Linking institutional investors to communities

Public pension funds, insurance companies, foundations, and universities increasingly pursue community investments because they deliver on twin goals: high financial returns and economic growth in underserved areas. Since 2000, mission-related investments have grown at a 19.5 percent compound annual rate.Investments ; Community development ; Community development - New England

Which lender of last resort for the eurosystem?

The paper want to demonstrate how to organise central banking in a monetary union of independent nations, with emphasis on the role of the central bank as lender of last resort. Section I presents the first proposal for a decentralised central banking system in a monetary union by the Swedish economist Erik Lindahl in 1930, as well as that in 1989 for the Eurosystem, the centrepiece of European Monetary Union (EMU), by Carlo Ciampi, then President of the Banca d’Italia. Both proposals emphasised the necessity of a strong and powerful central monetary authority. Section II demonstrates that EMU lacks a central monetary institution, because the European Central Bank (ECB) is neither a bank of issue nor can it act as a lender of last resort. Section III discusses how to overcome this fundamental deficiency of the Eurosystem, arguing that the missing central fiscal authority in EMU is as much an Achilles heel as the “narrow” ECB. --

The endogeneity of money and the eurosystem

The endogenous theory of money, developed by Basil Moore, argues that the supply of central bank money in modern economies is not under the control of the central bank. According to this view, a central bank typically supplies cash reserves automatically on demand at its minimum lending rate, resulting in a clearly horizontal money supply function. While the paper agrees with Moore that the supply of central bank money cannot be determined exogenously by the central bank, it wonders whether the supply is determined completely by the demand of the commercial banks. The paper suggests that the central bank has some exogenous power to control the quantity of its supply by rationing. More importantly, the central bank is forced to do so! The central bank cannot not merely exist as an automat responding to the wishes of the commercial banks. Part I discusses the cause why the central bank has to restrict its supply, while part II demonstrates how the supply of central bank money can be controlled by looking at the monetary policy operations of the Eurosystem. In accordance with this analysis, the paper offers a modified horizontal or “staircase” supply function of central bank money. --

Using new markets tax credits to mitigate the impact of foreclosures on communities

The author presents an overview of what is being done and offers community development practitioners’ ideas about how to refine and strengthen the federal program. One example: change the program to allow a separate, additional allocation of tax credits for the purchase and resale of foreclosed property in low-income areas.Foreclosure

0.5 Petabyte Simulation of a 45-Qubit Quantum Circuit

Near-term quantum computers will soon reach sizes that are challenging to directly simulate, even when employing the most powerful supercomputers. Yet, the ability to simulate these early devices using classical computers is crucial for calibration, validation, and benchmarking. In order to make use of the full potential of systems featuring multi- and many-core processors, we use automatic code generation and optimization of compute kernels, which also enables performance portability. We apply a scheduling algorithm to quantum supremacy circuits in order to reduce the required communication and simulate a 45-qubit circuit on the Cori II supercomputer using 8,192 nodes and 0.5 petabytes of memory. To our knowledge, this constitutes the largest quantum circuit simulation to this date. Our highly-tuned kernels in combination with the reduced communication requirements allow an improvement in time-to-solution over state-of-the-art simulations by more than an order of magnitude at every scale

The European Central Bank and the eurosystem: An analysis of the missing central monetary institution in European Monetary Union

The Eurosystem is the fifth decentralized system in the history of central banks. It consists of the European Central Bank (ECB) and twelve National Central Banks (NCBs) forming the European Monetary Union (EMU). The stark decentrality of this System is so little known that ubiquitous statements by high level Euro experts on its supposed similarity with other decentralized systems, like the former Bundesbank System and the existing Federal Reserve System, are met with no protest. A closer look on European documents and the balance sheet of the ECB reveals, however, that the ECB – far from being the monopoly supplier of central bank money – cannot set the refinancing conditions to credit institutions in EMU. The latter are determined by the Council of Governors of the Eurosystem, while the main refinancing operations are executed by the NCBs leaving to the ECB the role of vicarious agent. The ECB can neither control all types of securities accepted for the NCBs’ credit operations nor is it able to act as lender of last resort. Yet, every possible manoeuvre to make the ECB look like a central bank of the NCBs is relentlessly employed, most obviously in the design of the Euro banknotes which are issued by the NCBs but carry only the imprint of the ECB, as well as by the ECB’s balance sheet as at 31 December 2002. The latter contains for the first time the item “banknotes in circulation” that are, however, issued by the NCBs and only allocated to the ECB. --

Understanding the Two Components of Risk Attitudes: An Experimental Analysis

Economics and management science share the tradition of ordering risk aversion by ï¬tting the best expected utility (EU) model with a certain utility function to individual data, and then using the utility curvature for each individual as the sole index of risk attitude. (Cumulative) Prospect theory (CPT) has demonstrated various empirical deï¬ciencies of EU and introduced the weighting of probabilities as an additional component to capture risk attitude. However, if utility curvature and probability weighting were strongly correlated, the utility curvature in EU alone, while not properly describing risky behavior in general, would still capture most of the variance regarding degrees of risk aversion. This study shows, however, that such a strong correlation does not exist. Though, most individuals exhibit concave utility and convex probability weighting, the two components show no correlation. Thus neglecting one component entails a loss.risk attitudes, cumulative prospect theory, experimental study