Finance Commons^™

Fiscal Decentralization Stocktaking Study In Nepal: Final Report, Roy Kelly

Roy Kelly

Nepal is in the midst of a major political, administrative and fiscal restructuring reform moving towards a federal government structure to enhance governance and improve public service delivery. These ongoing efforts are being formulated against the background of the current sub-national governance structure which is largely based on the 1999 Local Self Governance Act (LSGA). The LSGA was a major decentralization reform at the time, introducing a number of key reform initiatives. Despite these bold initiatives under LSGA, however, the Nepalese government structure remained highly centralized, unable to address many of the pressing governance and service delivery problems. In fact, …

Transmisión De Shocks Y Acoplamiento Con Mercados Accionarios Externos: Efectos Asimétricos Y Quiebre Estructural, Marco Morales, Maria Jose Melendez, Guillermo Yáñez

Marco Morales

No abstract provided.

Assessment Of The Foreign Non-Government Organizations' Role In Sudan, Professor Issam A.W. Mohamed

Professor Issam A.W. Mohamed

The study presented reviews activities of NGOs in Sudan. That was a disputable issue that resulted in a mass expulsion of many in 2009. However¸ there were precedents of such expulsions in previous and following years. The paper discusses humanitarian work in Sudan, positive and negative sides. Reasons are that part of the hypothetical framework here is that their activities in the country are indispensible. The country still faces many humanitarian suffering in most of its regions and international aid is direly required. Thus, it is essential to rectify their modus operandi to be consistent with the culture of the …

Impacts Of Tribal And Economic Factors On Civil Conflict Between North And South Sudan, Professor Issam A.W. Mohamed

Professor Issam A.W. Mohamed

The crisis of Greater Darfur Region of Sudan extends to other regions as the South Sudan prepares for secession next July 2011. In the past eight years Sudan's crisis in Darfur was amplified by global news media all over the world. Civil conflict erupted, developed into armed rebellions and open uncontrolled war that enveloped the whole region. The current inflamed undecided and unmarked future borders between the south and north are also facing growing tensions. In this current paper we present some information on what we see as the seeds of conflicts with complicated tribal structures in both sides and …

Optimization Of Hydroelectric Power Generation, Case Study Of Roseires Dam In Sudan, Professor Issam A.W. Mohamed

Professor Issam A.W. Mohamed

Water reservoirs are large pools of water created stream or river catchment's areas and torrential rains and for storing water for use in many ways, and perhaps electric power generation is one of the most important uses of these reservoirs and for agriculture. That is extremely beneficial considering a rare and limited economic resources. Applied stochastic processes model has been applied in the work of Roseires dam, in order to develop a system to generate the highest possible power in the resources available. The current paper aims to apply another model, which is a dynamic programming model to verify the …

Using Spectrum Auctions To Enhance Competition In Wireless Services, Peter Cramton, Evan Kwerel, Gregory Rosston, Andrzej Skrzypacz1

Peter Cramton

Spectrum auctions are used by governments to assign and price licenses for wireless communications. Effective auction design recognizes the importance of competition, not only in the auction, but in the downstream market for wireless communications. This paper examines several instruments regulators can use to enhance competition and thereby improve market outcomes.

Achieving Cooperation In The Arms Race Game. Two New Approaches, Dimitris Voliotis

Dimitris Voliotis

When the risks of national security associated to inferior military power are perceived to be high, the interaction between rival countries resembles a prisoner dilemma with an arms race as its inevitable dominant strategy equilibrium. This paper investigates two different ideas. First, we incorporate in the static form of the game a psychological payoff associated to the perception of motivations and, second we extend the game in a dynamic setup, with overlapping terms of statesmen. In both cases, we find ways out of the arms race equilibrium.

Mexico Consensus Economic Forecast, Volume 14, Number 1, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., Teodulo Soto

Departmental Papers (E & F)

No abstract provided.

Finanzkapital In The Twenty-First Century, Nikhilesh Dholakia

College of Business Faculty Publications

Purpose – Drawing inspiration from the 1910 book Finanzkapital by Rudolf Hilferding, this paper seeks to explore the nature of financial capital in the early twenty-first century from a political-economic and culture theory perspective. It aims to offer suggestions for transcending the crises-prone contemporary economic systems.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper reconceptualises the notions of Finanzkapital in the contemporary context, drawing selective evidence from current and twentieth century economic and business history.

Findings – The nature of contemporaneous Finanzkapital is elaborated by presenting seven “theses” that probe the nature of Finanzkapital prior to, during, and after the Great Recession of 2007-9. …

Using Real World Applications To Policy And Everyday Life To Teach Money And Banking, Dean D. Croushore

Economics Faculty Publications

Teaching a course in money and banking can be simultaneously challenging and easy. It is challenging because teaching the course well often requires a fair amount of institutional knowledge, which an instructor may not have acquired in graduate school. However, it is easy because the course can be geared to the coverage of current events, so economic data releases and the state of the economy help the instructor develop a new course every semester and produce an interesting lecture every day.

