Student Loans : Empirical Evidence and Policy Implications (Working Paper 7)

This paper first summarizes the results of an empirical investigation of borrowing and repayment patterns of post-secondary graduates, then addresses a number of related policy issues, including i) the need for further research to generate the information needed to fully evaluate the student loan system, ii) the advantages of extending the assistance available for those facing problems with their debt burdens in the post-schooling period, iii) the need to increase borrowing limits, iii) the efficiency and equity advantages of providing assistance to post-secondary students through loans rather than the grants which many have been calling for, and iii) a proposal for revitalising the cash-strapped post-secondary system with infusions from both federal and provincial governments and students themselves of equal parts, the latter facilitated by the appropriate changes in the loan system (higher limits and more support for those who run into trouble with repayment).

Student Loans : the Empirical Record (Working Paper 6)

Student loan programmes have been the target of a good deal of attention in recent years and one important set of concerns has focussed on the levels of borrowing and the associated debt loads. This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation of borrowing and repayment patterns of four recent cohorts of post-secondary graduates based on the National Graduates Survey (NGS) databases. The paper should be relevant to those interested in access to post-secondary education and the well-being of students, the financing of the higher education more generally, and a range of related issues.

On a first-name basis: Englishization and naming in Flanders

Following and contributing to the ongoing shift from more structuralist, system-oriented to more pragmatic, socio-cultural oriented anglicism research, this paper verifies to what extent the global spread of English affects naming patterns in Flanders. To this end, a diachronic database of first names is constructed, containing the top 75 most popular boy and girl names from 2005 until 2014. In a first step, the etymological background of these names is documented and the evolution in popularity of the English names in the database is tracked. Results reveal no notable surge in the preference for English names. This paper complements these database-driven results with an experimental study, aiming to show how associations through referents are in this case more telling than associations through phonological form (here based on etymology). Focusing on the socio-cultural background of first names in general and of Anglo-American pop culture in particular, the second part of the study specifically reports on results from a survey where participants are asked to name the first three celebrities that leap to mind when hearing a certain first name (e.g. Lana, triggering the response Del Rey). Very clear associations are found between certain first names and specific celebrities from Anglo-American pop culture. Linking back to marketing research and the social turn in onomastics, we will discuss how these celebrities might function as referees, and how social stereotypes surrounding these referees are metonymically attached to their first names. Similar to the country-of-origin-effect in marketing, these metonymical links could very well be the reason why parents select specific “celebrity names”. Although further attitudinal research is needed, this paper supports the importance of including socio-cultural parameters when conducting onomastic research.

New Chinese Words in 2014 – A Study of Word-formation Processes

随着社会的发展，尤其是互联网的发展，很多语言每年都涌现出了不少新词汇。词语是每个语言最基本也是最重要的组成部分，因此分析这些新词汇的结构特点以及构词法是很有意义的。这篇文章分析了2014年出现在中文里的新词汇和它们的构词方式，论文的目的是为了更好地了解中文词汇的发展和特点。本文以《2014汉语新词语》中公布的2014年出现的新词汇作为语料进行分析，发现了以下两个主要特点：第一，合成法，派生法，缩略法是2014年产生的新词汇的主要构词方式；第二， 百分之七十二的新词汇是多音节词（包含三个或者三个以上音节），而百分之八十的是名词。这些特点说明中文词汇现阶段的特点和发展趋势，跟传统的中文词汇有不同之处。

As Implicações do novo regime financeiro das autarquias locais no apuramento do endividamento do grupo municipal

Dissertação de Mestrado em Auditoria

Bitcoin mining is about to become a lot less profitable.

Imagine being told that your wage was going to be cut in half. Well, that’s what’s soon going to happen to those who make money from Bitcoin mining, the process of earning the online currency Bitcoin. The current expected date for this change is 11 July 2016. Many see this as the day when Bitcoin prices will rocket and when Bitcoin owners could make a great deal of money. Others see it as the start of a Bitcoin crash. At present no one quite knows which way it will go. Bitcoin was created in 2009 by someone known as Satoshi Nakamoto, borrowing from a whole lot of research methods. It is a cryptocurrency, meaning it uses digital encryption techniques to create bitcoins and secure financial transactions. It doesn’t need a central government or organisation to regulate it, nor a broker to manage payments. Conventional currencies usually have a central bank that creates money and controls its supply. Bitcoin is instead created when individuals “mine” for it by using their computers to perform complex calculations through special software. The algorithm behind Bitcoin is designed to limit the number of bitcoins that can ever be created. All Bitcoin transactions are recorded on a public database known as a blockchain. Every time someone mines for Bitcoin, it is recorded with a new block that is transmitted to every Bitcoin app across the network, like a bank updating its online records.

Essays in asset price bubbles

This thesis studies the field of asset price bubbles. It is comprised of three independent chapters. Each of these chapters either directly or indirectly analyse the existence or implications of asset price bubbles. The type of bubbles assumed in each of these chapters is consistent with rational expectations. Thus, the kind of price bubbles investigated here are known as rational bubbles in the literature. The following describes the three chapters. Chapter 1: This chapter attempts to explain the recent US housing price bubble by developing a heterogeneous agent endowment economy asset pricing model with risky housing, endogenous collateral and defaults. Investment in housing is subject to an idiosyncratic risk and some mortgages are defaulted in equilibrium. We analytically derive the leverage or the endogenous loan to value ratio. This variable comes from a limited participation constraint in a one period mortgage contract with monitoring costs. Our results show that low values of housing investment risk produces a credit easing effect encouraging excess leverage and generates credit driven rational price bubbles in the housing good. Conversely, high values of housing investment risk produces a credit crunch characterized by tight borrowing constraints, low leverage and low house prices. Furthermore, the leverage ratio was found to be procyclical and the rate of defaults countercyclical consistent with empirical evidence. Chapter 2: It is widely believed that financial assets have considerable persistence and are susceptible to bubbles. However, identification of this persistence and potential bubbles is not straightforward. This chapter tests for price bubbles in the United States housing market accounting for long memory and structural breaks. The intuition is that the presence of long memory negates price bubbles while the presence of breaks could artificially induce bubble behaviour. Hence, we use procedures namely semi-parametric Whittle and parametric ARFIMA procedures that are consistent for a variety of residual biases to estimate the value of the long memory parameter, d, of the log rent-price ratio. We find that the semi-parametric estimation procedures robust to non-normality and heteroskedasticity errors found far more bubble regions than parametric ones. A structural break was identified in the mean and trend of all the series which when accounted for removed bubble behaviour in a number of regions. Importantly, the United States housing market showed evidence for rational bubbles at both the aggregate and regional levels. In the third and final chapter, we attempt to answer the following question: To what extend should individuals participate in the stock market and hold risky assets over their lifecycle? We answer this question by employing a lifecycle consumption-portfolio choice model with housing, labour income and time varying predictable returns where the agents are constrained in the level of their borrowing. We first analytically characterize and then numerically solve for the optimal asset allocation on the risky asset comparing the return predictability case with that of IID returns. We successfully resolve the puzzles and find equity holding and participation rates close to the data. We also find that return predictability substantially alter both the level of risky portfolio allocation and the rate of stock market participation. High factor (dividend-price ratio) realization and high persistence of factor process indicative of stock market bubbles raise the amount of wealth invested in risky assets and the level of stock market participation, respectively. Conversely, rare disasters were found to bring down these rates, the change being severe for investors in the later years of the life-cycle. Furthermore, investors following time varying returns (return predictability) hedged background risks significantly better than the IID ones.

