Regulation and Ruin Theory:Controlling the Probability of Failure

The standard theoretical approach underlying insurance regulation originates in actuarial methods and, more specifically, in ruin theory. It’s important to outline this theory, and then to discuss its limits, because it’s the one that most insurance practitioners or regulators have in mind when thinking about insurance regulation, partly, of course, because a number of them have been trained as actuaries

Efficient Operations On MDDs For Building Constraint Programming Models

International audienceWe propose improved algorithms for defining the most common operations on Multi-Valued Decision Diagrams (MDDs): creation, reduction, complement , intersection, union, difference, symmetric difference, complement of union and complement of intersection. Then, we show that with these algorithms and thanks to the recent development of an efficient algorithm establishing arc consistency for MDD based constraints (MDD4R), we can simply solve some problems by modeling them as a set of operations between MDDs. We apply our approach to the regular constraint and obtain competitive results with dedicated algorithms. We also experiment our technique on a large scale problem: the phrase generation problem and we show that our approach gives equivalent results to those of a specific algorithm computing a complex automaton

Exports and sectoral financial dependence: evidence on French firms during the great global crisis

The unprecedented drop in international trade during the last quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 has mainly been analysed at the macroeconomic or sectoral level. However, exporters who are heterogeneous in terms of productivity, size or external financial dependence should be heterogeneously affected by the crisis. This issue is examined in this paper by using data on monthly exports at the product and destination level for some 100,000 individual French exporters, up to 2009M4. We show that the drop in French exports is mainly due to the intensive margin of large exporters. Small and large exporters are evenly affected when sectoral and geographical specialisations are controlled for. Lastly, exporters (small and large) in sectors structurally more dependent on external finance are the most affected by the crisis. JEL Classification: F02, F10, G01financial crisis, firms’ heterogeneity, intensive and extensive margins, international trade

Combining finite and continuous solvers Towards a simpler solver maintenance

International audienceCombining efficiency with reliability within CP systems is one of the main concerns of CP developers. This paper presents a simple and efficient way to connect Choco and Ibex, two CP solvers respectively specialised on finite and continuous domains. This enables to take advantage of the most recent advances of the continuous community within Choco while saving development and maintenance resources, hence ensuring a better software quality

Phase transition of the susceptible-infected-susceptible dynamics on time-varying configuration model networks

We present a degree-based theoretical framework to study the susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) dynamics on time-varying (rewired) configuration model networks. Using this framework, we provide a detailed analysis of the stationary state that covers, for a given structure, every dynamic regimes easily tuned by the rewiring rate. This analysis is suitable for the characterization of the phase transition and leads to three main contributions. (i) We obtain a self-consistent expression for the absorbing-state threshold, able to capture both collective and hub activation. (ii) We recover the predictions of a number of existing approaches as limiting cases of our analysis, providing thereby a unifying point of view for the SIS dynamics on random networks. (iii) We reinterpret the concept of hub-dominated phase transition. Within our framework, it appears as a heterogeneous critical phenomenon : observables for different degree classes have a different scaling with the infection rate. This leads to the successive activation of the degree classes beyond the epidemic threshold.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure