bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Trade, Agriculture, and Environment
Authors: Ervin David E
Published: October 2023

Most developed nations are pursuing liberalized and expanded agricultural trade as well as improved environmental quality. Therein lie several potential conflicts. Will the trade expansion be hindered by stronger environmental programs for agriculture? Or, will environmental quality be sacrificed, especially in developing countries, in the rush to capture growing global food markets? Will nontariff trade barriers appear disguised as environmental protection efforts? Will the opening of new trade pathways spread harmful nonindigenous pests? How can transboundary environmental resources affected by food production and marketing be protected without raising trade tensions? These diverse concerns form a central question: How can trade expansion and environmental protection be managed such that the pursuit of one objective complements the other, or has negligible adverse effects?
Uncertainty and Complexity in Cabinet Formation
Authors: Winter Lieven De , Dumont Patrick
Published: October 2023

Bargaining is a foundational process of democracy. It pervades every phase of the life cycle of parliamentary politics. In this life cycle, cabinet formation sets the stage for policymaking, which occasionally in turn leads governments to resign, which may be followed by elections, which in turn give rise to the formation of a successor government, and so forth. Then the cycle begins all over again. Any one of these moments in the cycle could serve as a starting point for an examination of coalition politics. Yet, there is one phase of the parliamentary ‘life cycle’ in which inter-party, and often intra-party, bargaining is truly the focal point of political interest, and that is the process of cabinet (government) formation. It is here that bargaining between and within parties is most visible, most intense, and perhaps most decisive. This formative phase of the parliamentary life cycle will indeed be the starting point of our journey in this volume.
Coalition Agreements and Cabinet Governance
Authors: Müller Wolfgang C , Strøm Kaare
Published: October 2023

All cabinet coalitions are based on some initial agreement between the partners. At a minimum, they have to agree on which parties will participate in the government and on the division of cabinet offices. Otherwise, no government could assume office. In most cases, the coalition partners will make an agreement that goes beyond the division of high office spoils. They may define the government’s policy agenda, from at a minimum identifying its top priorities (e.g. budgetary restraint) to detailing a policy programme that seeks to anticipate all major legislation and government decisions of the parliamentary term. They may agree on some set of rules under which they will cooperate in government. They may even decide how they will interact in other institutions or at other levels of government. But these coalition agreements vary greatly in their contents, formality, and comprehensiveness. In this chapter, we discuss the precise nature of such agreements and identify the causes of variation.
Conclusions
Authors: Lachowski Zdzislaw
Published: October 2023

The confidence- and security-building measures of the OSCE are unique and remain the most elaborate and successful system and framework of this type in the world. In a sense, the OSCE CSBM regime is a barometer of broader 5erurity relations among the participating states. The CSBM process in Europe started slowly, forced its way past variou5 cold war obstacles and twists of policy and eventually generated an extensive collection of cooperative measures. norms and mechanisms. The question now is how current political changes will affect its status, form and content.
Unit roots and all that: the impact of time-series methods on macroeconomics
Authors: Smith Ron P
Published: October 2023

Over the past twenty years or so applied macroeconomics has been transformed by the widespread adoption of a set of new statistical techniques. The techniques I shall focus on are: unit-root tests, vector autoregressions (VARs), Granger-causality tests, and cointegration, which I will refer to as ‘unit roots etc.’. Although these techniques were invented to answer statistical questions, they diffused very rapidly through applied economics because they were thought to be able to answer important theoretical questions in macroeconomics.
Making an impact
Authors: Hargittai István
Published: October 2023

Once there is a discovery, the next step is to make it known so that others can use it and, in the final account, mankind can benefit from it. There are different ways for disseminating the results, from a press conference to a scholarly monograph. Holding a press conference as the primary means of communicating new scientific results is suspect because it circumvents the filter system of peer review, and there is seldom a discovery that calls for informing the general public before the scientific community. The most common and time-honored method is to submit an account to a peer-reviewed scientific periodical and to report to a scientific meeting. The whole process of communicating the results may have to start with naming the discovery if it is a truly new contribution.
The Dutch Republic
Authors: Israel Jonathan
Published: October 2023

