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Nine species of Graphidaceae are described as new to science from South and Central Brazil, in 7 different genera: Acanthothecis normuralis, A. psoromica, Acanthotrema minus, Aggregatorygma submuriforme, Allographa medioinspersa, Diorygma isidiolichexanthonicum, Fissurina excavatisorediosa, Graphis norsorediata, and Graphis tricolor.
Based on recent records, 89 lichen species are reported as new to Brazil. For the genera Ancistrosporella, Jamesiella, Lambiella, Paulia, Polyblastia, Porocyphus, and Trimmatothele, it is the first time they are reported from Brazil. Many more, in total 523 species, are newly reported from individual states.
Eleven species of lichens are described as new from the Serra do Bodoquena in Mato Grosso do Sul (Brazil): Alyxoria cyanea, Astrothelium ochraceum, Chiodecton xanthonosorediatum, Gyalecta perithecioidea, Gyalecta uniseptata, Pyrenula rubroacutispora, Ramonia xylophila, Synarthonia xanthosarcographoides, Trypethelium aureornatum, Trypethelium endoflavum, and Trypethelium xanthostiolornatum. Around 400 further species are reported, of which 27 are first records for Brazil and 265 are first records for the state.
Four new Astrothelium species and a Mazaediothecium from Várzea areas in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil
(2020)
Five species of lichens are described as new from Várzea areas in Mato Grosso do Sul (Brazil): Astrothelium fernandae, A. pseudodermatodes, A. septoconicum, A. xanthopseudocyphellatum, and Mazaediothecium serendipiticum, the latter being deviating from all other species in its order by the at least morphologically chlorococcoid photobiont. Further, we found 226 identifiable species in the Várzea reserve near Jateí and 47 on a farm near Naviraí. Of these, 15 are new records for Brazil and a further 88 are first reports from the state.
Six species of lichens are described as new from Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil): Astrothelium aureoirregulare Aptroot & Gumboski, Bogoriella xantholateralis Aptroot, Lecanora umbilicatimmersa Aptroot & Spielmann, Lepra lichexanthonorstictica Aptroot, Megalaria flavosorediata Aptroot and Vainionora sorediata Aptroot. Moreover, 28 further species are reported which are first records for Brazil; and a further 166 are first records for Santa Catarina and 104 for Rio Grande do Sul.
We examine the impact of so-called "Crisis Contracts" on bank managers' risk-taking incentives and on the probability of banking crises. Under a Crisis Contract, managers are required to contribute a pre-specified share of their past earnings to finance public rescue funds when a crisis occurs. This can be viewed as a retroactive tax that is levied only when a crisis occurs and that leads to a form of collective liability for bank managers. We develop a game-theoretic model of a banking sector whose shareholders have limited liability, so that society at large will suffer losses if a crisis occurs. Without Crisis Contracts, the managers' and shareholders' interests are aligned, and managers take more than the socially optimal level of risk. We investigate how the introduction of Crisis Contracts changes the equilibrium level of risk-taking and the remuneration of bank managers. We establish conditions under which the introduction of Crisis Contracts will reduce the probability of a banking crisis and improve social welfare. We explore how Crisis Contracts and capital requirements can supplement each other and we show that the efficacy of Crisis Contracts is not undermined by attempts to hedge.
Classically, encoding of images by only a few, important components is done by the Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Recently, a data analysis tool called Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for the separation of independent influences in signals has found strong interest in the neural network community. This approach has also been applied to images. Whereas the approach assumes continuous source channels mixed up to the same number of channels by a mixing matrix, we assume that images are composed by only a few image primitives. This means that for images we have less sources than pixels. Additionally, in order to reduce unimportant information, we aim only for the most important source patterns with the highest occurrence probabilities or biggest information called „Principal Independent Components (PIC)“. For the example of a synthetic picture composed by characters this idea gives us the most important ones. Nevertheless, for natural images where no a-priori probabilities can be computed this does not lead to an acceptable reproduction error. Combining the traditional principal component criteria of PCA with the independence property of ICA we obtain a better encoding. It turns out that this definition of PIC implements the classical demand of Shannon’s rate distortion theory.
