Spatial Competition in Credit Markets

Using Hotelling's two-stage model of spatial competition, we develop a lending model where the equilibrium outcome may be characterized by maximal differentiation - in contrast to Hotelling's model where firms have an incentive to reduce differentiation, as long as a pure-strategy price equilibrium exists. The difference is due to the specificities of banks' activities: banks perform independent tests to assess the credit-worthiness of their loan applicants, and thereby create a nongeographic customer heterogeneity. If banks are sufficiently pessimistic about the credit-worthiness of firms, they try to minimize the risk of default by moving away from the market centerBanking competition, Hotelling, information acquisition, credit-worthiness tests

Rules, Prudence and Public Value: Public Servants and Social Media in Comparative Perspective

The reach of social media is prodigious. Its ubiquitous nature has reshaped the ways in which government agencies can communicate with citizens. But amidst the rush to embrace the opportunities of Twitter, Facebook and other platforms, governments have had to lay down rules to govern how and when public service departments should use social media. This article undertakes a comparative analysis of the formal rules and guidelines in place across four Westminster jurisdictions – Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK – to identify the types of behaviours and activities that are seen as desirable when public servants are reaching out to the wider public through social media. The article argues that the horizontal communication patterns associated with social media are fundamentally at odds with the hierarchical structures of the Westminster system of government.</jats:p

Sticky words? Towards a theory of rhetorical path dependency

Speech matters. Political actors are defined by what they say as much as by what they do but, with each rhetorical choice, they also narrow the range of rhetorical options open to them for the future. This paper examines the idea of path dependency, a well-established concept in the field of policy studies, and applies it to the study of political rhetoric. It argues that words are sticky, leaving political leaders caught between the desire to utilise fresh and engaging rhetoric to explain new policy choices and the reality that they cannot shake off the wording of their previous promises. In advancing a theory of rhetorical path dependency, the paper builds on the insights of both discursive institutionalism and rhetorical political analysis to suggest that whilst ideas are indeed vital to the shaping of institutions, the arguments that give those ideas shape can themselves be constrained by earlier choices

CIVIL SERVANTS, POLITICAL HISTORY, AND THE INTERPRETATION OF TRADITIONS

ABSTRACTA renewed interest in aspects of high politics among historians who subscribe to the ‘new political history’ has coincided with the embrace by some political scientists of interpretivism as a method for understanding how beliefs and traditions impact on British political life. In order to examine the potential synergies between these two developments, this article utilizes a form of ‘historical interpretivism’ to study the beliefs and actions of senior civil servants. In 1980, the British government released a Memorandum of Guidance for Officials Appearing before Select Committees – known ever since as the ‘Osmotherly’ rules – to help civil servants navigate the stresses of appearing before parliamentary committees. This article analyses the civil service files in the decade leading up to the publication of the Osmotherly rules to reveal how senior civil servants sought to reconcile their interpretations of Westminster tradition with the need to respond to the demands of the ‘open government’ agenda. The article argues that studying the narratives which guide the beliefs of individual civil servants and their political masters can help political historians and political scientists alike analyse the power of tradition in shaping political action.</jats:p

The Effects of Urban Rapid Rail Transit on Gentrification in Canadian Urban Centres

Throughout the second half of the 20th century theories attempting to explain the phenomenon of gentrification have been pervasive among studies of the changing social structures of urban centres in Europe and North America. Gentrification is defined as a process whereby higher income households move into what were previously working class neighbourhoods, resulting in either direct or indirect displacement of working class households, and ultimately transforming the social character of the neighbourhood. There has been contentious debate over the definition of gentrification, but but through its evolution and adaptation to new contexts it has remained a popular topic among scholars in urban planning. Among the studies and papers published, there are many that show that the process is not only driven by individual actors', but it is also a process deeply affected by government interests and objectives and therefore by public investments. The consequences of the process are still debated; some hail the process as a boost for everyone, (e.g. Duany, 2001), while others assert that gentrification limits accessibility to urban space for lower-income, working-class households, often with already reduced options in terms of housing, and ultimately contributes to creating increasingly socially polarized urban spaces (Marcuse, 1986; Newman and Wyly, 2006). Keeping a necessarily critical perspective in mind, this study identifies the onset of gentrification in Canadian cities and links this process to an element of urban infrastructure essential to cities; transit. The objective of this research is not only to see what the effects of the implementation of transit are on gentrification when it is initially implemented, but also to look at the impacts of transit over time on the gentrification of surrounding neighbourhoods. In the gentrification literature there are a number of articles that make mention of the influential role of accessibility, and transit, on the process of gentrification. The relationship between neighbourhood changes and the implementation and upgrading of transit infrastructure, has, as of yet, not been clearly established. Though transit has long been recognized as having important connections to changes in land-use in the areas surrounding it, there have been few studies that attempt to explore, explicitly, the connections between the implementation of rail transit infrastructure and the process of gentrification in the surrounding metropolitan area. Additionally the few studies that do exist that explicitly address the relationship between transit and gentrification do not adhere to the conventional definition of gentrification according to the literature. The hypothesis of this project is that the implementation of rapid rail transit contributes to the gentrification of surrounding neighbourhoods and may result in the displacement of lower-income households, who would have the greatest marginal benefit from access to transit. This study presents data and analysis in order to assess the hypothesis using a number of indicators of gentrification and covering a study period long enough to capture the effects of major urban rapid rail transit as it has been implemented and upgraded in Canadian cities in the 20th century. This study will specifically address the effects of rail transit infrastructure on gentrification in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver

Theory of Umklapp-assisted recombination of bound excitons in Si:P

We present the calculations for the oscillator strength of the recombination of excitons bound to phosphorous donors in silicon. We show that the direct recombination of the bound exciton cannot account for the experimentally measured oscillator strength of the no-phonon line. Instead, the recombination process is assisted by an umklapp process of the donor electron state. We make use of the empirical pseudopotential method to evaluate the Umklapp-assisted recombination matrix element in second-order perturbation theory. Our result is in excellent agreement with the experiment. We also present two methods to improve the optical resolution of the optical detection of the spin state of a single nucleus in silicon.Comment: 9 pages, 6 EPS figures, Revtex