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High values of implicit guarantees for bank debt can be taken as signalling the market’s expectation that public authorities will rescue the institution in question in times of severe financial distress. By the same token, declines in the measure would suggest a drop in the perceived likelihood of such a bailout, perhaps reflecting the availability of more effective failure resolution tools (although they could also reflect other factors such an improvement in the asset quality of banks).
The study confirms that local content, Internet infrastructure and access prices are three inter-related elements. In particular: (i) better connectivity is significantly related to higher levels of local digital content creation; (ii) countries with more Internet infrastructure (at all income levels) are also countries which produce more local digital content as measured by Wikipedia entries and by web pages under a given country-code, top-level domain; (iii) countries with more international connectivity have lower domestic broadband prices, and countries with better domestic infrastructure have lower international bandwidth prices.
The study concludes that three key lines of policy considerations evolve out of this research: (i) fostering content development, (ii) expanding connectivity, and (iii) promoting Internet access competition.
This Working Paper relates to the 2013 OECD Economic Survey of South Africa, www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/listofeconomicsurveysofsouthafrica.htm.
We then build a simple model where both temporary and permanent contracts are available to firms. We use it to describe the demand for temporary contracts and the potential consequences of removing them and reach the following conclusions. First, employment protection has a moderate negative impact on employment, which can be mitigated when temporary contracts are available. Second, the elimination of temporary contracts decreases total employment (by 7 percentage points according to our calculations). Offsetting this effect would require an ambitious reform of employment protection laws of permanent contracts (in this specific setup, amounting to a cut in layoff costs by two thirds). Finally, the coexistence of temporary and permanent contracts may also have negative effects on social norms within the firm and workers' motivation and eliminating temporary contracts could therefore enhance productivity in this context.
We conclude that while there are costs to dualism, these are not as obvious and well established as the ones triggered by employment protection itself. Further, the single employment contract may partly be a qui pro quo (misunderstanding) Instead, more clarity on the objectives of a labour reform is needed.
This study models the distance-to-default (DTD) of a large sample of banks with the aim of shedding light on policy and regulatory issues. The determinants of the distance-to-default in a panel sample of 94 banks over the period 2004 to 2011, controlling for the market beta of each bank, includes house prices, relative size, simple leverage, derivatives gross market value of exposure, trading assets, wholesale funding and cross-border revenue. The Basel Tier 1 ratio finds no support as a predictor of default risk. The un-weighted leverage ratio, on the other hand, finds strong support. At the macro level house prices are a powerful predictor of the DTD. At the business model level, the results appear to be consistent with an approach to policy that focuses on the apparent importance of the “size-derivativesleverage- wholesale funding nexus” in influencing the DTD of banks. While these results are preliminary, it is encouraging that the out-of-sample predictive power of the model improves systematically as each year of new observations is added. The results are also consistent with some central bank involvement in the supervision process, given the importance of the asset price cycle, identified in this study.