Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Economic Writing On The Pressing Problems Of The Day: The Roles Of Moral Intuition And Methodological Confusion, Julie A. Nelson

Economics Faculty Publication Series

Economists are often called on to help address pressing problems of the day, yet many economists are uncomfortable about disclosing the values that they bring to this work. This essay explores how an inadequate understanding of the role of methodology, as related to ethics and human emotions of concern, underlies this reluctance and compromises the quality of economic advice. The tension between caring about the problems, on the one hand, and writing within the existing culture of the discipline, on the other, are illustrated with examples from U.S. policymaking, behavioral economics, and the economics of climate change and global poverty. …

Economic Writing On The Pressing Problems Of The Day: The Roles Of Moral Intuition And Methodological Confusion, Julie A. Nelson

Julie A. Nelson

Economists are often called on to help address pressing problems of the day, yet many economists are uncomfortable about disclosing the values that they bring to this work. This essay explores how an inadequate understanding of the role of methodology, as related to ethics and human emotions of concern, underlies this reluctance and compromises the quality of economic advice. The tension between caring about the problems, on the one hand, and writing within the existing culture of the discipline, on the other, are illustrated with examples from U.S. policymaking, behavioral economics, and the economics of climate change and global poverty. …

Slides - Africa In The World Trade Network, Luca De Benedictis

Luca De Benedictis

Here you find the slides of the presentation of the paper Africa in the World Trade Network held in Lausanne University at ETSG 2010, September 10th 2010

Reforming The Nigerian Banking Sector: Some Emerging Issues., Biodun Adedipe

Bullion

When the ongoing reforms of banking in Nigeria commenced, there were several arguments against the seeming harshness of the measures. As the revelations increased, the argument became the manner the revelations were made. All these pointed to the capacity of humans to resist change. lt was generally accepted that things went terribly wrong and some drastic steps needed to be taken. This paper examines existing and emerging financial reforms in the Nigeria banking sector. The outcome of the greed-induced crisis was not peculiar to Nigeria, as banks failed all around the world as their capital was eroded. There are obvious …

The Nigerian Financial Crisis: Lessons, Prospects And Way Forward, Charles N. O. Mordi

Bullion

This paper x-rays the recent banking sector crisis in Nigeria, its resolution, lessons learned and way forward. The paper is divided into six main sections. Following the introduction, section 2 highlights country experiences of banking crisis and resolution options, while section 3 gives an overview of financial crisis in Nigeria; section 4 discusses the recent financial crises in Nigeria (2000-2009), while section 5 presents the 2009 banking crises and its causes. The most recent reform measures are discussed in section 6. ln sections 7 and 8, the lessons of experience and the way forward are presented, while the concluding remarks …

Leveraged Etfs: The Trojan Horse Has Passed The Margin-Rule Gates, William M. Humphries

Seattle University Law Review

What do the Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the demise of Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns all have in common? One word: leverage. The misuse of leverage, in all its forms, contributed greatly to all of these events. Yet even today, common investors can purchase a leveraged exchange-traded fund (leveraged ETF), a complex product that uses leverage to increase returns, without triggering applicable laws designed to regulate the use of leverage. This Comment articulates the basics surrounding the functions and operations of leveraged ETFs and margin rules in order to assess the compatibility of the two. The Comment argues …

Africa In The World Trade Network, Luca De Benedictis

Luca De Benedictis

The Global Financial Crisis And Its Impact On Trade: The World And The European Emerging Economies, Robert C. Shelburne

Robert C. Shelburne

Presentation at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy/UNCTAD on the key issues on the international agenda. Discusses the impact of the 2007-2010 global financial crisis on world trade with an emphasis on the European emerging economies. Includes a discussion of policies to reduce the impact of future trade shocks and how the international economic system may be reformed as a result of the crisis.

Off The Cliff And Back? Credit Conditions And International Trade During The Global Financial Crisis, Davin Chor, Kalina Manova

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the collapse of international trade flows during the global financial crisis using detailed data on monthly US imports. We show that credit conditions were an important channel through which the crisis affected trade volumes, by exploiting the variation in the cost of capital across countries and over time, as well as the variation in financial vulnerability across sectors. Countries with higher interbank rates and thus tighter credit markets exported less to the US during the peak of the crisis. This effect was especially pronounced in sectors that require extensive external financing, have limited access to trade credit, or …

May Roundtable: The Downfall Of Human Rights? Introduction

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An annotation of:

“The Downfall of Human Rights” by Joshua Kurlantzick. Newsweek. February 19, 2010.

