Is the observed large increase in consumer indebtedness since the 1980s beneficial for U.S. consumers? This paper quantitatively studies the macroeconomic and welfare implications of relaxing borrowing constraints when consumers exhibit a hyperbolic discounting preference. The model can capture two contrasting views: the positive view, which links increased indebtedness to financial innovation ...

BACKGROUND Prescription medication borrowing and sharing is a behaviour that has been identified in patients of all ages. This behaviour is recognised by medical researchers and government health authorities as a potential risk factor in adverse drug events across the community. OBJECTIVE This article discusses prescription medication borrowing and sharing and identifies populations more like...

This paper looks at public sector debt in developing countries, being concerned specifically with the relationship between aid inflows and the public sector borrowing requirement net of aid loans. After examining the public sector budget constraint and various conditions under which aid might lead to an increase in this borrowing, the paper surveys the empirical results of literature on aid and...

Large vocabulary continuous speech recognition is always a difficult task, and it is particularly so for low-resource languages. The scenario we focus on here is having only 1 hour of acoustic training data in the “target” language. This paper presents work on a data borrowing strategy combined with the recently proposed Subspace Gaussian Mixture Model (SGMM). We developed data borrowing strate...

AIMS To give a detailed description of injection-related risk behaviours, and to estimate the relative importance of these behaviours with regard to HIV transmission. DESIGN The present study was part of the Amsterdam Cohort Study of drug users. SETTING In Amsterdam, a city with extensive preventive measures, large HIV-risk reductions have taken place, but no further decreases have occurred...

We extend the theoretical model of external corporate financing to the case when the buyers of the borrowing firm may default during the financing period. In our setup there is an asymmetric information and hence moral hazard between the lender and the borrower concerning the effrts of the borrower. We define the optimal debt contract in two cases. In the symmetric case the lender and the borro...

EMU driven interest rate convergence has led to a significant reduction of borrowing costs for some European governments in the second half of the nineties. The paper deals with the possible consequences for deficit behaviour. Although the impact of interest rates on deficits is a crucial element of the market discipline hypothesis it has widely been neglected in the literature. In the theoreti...

Multi-word lexical units are a typical feature of specialized dictionaries, in particular monolingual and bilingual maritime dictionaries. The paper studies the concept of the multi-word lexical unit and considers the similarities and differences of their selection and presentation in monolingual and bilingual maritime dictionaries. The work analyses such issues as the classification of multi-w...

Equity culture has spread among households on both sides of the Atlantic. We study likely effects of equity culture on the behavior of households entering the stock market. Without borrowing constraints, the improved prospects arising from the equity premium tend to dominate the increase in riskiness of future income streams. This encourages entrants to increase consumption, borrowing, and prec...