Growth and Business Cycles with Imperfect Credit Markets

We study the process of growth and business cycles in an open economy which has access to international financial markets. The financial market imperfection originates from costly state verification and a positive probability of default on loans. The degree of credit market imperfection is endogenously derived. The results show that developed economies are able to borrow on easier terms than emerging countries. The credit market imperfection may cause some economies to fall into a development trap if the initial endowment of capital is too low. The financial market frictions also generate interesting business cycle dynamics. Financial market imperfections help in replicating the empirical fact that output growth shows positive autocorrelation at short horizons. The model also predicts that a poorer economy will experience a more severe and persistent e.ect on investment and output due to an exogenous shock

Soil biological quality of grassland fertilized with adjusted cattle manure slurries in comparison with organic and inorganic fertilizers

We studied the effect of five fertilizers (including two adjusted manure slurries) and an untreated control on soil biota and explored the effect on the ecosystem services they provided. Our results suggest that the available N (NO3- and NH4+) in the soil plays a central role in the effect of fertilizers on nematodes and microorganisms. Microorganisms are affected directly through nutrient availability and indirectly through grass root mass. Nematodes are affected indirectly through microbial biomass and grass root mass. A lower amount of available N in the treatment with inorganic fertilizer was linked to a higher root mass and a higher abundance and proportion of herbivorous nematodes. A higher amount of available N in the organic fertilizer treatments resulted in a twofold higher bacterial activity (measured as bacterial growth rate, viz. thymidine incorporation), a higher proportion of bacterivorous nematodes, a 30% higher potential N mineralization (aerobic incubation), and 25–50% more potentially mineralizable N (anaerobic incubation). Compared to inorganic fertilizer, organic fertilization increased the C total, the N total, the activity of decomposers, and the supply of nutrients via the soil food web. Within the group of organic fertilizers, there was no significant difference in C total, abundances of soil biota, and the potential N mineralization rate. There were no indications that farmyard manure or the adjusted manure slurries provided the ecosystem service “supply of nutrients” better than normal manure slurry. Normal manure slurry provided the highest bacterial activity and the highest amount of mineralizable N and it was the only fertilizer resulting in a positive trend in grass yield over the years 2000–2005. The number of earthworm burrows was higher in the treatments with organic fertilizers compared to the one with the inorganic fertilizer, which suggests that organic fertilizers stimulate the ecosystem service of water regulation more than inorganic fertilizer. The trend towards higher epigeic earthworm numbers with application of farmyard manure and one of the adjusted manure slurries, combined with the negative relation between epigeic earthworms and bulk density and a significantly lower penetration resistance in the same fertilizer types, is preliminary evidence that these two organic fertilizer types contribute more to the service of soil structure maintenance than inorganic fertilize

Determinants of English accents

In this study we investigate which factors affect the degree of non-native accent of L2 speakers of English who learned English in school and mostly lived for some time in an anglophone setting. We use data from the Speech Accent Archive containing over 700 speakers speaking almost 160 different native languages. We show that besides several important predictors, including the age of English onset and length of anglophone residence, the linguistic distance between the speaker’s native language and English is a significant predictor of the degree of non-native accent in pronunciation. This study extends an earlier study which only focused on Indo-European L2 learners of Dutch and used a general speaking proficiency measure

Turning Back the Clock in Parkinson's Disease: Practical Recommendations for Managing Diurnal Symptom Worsening

Item does not contain fulltex

Expected issuance fees and market liquidity

We examine the interaction between the primary and secondary markets for euro area sovereign bonds. Primary dealers compete to be selected as lead manager in the primary market, and have an incentive to increase liquidity. For our 2008–2012 sample of sovereign bonds from 11 euro area countries, we find that expected issuance fees are positively and economically related to market liquidity. The fee-driven liquidity effect is especially strong for countries with high funding needs, in periods of high re-financing uncertainty, and for low-risk bonds

Near-Optimal Scheduling for LTL with Future Discounting

We study the search problem for optimal schedulers for the linear temporal logic (LTL) with future discounting. The logic, introduced by Almagor, Boker and Kupferman, is a quantitative variant of LTL in which an event in the far future has only discounted contribution to a truth value (that is a real number in the unit interval [0, 1]). The precise problem we study---it naturally arises e.g. in search for a scheduler that recovers from an internal error state as soon as possible---is the following: given a Kripke frame, a formula and a number in [0, 1] called a margin, find a path of the Kripke frame that is optimal with respect to the formula up to the prescribed margin (a truly optimal path may not exist). We present an algorithm for the problem; it works even in the extended setting with propositional quality operators, a setting where (threshold) model-checking is known to be undecidable

Multiplayer Cost Games with Simple Nash Equilibria

Multiplayer games with selfish agents naturally occur in the design of distributed and embedded systems. As the goals of selfish agents are usually neither equivalent nor antagonistic to each other, such games are non zero-sum games. We study such games and show that a large class of these games, including games where the individual objectives are mean- or discounted-payoff, or quantitative reachability, and show that they do not only have a solution, but a simple solution. We establish the existence of Nash equilibria that are composed of k memoryless strategies for each agent in a setting with k agents, one main and k-1 minor strategies. The main strategy describes what happens when all agents comply, whereas the minor strategies ensure that all other agents immediately start to co-operate against the agent who first deviates from the plan. This simplicity is important, as rational agents are an idealisation. Realistically, agents have to decide on their moves with very limited resources, and complicated strategies that require exponential--or even non-elementary--implementations cannot realistically be implemented. The existence of simple strategies that we prove in this paper therefore holds a promise of implementability.Comment: 23 page