PUC: valoració dels primers 100 dies

Presentació amb les dades estadístiques dels dos últims mesos del PUC, Préstec de Llibres entre Biblioteques del Consorci de Biblioteques Universitàries de Catalunya (CBUC)

Finanzas, cultura y poder en la comunidad Salasaca: un análisis de la experiencia del microcrédito y cooperativas indígenas

Este trabajo examina a los microcréditos como método para propulsar el desarrollo. A la vez, revela varios efectos de las microfinanzas sobre la pobreza, la cultura y las relaciones de poder a través de un análisis económico y etnográfico sobre los indígenas de Salasaca. Muestra que las instituciones financieras organizadas y dirigidas por otros indígenas, con el apoyo y los consejos de la comunidad internacional, exitosamente crean nuevos métodos sensibles a la cultura indígena para la distribución de créditos. Sin embargo, estos créditos no alivian la pobreza ni generan desarrollo económico y social dentro de la comunidad. Los préstamos otorgados por estas instituciones dan esperanza, pero no resultan en la creación de nuevas posibilidades para las comunidades indígenas. Además, la ampliación del acceso al crédito produce efectos corolarios negativos sobre la cultura y las relaciones de poder en la comunidad, beneficiando a los poderosos. Así, se muestra que la teoría de las microfinanzas tiene varias falencias.

Rol de los préstamos comerciales en los euromercados (Tema Central)

El intercambio de capitales es esencial en la economía actual, al ser un factor de producción básico que se requiere para poder encarar la producción creciente que demanda un consumo también acrecentado. Los mercados financieros constituyen el lugar en el cual se lleva a cabo el intercambio de capitales. Los euromercados son una clase de estos mercados financieros, dentro de los cuales se realizan una serie de transacciones de financiamiento. Los préstamos otorgados en el marco de los euromercados (denominados europréstamos) se convirtieron en el instrumento más importante de financiamiento para Estados y empresarios privados, no obstante, a raíz de la crisis de la deuda, las condiciones en que se otorgaban los eurocréditos se tornaron restringidas y, por ello, su concesión decreció, lo que produjo una transición desde la intermediación financiera a la desintermediación.

Las semillas del imperialismo agrícola estadounidense en el Ecuador (Estudios)

El artículo analiza la manera cómo, mediante emprésitos, asistencia técnica y el establecimiento de estaciones experimentales agrícolas en la región andina, los Estados Unidos desarrollaron una política imperial de planificación y dirección del desarrollo agrícola de vastas zonas de América Latina. En relación al caso ecuatoriano, el estudio centra su atención en las políticas implementadas por el United States Department of Agriculture, a partir de 1890, y la creación de la Estación Experimental Ecuatoriana como mecanismo para la explotación de la quina y el caucho en el marco de la obtención de recursos y materiales estratégicos para la guerra.

The Greek debt trap: an escape plan. Bruegel Policy Contribution 2012/19, 7 November 2012

Without corrective measures, Greek public debt will exceed 190 percent of GDP, instead of peaking at the anyway too-high target ratio of 167 percent of GDP of the March 2012 financial assistance programme. The rise is largely due to a negative feedback loop between high public debt and the collapse in GDP, and endangers Greek membership of the euro area. But a Greek exit would have devastating impacts both inside and outside Greece. A small reduction in the interest rate on bilateral loans, the exchange of European Central Bank holdings, buy-back of privately-held debt, and frontloading of some privatisation receipts are unlikely to be sufficient. A credible resolution should involve the reduction of the official lending rate to zero until 2020, an extension of the maturity of all official lending, and indexing the notional amount of all official loans to Greek GDP. Thereby, the debt ratio would fall below 100 percent of GDP by 2020, and if the economy deteriorates further, there will not be a need for new arrangements. But if growth is better than expected, official creditors will also benefit. In exchange for such help, the fiscal sovereignty of Greece should be curtailed further. An extended privatisation plan and future budget surpluses may be used to pay back the debt relief. The Greek fiscal tragedy highlights the need for a formal debt restructuring mechanism

A bank lending channel or a credit supply shock?

Shifts in credit supply could have a bearing on house prices e.g. through financial innovations and changes in regulation independently of the existence of a bank lending channel of monetary policy. This paper assesses the responses of US house prices to an exogenous credit supply shock and compares them with the effects from variations in credit supply associated with a bank lending channel. The contribution of the study is twofold. First, innovations in credit supply are identified using a mortgage mix variable, thereby accounting for the market-based financial intermediaries. As a robustness check a survey variable of bank lending standards for mortgage loans is also used. Second, the policy-induced credit supply effect on house prices is disentangled and compared with the effect from an exogenous credit supply shock. It is shown that in the first 3 years credit supply shocks affect house prices exogenously rather than through the bank lending channel. Monetary policy has still a large impact on house prices, even when the bank lending channel is ‘turned off’.

