Incentives in Merchant Empires: Portuguese and Dutch Labor Compensation

The different organizational structure of the Portuguese and Dutch merchant empires affected their ability to monitor workers. I test the theoretical implications of these differences using micro data of overseas workers' compensation from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The two merchant empires used significantly different compensation structures: working for the king of Portugal corresponded to a higher bonus share of compensation on average than that of the Dutch East India Company. These results are consistent with theoretical implications and provide additional support to the historical evidence we have on the organizational structure of merchant empires.Merchant Empires, Labor Compensation, Incentives, Monitoring

Multi-Hamiltonian Structures on Beauville's Integrable System and Its Variant

We study Beauville's completely integrable system and its variant from a viewpoint of multi-Hamiltonian structures. We also relate our result to the previously known Poisson structures on the Mumford system and the even Mumford system.Comment: This is a contribution to the Vadim Kuznetsov Memorial Issue on Integrable Systems and Related Topics, published in SIGMA (Symmetry, Integrability and Geometry: Methods and Applications) at http://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA

Velocity relaxation of a particle in a confined compressible fluid

The velocity relaxation of an impulsively forced spherical particle in a fluid confined by two parallel plane walls is studied using a direct numerical simulation approach. During the relaxation process, the momentum of the particle is transmitted in the ambient fluid by viscous diffusion and sound wave propagation, and the fluid flow accompanied by each mechanism has a different character and affects the particle motion differently. Because of the bounding walls, viscous diffusion is hampered, and the accompanying shear flow is gradually diminished. However, the sound wave is repeatedly reflected and spreads diffusely. As a result, the particle motion is governed by the sound wave and backtracks differently in a bulk fluid. The time when the backtracking of the particle occurs changes non-monotonically with respect to the compressibility factor and is minimized at the characteristic compressibility factor. This factor depends on the wall spacing, and the dependence is different at small and large wall spacing regions based on the different mechanisms causing the backtracking.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure