Do banks and microfinance institutions compete? Microevidence from Madagascar

in Economic Development and Cultural Change (in press)

This paper examines whether the loan strategy of a microfinance institution is shaped by the entry of a bank. Specifically, we investigate whether the distance between a borrower of a microfinance ... [more ▼]

This paper examines whether the loan strategy of a microfinance institution is shaped by the entry of a bank. Specifically, we investigate whether the distance between a borrower of a microfinance institution and the closest bank influences loan conditions provided by the microfinance institution. We use an original panel dataset of 32,374 loans granted to 14,834 borrowers provided by one of the largest microfinance institutions in Madagascar between 2008 and 2014. We find that the closer a bank is located to a given MFI borrower, the larger the loan obtained and the less collateral required. We also find that the effect is stronger for clients that could be more easily caught by banks (i.e., large firms and clients without a previous relationship with the MFI). [less ▲]

L’autobiographie dans la littérature de l’immigration italienne du Luxembourg et de la Grande Région

in Cicotti, Claudio (Ed.) La volonté d s'écrire (in press)

Towards an alternative to territorial jurisdiction to face criminality committed through or facilitated by the use of blockchains

in Eurojus (in press)

Characterization of field homomorphisms through Pexiderized functional equations

in Journal of Difference Equations and Applications (in press)

Der Reaktor als grenzüberschreitende Risikozone in der Großregion. Ökologische, interkulturelle und didaktische Herausforderungen der Kernenergie

in Thiltges, Sébastian; Solte-Gresser, Christiane (Eds.) Kulturökologie und ökologische Kulturen in der Großregion (in press)

Administrative Law and Policy of the European Union

Book published by Oxford University Pressq - 2nd edition (in press)

The European Union is a union under the rule of law and accordingly all exercise of public authority needs to conform with the principle of legality. The legal framework of the EU is, however, as much as ... [more ▼]

The European Union is a union under the rule of law and accordingly all exercise of public authority needs to conform with the principle of legality. The legal framework of the EU is, however, as much as that of any state or international organization, subject to change over time. That part of this legal framework specifically governing EU administration has been particularly dynamic. The central reason for this dynamism is to be found in the evolving nature of European integration, and in the changing requirements and conditions for implementing EU policies. The legal framework of administration has been both the subject of, and a response to, change in the ambient political and institutional environment. The EU, having started as an organization of six Member States focused on economic integration, has evolved into a Union of twenty-seven Member States now touching almost all elements of the exercise of public power in a modern society. The evolutionary development of the constitutional basis of EU law, with its many phases of Treaty reforms and change induced by case-law, finds its parallel in EU administrative law. European administrative law has in this process grown, changed, and indeed matured over time, and has emerged as an important, yet sometimes not well understood, factor which materially shapes policy in the EU and its achievement in reality. The rise of the importance of EU administrative law is itself attributable both to the specificities of European integration and to the general increase in the importance of administrative regulation in the past decades. On the one hand, the protection of the society against risks associated with private activity such as banking, food production, energy production and distribution, transport, or activities threatening to the environment, to name just a few, and the achievement of a balance between their benefits and dangers have become increasingly important subjects of attention. On the other hand, the provision of services and infrastructure necessary to ensure and protect basic standards of living such as pensions, health care, access to water, energy supply and telecommunications services have been the subject of mixed regimes, often still having a strong public service element, but increasingly left to private provision subject to various levels of market regulation. Both kinds of motivation for regulatory measures and their implementation by appropriate authorities have added to, and substantially changed, the broad character of public administration in Europe in recent decades. Such changes have occurred not just on a national, that is, Member State level, but also, pre-eminently, on the level of the European Community and now Union. Indeed, many of the changes have themselves been triggered on the European level as integral or at least adjuvant elements of the establishment of the European internal market. The role, then, of administrative law and administrative activity on the European level is extensive and important. Rules and principles governing the exercise of administrative functions, the organization of the institutions and bodies exercising these functions, and applicable procedures are the essence of EU administrative law. These are the subject of this book. There are, it must be observed, many perspectives from which one can view, analyse and comprehend both administration and administrative law. Three models or perspectives appear to us to be particularly helpful: administration and administrative law may be usefully considered from functional, organizational, and procedural standpoints. The functional aspect of administration refers to the totality of the tasks of administration, no matter who undertakes them and how they are carried out. The organizational perspective emphasises the organization and structure of the institutions, bodies, and actors engaged in undertaking such tasks. Finally, a procedural understanding of administration observes the processes which link the various actors and authorities in the performance of administrative functions. None of these models standing alone provides a fully rounded understanding or conceptualisation of the subject matter of the book. A proper analysis of EU administrative law cannot view it from only one of these perspectives. Taken together, however, these three standpoints do offer a comprehensive perception, giving the subject a more multi-dimensional shape, and thus allowing a more tractable presentation of what is very complex material. For this reason, we offer a discussion of each of these three perspectives — the functional, organizational, and procedural aspects of European Union administration and the associated legal framework — by way of introduction. The three models are, of course, closely interlinked and in reality scarcely separable but, for analytical and presentational clarity, they are here addressed separately. [less ▲]

The mod 2 cohomology rings of congruence subgroups in the Bianchi groups

E-print/Working paper (in press)

We provide new tools for the calculation of the torsion in the cohomology of congruence subgroups in the Bianchi groups : An algorithm for finding particularly useful fundamental domains, and an analysis ... [more ▼]

We provide new tools for the calculation of the torsion in the cohomology of congruence subgroups in the Bianchi groups : An algorithm for finding particularly useful fundamental domains, and an analysis of the equivariant spectral sequence combined with torsion subcomplex reduction. [less ▲]

Netzwerkvisualisierungen in den Geschichtswissenschaften zwischen explorativer Quellenanalyse und der Suggestionskraft des Bildes

in Häußling, Roger (Ed.) Visualisierung sozialer Netzwerke (in press)

Environmental and Sustainability Education in the Benelux Region

in Environmental Education Research (in press), (Special Issue),

A Methodology for Handling Data Movements by Anticipation: Position Paper

in Euro-Par 2018 Workshops (in press)

The enhanced capabilities of large scale parallel and distributed platforms produce a continuously increasing amount of data which have to be stored, exchanged and used by various tasks allocated on ... [more ▼]

The enhanced capabilities of large scale parallel and distributed platforms produce a continuously increasing amount of data which have to be stored, exchanged and used by various tasks allocated on different nodes of the system. The management of such a huge communication demand is crucial for reaching the best possible performance of the system. Meanwhile, we have to deal with more interferences as the trend is to use a single all-purpose interconnection network whatever the interconnect (tree-based hierarchies or topology-based heterarchies). There are two different types of communications, namely, the flows induced by data exchanges during the computations, and the flows related to Input/Output operations. We propose in this paper a general model for interference-aware scheduling, where explicit communications are replaced by external topological constraints. Specifically, the interferences of both communication types are reduced by adding geometric constraints on the allocation of tasks into machines. The proposed constraints reduce implicitly the data movements by restricting the set of possible allocations for each task. This methodology has been proved to be efficient in a recent study for a restricted interconnection network (a line/ring of processors which is an intermediate between a tree and higher dimensions grids/torus). The obtained results illustrated well the difficulty of the problem even on simple topologies, but also provided a pragmatic greedy solution, which was assessed to be efficient by simulations. We are currently extending this solution for more complex topologies. This work is a position paper which describes the methodology, it does not focus on the solving part. [less ▲]