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The treatise "Contra malos divites et usurarios" (Cracovie, 1512) was the first of the renowned Polish anti-usurious texts which was not written by a university professor but by an official of the royal administration. Stanisław Zaborowski focuses, especially, on the problem of land of the royal domain given by kings to great landlords as a pledge, with harm to res publica. He applies the late medieval conciliarist notions to the issue of royal power. Nevertheless, the text diverges from the medieval thought. Zaborowski’ discourse does not focus on demonstrating the rightness of the anti-usurious principles but rather on convincing the readers to follow them in life. The argumentation is ‘addressed’ more to the will than to the reason; it focuses on the vice of avarice, more than on the Seventh Commandment; the author emphasizes the virtue of charity, more than on the virtue of justice. Anti-usurious Zaborowski’s thought made a part of his political vision. His discussed treatise is closely related with his more renowned Tractatus de natura iurium et bonorum regis. In Contra malos divites et usurarios, the problems of public debt and forced loan are of crucial importance. At present Marcin Bukała is preparing the critical edition of the treatise.
9.01 This chapter outlines the development of Contingent Convertible Securities (CoCos) for financial institutions from their theoretical origins to their current form under the European Union’s Fourth Capital Requirements Directive framework and its Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive and examines the effect the framework and the directive have had on their design and ability to fulfill the ends for which they were initially conceived. It examines this from two viewpoints: the policy goals CoCos are meant to achieve and the corporate law issues raised by the requirements of CRD IV. On the policy side we conclude that CRD IV and the RRD have significantly limited the amount of CoCos a financial institution is likely to issue, but expanded their possible forms by including write-down as well as convertible structures and narrowed the differences between them and pure regulatory bail-in structures, thus calling into question whether they are truly ‘going concern’ rather than ‘gone concern’ capital. On the company law side we conclude that a number of issues, in particular the limits on an authorization of management to issue CoCos and shares, the scope of the shareholders’ right of pre-emption, the concept of dilution and the distinction between contributions in cash and in kind merit closer attention than they appear to have received in the current discussion on CoCos.
We examine whether the economy can be insured against banking crises with deposit and loan contracts contingent on macroeconomic shocks. We study banking competition and show that the private sector insures the banking system through such contracts, and banking crises are avoided, provided that failed banks are not bailed out. When risks are large, banks may shift part of them to depositors. In contrast, when banks are bailed out by the next generation, depositors receive non-contingent contracts with high interest rates, while entrepreneurs obtain loan contracts that demand high repayment in good times and low repayment in bad times. As a result, the present generation overinvests, and banks generate large macroeconomic risks for future generations, even if the underlying productivity risk is small or zero. We conclude that a joint policy package of orderly default procedures and contingent contracts is a promising way to reduce the threat of a fragile banking system.
This paper describes a method to treat contextual equivalence in polymorphically typed lambda-calculi, and also how to transfer equivalences from the untyped versions of lambda-calculi to their typed variant, where our specific calculus has letrec, recursive types and is nondeterministic. An addition of a type label to every subexpression is all that is needed, together with some natural constraints for the consistency of the type labels and well-scopedness of expressions. One result is that an elementary but typed notion of program transformation is obtained and that untyped contextual equivalences also hold in the typed calculus as long as the expressions are well-typed. In order to have a nice interaction between reduction and typing, some reduction rules have to be accompanied with a type modification by generalizing or instantiating types.
The pi-calculus is a well-analyzed model for mobile processes and mobile computations.
While a lot of other process and lambda calculi that are core languages of higher-order concurrent and/or functional programming languages use a contextual semantics observing the termination behavior of programs in all program contexts, traditional program equivalences in the pi-calculus are bisimulations and barbed testing equivalences, which observe the communication capabilities of processes under reduction and in contexts.
There is a distance between these two approaches to program equivalence which makes it hard to compare the pi-calculus with other languages. In this paper we contribute to bridging this gap by investigating a contextual semantics of the synchronous pi-calculus with replication and without sums.
To transfer contextual equivalence to the pi-calculus we add a process Stop as constant which indicates success and is used as the base to define and analyze the contextual equivalence which observes may- and should-convergence of processes.
We show as a main result that contextual equivalence in the pi-calculus with Stop conservatively extends barbed testing equivalence in the (Stop-free) pi-calculus. This implies that results on contextual equivalence can be directly transferred to the (Stop-free) pi-calculus with barbed testing equivalence.
