The cost of banking panics in an age before “Too Big to Fail”

How costly were the banking panics of the National Banking Era (1861-1913)? I combine two hand-collected data sets - the weekly statements of the New York Clearing House banks and the monthly holding period return of every stock listed on the NYSE - to estimate the cost of banking panics in an era before “too big to fail.” The bank statements allow me to construct a hypothetical insurance contract which would have allowed investors to insure against sudden deposit withdrawals and the cross-section of stock returns allow us to draw inferences about the marginal utility during panic states. Panics were costly. The cross-section of gilded-age stock returns imply investors would have willingly paid a 14% annual premium above actuarial fair value to insure $100 against unexpected deposit withdrawals The implied consumption of stock investors suggests that the consumption loss associated with National Banking Era bank runs was far more costly than the consumption loss from stock market crashes.National Bank Act ; Financial crises

Photon Yields of Energetic Particles in the Interstellar Medium: an Easy Way to Calculate Gamma-ray Line Emission

A gamma-ray line production calculation in astrophysics depends on i) the composition and energy source spectrum of the energetic particles, ii) the propagation model, and iii) the nuclear cross sections. The main difficulty for model predictions and data interpretation comes from the fact that the spectrum of the particles which actually interact in the ISM - the propagated spectrum, is not the same as the source spectrum coming out of the acceleration site, due to energy-dependent energy losses and nuclear destruction. We present a different approach to calculate gamma-ray line emission, based on the computation of the total number of photons produced by individual energetic nuclei injected in the interstellar medium at a given energy. These photon yields take into account all the propagation effects once and for all, and allow one to calculate quickly the gamma-ray line emission induced by energetic particles in any astrophysical situation by using directly their source spectrum. Indeed, the same photon yields can be used for any source spectrum and composition, as well as any target composition. In addition, these photon yields provide visual, intuitive tools for gamma-ray line phenomenology.Comment: 12 pages, 25 figures, accepted for publication in A&A (NB: the layout may be rather bad, because astro-ph still uses the old A&A LaTeX package. Please check the A&A edition for a better file...

Did adhering to the gold standard reduce the cost of capital?

A commonly cited benefit of the pre-World War One gold standard is that it reduced the cost of international borrowing by signaling a country’s commitment to financial probity. Using a newly constructed data set that consists of more than 55,000 monthly sovereign bond returns, we test if gold-standard adherence was negatively correlated with the cost of capital. Conditional on UK risk factors, we find no evidence that the bonds issued by countries off gold earned systematically higher excess returns than the bonds issued by countries on gold. Our results are robust to allowing betas to differ across bonds issued by countries off- and on-gold; to including proxies that capture the effect of fiscal, monetary, and trade shocks on the commitment to gold; and to controlling for the effect of membership in the British Empire.Gold standard ; Bonds

NASA Magnetospheric MultiScale Mission TableSat 1C

The NASA Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) mission (to be launched in 2014) consists of four spin-stabilized spacecraft flying in precise formation. The MMS spacecraft, which have wire booms up to 60 m long, are analyzed using the UNH MMS TableSat IC, a limited 3-DOF rotation (full spin, limited nutation) table top prototype of the MMS spacecraft. A PID controller is implemented on TableSat IC to observe the effects of spin rate and nutation control on the experimental satellite bus and scaled booms. Nutation and spin are implemented independently and the behavior of the test bed with and without SDP booms is examined. The SDP booms are shown to increase the response time of the controlled platform

A shape theorem for an epidemic model in dimension d≥3d\ge 3

We prove a shape theorem for the set of infected individuals in a spatial epidemic model with 3 states (susceptible-infected-recovered) on ${\mathbb Z}^d,d\ge 3$, when there is no extinction of the infection. For this, we derive percolation estimates (using dynamic renormalization techniques) for a locally dependent random graph in correspondence with the epidemic model.Comment: 39 pages; soumi

Cluster excitation and ionization in high velocity collisions:the atomic approach

The independent atom and electron model [1] is introduced in a quantum context and associated approximations tentatively estimated. Confrontation of the model to measured ionization and excitation cross sections of small ionic carbon clusters Cn+ in collisions with helium at an impact velocity of 2.6 a.u is presented

That's Where the Money Was: Foreign Bias and English Investment Abroad, 1866-1907

Why did Victorian Britain invest so much capital abroad? We collect over 500,000 monthly returns of British and foreign securities trading in London and the United States between 1866 and 1907. These heretofore-unknown data allow us to better quantify the historical benefits of international diversification and revisit the question of whether British Victorian investor bias starved new domestic industries of capital. We find no evidence of bias. A British investor who increased his investment in new British industry at the expense of foreign diversification would have been worse off. The addition of foreign assets significantly expanded the mean-variance frontier and resulted in utility gains equivalent to a meaningful increase in lifetime consumption.Capital markets, Home bias, History, Victorian overseas investment

Viscoroute 2.0: a tool for the simulation of moving load effects on asphalt pavement

As shown by strains measured on full scale experimental aircraft structures, traffic of slow-moving multiple loads leads to asymmetric transverse strains that can be higher than longitudinal strains at the bottom of asphalt pavement layers. To analyze this effect, a model and a software called ViscoRoute have been developed. In these tools, the structure is represented by a multilayered half-space, the thermo-viscoelastic behaviour of asphalt layers is accounted by the Huet-Sayegh rheological law and loads are assumed to move at constant speed. First, the paper presents a comparison of results obtained with ViscoRoute to results stemming from the specialized literature. For thick asphalt pavement and several configurations of moving loads, other ViscoRoute simulations confirm that it is necessary to incorporate viscoelastic effects in the modelling to well predict the pavement behaviour and to anticipate possible damages in the structure.Comment: 27 pages

Mavericks, Moderates, or Drifters - Supreme Court Voting Alignments, 1838-2009

We introduce a new data set recording the vote of every Justice in 18,812 Supreme Court cases decided between 1838 and 1949. When combined with existing data sets, our new data allow us to examine votes in all cases through 2009. We use this data to address previously unanswerable questions about the president\u27s ability to appoint Supreme Court Justices of similar ideology. Surprisingly, history shows that the president\u27s odds of appointing a Justice who sides with appointees of his party have been no better than a coin flip. We find no evidence that divided government at the time of nomination increased the rate of appointees who voted across party lines. These findings cast doubt on the hypothesis that appointments bring the Court in line with majoritarian views. Indeed, many failed appointments occurred when a majority of the Senate and the president were of the same party. These mavericks are not outliers, but rather are part of a larger pattern of appointees whose votes departed or drifted away from executive expectations at remarkable frequency throughout our nation\u27s histor