The role of state aid control in improving bank resolution in Europe

The financial crisis exposed EuropeÂ?s inadequacy in developing an effective banking resolution framework that could bring together national authorities and set guidelines for their coordination. The European Commission, through its assessment of state aid cases, managed to avoid single market distortions and mitigate moral hazard. This Policy Contribution explains why in the long-term Europe needs a single resolution authority. The authors Bruegel Senior Research Fellow André Sapir, Mathias Dewatripont, ULB and CEPR; Gregory Nguyen, National Bank of Belgium, and Peter Praet, National Bank of Belgium, show how in the short-term, the European Commission, through its state aid control discipline, can set the foundation for a new crisis resolution architecture. It can act as a substitute to improve coordination among member states and complement a European resolution authority once it is set up.

State ownership - a residual role?

The author reviews the state of thinking on the governance role of state ownership. He argues that a gradual transfer of operational control and financial claims over state assets remains the most desirable goal, but it needs to be paced to avoid regulatory capture, and the capture of the privatization process itself. In addition, the speed of transfer should be timed on the progress in developing a strong regulatory governance system, to which certain residual rights of intervention must be vested. In many countries institutional weakness limits regulatory capacity and reliability, yet the author's conclusion is that in such environments, maintaining state control undermines the very emergence of institutional capacity, and so the balance should tip toward progressively less direct state control. After all, what are"institutions"if not governance mechanisms with some degree of autonomy from both political and private interests? The gradual creation of institutions partially autonomous from political power must become central to the development of an optimal mode of regulatory governance. The author offers some suggestions about creating maximum accountability in regulatory governance, in particular creating an internal control system based on a rotating board representative of users, producers, and civic organizations, to be elected by a process involving frequent reporting and disclosure.Decentralization,National Governance,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,National Governance,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Governance Indicators,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management

Role of an intermediate state in homogeneous nucleation

We explore the role of an intermediate state (phase) in homogeneous nucleation phenomenon by examining the decay process through a doubly-humped potential barrier. As a generic model we use the fourth- and sixth-order Landau potentials and analyze the Fokker-Planck equation for the one-dimensional thermal diffusion in the system characterized by a triple-well potential. In the low temperature case we apply the WKB method to the decay process and obtain the decay rate which is accurate for a wide range of depth and curvature of the middle well. In the case of a deep middle well, it reduces to a doubly-humped-barrier counterpart of the Kramers escape rate: the barrier height and the curvature of an initial well in the Kramers rate are replaced by the arithmetic mean of higher(or outer) and lower(or inner) partial barriers and the geometric mean of curvatures of the initial and intermediate wells, respectively. It seems to be a universal formula. In the case of a shallow-enough middle well, Kramers escape rate is alternatively evaluated within the standard framework of the mean-first-passage time problem, which certainly supports the WKB result. The criteria whether or not the existence of an intermediate state can enhance the decay rate are revealed.Comment: 9pages, 11figure

Role of State Government in California Economic Growth

Part of a series that examines California's budget and its relationship to the state's economy. Examines short- and long-term growth, the role of governors and legislatures, public investment in education and infrastructure, and business regulation

The role of interaction vertices in bound state calculations

In recent studies of the one and two-body Greens' function for scalar interactions it was shown that crossed ladder and ``crossed rainbow'' (for the one-body case) exchanges play a crucial role in nonperturbative dynamics. In this letter we use exact analytical and numerical results to show that the contribution of vertex dressings to the two-body bound state mass for scalar QED are cancelled by the self-energy and wavefunction normalization. This proves, for the first time, that the mass of a two-body bound state given by the full theory can in a very good approximation be obtained by summing only ladder and crossed ladder diagrams using a bare vertex and a constant dressed mass. We also discuss the implications of the remarkable cancellation between rainbow and crossed rainbow diagrams that is a feature of one-body calculations.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

LANDSAT's role in state coastal management programs

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

The Effect of Role Ambiguity on Competitive State Anxiety

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between role ambiguity and precompetition state anxiety (A-state). Consistent with multidimensional anxiety theory (Martens, Vealey, & Burton, 1990), it was hypothesized that role ambiguity would be positively related to cognitive but not to somatic A-state. Based on the conceptual model presented by Beauchamp, Bray, Eys, and Carron (2002), role ambiguity in sport was operationalized as a multidimensional construct (i.e., scope of responsibilities, role behaviors, role evaluation, and role consequences) potentially manifested in each of two contexts, offense and defense. Consistent with hypotheses, ambiguity in terms of the scope of offensive role responsibilities predicted cognitive A-state (R2 = .19). However, contrary to hypotheses, offensive role-consequences ambiguity also predicted somatic A-state (R2 = .09). Results highlight the importance of using a multidimensional approach to investigate role ambiguity in sport and are discussed in terms of both theory advancement and possible interventions