The `Dutch Golden Age’, the age of Grotius, Spinoza, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and a host of other renowned artists and writers was also remarkable for its immense impact in the spheres of commerce, finance, shipping, and technology. It was in fact one of the most spectacularly creative episodes in the history of the world. In this book, Jonathan Israel gives the definitive account of the emergence of the United Provinces as a great power, and explains the subsequent decline in the eighteenth century. He places the thought, politics, religion, and social developments of the Golden Age in their broad context, and examines the changing relationship between the northern Netherlands and the south, which was to develop into modern Belgium. One of the principal aims of the book is to counter the oversimplification which characterizes so much history writing today, and to provide a new type of integrated history which draws the different dimensions of the discipline firmly together in strictly non-technical language. The result is a comprehensive and lucid account as useful to the reader primarily interested in artistic and cultural history as to the student who needs a survey of the Republic's institutions, class structure, and economic development. At the same time it will provide an invaluable aid to scholars interested in new research and new interpretations.
Society and economic life
Authors: Daunton Martin
Published: October 2023

The Great Exhibition of 1851, held in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, stands as a symbol of British economic power in the nineteenth century, a visible expression of the country’s economic might. No other country, before or since, has achieved such hegemony in the world economy. The Exhibition was part of the mid-Victorian boom, during which Britain dominated world markets in heavy engineering products, supplying the world with steam engines and machine tools, railway equipment and ships.
Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology
Authors: Smith Dorothy E
Published: October 2023

The women’s movement has given us a sense of our right to have women’s interests represented in sociology, rather than just receiving as authoritative the interests traditionally represented in a sociology put together by men. What can we make of this access to a social reality that was previously unavailable, was indeed repressed? What happens as we begin to relate to it in the terms of our discipline? We can of course think as many do merely of the addition of courses to the existing repertoire—courses on sex roles, on the women’s movement, on women at work, on the social psychology of women and perhaps somewhat different versions of the sociology of the family. But thinking more boldly or perhaps just thinking the whole thing through a little further might bring us to ask first how a sociology might look if it began from the point of view of women’s traditional place in it and what happens to a sociology which attempts to deal seriously with that. Following this line of thought, I have found, has consequences larger than they seem at first.
The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles
Authors: Martin Emily
Published: October 2023

As an anthropologist, I am intrigued by the possibility that culture shapes how biological scientists describe what they discover about the natural world. If this were so, we would be learning about more than the natural world in high school biology class; we would be learning about cultural beliefs and practices as if they were part of nature. In the course of my research I realized that the picture of egg and sperm drawn in popular as well as scientific accounts of reproductive biology relies on stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of male and female. The stereotypes imply not only that female biological processes are less worthy than their male counterparts but also that women are less worthy than men. Part of my goal in writing this article is to shine a bright light on the gender stereotypes hidden within the scientific language of biology. Exposed in such a light, I hope they will lose much of their power to harm us.
Shadow Prices
Authors: Dixit Avinash K
Published: October 2023

Lagrange’s method, and its extensions and generalizations in Chapter 3, all introduce an undetermined multiplier for each constraint. The values of these multipliers are found as a part of the solution. The heuristic discussion of the consumer choice problem in Chapter 1 offered an economic interpretation for its Lagrange multiplier: it was the marginal utility of income. In Chapters 2 and 3 I hinted that a similar interpretation holds much more generally for constrained optimization problems. That is the focus of this chapter.
Towards a theory of economic forecasting
Authors: Clements Michael P , Hendry David F
Published: October 2023

Some recent developments in the theory of economic forecasting using econometric systems are reviewed. Measures of forecast uncertainty for conditional and unconditional forecasts suggest a limit to forecastability and show the potential advantages of combining types of forecast to improve accuracy; but pooling forecasts from rival econometric models violates encompassing. Mean square forecast error comparisons are criticized in favour of generalized forecast error second moments: only the latter are invariant to linear transformations. We delineate five sources of forecast uncertainty: parameter non-constancy; estimation uncertainty; variable uncertainty; innovation uncertainty; and model misspecification. A theory of intercept corrections to mitigate such errors is discussed. Asymptotic forecast error variance formulae for nonstationary economic time series depend on the treatment of unit roots and cointegration but work well in finite samples, and show that forecast evaluation based on differenced data may fail to reveal inadequate models.
Beyond Interests in Politics: A Comment on Virginia Sapiro’s ‘When Are Interests Interesting? The Problem of Political Representation of Women’
Authors: Diamond Irene , Hartsock Nancy
Published: October 2023

