National Saving-Investment Dynamics and International Capital Mobility

The authors analyze the dynamics of national saving-investment relationships to determine the degree of international capital mobility. Following Coakley and Kulasi (1997), the authors interpret the close relationship between national saving and investment in the long run as reflecting a solvency constraint, rather than as evidence of limited capital mobility (Feldstein and Horioka 1980). As in Jansen (1996, 1998), the authors also examine the short-term saving-investment relationship, especially the speed at which the variables return to the long-run equilibrium relationship once they have deviated from it. The ease with which a country can borrow or lend and run current account imbalances in the short run, before it has to ultimately reverse the transaction at some future date to satisfy the solvency constraint, is interpreted as being positively related to the degree of international capital mobility. Extending the approach by Jansen, the authors apply panel error-correction techniques to data for 20 OECD countries from 1960 to 1999, and find that saving and investment display a long-run relationship that is consistent with the interpretation that a long-run solvency constraint is binding for each country. Furthermore, capital mobility has increased over time.International topics

Large-Scale Disasters and the Insurance Industry

We investigate the impact of the 20 largest – in terms of insured losses – man-made or natural disasters on various insurance industry stock indices. We show via an event study that insurance sectors worldwide are quite resilient, in a market–value sense, to unexpected losses to capital: our data provide evidence that equity market investors believe that insurance companies will on average be able to make losses back over the foreseeable future, i.e. that the adverse shocks to equity which have resulted from these catastrophes will be compensated by either an outward shift of the demand curve or an ability to raise premiums, or both.disaster, insurance industry, event-study

Large-scale disasters and the insurance industry

We investigate the effect of the 20 largest – in terms of insured losses – man-made or natural disasters on the insurance industry. We show via an event study that insurance markets worldwide are quite resilient to unexpected losses to capital and are even outperforming the general market subsequent to great disasters. --disaster,insurance industry,event-study

L‘immagine delle Terme di Traiano nel Codice Destailleur e in altre vedute d‘epoca

Der vorliegende Aufsatz diskutiert den Stand der Dokumentation der Trajansthermen im Codex Destailleur im Vergleich zu Vorgängerzeichnungen und der Forma Urbis Marmorea. Darüber hinaus identifiziert der Beitrag die heute zerstörten, als Titusthermen bekannten Ruinen zwischen Kolosseum und Trajansthermen in einer Vielzahl von Veduten. Sowohl für die Trajansthermen im Codex Destailleur wie auch für die Titusthermen im Fall einer Skizze von Palladio wird gezeigt, dass die fraglichen Zeichnungen nur in bemassten Bereichen archäologisch stichhaltig sind. Daraus resultiert unter anderem, dass es vor den Traiansthermen keinen ausreichenden Beweis gibt für ein axialsymmetrisches Thermengebäude mit zentraler kreuzgratgewölbter Halle

Revealing matrices

This chapter illustrates the usefulness of enriched and refined data model matrices for database project evaluation, exposing many nonintuitive data properties that are hard to uncover by simply using a database or looking at the commonly used indicators of quality. As data becomes more accessible in the form of Linked Data, RDF graphs, or open dumps of relational tables, the presented methods can be applied by funders or the projects themselves, within a very short time frame in a mostly automated process. The visualizations in this chapter present the first comprehensive big picture of an entire example database – the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance – where we can see the initial data model definition as well as the emerging complex structure in the collected data. I chose to visualize a state of the database at a point just before it was transferred from a graph-based database system (CENSUS 2005) to a more traditional relational database format (CENSUS BBAW) in 2006, allowing for comparison of the historic state with current and future achievements. By looking at the visualizations, we find out that many of the numbers given in project descriptions are incomplete or even misleading. Some of the new numbers may be smaller than the initially presented ones, but as we learn from our analysis, sometimes a little less is more—and more is different (Anderson 972)

