Joanna BĆach, Monika WieczorekâKosmala, Maria GorczyĆska, Anna DoĆ
IntroductionLiquidity management is a crucial managerial area of corporate finance. There is a common knowledge that even the most profitable company may go bankrupt if it does not manage its liquidity in a proper way. The importance of liquidity maintenance arises in times of crisis characterized by the high volatility of financial markets and clear symptoms of economic downturn.In this paper we focus on the problem of liquidity management by discussing the objectives and functions of corporate treasury. Corporate treasury is relatively new phenomenon, representing a profession dedicated for a defined, complex set of financial management-related tasks in a company. Corporate treasury function may be performed solely or by a dedicated department under the CFO supervision.In particular, the purpose of this paper is to support a thesis that corporate treasury has potential to enhance innovative actions within liquidity management. This potential arises primarily from the holistic managerial approach of the corporate treasury, which is supported by the broad understanding of the entire company and the extensive knowledge of all financial management areas that influence liquidity (through cash inflows and outflows) accompanied by the deep knowledge of financial market and instruments.This is a conceptual paper, based on the analysis of the current literature and practical documents. The paper is organized as follows. In the first Section we present the contemporary views on corporate treasury objectives and functions. The second Section discusses the understanding of liquidity management of a company, with cash management as the core issue regarding actions within, in the context of the core function of corporate treasury. In the third Section we address the potential areas of innovative actions of corporate treasury. The last Section concludes the paper.1. The identity of corporate treasury objectives and functionsCorporate treasury management involves financial activities within maximizing company's liquidity and mitigating various types of financial risk. However, the understanding of tasks and functions of corporate treasury is not homogenous. Possibly, it is partially connected with the clearly visible several stages of the development of corporate treasury functions. The role of the corporate treasury evolved over time, as the financial market was developing and becoming more volatile, with the growing importance of large international corporations (Figure 1).The evolution of the treasury role can be divided into three phases. During Phase I (Immature Treasury, TS 1.0) before the 1970s, treasury functions were decentralized and informal, characterized by manual processes, concerned with operational activities. Phase II (Mature Treasury, TS 2.0) started with the introduction of floating currencies systems and the end of gold standard for US dollar. This led to the increased volatility in financial markets and greater importance of treasury that become focused on financial risk management, using more and more sophisticated tools and instruments. Changing role of the treasury in Phase III (Strategic Treasury, TS 3.0) is a result of globalization process and increased complexity of financial system. Corporate treasury has to coordinate its activity with business partners and support business units in their strategies in order to create value (Polak, Robertson, Lind, 2011, p. 50). It is said that treasury involvement should be increased in all areas that require cash management, asset and liabilities management and financial risk management. It also involves enhanced reporting and communication with internal and external stakeholders as a response to their demand for better information. The strategic role of treasury in Phase III is to deliver value and efficiency for the company and act as a strategic unit to achieve the company's goals. It is stressed that the efficient treasury management is determined by four important factors: (1) centralization, (2) standardization, (3) simplification and (4) automation (Ala, 2011). âŠ
Abstract. We construct O(log 1+É n)-round public-coin concurrent zero knowledge arguments for NP from standard (against any polynomial-time adversary) collision-resistant hash functions for arbitrarily small constant É. Our construction is straight-line simulatable. This is the first public-coin concurrent zero knowledge protocol based on standard/long-studied assumption that (almost) achieves the best known round-complexity of its private-coin counterpart [Prabhakaran et al., FOCS 02]. Previously, such publiccoin constructions require either polynomial number of rounds [Goyal, STOC 13], newly-introduced assumptions [Chung et al., FOCS 13], or stronger model [Canetti et al., TCC 13]. This result has strong consequences: it yields the first (almost) logarithmic round simultaneously resettable arguments for NP and the first (almost) logarithmic round concurrent multi-party computation in the single input setting. These results significantly improve over the polynomial round-complexity of the best known protocols based on standard assumptions in both cases. Our technical contribution is two-fold. First, we introduce a simulation strategy called clearance that yields a simulation tree of very special combinatorial structure and enables us to instantiate Barakâs protocol [Barak, FOCS 01] using the recent Ben-Sasson et al.âs quasi-linear construction of PCP system [Ben-Sasson et al., STOC 13] to obtain logarithmic round-complexity; secondly, we show how to modify Barakâs protocol such that the soundness of overall construction does not rely on the (implicit/explicit) proof of knowledge property of the underlying universal argument/PCP system, which in turn allows us to benefit from progress on short PCP system of more general types without assuming stronger/superpolynomial hardness. 1
We present new constructions of two-message and one-message witness-indistinguishable proofs (ZAPs and NIWIs). This includes: âą ZAPs (or, equivalently, non-interactive zero-knowledge in the common random string model) from indistinguishability obfuscation and one-way functions. âą NIWIs from indistinguishability obfuscation and one-way permutations. The previous construction of ZAPs [Dwork and Naor, FOCS 00] was based on trapdoor permutations. The two previous NIWI constructions were based either on ZAPs and a derandomization-type complexity assumption [Barak, Ong, and Vadhan CRYPTO 03], or on a specific number theoretic assumption in bilinear groups [Groth, Sahai, and Ostrovsky, CRYPTO 06]. âMIT. Email: nirbitan@csail.mit.edu. Part of this work was done while at Tel Aviv University. â Boston University. Email: omer@bu.edu. Supported by the Simons award for graduate students in theoretical computer science and an NSF Algorithmic foundations grant 1218461.