The efficient management of large multimedia databases requires the development of new techniques to process, characterize, and search for multimedia objects. Especially in the case of image data, the rapidly growing amount of documents prohibits a manual description of the images’ content. Instead, the automated characterization is highly desirable to support annotation and retrieval of digital images. However, this is a very complex and still unsolved task. To contribute to a solution of this problem, we have developed a mechanism for recognizing objects in images based on the query by example paradigm. Therefore, the most salient image features of an example image representing the searched object are extracted to obtain a scale-invariant object model. The use of this model provides an efficient and robust strategy for recognizing objects in images independently of their size. Further applications of the mechanism are classical recognition tasks such as scene decomposition or object tracking in video sequences.
This paper makes a case for the future development of European corporate law through regulatory competition rather than EC legislation. It is for the first time becoming legally possible for firms within the EU to select the national company law that they wish to govern their activities. A significant number of firms can be expected to exercise this freedom, and national legislatures can be expected to respond by seeking to make their company laws more attractive to firms. Whilst the UK is likely to be the single most successful jurisdiction in attracting firms, the presence of different models of corporate governance within Europe make it quite possible that competition will result in specialisation rather than convergence, and that no Member State will come to dominate as Delaware has done in the US. Procedural safeguards in the legal framework will direct the selection of laws which increase social welfare, as opposed simply to the welfare of those making the choice. Given that European legislators cannot be sure of the ‘optimal’ model for company law, the future of European company law-making would better be left with Member States than take the form of harmonized legislation.
Executive Stock Option Programs (SOPs) have become the dominant compensation instrument for top-management in recent years. The incentive effects of an SOP both with respect to corporate investment and financing decisions critically depend on the design of the SOP. A specific problem in designing SOPs concerns dividend protection. Usually, SOPs are not dividend protected, i.e. any dividend payout decreases the value of a manager’s options. Empirical evidence shows that this results in a significant decrease in the level of corporate dividends and, at the same time, into an increase in share repurchases. Yet, few suggestions have been made on how to account for dividends in SOPs. This paper applies arguments from principal-agent-theory and from the theory of finance to analyze different forms of dividend protection, and to address the relevance of dividend protection in SOPs. Finally, the paper relates the theoretical analysis to empirical work on the link between share repurchases and SOPs.
We design, field and exploit survey data from a representative sample of the French population to examine whether informative social interactions enter householdsístockholding decisions. Respondents report perceptions about their circle of peers with whom they interact about Önancial matters, their social circle and the population. We provide evidence for the presence of an information channel through which social interactions ináuence perceptions and expectations about stock returns, and financial behavior. We also find evidence of mindless imitation of peers in the outer social circle, but this does not permeate as many layers of financial behavior as informative social interactions do.
We consider the continuous-time portfolio optimization problem of an investor with constant relative risk aversion who maximizes expected utility of terminal wealth. The risky asset follows a jump-diffusion model with a diffusion state variable. We propose an approximation method that replaces the jumps by a diffusion and solve the resulting problem analytically. Furthermore, we provide explicit bounds on the true optimal strategy and the relative wealth equivalent loss that do not rely on results from the true model. We apply our method to a calibrated affine model and fine that relative wealth equivalent losses are below 1.16% if the jump size is stochastic and below 1% if the jump size is constant and γ ≥ 5. We perform robustness checks for various levels of risk-aversion, expected jump size, and jump intensity.
We consider the continuous-time portfolio optimization problem of an investor with constant relative risk aversion who maximizes expected utility of terminal wealth. The risky asset follows a jump-diffusion model with a diffusion state variable. We propose an approximation method that replaces the jumps by a diffusion and solve the resulting problem analytically. Furthermore, we provide explicit bounds on the true optimal strategy and the relative wealth equivalent loss that do not rely on quantities known only in the true model. We apply our method to a calibrated affine model. Our findings are threefold: Jumps matter more, i.e. our approximation is less accurate, if (i) the expected jump size or (ii) the jump intensity is large. Fixing the average impact of jumps, we find that (iii) rare, but severe jumps matter more than frequent, but small jumps.
