Foreign exchange swaps

Foreign exchange swaps have appeared for some time in the intervention toolkit of many central banks around the world, although their popularity seems to be on the wane. In a Bank for International Settlements survey taken in 1997 (BIS 1997, p. 332), seven of fourteen industrial-country central banks surveyed listed foreign exchange swaps against either the U.S. dollar or the deutsche mark (or both) among the tools used to conduct open market intervention. Of those seven, five-Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands-discontinued foreign exchange operations when they became part of the European Monetary Union. Of the remaining two, Australia and Switzerland, only the latter has used foreign exchange swaps extensively, at some point as its main intervention tool, with the total amount of swaps hovering for years at about 40 percent of the monetary base. This use partly reflected the limited depth of domestic debt markets associated with limited fiscal deficits historically incurred by the Swiss government.Swaps (Finance) ; Foreign exchange ; Banks and banking, Central ; Open market operations

Market Efficiency and Coalition Structures

We consider a three-stage game in which symmetric firms decide whether to invest in a cost-reducing technology, then they have the possibility to merge (forming coalitions), and eventually, in the third stage, a Cournot oligopoly game is played by the resulting firms (coalitions). We show that, contrary to the existing literature, the monopoly market structure may fail to form even when the number of initial firms is just three. We then introduce a weighted sharing rule and show that a situation in which all firms acquire the cost-reducing asset cannot be sustained as a Subgame Perfect Equilibrium.

Monetary policy in pre-ECB Italy

In 1979, Italy entered into the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) as a founding member of the European Monetary System. After that date, the country's monetary policy was geared toward the maintenance of exchange rate stability against its ERM partners, despite a number of exchange parity realignments and with the exception of the period from September 1992 to November 1996. The strength of the ERM commitment was not uniform over time, either in terms of amplitude of the fluctuation band or in terms of frequency of realignment of bilateral parities. Despite this variability, however, changes in official rates-the discount rate and the rate on fixed term advances-were overwhelmingly linked throughout the ERM period to developments in foreign exchange markets.Monetary policy - Italy ; Banks and banking, Central - Italy ; Bank of Italy

Fiscal Rules and the Opportunistic Behaviour of the Incumbent Politician: Evidence from Italian Municipalities

Previous studies on electoral competition show that fiscal variables are manipulated by incumbent politicians in order to be re-elected. This phenomenon has been addressed by the literature on electoral budget cycle and, in a decentralised economy, by the literature on yardstick competition. Our objective is to consider the effect of the introduction of a fiscal rule on the opportunistic behaviour of incumbent politicians. We conduct a panel data analysis on the current expenditures of 246 Italian municipalities. The introduction of the domestic stability pact (DSP) seems to change the electoral cycle, by increasing the magnitude of the expenditures during pre-electoral periods. Moreover, our results show that municipalities affected by the DSP are more sensitive to changes in neighbouring jurisdictions’ fiscal policies, during pre-electoral periods. We conclude that the introduction of the DSP, besides significantly reducing the level of local public spending, strengthens the opportunistic behaviour of incumbent politicians in pre-electoral years.fiscal rules, electoral budget cycle, yardstick competition, system GMM, spatial econometrics

Self-* overload control for distributed web systems

Unexpected increases in demand and most of all flash crowds are considered the bane of every web application as they may cause intolerable delays or even service unavailability. Proper quality of service policies must guarantee rapid reactivity and responsiveness even in such critical situations. Previous solutions fail to meet common performance requirements when the system has to face sudden and unpredictable surges of traffic. Indeed they often rely on a proper setting of key parameters which requires laborious manual tuning, preventing a fast adaptation of the control policies. We contribute an original Self-* Overload Control (SOC) policy. This allows the system to self-configure a dynamic constraint on the rate of admitted sessions in order to respect service level agreements and maximize the resource utilization at the same time. Our policy does not require any prior information on the incoming traffic or manual configuration of key parameters. We ran extensive simulations under a wide range of operating conditions, showing that SOC rapidly adapts to time varying traffic and self-optimizes the resource utilization. It admits as many new sessions as possible in observance of the agreements, even under intense workload variations. We compared our algorithm to previously proposed approaches highlighting a more stable behavior and a better performance.Comment: The full version of this paper, titled "Self-* through self-learning: overload control for distributed web systems", has been published on Computer Networks, Elsevier. The simulator used for the evaluation of the proposed algorithm is available for download at the address: http://www.dsi.uniroma1.it/~novella/qos_web

Optimal mobility-aware admission control in content delivery networks

This paper addresses the problem of mobility management in Content Delivery Networks (CDN). We introduce a CDN architecture where admission control is performed at mobility aware access routers. We formulate a Markov Modulated Poisson Decision Process for access control that captures the bursty nature of data and packetized traffic together with the heterogeneity of multimedia services. The optimization of performance parameters, like the blocking probabilities and the overall utilization, is conducted and the structural properties of the optimal solutions are also studied. Heuristics are proposed to encompass the computational difficulties of the optimal solution when several classes of multimedia traffic are considered