on the basis of any conventional methods of evaluating balance sheet liquidity for U.S. health systems1, it might appear that some of the larger systems, as measured by asset base and operating revenue performance, are getting stronger. Even some midsized community health systems seem to be performing better in terms of such liquidity measures as cash-to-debt ratios, days cash on hand, and othe...

This paper develops a life insurance liability valuation model that integrates the balance-sheet insurer loans with shadow banking entrusted in premature default risk environment. It is shown policyholder significantly benefits from loan activities less likely The protection increased accord high guaranteed interest rate, particularly when company has ample access to loans. also by participatio...

We present novel empirical evidence on the use of off-balance sheet financing by publiclytraded, U.S. nonfinancial firms. We find that about 5 percent of nonfinancial firms reported using a special purpose financing vehicle (SPV) to finance receivables in 2006. At the origination of the off-balance sheet financing program, firms experienced abnormal increases in stock prices on the order of 2 p...

In spite of the mystique behind a central bank’s balance sheet, its resource constraint bounds the dividends it can distribute by the present value of seignorage, which is a modest share of GDP. Moreover, the statutes of the Federal Reserve or the ECB make it difficult for it to redistribute resources across regions. In a simple model of sovereign default, where multiple equilibria arise if deb...

C. Fred Bergsten is the director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He was assistant secretary for international affairs of the US Treasury (1977–81) and assistant for international economic affairs at the National Security Council (1969–71). He was chairman of APEC’s Eminent Persons Group throughout its existence from 1993 to 1995. The latest of his 37 books is China: The B...

This paper studies the interest rate exposure of the housing markets and the role of housing prices in monetary transmission mechanism in two emerging markets, Czech Republic and South Africa. The Granger causality test results indicate that housing price fluctuations create wealth and balance sheet effect in both countries. The results of impulse response functions based on the VECMs show that...

The global sea level rise has been attributed to the melting of mountain glaciers among other causes. The mass balance of the glacial ice plays an important role in the rise of the Earth’s sea level. A key variable in assessing the mass balance of an ice sheet is accumulation rate, which is currently determined from ice cores and pits. Accumulation data are sparse, and there are large uncertain...

[1] A new three-dimensional thermomechanically coupled ice sheet model is developed. Contrary to the majority of three-dimensional ice sheet models (shallow ice approximation), higher-order stress gradients (longitudinal and transverse) are accounted for in the force balance equations. The horizontal velocity field is determined from the force balance equations in their ‘‘derivative form’’ (ell...