Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries

This study examines whether and how public media systems contribute to the health of democracies in 33 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, the Middle East, Latin America, and South America. We gather national economic data and public media funding levels, audience shares, and regulatory data, primarily for 2018 and 2019 but in some cases earlier, due to lack of available data. We then assess correlations with strength of democracy indices and extend Hallin and Mancini's typology of North American and European media systems through hierarchical cluster analysis of these 33 countries. We find five models of public media systems around the world, ranging from “state-administered” systems with low levels of independence (Botswana and Tunisia) to systems aligning with Hallin and Mancini's “Democratic Corporatist” model, with strong and secure (multiyear) funding, large audience shares, and strong regulatory protection for their independence. In between, we identify three mixed models: a “Liberal-Pluralist” model, a “Direct Funding” model, and a “Commercial–Public” model. Correlations and cluster analyses show that high levels of secure funding for public media systems and strong structural protections for the political and economic independence of those systems are consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies.

Sizing hedge funds' Treasury market activities and holdings

Hedge funds play an increasingly important role in U.S. Treasury (UST) cash and futures markets, a role that has been widely discussed following the March 2020 U.S. Treasury sell-off. In this note, we analyze hedge funds' holdings of UST securities and their UST market activities in normal times and in times of financial market stress using regulatory data from the SEC Form PF. We also develop an approach to decompose the reported aggregate UST exposures into UST holdings and derivatives exposures.

Banks as Regulated Traders

Banks use trading as a vehicle to take risk. Using unique high-frequency regulatory data, we estimate the sensitivity of weekly bank trading profits to aggregate equity, fixed-income, credit, currency and commodity risk factors. Our estimates imply that U.S. banks had large trading exposures to equity market risk before the Volcker Rule, which they curtailed afterwards. They also have exposures to credit and currency risk. The results hold up in a quasi-natural experimental design that exploits the phased-in introduction of reporting requirements to address identification. Heterogeneity and placebo tests further corroborate the results. Counterfactual stress-test analyses quantify the financial stability implications.

Data Dentistry: How Data Are Changing Clinical Care and Research

Data are a key resource for modern societies and expected to improve quality, accessibility, affordability, safety, and equity of health care. Dental care and research are currently transforming into what we term data dentistry, with 3 main applications: 1) medical data analysis uses deep learning, allowing one to master unprecedented amounts of data (language, speech, imagery) and put them to productive use. 2) Data-enriched clinical care integrates data from individual (e.g., demographic, social, clinical and omics data, consumer data), setting (e.g., geospatial, environmental, provider-related data), and systems level (payer or regulatory data to characterize input, throughput, output, and outcomes of health care) to provide a comprehensive and continuous real-time assessment of biologic perturbations, individual behaviors, and context. Such care may contribute to a deeper understanding of health and disease and a more precise, personalized, predictive, and preventive care. 3) Data for research include open research data and data sharing, allowing one to appraise, benchmark, pool, replicate, and reuse data. Concerns and confidence into data-driven applications, stakeholders’ and system’s capabilities, and lack of data standardization and harmonization currently limit the development and implementation of data dentistry. Aspects of bias and data-user interaction require attention. Action items for the dental community circle around increasing data availability, refinement, and usage; demonstrating safety, value, and usefulness of applications; educating the dental workforce and consumers; providing performant and standardized infrastructure and processes; and incentivizing and adopting open data and data sharing.

Systemic risk and firm size: is notional amount a good metric?

Purpose Many recently enacted financial regulations exempt smaller entities. While the literature on systemic risk provides efficiency justifications for certain exemptions, the efficiency rationale depends on measuring size appropriately. This paper aims to argue that notional amount, the metric used in derivatives regulations, is a flawed measure of an entity’s contribution to systemic risk. This study discusses an alternative size measure – entity-netted notionals or ENNs – which better reflects risk exposure as discussed in that literature and provides empirical evidence on these two metrics. Design/methodology/approach This study first discusses the relationship between the systemic risk literature and size-based exemptions. This study then describes the current metric and our risk-based alternative. Finally, this paper presents regulatory data on US interest rate swaps (IRS) and uses this to characterize some features of risk exposure. Findings The unique data set provides empirical insight into how well the size metric used in current regulations corresponds to a more theoretically oriented measure. This study finds the relationship between the metrics is fairly weak for entities for whom the size-based exemption will soon be ending, and provide an empirical basis for understanding why they differ. This study also provides evidence on the correlation of risk within this group of entities. Practical implications The paper has important implications for regulation of derivatives and financial markets more generally. To the extent exemptions for small entities make good policy, having the appropriate metric is critical. As such, the metric could be a valuable tool for regulators. Originality/value This paper examines the likely objectives of size-based exemptions from financial regulations and relates them to the systemic risk literature. It provides a unique empirical description of IRS positions, which allows us to examine the relationship between the metric used by regulators and our alternative.

Discriminatory Pricing of Over-the-Counter Derivatives

For the first time, new regulatory data allow precise measurement of price discrimination against nonfinancial clients in the foreign exchange derivatives market. Consistent with the theoretical literature, transaction costs vary systematically with measures of client sophistication. The median client pays 10.9 pips more than blue-chip companies because of its lower level of sophistication, which compares with a sample average effective spread of 6.9 pips. However, price discrimination is fully eliminated when clients trade electronically on multidealer platforms. We also document that less sophisticated clients incur additional costs when trading with their relationship bank and in fast-moving markets, but only for bilaterally negotiated contracts. This paper was accepted by Haoxiang Zhu, finance.

FEATURES OF FORMATION OF ZONES WITH SPECIAL CONDITIONS USE OF RAILWAY TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE TERRITORIES IN CONDITIONS OF INFORMATION UNCERTAINTY IN CATALOGING THE INFLUENCE OF NATURAL FACTORS

Railway transport and its infrastructure operate as a sophisticated technological complex, charac-terized by a convergence of industrial, social and environmental norms and requirements. In order to comply with them, along the right-of-way for the railway tracks themselves, protected zones are formed with a limited regime of land use, defined, according to modern standards of urban develop-ment, as zones with special conditions for the use of territories (ZSCUT). The formation of such zones that represent the subject of cadastral engineers' activities is a composition of technological processes that are determined by spatial data, the volume and content of which is determined by the type and complexity of the object-the property complex, in this case represented by a railway section with the corresponding infrastructure. The ambiguity of regulatory requirements for the establishment of these zones on complex sections of the route determines the need to use additional data, in particular, de-scribing geological and other natural factors. This aspect allows us to consider the situation as infor-mation-uncertain, which is noted in the title of this work, and in its content to assess the safe function-ing of railway transport on the basis of information (cartographic) modeling of the parameters of the required zone. Taking into account the complexity of solving the problem of boundaries ZSCUT de-termination, the results of the presented study include: assessment of the adequacy of regulatory data for establishing such zones, new opportunities for cartographic modeling in their formation and moni-toring, recommendations for improving the regulatory framework.