The need for effective safety nets and social security has been highlighted by the recent crisis in East-Asia. In other parts of the developing world or in transition economies, the large economic fluctuations, climatic shocks and natural disasters also demand further development of support systems during crises. In this paper, we discuss the role played by self-insurance (via savings) in the p...

Natural resource management (NRM) in Australia began as a series of campaigns against specific threats to agricultural and pastoral production, with war progressively declared on soil erosion, introduced pests and dryland salinity. Critiques of NRM programs in the 1990s coincided with a shift towards an asset-based approach. This approach emphasises the need for public investment to be focused ...

This paper studies the use of social simulation in linking micro level investor behaviour and macro level stock market dynamics. Empirical data from a survey on individual investors' decision-making and social interaction was used to formalize the trading and interaction rules of the agents of the artificial stock market SimStockExchange. Multiple simulation runs were performed with this artifi...

Using a panel of 65,551 firms over the period 2000-2006, we examine the capital structure determinants of Chinese privately owned small and medium-sized enterprises. We find that investment in the building and maintenance of social capital, measured by entertainment expenditure, is positively associated with short-term leverage, but negatively associated with long-term leverage, while the oppos...

Software assets are key output of the RAGE project and they can be used by applied game developers to enhance the pedagogical and educational value of their games. These software assets cover a broad spectrum of functionalities – from player analytics including emotion detection to intelligent adaptation and social gamification. In order to facilitate integration and interoperability, all of th...

INTRODUCTION " Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured. " (The Associated Press, 10:07, April 23rd 2013) 72 characters later, the S&P500 index lost more than 121 billion US dollars until the tweet was proven false and confirmed to be sent by a hacked Associated Press account. A 1.68 billion-dollar bill for each character written. However, this particular event sh...

This paper analyzes the effect of transaction costs on the social learning in an asset market with asymmetric information, sequential trading and competitive price mechanism. Both fixed and proportional transaction costs reduce the informational content of trading orders and lead to informational cascades. If transaction costs are very high, an informational cascade can occur not only when beli...

A representative individual lives for two periods; works when young and depends on savings and a government operated social security system when old—the returns on both sources of income, when old, are random. Due to administrative problems the returns to savings are observed with some measurement error. Two alternative consumption tax systems are considered; the Registered Asset Treatment (RAT...

I develop a general equilibrium model in which the quality of household financial decisions is endogenously determined by the incentives to exert effort in learning about financial opportunities. The model generates predictions for asset market participation and returns across households. Moreover, search for financial returns enables the model to generate a more skewed equilibrium wealth distr...