Search Results (25)

This study seeks to answer the question of whether we could use a bank’s past financial data to predict the bank failure in 2009 and proposes three new empirical proxies for loan quality (LQ), interest margins (IntMag), and earnings efficiency (OIOE) to forecast bank failure. Using the bank failure list from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) database, I match the banks that failed in 2009 with a control sample based on geography, size, the ratio of total loans to total assets, and the age of banks. The model suggested by this paper could predict correctly up to 94.44% (97.15%) for the failure (and non-failure) of banks, with an overall 96.43% prediction accuracy, (p = 0.5). Specifically, the stepwise logistic regression suggests some proxies for capital adequacy, assets/loan risk, profit efficiency, earnings, and liquidity risk to be the predictors of bank failure. These results partially agree with previous studies regarding the importance of certain variables, while offering new findings that the three proposed proxies for LQ, IntMag, and OIOE statistically and economically significantly impact the probability of bank failure. Full article

(1) Background: Linear immunoglobulin A bullous dermatosis (LABD) is a rare autoimmune, subepidermal blistering disease, characterized by linear IgA deposits along the epidermal basement membrane. LABD is idiopathic and is associated with medication and systemic autoimmune diseases. (2) Methods: We investigated the demographic characteristics, disease course, causative agents, and associated diseases in Korean patients with LABD. The Korean Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service database was used to obtain data. We identified 670 LABD cases between 2010 and 2022. (3) Results: The annual incidence of LABD was 1.3 per 100,000 persons, with a higher prevalence in individuals ≥60 years old. The patients were treated with dapsone for 30.7 ± 56.7 days, had 1.3 ± 0.7 hospital visits, and were hospitalized for 19.8 ± 19.7 days. Risk factors, including malignancy, commonly preceded LABD. Antibiotic use, specifically vancomycin and third-generation cephalosporins, was a risk factor. The mean age of LABD diagnosis was 55.9 ± 21.7 years. (4) Conclusion: This is the first published study to assess a nationwide cohort for LABD. The incidence of LABD was higher than that in other studies. Most case reports have linked LABD with the administration of specific antibiotics; however, this study shows there were more associations with other conditions. Full article

The accelerated growth and interconnectedness of financial institutions and movement towards products and activities outside the regulatory purview have been met with huge concerns. South Africa is one of the emerging economies that this conundrum has beset. Any potential instability in the financial sector likely poses insurmountable consequences and unprecedented government intervention, especially given that the country currently has no deposit insurance scheme. Although it is easy to justify the channels through which banks contribute to destabilising financial markets, it remains a controversial issue for insurers and other non-banking institutions. This study aims to empirically quantify the contribution of banks and insurers to aggregate the systemic risk of their respective industries by employing the component expected shortfall (CES). The CES is a robust quantitative systemic risk measure that allows for a comprehensive assessment of systemic risk by considering the contributions of individual financial components. Our findings demonstrate that the rankings from the CES framework are closely aligned with the regulatory D-SIB surcharges of the banking entities included in the study. The close alignment of both approaches is primarily due to the consideration of the size of an institution, amongst other factors. Full article

Greater Montreal is situated in a region with moderate seismic activity and rests on soft ground deposits from the ancient Champlain Sea, as well as more recent alluvial deposits from the Saint Lawrence River. These deposits have the potential to amplify seismic waves, as demonstrated by past strong, and recent weak, earthquakes. Studies based on the 2015 National Seismic Hazard Model (SHM5) had estimated losses to residential buildings at 2% of their value for an event with a return period of 2475 years. In 2020, the seismic hazard model was updated (SHM6), resulting in more severe hazards for eastern Canada. This paper aims to quantify the impact of these changes on losses to residential buildings in Greater Montreal. Our exposure database includes population and buildings at the scale of dissemination areas (500–1000 inhabitants). Buildings are classified by occupancy and construction type and grouped into three building code levels based on year of construction. The value of buildings is obtained from property-valuation rolls and the content value is derived from insurance data. Damage and losses are calculated using Hazus software developed for FEMA. Losses are shown to be 53% higher than the SHM5 estimates. Full article