Extending the data set used in Beyer (2009) to 2017, we estimate I(1) and I(2) money demand models for euro area M3. After including two broken trends and a few dummies to account for shifts in the variables following the global financial crisis and the ECB's non-standard monetary policy measures, we find that the money demand and the real wealth relations identified in Beyer (2009) have remained remarkably stable throughout the extended sample period. Testing for price homogeneity in the I(2) model we find that the nominal-to-real transformation is not rejected for the money relation whereas the wealth relation cannot be expressed in real terms.
Ensuring financial stability : financial structure and the impact of monetary policy on asset prices
(2008)
This paper studies the responses of residential property and equity prices, inflation and economic activity to monetary policy shocks in 17 countries, using data spanning 1986-2006. We estimate VARs for individual economies and panel VARs in which we distinguish between groups of countries on the basis of the characteristics of their financial systems. The results suggest that using monetary policy to offset asset price movements in order to guard against financial instability may have large effects on economic activity. Furthermore, while financial structure influences the impact of policy on asset prices, its importance appears limited. Keywords: asset prices, monetary policy, panel VAR. JEL Number: C23, E52
We study the responses of residential property and equity prices, inflation and economic activity to monetary policy shocks in 17 countries, using data spanning 1986-2006, using single-country VARs and panel VARs in which we distinguish between groups of countries depending on their financial systems. The effect of monetary policy on property prices is about three times as large as its impact on GDP. Using monetary policy to guard against financial instability by offsetting asset-price movements thus has sizable effects on economic activity. While the financial structure influences the impact of policy on asset prices, its importance appears limited.
Recently, the Bank of Japan outlined a “two perspectives” approach to the conduct of monetary policy that focuses on risks to price stability over different time horizons. Interpreting this as pertaining to different frequency bands, we use band spectrum regression to study the determination of inflation in Japan. We find that inflation is related to money growth and real output growth at low frequencies and the output gap at higher frequencies. Moreover, this relationship reflects Granger causality from money growth and the output gap to inflation in the relevant frequency bands. Keywords: spectral regression, frequency domain, Phillips curve, quantity theory. JEL Numbers: C22, E3, E5
The complexities of geopolitical events, financial and fiscal crises, and the ebb and flow of personal life circumstances can weigh heavily on individuals’ minds as they make critical economic decisions. To investigate the impact of cognitive load on such decisions, the authors conducted an incentivized online experiment involving a representative sample of 2,000 French households. The results revealed that exposure to a taxing and persistent cognitive load significantly reduced consumption, particularly for individuals under the threat of furlough, while simultaneously increasing their account balances, particularly for those not facing such employment uncertainty. These effects were not driven by supply constraints or a worsening of credit constraints. Instead, cognitive load primarily affected the optimality of the chosen policy rules and impaired the ability of the standard economic model to accurately predict consumption patterns, although this effect was less pronounced among college-educated subjects
Abundant studies show that individuals often struggle and frequently fail to form a correct perception of how much they are worth in terms of income or net wealth, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The authors find that wealth misperception arises even in a frictionless environment. They show that this wealth misperception is related to low cognitive abilities and inattention, and that subjects who misperceive wealth have a greater tendency to borrow and spend out of gains. A standard optimal consumption choice model, enriched with a rational but inattentive agent à la Gabaix aligns the key experimental findings.
We study the accuracy and usefulness of automated (i.e., machine-generated) valuations for illiquid and heterogeneous real assets. We assemble a database of 1.1 million paintings auctioned between 2008 and 2015. We use a popular machine-learning technique—neural networks—to develop a pricing algorithm based on both non-visual and visual artwork characteristics. Our out-of-sample valuations predict auction prices dramatically better than valuations based on a standard hedonic pricing model. Moreover, they help explaining price levels and sale probabilities even after conditioning on auctioneers’ pre-sale estimates. Machine learning is particularly helpful for assets that are associated with high price uncertainty. It can also correct human experts’ systematic biases in expectations formation—and identify ex ante situations in which such biases are likely to arise.