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The paper analyzes the mutual influence of the capital structure and the investment decision of a bank, as well as the incentive effects of the bank executives compensation schemes on these decisions. In case the government implicitly or explicitly insures deposits and/or the banks debt, banks are incentivized to invest in risky assets and to have a high leverage. Capital regulation could potentially solve this excessive risk taking problem. However, this is only possible if the regulator can observe and properly measure the investment risks of the bank, which was called into question during the 2008-09 financial crisis. Hence, we propose a regulatory approach that is also able to implement the first best risk taking levels by the bank, but does not require the regulator to know the investment risk of the bank. The regulatory approach involves the implementation of capital requirements, which are made contingent on the management compensation.
Basel III and CEO compensation in banks: pay structures as a regulatory signal : [March 6, 2013]
(2013)
This paper proposes a new regulatory approach that implements capital requirements contingent on managerial compensation. We argue that excessive risk taking in the financial sector originates from the shareholder moral hazard created by government guarantees rather than from corporate governance failures within banks. The idea of the proposed regulation is to utilize the compensation scheme to drive a wedge between the interests of top management and shareholders to counteract shareholder risk-shifting incentives. The decisive advantage of this approach compared to existing regulation is that the regulator does not need to be able to properly measure the bank investment risk, which has been shown to be a difficult task during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
New technologies generate risks, for the evaluation of which various mechanisms have been developed; the most frequent of these mechanisms consists of advice from committees of experts to the bodies whose role is to decide whether a new technology should be implemented or not. Such committees try to measure the magnitude of the threats that accompany the introduction of a new technology in order that the policy-makers may take their decisions in the light of the reports of the experts. The legitimacy of such reports is not only found in the technical capacity of its authors, but also in the impartiality of their recommendations. On numerous occasions, nevertheless, the effective presence of this evaluation finds itself today under suspicion. There are various methods that can be employed to try to resolve this problem. Firstly by reinforcing the mechanisms on which the technocratic evaluation of the risk are based; for example, through transparency in the selection of the experts. Secondly, by means of the incorporation of democratic mechanisms in the scientific-technological policy. The exposure of the internal conditions to the dynamics of the technological change that make possible the institutionalised involvement of society in the control of risk, as well as of the mechanisms to realise it are the principal subjects of this work.
We evaluate the importance of the precautionary saving motive by relying on a direct question about precautionary wealth from the 1995 and 1998 waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances. In this survey, a new question has been designed to elicit the amount of desired precautionary wealth. This allows us to assess the amount of precautionary accumulation and to overcome many of the problems of previous works on this topic. We find that a precautionary saving motive exists and affects virtually every type of household. However, precautionary savings account for only 8 percent of total wealth holdings. Even though this motive does not give rise to large amounts of wealth, particularly for young and middle-age households, it is particularly important for two groups: older households and business owners. Overall, we provide strong evidence that we need to take the precautionary saving motive into account when modeling saving behavior. Klassifizierung: D91, E21, C21
This special issue explores how finance deploys time, structures the future, and interacts with actors and institutions that sometimes function according to very different temporal regimes. Finance capitalism’s logic of recurrence, repetitive cycles, and successive ruptures has long been with us, but the essays in this special issue are particularly interested in how recent decades of intensified financialization have restructured temporal experience. They interrogate the production and dissemination of agency in an age of acceleration, risk, and uncertainty, asking how the temporality inscribed in financial transactions emerges from and simultaneously shapes individual and social practice. Topics covered range from the logic of finance and foundational concepts of financial theory to the intersection between objective structures and social practice, the role of literature, and finally questions of social insecurity, political action, and the possibility of resistance within a context of competing temporalities. In this introduction, the editors delineate some fundamental concepts and questions for our financial times.
Delivery of geospatial information over the Internet for the management of risks from invasive alien species is an increasingly important service. The evolution of information technology standards for geospatial data is a key factor to simplify network publishing and exchange of maps and data. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)-geolocation specification is a recent addition that may prove useful for pest risk management. In this article we implement the W3C-geolocation specification and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) mapping standards in a Web browser application for smartphones and tablet computers to improve field surveys for alien invasive species. We report our first season field experiences using this tool for online mapping of plant disease outbreaks and host plant occurrence. It is expected that the improved field data collection tools will result in increased data availability and thereby new opportunities for risk assessment, because data-needs and availability are crucial for species distribution modelling and modelbased forecasts of pest establishment potential. Finally, we close with a comment on the future potential of geospatial information standards to enhance the translation from data to decisions regarding pest risks, which should enable earlier detection of emerging risks as well as more robust projections of pest risks in novel areas. The forthcoming standard for processing of geospatial information, the Web Processing Standard (WPS), should open new technological capabilities both for automatic initiation and updating of risk assessment models based on new incoming data, and subsequent early warning.
