We take a retrospective look at Hungary’s experiment with a particularly draconian bankruptcy law. For an eighteen-month period in 1992–93, the Hungarian bankruptcy code contained an unusual automatic trigger that required the managers of firms that held overdue debts of any size to any creditor to initiate reorganisation or liquidation proceedings to avoid prosecution under the civil code. We ...

Near field communication has enabled customers to put their credit cards into a smartphone and use the phone for credit card transaction. But EMV contactless payment allows unauthorized readers to access credit cards. Besides, in offline transaction, a merchant's reader cannot verify whether a card has been revoked. Therefore, we propose an EMV-compatible payment protocol to mitigate the transa...

We examine the productivity benefits of IT outsourcing in the credit union industry, using data on the population of U.S. credit unions from 1992-2005. Within-credit union switching from internal IT to outsourced IT reduces operating costs by roughly 30%, once we control for the endogeneity of switches. Less productive firms are more likely to outsource in the crosssection, and more likely to e...

Conventional measures of banking sector The traditional indicators utilized for assessing the size, depth and development of a country’s banking (financial) sector are: • The ratio of M2 to GDP • The ratio of private credit to GDP. In particular, both these measures have been used to show the causal effects of financial development on economic growth. However, both measures have some limitation...

Formal verification of liveness properties of practical communication fabrics are generally intractable with present day bit-level verification tools. We focus on a particular type of liveness called response. We show that a well-founded relation can be extracted from a high-level design of a communication fabric. This well-founded relation yields a set of local safety assertions, which are mor...

Social micro-blogging systems such as Twitter are designed for rapid and informal communication from a large potential number of participants. Due to the volume of content received, human users must typically skim their timeline of received content and exercise judgement in selecting items for consumption, necessitating a selection process based on heuristics and content meta-data. This selecti...

We examine a new construct dealing with individuals’ tendency to elaborate on potential outcomes, that is, to generate and evaluate potential positive and negative consequences of their behaviors. We develop the elaboration on potential outcomes (EPO) scale and then investigate its relationships with conceptually related traits and its association with consumer behaviors such as exercise of sel...

Research on relationship lending focuses attention on economic factors which influence the relationships between SMEs’ owners/managers and banks but no previous work has focused on the role of trust. Trust is expected to reduce agency costs, the perceived credit risk and, thus, influence credit availability and credit terms. Trustworthiness is associated with three attributes of SME owner manag...