The Self-insurance Role of International Reserves and the 2008-2010 Crisis

There is no standard rule for the definition of an “optimal level” of international reserves and several assumptions underlie the rationale behind holding reserves. There are various theoretical approaches, but no standard for the evaluation of the performance of “optimal level” models, and their parameters are difficult to estimate. The literature suggests that the benefits of holding reserves are high, but the accumulation of reserves is a costly strategy. In fact, in a world of high liquidity and free capital flow, establishing an adequate level of international reserves is still a puzzle. The strategy of accumulating international reserves is evaluated here using data from the 2008-2010 crisis and it is shown that countries with higher international reserve levels had less adjustment costs between 2008 and 2010. The cost-benefit relationship of holding reserves in the 2008-2010 crisis is also discussed based on a sample with 71 countries.

Gender Matters! Analyzing Global Cultural Gender Preferences for Venues Using Social Sensing

Gender differences is a phenomenon around the world actively researched by social scientists. Traditionally, the data used to support such studies is manually obtained, often through surveys with volunteers. However, due to their inherent high costs because of manual steps, such traditional methods do not quickly scale to large-size studies. We here investigate a particular aspect of gender differences: preferences for venues. To that end we explore the use of check-in data collected from Foursquare to estimate cultural gender preferences for venues in the physical world. For that, we first demonstrate that by analyzing the check-in data in various regions of the world we can find significant differences in preferences for specific venues between gender groups. Some of these significant differences reflect well-known cultural patterns. Moreover, we also gathered evidence that our methodology offers useful information about gender preference for venues in a given region in the real world. This suggests that gender and venue preferences observed may not be independent. Our results suggests that our proposed methodology could be a promising tool to support studies on gender preferences for venues at different spatial granularities around the world, being faster and cheaper than traditional methods, besides quickly capturing changes in the real world