Placing the Czech shadow banking sector under the light

The size of the shadow banking sector (SBS) has more than doubled in the Czech Republic over the last decade. This places a potential burden on policy makers. On the one hand, the SBS complements regular banking by expanding access to credit and investments, enabling better risk sharing and maturity transformation, and supporting market liquidity. On the other hand, SBS activities can put the stability of the financial system at risk and amplify its procyclicality by exacerbating the buildup of leverage and asset price bubbles. We implement a FAVAR model of the Czech economy to determine the impact of macroeconomic factors on the SBS. We find that the SBS: (i) is sensitive to changes in market interest rates and term spread; (ii) exhibits great procyclicality; (iii) can act as a complement to regular banking and satisfy some additional demand for credit. We also define some potential risks of continued growth of the SBS, linked to our empirical evidence.Web of Science29128

Innovating innovation policy: the emergence of ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’

Within the policy structures of the European Union (EU), the concept of ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ (RRI) appears to have a very specific emergence point, via a workshop for invited experts hosted by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Research and Innovation in May 2011. Through a textual analysis of EU documents, this paper will explore the processes through which RRI has been incorporated into Horizon 2020 as a policy framework for the European Research Area which promises that technological innovation will be shaped towards social goods. It concludes by discussing some of the tensions between RRI and policies emanating from other EU institutions, highlighting areas which may impede RRI's progress towards its goals

Monte Carlo Methods for Top-k Personalized PageRank Lists and Name Disambiguation

We study a problem of quick detection of top-k Personalized PageRank lists. This problem has a number of important applications such as finding local cuts in large graphs, estimation of similarity distance and name disambiguation. In particular, we apply our results to construct efficient algorithms for the person name disambiguation problem. We argue that when finding top-k Personalized PageRank lists two observations are important. Firstly, it is crucial that we detect fast the top-k most important neighbours of a node, while the exact order in the top-k list as well as the exact values of PageRank are by far not so crucial. Secondly, a little number of wrong elements in top-k lists do not really degrade the quality of top-k lists, but it can lead to significant computational saving. Based on these two key observations we propose Monte Carlo methods for fast detection of top-k Personalized PageRank lists. We provide performance evaluation of the proposed methods and supply stopping criteria. Then, we apply the methods to the person name disambiguation problem. The developed algorithm for the person name disambiguation problem has achieved the second place in the WePS 2010 competition

La qualité des soins en France : comment la mesurer pour l'améliorer ?

Définir et évaluer la qualité des soins est une démarche fondamentale si l'on veut améliorer le système de santé. Malgré sa réputation « de meilleur système de santé dans le monde », selon l’OMS, la France est en retard sur l'étude de la qualité des soins. Il n’existe pas à l’heure actuelle de système d’information permanent sur la qualité et la sécurité des soins et les données demeurent partielles, contradictoires et difficilement accessibles. Afin d'obtenir une image globale des problèmes de qualité de soins et développer des stratégies pour l’améliorer, il est important de recueillir des données de manière systématique et sur une base nationale cohérente. Cet article fournit une vue d'ensemble des données disponibles sur la qualité de soins en France en suivant le cadre d’analyse et les recommandations internationales pour mesurer la qualité. En comparant la situation de la France à celles d’autres pays développés, elle vise également à identifier les lacunes et les points forts du système actuel pour améliorer la gestion de la qualité des soins.Qualité, comparaison internationale, système, France

A visual analysis of the usage efficiency of library books

The monographic collections in academic libraries have undergone a period of tremendous growth in volume, in subject diversity, and in formats during the recent several decades. Readers may find it difficult to prioritize which book(s) should be borrowed for a specific purpose. The log data of book loan record may serve as a visible indicator for the more sought-after books by the readers. This paper describes our experimental efforts in works in a university library setting. The visual analysis is thought to provide an effective way to extract the book usage information, which may yield new insights into a host of other related technical as well as user behavior issues. Initial experiment has demonstrated that the proposed approach as articulated in this article can actually benefit end-users as well as library collection development personnel in their endeavor of book selections with effective measure.</p