India's demand for international reserve and monetary disequilibrium: Reserve adequacy under floating regime

The main aim of this study is to investigate India's demand for international reserve by focusing on the role of national monetary disequilibrium and to present new benchmarks for assessing the adequacy of international reserves. We assessed India's position in terms of reserve adequacy and found that India is well placed and has sufficient stock of international reserves to meet the minimum adequacy requirements. Also, the results reveal that the central bank is holding substantial excess reserves and the related opportunity cost (1.5% of GDP) appears to be quite considerable. Further, the estimates of reserve demand function suggest that scale of foreign trade, uncertainty and profitability considerations play significant role in determining India's long-term reserve demand policies. More importantly, validating the monetary approach to balance of payment, our results show that national monetary disequilibrium does play a crucial role in short-run reserve movements. An excess of money demand (supply) induces an inflow (outflow) of international reserves with an elasticity of 0.56 which also implies that Reserve Bank of India responds to correct the domestic money market disequilibrium; and did not just leave it completely on the mercy of reserve inflows.     

THE FAILURE TO PREDICT THE GREAT RECESSION—A VIEW THROUGH THE ROLE OF CREDIT

Much has been written about why economists failed to predict the latest crisis. Reading the literature, it seems that this crisis was so obvious that economists must have been blind not to see it coming. We approach this failure by looking at one of the key variables in this analysis, the evolution of credit. We compare the conclusions reached in the recent literature with those that could have been drawn from an ex‐ante analysis. We show that the effect of credit on the business cycle cannot be exploited from a policymaker's point of view.     

生态翻译视域下隐喻翻译研究——以《围城》英译本为例

隐喻作为一个非常巧妙的语言应用现象,非常值得研究。本文拟从生态翻译学对其进行研究。生态翻译学是一个从生态学角度研究翻译活动、翻译现象和翻译理论的新的研究范式。本文着重从适应/选择,三维转换和整体/关联的角度对《围城》这一文学巨著中典型的隐喻现象的翻译进行讨论,旨在开拓隐喻研究的新视角     

基于CAN总线的隧道通风监测系统设计

为了实现隧道通风监测系统的高安全可靠性、远距离信息传输、多节点网络监测等要求,提出了基于CAN总线 技术的隧道通风监控系统。设计了基于CAN总线技术的控制系统硬件结构,介绍了烟雾和温度检测原理;设计了基于 CAN总线的通风系统监测节点;设计了工控机与CAN总线通信接口适配卡;设计了系统主程序、事件检查和处理子程序 的流程图。应用结果表明该系统具有传输距离远、监测网络节点多等特点,大大提高了系统的实时性和可靠性。     

论十七年文学的忧患意识——兼与夏志清教授商榷

夏志清教授曾认为“感时忧国”精神是中国现代文学的主要特征,其他各历史阶段的文学是不存在该精神的。但是,如果仔细辨析“感时忧国”精神的源流,深入分析十七年文学相关文本,我们会发现该精神不过是积淀在中国知识分子思想深层的忧患意识在新的历史条件下的置换与发展,它在十七年文学中并没有全然消失而是得到了一定程度的继承。对此,夏志清的相关文章也是充满悖论的。     

Central tendency bias in belief elicitation

We conduct an experiment in which subjects participate in a first-price auction against an automaton that bids randomly in a given range. The subjects first place a bid in the auction. They are then given an incentivized elicitation of their beliefs of the opponent’s bid. Despite having been told that the bid of the opponent is drawn from a uniform distribution, we find that a majority of subjects report beliefs that have a peak in the interior of the range. This result is robust across seven different experimental treatments. While not expected at the outset, these single-peaked beliefs have precedence in the experimental psychology judgments literature. Our results suggest that an elicitation of probability beliefs can result in responses that are more concentrated than the objectively known or induced truth. We provide indicative evidence that such individual belief reports can be rationalized by well-defined subjective beliefs that differ from the objective truth. Our findings offer an explanation for the conservatism and overprecision biases in Bayesian updating. Finally, our findings suggest that probabilistic forecasts of uncertain events might have less variance than the actual events.     

Reconsidering the philanthropic foundation minimum payout policy under a “new normal”

With the increasing salience of foundations in many policy fields, and recent changes in market conditions, policies towards foundations designed decades ago seem outdated. In this article we suggest reassessing foundation payout minimums. To examine the impact of payout rates on grantmaking foundations lifespan and performance under “new normal” economics, we simulate multiple foundations lifecycles using Monte Carlo methods in diverse capital market conditions, with varied investment and payout strategies.We find that while under past market regime perpetuity seems to be a given, under more probable future scenarios, foundations might face increasingly early mortality and endowment depletion, limiting their potential impact. Furthermore, lower payout rates allow for higher lifetime grantmaking, higher mean annual grantmaking, and lower giving volatility. Accordingly, we suggest a tiered payout policy, in line with foundations’ missions and proper financial planning.     

How much is too much: Does the size of income support transfers affect labor supply?

Cash transfer programs pursue mainly protective objectives, but can also impact rural livelihoods by inducing investments in productive activities and changing household labor allocation. We adopt a continuous treatment approach to quantify how households’ labor supply responds to transfer size. We find a shift from paid labor to own farm labor and find that the transfer size is well within a level that would have disincentive effects on time spent on own farm activities. The switch from paid to own farm labor occurs at lower levels of transfers for labor-constrained households, and at higher levels for non-labor constrained households.     

Identifying Systemically Important Banks: A temporal approach for macroprudential policies

Contrary to the general belief, systemic risk does not only regard the risk posed by balance sheet relationships and interdependencies among institutions. It also features a temporal dimension related to the inappropriate responses of financial market participants to changes in risk over time. This paper proposes a method to simultaneously address the cross-sectional and the time dimension in which systemic risk materializes. The method is based on the TOPHITS algorithm. It provides three scores, namely borrowing, lending and time scores: the first two represent the systemic importance of the borrowing and the lending activity associated with each financial institution,while the third represents an empirical Early Warning Signal of the financial crisis. Our findings reveal that the identification of the time score as an indicator for an incoming market distress could be relevant to design macro prudential policies.     

Inflation projections for monetary policy decision making

Many central banks set inflation targets over the medium term and inflation projections are a key input for monetary policy decision making. In this paper, we present the procedures used by the Spanish Central Bank staff to project consumer price inflation. We also provide some illustrations of their policy uses, such as fan charts, deflation probabilities and the monitoring of inflation targets.