The trading of unlimited liability bank shares: the Bagehot Hypothesis

From the mid-1820s, banks became the first business sector in Great Britain and Ireland to be granted the right to form freely on an unlimited liability joint stock basis. Walter Bagehot, the renowned contemporary banking expert, warned that shares in such banks would ultimately be owned by widows, orphans and other impecunious individuals. An alternative hypothesis is that the governing bodies of these banks constrained by special legal restrictions on share trading acted effectively to prevent such shares being transferred to the less wealthy members of society. We test both conjectures using the archives of an Irish joint stock bank. The results do not support Bagehot's hypothesis, but instead indicate that shares continued to be owned by wealthy individuals.unlimited liability, corporate governance, joint stock companies, banking

What Do We Really Know About Cosmic Acceleration?

Essentially all of our knowledge of the acceleration history of the Universe - including the acceleration itself - is predicated upon the validity of general relativity. Without recourse to this assumption, we use SNeIa to analyze the expansion history and find (i) very strong (5 sigma) evidence for a period of acceleration, (ii) strong evidence that the acceleration has not been constant, (iii) evidence for an earlier period of deceleration and (iv) only weak evidence that the Universe has not been decelerating since z~0.3.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

Laboratory colonisation and genetic bottlenecks in the tsetse fly Glossina pallidipes

Background The IAEA colony is the only one available for mass rearing of Glossina pallidipes, a vector of human and animal African trypanosomiasis in eastern Africa. This colony is the source for Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) programs in East Africa. The source population of this colony is unclear and its genetic diversity has not previously been evaluated and compared to field populations.<p></p> Methodology/Principal Findings We examined the genetic variation within and between the IAEA colony and its potential source populations in north Zimbabwe and the Kenya/Uganda border at 9 microsatellites loci to retrace the demographic history of the IAEA colony. We performed classical population genetics analyses and also combined historical and genetic data in a quantitative analysis using Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC). There is no evidence of introgression from the north Zimbabwean population into the IAEA colony. Moreover, the ABC analyses revealed that the foundation and establishment of the colony was associated with a genetic bottleneck that has resulted in a loss of 35.7% of alleles and 54% of expected heterozygosity compared to its source population. Also, we show that tsetse control carried out in the 1990's is likely reduced the effective population size of the Kenya/Uganda border population.<p></p> Conclusions/Significance All the analyses indicate that the area of origin of the IAEA colony is the Kenya/Uganda border and that a genetic bottleneck was associated with the foundation and establishment of the colony. Genetic diversity associated with traits that are important for SIT may potentially have been lost during this genetic bottleneck which could lead to a suboptimal competitiveness of the colony males in the field. The genetic diversity of the colony is lower than that of field populations and so, studies using colony flies should be interpreted with caution when drawing general conclusions about G. pallidipes biology.<p></p&gt

Exiles in British sociology

We have all seen them, foreheads wrinkled like a ploughed field, pastel-shaded check summer shirts worn in winter, desks festooned with yellowed index cards covered in hieroglyphics, books like yours only in plainer covers and read more carefully, filthy cigarettes, an accent growing thicker with age. But we have all seen them too, the luxuriant thatch at seventy, the jacket and tie, the tidy desk, the London club and the house in the country, the pipe, the disdain for small talk made all the more intimidating by an English acquired somewhere between grammar school and Oxford. Self-contained in a way only the uprooted can be, mysterious because you never knew what questions to ask them, emissaries from worlds they have lost and you have never known: the Polish gentry, the central European peasantry, Jewish merchants, German workers and, most puzzling of all, the continental European middle class

APPROACH E: CHANGING MARKET SUPPLY BY RESTRICTING INPUTS

Agricultural and Food Policy,

Federal Methodology: An Analysis of Farm Families and Asset Equity Removal

The purpose of this study was to evaluate specific changes made to the federal need analysis formula between aid years 1992-93 and 1993-94. The primary focus was the elimination of home and farm equity from the need analysis calculation. Changes in parental contributions and Pell Grant awards between aid years and formulae were examined. The results were compared and contrasted using paired t-tests for dependent sample means. The results suggest significant differences between need formulae and aid years. This study suggests an increasing trend toward higher unmet need and lower Pell Grant awards. It also implies that the most needy student may be losing gift assistance to more affluent applicants. As resources become scarce, these results may have implications for campus-based aid policy decisions and future adjustments to the need analysis construct

Parameter extraction and transistor models

Using specified mathematical models of the MOSFET device, the optimal values of the model-dependent parameters were extracted from data provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Three MOSFET models, all one-dimensional were used. One of the models took into account diffusion (as well as convection) currents. The sensitivity of the models was assessed for variations of the parameters from their optimal values. Lines of future inquiry are suggested on the basis of the behavior of the devices, of the limitations of the proposed models, and of the complexity of the required numerical investigations

Resumming QCD perturbation series

Since the advent of Quantum Field Theory (QFT) in the late 1940's, perturbation theory has become one of the most developed and successful means of extracting phenomenologically useful information from a QFT. In the ever- increasing enthusiasm for new phenomenological predictions, the mechanics of perturbation theory itself have often taken a back seat. It is in this light that this thesis aims to investigate some of the more fundamental properties of perturbation theory. The benefits of resumming perturbative series are highlighted by the explicit calculation of the three-jet rate in e+e- annihilation, resummed to all orders in leading and next-to-leading large logarithms. It is found that the result can be expressed simply in terms of exponentials and error functions. In general it is found that perturbative expansions in QED and QCD diverge at large orders. The nature of these divergences has been explored and found to come from two sources. The first are instanton singularities, which correspond to the combinatoric factors involved in counting Feynman diagrams at large orders. The second are renormalon singularities, which are closely linked to non-perturbative effects through the operator product expansion (OPE).By using Borel transform techniques, the singularity structure in the Borel plane for the QCD vacuum polarization is studied in detail. The renormalon singularity structure is as expected from OPE considerations. These results and existing exact large-A^/ results for the QCD Adler D-function and Deep Inelastic Scattering sum rules are used to resum to all orders the portion of the QCD perturbative coefficients which is leading in b, the first coefficient of the QCD beta-function. This part is expected asymptotically to dominate the coefficients in a large-Nj expansion. Resummed results are also obtained for the e+e- R-ratio and the r-lepton decay ratio. The renormalization scheme dependence of these resummed results is discussed in some detail