COMPETITION AND CONTESTABILITY IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN BANKING MARKETS

This abstract will be reformatted upon submission. You don't need to format for line-breaks here!!!!! This will be a new paragraph but you can't indent - sorry. This study analyzes the evolution of competitive conditions in the Banking industries of fourteen Central and Eastern European (CEE) transition economies using firm-level data. The results of the competition analysis suggest that the banking markets of CEE countries cannot be characterized by the bipolar cases of either perfect competition or monopoly over 1993-2000 except for FYR of Macedonia and Slovakia. That is, banks earned their revenues as if operating under conditions of monopolistic competition in that period. Furthermore, the cross-sectional analysis of competitive structure reveals initially a decreasing trend between 1993 and 1996 and a subsequent increasing trend in competitive conditions after 1996. Large banks in transition countries operate in a relatively more competitive environment compared to small banks, or in other words, competition is lower in local markets compared to national and international markets.Bank Competition; Contestability; Transition Economies

Accounting for outliers and calendar effects in surrogate simulations of stock return sequences

Surrogate Data Analysis (SDA) is a statistical hypothesis testing framework for the determination of weak chaos in time series dynamics. Existing SDA procedures do not account properly for the rich structures observed in stock return sequences, attributed to the presence of heteroscedasticity, seasonal effects and outliers. In this paper we suggest a modification of the SDA framework, based on the robust estimation of location and scale parameters of mean-stationary time series and a probabilistic framework which deals with outliers. A demonstration on the NASDAQ Composite index daily returns shows that the proposed approach produces surrogates that faithfully reproduce the structure of the original series while being manifestations of linear-random dynamics.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figure

Tail risk constraints and maximal entropy

Portfolio selection in the financial literature has essentially been analyzed under two central assumptions: full knowledge of the joint probability distribution of the returns of the securities that will comprise the target portfolio; and investors’ preferences are expressed through a utility function. In the real world, operators build portfolios under risk constraints which are expressed both by their clients and regulators and which bear on the maximal loss that may be generated over a given time period at a given confidence level (the so-called Value at Risk of the position). Interestingly, in the finance literature, a serious discussion of how much or little is known from a probabilistic standpoint about the multi-dimensional density of the assets’ returns seems to be of limited relevance. Our approach in contrast is to highlight these issues and then adopt throughout a framework of entropy maximization to represent the real world ignorance of the “true” probability distributions, both univariate and multivariate, of traded securities’ returns. In this setting, we identify the optimal portfolio under a number of downside risk constraints. Two interesting results are exhibited: (i) the left- tail constraints are sufficiently powerful to override all other considerations in the conventional theory; (ii) the “barbell portfolio” (maximal certainty/ low risk in one set of holdings, maximal uncertainty in another), which is quite familiar to traders, naturally emerges in our construction

Analysis of Production and Location Decisions by Means of Multi-Criteria Analysis

During the last few years economists and operations researchers have paid much attention to multi-criteria analysis as a tool in modern decision-making. The basic feature of multi-criteria analysis is the fact that a wide variety of relevant decision aspects can be taken into account without a necessity to translate all these aspects in monetary terms. This article will give a brief survey of these new methods in both a quantitative and in a qualitative sense. After this survey the relevance of multi-criteria analysis for entrepreneurial decisions in the field of production and investments will be exposed. The analysis will be illustrated by means of two examples of entrepreneurial decision-problems, which have been solved by means of multi-criteria analysis

Revisiting the Twentieth Century Through the Lens of Generation X and Digital Games: A Scoping Review

Video games have been around since the 1960s and have impacted upon society in a myriad of different ways. The purpose of this scoping review is to identify existing literature within the domain of video games which recruited participants from the Generation X (1965–1980) cohort. Six databases were searched (ACM, CINHAL Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science) focusing on published journal papers between 1970 and 2000. Search results identified 3186 articles guided by the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR); 4 papers were irretrievable, 138 duplicated papers were removed, leaving 3048 were assessed for eligibility and 3026 were excluded. Articles (n = 22) were included into this review, with four papers primarily published in 1997 and in 1999. Thematic analysis identified five primary themes: purpose and objectives, respective authors’ reporting, technology, ethics and environment) and seven secondary themes: populations, type of participants (e.g. children, students), ethical approval, study design, reimbursement, language, type of assessments. This scoping review is distinctive because it primarily focuses on Generation X, who have experienced and grown-up with videogames, and contributes to several disciplines including: game studies, gerontology and health, and has wider implications from a societal, design and development perspective of video games

Nonlinear Properties, Complexity, and Emergence in the Governance Of the World Trade Organization

Immediately after World War II the allied powers began what would be a slow march towards a worldwide economic and political order. They established an organization for political and military crises (the United Nations), economic rehabilitation (the International Monetary Fund), facilitation of capital transfers (the World Bank), and promotion of free trade among nations (the World Trade Organization). These organizations did, however, institute (or tried to institute) change from the top down, which reflected the prevailing philosophy of the time. The problem was and is that these organizations ignored inevitable change from the bottom up. The very fact of national sovereignty precluded a top down imposition of a world economic order. Instead, a peculiar interaction has been occurring between this top down rules and bottom up reactions that can best be explained through chaos, or complexity theory. These elements (both nations and international organizations) may be likened to individual units in social space. Each individual unit is influenced both by the surrounding units (i) and by factors in its immediate environment (е). The presence of self-reinforcing (feedback) behavior ensures reverse causality whereby the individual unit influences its environment, which in turn, influences the individual unit. In this system, the total number of inputs equals the total number of elements in the system (i+ е) = N. In a binary system of this magnitude, where N is a large number like the WTO membership (W = 152 countries), chaos is likely to ensue. With nations and international organizations problems may come in two different ways. The first is when N ≤ 2, an ordered system emerges, because the elements have “low connectivity” to inputs. In this, the system withstands small perturbations and returns shortly to its original attractors; this homeostatic property also implies that significant behavioral (or permanent) changes can be achieved only by the introduction of major perturbations in the system. In the same vein, in a system with “high connectivity” order can also emerge if there exist biased “Boolean Switching Rules”. The current movement to worldwide economic order represents the introduction of specific “point attractors” to bring nations into global equilibrium. Unfortunately, these attractors are being introduced from the “top-down” by the wealthiest nations of the world. Hence, despite the presence of such “point attractors” as outlined above, the top-down approach also has the effect of incorporating strange attractors from the local systems. This paper discusses the adaptive complexity of designing and implementing world governance rules to sustain the survival and growth of the WTO. The paper utilizes the methodologies of “adaptive complex systems” and “evolutionary economics” and highlights its arguments by employing clinical studies from the U.S.A. Latin America, and Africa.Numéro Spécial « Special Issue on Nonlinear Financial Analysis :Editorial Introduction » Guest Editor :Catherine Kyrtsouinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe