A simple model of dynamic incentives and occupational choice with motivated agents

People care not only about how much they are paid, but also about what they do. The aim of this paper is to investigate the interplay between an individual's personal motivation and the structure of dynamic incentive schemes. The optimal long-term contract involves not only transfers at each date which are contingent on the whole past history of outcomes but also an initially assigned mission. A modified martingale property is shown to hold in equilibrium. Moreover, the occupational choice problem is investigated and an optimal job separation rule is deriveddynamic moral hazard, motivated agent, occupational choice

Is ECB Communication Effective?

In its Monthly Bulletin of November 2002, the European Central Bank (ECB) stated that the monthly press conference held by its President represents one of its most important communication channels and that it provides a comprehensive summary of the policy relevant assessment of economic developments. After providing a glossary to translate the qualitative information of the press conferences into an ordered scale, we verify empirically whether and to what extent market expectations react to the information released by the ECB. We found that the public not only understand but also believe the signals sent by the European monetary authority.communication, credibility, ECB, glossary, Repo, Euribor, news approach

The Importance of the Wording of the ECB

This paper analyses the ECB communication, focusing in particular on its transparency dimension. We posit that if the ECB is transparent about its future policy decisions, then we should be able to forecast fairly well its future interest rate setting behaviour. We find that the predicting ability of the European monetary authority's words, is similar to the one implied by market-based measures of monetary policy expectations. Moreover, the ECB's wording provides complementary, rather than substitute, information with respect to economic and monetary variables.ECB communication, transparency, monetary policy forecast, empirical reaction function, Euribor rate curve

The Impact of Central Bank Announcements on Asset Prices in Real Time: Testing the Efficiency of the Euribor Futures Market

This paper examines the effect of European Central Bank communication on the price discovery process in the Euribor futures market using a new tick-by-tick dataset. First, we show that two pieces of news systematically hit financial markets on Governing Council meeting days: the ECB policy rate decision and the explanation of its monetary policy stance. Second, we find that the unexpected component of ECB explanations has a significant and sizeable impact on futures prices. This indicates that the ECB has already acquired some credibility: financial markets seem to believe that it does what it says it will do. Finally, our results suggest that the Euribor futures market is semi-strong form informational efficient.market efficiency, central bank communication, news shock, tickby-tick Euribor futures data, event-study analysis.

SAI, a Sensible Artificial Intelligence that plays Go

We propose a multiple-komi modification of the AlphaGo Zero/Leela Zero paradigm. The winrate as a function of the komi is modeled with a two-parameters sigmoid function, so that the neural network must predict just one more variable to assess the winrate for all komi values. A second novel feature is that training is based on self-play games that occasionally branch -- with changed komi -- when the position is uneven. With this setting, reinforcement learning is showed to work on 7x7 Go, obtaining very strong playing agents. As a useful byproduct, the sigmoid parameters given by the network allow to estimate the score difference on the board, and to evaluate how much the game is decided.Comment: Updated for IJCNN 2019 conferenc

La democrazia della conoscenza

The aim of this article is to study the relationship between knowledge and democracy through the ideas of Edgar Morin. A reflection on training and educational theorising, which focuses on the stage of contemporary society, to meet the educational and democratic needs that it imposes on us: the ethical issue, which is closely linked to what is epistemological and aesthetic. From the criticism that the author makes of the traditional education system and the reflection on the epistemological rupture that weighs down knowledge, I reflect on aesthetic sensitivity, as the art of human understanding, for a regeneration of knowledge, of education and of society, towards a cognitive democracy.L’obiettivo del presente articolo è quello di indagare il rapporto tra conoscenza e democrazia attraverso il pensiero di Edgar Morin. Una riflessione sulla formazione e sulla teoresi pedagogica, che verte attorno agli scenari della società contemporanea, per rispondere alle esigenze formative e democratiche che essa ci impone: la questione etica, strettamente connessa a quella epistemologica ed estetica. A partire dalla critica che l’autore muove al sistema educativo tradizionale e dalla riflessione sulla frattura epistemologica che grava in seno alla conoscenza, cercherò di riflettere circa la sensibilità estetica, come arte della comprensione umana, per una rigenerazione della conoscenza, dell’educazione e della società, nella direzione di una democrazia cognitiva