Bank Capital Regulation in Contemporary Banking Theory: A Review of the Literature

This paper reviews the theoretical literature on bank capital regulation and analyzes some of the approaches to redesigning the 1988 Basel Accord on capital standards. The paper starts with a review of the literature on the design of the financial system and the existence of banks. It proceeds with a presentation of the market failures that justify banking regulation and an analysis of the mechanisms that have been suggested to deal with these failures. The paper then reviews the theoretical literature on bank capital regulation. This is followed by a brief history of capital regulation since the 1988 Basel Capital Accord and a presentation of both the alternative approaches that have been put forward on setting capital standards and the Basel Committee's proposal for a new capital adequacy framework.     

Infrequent Extreme Risks

The main tools and concepts of financial and actuarial theory are designed to handle standard, or even small risks. The aim of this paper is to reconsider some selected financial problems, in a setup including infrequent extreme risks. We first consider investors maximizing the expected utility function of their future wealth, and we establish the necessary and sufficient conditions on the utility function to ensure the existence of a non degenerate demand for assets with extreme risks. This new class of utility functions, called LIRA, does not contain the classical HARA and CARA utility functions, which are not adequate in this framework. Then we discuss the corresponding asset supply-demand equilibrium model.     

Earnings on the Information Technology Roller Coaster: Insight from Matched Employer-Employee Data

This article uses matched employer-employee data for the State of Georgia to examine workers' earnings experience through the information technology (IT) sector's employment boom of the mid-1990s and bust in the early 2000s. The results show that even after controlling for pre-boom individual characteristics, transitioning out of the IT sector to a non-IT industry generally resulted in a large wage penalty. However, IT service workers who transitioned to a non-IT industry still fared better than workers who took a non-IT employment path. For IT manufacturing workers, there is no benefit to having been touched by technology, likely because of the nontransferability of manufacturing experience to other industries.     

A Varying Parameters Approach to Constructing House Price Indexes

Conventional housing price index models assume interperiodparameter stability and typically employ either repeat sales or hedonic methodologies. This paper introduces a method of index construction that combines multiple sales observations with single sale transactions while permitting characteristics prices from hedonic regressions to vary over time. A test for interperiod parameter stability is provided. Each period's data are arranged by location and repeat sales are matched by rows. This construction allows greater use of sample information and acknowledges the unique contribution of repeat sales to the estimation process. It also produces intertemporal error correlations that can be beneficially exploited by the seemingly unrelated regressions (SUH) technique. The paper also demonstrates a significance test for error correlation and discusses the treatment of unequal numbers of observations among index periods.     

Heterogeneity and Share Contracting in Medical Group Practices

This paper offers an empirical analysis of the relationship between income sharing rules and physician heterogeneity in medical group practices.The economies to group formation associated with risk–sharing, mutual monitoring,and internal referral are served by sharing at least a portion of group income equally. Sharing group income equally is problematic, however, when group members differ in their contribution to group income. Member contributions to group income may differ because of differences in ability, effort, or the price of services across specialty fields. The analysis below is addressed to the question of how income sharing rules in physician groups are affected by variation in member contributions. The analysis finds evidence that heterogeneity in member contributions to group income limits the use of equal income sharing rules in multispecialty groups relative to single specialty groups, and large groups relative to small groups. Nevertheless, 65% of all groups in the survey share at least a pn of group income equally, which broadly suggests that the joint surplus enhancement from risk sharing, mutual monitoring, and internal referral are sufficient to overcome the incentive problems of such rules     

Some economics of content protection

We are grateful to a perceptive referee for many constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper entitled The Economics of Content Protection: A Dual Approach. The usual disclaimer applies.     

The human factor in national development: some reflections on population and development in Nigeria

The relationship between the effective utilization of human resources and successful socioeconomic development in Nigeria is examined. The author argues that Nigeria's current socioeconomic difficulties cannot be blamed on population growth alone, and maintains that "underutilization of human resources; lopsided production and distribution mechanisms; economic depression; and under-developed science and technology system; erratic climatic and agronomic conditions; the illegal exportation of food; [and] corruption and mismanagement of revenue, all constitute forces that simultaneously limit the national capacity to produce more resources for the growing population."