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Current thinking on African conflicts suffers from misinterpretations oversimplification, lack of focus, lack of conceptual clarity, state-centrism and lack of vision). The paper analyses a variety of the dominant explanations of major international actors and donors, showing how these frequently do not distinguish with sufficient clarity between the ‘root causes’ of a conflict, its aggravating factors and its triggers. Specifically, a correct assessment of conflict prolonging (or sustaining) factors is of vital importance in Africa’s lingering confrontations. Broader approaches (e.g. “structural stability”) offer a better analytical framework than familiar one-dimensional explanations. Moreover, for explaining and dealing with violent conflicts a shift of attention from the nation-state towards the local and sub-regional level is needed.
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 paper considers optimal monetary stabilization policy in a forward-looking model, when the central bank recognizes that private-sector expectations need not be precisely model-consistent, and wishes to choose a policy that will be as good as possible in the case of any beliefs that are close enough to model-consistency. It is found that commitment continues to be important for optimal policy, that the optimal long-run inflation target is unaffected by the degree of potential distortion of beliefs, and that optimal policy is even more history-dependent than if rational expectations are assumed. JEL Classification: E52, E58, E42
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
Kapitalmarktorientierte Risikosteuerung in Banken : Marktwertsteuerung statt Marktzinsmethode
(2005)
In diesem Beitrag wird das Konzept der Marktzinsmethode als Grundlage der dualen Risikosteuerung von Kredit- und Marktpreisrisiken in Frage gestellt. Die Kreditrisiken einer Bank implizieren bonitätsinduzierte Marktpreisrisiken und bankspezifische Refinanzierungskosten. Während die bonitätsinduzierten Marktpreisrisiken in der dualen Risikosteuerung keine Berücksichtigung finden, werden die bankspezifischen Refinanzierungskosten zwar erkannt, aber bankintern nicht verursachungsgerecht zugeordnet. Das Grundmodell der Marktzinsmethode bietet keine Lösungsansätze zur Behebung dieser Probleme. Demgegenüber lassen sich die Fehlsteuerungsimpulse von vornherein durch eine konsequente Marktbewertung (Mark to Market) aller Finanzinstrumente vermeiden. Als Ausblick werden erste Überlegungen zur Implementierung einer umfassenden Marktwertsteuerung in Banken entwickelt und exemplarisch ein hierfür geeignetes Bewertungsmodell vorgestellt.
In this paper, we propose a model of credit rating agencies using the global games framework to incorporate information and coordination problems. We introduce a refined utility function of a credit rating agency that, additional to reputation maximization, also embeds aspects of competition and feedback effects of the rating on the rated firms. Apart from hinting at explanations for several hypotheses with regard to agencies' optimal rating assessments, our model suggests that the existence of rating agencies may decrease the incidence of multiple equilibria. If investors have discretionary power over the precision of their private information, we can prove that public rating announcements and private information collection are complements rather than substitutes in order to secure uniqueness of equilibrium. In this respect, rating agencies may spark off a virtuous circle that increases the efficiency of the market outcome.
Using unobservable conditional variance as measure, latent-variable approaches, such as GARCH and stochastic-volatility models, have traditionally been dominating the empirical finance literature. In recent years, with the availability of high-frequency financial market data modeling realized volatility has become a new and innovative research direction. By constructing "observable" or realized volatility series from intraday transaction data, the use of standard time series models, such as ARFIMA models, have become a promising strategy for modeling and predicting (daily) volatility. In this paper, we show that the residuals of the commonly used time-series models for realized volatility exhibit non-Gaussianity and volatility clustering. We propose extensions to explicitly account for these properties and assess their relevance when modeling and forecasting realized volatility. In an empirical application for S&P500 index futures we show that allowing for time-varying volatility of realized volatility leads to a substantial improvement of the model's fit as well as predictive performance. Furthermore, the distributional assumption for residuals plays a crucial role in density forecasting. Klassifikation: C22, C51, C52, C53
Static analysis of different non-strict functional programming languages makes use of set constants like Top, Inf, and Bot denoting all expressions, all lists without a last Nil as tail, and all non-terminating programs, respectively. We use a set language that permits union, constructors and recursive definition of set constants with a greatest fixpoint semantics. This paper proves decidability, in particular EXPTIMEcompleteness, of subset relationship of co-inductively defined sets by using algorithms and results from tree automata. This shows decidability of the test for set inclusion, which is required by certain strictness analysis algorithms in lazy functional programming languages.