Economic Capital

Sustainable design is a phrase commonly used in the realms of design practice and yet the definition of the same remains quite fuzzy, thus providing the motivation for this research. The paper looks at contemporary sustainable design practices in the area of architecture design, building construction and landscape architecture. The objective is to understand what the term “sustainable design” really means as used in practice and what strategies are being employed towards the goal of sustainable development. The ...

The costly, time-consuming and complicated process of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) can be improved in many companies and made less tedious for managers by using reasonable data and templates obtained from the peer group entities. The models used to calculate Economic Capital (EC) often underestimate its value because they do not consider decision maker perception about risk, which are absorbed by the enterprise and transferred outside of the enterprise. We assumed that mangers as the decision makers have appropriate business understanding and they can provide substantial information about risk characteristics regarding all business processes. Therefore we are focused, in this paper, on collecting data from the managers across the different businesses to derive the appropriate knowledge about the risky events, importance of particular type of risks, relationship between the risk outcomes and the level of risk control in a particular industry. We conclude that the collected data h...

Credit risk analysis is an important topic in the financial risk management. Due to recent financial crises and regulatory concern of Basel II, credit risk analysis has been the major focus of financial and banking industry. An accurate estimation of credit risk could be transformed into a more efficient use of economic capital. In this study, we try to use a triple-phase neural network ensemble technique to design a credit risk evaluation system to discriminate good creditors from bad ones. In this model, many diverse neural network models are first created. Then an uncorrelation maximization algorithm is used to select the appropriate ensemble members. Finally, a reliability-based method is used for neural network ensemble. For further illustration, a publicly credit dataset is used to test the effectiveness of the proposed neural ensemble model.

Credit risk concentration is one of the leading topics in modern finance, as the bank regulation has made increasing use of external and internal credit ratings. Concentration risk in credit portfolios comes into being through an uneven distribution of bank loans to individual borrowers (single-name concentration) or in a hierarchical dimension such as in industry and services sectors and geographical regions (sectorial concentration).To measure single-name concentration risk the literature proposes specific concentration indexes such as the Herfindahl–Hirschman index, the Gini index or more general approaches to calculate the appropriate economic capital needed to cover the risk arising from the potential default of large borrowers.However, in our opinion, the Gini index and the Herfindahl–Hirschman index can be improved taking into account methodological and theoretical issues which are explained in this paper.We propose a new index to measure single-name credit concentration risk and we prove the properties of our contribution.Furthermore, considering the guidelines of Basel II, we describe how our index works on real financial data. Finally, we compare our index with the common procedures proposed in the literature on the basis of simulated and real data.

The concept of sustainable development has evolved a long way from its initial concerns of ‘ecological sustainability’. The sustainable development agenda respectably requires an integrated strategy which embraces and incorporate ‘economic sustainability’, ‘social sustainability’ and ‘cultural sustainability’.
From a capital perspective, sustainable development can be defined as environmental protection, economic growth, cultural identity and social well-being. The latter integrates efficient use of resources that yield valuable goods and services, investments, equity, social mobility, freedom of expression, cultural diversity, spiritual values and social cohesion through participation and empowerment. Protecting and promoting ecological, economic, social and cultural capital affects the socio-economic climate of a given environment. The synergy between the four pillars is rather major approach towards sustainable development. Indeed, approaching sustainable development from this perspective argues that the fulfilment of human needs can only be reachable through, the simultaneous development and intervention of economic drivers, human and community capacity and cultural values and conservation of the earth’s natural systems.
This paper provides a comprehensive overview of current perceptive of sustainable development, and present the main proposition of the concept through identify the key capitals where each one has its influence and demands, and shows how they contribute to sustainable development theory. Criteria for weak and strong sustainability are considered, based on which capital character is a main driver for sustainability. Further, this paper also discussed the notion of widespread use of existing indicators as a sole barometer of well-being and addressed the advantages and disadvantages of adopting them in a system. It is become obvious that existing indicators designed to evaluate individual component of capitals rather than assessing a holistic conceptualisation of sustainable and therefore different measures has to be developed. The challenge is to accumulate alternative sets of indicators that capture all the essential capitals of sustainable development to provide a holistic framework to any empirical application of human activities. This paper focus on sustainable development debate through a review and synthesis of the relevant literature.

Within the sociology of education most conceptualizations of cultural capital within empirical research focus on high status cultural participation. A smaller, parallel body of work emphasizes much broader understandings of cultural capital in relation to education. The first part of this article maps different conceptions of cultural capital across the field of educational research before developing a conceptualization that stresses the micro-interactional processes through which individuals comply (or fail to comply) with the evaluative standards of schooling. The article also argues that the growth of policy initiatives that accentuate the role of parents in schooling have made the myriad workings of cultural capital in relation to education more visible. Within government policy parental involvement has become the means whereby schools can tap the cultural capital resources of parents in the drive to raise standards. Economic capital has always had a defining influence, but now it is increasingly possible to see the power of cultural capital especially in relation to the growing emphasis on parental involvement and parental choice, and programmes such as gifted and talented. The second part of the article draws on data from research projects that examine parental choice, gifted and talented programmes, and parental involvement more generally, to illustrate the many ways in which cultural capital operates to reproduce educational advantage. Most of the examples underscore the close relationship between cultural and economic capital and how they work to reinforce each other, but an example is also included to illustrate how cultural capital can operate independently of economic capital. The article concludes that the policy emphasis on parental involvement and initiatives to retain the middle classes within state schooling work to maximize the potential of the already advantaged and are exacerbating class inequalities in education.

This paper examines identity construction and performance in Jamaican dancehall culture. It suggests that by utilizing publicly consumptive practices in the fluid space of the dancehall, the British Link-Up Crew draws on local and global factors to re-present a form of masculinity that has arisen
organically from Jamaican society. I do not argue for the homogeneity of this form of masculine identity but suggest that this highly consumptive and performative identity reflects the socio-political and economic status of particular groups of black men in Jamaican society who are denied real access
to resources and power in the formal structures in the society. These men draw on different and often symbolic strategies, including consumption, masquerade and performance, to seek and extend their identity and masculine
status.

Through popularized lyrics and exaggerated performance styles, popular dancehall culture re-presents these discourses of identity and provides a key space for the negotiation of black masculinity and identity in Jamaica within the race/class/colour and gendered structures of power that create and maintain hierarchies of personhood.

The aim of this paper is to compare two asset allocation methods for a pension scheme during the decumulation phase in the simplified portfolio selection between a risky asset following a geometric Brownian motion and a riskless asset. The two asset allocation criteria are the ruin probability of the insurance company and the optimization of the economic capital. We first

In this paper, which is based on fieldwork carried out in Italy in 2001–02, I consider migrants as mobile actors, people who make choices about where they go and under what title, but people whose choices are limited by a range of factors including migration regimes, social networks and social and economic capital. The key questions considered relate to ‘status’

This paper examines the declining levels of respect for teachers in two communities in Cape Town, South Africa. Education has been identified as a key area of reform and redress, but a critical skills shortage and under-resourced schools are hindering progress. Data from current and former teachers illustrate how the social and institutional capital of education is being replaced by a focus on economic capital, undermining the prestige of teaching as a career. These problems reflect trends elsewhere in the world and require action to prevent further shortages in education.

This article presents an analysis for the estimation of economic capital concerning operational risk in a Brazilian banking industry case making use of Markov chains, Extreme Value Theory (EVT) and Peaks Over Threshold (POT) modelling. The findings denote that some existent methods present consistent results among institutions with similar characteristics of loss data.