The uniqueness of each system stems from the fact that the risks of disasters are specific and that their presence and manifestation are not universal and the same for every country. Just as no ...country is the same in all other segments, their disaster risk systems are unequal. The paper describes the systems in four different countries, through observation and comparison of four areas of activity that are implemented in dealing with disasters. First of all, in the paper, the legal basis and institutional frameworks on which these systems rest in each of the countries were considered – starting from the international level and guidelines given at international conferences, to all by-laws and local disaster activity plans. It was considered how each of the states implements risk mitigation activities and how it increases preparedness for them. When the system recognizes risks, their probability and the frequency of their occurrence, activities are planned to prepare the country and every individual in it for a potentially unwanted event. Differences in the ways of mitigating risks and preparing all elements of the system and protected values for disasters are presented. The third element of action in the event of disasters concerns the response. In this segment, questions are raised regarding institutional solutions in the system, division of responsibilities, the priority of response and mobilization of resources at all levels. The last phase, the one that occurs after the disaster, and that is the recovery from it, depends on the reaction. In the paper, it was discussed how in the end, when a disaster occurs and when damage to the population, environment, material and other goods occurs, how each of the states implements reconstruction, i.e. how it recovers - whether that recovery was previously well planned or whether ad hoc solutions are applied.
Credit Supply and the Housing Boom Justiniano, Alejandro; Primiceri, Giorgio E.; Tambalotti, Andrea
The Journal of political economy,
06/2019, Volume:
127, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
An increase in credit supply driven by looser lending constraints in the mortgage market is the key force behind four empirical features of the housing boom before the Great Recession: the ...unprecedented rise in home prices, the surge in household debt, the stability of debt relative to house values, and the fall in mortgage rates. These facts are more difficult to reconcile with the popular view that attributes the housing boom only to looser borrowing constraints associated with lower collateral requirements, because they shift the demand for credit.
Anomalies and False Rejections Chordia, Tarun; Goyal, Amit; Saretto, Alessio
The Review of financial studies,
05/2020, Volume:
33, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
We use information from over 2 million trading strategies randomly generated using real data and from strategies that survive the publication process to infer the statistical properties of the set of ...strategies that could have been studied by researchers. Using this set, we compute t-statistic thresholds that control for multiple hypothesis testing, when searching for anomalies, at 3.8 and 3.4 for time-series and cross-sectional regressions, respectively. We estimate the expected proportion of false rejections that researchers would produce if they failed to account for multiple hypothesis testing to be about 45%.
We investigate whether patents on human genes have affected follow-on scientific research and product development. Using administrative data on successful and unsuccessful patent applications ...submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office, we link the exact gene sequences claimed in each application with data measuring follow-on scientific research and commercial investments. Using these data, we document novel evidence of selection into patenting: patented genes appear more valuable—prior to being patented—than non-patented genes. This evidence of selection motivates two quasi-experimental approaches, both of which suggest that on average gene patents have had no quantitatively important effect on follow-on innovation.
Abstract
We use a time-varying parameter dynamic factor model with stochastic volatility estimated using Bayesian methods to disentangle the relative importance of the common component in Federal ...Housing Finance Agency house price movements from state-specific shocks, over the quarterly period of 1975Q2 to 2017Q4. We find that the contribution of the national factor in explaining fluctuations in house prices is critical. We then use a Bayesian change-point vector autoregressive model that allows for different regimes throughout the sample period, to study the impact of aggregate supply, aggregate demand, (conventional) monetary policy, and term-spread shocks, identified based on sign restrictions on the national component of house price movements. While monetary policy and other shocks are found to be quite dominant early on, we find evidence that the national factor has been detached from the identified macroeconomic shocks since 2014, thus suggesting that a “national bubble” might be brewing again in the US housing market.
The US Great Recession featured a large decline in output and labor, tighter financial conditions, and a large increase in firm growth dispersion. We build a model in which increased volatility at ...the firm level generates a downturn and worsened credit conditions. The key idea is that hiring inputs is risky because financial frictions limit firms’ ability to insure against shocks. An increase in volatility induces firms to reduce their inputs to reduce such risk. Our model can generate most of the decline in output and labor in the Great Recession and the observed increase in firms’ interest rate spreads.
Using the news-based measure of Baker et al. Baker SR, Bloom N, Davis SJ (2013) Measuring economic policy uncertainty. Working paper, Stanford University, Stanford, CA to capture economic policy ...uncertainty (EPU) in the United States, we find that EPU positively forecasts log excess market returns. An increase of one standard deviation in EPU is associated with a 1.5% increase in forecasted three-month abnormal returns (6.1% annualized). Furthermore, innovations in EPU earn a significant negative risk premium in the Fama–French 25 size–momentum portfolios. Among the Fama–French 25 portfolios formed on size and momentum returns, the portfolio with the greatest EPU beta underperforms the portfolio with the lowest EPU beta by 5.53% per annum, controlling for exposure to the Carhart four factors as well as implied and realized volatility. These findings suggest that EPU is an economically important risk factor for equities.
This paper was accepted by Wei Jiang, finance.
At the intersection of social and environmental history there has emerged a rich body of black literary response to natural and agricultural experiences, whether the legacy of enforced agricultural ...labor or of the destruction and displacement brought about by a hurricane. In Cultivation and Catastrophe , Sonya Posmentier uncovers a vivid diasporic tradition of black environmental writing that responds to the aftermath of plantation slavery, urbanization, and free and forced migrations. While humanist discourses of African American and postcolonial studies often sustain a line between nature and culture, this book instead emphasizes the relationship between them, offering an innovative environmental history of modern black literature. Posmentier argues that environmental experiences of growth and rupture define the literature of black freedom, an archive that ranges from sonnets, mini-epics, documentary poems, periodicals, and novels to blues songs, dancehall productions, and ethnographic writing. In turn, this literature generates important and surprising models for ecological thought. Claude McKay, for example, connects rows of potatoes to the poetic line; Zora Neale Hurston composes rhythmic communal lyrics in the Florida muck following a deadly hurricane; and Derek Walcott critiques property-based ecological relations through the archipelagic shape of his mid-career poetry. Posmentier examines how these writers, along with Gwendolyn Brooks, Bessie Smith, Sterling Brown, Lloyd Lovindeer, Kamau Brathwaite, and others give voice to racialized experiences of alienation from the land while simultaneously envisioning a modern poetics of survival, repair, and generation. Going against the grain of scholarship that has situated modern black diasporic agency largely in metropolitan sites, Posmentier traces a black literary history of environmental and social disaster while exploring the possibilities and limits of poetry as an archive for black modern culture in its many forms. This pathbreaking book offers stunning new insight into modern black literature, environmental humanities, and poetry and poetics.
Technology has facilitated new, nontraditional work arrangements, including the ride-sharing company Uber. Uber drivers provide rides anytime they choose. Using data on hourly earnings and driving, ...we document driver utilization of this real-time flexibility. We propose that the value of flexibility can be measured as deriving from time variation in the drivers’ reservation wage. Measuring time variation in drivers’ reservation wages allows us to estimate the surplus and labor supply implications of Uber relative to alternative, less-flexible work arrangements. Despite other drawbacks to the Uber arrangement, we estimate that Uber drivers earn more than twice the surplus they would in less-flexible arrangements.
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