Capital adequacy tests and limited liability of financial institutions

The theory of acceptance sets and their associated risk measures plays a key role in the design of capital adequacy tests. The objective of this paper is to investigate, in the context of bounded financial positions, the class of surplus-invariant acceptance sets. These are characterized by the fact that acceptability does not depend on the positive part, or surplus, of a capital position. We argue that surplus invariance is a reasonable requirement from a regulatory perspective, because it focuses on the interests of liability holders of a financial institution. We provide a dual characterization of surplus-invariant, convex acceptance sets, and show that the combination of surplus invariance and coherence leads to a narrow range of capital adequacy tests, essentially limited to scenario-based tests. Finally, we emphasize the advantages of dealing with surplus-invariant acceptance sets as the primary object rather than directly with risk measures, such as loss-based and excess-invariant risk measures, which have been recently studied by Cont, Deguest, and He (2013) and by Staum (2013), respectively

Centrality measures for graphons: Accounting for uncertainty in networks

As relational datasets modeled as graphs keep increasing in size and their data-acquisition is permeated by uncertainty, graph-based analysis techniques can become computationally and conceptually challenging. In particular, node centrality measures rely on the assumption that the graph is perfectly known -- a premise not necessarily fulfilled for large, uncertain networks. Accordingly, centrality measures may fail to faithfully extract the importance of nodes in the presence of uncertainty. To mitigate these problems, we suggest a statistical approach based on graphon theory: we introduce formal definitions of centrality measures for graphons and establish their connections to classical graph centrality measures. A key advantage of this approach is that centrality measures defined at the modeling level of graphons are inherently robust to stochastic variations of specific graph realizations. Using the theory of linear integral operators, we define degree, eigenvector, Katz and PageRank centrality functions for graphons and establish concentration inequalities demonstrating that graphon centrality functions arise naturally as limits of their counterparts defined on sequences of graphs of increasing size. The same concentration inequalities also provide high-probability bounds between the graphon centrality functions and the centrality measures on any sampled graph, thereby establishing a measure of uncertainty of the measured centrality score. The same concentration inequalities also provide high-probability bounds between the graphon centrality functions and the centrality measures on any sampled graph, thereby establishing a measure of uncertainty of the measured centrality score.Comment: Authors ordered alphabetically, all authors contributed equally. 21 pages, 7 figure

Heresy or defamation?:The bollandists under the eye of the holly office (1691-1715)

Tiempo después de que el jesuita Héribert Rosweyde (1569-1629) falleciera en Amberes, sin dar inicio a la publicación más ambiciosa que sobre hagiografía se había proyectado hasta el momento, el también jesuita Jean Bolland (1596-1665) fue cometido por sus superiores para abordar la edición de la obra. Así nacieron las “Acta Sanctorum”, cuya edición prosiguió hasta 1940 de la mano de los colaboradores y sucesores de Bolland: los Bolandistas.Pero, en 1691, la Orden de Nuestra Señora del Monte Carmelo denunció la publicación y a sus autores ante la Inquisición, motivando su condena en todos los territorios donde el Santo Oficio hispano ejercía su influencia.El presente artículo pretende ahondar en el desarrollo del conflicto que, ante la en ocasiones pasiva mirada del Santo Oficio y con el contenido de las “Acta Sanctorum” como excusa, enfrentó a jesuitas y carmelitas entre los años 1691 y 1715.Because of his duties, the jesuit Héribert Rosweyde (1569-1629) died without beginning the edition of the most ambitious hagiographic project to date. Jean Bolland (1596-1665), who was also a member of the Society of Jesus, was commissioned to start the publication of the books. This is why “Acta Sanctorum”, a collection of works launched from 1643 to 1940, exists. After Jean Bolland’s death, the project was assumed by his collaborators and successors, called “the Bollandists”.In spite of the significance of this venture, the Order of the Brothers of Our Lady of Mount Carmel denounced to the Inquisition not only some volumes of the “Acta Sanctorum”, but also its authors. They were all condemned because of their supposed heretical propositions.This paper tries to explain the course of conflict between Carmelites and Jesuits from 1691 to 1715. And this was a dispute in which the Holly Office was involved in some different ways

The substance of Elizabethan dreams: the "secretary hand" (16th-17th centuries)

Durante los siglos XVI y XVII, la escritura más utilizada en Inglaterra fue la conocida como “secretary hand”. Se trató de un tipo específico de grafía gótica que alcanzó gran popularidad en época isabelina y jacobea y se empleó tanto para la factura de códices como de documentos. Coexistió junto a otras escrituras como la “itálica”, exitosa y recién llegada, concebida por los humanistas italianos; y las múltiples formas de “court hand”, una grafía gótica que puede encontrarse, en mayor medida, en textos legales. Este artículo pretende ser una introducción histórica al fenómeno de la “secretary hand”, presentando para ello un completo análisis paleográfico de la misma y transcripciones de diferentes casos prácticos.In sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the workaday hand in England was the so-called “secretary hand”. It was a specific type of gothic hand that became very popular throughout Elizabethan and Jacobean era, being used both for books and documents. But “secretary hand” wasn’t the only hand used by Englishmen in that period of history. It existed side by side with the “italic”, a successful and recently arrived script modelled by the Italian humanists, and the multiple forms of “court hands”, a gothic handwriting found on legal documents. This article aims to provide a historical introduction to the “secretary hand”, including a paleographical analysis of this script as well as transcripts of some plates