Quichua-Spanish language contact in Salcedo, Ecuador: revisiting media lengua syncretic language practices

The purpose of the current thesis is to develop a better understanding of the interaction between Spanish and Quichua in the Salcedo region and provide more information for the processes that might have given rise to Media Lengua, a ‘mixed’ language comprised of a Quichua grammar and Spanish lexicon. Muysken attributes the formation of Media Lengua to relexification, ruling out any influence from other bilingual phenomena. I argue that the only characteristic that distinguishes Media Lengua from other language contact varieties in central Ecuador is the quantity of the overall Spanish borrowings and not the type of processes that might have been employed by Quichua speakers during the genesis of Media Lengua. The results from the Salcedo data that I have collected show how processes such as adlexification, code-mixing, and structural convergence produce Media Lengua-type sentences, evidence that supports an alternative analysis to Muysken’s relexification hypothesis. Overall, this dissertation is developed around four main objectives: (1) to describe the variation of Spanish loanwords within a bilingual community in Salcedo; (2) to analyze some of the prominent and recent structural changes in Quichua and Spanish; (3) to determine whether Spanish loanword use can be explained by the relationship consultants have with particular social categories; and (4) to analyze the consultants’ language ideologies toward syncretic uses of Spanish and Quichua. Overall, 58% of the content words, 39% of the basic vocabulary, and 50% of the subject pronouns in the Salcedo corpus were derived from Spanish. When compared to Muysken’s description of highlander Quichua in the 1970’s, Spanish loanwords have more than doubled in each category. The overall level of Spanish loanwords in Salcedo Quichua has grown to a level between highlander Quichua in the 1970’s and Media Lengua. Similar to Spanish’s lexical influence in Media Lengua, the increase of Spanish borrowings in today’s rural Quichua can be seen in non-basic and basic vocabularies as well as the subject pronoun system. Significantly, most of the growth has occurred through forms of adlexification i.e., doublets, well-established borrowings, and cultural borrowings, suggesting that ‘ordinary’ lexical borrowing is also capable of producing Media Lengua-type sentences. I approach the second objective by investigating two separate phenomena related to structural convergence. The first examines the complex verbal constructions that have developed in Quichua through Spanish loan translations while the second describes the type of Quichua particles that are attached to Spanish lexemes while speaking Spanish. The calquing of the complex verbal constructions from Spanish were employed when speaking standard Quichua. Since this standard form is typically used by language purists, I argue that their use of calques is a strategy of exploiting the full range of expression from Spanish without incorporating any of the Spanish lexemes which would give the appearance of ‘contamination’. The use of Quichua particles in local varieties of Spanish is a defining characteristic of Quichuacized Spanish, spoken most frequently by women and young children in the community. Although the use of Quichua particles was probably not the main catalyst engendering Media Lengua, I argue that its contribution as a source language to other ‘mixed’ varieties, such as Media Lengua, needs to be accounted for in descriptions of BML genesis. Contrary to Muysken’s representation of relatively ‘unmixed’ Spanish and Quichua as the two source languages of Media Lengua, I propose that local varieties of Spanish might have already been ‘mixed’ to a large degree before Media Lengua was created. The third objective attempts to draw a relationship between particular social variables and the use of Spanish loanwords. Whisker Boxplots and ANOVAs were used to determine which social group, if any, have been introducing new Spanish borrowings into the bilingual communities in Salcedo. Specifically, I controlled for age, education, native language, urban migration, and gender. The results indicate that none of the groups in each of the five social variables indicate higher or lower loanword use. The implication of these results are twofold: (a) when lexical borrowing occurs, it is immediately adopted as the community-wide norm and spoken by members from different backgrounds and generations, or (b) this level of Spanish borrowing (58%) is not a recent phenomenon. The fourth and final objective draws on my ethnographic research that addresses the attitudes of syncretic language use. I observed that Quichuacized Spanish and Hispanicized Quichua are highly stigmatized varieties spoken by the country’s most marginalized populations and families, yet within the community, syncretic ways of speaking are in fact the norm. It was shown that there exists a range of different linguistic definitions for ‘Chaupi Lengua’ and other syncretic language practices as well as many contrasting connotations, most of which were negative. One theme that emerged from the interviews was that speaking syncretic varieties of Quichua weakened the consultant’s claim to an indigenous identity. The linguistic and social data presented in this dissertation supports an alternative view to Muysken’s relexification hypothesis, one that has the advantage of operating with well-precedented linguistic processes and which is actually observable in the present-day Salcedo area. The results from the study on lexical borrowing are significant because they demonstrate how a dynamic bilingual speech community has gradually diversified their Quichua lexicon under intense pressure to shift toward Spanish. They also show that Hispanicized Quichua (Quichua with heavy lexical borrowing) clearly arose from adlexification and prolonged lexical borrowing, and is one of at least six identifiable speech styles found in Salcedo. These results challenge particular interpretations of language contact outcomes, such as, ones that depict sources languages as discrete and ‘unmixed.’ The bilingual continuum presented in this thesis shows on the one hand, the range of speech styles that are accessible to different speakers, and on the other hand, the overlapping, syncretic features that are shared among the different registers and language varieties. It was observed that syncretic speech styles in Salcedo are employed by different consultants in varied interactional contexts, and in turn, produce different evaluations by other fellow community members. In the current dissertation, I challenge the claim that relexification and Media Lengua-type sentences develop in isolation and without the influence of other bilingual phenomena. Based on Muysken's Media Lengua example sentences and the speech styles from the Salcedo corpus, I argue that Media Lengua may have arisen as an institutionalized variant of the highly mixed "middle ground" within the range of the Salcedo bilingual continuum discussed above. Such syncretic forms of Spanish and Quichua strongly resemble Media Lengua sentences in Muysken’s research, and therefore demonstrate how its development could have occurred through several different language contact processes and not only through relexification.

