The New Basel Capital Accord: A Primer with an Indian Focus

The article examines the pros and cons of the implementation of Basel II in India and contextually, conducts an empirical exercise to examine the impact of capital requirements on the Indian banking systemBasel accord; banknig; India

Banking in India

The article traces the development of banking in India since independence and raises certain issues relevant to the sector at the present juncturebanking; India

Does monetary policy have differential state-level effects? an empirical evaluation

The paper examines whether monetary policy has similar effects across major states in the Indian polity. Impulse response functions from an estimated Structural Vector Auto Regression (SVAR) reveal two sets of states: a core of states that respond to monetary policy in a significant fashion vis-à-vis others whose response is less significant. The paper attempts to trace the reasons for the differential response of these two sets of states in terms of financial deepening and differential industry mix.monetary policy; regional effect; optimum currency area

Bank nominee directors and corporate performance: micro evidence for India

Banks and financial institutions play a major role in governance of non-financial companies in India through the mechanism of nominee directors. This paper probes two allied issues: firstly, the isolation of the firm specific factors which determine the presence of bank nominee directors on boards and secondly, whether companies, with bank nominee directors exhibit better performance/governance than companies with no banker representation on their boards. A Probit model estimated over a cross-section of Indian manufacturing firms for 2003, indicates that bankers on boards seem to exert a healthy impact on the companies. In fact, large public limited companies are likely to exhibit banker representation, primarily in their role as expertise providers. The evidence from Tobit model reconfirms these results.Banker; corporate governance; debt equity ratio

Bank nominee directors and corporate performance: micro evidence for India

Banks and financial institutions play a major role in governance of non-financial companies in India through the mechanism of nominee directors. This paper probes two allied issues: firstly, the isolation of the firm specific factors which determine the presence of bank nominee directors on boards and secondly, whether companies, with bank nominee directors exhibit better performance/governance than companies with no banker representation on their boards. A Probit model estimated over a cross-section of Indian manufacturing firms for 2003, indicates that bankers on boards seem to exert a healthy impact on the companies. In fact, large public limited companies are likely to exhibit banker representation, primarily in their role as expertise providers. The evidence from Tobit model reconfirms these results.Banker; corporate governance; debt equity ratio

The new Basel capital accord: Rationale, design and tentative implications for India

The article surveys the literature pertaining to the Basel II and concludes with the concerns germane to India in this regardBasel II; capital adequacy; pro-cyclicality; banking; India

Abductive reasoning in neural-symbolic learning systems

Abduction is or subsumes a process of inference. It entertains possible hypotheses and it chooses hypotheses for further scrutiny. There is a large literature on various aspects of non-symbolic, subconscious abduction. There is also a very active research community working on the symbolic (logical) characterisation of abduction, which typically treats it as a form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In this paper we start to bridge the gap between the symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches to abduction. We are interested in benefiting from developments made by each community. In particular, we are interested in the ability of non-symbolic systems (neural networks) to learn from experience using efficient algorithms and to perform massively parallel computations of alternative abductive explanations. At the same time, we would like to benefit from the rigour and semantic clarity of symbolic logic. We present two approaches to dealing with abduction in neural networks. One of them uses Connectionist Modal Logic and a translation of Horn clauses into modal clauses to come up with a neural network ensemble that computes abductive explanations in a top-down fashion. The other combines neural-symbolic systems and abductive logic programming and proposes a neural architecture which performs a more systematic, bottom-up computation of alternative abductive explanations. Both approaches employ standard neural network architectures which are already known to be highly effective in practical learning applications. Differently from previous work in the area, our aim is to promote the integration of reasoning and learning in a way that the neural network provides the machinery for cognitive computation, inductive learning and hypothetical reasoning, while logic provides the rigour and explanation capability to the systems, facilitating the interaction with the outside world. Although it is left as future work to determine whether the structure of one of the proposed approaches is more amenable to learning than the other, we hope to have contributed to the development of the area by approaching it from the perspective of symbolic and sub-symbolic integration

Sustaining supercooled mixed phase via resonant oscillations of the order parameter

We investigate the dynamics of a first order transition when the order parameter field undergoes resonant oscillations, driven by a periodically varying parameter of the free energy. This parameter could be a background oscillating field as in models of pre-heating after inflation. In the context of condensed matter systems, it could be temperature $T$, or pressure, external electric/magnetic field etc. We show that with suitable driving frequency and amplitude, the system remains in a type of mixed phase, without ever completing transition to the stable phase, even when the oscillating parameter of the free energy remains below the corresponding critical value (for example, with oscillating temperature, $T$ always remains below the critical temperature $T_c$). This phenomenon may have important implications. In cosmology, it will imply prolonged mixed phase in a first order transition due to coupling with background oscillating fields. In condensed matter systems, it will imply that using oscillating temperature (or, more appropriately, pressure waves) one may be able to sustain liquids in a mixed phase indefinitely at low temperatures, without making transition to the frozen phase.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures, Expanded version with more detail