Bitcoin has become increasingly important in recent years. The exchange rate raised from $14 in January 2013 up to $240 in April 2013 and even $900 in early 2014. In this paper, we present novel insights about Bitcoin's peer-to-peer (P2P) network with a special focus on its distribution among distinct autonomous systems. We traversed Bitcoin's P2P network in a protocol-compliant manner and collected information about the network size, the number of clients, and the network distribution among autonomous systems. Our findings lead to conclusions about the resilience of the Bitcoin ecosystem, the unambiguousness of the blockchain in use, and the propagation and verification of transaction blocks.
Public key infrastructures (PKIs) enable users to look up and verify one anotherâs public keys based on identities. Current approaches to PKIs are vulnerable because they do not offer sufficiently strong guarantees of identity retention; that is, they do not effectively prevent one user from registering a public key under anotherâs already-registered identity. In this paper, we leverage the consistency guarantees provided by cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Namecoin to build a PKI that ensures identity retention. Our system, called Certcoin, has no central authority and thus requires the use of secure distributed dictionary data structures to provide efficient support for key lookup. 1
New terrorism has been recently considered a new type of terrorism. The terrorism characteristics that have instigated the introduction of the term stem from the modern evolutions in most aspects of terrorism, such as its organizational structure, financing, recruitment, training, motivations, tactics, reach, targets, and lethality. This chapter reviews discussions surrounding new terrorism, explains its key characteristics and features, and demonstrates the dual role of the media and information technologies. Distinctions from conventional terrorism recognize it as loose, decentralized cell-based networks, using high-intensity weapons, religiously and vaguely motivated, using asymmetrical methods for maximum casualties, and highly skillful in using new media and information technologies. Moreover, the most critical features focus on how the functioning of new terrorism adapts new media technologies, which in turn, contribute to all of its aspects. However, it is concluded that regardless of the labelânew or oldâattention should be focused on the act and the actors, whether the ways they function utilize the conventional or adapt with the most recent technologies, media, and weapons, and most crucially, recognizing how fast and efficient terrorists are in utilizing the most advanced media and information technologies.
Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence
Global Security and Public Health
European and Russian Geopolitical Military Strategies
The paper explores a reason why retailers pay such large merchant fees to credit card issuers. Credit cards as media of exchange are introduced to a New Monetarist model in which exchange occurs in alternating centralized and decentralized markets. Sellers who exert high (low) effort produce a good with a high (low) probability of being high quality. The quality of the good is revealed only after trade. To avoid network externalities, the decentralized market is characterized by competitive search. Buyers who use credit cards commit to repay the purchase price of the good to the card issuer in the next period. If the good is of low quality, the issuer stops payment to the seller and the buyer is not charged. Sellers who exert high effort price goods to encourage credit card sales and to establish credibility. Thus a benefit offered to buyers can then be used by the credit card network to support charging sellers high merchant fees. âAcknowledgements: I would like to thank Shouyong Shi and participants at the Chicago Fed Money, Banking, Payment and Finance Workshop 2013 for helpful comments on my paper. Any remaining errors are my own.
The growing demands of users and industry have led to an increase in both size and complexity of deployed software in recent years. This tendency mainly stems from a growing number of interconnected mobile devices and from the huge amounts of data that is collected every day by a growing number of sensors and interfaces.\nSuch increase in complexity imposes various challenges -- not only in terms of software correctness, but also with respect to security. This thesis addresses three complementary approaches to cope with the challenges: (i) appropriate high-level abstractions and verifiable translation methods to executable applications in order to guarantee flawless implementations, (ii) strong cryptographic mechanisms in order to realize the desired security goals, and (iii) convenient methods in order to incentivize the correct usage of existing techniques and tools.\nIn more detail, the thesis presents two frameworks for the declarative specification of functionality and security, together with advanced compilers for the verifiable translation to executable applications. Moreover, the thesis presents two cryptographic primitives for the enforcement of cloud-based security properties: homomorphic message authentication codes ensure the correctness of evaluating functions over data outsourced to unreliable cloud servers; and efficiently verifiable non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs convince verifiers of computation results without the verifiers having access to the computation input.
