Sovereign debt management and the globalization of finance: recasting the City of London’s ‘Big Bang’

This article focuses on the central position of sovereign debt securities in the financial system to challenge existing accounts about the 1986 ‘Big Bang’ deregulation of the City of London’s securities market. The reforms are often cast as an iconic moment of neoliberal deregulation and a key episode in the globalization of financial markets. Such accounts stress that the state played an active role in constructing the reforms and upholding the global market relations they produced, yet they remain unclear about the state’s direct interest in pursuing financial market liberalization. The article contends that domestic concerns over sovereign debt management were central to the state’s pursuit of regulatory change. The Big Bang reforms greatly expanded the size and liquidity of the market for British sovereign debt. This empowered the state, improving its capacity to conduct monetary policy and to raise finance on better terms. In doing so, the article demonstrates the necessity of examining sovereign debt management in order to specify the state’s role in the construction of financial globalization

What explains rare and conspicuous colours in a snail? A test of time-series data against models of drift, migration or selection

It is intriguing that conspicuous colour morphs of a prey species may be maintained at low frequencies alongside cryptic morphs. Negative frequency-dependent selection by predators using search images ('apostatic selection') is often suggested without rejecting alternative explanations. Using a maximum likelihood approach we fitted predictions from models of genetic drift, migration, constant selection, heterozygote advantage or negative frequency-dependent selection to time-series data of colour frequencies in isolated populations of a marine snail (Littorina saxatilis), re-established with perturbed colour morph frequencies and followed for >20 generations. Snails of conspicuous colours (white, red, banded) are naturally rare in the study area (usually <10%) but frequencies were manipulated to levels of ~50% (one colour per population) in 8 populations at the start of the experiment in 1992. In 2013, frequencies had declined to ~15-45%. Drift alone could not explain these changes. Migration could not be rejected in any population, but required rates much higher than those recorded. Directional selection was rejected in three populations in favour of balancing selection. Heterozygote advantage and negative frequency-dependent selection could not be distinguished statistically, although overall the results favoured the latter. Populations varied idiosyncratically as mild or variable colour selection (3-11%) interacted with demographic stochasticity, and the overall conclusion was that multiple mechanisms may contribute to maintaining the polymorphisms.Heredity advance online publication, 21 September 2016; doi:10.1038/hdy.2016.77

An investigation into the application of fuzzy logic control to industrial gas turbines

This paper investigates the feasibility benefits of applying fuzzy logic control (FLC) strategies for use with industrial gas turbines. Our main objective is to investigate different designs methods, design implement an FLC strategy, plant simulation in a test environment optimize the FLC, conduct tests to compare the FLC with conventional controls in scenarios relevant to the application. We have designed, implemented, and tested our simulation to the exhaust temperature control problem of a gas turbine problem. The FLC, plant simulation, existing control configuration, and integrated test environment were developed in Java. Heuristic methods were used to optimize the FLC, which proved time consuming. The paper illustrates that while implementation of the FLC is feasible, it requires more effort than the conventional controls examined

A hierarchical agency model of deposit insurance

This paper develops a hierarchical agency model of deposit insurance. The main purpose of the analysis is to propose a micro-founded model of deposit insurance schemes and study their effects on the behavior of depositors and the monitoring problem for a bank. This paper also characterizes a risk-based premium in equilibrium, and conducts a comparative statics analysis of depositors’ optimal actions. The results supply the basic theoretical foundation for designing deposit insurance schemes. Our findings are consistent with the empirical research on depositor behavior