In ‘When Are Interests Interesting?’ Virginia Sapiro makes a number of stimulating and important arguments. Her article is particularly useful because it both suggests new research directions and serves as an example of the difficulties of approaching the study of women and politics within the conventional categories of political analysis. We disagree with Sapiro on a number of points, but rather than addressing these here, we hope to expand the discussion by focusing on the ways in which Sapiro’s arguments illuminate the problems created by attempting to make do with the conventional categories.1 Recent developments in feminist theory have begun to uncover fundamental weaknesses in the categories of political analysis themselves, thus forcing researchers to move beyond the positions Sapiro has taken.
Coalition Politics: Turning the Century
Authors: Reagon Bernice Johnson
Published: October 2023

I’ve never been this high before. I’m talking about the altitude. There is a lesson in bringing people together where they can’t get enough oxygen, then having them try to figure out what they’re going to do when they can’t think properly. I’m serious about that. There probably are some people here who can breathe, because you were born in high altitudes and you have big lung cavities. But when you bring people in who have not had the environmental conditioning, you got one group of people who are in a strain- and the group of people who are feeling fine are trying to figure out why you’re staggering around, and that’s what this workshop is about this morning. I wish there had been another way to graphically make me feel it because I belong to the group of people who are having a very difficult time being here. I feel as if I’m gonna keel over any minute and die.
Challenging Imperial Feminism
Authors: Amos Valerie , Parmar Pratibha
Published: October 2023

Our task here is to begin to identify the ways in which a particular tradition, white Eurocentric and Western, has sought to establish itself as the only legitimate feminism in current political practice. [⃛ ] The growth of the Black feminist movement in Britain in the last decade has forced the question of the centrality of Black women’s oppression and exploitation onto the political and theoretical agendas.
The Politics of Postmodern Feminism: Lessons from the Anti-Pornography Campaign
Authors: Frug Mary Joe
Published: October 2023

A particular phase of the legal anti-pornography campaign is dead in the water. The ordinance which Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin initially authored and then vigorously promoted in Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Cambridge, and other cities would have made pornography a form of discrimination against women. It would have permitted women to bring civil actions against those who produce, make, distribute, or sell pornography, which the ordinance generally defined as ‘the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or in words’. It would have provided civil remedies for the harm that pornography causes. But the Supreme Court’s summary affirmance of the Seventh Circuit’s decision holding the ordinance unconstitutional has rendered continued efforts to enact this particular ordinance very problematic.
Avoiding Constitutional Depression: Bad Attitudes and the Fate of Butler
Authors: Scales Ann
Published: October 2023

During the spring term of 1993, I was honoured to be the Walter S. Owen Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law. This paper is a revised version of the ‘Owen Lecture’, at UBC on 16 March 1993. That lecture transpired in the middle of a political firestorm about gay and lesbian sexual expressions, my involvement in which unfolded as follows.
‘Love Me, Master, Love Me, Son’ A Cultural Other Pornographically Constructed in Time
Authors: Chow Rey
Published: October 2023

In an age in which ‘identity’ has become a crucial issue in cultural politics, the word we encounter most frequently is ‘other’. To think in terms of our ‘others’ is to think, critically, of differences and boundaries. Often, it is assumed that the differences that define our ‘others’ imply a subversion, transgression and revolution of the stable boundaries of our existing identities, and thus the return of those boundaries to their constructedness and historicity. And yet, precisely because as a concept the ‘other’ is no less relative in function than other concepts, it can be the occasion for conservatism as much as it can be the occasion for radical possibilities. This essay is an attempt to demonstrate this ambiguity.
An Introduction to Covert Policing
Authors: Hopkins Andrea
Published: October 2023

Intelligence gathering by the police and security services has seen rapid growth in recent years. It is clear that secret surveillance, such as covert cameras, CCTV, tracking devices, telephone tapping, and any personal data collected during such covert activities amount to a serious interference with an individual’s enjoyment of a private life under the European Convention on Human Rights (‘ECHR’), Article 8.These activities engage ‘the right to respect for his private life and family life, his home and his correspondence’ as protected by Article 8(1) and must, if they are not to be in breach of this right, be justified in accordance with the qualifications set out in Article 8(2). The activity must be ‘prescribed by law’, which in ECHR terms means that the applicable legal rules must be accessible and formulated with sufficient precision to enable citizens to foresee, if need be with appropriate advice, the consequences of their actions. Actions must also be necessary and proportionate; secret surveillance is tolerable under the Convention.
Bank of France: The Challenge of Escaping Politicization
Authors: Howarth David
Published: October 2023

