samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
I am especially grateful for the support from the faculty over the years – both while I was a student and afterwards. There are two people I would particularly like to highlight: Jan Van der Veen – Jan was the professor who really got me started in economics. Bob Bennedetti – Bob agreed to a contract in which I would get a semester of college credit mainly through working on the 1972 presidential campaign in the California primary election and in Ohio for the general election. Probably learned more from that experience than anything else I have ever done in higher education. I would encourage all of you – Republicans, Democrats and Independents – to get involved in public service at some point in your careers. I have many memories of New College – some about people such as Jan and Bob, and others about events and experiences. For example, one of the most remarkable events I have ever witnessed occurred here one night in December 1972 – the first Apollo spacecraft night launch. I remember staring out from the top of a dormitory roof not far from here across the horizon looking at the star specks – wondering, is that the rocket? When it actually came up over the horizon it truly was amazing. I remember it as no bigger than a half-inch gap between your thumb and index finger at arm’s length.

In Chart 7, the greater the number of years spent in school, the darker the green in which the country is colored. In Asia, there are a number of dark green areas, such as Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. As you would expect, Hong Kong and Singapore also belong to this group, although it is not shown clearly on this map. One may get the impression that Asia as a whole is not as green as North America or Europe, and is more or less similar to South America. This would seem to indicate that there remains significant potential for further accumulation of human capital in the region. At the same time, there are some interesting figures relating to U.S. universities, which are generally acknowledged as providing the highest standard of education, attracting talented people from all over the world. If you look at the data for U.S. university students by their country of origin, you can see that students from Asian countries dominate, as shown in Chart 8. Those students returning to their home countries will no doubt have a profound impact on the human capital there. It is well known that Bangalore, the IT hub of India, benefited from returnees from Silicon Valley. Moretti’s study shows that innovative, highly skilled workers contribute not only directly to the higher quality of human capital, but they also have a positive effect on the skills of those around them – a sort of positive externality.
The fox and the hedgehog: preparing in a world of high risk and high uncertainty Speech given by Charlotte Gerken, Executive Director, Insurance Supervision InsuranceERM Risk and Capital EMEA Virtual Conference 3 December 2020  I would like to thank Alan Sheppard, Zachary Morris-Dyer, Gareth Truran, Anthony Brown, Robin Swain, Manuel Sales, Olga Filipenko and Sarah O’Sullivan for their assistance preparing these remarks. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  Good morning. Thank you to Insurance ERM for inviting me to speak at your conference. When I told a colleague I had been asked to give a talk on responses to risk, he told me: “the fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one important thing.” I was curious to learn more: this idea came from a fragment of text by an Ancient Greek poet Archilochus of Paros; it inspired Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 essay on Tolstoy’s view of history; and has been used in Jim Collins’s book From Good to Great. What it boils down to is a way of thinking, one that guides how you prepare for and respond to risk: the fox looking at every eventuality; the hedgehog’s one big idea being to curl into a ball and wait for the peril to pass. I’m left with the image of the fox hopping about and getting ever more frustrated as it schemes how to get at the hedgehog.

Structural reforms of this sort have been decided upon by national governments within the framework of the agreements made in Lisbon and we should not forget that the ultimate objective is to increase the pace of economic growth in order to ensure more prosperity and provide more jobs for everyone, which is fundamental for the weakest and the poorest. Rather than finding a compromise between the various members of our society, between those that have costs and those that reap the benefits, I see it more as a compromise between the present and future. It is a forwardlooking investment and a better future for the weakest part of the population which entails costs at the beginning. And in any case let us not forget that we cannot ask our children and grandchildren to pay our bills! In Europe, the population is shrinking to the point that by 2020, according to different studies, there will be 20 million people available for work. In the United States, it is on the rise. How is this? Perhaps this is because the United States is a population with entire generations of immigrants in which the birth rate is higher. And then there is the cultural aspect, they are more optimistic than us. Why? This involves philosophical and cultural aspects and I am not convinced that they are structural.
There are three answers that I would rule out: the answer is not to go back to the good old days, because viewed with hindsight they don’t look that good; the answer is not to wish that finance should be simpler, something that is too idealistic to have relevance to today’s challenge; and the answer is not to repeal the duty of responsibility as it will apply to the Chairs of Boards and Board committees because as quite a few have said to me, “what’s all the fuss, this is just a description of what we are here to do.” So, what might the answer be? In the work that we are doing at the PRA to overhaul our approach to supervision of governance in firms as it relates to our statutory objectives, we want to help to get this issue on the table and make real progress. My hunch, as I have explained today, is that one answer lies in the approach by which Non-Executives are informed by Executives about firms and thus for Executives to enable rigorous challenge and to be given credit for doing so even where the consequences will be sometimes uncomfortable. We will always be cautious of Executives who seem to see Non-Executives as some form of threat; the really effective Executives are those who see their Non-Executive colleagues’ experience  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  and knowledge as a means of improving the effectiveness of the Board’s judgement through constructive support and challenge.

