Gibrat's law and the British industrial revolution

This paper examines Gibrat’s law in England and Wales between 1801 and 1911 using a unique data set covering the entire settlement size distribution. We find that Gibrat’s law broadly holds even in the face of population doubling every fifty years, an industrial and transport revolution, and the absence of zoning laws to constrain growth. The result is strongest for the later period, and in counties most affected by the industrial revolution. The exception were villages in areas bypassed by the industrial revolution. We argue that agglomeration externalities balanced urban disamenities such as commuting costs and poor living conditions to ensure steady growth of many places, rather than exceptional growth of few

Poverty Elimination Strategies that Work: A Human Rights Toolkit for Addressing Poverty in Your Community

This report highlights numerous local solutions that are currently being implemented in communities around the state and the country. This report is meant to be a resource to assist neighborhood groups, faith communities, service providers, policymakers, and others, in creating solutions to fundamentally address poverty. The report provides over 50 poverty elimination strategies that work along with hyperlinks to sources which contain information about highlighted solutions and additional resources that may be useful in developing and implementing poverty elimination strategies locally

Correlations Between High School Athletic Participation and Academic Performance

This research study examines the correlation between high school students‘ school-sponsored athletic participation and their academic performance. Previous studies show students who participate in school-sponsored athletic activities will have an academic advantage (Eccles, Barber, Stone, & Hunt, 2003; Hartmann, 2008). This study expands previous studies by examining whether the amount of participation has an impact on students‘ academic achievement. The research study included a sample of students from a small midwestern Christian school in the ninth and eleventh grades. This study found a negative correlation between school-sponsored athletic participation and students‘ academic performance. This study concludes that as students‘ school-sponsored athletic participation increases, their academic achievement, based on tests and GPA, will be lower than those who did not participate

Should We be on FIRE?

A new personal finance craze is catching the attention of many millennials. FIRE, or Financial Independence and Retire Early, is a push to get out of the daily grind of the 9 to 5 workday. Posting about the gift of work from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation. https://inallthings.org/should-we-be-on-fire

Different Approaches to Investigatory Journalism in the Muckraking Era

The muckraking era is seen as a golden age of investigatory journalism. This thesis argues that within the muckraking era, there were a number of distinct types of journalism. To understand the muckrakers, we must recognize these different types of investigatory journalism and the potential influence the different types of storytelling can have on public opinion. Fourteen of the preeminent muckrakers are analyzed based on their most important investigatory journalism article

Gibrat’s law and the British industrial revolution

Gibrat's Law states that the growth of towns and cities is independent of their initial size. We show that the Industrial Revolution was revolutionary enough to violate this law for 1761-1801, 1801-1891, and all decades within. Small places grew more slowly throughout this period. Larger towns, in contrast, typically grew faster, but only if they were in core Industrial Revolution Counties. In line with economic theory, towns grew disproportionately when agglomeration economies exceeded urban disamenities, allowing wage rises that induced workers to migrate to the town. This only occurred in places characterised by new, mechanised industries and mining

Changing Brains, Changing Lives: Researching the Lived Experience of Individuals Practicing Self-Directed Neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change and adapt both structure and function in response to sensory experiences. Self-directed neuroplasticity (SDN) specifically addresses the capacity to proactively modify cerebral function through volitional control and the intentional practice of focusing attention in desired ways. In other words, the mind can consciously change the brain. Self-directed neuroplasticity (SDN) approaches are successfully used to treat a range of challenges such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), depression, and emotional response regulation. However, no research describes the lived experiences of individuals practicing SDN across multiple modalities. Using semi-structured, in-depth interviews, this phenomenological inquiry describes the lived experiences of 13 participants practicing SDN. In addition to identifying SDN uses and multifaceted aspects to SDN practices outside of current academic literature, this study utilized thematic analysis to uncover four themes: Seeking, Empowerment, Growth in Relationships, and Transformation. Results offer insights into expanding SDN uses, broadening practice context, and life-changing transformation. Implications include the need to increase awareness, education, and integration of SDN within holistic health and other communities, as well as expand research regarding SDN uses, application among various populations, and longitudinal efficacy

Flexible specification testing in quantile regression models

We propose three novel consistent specification tests for quantile regression models which generalize former tests in three ways. First, we allow the covariate effects to be quantile-dependent and nonlinear. Second, we allow parameterizing the conditional quantile functions by appropriate basis functions, rather than parametrically. We are thereby able to test for general functional forms, while retaining linear effects as special cases. In both cases, the induced class of conditional distribution functions is tested with a Cramér–von Mises type test statistic for which we derive the theoretical limit distribution and propose a bootstrap method. Third, a modified test statistic is derived to increase the power of the tests. We highlight the merits of our tests in a detailed MC study and two real data examples. Our first application to conditional income distributions in Germany indicates that there are not only still significant differences between East and West but also across the quantiles of the conditional income distributions, when conditioning on age and year. The second application to data from the Australian national electricity market reveals the importance of using interaction effects for modeling the highly skewed and heavy-tailed distributions of energy prices conditional on day, time of day and demand.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659Peer Reviewe