Prior to 1994, the Bank of France could be described as the quiet giant of European central banking. Most comparative studies of central bank independence rank the pre-1994 Bank of France as one of the more dependent in its relationship to government. While responsible for the range of operations typical of central banks and exerting potentially considerable influence on policy making, the Bank was very much in the policy making shadow of the Treasury direction of the Ministry of Finance, which held ultimate control over most aspects of monetary policy and considerable influence in prudential supervision (Goodman 1992; Prate 1987).
Denmark and Sweden: Networking by Euro-Outsiders
Authors: Marcussen Martin
Published: October 2023

Both Denmark and Sweden have a paradoxical relationship to the European Union. Their populations clearly favour international cooperation in general and membership of the EU in particular. They are also among the most informed about matters related to European integration overall. Still, although public support for the euro seems to have increased over the last 15 years, the two countries’ populations belong to the most EMU-sceptical in the EU. Only about half of their populations thinks it would be a good idea to replace their national currencies with the euro, the Danes being slightly more positive than the Swedes (Figure 12.1).
Introduction
Authors: Onley James
Published: October 2023

The situation of Great Britain in the Persian Gulf has been well described as unique; for … she has at no time enjoyed, or even asked for, territorial acquisitions in those regions; she has for generations borne burdens there which no other nation has ever undertaken anywhere, except in the capacity of sovereign; she has had duty thrust upon her without dominion; she has kept the peace amongst people who are not her subjects; has patrolled, during upwards of two centuries, waters over which she has enjoyed no formal lordship; [she] has kept, in strange ports, an open door through which the traders of every nation might have as free access to distant markets as her own.
The European Bond Markets Under Emu
Authors: Pagano Marco , Thadden Ernst-Ludwig Von
Published: October 2023

The European Monetary Union (EMU) has probably been the single most important policy-induced innovation in the international financial system since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. It has opened the possibility for the creation of a new, fully integrated continental financial market, of the same scale as that of the United States. By eliminating exchange rate risk, EMU has eliminated a key obstacle to financial integration.
The Sorcerer’s Tale
Authors: Ryrie Alec
Published: October 2023

An earl’s son, plotting murder by witchcraft; conjuring spirits to find buried treasure; a stolen coat embroidered with pure silver; crooked gaming-houses and brothels; a terrifying new disease, and the self-trained surgeon who claims he can treat it. This is the world of Gregory Wisdom, a physician, magician, and consummate con-man at work in sixteenth-century London. In this book, Alec Ryrie uses previously unknown documents to reconstruct this extraordinary man’s career. The journey takes us through the cut-throat business of early modern medicine, down to Tudor London’s gangland of fraud and organized crime; from the world of Renaissance magi and Kabbalistic conjurers to street-corner wizards; and into the chaotic, exhilarating religious upheavals of the Reformation. On the way, we learn how Tudor England’s dignified public face and its rapacious underworld were intimately connected to each other. Gregory Wisdom’s career is an object lesson in how to conjure up wealth and respectability from nothing in a turbulent age. And it provides a unique glimpse into a world intoxicated with new ideas, where it was impossible to know quite what to believe - or who to trust.
The ‘Neither This Nor That’ Economy
Authors: Raby Geoff
Published: October 2023

The mixture of half-plan, half-market; neither-plan, nor market; pretend¬ socialism, pretend-capitalism, with ill¬ defined borders between legality and illegality; socialist moral codes and principles of market efficiency; neither this nor that; half this, half that; in short a condition of ‘market socialism’, the NEM [New Economic Mechanism], or ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, is an unstable condition---economically and ethically. Sooner or later (probably sooner) either plan and centralised social property, or market and private property must prevail and dominate the system (Prybyla 1986:43-4).
Low Pay and Household Poverty
Authors: Nolan Brian , Marx Ive
Published: October 2023

A number of major industrialized economies have seen earnings dispersion increase and the incidence of low-paid employment grow over the past two decades (OECD 1996a). Many have expressed their concern that, as a consequence, poverty in work has worsened. It is against this background that minimum wages, for example, have moved back into the spotlight. Much of the debate revolves around the question of whether and to what extent low-paid workers live in low-income households, and hence whether minimum wages are effective as a poverty alleviation device. At the same time, in-work benefits and/or tax credits are being introduced or existing programmes expanded, again with the aim of improving the living standards of low-paid workers. In continental Europe, where most countries have seen little or no increase in earnings inequality and where low-wage employment remains less widespread than in the Anglo-Saxon countries, the policy debate is somewhat different. There, prompted by the OECD, enhanced wage flexibility is being debated as a possible cure for persistent high unemployment. But there also exists a widespread perception that an expansion of low-wage employment would lead to a proliferation of the working poor. It is in this context that this chapter attempts to shed some light on the empirical relationship between low pay and poverty.
Japanese Labor Markets: Can We Expect Significant Change?
Authors: Rebick Marcus
Published: October 2023