Abstract. Garg, Jain, and Sahai first consider zero knowledge proofs in the presence of leakage on the local state of the prover, and present a leakage-resilient-zero-knowledge proof system for HC (Hamiltonian Cycle) problem. Their construction is called (1 + Δ)-leakage-resilient zero-knowledge, for any constant Δ> 0, because the total length of the leakage the simulator needs is (1 + Δ) times as large as that of the leakage received by the verifier. In recent, Pandey provides a constant-round leakage-resilient zero-knowledge argument satisfying the ideal requirement of Δ = 0. Whether there exist constant round leakage-resilient zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge for all NP languages is an interesting problem. This paper focuses on this problem and presents a constant-round construction of leakage-resilient zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge for the HC problem. Key word: zero-knowledge proofs, proofs of knowledge, leakage-resilient, non-black-box simulation, constant-round. 1
3:30 â 4:30PM: The Promise of a Resource Allocation Strategy [Gallery I/II] Each year, more and more districts are shifting to a decentralized resource allocation model. Why is this shift important for districts, schools and students and how does the finance strategy matter in the context of the districtâs other reform efforts? Whether the push is for equity, productivity, accountability, choice, or innovation, the finance strategy sits at the heart of the districtâs efforts. In this conversation, finance experts, school leaders, and private funders will share their thinking on why a districtâs resource allocation strategy is so important.
Bitcoin has provided a creative way to solve several long-standing problems in computer science yet despite its innovations, there are still fundamental technical and governance hurdles that limit its growth. This includes the financial incentives for operating a centralized mining pool, the centralization of infrastructure without the benefits of centralization, the lack of financial incentives for working as a developer and the various public goods issues surrounding a communal effort beholden to lobbying by special interest groups.
In recent years there has been a fantastic boom of increasingly sophisticated âcryptographic objects â â identity-based encryption, fully-homomorphic encryption, functional encryption, and most recently, various forms of obfuscation. These objects often come in various flavors of security, and as these constructions have grown in number, complexity and inter-connectedness, the relationships between them have become increasingly confusing. We provide a new framework of cryptographic agents that unifies various cryptographic objects and security definitions, similar to how the Universal Composition framework unifies various multi-party computation tasks like commitment, coin-tossing and zero-knowledge proofs. Our contributions can be summarized as follows. âą Our main contribution is a new model of cryptographic computation, that unifies and extends cryptographic primitives such as Obfuscation, Functional Encryption, Fully Homomorphic En-cryption, Witness encryption, Property Preserving Encryption and the like, all of which can be cleanly modeled as âschemata â in our framework. We provide a new indistinguishability preserving (IND-PRE) definition of security that interpolates indistinguishability and simulation
Since the seminal work of Oates (1972) on scal federalism, a central question of public finance has been which level of a federation should be as- signed the provision of public goods. In this paper we study the problem of a government that is to choose the optimal centralization/decentralization mechanism for the final treatment of municipal solid waste. We analyze incentives, equilibria and implications of the governance framework for the disposal of waste. The key decisions revolve around the mobility of waste and the externalities (pollution) associated with its disposal, be it incineration or landfill. Moreover, if the Regions are characterized by different levels of efficiency in the processes they apply to the final treat- ment of waste, in theory a certain degree of waste mobility across regions should allow to reap the benefits of higher efficiency. On the other hand, as transportation and other environmental costs implied by mobility and concentration are significant, a trade-off emerges. Our model evaluates the implications of that trade-off for the optimal degree of decentralization in waste management.
Over the last years, scholars looked at the decentralization of competences as a possible solution for several issue of public finance. Despite the development of a new branch in fiscal federalism theory (the so-called Second Generation Theory), the homogeneity of preferences at local level still represents one of the main assumption in this literature. This hypothesis allows assuming that a local allocation of public services minimizes the welfare losses that a central allocation could generate. The present contribution tries to underline how the homogeneity of preferences continues to represent a central topic in fiscal federalism theory, finding in the information issue a kind of trait d'union between them. Moreover, by means of an empirical analysis on the Italian case, we will try to analyze if individual attitudes towards a public management of local ser- vices present a greater heterogeneity at macroregional (NUTS1) or regional (NUTS2) level.
This paper uses simple monetary economic theory in order to extract implied BTC interest rates from exchange rates, interest rates and monetary supply data. Uncovered interest rate parity permits to derive a theoretical risk free BTC interest rate that is supposed to apply in a no arbitrage environment with rational expectations. Application to BTC/US$ exchange rates, Libor and Money supply US M2 data on the period September 2010 to January 2014 provides estimates, which illustrate what a risk free BTC interest rate could look like.