The design of the risk-sensitivity of capital requirements: does it matter for bank business choices?

By employing cross-country variations in the adoption of the Basel I and II capital Accords, we examine how different designs of the risk-sensitivity of capital requirements influence bank business choices. We show that the move to the Basel II regime has not amplified the trends found for the Basel I Accord in the form of a reduction in total lending growth (asset substitution), and increases in lending risk (cherry picking) and noninterest income activities (activity substitution). In fact, Basel II has led to a reduction in bank exposure to non-interest income and, at least in the case of banks opting for the high risk-sensitive Internal Rating Based (IRB) option within Basel II, decreased lending risk. Nevertheless, the adoption of the IRB approach has had the negative consequence of lowering the growth rate of loans to the corporate sector and amplifying its procyclicality

Lessons Learned from EVALITA 2020 and Thirteen Years of Evaluation of Italian Language Technology

This paper provides a summary of the 7th Evaluation Campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian (EVALITA2020) which was held online on December 17th, due to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020 edition of Evalita included 14 different tasks belonging to five research areas, namely: (i) Affect, Hate, and Stance, (ii) Creativity and Style, (iii) New Challenges in Long-standing Tasks, (iv) Semantics and Multimodality, (v) Time and Diachrony. This paper provides a description of the tasks and the key findings from the analysis of participant outcomes. Moreover, it provides a detailed analysis of the participants and task organizers which demonstrates the growing interest with respect to this campaign. Finally, a detailed analysis of the evaluation of tasks across the past seven editions is provided; this allows to assess how the research carried out by the Italian community dealing with Computational Linguistics has evolved in terms of popular tasks and paradigms during the last 13 years

Does corruption influence the self-restraint attitude of women-led SMEs towards bank lending?

In this article we address the question of whether the perceived level of corruption in a country may influence women’s inclination in self-refraining from applying for bank loans. Using a sample of 60,058 observations—drawn from the European Central Bank- Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (ECB-SAFE)—related to small- and medium- sized enterprises (SMEs) chartered in 11 Euro-area countries during the period 2009–2014, we first investigate whether female-led businesses are more likely, than male-led ones, to refrain from applying for bank credit. Finally, we assess whether corruption actually matters in the women’s decision not to relying on the bank-lending channel. Our results—robust to various model specifications—highlight that women-led SMEs face a higher probability to self-refrain from applying for loans vis-à-vis their male counterparts. In addition, although corruption appears strongly correlated to the self-restraint attitudes of firms, our empirical analysis reveals that women-led SMEs generally tend to refrain from applying for loans, more than men, regardless of the quality of the surrounding environment

Design of hybrid-electric aircraft with fault-tolerance considerations

The potential benefits of hybrid-electric or all-electric propulsion have led to a growing interest in this topic over the past decade. Preliminary design of propulsion systems and innovative configurations has been extensively discussed in literature, but steps towards higher levels of technological readiness, optimisation algorithms based on reliable weight estimation and simulation-based mission analysis are required. This paper focuses on the integration of a method for evaluating the lateral-directional controllability of an aircraft within a design chain that integrates aero-propulsive interactions, accurate modelling of the fuel system, and mid-fidelity estimation of the structural weight. Furthermore, the present work proposes a strategy for powerplant management in scenarios with an inoperative chain element. Benefits of hybrid-electric propulsion on the design of the vertical tail plane are evaluated involving the analysis of multiple failure scenarios and certification requirements. The proposed application concerns a commuter aircraft

Towards continuous software release planning

@2017 Personal use of these materials is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating news collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksContinuous software engineering is a new trend that is gaining increasing attention of the research community in the last years. The main idea behind this trend is to tighten the connection between the software engineering lifecycle activities (e.g., development, planning, integration, testing, etc.). While the connection between development and integration (i.e., continuous integration) has been subject of research and is applied in industrial settings, the connection between other activities is still in a very early stage. We are contributing to this research topic by proposing our ideas towards connecting the software development and software release planning activities (i.e., continuous software release planning). In this paper we present our initial findings on this topic, how we envision to address the continuous software release planning, and a research agenda to fulfil our objectives.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Uma análise sobre os processos de popularização e disseminação do futebol no Brasil: Um olhar a partir do estado de São Paulo.

O artigo apresenta como problemática analisar o processo de popularização e disseminação do futebol no Brasil, traçando um olhar a partir do estado de São Paulo. Para tanto, objetivou-se um exame histórico tendo como base três pressupostos: a) a criação dos clubes de futebol na cidade de São Paulo foi um processo importante para sua popularização; b) a construção das estradas de ferro para o interior paulista foi decisiva para a disseminação do futebol em terras Bandeirantes; c) o rádio como principal instrumento comunicador de massa foi um elemento grave para a difusão dessa modalidade esportiva por meio das primeiras transmissões dos jogos. Empreendeu-se uma revisão bibliográfica com o escopo de perscrutar a literatura, e assim de acordo com esse levantamento teórico elucidar os temas de investigação aqui expostos. Deste modo, verificou-se dentro dessas perspectivas que todos esses movimentos históricos foram motores elementares para a popularização e disseminação do futebol no estado de São Paulo, destacando que a pluralidade econômica, social, étnica e cultural, diferenças entre classes, transformações estruturais e sociais, além da revolução dos meios de comunicação foram pontos chave que estão intimamente ligados a esses processos.

Development of a PPG-based hardware and software system deployable on elbow and thumb for real-time estimation of pulse transit time

Blood pressure (BP) is a vital parameter used by clinicians to diagnose issues in the human cardiovascular system. Cuff-based BP devices are currently the standard method for on-the-spot and ambulatory BP measurements. However, cuff-based devices are not comfortable and are not suitable for long-term BP monitoring. Many studies have reported a significant correlation between pulse transit time (PTT) with blood pressure. However, this relation is impacted by many internal and external factors which might lower the accuracy of the PTT method. In this paper, we present a novel hardware system consisting of two custom photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors designed particularly for the estimation of PTT. In addition, a software interface and algorithms have been implemented to perform a real-time assessment of the PTT and other features of interest from signals gathered between the brachial artery and the thumb. A preclinical study has been conducted to validate the system. Five healthy volunteer subjects were tested and the results were then compared with those gathered using a reference device. The analysis reports a mean difference among subjects equal to -3.75±7.28 ms. Moreover, the standard deviation values obtained for each individual showed comparable results with the reference device, proving to be a valuable tool to investigate the factors impacting the BP-PTT relationship.Clinical Relevance- The proposed system proved to be a feasible solution to detect blood volume changes providing good quality signals to be used in the study of BP-PTT relationship