Detrimental effects of television advertising on consumer socialization

As in the United States, there has been a heated discussion about possible negative effects of TV advertising on children in the Federal Republic of Germany. Results obtained in the United States are not readily transferable, owing to differences in media structure. Based on interviews with experts and a qualitative content analysis of relevant documents, this article tries to organize claims made about detrimental effects into dimensions of detrimentality.     

Stock market contagion in Central and Eastern Europe: unexpected volatility and extreme co-exceedance

We examine whether there is contagion from the US stock market to six Central and Eastern European stock markets. We use a novel measure of contagion that examines whether volatility shocks in the US stock market coupled with negative returns are followed by higher co-exceedance between US and emerging stock markets. Using our approach and controlling for a set of market-related variables, we show that during the period from 1998 to 2014, financial contagion occurred, that is, unexpected negative events in the US market are followed by higher co-exceedance between US and Central and Eastern European stock markets. Even though contagion is stronger during the financial crisis, it also occurs in tranquil times.     

The Arctic Environmental Responsibility Index: A method to rank heterogenous extractive industry companies for governance purposes

The Arctic Environmental Responsibility Index (AERI) covers 120 oil, gas, and mining companies involved in resource extraction north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Finland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden. It is based on an international expert perception survey among 173 members of the International Panel on Arctic Environmental Responsibility (IPAER), whose input is processed using segmented string relative ranking (SSRR) methodology. Equinor, Total, Aker BP, ConocoPhillips, and BP are seen as the most environmentally responsible companies, whereas Dalmorneftegeophysica, Zarubejneft, ERIELL, First Ore-Mining Company, and Stroygaz Consulting are seen as the least environmentally responsible. Companies operating in Alaska have the highest average rank, whereas those operating in Russia have the lowest average rank. Larger companies tend to rank higher than smaller companies, state-controlled companies rank higher than privately controlled companies, and oil and gas companies higher than mining companies. The creation of AERI demonstrates that SSRR is a low-cost way to overcome the challenge of indexing environmental performance and contributing to environmental governance across disparate industrial sectors and states with divergent environmental standards and legal and political systems.     

Growing apart? A tale of two republics: Estonia and Georgia

We compare and contrast the economic growth performance of Estonia and Georgia from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 until 2006 and beyond in an attempt to understand better the extent to which the growth differential between the two countries can be traced to increased efficiency in the use of capital and other resources (intensive growth) as opposed to brute accumulation of capital (extensive growth). On the basis of a simple growth accounting exercise, we infer that advances in education at all levels, good governance, and institutional reforms have played a more significant role in raising economic output and efficiency in Estonia than in Georgia which remains marred by various problems related to weak governance in the public and private spheres.     

An innovative feature selection method for support vector machines and its test on the estimation of the credit risk of default

Support vector machines (SVM) have been extensively used for classification problems in many areas such as gene, text and image recognition. However, SVM have been rarely used to estimate the probability of default (PD) in credit risk. In this paper, we advocate the application of SVM, rather than the popular logistic regression (LR) method, for the estimation of both corporate and retail PD. Our results indicate that most of the time SVM outperforms LR in terms of classification accuracy for the corporate and retail segments. We propose a new wrapper feature selection based on maximizing the distance of the support vectors from the separating hyperplane and apply it to identify the main PD drivers. We used three datasets to test the PD estimation, containing (1) retail obligors from Germany, (2) corporate obligors from Eastern Europe, and (3) corporate obligors from Poland. Total assets, total liabilities, and sales are identified as frequent default drivers for the corporate datasets, whereas current account status and duration of the current account are frequent default drivers for the retail dataset.     

Loss of water availability and stream biodiversity under land abandonment and climate change in a Mediterranean catchment (Olzinelles,NE Spain)

In the north rim of the Mediterranean region, where forest cover is increasing as a result of land abandonment and temperatures are rising as a result of climate change, there is increasing interest for the effects of such changes on the runoff of water courses. This is a paramount issue for the conservation of many freshwater habitats and species. In this work we studied the effects of both an increase in forest cover after depopulation and land abandonment and an increase in temperature on the runoff of a Mediterranean catchment and on the aquatic and semi-aquatic fauna species of the stream (Olzinelles valley, NE Spain). Although in our simulation no decreasing trend in runoff is detected, the monthly runoff-rainfall ratio is now 15% lower than 30 years ago, a fact that may be attributed to a drier period rather than to the small afforestation experienced by the catchment in the last decades. Other factors such as increasing temperatures, changing rainfall patterns and increasing canopy cover are discussed. The observed decrease in the water flow has caused the disappearance of white-clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes), Mediterranean barbel (Barbus meridionalis), chub (Squalius cephalus), European eel (Anguilla anguilla), and southern water vole (Arvicola sapidus). Our results suggest that in a progressively warmer climate, and especially after land abandonment processes, management of Mediterranean mountain areas should be oriented towards an appropriate distribution of agrarian and forest land-covers in terms of water availability. Down to the stream scale, the pools that keep water throughout the year should be conserved and extended to enhance its potential to maintain aquatic and semi-aquatic species populations.     

The current role of national central banks in the Eurosystem

This paper describes in some detail the tasks currently performed by the national central banks of the Eurosystem, using the Oesterreichische Nationalbank as an example. It does so against the background of the regime shift to the European economic and monetary union that occurred on January 1, 1999. It also sketches some of the issues which will need be addressed in the evolution of the division of labor between the European Central Bank and the national central banks.