High altitude flying

This note investigates the effect of high altitude or low atmospheric pressure upon the operation of an engine and the effect of the low pressure and lack of oxygen and of the very low temperatures upon the pilot and upon the performance of the airplane itself

Are the causes of bank distress changing? can researchers keep up?

Since 1990, the banking sector has experienced enormous legislative, technological and financial changes, yet research into the causes of bank distress has slowed. One consequence is that current supervisory surveillance models may no longer accurately represent the banking environment. After reviewing the history of these models, we provide empirical evidence that the characteristics of failing banks has changed in the last ten years and argue that the time is right for new research employing new empirical techniques. In particular, dynamic models that utilize forward-looking variables and address various types of bank risk individually are promising lines of inquiry. Supervisory agencies have begun to move in these directions, and we describe several examples of this new generation of early-warning models that are not yet widely known among academic banking economists.Bank failures ; Bank supervision

Writing center tutor training: an examination of emphasis on critical pedagogy in tutor training handbooks

Writing center theory has not always emphasized critical pedagogy as part of writing center pedagogy. However, with scholars’ applications of critical lenses such as postmodernism and postcolonialism to critique writing center practice, critical pedagogy has found its way into writing center practices. Self-critical awareness is one key element of critical pedagogy, and through the dialogic application of critical pedagogy in writing center sessions, students can be made aware of the hegemonic nature of academic discourse and why institution and discipline-valued writing is expected over other kinds of writing. Because critical pedagogy has value in writing center contexts, both for the writing tutor and tutee, for this project I analyzed five writing center tutor training handbooks to examine how and/or whether critical pedagogy is emphasized in tutor training. One handbook is a mass-marketed text while the other four are institution-specific texts representative to their particular writing center. I used five search terms for textual analyses to detect explicit or implicit references to critical pedagogy: critical pedagogy, critical, pedagogy, philosophy, andtheory.My findings strongly suggest that critical pedagogy is not adequately stressed in writing center tutor training handbooks, even though multiple writing center scholars have called attention for the need to implement critical pedagogy in writing center pedagogy. As a result of the discrepancy between writing center theory and critical pedagogical theory application in writing center pedagogy, I argue that critical pedagogy should be emphasized and made explicit in writing center tutor training curricula, including tutor training handbooks

The Surface Tension of Molten Slags

1. The adaptation of the ring method of measuring surface tension to work on slags at high temperatures has proved successful. The apparatus developed is capable of measuring the surface tension of the more fluid slags up to 160

Are the causes of bank distress changing? can researchers keep up?

Since 1990, the banking sector has experienced enormous legislative, technological, and financial changes, yet research into the causes of bank distress has slowed. One consequence is that traditional supervisory surveillance models may not capture important risks inherent in the current banking environment. After reviewing the history of these models, the authors provide empirical evidence that the characteristics of failing banks have changed in the past ten years and argue that the time is right for new research that employs new empirical techniques. In particular, dynamic models that use forward-looking variables and address various types of bank risk individually are promising lines of inquiry. Supervisory agencies have begun to move in these directions, and the authors describe several examples of this new generation of early-warning models that are not yet widely known among academic banking economists.Bank supervision ; Risk management

Discipline and liquidity in the market for federal funds

I find that high-risk banks pay more for federal funds and are less likely to utilize them as a source of liquidity. The extent of this discipline has risen in recent years, following legislation designed to impose more of the costs of bank failure on uninsured creditors. However, the risk-pricing remains imperfect, and additional results suggest that information problems persist in the fed-funds market. The findings have implications for interest-rate determination, risk contagion in the financial system, the use of market data in banking supervision, and recent efforts to reform Discount Window operations.Federal funds market (United States) ; Discount ; Liquidity (Economics)

Labor productivity and job-market flows: trends, cycles, and correlations

I derive measures of U.S. job-separation and job-matching rates from aggregate Current Population Survey data. Using an unrestricted unobserved-components approach, I decompose these series into trends and cycles and compare the results with the trend and cyclical behavior of labor-productivity growth. Both transitory and permanent shocks to productivity are strongly positively correlated with fluctuations in the rate of job matching and negatively correlated with cyclical fluctuations in separation rates. Productivity growth thereby accounts for about a third of the overall variation in the unemployment rate. However, it displays only weak correlation with trend separation rates. Because trend movements in unemployment are dominated by permanent changes in separation rates, productivity shocks alone cannot account for most of the movement in the natural rate of unemployment over time.Labor productivity ; Employment (Economic theory)

Static and Dynamic Resource Allocation Effects of Corporate and PersonalTax Integration in the U.S.: A General Equilibrium Approach(Rev)

This paper presents estimates of static and dynamic general equilibrium resource allocation effects for four alternative plans for corporate and personal income tax integration in the U.S. A medium—scale numerical general equilibrium model is used which integrates the U.S. tax system with consumer demand behavior by household and producer behavior by industry. Results indicate that total integration of personal and corporate taxes would yield an annual static efficiency gain of around $4 billion (1973 dollars). Partial integration plans yield less. Dynamic effects are larger, and our analysis indicates that full integration may yield gains whose present value is as large as$400 billion or 0.8% of the discounted present value of the GNP stream to the U.S. economy after correction for population growth. Plans differ in their distributional impacts, although these findings depend on the nature of replacement taxes used to preserve government revenues. The size of dynamic resource allocation effects are sensitive to the choice of the replacement tax, while static gains are reasonably robust.

What does anticipated monetary policy do?

Forward rate guidance, which has been used with increasing regularity by monetary policymakers, relies on the manipulation of expectations of future short-term interest rates. We identify shocks to these expectations at short and long horizons since the early 1980s and examine their effects on contemporaneous macroeconomic outcomes. Our identification uses sign restrictions on survey forecasts incorporated in a structural VAR model to isolate expected deviations from the monetary- policy rule. We find that expectations of future policy easing that materialize over the subsequent four quarters - similar to those generated by credible forward guidance - .have immediate and persistent stimulative effects on output, inflation, and employment. The effects are larger than those produced by an identical shift in the policy path that is not anticipated. Our results are broadly consistent with the mechanism underlying forward guidance in New Keynesian models, but they suggest that those models overstate the persistence of the inflation response. Further, we find that changes in short-rate expectations farther in the future have weaker macroeconomic effects, the opposite of what most New Keynesian models predict

What drives bank funding spreads?

We use matched, bank-level panel data on Libor submissions and credit default swaps to decompose bank-funding spreads at several maturities into components reflecting counterparty credit risk and funding-market liquidity. To account for the possibility that banks may strategically misreport their funding rates in the Libor survey, we nest our decomposition within a model of the costs and benefits of lying. We find that Libor spreads typically consist mostly of a liquidity premium and that this premium declined at short maturities following Federal Reserve interventions in bank funding markets. At longer maturities, credit risk explains much of the time variation in Libor, reflecting in part fluctuations in the degree to which default risk is priced in the interbank market. Our results are consistent with banks both under- and over-reporting their funding costs during the crisis but suggest that the incidence of this behavior may have subsequently declined