One thing is clear in our work, it is time to take stock on this issue. Thank you. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches
As a Thammasat Economics alumnus, it is an honor and a great pleasure to be ‘home’ addressing the distinguished guests and participants of this prominent conference. Thank you. BIS Review 62/2002  5

That is why we are treading a fine line between stimulus to demand in the short run, and a rebalancing away from private and public consumption towards exports and import substitution in the longer run. Without monetary stimulus – low interest rates and large asset purchases – there is a risk that growth will stall and inflation fall below our symmetric 2% target. But easy monetary policy, by bringing forward spending from the future to the present, means that the ultimate adjustment of borrowing and spending will be even greater. That is our dilemma, and that of other deficit countries. The best way to escape this dilemma would be higher spending by the surplus countries – to make possible rebalancing by the deficit countries – and supply-side reforms in the deficit countries – to raise expected future incomes and ease the burden of debt repayments. Each country can put itself in a position to rebalance, as we have done in the UK. But in the absence of rebalancing, globally and especially in the euro area, we could be facing a recovery that is not merely reluctant but recalcitrant. Just as St. George’s Hall was reconstructed to meet the needs of Liverpool in the twenty-first century, so the international financial system must be reconstructed to ensure a return to prosperity. We can be optimistic – the fundamentals of the UK economy are strong. But without a rebalancing of spending in the world economy, a struggle between debtor and creditor countries will inflict economic pain on everyone.
The higher is the trust in the institutions, the easier it is done. And institutions themselves build credibility in the times of crisis. The second lesson is adaptability. Although resilience and adaptability are linked, they are different in important ways. Resilience entails enduring a challenge, while adaptability refers to the ability to thrive beyond it. In the EU, progress on this front is evident. We have been moving from reactive policies to strategic decision-making. The recent crises brought about some tectonic institutional enhancements: the early months of the pandemic led to the establishment of the EU recovery fund, which constituted a breakthrough for the financial solidarity of member states. The Next Generation EU package provided an anchor for investment in the  2/4  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  green and digital transitions in a way that will support resilience and adaptability in the long term. Finally, the REPowerEU Plan aims to end dependence on Russian fossil fuels, but also entails measures for energy savings, new energy storage rules, and a strategy to buy energy together. That being said, adaptability is difficult to nurture, as we often tend to stick to existing patterns of behaviour and decision-making, especially when there is no imminent crisis that would push changes and force us to think outside the box. The last lesson that I'd like to mention (though you can derive more) is cooperation.

