Performance of the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure in light of historical experience in the CEE region

This article applies set of 24 baseline and auxiliary indicators included into the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure framework on the conditions of 17 CEE countries to assess their predictive power given the policy pre-determined and optimal thresholds for the period 1991–2014. Our results suggest that the optimal official thresholds might either be excessively too accommodative (public and private, total or external debt levels), overly conservative (current account balance, export market share and nominal unit labour costs), or with less informative value (labour market characteristics) for set of transition economies. Indicators with higher predictive power belong predominantly to the group of external imbalances indicators.     

Analysis of human needs as a basis for research policy

The authors postulate the necessity of establishing a coherent system of socio-economic goals and say that the analysis of human needs and studies of the dynamics of their satisfaction can become the means for goal-setting. They refer to the psychological theory of human needs [1, 2] enabling the decomposition of goals and quantification of requirements concerning the satisfaction of particular categories of needs. The model of needs is discussed and its usefulness for forecasting of the tasks of research and technology is shown. The program design based on the concept of the model should include such elements as diagnosis of the current state of needs satisfaction, diagnosis of the current state of identified desires, assessment of areas of needs dissatisfaction expected in the future, forecasts of the development of the system of needs, analysis, and evaluation of the present and future opportunities, and forecasts of barriers to growth. Decomposition of goals and dynamic analysis of needs satisfaction allow one to make a hierarchy of research projects from the point of view of their social importance.     

A valuation algorithm for indifference prices in incomplete markets

A probabilistic iterative algorithm is constructed for indifference prices of claims in a multiperiod incomplete model. At each time step, a nonlinear pricing functional is applied that isolates and prices separately the two types of risk. It is represented solely in terms of risk aversion and the pricing measure, a martingale measure that preserves the conditional distribution of unhedged risks, given the hedgeable ones, from their historical counterparts.Received: 1 September 2003, Mathematics Subject Classification: 93E20, 60G40, 60J75JEL Classification: C61, G11, G13The second author acknowledges partial support from NSF Grants DMS 0102909 and DMS 0091946.     

Computer-assisted constrained approval voting

Approval voting, proposed independently by several analysts in the 1970s, is a voting system in which voters can vote for as many candidates as they like in multicandidate elections. Recently, S.J. Brams modified this system, introducing so-called constrained approval voting. It is designed for a professional association to ensure equitable representation of different interests. In his new system approval voting is combined with the constraints on the number of persons that can be elected from different categories of members. In the present paper the problem of constrained approval voting is formulated (following the work of R.F. Potthoff) as an integer programming problem. Some computational aspects of this problem are discussed. The paper presents a numerical example illustrating a possibility to apply the discussed voting procedure in the election of members of the Committee for Organization and Management Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences.     

The Role and Current Status of IFRS in the Completion of National Accounting Rules – Evidence from Poland

ABSTRACT

We outline the process of implementation of the accounting Directive 2013/34/EU by the Republic of Poland in the context of references to IFRS. The purpose of the article is to determine to what extent IFRS are used by actors taking part in the legislative and enforcement processes. The accounting regulation in Poland comprises an act of Parliament and the regulations of the Ministry of Finance. As a result the regulation is relatively succinct and many elements present in IFRS are not covered, while the issues of record-keeping and verification of accounting documentation receive more attention. A review of the responses to a call for opinions reveals that IFRS are rarely mentioned.     

Reconstruction of previous failure times and records

For the sequences of independent identically distributed random variables with continuous distributions, we provide the optimal upper bounds for the increments of order and record statistics under condition that the values of future order statistics and records are known. The bounds are expressed in terms of quantiles and absolute moments centered about the quantiles of the parent distribution. We also describe the distributions which approach the bounds with arbitrary desired accuracy.The second author was supported by the Polish State Committee for Scientific Research (KBN) under Grant 5 P03A 012 20Received November 2003     

A BSDE approach to fair bilateral pricing under endogenous collateralization

Nie and Rutkowski (Int. J. Theor. Appl. Finance 18:1550048, 2015; Math. Finance, 2016, to appear) examined fair bilateral pricing in models with funding costs and an exogenously given collateral. The main goal of this work is to extend results from Nie and Rutkowski (Int. J. Theor. Appl. Finance 18:1550048, 2015; Math. Finance, 2016, to appear) to the case of an endogenous margin account depending on the contract’s value for the hedger and/or the counterparty. Comparison theorems for BSDEs from Nie and Rutkowski (Theory Probab. Appl., 2016, forthcoming) are used to derive bounds for unilateral prices and to study the range for fair bilateral prices in a general semimartingale model. The backward stochastic viability property, introduced by Buckdahn et al. (Probab. Theory Relat. Fields 116:485–504, 2000), is employed to examine the bounds for fair bilateral prices for European claims with a negotiated collateral in a diffusion-type model. We also generalize in several respects the option pricing results from Bergman (Rev. Financ. Stud. 8:475–500, 1995), Mercurio (Actuarial Sciences and Quantitative Finance, pp. 65–95, 2015) and Piterbarg (Risk 23(2):97–102, 2010) by considering contracts with cash-flow streams and allowing for idiosyncratic funding costs for risky assets.     

Did you really take a hit? Understanding how video games playing affects individuals

This study addresses the important and recurring question of whether playing video games is detrimental to the socio-economic development of a person. It does this by using novel data from the Taking Part Survey in England to establish whether games playing is associated with particular socio-economic characteristics and/or other forms of cultural participation. The results do not indicate any obviously negative effects of video games playing: rather, those who play are typically better educated and no less wealthier, and games players are also more likely than non-games players to participate in other forms of culture, particularly active forms of participation. These findings are reinforced when comparing the characteristics of individuals who did and did not play video games when younger.     

Estimating the revenue costs of tax treaties in developing countries

(12764) Petr Janský Marek Šedivý Tax treaties between countries influence how much tax revenues governments receive from multinational enterprises. These treaties often reduce the withholding tax rates on outgoing dividend and interest payments. We provide illustrative estimates of costs for these two taxes for 14 developing countries in sub‐Saharan Africa and Asia in a first multi‐country comparison of this kind. These might be overestimates because we assume that foreign direct investments are not influenced by the tax treaties. We estimate that the highest potential tax revenue losses are within hundreds of millions US$ and around 0.1% of GDP, with Philippines incurring the highest losses both in US$ and relative to GDP. We also find that around 95% of the losses is due to dividends and that only four investor countries—Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland and Singapore—are together responsible for more than half of the losses. We discuss the limitations of these estimates and how future research could improve their quality as well as coverage.