Debt, Default, and Revenue Structure: The American State Debt Crisis in the Early 1840s

During the 1820s and 1830s, American state governments made large investments in canals, banks, and railroads. In the early 1840s, nine states defaulted on their debts, four ultimately repudiated all or part of their debts, and three went through substantial renegotiations. This paper examines how the states got into the debt crisis and, as a result of their earlier history, how they responded to fiscal pressure in the debt crisis. The explanation is built around revenue structures. States along the developed eastern seaboard were able to avoid politically costly property taxes, while states along the frontier were forced to rely heavily on property taxes. When faced with fiscal pressures, two of the defaulting states -- Maryland and Pennsylvania -- were able to resume debt payments, with back interest, as soon as a property tax was enacted. The other defaulting states, however, already had high property taxes. Without access to new revenue sources, these states were forced to default, and then either renegotiate or repudiate their debts.

An econometric study of forecasting French foreign exchange rates

Purpose: The objective of this paper is to study possible diversity of exchange rate models, by applying both parametric and nonparametric techniques, and examines said models’ collective predictive performance. Design/Methodology/Approach: We shall choose the forecasting predictor with the smallest Root Mean Square Forecast Error (RMSE). The better type of exchange rate model is in the Autoregressive model’s equation, according to the empirical evidence, although none of this data yields an optimal forecast. Findings: In our conclusion, the error correction versions of these exchange rate models will be adjusted so that credible long-run elasticities can be imposed on each model’s fundamental variables.peer-reviewe

Living with Uncertainty

The last few years have seen a major rethinking of some of the hallowed assumptions of range ecology and range management practice. This book examines the management of policy implications of this new ecological thinking for pastoral development in dryland areas. With examples drawn from all over Africa, the contributors examine the consequences of living with uncertainty for pastoral development planning, range and fodder management, drought responses, livestock marketing, resource tenure, institutional development and pastoral administration

Prophet of Perspective: Thomas K. McCraw

Thomas K. McCraw is justly admired as a consummate prose stylist, a talented editor, a perceptive historian of the United States, and an inspiring teacher whose mastery of the biographical form led to a string of elegantly written prize-winning publications that are widely read and often taught. The publication one month before McCraw’s death in November 2012 of his last book, The Founders and Finance, provides the occasion for this essay, which contends that McCraw also deserves to be remembered as a founder of two thriving academic subfields—policy history and the history of capitalism—despite the fact that he trained relatively few history PhD students, and rarely appeared in public during the final years of his life as the result of a debilitating illness that greatly limited his mobility

Living with Uncertainty

The last few years have seen a major rethinking of some of the hallowed assumptions of range ecology and range management practice. This book examines the management of policy implications of this new ecological thinking for pastoral development in dryland areas. With examples drawn from all over Africa, the contributors examine the consequences of living with uncertainty for pastoral development planning, range and fodder management, drought responses, livestock marketing, resource tenure, institutional development and pastoral administration

Robust evidence for bisexual orientation among men

The question whether some men have a bisexual orientation—that is, whether they are substantially sexually aroused and attracted to both sexes—has remained controversial among both scientists and laypersons. Skeptics believe that male sexual orientation can only be homosexual or heterosexual, and that bisexual identification reflects nonsexual concerns, such as a desire to deemphasize homosexuality. Although most bisexual-identified men report that they are attracted to both men and women, self-report data cannot refute these claims. Patterns of physiological (genital) arousal to male and female erotic stimuli can provide compelling evidence for male sexual orientation. (In contrast, most women provide similar physiological responses to male and female stimuli.) We investigated whether men who self-report bisexual feelings tend to produce bisexual arousal patterns. Prior studies of this issue have been small, used potentially invalid statistical tests, and produced inconsistent findings. We combined nearly all previously published data (from eight previous studies in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada), yielding a sample of 474 to 588 men (depending on analysis). All participants were cisgender males. Highly robust results showed that bisexual-identified men’s genital and subjective arousal patterns were more bisexual than were those who identified as exclusively heterosexual or homosexual. These findings support the view that male sexual orientation contains a range, from heterosexuality, to bisexuality, to homosexuality

The secondary market for bank shares in nineteenth-century Britain

Stock transferability and liquidity are viewed as vital characteristics of capital markets. Surprisingly, we know very little about the level of trading activity on, and liquidity of the market for, company stock during the rapid growth of the British capital market in the nineteenth century. This article attempts to shed some light on this important issue by examining the market for bank shares using trading data collected from bank archives. Our evidence suggests that trading activity and liquidity changed imperceptibly over the century. We also find that ownership structure is a major determinant of trading activity and liquidity; whereas shareholder liability regimes don't appear to affect liquidity

The Many Virtues of Second Nature : Habitus in Latin Medieval Philosophy

This chapter consists of a systematic introduction to the nature and function of habitus in Latin medieval philosophy. Over the course of this introduction, several topics are treated: the theoretical necessity to posit habitus; their nature; their causal contribution to the production of internal and external acts; how and why habitus can grow and decay; what makes their unity when they can have multiple objects and work in clusters. Finally we examine two specific questions: why intellectual habitus represent a special case that triggered considerable debate; how human beings can be said to be free if their actions are determined by moral habitus

Quantifying the value of viral genomics when inferring who infected whom in the 2014–16 Ebola virus outbreak in Guinea

Transmission trees can be established through detailed contact histories, statistical or phylogenetic inference, or a combination of methods. Each approach has its limitations, and the extent to which they succeed in revealing a 'true' transmission history remains unclear. In this study, we compared the transmission trees obtained through contact tracing investigations and various inference methods to identify the contribution and value of each approach. We studied eighty-six sequenced cases reported in Guinea between March and November 2015. Contact tracing investigations classified these cases into eight independent transmission chains. We inferred the transmission history from the genetic sequences of the cases (phylogenetic approach), their onset date (epidemiological approach), and a combination of both (combined approach). The inferred transmission trees were then compared to those from the contact tracing investigations. Inference methods using individual data sources (i.e. the phylogenetic analysis and the epidemiological approach) were insufficiently informative to accurately reconstruct the transmission trees and the direction of transmission. The combined approach was able to identify a reduced pool of infectors for each case and highlight likely connections among chains classified as independent by the contact tracing investigations. Overall, the transmissions identified by the contact tracing investigations agreed with the evolutionary history of the viral genomes, even though some cases appeared to be misclassified. Therefore, collecting genetic sequences during outbreak is key to supplement the information contained in contact tracing investigations. Although none of the methods we used could identify one unique infector per case, the combined approach highlighted the added value of mixing epidemiological and genetic information to reconstruct who infected whom