Should multivariate early warning systems for banking crises pool across regions?

Most extant work on prediction of banking crises has utilised global samples, which are in turn dominated by observations from middle-income countries, and rely on a single estimator. However, economic and financial structures as well as the pattern of shocks may differ substantially across regions, while a range of specifications is desirable to check robustness. Accordingly, in this paper we test the implicit pooling assumption in earlier multivariate work on Early Warning Systems using both logit and binary recursive tree specifications separately for crises in Asia and Latin America, as well as the pooled sample. Results suggest markedly different crisis determinants across regions, implying global samples are inappropriate.     

Immigrant Struggles in New Orleans Post-Katrina

Race relations in New Orleans have often been narrowed to Black and white, especially pre-Katrina. According to the 2000 census, the city was about 67% African American, 27% white, 2% Asian, and 3% “Hispanic.” In a city with a deep history of racial tensions between Black and white, other people of color—and especially recent immigrants—often went unmentioned in discussions of city demographics. The city’s world famous culture—whether in the traditions of Mardi Gras Indians and secondline parades, or in music like jazz and bounce—is also famously rooted in specifically African cultures. Even in media coverage of the city post-Katrina, the story of immigrant experiences has remained mostly invisible. When these stories have been told, they have often fit into the old stereotypes of “model minorities” (as in the case of the Vietnamese recovery) or of low-wage workers stealing jobs (as in the case of news reports on the city’s new Latino population). However, the stories of these other New Orleanians offer an important lens through which to view the overall struggle over the city’s recovery. And the work of grassroots activists from these communities, who strived to not only work for justice for their friends and neighbors, but also to build broad multi-racial alliances, provides an inspiring example for people in other cities who are waging similar fights.     

Foreign Investors in The Netherlands: Heterogeneous Employment and Productivity Effects

Recent academic research suggests that the effects of inward foreign direct investment for productivity and employment may vary across foreign investors with different characteristics. Using a newly created dataset that integrates micro-level information from The Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency and Statistics Netherlands, this paper explores the role of several of these characteristics, including e.g. the country of origin, activities and tasks, age and strategic role of foreign affiliates in The Netherlands in the 2000–2007 period. Our analysis shows that important employment and productivity differences exist for nearly all these dimensions.     

Financial Reform after the Crisis: An Early Assessment

Financial reform has been a core dimension of the initial global policy response to the financial turmoil of 2007-08.At the first G-20 summit of heads of state and government in November 2008,more than four-fifths of the action points in the final declaration were about financial regulation.Obviously,the crisis is not over at the time of writing,and the cycle of financial reform it triggered is very far from complete.But it can be said confidently that the crisis has been transformational for financial regulatory policy,at least in the United States and Europe.