Spanish Abstract: En 2014 el Ministerio de Educación Nacional de Colombia lanzó el programa Ser Pilo Paga como parte del objetivo de convertir el país en el más educado de América Latina en el 2025. Desde su creación, el programa ha beneficiado a más de 30,000 jóvenes de escasos recursos...

pt. 1. Migrant labour and 'quality' food products -- pt. 2. Social (un)sustainability of intensive agriculture : migrant labour in supply chains 'under pressure' in Southern Europe -- pt. 3. Restructuring of agri-food systems in Maghreb and Middle-East -- pt. 4. Restructuring of agricultural...

This article extends the parametric portfolio policy approach to optimizing portfolios with a large numbers of assets (Brandt, et al. 2009). The proposed approach incorporates unobserved effects into the portfolio policy function. These effects measure the importance of unobserved heterogeneity...

This paper assesses the sensitivity of solvency stress testing results to the choice of credit risk variable and level of data aggregation at which the stress test is conducted. In practice, both choices are often determined by technical considerations, such as data availability. Using data for...

In December 2013 the National Bank of Belgium introduced a sectoral capital requirement aimed at strengthening the resilience of Belgian banks against adverse developments in the real estate market. This paper assesses the impact of this macroprudential measure on mortgage lending spreads. Our...

Financial institutions are connected to each other by a series of bilateral transactions. In normal times, institutions' connections may result in efficient risk transfer. But in crises, connections can facilitate contagion - as initial problems lead to chains of defaults and liquidity shortages...

This Occasional Paper presents a formal statistical evaluation of potential early warning indicators for real estate-related banking crises. Relying on data on real estate-related banking crises for 25 EU countries, a signalling approach is applied in both a non-parametric and a parametric...

This paper empirically examines the effects of discriminatory fees on ATM investment and welfare, and considers the role of coordination in ATM investment between banks. Our main findings are that foreign fees tend to reduce ATM availability and (consumer) welfare, whereas surcharges positively...