Do specialization benefits outweigh concentration risks in credit portfolios of German banks?

Lending specialization on certain industry sectors can have opposing effects on monitoring (including screening) abilities and on the sectoral concentration risk of a credit portfolio. In this paper, we examine in the first part if monitoring abilities of German cooperative banks and savings banks increase with their specialization on certain industry sectors. We observe that sectoral specialization generally entails better monitoring quality, particularly in the case of the cooperative banks. In the second part we measure the overall effect of better monitoring and the associated higher sectoral credit concentrations on the credit risk of the portfolio. Our empirical results suggest that specialization benefits overcompensate the impact of higher credit concentrations in the case of the cooperative banks. For savings banks, the results on the net effect depend on how specialization is measured. If specialization is gauged by Hirschman Herfindahl indices, the net effect is an increase of portfolio risk due to the higher sectoral concentration. If specialization is instead measured by distance measures, portfolio risk decreases as the impact of better monitoring abilities prevails. --bank lending,loan portfolio,diversification,expected loss,savings banks,cooperative banks,concentration,economic capital,credit risk

Online Searching with an Autonomous Robot

We discuss online strategies for visibility-based searching for an object hidden behind a corner, using Kurt3D, a real autonomous mobile robot. This task is closely related to a number of well-studied problems. Our robot uses a three-dimensional laser scanner in a stop, scan, plan, go fashion for building a virtual three-dimensional environment. Besides planning trajectories and avoiding obstacles, Kurt3D is capable of identifying objects like a chair. We derive a practically useful and asymptotically optimal strategy that guarantees a competitive ratio of 2, which differs remarkably from the well-studied scenario without the need of stopping for surveying the environment. Our strategy is used by Kurt3D, documented in a separate video.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, 12 photographs, 1 table, Latex, submitted for publicatio

Analysis Methods of Errors (Motion and Atmospheric) in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Images

A method to allow the analysis of the effects of motion and atmospheric errors in SAR images is here presented. The objective of the method is to allow the visualization of the effects of motion errors and atmospheric artefacts on the processed (focused) SAR image. The method is intended to allow the analysis of the interaction of motion and atmospheric errors with the adopted SAR processing procedure and motion compensation algorithms. In this article the analysis method has been applied and tested to a C-Band E-SAR (DLR airborne SAR system) data set where we see that the effects of linear and non-linear phase errors observed are in agreement with the theory

Unkonventionelle Politische Partizipation Im Zeitverlauf: Hat die Bildungsexpansion zu einer politischen Mobilisierung beigetragen?

Zusammenfassung: In Demokratien wird von vielen Seiten eine zunehmende Abkehr der Bürger und Bürgerinnen von Politik beklagt. Haben die Bildungsreformen der 1960er Jahre, zu deren Grundanliegen auch die Förderung politischen Engagements und die Erziehung zu mündigen Bürgerinnen und Bürgern gehörten, in diesem Punkt versagt? Im Rahmen dieses Beitrags wird der Frage nachgegangen, ob die Bildungsexpansion eine politische Mobilisierung zur Folge hatte, im Zuge derer unkonventionelle politische Partizipationsformen an Bedeutung gewonnen haben. Unter Nutzung kumulierter ALLBUS-Datensätze (1988-2000) werden zunächst soziale Hintergrundmechanismen des Zusammenhangs zwischen Bildung und politischer Partizipation auf der individuellen Ebene betrachtet, um dann anhand einer simultanen Modellierung von Alters-, Perioden-und Kohorteneffekt unkonventionelle politische Partizipation im Zeitverlauf zu untersuchen. Im Ergebnis zeigen sich gleich bleibend starke Effekte des Bildungsniveaus sowie Hinweise, dass eine politische Mobilisierung stattgefunden hat. Während die höher Gebildeten sich als die hauptsächlichen Träger dieses Prozesses erweisen, bleibt die Distinktion der niedrigen Bildungsgruppen im Hinblick auf ein geringes Niveau politischer Partizipation erhalte