This paper argues that macroeconomic stability depends less on riskless interest rates than on leverage and other measures of credit conditions, like average FICO scores of borrowers. It suggests that the leverage cycle played a central role in the recent American and European financial crisis. In the leverage cycle, asset prices and leverage rise when volatility is low and then fall as volatil...

3D Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) have been in the focus of CSCW research for some time. This paper presents a study comparing teamwork done in a CVE with teamwork done in a 2D remote condition and a F2F control condition. The tasks done were designed for groups without prior knowledge; they did not favor any of the environments. In some dependent variables, the 3D environment outper...

The interdisciplinary research presented in this article is part of the study of collective human activities supported by technical devices. We begin by stating the objectives of the study and the type of activity observed, i.e., joint mediated writing. Then we describe our procedure by (i) justifying our methodological choices, which are grounded in a psycho-ergonomic approach of ethnographica...

Islamic banking is one the most blossoming doctrine in economic system of the world. The Fast growing awareness about Islamic financial system has brought strong feeling to Muslims to confront the western interest-based economic cycle. The Islamic economic system is emerging as a reliable alternative to the interest based system. This study is proposed to ascertain the motivational factors enco...

The neoclassical production function assumes that economic growth depends on exogenous factors of production centred on capital, labour and technology. However, residual variables, notably social capabilities and knowledge, are neglected. This study seeks to highlight that, in fact, they are key variables for understanding the economic growth and recent structural changes of an industrial clust...

Central banks and other policy institutions have a long history of using macroeconomic models to help prepare forecasts and to quantify the economic consequences of various policies. Likewise, private sector firms have long depended on models to summarize these complex interactions succinctly and to evaluate the likelihood of specific macroeconomic outcomes; this is especially true for financia...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the journey-to-work commute patterns for male teenage workers within a single local labor market: the Oakland Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area. Controlling for the intervening opportunities and the intervening labor supply between a given origin and destination reduces the estimated negative effect of distance on the inter-zonal flow of labor by near...

In this paper we investigate whether banks that borrow from other banks have lower risk levels. We concentrate on a large sample of Central and Eastern European banks which allows us to explore the impact of interbank lending when exposures are long-term and interbank borrowers are small banks. The results of the empirical analysis generally confirm the hypothesis that long-term interbank expos...

engineering and related sciences are among the most important compartments of the knowledge, which has been developed during centuries in order to provide a better life for human being. unfortunately, during the expansion of this knowledge, the aim has been sometimes neglected. in fact, human being has been destroying and depleting the natural resources, which is related on them for his life. t...