Institutionalising future geographies of financial inclusion: national legitimacy versus local autonomy in the British credit union movement.

This paper provides a critical overview of recent developments in British credit union development, and contributed to the broader analysis of alternative financial/economic spaces and (the geographies of) alterity. The paper was underpinned by a wide range of local, national and international conference presentations including the National Association of Credit Union Workers, Birmingham, 2001; Combating Financial Exclusion, Salford, 2001; Association of American Geographers, New York, 2001, New Orleans, 2003; Alternative Economic Spaces, Hull, 2005; and discussions with local user communities throughout the UK (including through non-academic publishing, such as SCCD news and New Start articles)

Capacity-building and community control of local economic assets

This paper explores the major changes and challenges confronting British credit unions, and highlights some of their implications in relation to notions of capacity-building. The paper’s key themes were presented at a wide range of local, national and international conference presentations including the National Association of Credit Union Workers, Birmingham, 2001; ESRC ‘Capacity building: learning for community economic development’ seminar series, ‘Seminar Three: Capacity-building and community control of local economic assets’, Salford University, 2001; Alternative Economic Spaces, Hull, 2005; and via discussions with local user communities throughout the UK (including through non-academic publishing, including SCCD news and New Start articles)

Cluster detection and risk estimation for spatio-temporal health data

In epidemiological disease mapping one aims to estimate the spatio-temporal pattern in disease risk and identify high-risk clusters, allowing health interventions to be appropriately targeted. Bayesian spatio-temporal models are used to estimate smoothed risk surfaces, but this is contrary to the aim of identifying groups of areal units that exhibit elevated risks compared with their neighbours. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new Bayesian hierarchical modelling approach for simultaneously estimating disease risk and identifying high-risk clusters in space and time. Inference for this model is based on Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation, using the freely available R package CARBayesST that has been developed in conjunction with this paper. Our methodology is motivated by two case studies, the first of which assesses if there is a relationship between Public health Districts and colon cancer clusters in Georgia, while the second looks at the impact of the smoking ban in public places in England on cardiovascular disease clusters

Cyclic rewriting and conjugacy problems

Cyclic words are equivalence classes of cyclic permutations of ordinary words. When a group is given by a rewriting relation, a rewriting system on cyclic words is induced, which is used to construct algorithms to find minimal length elements of conjugacy classes in the group. These techniques are applied to the universal groups of Stallings pregroups and in particular to free products with amalgamation, HNN-extensions and virtually free groups, to yield simple and intuitive algorithms and proofs of conjugacy criteria.Comment: 37 pages, 1 figure, submitted. Changes to introductio

Global Financial Crises and Time-varying Volatility Comovement in World Equity Markets

This paper studies volatility comovement in world equity markets between 1994 and 2008. Global volatility factors are extracted from a panel of monthly volatility proxies relating to 25 developed and 20 emerging stock markets. A dynamic factor model (FM) is estimated using two-year rolling window regressions. The FMÂ’s time-varying variance shares of global factors map variations in volatility comovement over time and across countries. The results indicate that global volatility linkages are particularly strong during Â…nancial crises in Asia (1997-8), Russia (1998), and the United States (2007-8). Emerging markets are less syncrhonised with world volatility than are developed markets. In particular, we observe decoupling between emerging and world volatilities between 2001 and 2007. Recoupling occurs during 2008, thus identifying emerging market investments as a temporary hedge against volatility spillovers from the US subprime crisis.Asset Market Linkages, Dynamic Factor Model, Financial Crisis, International DiversiÂ…cation, Volatility Comovement

Volatility Spillovers across South African Asset Classes during Domestic and Foreign

This paper studies domestic volatility transmission in an emerging economy. Daily volatility spillover indices, relating to South African (SA) currencies, bonds and equities, are estimated using variance decompositions from a generalised vector autoregressive (GVAR) model (Pesaran and Shin 1998). The results suggest substantial time-variation in volatility linkages between October 1996 and June 2010. Typically, large increases in volatility spillovers coincide with domestic and foreign financial crises. Equities are the most important source of volatility spillovers to other asset classes. However, following the 2001 currency crisis, and up until mid-2006, currencies temporarily dominate volatility transmission. Bonds are a consistent net receiver of volatility spillovers. In comparison to similar research focussing on the United States (Diebold and Yilmaz 2010), volatility linkages between SA asset classes are relatively strong.Asset Market Linkages, Dynamic Correlation, Financial Crisis, Generlised Vector Autoregression, Variance Decomposition, Volatility Spillover.