Asymmetric information, credit market condition, and entrepreneurial finance

The issue of imperfect information plays a much more important role in financing “informationally opaque” small businesses than in financing large companies.1 This chapter examines the asymmetric information issue in entrepreneurial finance from two perspectives: the effects of relationship lending and the impacts of credit market concentration on entrepreneurial financial behavior. These two perspectives are strongly linked to each other via the asymmetric information issue in entrepreneurial finance. Existing literature has recognized the important role played by relationship lending in alleviating the problem of asymmetric information. However, mixed empirical results have been reported. For example, it has been found that the development of relationship lending can improve the availability of finance for small businesses borrowers (Petersen and Rajan, 1994) and reduce the costs of finance (Berger and Udell, 1995). Meanwhile, with monopoly power, banks may extract rents, in terms of charging higher-than-market interest rates, from small businesscustomers who have very concentrated banking relationships (Ongena and Smith, 2001). In addition, both favorable and unfavorable effects of credit market concentration on financing small businesses have been acknowledged. Small business borrowers may have to pay a higher-than-market price on loans (Degryse and Ongena, 2005) and are more likely to be financially constrained (Cetorelli, 2004) than in competitive markets. On the other hand, empirical studies have shown that market concentration create a strong motive for lenders to invest in private information from small business customers, and therefore a concentrated market is more efficient in terms of private information acquisition (Han et al., 2009b). The objective of this chapter is to investigate, by reviewing existing literature, the role played by relationship lending and the effects of market concentration on financing entrepreneurial businesses that are supposed to be informationally opaque. In the first section we review literature on the important role played by asymmetric information in entrepreneurial finance from two perspectives: asymmetric information and relationship lending, and the theoretical modeling of asymmetric information. Then we examine the relationship between capital market conditions and entrepreneurial finance and attempt to answer two questions: Why is the capital market condition important for entrepreneurial finance? and What are the effects of capital market conditions on entrepreneurial financial behavior in terms of discouraged borrowers, cash holding, and the availability and costs of finance?

The effects of corporate and country sustainability characteristics on the cost of debt: an international investigation

We investigate the relationship between corporate and country sustainability on the cost of bank loans. We look into 470 loan agreements signed between 2005 and 2012 with borrowers based in 28 different countries across the world and operating in all major industries. Our principal findings reveal that country sustainability, relating to both social and environmental frameworks, has a statistically and economically impactful effect on direct financing of economic activity. An increase of one unit in a country's sustainability score is associated with an average decrease in the cost of debt by 64 basis points. Our international analysis shows that the environmental dimension of a country's institutional framework is approximately twice as impactful as the social dimension, when it comes to determining the cost of corporate loans. On the other hand, we find no conclusive evidence that firm-level sustainability influences the interest rates charged to borrowing firms by banks. Our main findings survive a battery of robustness tests and additional analyses concerning subsamples, alternative sustainability metrics and the effects of financial crisis.

The option market reaction to bank loan announcements

In this study, we examine the options market reaction to bank loan announcements for the population of US firms with traded options and loan announcements during 1996-2010. We get evidence on a significant options market reaction to bank loan announcements in terms of levels and changes in short-term implied volatility and its term structure, and observe significant decreases in short-term implied volatility, and significant increases in the slope of its term structure as a result of loan announcements. Our findings appear to be more pronounced for firms with more information asymmetry, lower credit ratings and loans with longer maturities and higher spreads. Evidence is consistent with loan announcements providing reassurance for investors in the short-term, however, over longer time horizons, the increase in the TSIV slope indicates that investors become increasingly unsure over the potential risks of loan repayment or uses of the proceeds.

