to assist with such quantification –and why has it become necessary to introduce other regulatory actors and greater measures aimed at fostering corporate governance and accountability into the regulatory process? These questions constitute some of the issues which this paper aims to address.risk; financial; regulation; audit; governmentality theory; risk society; cultural theory; hedge funds; uncertainty; legal theory; accountability

    A continuation semantics of interrogatives that accounts for Baker's ambiguity

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    Wh-phrases in English can appear both raised and in-situ. However, only in-situ wh-phrases can take semantic scope beyond the immediately enclosing clause. I present a denotational semantics of interrogatives that naturally accounts for these two properties. It neither invokes movement or economy, nor posits lexical ambiguity between raised and in-situ occurrences of the same wh-phrase. My analysis is based on the concept of continuations. It uses a novel type system for higher-order continuations to handle wide-scope wh-phrases while remaining strictly compositional. This treatment sheds light on the combinatorics of interrogatives as well as other kinds of so-called A'-movement.Comment: 20 pages; typo fixe

    Valuation of Ecosystem Services Provided by Biodiversity Conservation: An Integrated Hydrological and Economic Model to Value the Enhanced Nitrogen Retention in Renaturated Streams

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    The importance of ecosystem functions for humankind is well known. But only few attempts have been undertaken to estimate the economic value of these ecosystem services. In particular, indirect methods are rarely used, even though they are most suitable for the task. This discrepancy is because quantitative knowledge of changes in ecosystem functions is scarce. This paper presents a user-friendly procedure to quantify the increased N-retention in a renaturated river using easily available data. In a case study of the renaturated River Jossa (Germany) the benefits of increased nitrogen retention caused by beaver reintroduction are determined by using the replacement cost method. The quantification of chemical processes is discussed in detail, as well as the problems of defining an adequate reference scenario for the substitute costs. Results show that economic benefits from the evaluated ecosystem service (€12,000/annum) equal 12% of the total costs of the corresponding conservation scheme.Biodiversity conservation programmes, Cost-benefit-analysis, Replacement cost method, Ecosystem services, Nutrient retention

    Survey Expectations

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    This paper focuses on survey expectations and discusses their uses for testing and modeling of expectations.Alternative models of expectations formation are reviewed and the importance of allowing for heterogeneity of expectations is emphasized. A weak form of the rational expectations hypothesis which focuses on average expectationsrather than individual expectations is advanced. Other models of expectations formation, such as the adaptive expectations hypothesis, are briefly discussed. Testable implications of rational and extrapolative models of expectationsare reviewed and the importance of the loss function for the interpretation of the test results is discussed. The paper thenprovides an account of the various surveys of expectations, reviews alternative methods of quantifying the qualitative surveys, and discusses the use of aggregate and individual survey responses in the analysis of expectations and for forecasting
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