The State Of The World Economy, Robert C. Shelburne

Robert C. Shelburne

Keynote address to the UNWTO Resilience Committee in Berlin, Germany on the state of the world economy.

Shin-Gate: Misunderstanding The Power Of Shame In South Korea, Koushik Ghosh

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of Business

Shame is not perceived the same way in different cultures, nor is it used the same way. How does that difference across cultures influence our interactions in public space? How does it affect our business interactions? It has been argued, especially in the wake of Asia’s financial crisis in 1997, that there was a lack of shame in Asian cultures aft er the economic crash. The same kind of argument has been presented in the United States following the financial crisis which began in 2008. President Obama has tried to shame the Wall Street crowd. Economic commentators have spoken of …

Credit Risk Models: An Analysis Of Default Correlation, Howard Qi, Yan Alice Xie, Sheen Liu

College of Business Publications

This paper examines one of the major problems in credit risk models widely used in the financial industry to forecast future defaults and bankruptcies. We find that even after proper calibration, a representative credit risk model can severely underestimate default correlation. We further find that a likely reason for the underestimation of default correlation is the problematic common practice in the financial industry of using observable equity correlation as a proxy for unobservable asset correlation when the model is applied to predict default correlation. However, our results show that this proxy in common practice is not valid.

Do We Really Need To Start From Scratch?, Michal Gradzewicz, Krzysztof Makarski, Joanna Tyrowicz

Joanna Tyrowicz

This paper presents views and believes of the authors on the relevance of the current economic theory for the understanding of the complex world we live in. Has the crisis indeed demonstrated that as profession we are misled by the beauty of the mathematical models and the only useful, workable solutions at hand were provided in early 1930s? The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the current state-of-the-art literature from the perspective of its usefulness in the context of economic crises. We argue that although we might be unable to answer many questions or to “predict” …

The Government Shareholder: Regulating Public Ownership Of Private Enterprise, Benjamin A. Templin

Benjamin A. Templin

During the subprime financial crisis of 2007-2009, the U.S. transformed its policies from a focus on privatization and deregulation to one where the government plays an active role as a market participant. By the end of the 2009 fiscal year, the U.S. government became one of the largest shareholders in the world owning a portfolio of investments valued at $959 billion. Some pundits condemned the investments as socialism. The sudden increase in the government portfolio is better understood as a Keynesian response to market failure rather than a change in the political economy. However, the dramatic increase in the government …

Credit Risk And Real Capital : An Examination Of Swiss Banking Sector Default Risk Using Cvar, Robert J. Powell, David E. Allen

Research outputs pre 2011

The global financial crisis (GFC) has placed the creditworthiness of banks under intense scrutiny. In particular, capital adequacy has been called into question. Current capital requirements make no allowance for capital erosion caused by movements in the market value of assets. This paper examines default probabilities of Swiss banks under extreme conditions using structural modeling techniques. Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) and conditional probability of default (CPD) techniques are used to measure capital erosion. Significant increase in probability of default (PD) is found during the GFC period. The market asset value based approach indicates a much higher PD than external …

Financial Liberalization And Banking Crises: A Cross-Country Analysis, Apanard P. Angkinand, Wanvimol Sawangngoenyuang, Clas Wihlborg

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Several studies indicate that financial liberalization contributes to the likelihood of a financial crisis. We focus on banking crises and argue that they are most likely to occur after an intermediate degree of liberalization. Using a recently updated dataset for financial reforms in 48 countries between 1973 and 2005, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship between liberalization and the likelihood of crisis. We ask whether the relationship remains when institutional characteristics of countries and dynamic effects of liberalization are considered. The empirical results indicate that the relationship between liberalization and banking crises depends strongly on the strength of capital regulation …

Black Tuesday And Graying The Legitimacy Line For Governmental Intervention: When Tomorrow Is Just A Future Yesterday, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

Black Tuesday in October 1929 marked a major crisis in American history. As we face current economic woes, it is appropriate to recall not only the event but also reflect on how it altered the legal landscape and the change it precipitated in the acceptance of governmental intervention into the marketplace. Perceived or real crises can cause us to dance between free markets and regulatory power. Much like the events of 1929, current financial concerns have led to new, unprecedented governmental intervention into the private sector. This Article seeks caution, on the basis of history, arguing that fear and crisis …