Censorship as a Typographical Chimera: John Milton and John Locke on Gestures

The aim of my paper is to show some elements in Milton’s and Locke’s political writings, depending on their attitudes to different media. Milton in his argumentation against censorship must demonstrate that all the ancient instances for censorship, usually cited in his century, can be interpreted as examples of another phenomenon. However, Milton, analysing loci of Plato’s Republic and some Scriptural topics, recognises the scope and significance of non-conceptual, non-printed, non-verbal forms of communication; he describes them as signs of childish, female or uneducated behaviours, as valueless phenomena from the point of view of political liberty incarnated in the freedom of press. John Locke’s attitude is the same. I will show a chain of ideas, similar to Milton’s one, in his Two Tracts on Government and in his Epistola de tolerantia, focusing the analyses on the concept of adiaphora (indifferent things)

Invariant monotone coupling need not exist

We show by example that there is a Cayley graph, having two invariant random subgraphs X and Y, such that there exists a monotone coupling between them in the sense that $X\subset Y$, although no such coupling can be invariant. Here, "invariant" means that the distribution is invariant under group multiplications.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOP767 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Speciation without chromatography: Part 2. Determination of tributyltin by chloride generation flow injection atomic absorption spectrometry

A procedure is described for the quantitation of tributyltin in aqueous samples and extracts based on its relatively high volatility in halide media, permitting vapour phase sampling from the headspace above such samples.Tributyltin chloride (TBT-C1) was purged from various chloride containing aqueous matrices and collected on the surface of an iridium treated graphite tube for subsequent quantitation by graphite furnace atomic absorption. Iodide, bromide and chloride matrices were compared for their generation efficiency. The effect of acidity of the sample was also studied. An absolute detection limit of 1.3 ng TBT (as tin) was estimated, corresponding to a detection limit of 0.33 ng ml 1 for a 4 ml sub-sample. Method validation was achieved using NRCC PACS-2 (sediment) Certified Reference Material, for which reasonable agreement between certified and measured values of tributyltin content was obtained. A procedural concentration limit of detection of 66 ng g 1 TBT in the sediment could be achieved

Efficiency of Banks in the Third Federal Reserve District

In recent years banks have had to operate in an increasingly competitive environment. How banks will be affected by the increased competitive pressures depends in part on how efficiently they are run. This paper uses the stochastic econometric cost frontier approach to study efficiency at banks in the Third Federal Reserve District. The paper looks at scale efficiency - whether banks are operating with the efficient level of outputs; scope efficiency - whether banks are operating with the efficient mix of outputs; and x-efficiency - whether banks are using their inputs efficiently. The cost model differs from previous studies in that it explicitly accounts for the quality of banks' assets and the probability of failure, which influences banks' costs in a number of ways. The paper also differs from previous studies in its treatment of financial capital as an input into the production process. In addition to providing a cushion against losses, financial capital can be used to fund loans as a substitute for deposits or borrowed funds. The paper differs in a third way in reporting confidence intervals for the bank- specific measures of efficiency. There do not seem to be many cost efficiency gains made from Third District banks' changing their sizes, and these results are much like those obtained in studies using U.S. samples. The model shows that there is no evidence of either scope economies or diseconomies at the average efficient bank in the Third District, nor at banks in different size categories. While the scope measures suggest there is no cost justification for joint production, the approach leaves open the possibility of revenue benefits. Average x-inefficiency at banks in the Third District is on the order of 6 % to 9 %. In competitive markets not all of this gain would be retained by the bank - the savings would be passed on to customers - increasing overall welfare. When compared to U.S. samples, Third District banks seem to be outperforming U.S. bankers on average in this regard. A simple correlation and regression results indicate that inefficient banks in the District tend to be younger. There is no statistically significant differences in efficiency across the three states. There is no evidence that larger banks are more or less x-efficient than smaller banks. Inefficient banks have a higher percentage of loans in construction and land development, and loans to individuals. One of the more interesting relationships is the negative relationship between inefficiency and the capital-asset ratio. It may indicate that higher capital may prevent moral hazard. In conclusion, inefficient banks may have more to fear from efficient producers than from banks producing particular volume or product mix.

Is the personal bankruptcy system bankrupt?

Loretta Mester outlines the components of reform proposals. She then looks at the empirical research on personal bankruptcy to evaluate the rationale for reforming the system and the effectiveness of proposed changes. ; Also issued as Payment Cards Center Discussion Paper No. 02-02Bankruptcy

Some two-dimensional finite energy percolation processes

Some examples of translation invariant site percolation processes on the $\Z^2$ lattice are constructed, the most far-reaching example being one that satisfies uniform finite energy (meaning that the probability that a site is open given the status of all others is bounded away from $0$ and $1$) and exhibits a.s. the coexistence of an infinite open cluster and an infinite closed cluster. Essentially the same example shows that coexistence is possible between an infinite open cluster and an infinite closed cluster that are both robust under i.i.d. thinning.Comment: 14 page

Measuring efficiency at U.S. banks: accounting for heterogeneity is important

Estimates of bank cost efficiency can be biased if bank heterogeneity is ignored. The author compares X-inefficiency measures derived from a model that constrains the cost frontier to be the same for all banks in the nation and a model that allows the cost functions and error terms to differ across Federal Reserve Districts. The author finds that the data reject the single cost function model; X-inefficiency measures based on the single cost function model are, on average, higher than those based on the separate cost functions model; the distributions of the one-sided error terms on which X-inefficiency measures are based are wider for the single cost function model than for the separate cost functions models; and the ranking of Districts by the level of X-inefficiency differs in the two models. The differences in efficiency across Districts reflect more than just differences in bank size, geographic size, or population of the Districts. These results suggest that it is important when studying X-inefficiency to account for differences across the markets in which banks are operating and, more generally, that since X-inefficiency is, by construction, a residual, it will be particularly sensitive to omissions in the basic model.Banks and banking - Costs

Managing the recovery in uncertain times: a summary of the 2003 Philadelphia Fed Policy Forum.

Managing the recovery in uncertain times was the topic of our third annual Philadelphia Fed Policy Forum held on November 14, 2003. This event, sponsored by the Bank’s Research Department, brought together a group of highly respected academics, policymakers, and market economists, for discussion and debate about the effect of uncertainty on economic decision-making. Our hope is that the 2003 Policy Forum serves as a catalyst for both greater understanding and more research on policymaking in the face of uncertainty.Uncertainty ; Economic policy ; Monetary policy