The significance of digital data systems for smart city policy

Our planet is gradually moving towards an urbanized world. Modern urban agglomerations tend to turn nowadays into advanced information hubs supporting a smart management of dynamic urban systems. The currently popular notion of ‘smart cities’ aims to provide a new perspective for sustainable and high-performance strategies of city stakeholders in our ‘urban century’. In this context, digital information technology provides a new tool for efficient and effective management and planning of urban space, inter alia in the field of transportation, environment, public facilities or advanced service provision to citizens. This paper aims to offer, first, a concise overview of the emerging opportunities of information and communication technology (ICT) for smart urban policy; digital technology in particular, appears to provide novel pathways for modern planning strategies in smart cities. Against this background, the paper sketches out the complex force field of global urbanisation phenomena and highlights the data and information needs for strategic planning of cities (using inter alia as a framework the so-called ‘urban piazza’ strategy framework). Secondly, various new decision support tools that are currently emerging and that offer a new promising scope for handling complex urban management issues (for instance, on accessibility, congestion, safety or sustainability) are briefly presented. And finally, the potential of such digital data systems for urban management and policy is concisely illustrated by means of some recent applications in the area of smartphone data systems. The paper concludes with a discussion of the challenges ahead for urban policy, inter alia by paying attention to institutional and governance aspects of ‘big digital data’ management in urban systems.     

Why is credit-to-GDP a good measure for setting countercyclical capital buffers?

We examine banks’ loan losses in Europe in 1982–2012 using a nonlinear three-factor model that takes into account output growth, real interest rate, and the ratio of private credit to GDP relative to its trend (i.e., “excessive indebtedness”). We find that a drop in output has an intensified impact on loan losses if the private sector is excessively indebted. Because increased bank credit risk should be matched with higher bank capital, the result motivates the Basel III's countercyclical capital buffers as a function of private indebtedness relative to its trend. The result also helps to explain differences in the amount of loan losses in different recessions across time and across countries. The model also indicates that low interest rates during the recent recession have clearly mitigated loan losses.     

A contextual perspective on consumers' perceived usefulness: The case of mobile online shopping

This research aims to study the origins of consumers' usefulness perceptions through the example of mobile online shopping adoption in Europe. The results of an empirical study, which is grounded in technology acceptance theory, reveal the pivotal role of consumers' beliefs about the quality of mobile online stores in the formation of usefulness perceptions prior to adoption. While this study identifies that consumers form their usefulness evaluations depending on the respective shopping tasks, the results of a moderation analysis yield usefulness predictors that differ in relevance across product categories and shopping touchpoints. This contextual perspective has implications for both adoption and (online) channel research. It also helps managers to identify starting points on how to promote (mobile) online shopping adoption.     

Which Net Capital Flows Matter?

This article classifies extreme net capital flow episodes into four types and analyzes the macroeconomic impacts of each type. First, we find that all types of episodes increased drastically in the 2000s relative to previous years. Second, we conclude that liability-flow-driven episodes have more significant macroeconomic impacts than do asset-flow-driven episodes. Third, we show that only drastic positive net capital flows that were driven by liability flows were associated with a higher probability of banking crises in the 2000s. The results suggest that the detailed classification of extreme net capital flows provides insight into these movements’ macroeconomic impacts and policy implementations.     

Financial liberalization and bank risk-taking: International evidence

This paper analyzes the channels through which financial liberalization affects bank risk-taking in an international sample of 4333 banks in 83 countries. Our results indicate that financial liberalization increases bank risk-taking in both developed and developing countries but through different channels. Financial liberalization promotes stronger bank competition that increases risk-taking incentives in developed countries, whereas in developing countries it increases bank risk by expanding opportunities to take risk. Capital requirements help reduce the negative impact of financial liberalization on financial stability in both developed and developing countries. However, official supervision and financial transparency are only effective in developing countries.     

