The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

The Science Performance of JWST as Characterized in Commissioning

This paper characterizes the actual science performance of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as determined from the six month commissioning period. We summarize the performance of the spacecraft, telescope, science instruments, and ground system, with an emphasis on differences from pre-launch expectations. Commissioning has made clear that JWST is fully capable of achieving the discoveries for which it was built. Moreover, almost across the board, the science performance of JWST is better than expected; in most cases, JWST will go deeper faster than expected. The telescope and instrument suite have demonstrated the sensitivity, stability, image quality, and spectral range that are necessary to transform our understanding of the cosmos through observations spanning from near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.Comment: 5th version as accepted to PASP; 31 pages, 18 figures; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/acb29

UK credit and discouragement during the GFC

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York. The availability of credit to entrepreneurs with good investment opportunities is an important facilitator of economic growth. Under normal economic conditions, most entrepreneurs who requested loans receive them. In a global financial crisis, popular opinion is that banks are severely restricting lending to smaller businesses. This assumes that low levels of investment are caused by supply-side restrictions in the credit market. Little is said about potential changes in the demand for credit and how it is influenced by entrepreneurs’ perceptions about supply-side restrictions. One particularly interesting, and under-researched, group of small businesses is that who have potentially good investment opportunities, but are discouraged from applying for external funding as they fear rejection. In this study, we question whether these entrepreneurs were correct in their assumptions. We find that levels of discouragement are quite low in general at 2.7% of the total smaller business population. Further analysis implies that 55.6% of discouraged borrowers would have got loans had they applied