How Government Bond Prices Reflect Wartime Events. The Case of the Stockholm Market.

How are political events reflected in financial asset prices? Break points in sovereign debt prices are analyzed for Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Germany and Belgium during 1930-1948, using unique data from the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Unlike in countries involved in WWII, this market was unregulated. The outbreak of World War II heavily depressed prices of government bonds. Countries which were occupied (Belgium, Denmark and Norway) or under attack (Finland) saw their debt depreciate substantially. The battle of Stalingrad turns out indeed to be a turning-point of the war. This approach represents a complementary quantitative method to analyze the impact of political events.Financial Markets; Economic History; WWII; Europe; Cliometrics

Using Markets to Measure Pre-War Threat Assessments: The Nordic Countries Facing World War II

Nordic historians have asserted for a long time that in the Nordic countries only few people, if any, perceived increased threats of war prior to the World War II outbreak. This would explain, and possibly excuse, why their governments did not mobilize their armies until it was too late. This paper questions this established notion by deriving new estimates of widely held war threat assessments from the fluctuations of sovereign market yields collected from all Nordic bond markets at this period. Our results show that the Nordic contemporaries indeed perceived significant war risk increases around the time of major war-related geopolitical events. While these findings hence question some, but not all, of the standard Nordic World War II historiography, they also demonstrate the value of analyzing historical market prices to reassess the often tacit views and opinions of large groups of people in the past.Structural breaks; Sovereign debt; Capital Markets; Historiography; Cliometrics; World War II

Robustness and Idealizations in Agent-Based Models of Scientific Interaction

The paper presents an agent-based model (ABM) of scientific interaction aimed at examining how different degrees of connectedness of scientists impact their efficiency in knowledge acquisition. The model is built on the basis of Zollman's (2010) ABM by changing some of its idealizing assumptions that concern the representation of the central notions underlying the model: epistemic success of the rivaling scientific theories, scientific interaction and the assessment in view of which scientists choose theories to work on. Our results suggest that whether and to which extent the degree of connectedness of a scientific community impacts its efficiency is a highly context-dependent matter since different conditions deem strikingly different results. More generally, we argue that simplicity of ABMs may come at a price: the requirement to run extensive robustness analysis before we can specify the adequate target phenomenon of the model

What Is the Epistemic Function of Highly Idealized Agent-Based Models of Scientific Inquiry?

In this paper we examine the epistemic value of highly idealized agent-based models (ABMs) of social aspects of scientific inquiry. On the one hand, we argue that taking the results of such simulations as informative of actual scientific inquiry is unwarranted, at least for the class of models proposed in recent literature. Moreover, we argue that a weaker approach, which takes these models as providing only “how-possibly” explanations, does not help to improve their epistemic value. On the other hand, we suggest that if ABMs of science underwent two types of robustness analysis, they could indeed have a clear epistemic function, namely by providing evidence for philosophical and historical hypotheses. In this sense, ABMs can obtain evidential and explanatory properties and thus be a useful tool for integrated history and philosophy of science. We illustrate our point with an example of a model—building on the work by Kevin Zollman—which we apply to a concrete historical case study

A Systematic Approach to Pricing and Hedging of International Derivatives with Interest-Rate Risk

We deal with the valuration and hedging of non path-dependent European options on one or several underlyings in a model of an international economy which allows for both interest rate and exchange rate risk. Using martingale theory we provide a unified and easily applicable approach to pricing and hedging Black-Scholes type options on stocks, bonds, forwards. futures and exchange rates. We also cover the pricing and hedging of options to exchange two Black-Scholes type options for one another. The contigent claims may pay off in arbitrary currencies.Arbitrage, interest rate risk, exchange rate risk, option pricing, hedging

Epistemology in Engineering Systems

The engineering systems division at MIT has adopted an official vision statement -- “ESD will be a leader in understanding, modeling, predicting and affecting the structure and behavior of technologically enabled complex systems.” To fulfill this vision, I think it is worthwhile for ESD faculty to reflect on epistemology and its relationship to engineering systems. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge, justification, evidence, and related notions. By reflecting upon epistemology, we may clarify in our own minds how we come to know something about engineering systems and thereby improve our research methods. In this white paper, I pose five questions related to epistemology and engineering systems. I also discuss possible answers, but my goal was primarily to spark discussion rather than solidify a position

Modeling Emission from the First Explosions: Pitfalls and Problems

Observations of the explosions of Population III (Pop III) stars have the potential to teach us much about the formation and evolution of these zero-metallicity objects. To realize this potential, we must tie observed emission to an explosion model, which requires accurate light curve and spectra calculations. Here, we discuss many of the pitfalls and problems involved in such models, presenting some preliminary results from radiation-hydrodynamics simulations.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, proceedings of 'The First Stars and Galaxies: Challenges for the Next Decade", Austin, TX, March 8-11, 201

Do natural resources define convergence clubs? Empirical evidence from the Kazakh regions

This paper deals with the hypothesis that natural resources are important in forming convergence clubs. We check this hypothesis by applying a dependence and an endowment measure of natural resource abundance and a regression tree analysis. The results indicate that for the Kazakh regions natural resources indeed play an important role in forming convergence clubs. It is further shown that rather natural resource endowment than resource dependence determines initial conditions and thereby convergence clubs

Seeing the First Supernovae at the Edge of the Universe with JWST

The first stars ended the cosmic Dark Ages and created the first heavy elements necessary for the formation of planets and life. The properties of these stars remain uncertain, and it may be decades before individual Pop III stars are directly observed. Their masses, however, can be inferred from their supernova explosions, which may soon be found in both deep-field surveys by JWST and in all-sky surveys by WFIRST. We have performed radiation hydrodynamical simulations of the near infrared signals of Pop III pair-instability supernovae in realistic circumstellar environments with Lyman absorption by the neutral intergalactic medium. We find that JWST and WFIRST will detect these explosions out to z ~ 30 and 20, respectively, unveiling the first generation of stars in the universe.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted by ApJ