Octavia's Brood: Riding the Ox Home

Octavia’s Brood: Riding the Ox Home was an evening-length dance concert performed October 15 and 16, 2015, at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in partial fulfillment of the Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Maryland’s School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Inspired by the prophetic envisioning of Harriet Tubman and Octavia Butler, it explores race, otherness, ownership and story-telling from the perspective of Black women’s dancing bodies and histories. Borrowing its title from Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, it utilizes visionary story-telling, where science fiction provides a foundation for imagining socially just worlds inhabited by richly diverse protagonists. This paper is a written account of the research by which I composed this immersive dance event, leaping back and forth through time, landing between antebellum Maryland of the mid-1800s and an unknown place at an unknown date of a foreseen future.

Quantification of air quality in space and time and its effects on health

The long-term adverse effects on health associated with air pollution exposure can be estimated using either cohort or spatio-temporal ecological designs. In a cohort study, the health status of a cohort of people are assessed periodically over a number of years, and then related to estimated ambient pollution concentrations in the cities in which they live. However, such cohort studies are expensive and time consuming to implement, due to the long-term follow up required for the cohort. Therefore, spatio-temporal ecological studies are also being used to estimate the long-term health effects of air pollution as they are easy to implement due to the routine availability of the required data. Spatio-temporal ecological studies estimate the health impact of air pollution by utilising geographical and temporal contrasts in air pollution and disease risk across $n$ contiguous small-areas, such as census tracts or electoral wards, for multiple time periods. The disease data are counts of the numbers of disease cases occurring in each areal unit and time period, and thus Poisson log-linear models are typically used for the analysis. The linear predictor includes pollutant concentrations and known confounders such as socio-economic deprivation. However, as the disease data typically contain residual spatial or spatio-temporal autocorrelation after the covariate effects have been accounted for, these known covariates are augmented by a set of random effects. One key problem in these studies is estimating spatially representative pollution concentrations in each areal which are typically estimated by applying Kriging to data from a sparse monitoring network, or by computing averages over modelled concentrations (grid level) from an atmospheric dispersion model. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the health effects of long-term exposure to Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) and Particular matter (PM10) in mainland Scotland, UK. In order to have an initial impression about the air pollution health effects in mainland Scotland, chapter 3 presents a standard epidemiological study using a benchmark method. The remaining main chapters (4, 5, 6) cover the main methodological focus in this thesis which has been threefold: (i) how to better estimate pollution by developing a multivariate spatio-temporal fusion model that relates monitored and modelled pollution data over space, time and pollutant; (ii) how to simultaneously estimate the joint effects of multiple pollutants; and (iii) how to allow for the uncertainty in the estimated pollution concentrations when estimating their health effects. Specifically, chapters 4 and 5 are developed to achieve (i), while chapter 6 focuses on (ii) and (iii). In chapter 4, I propose an integrated model for estimating the long-term health effects of NO2, that