Practical reason and the unity of agency: critical notice of Christine M. Korsgaard's 'Self-Constitution'

In her book Self-Constitution, Christine Korsgaard unfolds an impressive chain of reasoning intended to tie the normativity of the moral law at one end to the very idea of action at the other. In this paper I voice concerns regarding two key links in this chain. The first relates to her so-called 'argument against particularistic willing', an argument designed to derive the authority of the categorical imperative from the very idea of reflective action, by showing that one truly qualifies as an agent only insofar as one acts on a 'principle of choice'. The second concerns her attempted explanation of how bad action can be possible if principles of practical reason are, as she thinks they are, constitutive principles of action. I suggest that her attempt to deal with this problem by appeal to the idea that practical principles can be more or less agentially unifying is ultimately hindered by her employment of an insufficiently explicated notion of agential unity

The global credit boom: challenges for macroeconomics and policy

The recent financial crisis has put the spotlight on the rapid rise in credit which preceded it. In this paper, we provide an empirical and theoretical analysis of the credit boom and the macroeconomic context in which it developed. We find that the boom was unusually long and associated with neither particularly strong growth nor rising inflation in the economies in which it took place. We show that this type of credit and financial cycle is hard to reconcile with existing economic theory and argue that, while the 'global savings glut' may account for the cycle's initial phase, other factors - such as the conduct of monetary policy and perceptions of declining macroeconomic risk - were more important from the mid-2000s onwards. We conclude by identifying some of the challenges now facing macroeconomics and policy.credit; business cycle; financial crisis; monetary policy; asset prices; boom and bust

Global imbalances and the financial crisis

The recent financial crisis has put the spotlight on the rapid rise in credit which preceded it and the macroeconomic context in which it developed. This article examines the contribution of international savings and investment imbalances to the crisis and how these imbalances have evolved since its onset, focusing on the UK experience as a deficit country over the past decade. It also briefly discusses some implications of the crisis for global imbalances over the medium term.

Mathematical optimisation of drainage and economic land use for target water and salt yields

Land managers in upper catchments are being asked to make expensive changes in land use, such as by planting trees, to attain environmental service targets, including reduced salt loads in rivers, to meet needs of downstream towns, farms and natural habitats. End-of-valley targets for salt loads have sometimes been set without a quantitative model of cause and effect regarding impacts on water yields, economic efficiency or distribution of costs and benefits among stakeholders. This paper presents a method for calculating a ‘menu’ of technically feasible options for changes from current to future mean water yields and salt loads from upstream catchments having local groundwater flow systems, and the land-use changes to attain each of these options at minimum cost. It sets the economic stage for upstream landholders to negotiate with downstream parties future water-yield and salt-load targets, on the basis of what it will cost to supply these ecosystem services.discounting, landuse, NPV, opportunity-cost, salinity, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

A Slight Excess of Large Scale Power from Moments of the Peculiar Velocity Field

The peculiar motions of galaxies can be used to infer the distribution of matter in the Universe. It has recently been shown that measurements of the peculiar velocity field indicates an anomalously high bulk flow of galaxies in our local volume. In this paper we find the implications of the high bulk flow for the power spectrum of density fluctuations. We find that analyzing only the dipole moment of the velocity field yields an average power spectrum amplitude which is indeed much higher than the LCDM value. However, by also including shear and octupole moments of the velocity field, and marginalizing over possible values for the growth rate, an average power spectrum amplitude which is consistent with LCDM is recovered. We attempt to infer the shape of the matter power spectrum from moments of the velocity field, and find a slight excess of power on scales ~ h-1 Gpc.Comment: 6 pages,6 figures, updated to match accepted versio

Sports-related brain injury in the general population: An epidemiological study

Objectives To determine the incidence, nature and severity of all sports-related brain injuries in the general population. Design Population-based epidemiological incidence study. Methods Data on all traumatic brain injury events sustained during a sports-related activity were extracted from a dataset of all new traumatic brain injury cases (both fatal and non-fatal), identified over a one-year period in the Hamilton and Waikato districts of New Zealand. Prospective and retrospective case ascertainment methods from multiple sources were used. All age groups and levels of traumatic brain injury severity were included. Details of the registering injuries and recurrent injuries sustained over the subsequent year were obtained through medical/accident records and assessment interviews with participants. Results Of 1369 incident traumatic brain injury cases, 291 were identified as being sustained during a sports-related activity (21% of all traumatic brain injuries) equating to an incidence rate of 170 per 100,000 of the general population. Recurrent injuries occurred more frequently in adults (11%) than children (5%). Of the sports-related injuries 46% were classified as mild with a high risk of complications. Injuries were most frequently sustained during rugby, cycling and equestrian activities. It was revealed that up to 19% of traumatic brain injuries were not recorded in medical notes. Conclusions Given the high incidence of new and recurrent traumatic brain injury and the high risk of complications following injury, further sport specific injury prevention strategies are urgently needed to reduce the impact of traumatic brain injury and facilitate safer engagement in sports activities. The high levels of ‘missed’ traumatic brain injuries, highlights the importance in raising awareness of traumatic brain injury during sports-related activity in the general population

Essays on the crisis of monetary union

This thesis is an inter-disciplinary analysis of the fundamental causes of the decade-long crisis of monetary union and why it has proved so persistent despite major reforms. The consensus narrative of economists has been that the crisis was caused by policy failures and weaknesses in the policy architecture, notably a lack of crisis management and allowing imbalances to get so large. The first two papers reconsider these failures and weaknesses. Paper 1 challenges the consensus view that the fragility of euro-area sovereign bond markets stems from strategic default risk and a failure of policy to coordinate investor beliefs on a ‘good’ equilibrium in the heat of the crisis. Instead, it argues that interaction between the euro area’s legacy bond market structure with a complex policy risk premium created a structural vulnerability that is still to be addressed. Paper 2 finds that imbalances were predominantly caused by credit supply shocks and that, while macroprudential policies may have been helpful in attenuating them, the emergence of imbalances prior to the crisis should not be viewed as a policy failure but as a fact of life in a diverse monetary union. Finally, building on the insights of the previous two papers, Paper 3 formulates a political-financial trilemma founded on the policy goals embodied in the Maastricht compromise. It concludes that euro-area policymakers have been circling around the trilemma over the past decade and that only a multi-faceted approach that anticipates how sovereign bond market structures might change is likely to lead to a stable outcome. The overarching conclusion of the thesis is that the contribution of policy failures and weaknesses in the policy architecture to the crisis has been exaggerated and that greater emphasis should be placed on understanding the structure of sovereign bond markets and their associated vulnerabilities

Cyclic Amp, Cyclic Amp-dependent Protein Kinase and Its Inhibitor Protein in Salivary Glands of Unfed and Feeding Female Lone Star Ticks, Amblyomma Americanum (L.)

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