1,716 research outputs found
The treatment of distressed banks.
This article suggests some reforms of regulatory architecture for the treatment of distressed banks. Our main recommendations are: ⢠a special bankruptcy regime for banks should be implemented ; ⢠strong, truly independent supervisory agencies should be established ; ⢠the incentives of the top managers of distressed banks should not be kept unchecked ; ⢠procyclicality of solvency regulations should be dampened by the introduction of âautomatic stabilisersâ ; ⢠one should move toward centralised supervision in economic areas which are meant to be integrated.
Precision and accuracy of fish length measurements obtained with two visual underwater methods
During the VITAL cruise in the Bay of Biscay in summer 2002, two devices for measuring the length of swimming fish were tested: 1) a mechanical crown that emitted a pair of parallel laser beams and that was mounted on the main camera and 2) an underwater auto-focus video camera. The precision and accuracy of these devices were compared and the various sources of measurement errors were estimated by repeatedly measuring fixed and mobile objects and live fish. It was found that fish mobility is the main source of error for these devices because they require that the objects to be measured are perpendicular to the field of vision. The best performance was obtained with the laser method where a video-replay of laser spots (projected on fish bodies) carrying real-time size information was used. The auto-focus system performed poorly because of a delay in obtaining focus and because of some technical problems
The lender of last resort: a 21st century approach
The classical Bagehotâs conception of a Lender of Last Resort (LOLR) that lends to illiquid banks has been criticized on two grounds: on the one hand, the distinction between insolvency and illiquidity is not clear cut; on the other a fully collateralized repo market allows Central Banks to provide the adequate aggregated amount of liquidity and leave the responsibility of lending uncollateralized to the banks. The object of this paper is to analyze rigorously these issues by providing a framework where liquidity shocks cannot be distinguished from solvency ones and ask whether there is a need for a LOLR and how should it operate. Determining the optimal LOLR policy requires a careful modeling of the structure of the interbank market and of the closure policy. In our set up, the results depend upon the existence of moral hazard. If the main source of moral hazard is the banksâ lack of incentives to screen loans, then the LOLR may have to intervene to improve the e?ciency of an unsecured interbank market; if instead, the main source of moral hazard is loans monitoring, then the interbank market should be secured and the LOLR should never intervene. JEL Classification: E58, G28Interbank Market, Lender of Last Resort, Liquidity
The lender of last resort: A 21st Century approach
The object of this paper is to analyze rigorously the role of a Lender of Last Resort by providing a framework where the distinction between insolvency and illiquidity is not clearly cut. Determining the optimal Lender of Last Resort policy requires a careful modeling of the structure of the interbank market and of the closure policy. In our set up, the results depend upon the existence of moral hazard. If the main source of moral hazard is the banksâ lack of incentives to screen loans, then the Lender of Last Resort may have to intervene to improve the e¢ciency of an unsecured interbank market; if instead, the main source of moral hazard is loans monitoring, then the interbank market should be secured and the Lender of Last Resort should never intervene.Lender of Last Resort, interbank market, liquidity
Scintillation efficiency of liquid argon in low energy neutron-argon scattering
Experiments searching for weak interacting massive particles with noble gases
such as liquid argon require very low detection thresholds for nuclear recoils.
A determination of the scintillation efficiency is crucial to quantify the
response of the detector at low energy. We report the results obtained with a
small liquid argon cell using a monoenergetic neutron beam produced by a
deuterium-deuterium fusion source. The light yield relative to electrons was
measured for six argon recoil energies between 11 and 120 keV at zero electric
drift field.Comment: 21 pages, 19 figures, 4 table
Power-Law Distributions in a Two-sided Market and Net Neutrality
"Net neutrality" often refers to the policy dictating that an Internet
service provider (ISP) cannot charge content providers (CPs) for delivering
their content to consumers. Many past quantitative models designed to determine
whether net neutrality is a good idea have been rather equivocal in their
conclusions. Here we propose a very simple two-sided market model, in which the
types of the consumers and the CPs are {\em power-law distributed} --- a kind
of distribution known to often arise precisely in connection with
Internet-related phenomena. We derive mostly analytical, closed-form results
for several regimes: (a) Net neutrality, (b) social optimum, (c) maximum
revenue by the ISP, or (d) maximum ISP revenue under quality differentiation.
One unexpected conclusion is that (a) and (b) will differ significantly, unless
average CP productivity is very high
Thermodynamics of aggregation of two proteins
We investigate aggregation mechanism of two proteins in a thermodynamically
unambiguous manner by considering the finite size effect of free energy
landscape of HP lattice protein model. Multi-Self-Overlap-Ensemble Monte Carlo
method is used for numerical calculations. We find that a dimer can be formed
spontaneously as a thermodynamically stable state when the system is small
enough. It implies the possibility that the aggregation of proteins in a cell
is triggered when they are confined in a small region by, for example, being
surrounded by other macromolecules.We also find that the dimer exhibits a
transition between unstable state and metastable state in the infinite system.Comment: jpsj2.cls, 7 pages, 14 figures; misconfigurations of Fig.Nos.
correcte
Rockfall Hazard Analysis at Small Scale: A Numerical Study for the Estimation of Representative Slope Parameters
The identification of rockfall-affected areas depends on a large number of stochastic variables influencing both triggering and propagation phases. Therefore, rockfall hazard assessment presents huge uncertainties linked to the various scales of analysis. At the small scale (e.g. valley scale), a quick evaluation of rockfall hazard zones is generally required in order to highlight the most critical situations where more detailed analyses should be carried out. The Cone Method (Jaboyedoff and Labiouse 2011), recently implemented in the QPROTO plugin for QGIS, allows to reach this goal with simplified geometrical considerations. In a 3D analysis, the energy line angle and the lateral spreading angle Îą define a cone of propagation whose apex is located in the rockfall source point. The most significant issue in using the plugin is the evaluation of these angles, which must be defined by the users to consider all the rockfall dissipative processes included in the energy line method (Evans and Hungr 1993). In this paper a study concerning the influence of slope properties (forest coverage and slope inclination) and block characteristics (shape and volume) is proposed, in order to provide to the users of the plugin a preliminary dataset of calibrated angles
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