1,721,028 research outputs found
Ideology Without Ideologists
Full text linkGenerally, Democrats do not increase military spending, and Republicans do not raise welfare payments. Mostly, ruling politicians stick to the manifesto of their party. The current paper provides a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon that does not assume politicians or voters to be ideologists. I explore an environment where both voters and politicians always prefer the policy that is adequate to the world state but contradicts the party manifesto over the policy that is in line with the manifesto but not adequate. I find that nevertheless, the inefficient manifesto-driven policy will often result from their interaction. Besides, I show that a high degree of agreement between the politician in office, his party basis and the voter makes efficient, informed policy rare or even impossible. But if homogeneity of convictions within parties is high, swing voter behavior can solve the problem.Information transmission, signalling, ideology, intra-party politics, political opinion.
The Bologna Process: How Student Mobility Affects Multi-Cultural Skills and Educational Quality
Full text linkWe analyze the two goals behind the European Bologna Process of increasing student mobility: enabling graduates to develop multi cultural skills and increasing the quality of universities. We isolate three effects: 1) a competition effect that raises quality; 2) a free rider effect that lowers quality; 3) a composition effect that influences the relative strengths of the two previous effects. The effects lead to a trade off between the two goals. Full mobility may be optimal, only when externalities are high. In this case, student mobility yields inef- ficiently high educational quality. For moderate externalities partial mobility is optimal and yields an inefficiently low quality of education.Student mobility, Quality of higher education, Multicultural skills, Bologna Process
Migration of the Highly Skilled: Can Europe catch up with the US?
Full text linkWe develop a model to analyze the determinants and effects of an endogenous imperfect transferability of human capital on natives and immigrants. The model reveals that high migration flows and high skill-transferability are mutually interdependent. Moreover, we show that high mobility within a Federation is necessary to attract highly skilled immigrants into the Federation. We study in how far and in what way the European public policy behind the Bologna and the Lisbon Process can contribute to higher mobility in Europe.human capital, migration, transferability, public policy
Barrier Option Hedging under Constraints: A Viscosity Approach
Full text linkWe study the problem of finding the minimal initial capital needed in order to hedge without risk a barrier option when the vector of proportions of wealth invested in each risky asset is constraint to lie in a closed convex domain. In the context of a Brownian diffusion model, we provide a PDE characterization of the super-hedging price. This extends the result of Broadie, Cvitanic and Soner (1998) and Cvitanic, Pham and Touzi (1999) which was obtained for plain vanilla options, and provides a natural numerical procedure for computing the corresponding super-hedging price. As a by-product, we obtain a comparison theorem for a class of parabolic PDE with relaxed Dirichet conditions involving a constraint on the gradient.Super-replication, barrier options, portfolio constraints, viscosity solutions
Time Dependent Relative Risk Aversion
Full text linkRisk management and the thorough understanding of the relations between financial markets and the standard theory of macroeconomics have always been among the topics most addressed by researchers, both financial mathematicians and economists. This work aims at explaining investors’ behavior from a macroeconomic aspect (modeled by the investors’ pricing kernel and their relative risk aversion) using stocks and options data. Daily estimates of investors’ pricing kernel and relative risk aversion are obtained and used to construct and analyze a three-year long time-series. The first four moments of these time-series as well as their values at the money are the starting point of a principal component analysis. The relation between changes in a major index level and implied volatility at the money and between the principal components of the changes in relative risk aversion is found to be linear. The relation of the same explanatory variables to the principal components of the changes in pricing kernels is found to be log-linear, although this relation is not significant for all of the examined maturities.risk aversion, pricing kernels, time dependent preferences
Technological Choice under Organizational Diseconomies of Scale
Full text linkWith adverse selection, diseconomies of scale associated with hierarchies may induce the implementation of a second-best technology. This occurs whenever rents to lower tiers of the hierarchy increase faster than total surplus. This is more likely with longer hierarchies.Adverse Selection, Hierarchies, Technology
e-Learning Statistics - A Selective Review
Full text linkModern computing equipment is present at schools and universities at all levels of education. In the statistical sciences computers offer great opportunities to enrich the learning process by the means of e.g. animations, software integration or on-the-fly computations. A personal review of different e-learning platforms for statistics is done in this paper. This review reveals facts that could be taken into account for future e-learning platforms in statistics. One of the most striking discoveries of our analysis is that students of statistics actually do not use electronic media in the desired frequency and actually rely more on print media such as books,copies of slides, etc.e-learning, electronic books, hypertext courseware, statistical software
Tail Conditional Expectation for vector-valued Risks
Full text linkIn his paper we introduce a quantile-based risk measure for multivariate financial positions "the vector-valued Tail-conditional-expectation (TCE)". We adopt the framework proposed by Jouini, Meddeb, and Touzi [9] to deal with multi-assets portfolios when one accounts for frictions in the financial market. In this framework, the space of risks formed by essentially bounded random vectors, is endowed with some partial vector preorder >= accounting for market frictions. In a first step we provide a definition for quantiles of vector-valued risks which is compatible with the preorder >=. The TCE is then introduced as a natural extension of the "classical" real-valued tail-conditional-expectation. Our main result states that for continuous distributions TCE is equal to a coherent vector-valued risk measure. We also provide a numerical algorithm for computing vector-valued quantiles and TCE.Risk measures, vector-valued risk measures, coherent risk-measures, quantiles, tail-conditional-expectation
Exploratory Graphics of a Financial Dataset
Full text linkcompany rating, default probability, support vector machines, colour coding
Spectral calibration of exponential Lévy Models [1]
Full text linkWe investigate the problem of calibrating an exponential Lévy model based on market prices of vanilla options. We show that this inverse problem is in general severely ill-posed and we derive exact minimax rates of convergence. The estimation procedure we propose is based on the explicit inversion of the option price formula in the spectral domain and a cut-off scheme for high frequencies as regularisation.European option, jump diffusion, minimax rates, severely ill-posed, nonlinear inverse problem, spectral cut-off
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