Wealth Transfers, Contagion, and Portfolio Constraints

This paper examines the co-movement among stock market prices and exchange rates within a three-country Center-Periphery dynamic equilibrium model in which agents in the Center country face portfolio constraints. In our model, international transmission occurs through the terms of trade, through the common discount factor for cash flows, and, finally, through an additional channel reflecting the tightness of the portfolio constraints. Portfolio constraints are shown to generate endogenous wealth transfers to or from the Periphery countries. These implicit transfers are responsible for creating contagion among the terms of trade of the Periphery countries, as well as their stock market prices. Under a portfolio constraint limiting investment of the Center country in the stock markets of the Periphery, stock prices also exhibit a flight to quality: a negative shock to one of the Periphery countries depresses stock prices throughout the Periphery, while boosting the stock market in the Center.

Asset Prices and Exchange Rates

This paper develops a simple two-country, two-good model, in which the real exchange rate, stock and bond prices are jointly determined. The model predicts that stock market prices are correlated internationally even though their dividend processes are independent, providing a theoretical argument in favor of financial contagion. The foreign exchange market serves as a propagation channel from one stock market to the other. The model identifies interconnections between stock, bond and foreign exchange markets and characterizes their joint dynamics as a three-factor model. Contemporaneous responses of each market to changes in the factors are shown to have unambiguous signs. These implications enjoy strong empirical support. Estimation of various versions of the model reveals that most of the signs predicted by the model indeed obtain in the data, and the point estimates are in line with the implications of our theory. Furthermore, the uncovered interest rate parity relationship has a risk premium in our model, shown to be volatile. We also derive agents? portfolio holdings and identify economic environments under which they exhibit a home bias, and demonstrate that an international CAPM obtaining in our model has two additional factors.

An Asset-Pricing View of External Adjustment

Recent evidence on the importance of cross-border equity flows calls for a rethinking of the standard theory of external adjustment. We introduce equity holdings and portfolio choice into an otherwise conventional open-economy dynamic equilibrium model. Our model is simple and admits a closed-form solution regardless of whether financial markets are complete or incomplete. We find that the excessive emphasis put in the literature on solving models with incomplete markets for the sole purpose of obtaining nontrivial implications for the current account is misplaced. We revisit the current debate on the relative importance of the standard vs. the capital-gains-based (or "valuation'') channels of the external adjustment and establish that in our framework they are congruent. Our model's implications are consistent with a number of intriguing stylized facts documented in the recent empirical literature.

Quantitative cw Overhauser DNP Analysis of Hydration Dynamics

Liquid state Overhauser Effect Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (ODNP) has experienced a recent resurgence of interest. In particular, a new manifestation of the ODNP measurement measures the translational mobility of water within 5-10 \AA\ of an ESR-active spin probe (i.e. the local translational diffusivity D_{local} near an electron spin resonance active molecule). Such spin probes, typically stable nitroxide radicals, have been attached to the surface or interior of macromolecules, including proteins, polymers, and membrane vesicles. Despite the unique specificity of this measurement, it requires only a standard X-band (~10 GHz) continuous wave (cw) electron spin resonance (ESR) spectrometer, coupled with a standard nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer. Here, we present a set of developments and corrections that allow us to improve the accuracy of quantitative ODNP and apply it to samples more than two orders of magnitude lower than were previously feasible.Comment: 25 page manuscript submitted to PNMR

Некоторые особенности двувидовых глаголов и их восприятие билингвами и монолингвами

The Russian language contains a number of bi-aspectual verbs, which may be used as both imperfective and perfective. A comparison of several dictionaries shows that lexicographers hold very different opinions as to whether a given verb is bi-aspectual or not. A comparison of verbs labeled as bi-aspectual in a dictionary against real usage of some bi-aspectual verbs in texts indicates that the dictionaries are not always reliable and that the lexicographic mark-ing of bi-aspectual verbs is rather founded on tradition than on actual usage in texts

Paulo Coelho: Transnational Literature, Popular Culture, and Postmodernism

With over 350 million books sold worldwide in more than 80 languages, Paulo Coelho is an international literary phenomenon that moves “beyond culture of origin” (Damrosch 199) and inhabits the “world literary space” (Pascale 281). Would his novels, therefore, stand as materialization of Goethe’s humanist cosmopolitan vision upon the coinage of the term world literature? Many cultural scholars would argue to the contrary. This dissertation aims at exploring Coelho narratives and their popularity and controversial reception by contextualizing them within the contemporary scholarship on World Literature and within the global cultural economy. An underlying assumption of this Cultural Studies approach to Coelho’s oeuvre is that popular literature, as the hors concours cultural site of hegemonic struggles, has much to offer to literary scholarship. This dissertation applies the premises of rhetorical narrative criticism and cognitive theory (Unnatural Narratology, specifically) to answer the question: How do readers incorporate Coelho narratives to their lived-cultures? To that end, this dissertation explores the narrative elements in Coelho’s novels – implied author, authorial audience, settings, characters, narration, structure, ethos/pathos, etc. – as well as possible interpretation pathways to such elements. Particular attention is paid to the author’s major themes, namely, self-realization journey, cultural hybridity, and anti-mimesis, and their respective significance to transnational audiences. Furthermore, the cultural-material conditions from which Coelho novels stem are discussed in this study by examining the correlation between these narratives and issues such as postmodernism, globalization, the convergence culture, mass self-communication, and others. This dissertation argues that the production, circulation, and consumption of Paulo Coelho novels constitute cultural processes that are more complex than his critics have typically considered. These are highly intertextual, born-translated, postmodern narratives that embody the practices of a globalized, digitalized, participatory, self-contradictory, and uneven cultural economy. Despite their narrative simplicity, Coelho novels function as contact zones to their remarkably diverse audience, dialogically yielding and celebrating cultural hybridization, promoting the Goethean tolerance among different cultures, and potentially encouraging a critique of our narratively constructed social reality