The use of most if not all technologies is accompanied by negative side effects, While we may profit from today’s technologies, it is most often future generations who bear most risks. Risk analysis therefore becomes a delicate issue, because future risks often cannot be assigned a meaningful occurance probability. This paper argues that technology assessement most often deal with uncertainty and ignorance rather than risk when we include future generations into our ethical, political or juridal thinking. This has serious implications as probabilistic decision approaches are not applicable anymore. I contend that a virtue ethical approach in which dianoetic virtues play a central role may supplement a welfare based ethics in order to overcome the difficulties in dealing with uncertainty and ignorance in technology assessement.
Understanding the diverging opinions of academic experts, stakeholders and the public is important for effective conservation management. This is especially so when a consensus is needed for action to minimize future risks but the knowledge upon which to base this action is uncertain or missing. How to manage non-native, invasive species (NIS) is an interesting case in point: the issue has long been controversial among stakeholders, but publicly visible, major disagreement among experts is recent. To characterize the multitude of experts’ understanding and valuation of non-native, NIS we performed structured qualitative interviews with 26 academic experts, 13 of whom were invasion biologists and 13 landscape experts. Within both groups, thinking varied widely, not only about basic concepts (e.g., non-native, invasive) but also about their valuation of effects of NIS. The divergent opinions among experts, regarding both the overall severity of the problem in Europe and its importance for ecosystem services, contrasted strongly with the apparent consensus that emerges from scientific synthesis articles and policy documents. We postulate that the observed heterogeneity of expert judgments is related to three major factors: (1) diverging conceptual understandings, (2) lack of empirical information and high scientific uncertainties due to complexities and contingencies of invasion processes, and (3) missing deliberation of values. Based on theory from science studies, we interpret the notion of an NIS as a boundary object, i.e., concepts that have a similar but not identical meaning to different groups of experts and stakeholders. This interpretative flexibility of a concept can facilitate interaction across diverse groups but bears the risk of introducing misunderstandings. An alternative to seeking consensus on exact definitions and risk assessments would be for invasive species experts to acknowledge uncertainties and engage transparently with stakeholders and the public in deliberations about conflicting opinions, taking the role of honest brokers of policy alternatives rather than of issue advocates.
The treatment of metastatic breast cancer has become more complicated due to increasing numbers of new therapies which need to be tested. Therapies are now being developed to treat special clinical or molecular subgroups. Even though intrinsic molecular subtypes play a major role, more and more new therapies for subgroups and histological subtypes are being developed, such as the use of PARP inhibitors to treat patients with BRCA mutations (breast and ovarian cancer). Supportive therapies are also evolving, allowing problems such as alopecia or nausea and vomiting to be treated more effectively. Treatment-related side effects have a direct impact on the prognosis of patients with metastatic breast cancer, and supportive therapy can improve compliance. Digital tools could be useful to establish better patient management systems. This overview provides an insight into recent trials and how the findings could affect routine treatment. Current aspects of breast cancer prevention are also presented.
In primary early breast cancer, the aim of treatment planning is to obtain an increasingly better understanding of the disease. The identification of patients with an excellent prognosis could help this group avoid unnecessary treatments. Furthermore, the planning of treatment is becoming increasingly patient-focussed. There is a growing understanding of those patients who benefit particularly from chemotherapy, as well as of those who could benefit from immunotherapy. Studies conducted on immunotherapies will be published shortly. Smaller individual studies offer an initial insight into the efficacy of checkpoint inhibitors (anti-PD1/PDL1 therapies). Not least, one of the largest breast cancer studies of all times has recently come to an end. The use of a multigene test has shown that it is sufficient to identify patients with such a good prognosis that chemotherapy is unnecessary. This review article is intended to summarise the current studies and give an outlook on current developments.