Die Entstehung von mittelalterlichen Doppelstädten in der Mark Brandenburg

Doppelstädte entstanden vor allem im 13. Jahrhundert, in der Zeit der Ausbreitung der Stadt mit besonderem Recht, deren wirtschaftlich aktive Bewohner eine lokale städtische Gemeinde bildeten und gleichzeitig in einem Vertragsverhältnis zu einem Herrschaftsträgerstanden. Wo sich dies nicht in einem einzigen Siedlungs- und Rechtskörper realisieren ließ, konnte eine Doppelstadt entstehen. Ein häufiger Grund war eine herrschaftliche Konkurrenzsituation am Ort. Aber auch die Ansiedlung einer größeren Gruppe von Neusiedlern, deren Integration in die bestehende Stadt Schwierigkeiten bereitete, in einer ergänzenden Neustadt zur wirtschaftlichen Stärkung des Ortes und die Lage beiderseits eines Flussübergangs konnten eine Rolle spielen.Twin cities chiefly arose in the thirteenth century, during the time when cities were proliferating and had particular rights; their economically active inhabitants comprised a local urban community and at the same time were in a contractual relationship with a ruler. A twin city could arise in places where this particularity could not be realized in a singlelegal and settlement entity. One frequent reason was local competition for dominance, but a larger group of new settlers could also play a role, by settling in a complementary new city to strengthen the place economically after having trouble integrating into the existingcity, and so could a location on both sides of a river crossing

Dependencies between European stock markets when price changes are unusually large

The present paper studies dependencies between European stock markets when returns are unusually large, using daily data on stock market indices for Germany, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Italy from 1973 to 2001. Dependency is measured by the conditional probability of an unusually large return in one market given an unusually large return in another and is estimated using an approach from multivariate extreme value theory. The paper finds the following. First, dependencies between markets in situations of unusually large returns have become closer over time. Second, they are generally higher for large negative returns than for large positive ones. Third, dependencies differ depending on the country pair considered. For example, stock markets in the Netherlands and France are more closely and those in the United Kingdom and Italy less closely linked to the German market. Fourth, overall dependencies are quite symmetric, in the sense that the conditional probability for an unusually large change given a large change in the other country is similar irrespective of which of the two countries the probability is conditioned on.Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die Abhängigkeiten zwischen Europäischen Aktienmärkten in Situationen ungewöhnlich grosser Kursschwankungen anhand von täglichen Daten der Aktienmarktindices für Deutschland, Großbitannien, Frankreich, die Niederlande und Italien von 1973 bis 2001. Abhängigkeit wird dabei gemessen anhand der bedingten Wahrscheinlichkeit einer ungewöhnlich grossen Preisveränderung auf einem Aktienmarkt, wenn eine ungewöhnlich grosse Preisveränderung auf einem anderen Markt gegeben ist. Diese Wahrscheinlichkeit wird geschätzt mit Hilfe eines Ansatzes aus der multivariaten Extremwerttheorie. Die Ergebnisse können folgendermaßen zusammengefaßt werden: Erstens sind die geschätzten Abhängigkeiten im Laufe der Zeit stärker geworden. Zweitens sind sie ausgeprägter im Falle negativer als im Falle positiver Kursbewegungen. Drittens sind sie unterschiedlich je nach betrachtetem Länderpaar. So stehen die Aktienmärkte in Frankreich und den Niederlanden in jeweils relativ starker gegenseitiger Abhängigkeit in Bezug auf den deutschen Aktienmarkt, während die Aktienmärkte in Grossbritannien und Italien weniger eng mit dem deutschen Aktienmarkt verbunden sind. Viertens sind die Abhängigkeiten zwischen zwei Märkten generell symmetrisch in dem Sinne, dass die geschätzte bedingte Wahrscheinlichkeit weitgehend unabhängig davon ist, auf welchen der beiden Märkte die Wahrscheinlichkeit konditioniert wird

Large-scale disasters and the insurance industry

We investigate the effect of the 20 largest – in terms of insured losses – man-made or natural disasters on the insurance industry. We show via an event study that insurance markets worldwide are quite resilient to unexpected losses to capital and are even outperforming the general market subsequent to great disasters