to such loans? This question is important to monetary policy. Like other central banks, normally the Fed makes loans to banks through its discount window. This credit has long been thought to be an important tool for responding to financial strain. But if banks are reluctant to borrow from the Fed because of a stigma attached to such loans, then the Fed’s ability to provide liquidity as a lende...

The private market of student loans has become an important source of college financing in the U.S. Unlike government student loans, eligibility conditions on student loans from the private market are based on the credit history of the student and the parents, who often serve as cosigners. In addition, interest rates on private loans vary significantly with credit scores (from 7.4 to 15.4 perce...

Four nickel clusters, cyclo-[{Ni(μ-S(i)Pr)(μ-SMe)}(6)] (1), cyclo-[{Ni(μ-StBu)(μ-SMe)}(6)] (2), cyclo-[{Ni(μ-S(i)Pr)(μ-SEt)}(6)] (3) and cyclo-[{Ni(μ-StBu)(μ-SEt)}(10)] (4), based on thiolate ligands have been successfully synthesized and characterized by elemental analysis, FT-IR spectra, UV-vis-NIR spectra, powder X-ray diffraction and single-crystal X-ray diffraction. Intriguingly, the SMe a...

Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) includes the planning, management, control and improvement of enterprise architecture. The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) is the best known and most trusted enterprise architecture standard used to improve the operational e ciency. It brings many benefits, but is also associated with costs. While the applicability to large enterprises is beyon...

The Standard-Model Extension (SME) is defined as the general effective field theory (EFT) that incorporates Lorentz violation. In flat Minkwoski spacetime, the SME has the following features: ⇒ it is defined in terms of an observer-scalar Lagrangian L ⇒ it includes dynamical matter fields φ, ψ, A, . . . ⇒ it includes fixed background tensors aμ, bμ, cμν , . . . that break Lorentz symmetry ⇒ it ...

Cooperation is a key success factor for small and medium enterprises (SME) in most of the countries. At the beginning of the 2000s, a large European study has analysed the extent and the effect of cooperation between SMEs. However, how successful have been cooperation of SMEs during the economic crisis of the last years? Has the cooperation rate decreased or increased? What are the drivers and ...

This paper proposes a model for the integration of a formal ontology and a folksonomy within a knowledge-based system. We evaluated such a model by designing ARNEIS 2.0, an “intelligent” and social web-based repository of software solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). ARNEIS 2.0 is a work in progress and aims at exploiting the integration of Semantic Web (ontologies and reason...

We analyze lending contracts when social sanctions are used to enforce repayments and borrowers di¤er in their unobserved sanctioning abilities. Symmetric group loans are preferred to cosigned loans when borrowers are relatively equal, and cosigned loans are preferred when borrowers are unequal. This explains why microlenders that target the poor (e.g., the Grameen Bank) use symmetric group loa...

This paper studies loan collateral and relationship banking. A firm has different loans (e.g. short-term and long-term loans) and alternative collateral assets. How does it allocate the collateral assets between the loans? It optimally secures a long-term loan with collateral that incurs high information costs initially and has a strong learning effect during the loan period (e.g. accounts rece...

This paper studies peer-to-peer (p2p) lending on the Internet. Prosper.com, the first p2p lending website in the US, matches individual lenders and borrowers for unsecured consumer loans. Using transaction data from June 1, 2006 to July 31, 2008, we examine what information problems exist on Prosper and whether social networks help alleviate the information problems. As we expect, data identifi...