fuses modelled and measured pollution data to provide improved predictions of areal level pollution concentrations and hence health effects. The air pollution fusion model proposed is a Bayesian space-time linear regression model for relating the measured concentrations to the modelled concentrations for a single pollutant, whilst allowing for additional covariate information such as site type (e.g. roadside, rural, etc) and temperature. However, it is known that some pollutants might be correlated because they may be generated by common processes or be driven by similar factors such as meteorology. The correlation between pollutants can help to predict one pollutant by borrowing strength from the others. Therefore, in chapter 5, I propose a multi-pollutant model which is a multivariate spatio-temporal fusion model that extends the single pollutant model in chapter 4, which relates monitored and modelled pollution data over space, time and pollutant to predict pollution across mainland Scotland. Considering that we are exposed to multiple pollutants simultaneously because the air we breathe contains a complex mixture of particle and gas phase pollutants, the health effects of exposure to multiple pollutants have been investigated in chapter 6. Therefore, this is a natural extension to the single pollutant health effects in chapter 4. Given NO2 and PM10 are highly correlated (multicollinearity issue) in my data, I first propose a temporally-varying linear model to regress one pollutant (e.g. NO2) against another (e.g. PM10) and then use the residuals in the disease model as well as PM10, thus investigating the health effects of exposure to both pollutants simultaneously. Another issue considered in chapter 6 is to allow for the uncertainty in the estimated pollution concentrations when estimating their health effects. There are in total four approaches being developed to adjust the exposure uncertainty. Finally, chapter 7 summarises the work contained within this thesis and discusses the implications for future research.

Adieu New York, bonjour Paris ! : les enjeux esthétiques et culturels des appropriations du jazz dans le monde musical savant français (1900-1930)

Thèse réalisée en cotutelle avec l'Université Paris-Sorbonne et l'Université de Montréal. Composition du jury : M. Laurent Cugny (Université Paris-Sorbonne) ; M. Michel Duchesneau (Université de Montréal) ; M. Philippe Gumplowicz (Université d'Evry-Val d'Essonne) ; Mme Barbara Kelly (Keele University - Royal Northern College of Music) ; M. François de Médicis (Université de Montréal) ; M. Christopher Moore (Université d'Ottawa)

Training patterns of German companies in India, China, Japan and the USA: What really works?

The transfer of vocational education and training (VET) systems is currently the subject of lively international debate, but there has so far been very little documentation of the process or analysis of how such transfers are achieved in practical terms. This paper therefore considers the potential for transferring Germany’s ‘dual’ vocational training system to German subsidiaries abroad, specifically in China, India, Japan and the USA. Using the EPRG typology as a theoretical framework, the paper systematises the range of training strategies deployed by German subsidiaries. It analyses the findings of interviews with training officers and Directors of Human Resources in more than 40 German subsidiaries abroad. These interviews show clearly that local factors in the host country exert such a strong influence that it is not possible completely to transfer the German VET system to another country. What is more likely is that an accommodation is reached with local VET structures, local labour market conditions and other socio-cultural features. The findings suggest that policy borrowing in the area of VET is likely to be only partial and will be strongly influenced by the national characteristics of the host country. (DIPF/Orig.)

