Dealing with the Challenges of Capital Inflows in the Context of Macrofinancial Links

In the wake of the recent global financial crisis, emerging markets have seen a significantly higher degree of volatility in their capital flows. At the onset, all countries experienced sudden stops and increases in risk premia. Following this initial period of uncertainty, financial markets began to differentiate between the countries, and while most developing regions have regained access to both debt and equity issuance, the pace of recovery of capital inflows has been particularly remarkable for some countries. Given the likelihood that the prevailing low interest rates in the developed world will remain for some time to come, and given the prospects of faster growth in emerging markets, it is likely that some emerging markets will experience significant surges in capital flows in the near future. This note examines potential policy responses to maintain macroeconomic and financial sector stability in the face of increased capital inflows.capital, inflows, macrofinancial linkage, financial crisis, emerging markets, volatility, rick, debt, equity, recovery, interest

Chief executive pay in UK higher education: the role of university performance

open accessRemuneration for chief executives in UK higher education—known as Vice Chancellors (VCs)—has been on an upward trend in recent years, and VCs have received criticism that their performance does not warrant such reward. We investigate the relationship between VC pay and performance (rooted in principal agent theory), taking into account an array of other possible determinants. Deriving measures of VC performance is difficult as VCs are agents for various principals, and each principal may be interested in a different aspect of performance. We consider three measures of VC performance here: managerial efficiency as measured by data envelopment analysis; performance in university rankings produced by the media; the financial stability of the university. We construct a comprehensive data set, covering academic years 2009/2010 to 2016/2017, a period of considerable change in the UK higher education sector including rapidly-rising undergraduate tuition fees. Our results show that, once other possible determinants of VC pay are taken into account, the main measure of performance which affects VC pay is the one based on media rankings. Thus the agents (VCs) appear to be rewarded for delivering against this performance benchmark which is likely to be of interest to a variety of principals. This result however varies by type of university suggesting that the labour market for VCs differs by mission group

Full Body Interaction beyond Fun: Engaging Museum Visitors in Human-Data Interaction

Engaging museum visitors in data exploration using full-body interaction is still a challenge. In this paper, we explore four strategies for providing entry-points to the interaction: instrumenting the floor; forcing collaboration; implementing multiple body movements to control the same effect; and, visualizing the visitors' silhouette beside the data visualization. We discuss preliminary results of an in-situ study with 56 museum visitors at Discovery Place, and provide design recommendations for crafting engaging Human-Data Interaction experiences

Trading Away Wide Brands for Cheap Brands

Firms face competing needs to expand product variety and reduce production costs. Trade policy affects firm investments in product variety and production processes differently. Access to larger markets enables innovation to reduce costs. Although firm scale increases, foreign competition reduces markups. Firms react by narrowing their product varieties to recapture these lost markups. I provide a theory detailing this conflicting impact of trade policy and address welfare gains from trade. Accounting for firm heterogeneity, I show support for the theoretical predictions with firm-level innovation data from Thailand's manufacturing sector which experienced unilateral home tariff changes during 2003-2006.brands, trade, manufacturing, heterogeneous firms, Thailand