Financial globalization : unequal blessings

The authors present a framework to analyze financial globalization. They argue that financial globalization needs to take into account the relation between money (particularly in its role as store of value), asset and factor price flexibility, and contractual and regulatory institutions. Countries that have the"blessed trinity"(international currency, flexible exchange rate regime, and sound contractual and regulatory environment) can integrate successfully into the world financial markets. But developing countries normally display the"unblessed trinity"(weak currency, fear of floating, and weak institutional framework). The authors define and discuss two alternative avenues (a"dollar trinity"and a"peso trinity") for developing countries to safely embrace international financial integration while the blessed trinity remains beyond reach.Economic Theory&Research,Fiscal&Monetary Policy,Banks&Banking Reform,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Financial Intermediation,Financial Economics,Macroeconomic Management,Economic Stabilization,Economic Theory&Research,Fiscal&Monetary Policy

Financial globalization: Unequal blessings

This paper presents a framework to analyze financial globalization. It argues that financial globalization needs to take into account the relation between money (particularly in its role as store of value), asset and factor price flexibility, and contractual and regulatory institutions. Countries that have the “blessed trinity” (international currency, flexible exchange rate regime, and sound contractual and regulatory environment) can integrate successfully into the (imperfect) world financial markets. But developing countries normally display the “unblessed trinity” (weak currency, fear of floating, and weak institutional framework). The paper defines and discusses two alternative avenues (a “dollar trinity” and a “peso trinity”) for developing countries to safely embrace international financial integration while the blessed trinity remains beyond reach.

Living and dying with hard pegs : the rise and fall of Argentina's currency board

The rise and fall of Argentina's currency board shows the extent to which the advantages of hard pegs have been overstated. The currency board did provide nominal stability and boosted financial intermediation, at the cost of endogenous financial dollarization, but did not foster monetary or fiscal discipline. The failure to adequately address the currency-growth-debt trap into which Argentina fell at the end of the 1990s precipitated a run on the currency and the banks, followed by the abandonment of the currency board and a sovereign debt default. The crisis can be best interpreted as a bad outcome of a high-stakes strategy to overcome a weak currency problem. To increase the credibility of the hard peg, the government raised its exit costs, which deepened the crisis once exit could no longer be avoided. But some alternative exit strategies would have been less destructive than the one adopted.Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Fiscal&Monetary Policy,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Financial Intermediation,Banks&Banking Reform,Fiscal&Monetary Policy,Financial Intermediation,Financial Economics,Economic Theory&Research

Building Research-Informed Teacher Education Communities: A UCET Framework

©UCET December 201

Comments welcome Argentina’s Financial Crisis: Floating Money, Sinking Banking ⊗ Augusto

This paper argues that the relation between the currency board and the financial system—i.e., the link between money and banking—is essential to understand the 2001-02 Argentine crisis. The establishment of the currency board in 1991 helped develop the Argentine financial system. Despite its strengths, the financial system remained vulnerable to real exchange rate misalignments and fiscal shocks. After 1998, Argentina fell into a currencygrowth-debt trap. It tried to break away by focusing on growth, but failed to address the currency and debt components of the trap, dramatically raising uncertainty. This unleashed a depositor run, which lead to the abandonment of the currency board. We argue that an early exit of the currency board into dollarization would have likely prevented the run and substantially lowered the magnitude of the crisis. Dollarization would have preserved property rights and financial intermediation. Moreover, it would not have necessarily implied giving up nominal flexibility altogether, since dollarization could have been followed over time by “pesification at the margin.

The AFLOW Fleet for Materials Discovery

The traditional paradigm for materials discovery has been recently expanded to incorporate substantial data driven research. With the intent to accelerate the development and the deployment of new technologies, the AFLOW Fleet for computational materials design automates high-throughput first principles calculations, and provides tools for data verification and dissemination for a broad community of users. AFLOW incorporates different computational modules to robustly determine thermodynamic stability, electronic band structures, vibrational dispersions, thermo-mechanical properties and more. The AFLOW data repository is publicly accessible online at aflow.org, with more than 1.7 million materials entries and a panoply of queryable computed properties. Tools to programmatically search and process the data, as well as to perform online machine learning predictions, are also available.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

Survivin as a therapeutic target in Sonic hedgehog-driven medulloblastoma.

Medulloblastoma (MB) is a highly malignant brain tumor that occurs primarily in children. Although surgery, radiation and high-dose chemotherapy have led to increased survival, many MB patients still die from their disease, and patients who survive suffer severe long-term side effects as a consequence of treatment. Thus, more effective and less toxic therapies for MB are critically important. Development of such therapies depends in part on identification of genes that are necessary for growth and survival of tumor cells. Survivin is an inhibitor of apoptosis protein that regulates cell cycle progression and resistance to apoptosis, is frequently expressed in human MB and when expressed at high levels predicts poor clinical outcome. Therefore, we hypothesized that Survivin may have a critical role in growth and survival of MB cells and that targeting it may enhance MB therapy. Here we show that Survivin is overexpressed in tumors from patched (Ptch) mutant mice, a model of Sonic hedgehog (SHH)-driven MB. Genetic deletion of survivin in Ptch mutant tumor cells significantly inhibits proliferation and causes cell cycle arrest. Treatment with small-molecule antagonists of Survivin impairs proliferation and survival of both murine and human MB cells. Finally, Survivin antagonists impede growth of MB cells in vivo. These studies highlight the importance of Survivin in SHH-driven MB, and suggest that it may represent a novel therapeutic target in patients with this disease

Universal features of electron-phonon interactions in atomic wires

The effect of electron-phonon interactions in the conductance through metallic atomic wires is theoretically analyzed. The proposed model allows to consider an atomic size region electrically and mechanically coupled to bulk electrodes. We show that under rather general conditions the features due to electron-phonon coupling are described by universal functions of the system transmission coefficients. It is predicted that the reduction of the conductance due to electron-phonon coupling which is observed close to perfect transmission should evolve into an enhancement at low transmission. This crossover can be understood in a transparent way as arising from the competition between elastic and inelastic processes.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure