The effect of potential foreign entry in the banking sector

The existing literature ignores the effects of potential foreign entry on domestic banks in the process of financial liberalization. Empirical investigation of these effects is rare in practice due to the difficulties in observation and identification. Upon accession to the WTO, the China government committed to an opening timetable for the local-currency transactions. This timetable s an ideal setting to examine whether the potential entry of foreign banks has pro-competitive effects on the domestic banking market. Our empirical results show that domestic banks lower their interest margins in response to potential competition, and accordingly their before-tax profits decline. This signifies that efficiency gains in the banking sector also arise from potential foreign entry.

Dominant Resource Fairness in Cloud Computing Systems with Heterogeneous Servers

We study the multi-resource allocation problem in cloud computing systems where the resource pool is constructed from a large number of heterogeneous servers, representing different points in the configuration space of resources such as processing, memory, and storage. We design a multi-resource allocation mechanism, called DRFH, that generalizes the notion of Dominant Resource Fairness (DRF) from a single server to multiple heterogeneous servers. DRFH provides a number of highly desirable properties. With DRFH, no user prefers the allocation of another user; no one can improve its allocation without decreasing that of the others; and more importantly, no user has an incentive to lie about its resource demand. As a direct application, we design a simple heuristic that implements DRFH in real-world systems. Large-scale simulations driven by Google cluster traces show that DRFH significantly outperforms the traditional slot-based scheduler, leading to much higher resource utilization with substantially shorter job completion times