Up to now, the use of TiO₂ has been considered a promising advanced technology for organic pollutants removal from air or water, since it has high biological and chemical stability, high photoactivity, low toxicity, and low-cost production. However, there are issues to be addressed in enhancing TiO₂ performance, and one of the current key issues is redesigning UV-active photocatalysts and making them active in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum. This way, solar light absorption will be insured, and thus, a more efficient photocatalyst could be obtained. For this reason, conjugated polymers and their derivatives are considered to act as photosensitizers, being able to shift the TiO₂ activity from the UV to the visible region. Therefore, this study focuses on the synthesis of TiO₂/conjugated polymer systems, which was accomplished by the deposition of poly-3,4-ethylene-dioxy-thiophene (PEDOT [-C₆H₄O₂S-]_n), a low-band semiconductor with an excellent stability due to its extending π-conjugated electron system, on titania nanoarchitecture. First of all, a TiO₂ nanoarchitecture was synthesized by an ultrasound-assisted sol–gel method. Then, TiO₂/PEDOT systems were obtained and characterized by using different techniques such as X-ray diffraction, Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy, Scanning Electron Microscopy, UV–Vis diffuse reflectance, and N₂ sorption measurements. The synthesized composites confirmed their mesoporosity and lower band gap values compared to bare titania, which clearly shows the ability to work as photocatalysts under visible-light activity. Further, we demonstrated that an organic pollutant, Congo Red dye, used as a model molecule could be photodegraded with the synthesized TiO₂/PEDOT systems, with efficiencies of up to 95% in the case of T_convPEDOT under UV light and up to 99% for T_convPEDOT under visible-light irradiation, accomplishing in this way a successful synthesis of visible-light-activated titania photocatalyst. Full article

This paper investigates the optimal private health insurance contract design problem, considering the joint interests of a policyholder and an insurer. Both the policyholder and the insurer jointly determine the premium of private health insurance. In order to better reflect reality, the illness expenditure is modelled by an extended compound Poisson process depending on health status. Under the mean–variance criterion and by applying dynamic programming, control theory, and leader–follower game techniques, analytically time-consistent private health insurance strategies are derived, optimal private health insurance contracts are designed, and their implications toward insurance are analysed. Finally, we perform numerical experiments assuming that the policyholder and the insurer calculate their wealth every year and they deposit their disposable income into the Bank of China with the interest rate being $r=0.021$. The values of other model parameters are set by referring to the data in the related literature. We find that the worse the policyholder’s health, the higher the premium that they pay for private health insurance, and buying private health insurance can effectively reduce the policyholder’s economic losses caused by illnesses. Full article

Disputes due to defects in newly built houses are increasing worldwide. A house builder is responsible for repairing any defects in a newly built house. However, since house builders’ risk of closure and bankruptcy are increasing due to aggravated disputes and economic crises, builders may become insolvent and fail to perform defect repairs. In preparation for this, many countries have established defect repair deposit or guaranty insurance systems; however, the standards for these systems are not based an objective evidence since the current standards were arbitrarily established during industrialization. It has been pointed out that Korea’s housing defect repair deposit has been set excessively high and is being abused in disputes. Based on dispute cases in Korea, this study analyzed housing construction costs, deposits, and defect repair costs, resulting from lawsuits due to defects. The results confirmed that the defect repair deposit has been set too high compared to incurred defect repair costs. In addition, it was found that the guaranty insurance premium in lieu of the housing defect repair deposit was excessive compared to the damage caused by builder insolvency. In order to improve this, in this study, we proposed two alternative plans in which the housing defect repair deposit was set at a certain percentage of the construction cost based on the current Korean standard. In addition, based on the concept of different deposit levels using the scale of housing construction, such as in Australia and Canada, two additional alternative plans with different deposit ratios for each scale of housing construction were presented. The comparison results for housing defect repair deposits and guaranty insurance premiums based on the four presented alternative plans accompanied by actual cases showed that all the alternative plan deposits were higher than the actual defect repair costs. Even in the case of a guaranty insurance premium, the level was at least twice as high as the damage caused by builder insolvency. Therefore, all the alternative plans can fulfill their original role of protecting homeowners in the case of builder insolvency. At the same time, reducing the guaranty insurance premium to reflect the cost of housing construction is possible, and would benefit both house builders and home buyers. The results of this study are valuable as a reference for other countries considering establishing or revising a housing defect repair deposit system. Specifically, these findings, which analyzed the case of Korea’s socioeconomic changes as it transitioned from a developing country to a developed country, can provide important information for many developing countries operating housing defect repair deposit policies and systems. Full article

The rapid use and development of information and communication technology capabilities in the public sector has revolutionized the mechanism that government agencies use to collect, process, and disseminate data. Electronic government is one of the strategic initiatives that many government agencies have considered adopting to offer efficient web-based services and operations. Although there have been efforts to examine the implementation process of technological innovations in financial and business reporting, many government agencies are about to face a bigger challenge in developing or adopting current technologies to assess their usefulness for non-financial sustainability reporting. The Extensible Business Reporting Language, XBRL, has been adopted by the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to process financial data in the quarterly call reports filed by banks. Using Rogers’ well-established theory of innovation adoption process, this paper discusses the FDIC’s XBRL implementation process and investigates the roles and experiences of the agency’s stakeholders. A case study research methodology, supported by semi-structured interviews, is used to explore each phase of the implementation process. The findings reveal that the process was facilitated by stakeholder engagement, technical support, and the agency’s strategic decision-making process. This paper contributes to the literature by examining the applications, benefits, and challenges of using XBRL technology to process non-financial sustainability data, which is still an under-researched area. Therefore, the implications for using the technology in non-financial reporting will be insightful for future regulatory adopters and their stakeholders including filer banks, software vendors, and various users of financial and non-financial information. Full article

Liquid money controlled by a trustworthy central bank can serve as an insurance against external surprises such as stock market crashes, bank fails and other setbacks that endanger the yield of illiquid savings. In turbulent times, the insurance property of money is particularly accentuated. The paper constructs a life cycle framework for the analysis of rational and irrational motives to save money, answers to questions about the effects of saving liquid money on labor supply, illiquid saving and education, and examines the inherent cost of saving cash. The main findings are the following. The rational insurance motive to save money increases total savings by replacing deposit saving more than one-to-one. The share of deposit savings depends positively on the expected interest rate, while the share of cash savings is the higher the less there is inflation. Deposit saving correlates positively and education negatively with the expected market interest rate thus affecting the relative proportion of liquid and illiquid saving, but the implicit cost of cash insurance is independent of education. Money illusion adds an internal bias to consumers’ life-time optimization, thus making them save excessively in cash at the cost of market deposits and increasing the cost of using cash as insurance against external uncertainty. Full article

The propagation of bankruptcy-induced shocks across domestic and global economies is sometimes very dramatic; this phenomenon can be modelled as a dynamical process in economic networks. Economic networks are usually scale-free, and scale-free networks are known to be vulnerable with respect to targeted attacks, i.e., attacks directed towards the biggest nodes of the network. Here we address the following question: to what extent does the scale-free nature of economic networks and the vulnerability of the biggest nodes affect the propagation of economic shocks? We model the dynamics of bankruptcies as the propagation of financial contagion across the banking sector over a scale-free network of banks, and perform Monte-Carlo simulations based on synthetic networks. In addition, we analyze the public data regarding the bankruptcy of US banks from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The dynamics of the shock propagation is characterized in terms of the Bank Failures Diffusion Index, i.e., the average number of new bankruptcies triggered by the bankruptcy of a single bank, and in terms of the Shannon entropy of the whole network. The simulation results are in-line with the empirical findings, and indicate the important role of the biggest banks in the dynamics of economic shocks. Full article

The European financial regulation is evolving with new and specific forms of cooperation for the member states, enhancing concepts and innovative rule of law, particularly featuring the actual level of harmonization. This paper investigates the European deposit insurance scheme, in the context of the European law development, in reply to the current economic and social challenges and in accordance with the principles of the free market. The methods of research include a theoretical investigation of the relevant literature, a comparison of the proposed regulation and regulation in force, synthesis, and deduction. The research results are based on the assessment of the progress of negotiation in building efficient mechanisms to stimulate money saving conduct for individuals and legal persons, globally and within the European Union. Acknowledging the status of the three pillars of the European banking union legislative package, the member states have unanimously agreed that the framework established by the Directive from 2014 needed a bracing approach, to ensure more protection and to support enhanced financial integration. The analysis carried out showed the importance of the European deposit insurance scheme in the context of the present global challenges. The money saving conduct was strongly influenced by the regulation for the deposit guarantee mechanism, while the tight estimated agenda for the final regulatory proposal asks for ingenious cooperation to reach a consensus within members states. The research showed the imperative to build common legislation for the member states and a future direction of investigation to evaluate the effects of the gap between the domestic regulation and milestone generated by the European directives in each state legal framework. Full article

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether public health entrepreneurship principles implementation in the public health sector are alternative ways of promoting an immediate improvement of healthcare infrastructure. To contribute to the literature on the impact of public health entrepreneurship on public healthcare infrastructure, we estimate two empirical models, with the first model having institutions and the second model having public healthcare policies as the dependent variable. Our empirical analysis is based on the WHO international health regulation data for all WHO member countries (in order to achieve a balanced panel, we decided to retain 192 of them), covering the period from 2010 through to 2019. The main results obtained using a Poisson panel regression indicate a positive relationship between employing more entrepreneurship within public healthcare and the quality of public healthcare infrastructure represented through institutions and policies. This study produces several contributions to the stream of research on public health entrepreneurship. First, it makes a theoretical contribution in the way that it fills the lacking literature on the relationship between entrepreneurship within the public health sector and efficiency of country-specific public healthcare infrastructure. Second, it offers an empirical quantitative analysis of entrepreneurship that is generally lacking. Concerning policy implications, the third contribution of this paper is the provision of evidence showing alternative ways to improve healthcare infrastructure other than traditionally observed investments in physical infrastructure. Full article

It is unknown if the lung deposition of surfactant administered via a catheter placed through a laryngeal mask airway (LMA) is equivalent to that obtained by bolus instillation through an endotracheal tube. We compare the lung deposition of surfactant delivered via two types of LMA with the standard technique of endotracheal instillation. 25 newborn piglets on continuous positive airway pressure support (CPAP) were randomized into three groups: 1—LMA-camera (integrated camera and catheter channel; catheter tip below vocal cords), 2—LMA-standard (no camera, no channel; catheter tip above the glottis), 3—InSurE (Intubation, Surfactant administration, Extubation; catheter tip below end of endotracheal tube). All animals received 100 mg·kg⁻¹ of poractant alfa mixed with ^99mTechnetium-nanocolloid. Surfactant deposition was measured by gamma scintigraphy as a percentage of the administered dose. The median (range) total lung surfactant deposition was 68% (10–85), 41% (5–88), and 88% (67–92) in LMA-camera, LMA-standard, and InSurE, respectively, which was higher (p < 0.05) in the latter. The deposition in the stomach and nasopharynx was higher with the LMA-standard. The surfactant deposition via an LMA was lower than that obtained with InSurE. Although not statistically significant, introducing the catheter below the vocal cords under visual control with an integrated camera improved surfactant LMA delivery by 65%. Full article

During the global financial crisis (GFC), regulators and policymakers turned to deposit insurers, along with monetary and fiscal measures, to help restore market confidence and promote financial stability. These events have focused attention on the role of deposit insurers and their role in the banking system. Recent literature reveals that during the GFC, deposit insurance maintained banking stability and successfully prevented customers doing ‘runs’ on the banks. The objective of this paper is to examine the deposit insurance system’s coverage limits and the impact on banking stability, in the context of a jurisdiction’s economic and institutional environment. Our model examines 61 jurisdictions in Asia and Europe with explicit deposit insurance systems, covering the pre- and post-GFC period between 2004 and 2014. We also examine subsets to investigate the effects of the region by comparing Asia and Europe, as well as a subset using the date of establishment of the deposit insurance system to understand if maturity matters. The results indicate that deposit insurance systems, and specifically deposit insurance coverage levels, have both positive and negative effects on banking stability. We find significant associations with certain economic and institutional factors; however, there are differences between the models we ran. These can be ascribed to regional factors and the date of when a deposit insurance system was established. Full article

The aim of the article is to identify the risk factors affecting bancassurance development in Poland. The development is understood here as a change of gross written premiums obtained through banks in Poland. The group of risk factors selected in a survey conducted among financial sector employees was subject to statistical verification. The analysis used both variables directly related to the insurance product (e.g., a regulatory restriction of insurance acquisition costs) as well as those resulting from the specificity of the bancassurance channel, such as the sales of banking products, i.e., cash loans, housing loans and the value of funds placed by customers on deposits. The study was conducted on the basis of data on the gross premiums written in Poland in the years 2004–2019. The result of the applied model confirms the assumptions and the importance of insurance distribution in banks. Significant risk factors (statistically significant) which determine gross premiums written in the bancassurance channel are: the size of policyholder’s family (number of children, dependants) represented by the average number of people in a household in Poland, demand on mortgage loans represents by bank housing loans for households and agent’s commission, represented by the ratio of acquisition costs to gross written premium. The results of the econometric model obtained are consistent with expectations arising from the principles and practice of cooperation between banks and insurers as well as the specificity of insurance products distribution (also local) in the bancassurance channel. Full article