These loans are used to finance human capital investment projects with returns that are highly uncertain. It’s true that virtually every study finds that the returns on college degrees are high, on average, relative to their cost. But some people who take out student loans don’t end up with these high average returns. The net returns for some may, in fact, be negative. For example, many who have pursued vocational training may be less remunerated in the market. Similarly, some students attend certain for-profit universities with track records that indicate that their graduates have lower lifetime earnings than other types of educational institutions. While others drop out before receiving a degree – just 59 percent of the 2006 cohort had received their four-year degree by 2012. Of course, uncertain returns are a feature of most investments, but for other loan types this uncertainty is generally managed more effectively through credit underwriting, collateralization and risk-based interest rates. We are fairly confident in the aggregate statistics – over a trillion dollars in loan balances outstanding, 43 million borrowers and the highest delinquency rates of any form of household debt. But we know a lot less about the precise causes and consequences of the heterogeneity in the net returns to educational investments that I just described. What we know so far, based on very imperfect data, suggests that this heterogeneity is likely to be very important.
The current reference value for the HICP inflation criterion is influenced by countries whose energy needs are satisfied in varying degrees by non-oil fuels. At the same time, of the NMS that would not have satisfied the inflation criterion on the basis of the March 2006 data, some are more heavily dependent on oil imports, so that price levels generally in these countries have been reflecting the higher cost of oil and energy to a much greater degree than is the case in the reference countries. This argument could also apply to Malta in the future since not only is oil the sole source of electricity generation, but a high proportion of drinking water needs are also met by the transformation of sea water, a process that involves a high consumption of electricity. The difficulty of controlling inflation in current circumstances is indeed also reflected in the fact that three of the present euro area members exceed the inflation reference value by an average of 1 percentage point, and there is evidence pointing towards a divergence in inflation rates between these countries over the past five years. 9 Moreover, the NMS have registered rates of inflation between 2002 and 2005 that were around one half those recorded during the preceding four-year period. This is indicative of the significant degree of macroeconomic stabilisation taking place, at the same time that progress continued to be registered in terms of real convergence.

Figure 10 CPI monthly inflation (percent) 2.0  2.0  1.5  1.5  1.0  1.0  0.5  0.5  0.0  0.0  -0.5  -0.5  -1.0  -1.0  -1.5  -1.5  Jan.  Feb.  Mar. Apr. May  2001-2006 average  Jun. 2007  Jul. Aug.  Sep.  2008  Oct.  Nov.  Dec.  2009  Source: National Statistics Bureau (INE). 12  BIS Review 65/2009  Table 3 Inflation (annual change, percent) 2006  2007  2008  2009 (f)  2010 (f)  Average CPI inflation December CPI inflation CPI inflation two years ahead (*)  3.4 2.6  4.4 7.8  8.7 7.1  2.3 0.6  1.5 2.3  Average CPIX inflation December CPIX inflation CPIX inflation two years ahead (*)  3.2 2.7  4.0 6.3  8.4 8.7  3.7 0.5  1.1 2.2  Average CPIX1 inflation December CPIX1 inflation CPIX1 inflation two years ahead (*)  2.5 2.4  4.1 6.3  7.8 7.9  3.8 1.0  1.0 2.2  2011 (f)  3.0  2.9  3.0  (f) Projection. (*) Inflation projected for the second quarter of 2011. Source: Central Bank of Chile.
More importantly, the licensing of new retakaful operators in Malaysia will also ensure that the technical knowledge is made more readily available and enhanced in the market, particularly in takaful and retakaful underwriting, as well as in promoting product development and innovation. Under this initiative, qualified applicants will be allowed to conduct in both the Malaysia Ringgit and international currencies retakaful business under the Takaful Act 1984. Flexibility is accorded to the retakaful operators to conduct its retakaful business in Malaysia by way of an incorporated entity or a branch. Foreign applicant is also welcome d to conduct retakaful business in Malaysia through a joint-venture with Malaysian companies, subject to the merits of each case. It is anticipated that this measure would serve as a catalyst in our efforts for Malaysia to become the centre for takaful and retakaful business through the establishment of a significant number of strong and reputable retakaful operators. Ladies and gentlemen, Let me conclude by saying that the future prospects of the takaful industry will be very much depend on the combined efforts of all the relevant parties; the regulators, market participants and the international community at large, to chart the strategic direction for the industry. Collective effort is crucial in order to maximize the potential for the industry. Sharing common vision and goal will be an important first step. I believe that our sincere efforts in realizing this noble objective would InsyaAllah, God Almighty will shower us with His blessings, guidance and assistance.