An Environmental Analysis Corroborating PDA and the Winthrop Example

Libraries seek active ways to innovate amidst macroeconomic shifts, growing online education to help alleviate ever-growing schedule conflicts as students juggle jobs and course schedules, as well as changing business models in publishing and evolving information technologies. Patron-driven acquisition (PDA), also known as demand-driven acquisition (DDA), offers numerous strengths in supporting university curricula in the context of these significant shifts. PDA is a business model centered on short-term loans and subsequent purchases of ebooks resulting directly from patrons' natural use stemming from their discovery of the ebooks in library catalogs where the ebooks' bibliographic records are loaded at regular intervals established between the library and ebook supplier. Winthrop University's PDA plan went live in October 2011, and this article chronicles the philosophical and operational considerations, the in-library collaboration, and technical preparations in concert with the library system vendor and ebook supplier. Short-term loan is invoked after a threshold is crossed, typically number of pages or time spent in the ebook. After a certain number of short-term loans negotiated between the library and ebook supplier, the next short-term loan becomes an automatic purchase after which the library owns the ebook in perpetuity. Purchasing options include single-user and multi-user licenses. Owing to high levels of need in college and university environments, Winthrop chose the multi-user license as the preferred default purchase. Only where multi-user licenses are unavailable does the automatic purchase occur with single-user title licenses. Data on initial use between October 2011 and February 2013 reveal that of all PDA ebooks viewed, only 30% crossed the threshold into short-term loans. Of all triggered short-term loans, Psychology was the highest-using. Of all ebook views too brief to trigger short-term loans, Business was the highest-using area. Although the data are still too young to draw conclusions after only a few months, thought-provoking usage differences between academic disciplines have begun to emerge. These differences should be considered in library plans for the best possible curricular support for each academic program. As higher education struggles with costs and course-delivery methods libraries have an enduring lead role.

Interview with Martha "Marty" Grigsby

In her December 10, 2012 interview with Robert Ryals, Martha Grigsby detailed her thoughts and memories of her time at Winthrop University. Grigsby shares the story of how she was able to attend Winthrop and the members of her community who assisted her in this process. Included are details of working in the dining hall on a scholarship, how relationships were formed amongst students, and how the students navigated Winthrop’s strict rules. Grigsby concludes her interview by stating how Winthrop helped her career as an educator and how she has stayed involved as an alumna. This interview was conducted for inclusion into the Louise Pettus Archives and Special Collections Oral History Program.

Speculative attacks on debts and optimum currency area: a welfare analysis

Traditionally the issue of an optimum currency area is based on the theoretical underpinnings developed in the 1960s by McKinnon [13], Kenen [12] and mainly Mundell [14], who is concerned with the benefits of lowering transaction costs vis-à- vis adjustments to asymmetrical shocks. Recently, this theme has been reappraised with new aspects included in the analysis, such as: incomplete markets, credibility of monetary policy and seigniorage, among others. For instance, Neumeyer [15] develops a general equilibrium model with incomplete asset markets and shows that a monetary union is desirable when the welfare gains of eliminating the exchange rate volatility are greater than the cost of reducing the number of currencies to hedge against risks. In this paper, we also resort to a general equilibrium model to evaluate financial aspects of an optimum currency area. Our focus is to appraise the welfare of a country heavily dependent on foreign capital that may suffer a speculative attack on its public debt. The welfare analysis uses as reference the self-fulfilling debt crisis model of Cole and Kehoe ([6], [7] and [8]), which is employed here to represent dollarization. Under this regime, the national government has no control over its monetary policy, the total public debt is denominated in dollars and it is in the hands of international bankers. To describe a country that is a member of a currency union, we modify the original Cole-Kehoe model by including public debt denominated in common currency, only purchased by national consumers. According to this rule, the member countries regain some influence over the monetary policy decision, which is, however, dependent on majority voting. We show that for specific levels of dollar debt, to create inflation tax on common-currency debt in order to avoid an external default is more desirable than to suspend its payment, which is the only choice available for a dollarized economy when foreign creditors decide not to renew their loans.

Inflationary bias and state owned financial institutions

This article explains why the existence of state owned financial institutions makes it more difficult for a country to balance its budget. We show that states can use their financiaI institutions to transfer their deficits to the federal govemment. As a result, there is a bias towards Iarge deficits and high inflation rates. Our model also predicts that state owned financiaI institutions should underperform the market, mainly because they concentrate their portfolios on non-performing loans to their own shareholders, that is, the states. Brazil and Argentina are two countries with a history of high inflation that confirm our predictions .

How much debtors' punishment?

This paper investigates how the bankruptcy exemptions applied by the Personal Bankruptcy Law in each American state a§ect the aggregated level of individuals and small businessesí loans. Higher levels of bankruptcy exemptions imply in a lenient rule, motivating debtors to Öle for bankruptcy, what makes lenders worsen the terms of credit. On the other hand, lower levels of exemptions imply in a harsh punishment to debtors, inhibiting their demand for credit fearing a possible bankruptcy by bad luck. ConÖrming the theoretical claims, empirical tests show the existence of a non-monotonic shape in the relationship between the bankruptcy exemptions and the amount of credit to individuals and small businesses, where the optimal level of exemptions should be neither too high nor too low. Since the majority of the states in U.S. do not apply the optimal level, an intervention that brings the exemption level closer to the optimal one can be credit and welfare enhancing.