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The role of biotechnology in combating climate change: A question of politics?

Biotechnology is a platform technology that may significantly contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Yet biotechnology is hardly ever referred to as a ‘clean technology’. This paper investigates why biotechnology tends to be ignored in this context. A global stakeholder survey on biotechnology and climate change was conducted with 55 representatives of 44…

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English / 01/02/2016

Should cable television channels be offered à la carte?

Why do cable TV companies force people to purchase channels they don’t even like? Wouldn’t consumers be better off if they could purchase channels individually rather than only as part of large packages? Not necessarily. This research shows that channel prices would be higher on average if they were offered individually, and if the increase in prices is large enough it can more than…

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English / 11/01/2016

How learning shapes the empathic brain

Deficits in empathy enhance conflicts and human suffering. Thus, it is crucial to understand how empathy can be learned and how learning experiences shape empathy-related processes in the human brain. As a model of empathy deficits, we used the well-established suppression of empathy-related brain responses for the suffering of out-groups and tested whether and how out-group empathy…

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English / 05/01/2016

Forget "Unlearning": How an empirically unwarranted concept was allegedly imported from psychology to flourish in management and organisation studies

We provide a critique of the development in organisation studies of the idea of ‘unlearning’ as allegedly imported from the psychology literature by Hedberg and understood to mean the manageable discard of knowledge precedent to and aiding later learning. We re-review the psychology literature and in contrast to Hedberg, find that this definition of unlearning is not empirically…

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English / 01/01/2016

Collateralization, bank loan rates, and monitoring

We show that collateral plays an important role in the design of debt contracts, the provision of credit, and the incentives of lenders to monitor borrowers. Using a unique data set from a large bank containing timely assessments of collateral values, we find that the bank responded to a legal reform that exogenously reduced collateral values by increasing interest rates, tightening…

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English / 01/01/2016

Decoding Financial Networks: Hidden Dangers and Effective Policies

Two changes have ushered in a new era of analyzing the complex and interdependent world surrounding us. One is related to the increased influx of data, furnishing the raw material for this revolution that is now starting to impact economic thinking. The second change is due to a subtler reason: a paradigm shift in the analysis of complex systems.

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English / 01/01/2016

Financial fragility and distress propagation in a network of regions

Building on previous works on business fluctuations, we model the propagation of financial distress in a network of regions, each populated by heterogeneous interacting firms and banks. In order to diversify risk, firm sell goods outside their own region and borrow from banks located there. However, this results in ties across regions which propagate financial distress across…

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English / 01/01/2016

DebtRank and the network of leverage

The interconnectedness of the financial system is one of the main factors contributing to systemic risk. The financial crisis has shown how the network of intrafinancial exposures may, in times of systemic distress, amplify initially small shocks. In this work, the authors build on the DebtRank methodology by introducing the notion of a network of leverage and propose a two-round…

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English / 01/01/2016

Complexity theory and financial regulation

Traditional economic theory could not explain, much less predict, the near collapse of the financial system and its long-lasting effects on the global economy. Since the 2008 crisis, there has been increasing interest in using ideas from complexity theory to make sense of economic and financial markets. Concepts, such as tipping points, networks, contagion, feedback, and resilience…

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English / 01/01/2016

The financial system as a nexus of interconnected networks

In this Chapter, we describe the phenomenology of multilevel financial networks. Network analysis represents a useful tool for the analysis of financial systems, allowing, in particular, for a better understanding of the mechanics of systemic distress. However, the level of complexity reached by the financial system, coupled with the linkages arising to and from other economic…

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English / 01/01/2016

Sorry, we're closed: Loan conditions when bank branches close and firms transfer to another bank

We study loan conditions when bank branches close and firms subsequently transfer to a branch of another bank in the vicinity. Such transfer loans allow us for the first time to observe the conditions granted when banks pool-price new applicants. Consistent with recent theoretical work on hold up in bank-firm relationships we find that transfer loans do not receive the discount in…

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English / 01/01/2016

Valuations of options on discretely sampled variance: A general analytic approximation

The values of options on realized variance are significantly impacted by the discrete sampling of realized variance and may be substantially higher than the values of options on continuously sampled variance (or, quadratic variation). Under arbitrary stochastic volatility dynamics, we analyze the discretization effect and obtain a simple analytical correction term to be applied to…

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English / 01/01/2016

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