The ratio of total household debt to aggregate personal income in the United States has risen from an average of 0.6 in the 1980s to an average of 1.0 so far this decade. In this paper we explore the causes and consequences of this dramatic increase. Demographic shifts, house price increases and fi nancial innovation all appear to have contributed to the rise. Households have become more expose...

This paper develops a model of financial institutions that borrow short term and invest in longterm assets that can be traded in frictionless markets. Because these financial intermediaries perform maturity transformation, they are subject to potential runs. We derive distinct liquidity, collateral, and asset liquidation constraints, which determine whether a run can occur as a result of changi...

Numerous computational methods exist to assess the mode and strength of natural selection in protein-coding sequences, yet how distinct methods relate to one another remains largely unknown. Here, we elucidate the relationship between two widely used phylogenetic modeling frameworks: dN/dS models and mutation-selection (MutSel) models. We derive a mathematical relationship between dN/dS and sca...

In this work we prove the generic simplicity of the spectrum of the clamped plate equation in a bounded regular domain of Rd. That is, given Ω ⊂ Rd, we show that there exists an arbitrarily small deformation of the domain u, such that all the eigenvalues of the plate system in the deformed domain Ω + u are simple. To prove this result we first prove a nonstandard unique continuation property fo...

We examine the holography bound suggested by Bousso in his covariant entropy conjecture, and argue that it is violated because his notion of light sheet is too generous. We suggest its replacement by a weaker bound.

South Africa is an important country within the continent of Africa. Its full adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in 2005 for listed firms is unique. In this paper, I study the effects of IFRS adoption on accounting quality. I define accounting quality as earnings quality and value relevance, and hypothesize that both will increase post IFRS adoption. In a variety of ...

Recently, all the human genes were identified. But understanding the functions coded in the genes is a much harder problem. We are used to view DNA as some sort of a computer code, but there are striking differences. For example, by using entropy, it has been shown that the DNA code is much closer to random code than written text, which in turn is less ordered than ordinary computer code. Inste...