Essays on Supply Chain Finance

I study how a larger party within a supply chain could use its superior knowledge about its partner, who is considered to be financially constrained, to help its partner gain access to cheap finance. In particular, I consider two scenarios: (i) Retailer intermediation in supplier finance and (ii) The Effectiveness of Supplier Buy Back Finance. In the fist chapter, I study how a large buyer could help small suppliers obtain financing for their operations. Especially in developing economies, traditional financing methods can be very costly or unavailable to such suppliers. In order to reduce channel costs, in recent years large buyers started to implement their own financing methods that intermediate between suppliers and financing institutions. In this paper, I analyze the role and efficiency of buyer intermediation in supplier financing. Building a game-theoretical model, I show that buyer intermediated financing can significantly improve supply chain performance. Using data from a large Chinese online retailer and through structural regression estimation based on the theoretical analysis, I demonstrate that buyer intermediation induces lower interest rates and wholesale prices, increases order quantities, and boosts supplier borrowing. The analysis also shows that the retailer systematically overestimates the consumer demand. Based on counterfactual analysis, I predict that the implementation of buyer intermediated financing for the online retailer in 2013 improved channel profits by 18.3%, yielding more than $68M projected savings. In the second chapter, I study a novel buy-back financing scheme employed by large manufacturers in some emerging markets. A large manufacturer can secure financing for its budget-constrained downstream partners by assuming a part of the risk for their inventory by committing to buy back some unsold units. Buy back commitment could help a small downstream party secure a bank loan and further induce a higher order quantity through better allocation of risk in the supply chain. However, such a commitment may undermine the supply chain performance as it imposes extra costs on the supplier incurred by the return of large or costly-to-handle items. I first theoretically analyze the buy-back financing contract employed by a leading Chinese automative manufacturer and some variants of this contracting scheme. In order to measure the effectiveness of buy-back financing contracts, I utilize contract and sales data from the company and structurally estimate the theoretical model. Through counterfactual analysis, I study the efficiency of various buy-back financing schemes and compare them to traditional financing methods. I find that buy-back contract agreements can improve channel efficiency significantly compared to simple contracts with no buy-back, whether the downstream retailer can secure financing on its own or not.

Bank Governance and the Bail-in in the EU. A Law & Finance analysis on the role of bail-inable creditors

This dissertation assesses the impact of the EU Directive on Bank Recovery and Resolution (BRRD) on bank corporate governance and investigates a fundamental question. Can the resolution framework for distressed banks enhance the quality of banks’ decision making? According to the Directive, the Resolution Authority can impose losses on bank’s creditors in case of distress through a bail-in. Bail-inable creditors become residual claimants of the bank, contingent on its distress. The first part of the dissertation establishes an analytical framework for bank governance, starting from the problem of what can be defined as “good governance” in banking. The dissertation hypothesizes that governance regulation represents a necessary link between the incentives of corporate constituencies and the goals of substantive regulation. The second part builds upon this analytical framework and carries out a positive analysis encompassing three channels of debt governance; namely, price internalisation of risk; contractual arrangements and the discrete impact of different type of creditors. The existence of a resolution framework should incentivise bail-inable creditors to better discipline the borrowing bank; yet, the design of both the capital and resolution regulation largely foreclose such possibility to creditors. Against this backdrop, the third part of the dissertation moves to normative considerations. The approach to this normative part combines and complements the study of cash flow rights of the management with the study of the voting rights to bail-inable creditors. On the cash flow side, the dissertation proposes to include bail-inable debt as part of the variable remuneration for bank risk-takers. On the voting right, the proposal is to grant a limited basket of ex-ante governance rights to bail-inable creditors. Such a unified approach is rather uncommon in the literature, where cash flow rights and voting rights are often approached separately whereas those complement each other in the dissertation.