粮食移动式输送及装仓设备安全性评价方法

本文建立粮食移动式输送及装仓设备安全性评价方法,量化此类设备安全等级,以期对生产厂家在设计、制造上有一定的指导意义,对使用单位的选择上有借鉴意义。     

The synergistic effect of insurance and banking sector activities on economic growth in Africa

It is widely understood that the insurance and banking sectors of every economy perform some functions in driving economic growth. What is not yet well documented is whether their roles are complimentary or substitutive. With the aid of the dynamic panel generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation technique, this paper evaluates the synergistic effect of both sectors on economic growth in a panel of 10 African countries that are responsible for most of the activities in the continent’s financial sector. The insurance-banking-growth nexus was also examined through bootstrap panel causality tests. The results show that the life insurance market and the banking sector, as well as the non-life insurance market and the banking sector, are complimentary. We find that, overall, the relationship between the insurance and banking sectors in Africa is a complimentary one and that their synergistic impact on economic growth is positive. The feedback hypothesis was also confirmed in the relationship between the insurance sector and economic growth and between the banking sector and economic growth.     

Real estate prices and systemic banking crises

The collapse of real estate prices has historically jeopardized banking stability and triggered systemic banking crises. This paper studies risk contagion in a banking system in real estate price shock by adopting complex network theory. Modelling the real estate-related asset as a common exposure of banks to the real estate market, we propose a model that incorporates two main risk contagion channels, i.e., the financial network and asset fire sales, and reveal how the real estate price shock is transmitted and propagated across banks. We demonstrate that banking stability is highly sensitive to the real estate price shock. Moreover, due to the particularly low liquidity of the real estate market, the asset fire-sales of real estate assets overwhelms the financial network, playing the dominant role in risk contagion. Our model can be adopted by regulators to conduct stress testing and to forge effective risk management strategies.     

Mobile payment and online to offline retail business models

Mobile payments are services that use mobile devices to make payments. When digitalization moves across channel boundaries, online to offline channel retail will expand. Online to offline retailing will become the future retail owner stream and retail operators will move from cross-channel or multi-channel to omni-channel. This study investigates a market survey in Taiwan developing a data mining analytics including clustering analysis and association rules based on a snowflake schema database design. The role of mobile payment is determined in terms of new retail payment mechanism that promotes a better consumer purchase experience in an online to offline business environment.     

Mobile diaries – Benchmark against metered measurements: An empirical investigation

Researchers seeking to study the relationships between consumers' communications, attitudes, and behaviors could benefit from monitoring consumers over time, across multiple locations and channels, and in a way that reflects consumers' subjective perceptions. Diaries on smartphones (mobile diaries) can be used as a research tool for such purposes. A mobile diary is a self-report instrument whereby people use their mobile handset to repeatedly report experiences of interest. Mobile diaries are increasingly used in psychology, geography, medicine, and commercial marketing. Yet they have rarely been used for quantitative marketing research, and were not benchmarked against best-practice metrics in marketing.In this study, we aim to set the ground for using mobile diaries in quantitative marketing research. We first lay out the theoretical infrastructure for the usage of mobile diaries, and describe possible respondent reporting concerns, including concerns related to non-reporting, reporting over time, and concerns stemming from individual-level heterogeneity.We demonstrate the potential of mobile diaries, as well as the importance of the various concerns, using a benchmark test case in the context of primetime TV viewing. Our benchmark uses a sample of respondents with both mobile diary viewing reports and Nielsen People Meter (NPM) records. Our analysis reveals that averaging across all conditions, 47.4%–64.7% of the NPM records are reported by the diary. The major sources for mismatch are random time periods without alarms, short viewings, and periodic reporting inactivity (pulsing). Concerns such as a decrease in reporting rates over time (e.g., fatigue), smartphone ownership, and demographic variation across individuals have relatively small effects on reporting likelihood. Analyzing the cases in which diary reports do not have a matching NPM record, we find many of them can be attributed to out-of-home viewing and viewing on non-metered devices. This finding demonstrates how mobile diaries can complement metered measurements. Overall, aggregate diary-based ratings have a 0.90 correlation with NPM ratings.We discuss implications for designing and using mobile diary studies in marketing.