Why is the Notion of Person also Descriptively Problematic?

Informally and on occasions formally, the notion of person seems to be indispensable in many walks of life. In philosophical debates, though, the notion oftentimes appears to play a subordinate role. Other notions--subject, self, individual, human being, or characteristic marks of persons: mind, consciousness, rationality, (individual or cultural) identity, autonomy, authenticity, responsibility-- occupy center stage. There are exceptions: there is the venerable problem of personal identity through time; in certain ethical issues, e.g., in bioethics or political philosophy, conceptions of person figure explicitly; and there are some treatises of the "concept of person" itself. Yet, even here one can hear warnings, e.g., that the concept is fraught with dilemmas and should be avoided in bioethical debates (Birnbacher 1997), or warnings concerning the "vagueness" (Wils 1997, 37) or the "contemporary crisis" of the concept (Kobusch 1997, 263ff.)

Foreign Currency Loans - Demand or Supply Driven?

Motivated by current concerns over foreign currency exposures in emerging economies, we examine the currency denomination of business loans made in Bulgaria prior to the current crisis. We analyze information on the requested and granted currency for more than hundred thousand loans granted by one bank to sixty thousand different firms during the period 2003- 2007. This unique data set allows us to disentangle demand-side from supply-side determinants of foreign currency loans. We find that the bank in our sample often grants loans in foreign currency even when a firm requests a loan in local currency. The bank lends in foreign currency, not only to less risky firms, but also when the firm requested a large or long-term loan and after the bank itself received more funding in euro. These results suggest that foreign currency borrowing in Eastern Europe is not only be driven by borrowers who try to benefit from lower interest rates but may be partly supply-driven with banks hesitant to lend long-term in local currency and eager to match the currency structure of their assets and liabilities. --foreign currency debt,banking

Foreign Currency Loans - Demand or Supply Driven?

Motivated by current concerns over foreign currency exposures in emerging economies, we examine the currency denomination of business loans made in Bulgaria prior to the current crisis. We analyze information on the requested and granted currency for more than hundred thousand loans granted by one bank to sixty thousand different firms during the period 2003- 2007. This unique data set allows us to disentangle demand-side from supply-side determinants of foreign currency loans. We find that the bank in our sample often grants loans in foreign currency even when a firm requests a loan in local currency. The bank lends in foreign currency, not only to less risky firms, but also when the firm requested a large or long-term loan and after the bank itself received more funding in euro. These results suggest that foreign currency borrowing in Eastern Europe is not only be driven by borrowers who try to benefit from lower interest rates but may be partly supply-driven with banks hesitant to lend long-term in local currency and eager to match the currency structure of their assets and liabilities.foreign currency debt;banking

Foreign Currency Loans - Demand or Supply Driven?

Motivated by concerns over foreign currency exposures of banks in Emerging Europe, we examine the currency denomination of business loans made in Bulgaria during the period 2003-2007. We analyze a unique dataset including information on the requested and granted currency for more than hundred thousand loans granted by one bank to sixty thousand different firms. This data set allows us to disentangle demand-side from supply-side determinants of foreign currency loans. We find that 32% of the foreign currency loans disbursed in our sample were actually requested in local currency by the firm. Our analysis suggests that the bank lends in foreign currency, not only to less risky firms, but also when the firm requests a long-term loan and when the bank itself has more funding in euro. These results imply that foreign currency borrowing in Eastern Europe is not only driven by borrowers who try to benefit from lower interest rates but also by banks hesitant to lend longterm in local currency and eager to match the currency structure of their assets and liabilities.foreign currency debt, banking

Numeracy and the quality of on-the-job decisions : evidence from loan officers

We examine how the numeracy level of employees influences the quality of their on-the-job decisions. Based on an administrative dataset of a retail bank we relate the performance of loan officers in a standardized math test to the accuracy of their credit assessments of small business borrowers. We find that loan officers with a high level of numeracy are more accurate in assessing the credit risk of borrowers. The effect is most pronounced during the pre-crisis credit boom period when it is arguably more difficult to pick out risky borrowers

The zero risk fallacy? : banks' sovereign exposure and sovereign risk spillovers

European banks are exposed to a substantial amount of risky sovereign debt. The “missing bank capital” resulting from the zero-risk weight exemption for European banks for European sovereign debt amplifies the co-movement between sovereign CDS spreads and facilitates cross-border financial-crisis spillovers. Risks spill over from risky periphery sovereigns to safer core countries, but not in the opposite direction nor for exposures to countries not exempted from risk-weighting. We consider the trade-off of benefits of sovereign debt (for banks and sovereigns) and spillover risk when applying risk-weights. More bank capital as well as positive risk-weighting for sovereign exposures mitigates spillovers

Transition from Free to Interacting Composite Fermions away from ν\nu=1/3

Spin excitations from a partially populated composite fermion level are studied above and below $\nu=1/3$. In the range $2/7<\nu<2/5$ the experiments uncover significant departures from the non-interacting composite fermion picture that demonstrate the increasing impact of interactions as quasiparticle Landau levels are filled. The observed onset of a transition from free to interacting composite fermions could be linked to condensation into the higher order states suggested by transport experiments and numerical evaluations performed in the same filling factor range.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, to appear in PR

Decline and repair, and covariate effects

The failure processes of repairable systems may be impacted by operational and environmental stress factors. To accommodate such factors, reliability can be modelled using a multiplicative intensity function. In the proportional intensity model, the failure intensity is the product of the failure intensity function of the baseline system that quantifies intrinsic factors and a function of covariates that quantify extrinsic factors. The existing literature has extensively studied the failure processes of repairable systems using general repair concepts such as age-reduction when no covariate effects are considered. This paper investigates different approaches for modelling the failure and repair process of repairable systems in the presence of time-dependent covariates. We derive statistical properties of the failure processes for such systems

Multi-Target Vectorization with MTPS C++ Generic Library

International audienceThis article introduces a C++ template library dedicated at vectorizing algorithms for different target architectures: Multi-Target Parallel Skeleton (MTPS). Skeletons describing the data structures and algorithms are provided and allow MTPS to generate a code with optimized memory access patterns for the choosen architecture. MTPS currently supports x86-64 multicore CPUs and CUDA enabled GPUs. On these architectures, performances close to hardware limits are observed