Strategic group lending for banks

Credit institutions often refuse to lend money to small firms. Usually, this happens because small firms are not able to provide collateral to lenders. Moreover, given the small amount of required loans, the relative cost of full monitoring is too high for lenders. Group lending contracts have been viewed as an effective solution to credit rationing of small firms in both developing and industrialized countries. The aim of this paper is to highlight the potential of group lending contracts in terms of credit risk management. In particular, this paper provides a theoretical explanation of the potential of group lending programs in screening good borrowers from bad ones to reduce the incidence of non-performing-loans (NPL). This paper shows that the success of firms involved in selected group lending programs is due to the fact that cosignature is an effective screening device: more precisely, if lenders make a proper use of co-signature to screen good firms from bad ones, then only firms that are good ex-ante enter group lending contracts. So, the main argument of this paper is that well designed group lending programs induce good firms to become jointly liable, at least partially, with other good firms and discourage other – bad-firms to do the same. Specifically, co-signature is proven to be a screening device only in the case of a perfectly competitive bank sector

ECONOMICS OF MAIZE PRODUCTION UNDER DIFFERENT COWPEA-BASED GREEN MANURE PRACTICES IN DERIVED SAVANNA ZONE OF NIGERIA

There is a challenge in Nigeria of how to sustainably increase land productivity in the face of land pressures, un-availability and/or high cost of fertilizers, and reduced fallow periods. The present study analyzed the economic potential of producing maize under different regimes of cowpea green manure cropping

A Methodological Toolkit to Reform Payment Systems: An Example of Applied Cost-Benefit Analysis

In principle, a careful evaluation of costs and benefits should be a wise rule for everyone who has to take any important decision. In particular, it is very important when a payment system reform is at stake. Since many stakeholders are involved in a payment system reform, the final decisions are going to be the result of several cost-benefit analyses and of “negotiation” among economic agents, in particular system providers, system participants, and end users. In this paper we will only focus on cost-benefit analysis, providing both theoretical guidelines and numerical examples. We conclude that past evaluations of payment system reforms mainly focused on qualitative assessments, hence overlooking quantitative ones. So, we suggest that it would be worthy for international institutions to spend some efforts to build, manage and make available to all countries a database on payments systems, with both relevant data and methods to assess costs and benefits

Sonar and radar SAR processing for parking lot detection

In this paper, SAR processing algorithms for automotive applications are presented and illustrated on data from non-trivial test scenes. The chosen application is parking lot detection. Laboratory results obtained with a teaching sonar experiment emphasize the resolution improvement introduced with range-Doppler SAR processing. A similar improvement is then confirmed through full scale measurements performed with an automotive radar prototype operating at 77GHz in very close range conditions, typical of parking lot detection. The collected data allows a performance comparison between different SAR processing algorithms for realistic targets

Is there a regulatory trade-off between stability and performance? Evidence from italian banks.

Disentangling the direct causal effect that sanctions exert on bank performance from the indirect through default risk, we show that a trade-off exists for regulators between banks’ performance and stability in Italy. Two key findings provide evidence for the nontriviality of the return-risk nexus: (i) banks’ liquidations are concentrated at the lower-end of the profitability distribution, resulting in (attrition) biased estimates; (ii) the drop-out is informative since it depends on the unobserved measurements of profitability. Despite this evidence, while returns are affected by sanctions and regulatory requirements, default risk is not. However, looking at growth of gross loans, enforcement actions reduce default risk though at a cost of a significant fall in lending, creating a regulatory tradeoff. In fact, through loans’ growth, we account for the key dynamics of intermediaries’ soundness, namely higher profits and less non-performing loans

The puzzle of non-participation in continuing training : an empirical study of chronic vs. temporary non-participation

"Although participation in continuing vocational training is often found to be associated with considerable individual benefits, a puzzlingly large number of people still do not take part in training. In order to solve the puzzle we distinguish between temporary and chronic non-participants. Previous studies have shown that training participants and non-participants differ in unobservable characteristics and therefore self-select into training or not. We show that even non-participants cannot be treated as a homogeneous group: there are those who never take part in training (chronic non-participants) and those who are not currently taking part (temporary (non-)participants). Using a unique data set of non-participants commissioned by the German 'Expert Commission on Financing Lifelong Learning' and covering a very large number of individuals not taking part in training, we separate and compare chronic and temporary non-participants. By estimating a sample selection model using maximum likelihood estimation we take potential selection effects into account: temporary (non-)participants may be more motivated or may have different inherent skills than chronic nonparticipants. We find that chronic non-participants would have higher costs than temporary (non-)participants and their short-term benefits associated with their current jobs would be lower. However, in the long run even chronic non-participants would benefit similarly from participation due to improved prospects on the labor market. The results indicate that chronic non-participants either misperceive future developments or suffer from an exceptionally high discount rate, which in turn leads in their view to a negative cost-benefit ratio for training." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en)) Additional Information Kurzfassung (deutsch) Executive summary (English)Weiterbildung, Teilnehmer, Bildungsbeteiligung, Bildungsinvestitionen, Bildungsertrag, Kosten-Nutzen-Analyse, Bildungsökonomie

Intrinsically Photosensitive Retinal Ganglion Cells of the Human Retina.

Light profoundly affects our mental and physical health. In particular, light, when not delivered at the appropriate time, may have detrimental effects. In mammals, light is perceived not only by rods and cones but also by a subset of retinal ganglion cells that express the photopigment melanopsin that renders them intrinsically photosensitive (ipRGCs). ipRGCs participate in contrast detection and play critical roles in non-image-forming vision, a set of light responses that include circadian entrainment, pupillary light reflex (PLR), and the modulation of sleep/alertness, and mood. ipRGCs are also found in the human retina, and their response to light has been characterized indirectly through the suppression of nocturnal melatonin and PLR. However, until recently, human ipRGCs had rarely been investigated directly. This gap is progressively being filled as, over the last years, an increasing number of studies provided descriptions of their morphology, responses to light, and gene expression. Here, I review the progress in our knowledge of human ipRGCs, in particular, the different morphological and functional subtypes described so far and how they match the murine subtypes. I also highlight questions that remain to be addressed. Investigating ipRGCs is critical as these few cells play a major role in our well-being. Additionally, as ipRGCs display increased vulnerability or resilience to certain disorders compared to conventional RGCs, a deeper knowledge of their function could help identify therapeutic approaches or develop diagnostic tools. Overall, a better understanding of how light is perceived by the human eye will help deliver precise light usage recommendations and implement light-based therapeutic interventions to improve cognitive performance, mood, and life quality

Real-time scattering compensation for time-of-flight camera

3D images from time-of-flight cameras may suffer from false depth readings caused by light scattering. In order to reduce such scattering artifacts, a scattering compensation procedure is proposed. First, scattering is analysed and expressed as a linear transform of a complex image. Then, a simple scattering model is formulated. Assuming a space invariant point spread function as a model for the scattering leads to a solution in a form of a deconvolution scheme whose computational feasibility and practical applicability are further discussed in this paper