New Releases by Pedro Maia

Central banks'' liabilities are still often excluded from debt sustainability analyses, despite the enormous expansions in central banks'' balance sheets that we have witnessed in recent years. In this paper, we construct a dataset that consolidates both general government and central bank balance sheets and argue that this metric allows for fairer comparisons across countries. The findings highlight the increasingly important role played by central banks in managing and altering the profile of the privately-held sovereign debt. In addition, they shed light into the impact of FX reserves accumulation and QE on reducing the debt maturity, which cannot be captered by traditional general government debt metric.

Extraction and use of minerals through mining is essential for industrial and societal development. However, the mining industry carries significant risks of long-lasting negative impacts on the environment, particularly on water resources and landscapes, as well as on local communities. Catastrophes such as the Brumadinho dam collapse in Brazil in January 2019 and in Nachterstedt, Germany, in 2009, where three people died because parts of an inhabited settlement slipped into a flooded open-cast mining area, call for action and can provide momentum for change. A transition towards mining in sustainable landscapes is necessary to ensure that the future of this industry operates with a sufficient degree of resilience and in a manner that can adequately respond to and align with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This Science Policy Report which was written by a group of 23 young scientists from Brazil, Germany, Canada, Chile and Peru outlines a new vision for mining activities and proposes several recommendations that can guide this paradigm shift towards sustainable mining landscapes. The report by the young scientists is the result of a workshop hosted by the Leopoldina and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences last year in Belo Horizonte.

When Ivy met Rachel, the result wasn’t exactly love at first sight. Sparks flew as the living vampire and the stubborn witch learned what it meant to be partners. Now Kim Harrison, the acclaimed author of Pale Demon and Black Magic Sanction, turns back the clock to tell the tale—in an original full-color graphic novel. Hot-as-hell, tough-as-nails detective Ivy Tamwood has been demoted from homicide down to lowly street-crime detail. As if rousting trolls and policing pixies instead of catching killers wasn’t bad enough, she’s also been saddled with a newbie partner who’s an earth witch. It’s enough to make any living vampire bare her fangs. But when a coven of murderous witches begins preying on werewolves, Rachel Morgan quickly proves she’s a good witch who knows how to be a badass. Together, Ivy and Rachel hit the mean streets to deal swift justice to the evil element among Cincinnati’s supernatural set. But there’s more to their partnership than they realize—and more blood and black magic in their future than they bargained for.