Both also share strong call for “muhasabah” or reflection – to strategize for the future by reflecting on past experiences. My address today will touch on these two aspects. I will share my observations on the significant trends surrounding takaful industry in recent years as well as key focus areas for the industry moving forward. Finally, I will highlight a couple of major initiatives undertaken by Malaysia to further strengthen as well as expand the breadth and depth of the takaful and retakaful industry. High growth potential of global takaful market As a starting point, allow me to share with you five major trends in global takaful industry over the past few years. These trends have significant bearing on the development of this industry moving forward. First, the takaful and retakaful industry continued to show rapid growth momentum, and is increasingly being recognized as one of the major components of the overall Islamic financial system . Global takaful contributions amounted more than USD2 billion in 2005 and are expected to reach USD7 billion by 2015. The past few years have seen growth rates of around 20%, indicating high growth potential in years to come due especially to the present very low rate of takaful market penetration. As for Malaysia, a commendable track record of the takaful industry has been recorded since its inception more than two decades ago. For the first half of this year, the total assets of the takaful funds stood at RM7.6 billion (as equivalent to USD2.2 billion).
Such action would be in line with the recommendations recently made by the European Council for all European countries in the framework of the review of governance in Europe. 4  BIS Review 129/2010  A key element of the Budgetary Stability Law for achieving fiscal discipline is transparency. The dissemination of data relating to the non-financial activity of the State is abundant, detailed and released with a relatively small lag. This is regrettably not the case for regional or local governments, which curtails the ability to control their activity in time and accountability. In my view, these shortcomings must urgently be redressed. At a time such as the present, a lack of transparency may lead to a lack of market confidence that takes the form of a further premium on the cost of financing. Given the circumstances, all available instruments should be used to ensure compliance with the targets set. In particular, authorisation for regional and local governments to issue new debt should be conditional upon compliance with consolidation plans. A spending ceiling might even be considered for these governments, an instrument which has proven enormously useful in strengthening budgetary discipline in the case of the State. Along the same lines, medium-term planning necessitating analysis of the structural dynamics of the various public revenue and spending items and enabling those areas where the scope for rationalisation and adjustment are greater to be detected may prove appropriate, especially when adjustment measures going beyond a temporary correction of imbalances are required.

Had this situation continued, it would have jeopardised the soundness of the financial system and the vital funding of the economy. In order to break the dangerous dynamic unleashed and to restore confidence in the Spanish economy, which had become the main objective, it was vital to set new bearings for economic policy through the adoption of substantial fiscal, labour and financial measures. I previously had the opportunity to inform you of the numerous financial measures pursued to oversee the necessary restructuring of the Spanish banking system, an essential condition for the sound and sustainable recovery of the economy. Allow me today to refer to the role played by the stress tests of the banking system in late July. These are a marker of the progress made in restructuring and, above all, they have provided for an exercise in transparency, allowing us to break the vicious circle of lack of confidence that was building up on the basis of relatively unfounded assumptions and expectations. As you will recall, when I presented the Banco de España Annual Report for 2009 in June, I set out our intention to publish the stress tests of all Spanish banks and savings banks. This initiative was assumed at European level by the European Council under Spain’s presidency, and the results of the exercise, harmonised by the Committee of European Banking Supervisors, were published on 23 July.
In addition, governments of the region should also take a careful look at existing social policies so that they are aimed at reducing poverty and improving the access of the poorest groups of the population to quality education and health services. In his concise and well-focused document, launched before the 2005 Annual Meetings, Mr de Rato addressed the fundamental strategic question for the Fund: Given the purpose of the Fund, as set out in Article I of Articles of Agreement, what is the relevance of the Fund in today’s global economy and financial markets? In our opinion, the Fund has a privileged position to contribute to more effective management of global macroeconomic and financial risks around the world. This process involves taking several steps simultaneously: •  Identify threats to global macroeconomic and financial stability and to member countries;  •  Quantify its effects on key variables such as exchange rates, relative prices, and real outputs, etc. ;  •  Identify economic and financial vulnerabilities at global, regional and country level;  •  Manage implied risks by making better analyses and developing better understanding of institutional and market mechanisms so as to absorb, cushion, transfer, hedge, strengthen the resilience to such risks, and ultimately, minimize their potential impact;  •  Continue surveillance of risks and vulnerabilities. In our opinion, continued surveillance of macroeconomic and financial stability is a shared responsibility of the Fund, member countries, and private sector institutions of the international financial system, especially those participants of systemic relevance.

(2013), “Monetary policy and employment: monetary policy is too tight”, speech at the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, Stockholm, 16 January 2013. Sveriges Riksbank. Vredin, Anders, Martin Flodén, Anna Larsson and Morten Ravn (2012), Report of the Economic Policy Group 2012. Simple rules, difficult times - does stabilisation policy need to be changed?, SNS Förlag (Stockholm). BIS central bankers’ speeches  17