EU-15 SOVEREIGN GOVERNMENTS COST OF BORROWING AFTER SEVEN YEARS OF MONETARY UNION

Yield spreads over 10-year German government securities of the EU-15 countries converged dramatically in the seven years after the beginning of Monetary Integration. In this paper, we investigate the relative influence of systemic and idiosyncratic risk factors on their behaviour. Our conclusions suggest that in EMU-countries the relative importance of domestic risk factors (both credit and liquidity risk factors) is higher than that of international factors, which appear to play a secondary but significant role in non-EMU countries.Monetary integration, sovereign securities markets, systemic, idiosyncratic risk.

The Impact of Monetary Union on EU-15 Sovereign Debt Yield Spreads

With European Monetary Union (EMU), there was an increase in the adjusted spreads (corrected from the foreign exchange risk) of euro participating countries sovereign securities over Germany and a decrease in those of non-euro countries. The objective of this paper is to study the reasons for this result, and in particular, whether the change in the price assigned by markets was due to domestic factors such as credit risk and/or market liquidity, or to international risk factors. The empirical evidence suggests that market size scale economies have increased since EMU for all European markets, so the effect of the various risk factors, even though it differs between euro and non-euro countries, is always dependent on the size of the market.sovereign securities markets, monetary integration, market liquidity, international and domestic credit risk

Remarks on twisted theories with matter

We investigate some aspects of N=2 twisted theories with matter hypermultiplets in the fundamental representation of the gauge group. A consistent formulation of these theories on a general four-manifold requires turning on a particular magnetic flux, which we write down explicitly in the case of SU(2k). We obtain the blowup formula and show that the blowup function is given by a hyperelliptic sigma-function with singular characteristic. We compute the contact terms and find, as a corollary, interesting identities between hyperelliptic Theta functions.Comment: 18 pages, harvmac, one figur

Biometric presentation attack detection: beyond the visible spectrum

The increased need for unattended authentication in multiple scenarios has motivated a wide deployment of biometric systems in the last few years. This has in turn led to the disclosure of security concerns specifically related to biometric systems. Among them, presentation attacks (PAs, i.e., attempts to log into the system with a fake biometric characteristic or presentation attack instrument) pose a severe threat to the security of the system: any person could eventually fabricate or order a gummy finger or face mask to impersonate someone else. In this context, we present a novel fingerprint presentation attack detection (PAD) scheme based on i) a new capture device able to acquire images within the short wave infrared (SWIR) spectrum, and i i) an in-depth analysis of several state-of-theart techniques based on both handcrafted and deep learning features. The approach is evaluated on a database comprising over 4700 samples, stemming from 562 different subjects and 35 different presentation attack instrument (PAI) species. The results show the soundness of the proposed approach with a detection equal error rate (D-EER) as low as 1.35% even in a realistic scenario where five different PAI species are considered only for testing purposes (i.e., unknown attacks

Homomorphic Encryption for Speaker Recognition: Protection of Biometric Templates and Vendor Model Parameters

Data privacy is crucial when dealing with biometric data. Accounting for the latest European data privacy regulation and payment service directive, biometric template protection is essential for any commercial application. Ensuring unlinkability across biometric service operators, irreversibility of leaked encrypted templates, and renewability of e.g., voice models following the i-vector paradigm, biometric voice-based systems are prepared for the latest EU data privacy legislation. Employing Paillier cryptosystems, Euclidean and cosine comparators are known to ensure data privacy demands, without loss of discrimination nor calibration performance. Bridging gaps from template protection to speaker recognition, two architectures are proposed for the two-covariance comparator, serving as a generative model in this study. The first architecture preserves privacy of biometric data capture subjects. In the second architecture, model parameters of the comparator are encrypted as well, such that biometric service providers can supply the same comparison modules employing different key pairs to multiple biometric service operators. An experimental proof-of-concept and complexity analysis is carried out on the data from the 2013-2014 NIST i-vector machine learning challenge

Monetary Integration and the Cost of Borrowing

With the beginning of the European Monetary Union (EMU), euro-area sovereign securities adjusted spreads over Germany (corrected from the foreign exchange risk) experienced an increase that caused a lower than expected decline in borrowing costs. The objective of this paper is to study what explains that rising. In particular, if it took place a change in the price assigned by markets to domestic (credit risk and/or market liquidity) or to international risk factors. The empirical evidence supports the idea that a change in the market value of liquidity occurred with the EMU. International and default risk play a smaller role.sovereign securities markets, monetary integration, market liquidity, international and domestic credit risk

Why Does Alejandro Know More about Politics than Catalina? Explaining the Latin American Gender Gap in Political Knowledge

This article tests contextual and individual-level explanations of the gender gap in political knowledge in Latin American countries. It suggests that this gap is impacted by political and economic settings through two interrelated mechanisms: gender accessibility (that is, the extent of available opportunities for women to influence the political agenda) and gender-bias signaling (that is, the extent to which women play important roles in the public sphere). Analyzing data from the 2008 Americas Barometer survey, this study shows that the gender gap in political knowledge is smaller among highly educated citizens, in rural areas (where both men and women know little about politics) and in bigger cities (where women’s levels of political knowledge are higher). More importantly, the magnitude of the gap varies greatly across countries. Gender differences in income, party system institutionalization and the representation of women in national parliaments are all found to play a particularly important role in explaining the magnitude of the gender gap in political knowledge across Latin America

Antimicrobial Peptides for Use in Oyster Aquaculture: Effect on Pathogens, Commensals, and Eukaryotic Expression Systems

Two antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) of marine origin, tachyplesin from the Japanese horseshoe crab, Tachypleus tridentatus, and pleurocidin-amide from the winter flounder, Pseudopleuronectes americanus, were tested for their potential effectiveness in disease treatment in oyster aquaculture. Tachyplesin had a greater antimicrobial effect than pleurocidin-amideagainst a range of gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, with minimum inhibitor concentrations in the range of 0.625 to 5ug mL–1. Tachyplesin (50 mg mL–1) was also more effective than pleurocidin-amide (250 mg mL–1) against the oyster protozoan parasite Perkinsus marinus, reducing its viability to 9% versus 22% in vitro. Both peptides were unaffected by variations in pH and salinity that would be encountered in marine culture conditions. Candidate algal and yeast for expression and feed-based delivery of recombinant AMPs were largely unaffected by tachyplesin and pleurocidin at concentrations that inhibited bacterial growth but were sensitive to concentrations that reduced the viability of P. marinus. Several proteases, including those of oyster and parasitic origin, decreased AMP activity, but tachyplesin was affected to a much lesser degree than pleurocidin-amide. Coincubation of homogenates from oyster digestive tissues with tachyplesin and pleurocidin-amide was found to reduce the abundance of colony forming units in the tissue. Tachyplesin was more effective against gram-negative bacteria present in oyster tissues, whereas pleurocidin-amide was more effective against gram-positive bacteria. Tachyplesin was considered a better candidate than pleurocidin-amide for feed-based delivery applications in oyster aquaculture