Money market pressure and the determinants of baning crises

Identifying banking crises is the first step in the research on determinants of banking crises. The prevailing practice is to employ market events to identify a banking crisis. Researchers justify the usage of this method on the grounds that either direct and reliable indicators of banks’ assets quality are not available, or that withdrawals of bank deposits are no longer a part of financial crises in a modern financial system with deposits insurance. Meanwhile, most researchers also admit that there are inherent inconsistency and arbitrariness associated with the events method. This paper develops an index of money market pressure to identify banking crises. We define banking crises as periods in which there is excessive demand for liquidity in the money market. We begin with the theoretical foundation of this new method and show that it is desirable, and also possible, to depend on a more objective index of money market pressure rather than market events to identify banking crises. This approach allows one to employ high frequency data in regression, and avoid the ambiguity problem in interpreting the direction of causality that most banking literature suffers. Comparing the crises dates with existing research indicates that the new method is able to identify banking crises more accurately than the events method. The two components of the index, changes in central bank funds to bank deposits ratio and changes in short-term real interest rate, are equally important in the identification of banking crises. Bank deposits, combined with central bank funds, provide valuable information on banking distress. With the newly defined crisis episodes, we examine the determinants of banking crises using data complied from 47 countries. We estimate conditional logit models that include macroeconomic, financial, and institutional variables in the explanatory variables. The results display similarities to and differences with existing research. We find that slowdown of real GDP, lower real interest rates, extremely high inflation, large fiscal deficits, and over-valued exchange rates tend to precede banking crises. The effects of monetary base growth on the probability of banking crises are negligible. --

Reply to Hagen & Sudarshan's Comment

We show that the argument in Phys Rev Lett 70 (1993) 1360 is correct and consistent, and that Hagen & Sudarshan's solution has inconsistency leading to non-vanishing commutators of $[P^1, P^2]$ and $[P^j, H]$ even in physical states. This proves that many of HS's statements in their Comment are based merely on incorrect guess, but not on careful algebra.Comment: one page, UMN-TH-1245/9

Scattering of spin-polarized electron in an Aharonov--Bohm potential

The scattering of spin-polarized electrons in an Aharonov--Bohm vector potential is considered. We solve the Pauli equation in 3+1 dimensions taking into account explicitly the interaction between the three-dimensional spin magnetic moment of electron and magnetic field. Expressions for the scattering amplitude and the cross section are obtained for spin-polarized electron scattered off a flux tube of small radius. It is also shown that bound electron states cannot occur in this quantum system. The scattering problem for the model of a flux tube of zero radius in the Born approximation is briefly discussed.Comment: 11 pages, no figures. Minor typos correcte

Temperature and Supersaturation Dependent Nucleation Rates of Heterogeneous Water by Molecular Cluster Model Calculation

A statistical mechanical method to evaluate the energy of formation of water clusters attached to a foreign particle surface is described, with the binding energy being evaluated on a molecular level, using semiempirical modified neglect of diatomic overlap (MNDO) theory. The model is applied to water nucleation on a silicon oxide surface. The binding energy contribution, which represents the energy of formation at T=0 K, is found to slightly (but not negligibly in the thermal sense) increase with the number of hydrogen bonds between the water cluster and the condensation nucleus whose surface is made of silicon oxide. An analytic expression is developed to fit the binding energy contribution as a function of cluster size. At lower temperatures, a linear relationship is found between the log of the nucleation rate and reciprocal temperature for fixed saturation ratio. However, at higher temperatures, this relationship deviates from linearity. The deviation is sufficient to suggest the existence of a critical temperature for which the nucleation rate reaches a maximum. Furthermore, another kind of critical temperature is found, which corresponds to a minimum cluster critical size (at fixed saturation ratio). These are found to almost coincide for the cases of heterogeneous and homogeneous nucleation

Study of Prenucleation Ion Clusters: Correlation between Ion Mobility Spectra and Size Distributions

Additional studies regarding our earlier electrothermodynamic theory are presented. Comparisons to recent expansion cloud chamber ion mobility measurements are made, indicating general agreement with observations. This theory predicts more stable and ordered structure for prenucleation ion-water cluster systems than accounted for by the classical Thomson\u27s theory. In the limiting case of the dielectric constant ε = 1, our monopole electrostatic energy term contributed by the foreign ion center precisely converges to that of Thomson. Predicted ion cluster size distributions are found to correlate well with ion cluster size spectra obtained from the ion mobility measurements of hydrated ion clusters and Champman-Enskog theory. In view of good correlation between the theory and observation, we believe that ion mobility study at sufficiently low electric field is a powerful tool for studying prenucleation dynamics

Temperature and Supersaturation Dependent Nucleation Rates of Water by Molecular Cluster Model Calculations

Using a microphysical approach to nucleation, we present an extensive study of water nucleation rates for wide ranges of both temperature and supersaturation ratio. Based on the fundamental molecular properties of clusters instead of bulk properties, the microphysical approach is demonstrated to predict good agreement with measured nucleation rates over this broad range of conditions. Predicted critical sizes for nucleation are found to be relatively small, and are in the molecular cluster size regime rather than in a size regime that should be characterized by bulk values. Estimated sticking coefficient values cover the range of ~0.9 to ~0.2 for the temperature range considered, whereas sticking coefficient values corresponding to Becker-Doring theory suffer an unreasonably large three-orders of magnitude decrease for temperature increase from 220K to 285K

Simulation of Bulk Silicon Crystals and Si(111) Surfaces with Application to a Study of Fluorine Coverage of the Surfaces

Computational efficiency for the simulation of bulk crystals and surfaces is highly desirable. In an effort to study semiconductor crystals, we present a self-consistent treatment for the simulation of silicon crystals and surfaces based on the combination of a siligen model and a semiempirical Hamiltonian method. An artificial atom called siligen is introduced for the application of the semiempirical method to finite-size silicon clusters. The calculated average bond energies for the saturated silicon clusters are between 2.045 and 2.568 eV, compared to the measured value of 2.31 eV. A simulated bulk silicon surface using siligens is introduced in order to examine variation of the bond strength between fluorine atoms and the simulated silicon (111) surface. It is found that bond strength computed from the simulated surface, with siligens, rapidly converges to a saturated limit as the number of surface layers increases, while a pure silicon (111) surface without siligens yields no satisfactory convergence

Pressure and Temperature Effects on the Energy of Formation for Silicon Clusters

At present most theoretical studies of atomic clusters are limited to their physical properties referred to 0 K. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no theoretical study of the simultaneous dependence of cluster formation and cluster-size distributions on both pressure and temperature. In the present work both pressure and temperature effects on the formation of silicon clusters are explored. A universal semiempirical formula is obtained to show a general trend in the variation of binding energy as a function of cluster size for both atomic and molecular clusters

Schr\"{o}dinger Fields on the Plane with non-Abelian Chern-Simons Interactions

Physical content of the nonrelativistic quantum field theory with non-Abelian Chern-Simons interactions is clarified with the help of the equivalent first- quantized description which we derive in any physical gauge.Comment: 12 pages, LaTex, SNUTP 94-1

Quantum mechanics in multiply connected spaces

This paper analyses quantum mechanics in multiply connected spaces. It is shown that the multiple connectedness of the configuration space of a physical system can determine the quantum nature of physical observables, such as the angular momentum. In particular, quantum mechanics in compactified Kaluza-Klein spaces is examined. These compactified spaces give rise to an additional angular momentum which can adopt half-integer values and, therefore, may be identified with the intrinsic spin of a quantum particle.Comment: Latex 15 page