We analyze the contextual ordering, prove some nontrivial process equivalences, and provide proof tools for showing contextual equivalences. Among them are a context lemma, and new notions of sound applicative similarities for may- and should-convergence.
Natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from a bad reputation. Oil and diamonds, particularly, have been blamed for a number of Africa’s illnesses such as poverty, corruption, dictatorship and war. This paper outlines the different areas and transmission channels of how this so-called “resource curse” is said to materialize. By assessing empirical evidence on sub-Saharan Africa it concludes that the resource curse theory fails to sufficiently explain why and how several countries have not or only partly been affected by the “curse”. Theoretically, the paper argues that whether or not natural resources are detrimental to a country’s socio-economic and political development depends on a number of contextual variables, divided into country-specific conditions and resource-specific conditions (type, degree/level of abundance and dependence, resource revenue management, involved companies etc.). Methodologically, a future research agenda needs to examine the complex interplay of these contextual variables by adding sophisticated comparative research designs, especially “small and medium N” comparisons, to the tool box which has been widely confined to the juxtaposition of “large N” and country case studies.
The amino acid content (alanine/arginine, glutamine, proline, taurine) of five different lichen species (Evernia prunastri, Hypogymnia physodes, Parmelia sulcata, Physcia adscendens, Xanthoria parietina) from different parts of Germany and NW France with different atmospheric nitrogen depositions was determined.
The study revealed that the so called nitrophytic lichen species (Physcia adscendens, Xanthoria parietina) had no higher amino acid contents as compared with the other species. The amino acid contents of five different lichen species from the same tree varied without regard to the nitrophily of the species. The contents of amino acids of the lichen species studied from Bonn is four to twelve times higher as in the same species in the Vosges Mountains, France. The amount of amino acids in nitrophytic species (Xanthoria parietina, Physcia adscendens) from a region with high load of atmospheric nitrogen (35 kg/y/ha) is in average 5 times higher than in the same species from a region with low nitrogen immission (16 kg/y/ha).
It can be concluded that the amino acid contents of lichens reflects the atmospheric nitrogen load and that the amino acid content of so called nitrophytic lichen species is not higher as in other species, that lichens are passive sampler and take up the available nitrogen but make no use of it but store it as amino acids. On the other hand, the conductivity of the cell liquid (as a measure of the osmotic pressure) of nitrophytic lichen species is higher as compared with non-nitrophytic species. Thus the “nitrophily” of these species is presumably not based upon the facility to higher nitrogen uptake but osmotic tolerance against the salt effects of nitrogen compounds. Within nitrophytic species, the osmotic values of Phaeophyscia orbicularis are double as high as those from Physcia adscendens, which is explained by the higher tolerance of Phaeophyscia against dry deposition. The higher osmotic values of nitrophilous lichen species lead to the conclusion that they are also drought resistant species and occur in regions with low humidity where they are more competitive than other lichen species.
Since the 1970s, exports and imports of manufactured goods have been the engine of international trade and much of that trade relies on container shipping. This paper introduces a new monthly index of the volume of container trade to and from North America. Incorporating this index into a structural macroeconomic VAR model facilitates the identification of shocks to domestic U.S. demand as well as foreign demand for U.S. manufactured goods. We show that, unlike in the Great Recession, the primary determinant of the U.S. economic contraction in early 2020 was a sharp drop in domestic demand. Although detrended data for personal consumption expenditures and manufacturing output suggest that the U.S. economy has recovered to near 90% of pre-pandemic levels as of March 2021, our structural VAR model shows that the component of manufacturing output driven by domestic demand had only recovered to 59% of pre-pandemic levels and that of real personal consumption only to 76%. The difference is mainly accounted for by unexpected reductions in frictions in the container shipping market.
Contagious stablecoins?
(2023)
Can competing stablecoins produce efficient and stable outcomes? We study competition among stablecoins pegged to a stable currency. They are backed by interest-bearing safe assets and can be redeemed with the issuer or traded in a secondary market. If an issuer sticks to an appropriate investment and redemption rule, its stablecoin is invulnerable to runs. Since an issuer must pay interest on its stablecoin if other issuers also pay interest, competing interest-bearing stablecoins, however, are contagious and can render the economy inefficient and unstable. The efficient allocation is uniquely implemented when regulation prevents interest payments on stablecoins.