There are many different ways to teach a course on money and banking. At most schools, the only prerequisite …

A Financial Impact Assessment Of Ld 1725: Stream Crossings (Presentation), New England Environmental Finance Center, Muskie School Of Public Service

Water

This report looks at the potential financial impact of LD 1725 on the estimated 30,000 stream crossings in the State of Maine that would be affected by the law. Our research for this report included the analysis of nearly 2000 stream crossings and the data collection necessary for the development of extensive stream crossing replacement cost models. We found that the 1.2 bankfull requirements in LD 1725 would result in a 75% ‐ 250% increase in structure widths for stream crossing projects across the state. An upsize of this magnitude would increase the cost of replacing stream crossings statewide by …

"Does It Pay To Be Informed?" Expenditure Efficiency In The Us Mutual Fund Industry, Jan Cerny

Gettysburg Economic Review

The mutual fund industry would like us to believe that fund expenses are justifiable by their extensive management expertise, security analysis and the consequent delivery of returns that exceed the market performance. Management know-how is costly and thus it drives up the expenditure of actively managed mutual funds and potentially lowers their net returns. Nevertheless the fund managers argue that their contributions to the returns fully outweigh their costs and in general their trading strategies add value to the investors. On the other hand many academics hold that such claims are fundamentally misleading and actively managed funds cannot continuously outperform …

The Impact Of Continuing Education Modules On The Moral Obligations And Responsibilities Of Financial Advisors, Sandy Modell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Increased life expectancies and a significant reduction in the number of corporate pension plans nationwide have made the prospects of retirement a challenge for many of us. The burden of funding retirement will move from the corporation or government to the individual. Those individuals with limited financial experience will most likely need the guidance of a financial advisor. Can we trust and rely upon them? Following the 2004 late trading scandal and the 2008 financial meltdown, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority ("FINRA") implemented Continuing Education requirements at the advisor level. The intent was to improve the quality and integrity of …

Currency Trading Using The Fractal Market Hypothesis, Jonathan Blackledge, Kieran Murphy

Articles

We report on a research and development programme in financial modelling and economic security undertaken in the Information and Communications Security Research Group (ICSRG, 2011) which has led to the launch of a new company - Currency Traders Ireland Limited - funded by Enterprise Ireland. Currency Traders Ireland Limited (CTI, 2011) has a fifty year exclusive license to develop a new set of indicators for analysing currency exchange rates (Forex trading). We consider the background to the approach taken and present examples of the results obtained to date.

Forex Trading Using Metatrader 4 With The Fractal Market Hypothesis, Jonathan Blackledge, Kieran Murphy

Conference papers

This paper reports on the results of a research and development programme concerned with the analysis of currency pair exchange time series for Forex trading in an intensive applications and services environment. In particular, we present some of the preliminary results obtained for Forex trading using MetaTrader 4 with a new set of trend indicators deigned using a mathematical model that is based on the Fractal Market Hypothesis. This includes examples of various currency pair exchange rates considered over different time intervals and use of the indicators in a live trading environment to place a buy/sell order.

Structured Finance And Its Effects On Macroeconomic Stability, Brian Charles Fahey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The tools and techniques of structured finance have changed banking remarkably over the past twenty years. This area grew to become larger than the sum total of traditional banking deposits in 2007. Despite this, the field is poorly understood and its connection to macroeconomic stability was underestimated until the credit crisis. This paper explores the structured finance market in three phases. First, the market is broken into parts based on the incentives and motivations of each of the three major agents in the field. Next, a critical review of pricing models that are used to justify the valuations of the …

Three Essays On Trading And Banking, William Paul Spurlin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay, Short Sales in the NYSE Batch Open and NASDAQ Opening Cross, examines opening-trade short volume's relation to short volume for the rest of the trading day and to overnight, previous-day, and same-day price changes. We find that short volume in the batch open and opening cross increases with short volume for the rest of the day, with previous-day, open-to-close price changes, and with overnight price changes for S&P 500 stocks. Batch-open short volume increases with overnight price changes, and it increases (does not decrease) for firms making positive (negative) overnight earnings …

Three Essays On The Impact Of Information And Transparency In Firms, Lloyd R. Wade

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays on the information and transparency in firms. In the first essay, we provide some of the first evidence regarding the impact of safety expenditures on moral hazard induced by increases in workers' compensation benefits. Prior studies have inferred the effect of safety incentives by testing the relation between claims frequency and benefit increases. However, these studies have not explicitly modeled the impact of actual safety expenditures. Using a proprietary dataset containing policy-level data for several thousand policies over a 13-year period we show that safety expenditures play a positive role in reducing the moral …

Xtreme Credit Risk Models: Implications For Bank Capital Buffers, David E. Allen, Akhmad R. Kramadibrata, Robert J. Powell, Abhay K. Singh

Research outputs 2011

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) highlighted the importance of measuring and understanding extreme credit risk. This paper applies Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) techniques, traditionally used in the insurance industry to measure risk beyond a predetermined threshold, to four credit models. For each of the models we use both Historical and Monte Carlo Simulation methodology to create CVaR measurements. The four extreme models are derived from modifications to the Merton structural model (which we term Xtreme-S), the CreditMetrics Transition model (Xtreme-T), Quantile regression (Xtreme-Q), and the author’s own unique iTransition model (Xtreme-i) which incorporates industry factors into transition matrices. For …

Three Essays On Financial Markets And Monetary Policy, Abeba Siraj Mussa

Dissertations

The global financial crisis triggered by fallout from the sub-prime mortgage market in the U.S. has led economists to focus attention on the role of monetary policy in the crisis. The question of how monetary policy affects the financial sector is the key to the current debate over the role financial stability should play in the monetary policy decisions. As a contribution to this debate, my dissertation examines the link between monetary policy and three main financial sectors - the banking sector, the stock market, and the housing market.

The first essay examines whether the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) …