Evaluating the SEC Review of Commercial Banks: Evidence from Comment Letters

This paper examines whether the oversight provided by the SEC over commercial banks was appropriate in the period immediately preceding the end of the recent real-estate boom. The approach followed here is to first identify the variables that are of interest to those who invest in banks, and then to present evidence from comment letters to identify the areas in which the SEC actually focuses on . These two results are then compared to determine if the SEC's review efforts are aligned with the interests of bank investors. The results are mixed: in some instances the SEC focuses on the same areas as investors, but in other cases it does not – either because the SEC does not focus on areas of interest to investors, or because the SEC focuses in areas that are of questionable or no interest to investors. Even in cases in which the SEC and investors' interests are aligned, however, investors would benefit from enhanced disclosures. Overall, the paper suggests specific improvements to the SEC review process by identifying areas in which the SEC should focus on, and by suggesting areas of improved disclosure. Finally, this paper also examines the attributes of banks that generated issues upon SEC review.Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, Financial Reporting, Annual Reports, 10K, Commercial Banks, Banking, Regulation.

Contracting the Road to Development: Early Impacts of a Rural Roads Program

We study here the early impacts of the Peruvian Rural Roads Program (RRP), characterized by a decentralized mechanism that contracts private local firms for the rehabilitation and maintenance of rural roads with local supervision by community leaders setting incentives that favour prevention activities and a sustainable and timely maintenance of rural roads. The analysis is based on a quasi-experimental approach through which control roads are defined prior to the intervention and based on key observable characteristics of the road and the villages they connect. Diff-in-Diff estimates are reported to control for biases associated with time-invariant unobservables. We find that this institutional innovation improved road transitability, which in turn led to significant changes in employment patterns and increased investments in education and health. Income effects are not significant on average, but they appear strong in villages with pre-existent endowments of key productive infrastructure, favouring the notion that road improvements need to be complemented with additional investments to effectively contribute to the reduction of rural poverty. Most of these results, though, are concentrated on interventions in motorized roads, although the inclusion of non-motorized tracks is supported by the empowering of women through their participation in farm activities. Thus, the results of this early evaluation are encouraging in terms of program impacts, as these indicate that the Peruvian RRP has been able to control local capture and corruption threats.Rural road, provision of public services, contracting, Peru

Poverty, Health Infrastructure and the Nutrition of Peruvian Children

After the Peruvian economic crisis of the late 1980s, the 1990s witnessed a significant pro-poor expansion of the country`s health infrastructure that was instrumental in increasing preventive and primary health care expenditures. Using empirical evidence, this paper discusses the effect of this expansion in health infrastructure on child nutrition in Peru, as measured by the height-for-age z-score. Using a pooled sample from the 1992, 1996 and 2000 rounds of the Peruvian DHS, this analysis controls for biases in the allocation of public investments by using a district fixed effects model. The econometric analysis finds a positive albeit small effect of the expansion of the last decade. After desegregating by type of location, however, the effect was found to be significant only in urban areas. Furthermore, the effect is highly nonlinear and has a pro-poor bias. The estimated coefficient for health infrastructure in less endowed districts is 10 times higher than that in the better-endowed districts. The pro-poor bias refers to the fact that the estimated effect is larger for children of less educated mothers. In this sense, this policy seems to have had a pro-poor bias within urban areas, while at the same time excluding the rural population, a traditionally marginalized population group in Peru. These findings support the idea that reducing distance and waiting time barriers may be necessary, but that more explicitly inclusive policies are required to improve the health of the rural poor, especially indigenous groups, so that they can escape this kind of poverty trap.

Covariant Quiver Gauge Theories

We consider dimensional reduction of gauge theories with arbitrary gauge group in a formalism based on equivariant principal bundles. For the classical gauge groups we clarify the relations between equivariant principal bundles and quiver bundles, and show that the reduced quiver gauge theories are all generically built on the same universal symmetry breaking pattern. The formalism enables the dimensional reduction of Chern-Simons gauge theories in arbitrary odd dimensionalities. The reduced model is a novel Chern-Simons-Higgs theory consisting of a Chern-Simons term valued in the residual gauge group plus a higher order gauge and diffeomorphism invariant coupling of Higgs fields with the gauge fields. We study the moduli spaces of solutions, which in some instances provide geometric representations of certain quiver varieties as moduli spaces of flat invariant connections. As physical applications, we consider dimensional reductions involving non-compact gauge supergroups as a means for systematically inducing novel couplings between gravity and matter. In particular, we reduce Chern-Simons supergravity to a quiver gauge theory of AdS gravity involving a non-minimal coupling to scalar Higgs fermion fields.Comment: 32 pages; v2: minor corrections, reference adde

Self-efficacy beliefs in pre-service chilean english teachers

Tesis (Profesor de Inglés para la Enseñanza Básica y Media y al grado académico de Licenciado en Educación)This research study investigated Chilean pre-service teachers of English. A mixed-method research design was employed to obtain relevant data in this study. The quantitative instrument selected was an adapted version of the questionnaire developed by Tschannen-Moran & Hoy called “Teachers’ Sense of Self-Efficacy Scale” (1998). This version of the questionnaire was applied to 39 participants who were the total number of students going through their last semester at the English Teaching Training Programme at Universidad Nacional Andrés Bello. The qualitative instrument employed was an interview developed by the researchers. After having conducted the questionnaire, 10 participants were randomly chosen to implement a one-on-one interview, in order to explore more in depth in the questionnaire results. Therefore, the results were divided into two sections: quantitative and qualitative. An analysis of the questionnaire was made in the quantitative results section likewise, for the interview in the qualitative results section. Finally, in the conclusion, a thorough analysis was provided so that self-efficacy beliefs of pre-service teachers were described. The findings in this research exhibited that in general the levels of self-efficacy of pre-service teachers are high.Este estudio investigó las nociones de autoeficacia de los profesores chilenos en formación. El método mixto fue empleado para obtener información relevante en este estudio. El instrumento cuantitativo seleccionado fue una versión adaptada de la cuestionario desarrollado por Tschannen-Moran & Hoy llamada “Teachers’ Sense of Self-efficacy Scale” (1998). Esta versión del cuestionario fue aplicada a 39 participantes quienes constituyen la totalidad de alumnos cursando el último semestre del Programa de Formación de Profesores de Inglés de la Universidad Nacional Andrés Bello. El instrumento cualitativo seleccionado fue una entrevista creada por los investigadores. Después de haber realizado la encuesta, 10 participantes fueron aleatoriamente seleccionados para llevar a cabo entrevistas personales con la finalidad de explorar más a fondo los resultados de la encuesta. Por consiguiente, los resultados están divididos en dos secciones: cuantitativos y cualitativos. Un análisis de la encuesta fue realizado en la sección de resultados cuantitativos y de igual manera, de la entrevista en la sección de resultados cualitativos. Finalmente, en la conclusión un exhaustivo análisis fue proporcionado de modo que las percepciones de autoeficacia de los profesores en formación fueron retratadas. Los hallazgos en esta investigación mostraron que en general los niveles de autoeficacia de los profesores en formación son altos