Trends of the Contagion Risk in Sovereign Spreads for Emerging European Countries

We investigate the sovereign spreads behavior of the European emerging countries using the clustering technique. Our main finding is that the distances between spreads during high volatile times is significantly lower than in normal periods, that is, the correlation is much higher. Secondly, the market sentiment explains a much higher percentage of the spreads movements during turbulent times. Thirdly, the link between spreads and macroeconomic fundamentals seems to be blurred compared with the expectations from the economic theory.contagion spreads, emerging markets, clustering

Sudden stop of capital flows and the consequences for the banking sector and the real economy

The paper develops a macro-prudential liquidity stress-testing tool in order to capture the possible consequences of a capital outflow (including a run of deposits). The tool includes a feedback from the banking sector to the real economy, incorporates a link between liquidity risk and solvency risk, and is tailored for emerging market features. The stress-testing tool aims to: (i) test the capacity of the banking sector to withstand the sudden stop of capital flows, and to gauge the consequences of the liquidity stress to the solvency ratio; (ii) quantify the liquidity deficit that a central bank should accommodate; (iii) assess the impact on credit supply when the sudden stop occurs; and (iv) support the implementation of an orderly disintermediation process. The macro-prudential tool is applied on the Romanian banking sector

Planning of Operation & Maintenance Using Risk and Reliability Based Methods

AbstractOperation and maintenance (OM) of offshore wind turbines contributes with a substantial part of the total levelized cost of energy (LCOE). The objective of this paper is to present an application of risk- and reliability-based methods for planning of OM. The theoretical basis is presented and illustrated by an example, namely for planning of inspections and maintenance of wind turbine blades. A life-cycle approach is used where the total expected cost in the remaining lifetime is minimized. This maintenance plan is continuously updated during the lifetime using information from previous inspections and from condition monitoring with time intervals between inspections and maintenance / repair options as the decision parameters

Learning User Embeddings from Human Gaze for Personalised Saliency Prediction

Reusable embeddings of user behaviour have shown significant performance improvements for the personalised saliency prediction task. However, prior works require explicit user characteristics and preferences as input, which are often difficult to obtain. We present a novel method to extract user embeddings from pairs of natural images and corresponding saliency maps generated from a small amount of user-specific eye tracking data. At the core of our method is a Siamese convolutional neural encoder that learns the user embeddings by contrasting the image and personal saliency map pairs of different users. Evaluations on two public saliency datasets show that the generated embeddings have high discriminative power, are effective at refining universal saliency maps to the individual users, and generalise well across users and images. Finally, based on our model's ability to encode individual user characteristics, our work points towards other applications that can benefit from reusable embeddings of gaze behaviour

FINANCIAL CONTAGION AND INVESTORS BEHAVIOR

International capital markets, in general, seem to be volatile markets, influenced bymany factors, a phenomenon that affects both developed markets, as well as least developed, withemerging market economies suffering most because of this. It is clear, however, that volatility willremain for as long as it is delayed the adoption of specific measures at national and internationalfinancial architecture level, measures that may be necessary to reduce these risks, to limit theirimpact, and that the question financial market can relapse in a manner as efficiently as possible.investor behaviour, financial crisis, rational investor, irational investor, financial contagion

ROMANIA'S REAL CONVERGENCE TO THE EUROPEAN UNION Dragos Mihai Ungureanu , Permanent Representation of Romania to the European Union Ruxandra Dana Vilag, Romanian-American University Bucharest George Horia Ionescu, Romanian-American University Bucharest Florian Bogdan Stoian, “Lucian Blaga†University of Sibiu

In the process of European integration, switching in 1999 to the third stageof Economic and Monetary Union, has intensified the need to coordinate economic andsectoral policies of the Member States. The process of coordination is necessary toharmonize national economic policy objectives in order to minimize the negative impactof economic policy measures taken by some member countries to other member countriesand reduce the temptation for Member States to have behavior riders. Real Convergenceis an essential goal of Romanian integration into the European Union. Attenuation of thedevelopment gaps maintained between Romania and the EU can not be achieved solelythrough the use of market forces. Economic transformations occurring globally andincreased risk aversion contributed to a signifiant reduction of capital flows to Romania,increased pressures upon exchange rate.Real convergence, nominal convergence, integration, European Union

Solving moment problems by dimensional extension

The first part of this paper is devoted to an analysis of moment problems in R^n with supports contained in a closed set defined by finitely many polynomial inequalities. The second part of the paper uses the representation results of positive functionals on certain spaces of rational functions developed in the first part, for decomposing a polynomial which is positive on such a semi-algebraic set into a canonical sum of squares of rational functions times explicit multipliers.Comment: 21 pages, published version, abstract added in migratio