Monopoly Power and the Firm’s Valuation:

Recent anti-trust cases exacerbated the concerns of investors regarding the effects of a firm's monopoly power on its production choice, shareholder value, and the overall economy. We address this issue within a dynamic equilibrium model featuring a large monopolistic firm whose actions not only affect the price of its output, but also effectively influence the valuation of its stock. The latter renders time inconsistency to the firm's dynamic production choice. When the firm is required to pre-commit to its strategy, the ensuing equilibrium is largely in line with the predictions of the textbook monopoly model. When the firm behaves in a time-consistent manner, however, the predictions are strikingly at odds. The trade-off between current profits and the valuation of future profits induces the firm to increase production beyond the competitive benchmark and cut prices. This policy may result in destroying shareholder value, and does indeed fully wipe out the firm's profit in the limit of the decision-making interval shrinking to zero, in line with the Coase conjecture

Asset Prices and Exchange Rates

This paper develops a simple two-country, two-good model, in which the real exchange rate, stock and bond prices are jointly determined. The model predicts that stock market prices are correlated internationally even though their dividend processes are independent, providing a theoretical argument in favor of financial contagion. The foreign exchange market serves as a propagation channel from one stock market to the other. The model identifies interconnections among stock, bond and foreign exchange markets and characterizes their joint dynamics as a three-factor model. Contemporaneous responses of each market to changes in the factors are shown to have unambiguous signs. These implications enjoy strong empirical support. Estimation of various versions of the model reveals that most of the signs predicted by the model indeed obtain in the data, and the point estimates are in line with the implications of our theory. Moreover, the factors we extract from daily data on stock indexes and exchange rates explain a sizable fraction of the variation in a number of macroeconomic variables, and the estimated signs on the factors are consistent with our model's implications. We also derive agents' portfolio holdings and identify economic environments under which they exhibit a home bias, and demonstrate that an international CAPM obtaining in our model has two additional factors

Zweisprachige Wörterbücher für die Hinübersetzung

An active dictionary enables users to produce correct texts in the foreign language. The user should get as many equivalents as possible, and also learn about meaning differences, stylistic characteristics and usage of different equivalents. The dictionary has to offer paraphrases, synonyms and text examples of word and idiom usage. In a bi-directional dictionary, e. g. Italian-German and German-Italian, the user should be enabled to double-check potential translation using the passive dictionary (back translation). The two parts of the dictionary should be relatively symmetric. This article contains some suggestions how to achieve this relative symmetry

Класична раціональність та соціальна філософія

Тема раціональності не є новою, але є надзвичайно актуальною. На початку 21 століття змінюються ідеали і принципи філософських та наукових досліджень. Наука тепер не стільки відштовхується від емпіричних фактів, а оперує тими даними і фактами, які не доступні емпіричному досвіду, безпосередньо не спостерігаються. До таких теорій можна віднести теорії суперструн і теорію супергравітаціі. Теоретичні дослідження розвиваються значно швидше за практичні ті, що доступні досвіду. Таким чином формується нова раціональність в філософії і науці. Досвід тепер не розуміється широко і універсально, а більш характеризується як локальний, що має значення для якоїсь певної ситуації чи обумовленого об’єкту. Такі погляди потребують свого нового розуміння, дослідження, вони повертають нас до класичних уявлень про раціональність, точніше до того, як її слід інтерпретувати сьогодні у контексті соціального буття і знання, що постійно змінюється. Нове повернення до класичної філософської предметності: істини, добра, краси потребує свого пояснення в межах класичної раціональності. Метою роботи є дослідження раціональності на її класичному етапі розвитку, а також її вплив на соціальну філософію Нового часу. Умоглядність сучасної науки тепер виражається у тому, що Всесвіт розуміється як дещо єдине, а теоретична діяльність розуму стає основним методом пізнання. Всесвіт існує не за механічними законам Нового часу, а за більш складними і багаторівневими принципами. Але звичайно поворот сучасної науки до античних принципів у пізнанні є лише умовним. Цей перехід чи повернення більш нагадує гегелівський рух духу від суб’єктивного через об’єктивний до абсолютного, де людське знання пройшовши певні етапи свого розвитку знов повертається до себе, але збагачене новим знанням і новим досвідом