The dramatic rise in the value of the yen after 1985 has made Japanese firms much more conscious of labor costs, especially those that produce goods traded in the international market. The boom of the late 1980s bought some time for these firms, but the slump of the 1990s with the unemployment rate rising to 5 per cent in 1999, combined with the yen reaching a peak of 80 yen to the dollar in the Spring of 1995, has created a much stronger sense of urgency.
Birth Rate Trends in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan: A Long Comparative View
Authors: Dyson Tim
Published: October 2023

This chapter presents time series of annual crude birth rates (CBRs) for selected populations in South Asia. It argues that birth rates throughout the region were declining from the 1950s and early 1960s. In Sri Lanka, the CBR decline dates from about 1950. The turning point in Kerala’s birth rate may have happened slightly earlier, in the late 1940s. For West Bengal we present fairly convincing evidence that the CBR has been falling since about 1956. And the data strongly suggest that the turning point in Bangladesh’s birth rate probably occurred only slightly later. The CBR on the Indian side of former Punjab too was falling from about 1955. It seems reasonable to speculate that a similar trend was happening only a little later in core parts of Punjab province in Pakistan. In contrast, in much of India it is the early 1960s that marks the onset of sustained birth rate decline.
Renegotiation In Repeated Oligopoly Interaction
Authors: Farrell Joseph
Published: October 2023

What determines whether an oligopoly can sustain prices above competitive levels, and if so how much above?1 Modern oligopoly theory offers two general answers to this question. First, there are static models in which price competition is muted because of product differentiation or because firms compete in dimensions less cut-throat than price; the main examples are Cournot oligopoly theory and models of spatial product differentiation. But these models ignore the often obvious dynamic features of oligopoly markets: in particular, firms’ actions are based on predictions about competitors’ reactions.
The British-Irish Council
Authors: Walker Graham
Published: October 2023

The British-Irish Council (BIC), more popularly known as ‘the Council of the Isles’, constitutes one part of Strand Three of the Belfast Agreement of 10 April 1998. It is one of the institutions connecting the governments and nations of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, and is the subject of an international treaty between the two states, attached to the Agreement. The EiC brings together representatives of the British and Irish Governments, devolved institutions in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and representatives of the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.
Germany
Authors: Zimmermann Andreas
Published: October 2023

The Federal Republic of Germany signed the European Convention on Human Rights on 11 November 1950 and ratified it on 5 December 1952. On 5 July 1955, the Federal Republic of Germany made declarations under Arts. 25 and 46 of the Convention, both being valid for a period offive years. They have since been renewed periodically. The scope of application of these declarations had also been extended to all additional protocols which the Federal Republic of Germany has ratified. Finally, the 11th Additional Protocol was ratified by Germany on 2 October 1995. On 4 November 2000 Germany also signed the 12th Additional Protocol.
France in the 1780s
Authors: McPhee Peter
Published: October 2023

The most important feature of eighteenth-century France was that it was essentially a rural society. Ten times as many people inhabited France’s villages and farms as do today. Perhaps 28 million people inhabited France in 1780: if we define an urban community as one with more than 2,000 people, then only two persons in ten lived in an urban centre in the eighteenth century. The great majority inhabited 38,000 rural communities or parishes with, on average, about 600 residents. A glimpse of two of them reveals some of the central characteristics of that distant world.
The Revolution of 1789
Authors: McPhee Peter
Published: October 2023

More than 1,200 deputies from the three estates gathered in Versailles late in April 1789. The expectations of their constituents were boundless, exemplified in the publication by a self-styled ‘roturier’ (commoner) from Anjou in western France of a seven-page Ave et le crédo du tiers-état, which concluded with an adaptation of the Apostles’ Creed: I believe in the equality that Almighty God, maker of heaven and earth, has established among men: I believe in the liberty which was conceived by courage and born of magnanimity; which suffered under Brienne and Lamoignon, was crucified, died, and was buried, and descended into hell; which will soon be resurrected, will appear in the midst of the French, will be seated at the right hand of the Nation, from where she will judge the Third Estate and the Nobility.
The Microeconomics of Technological Systems
Authors: Antonelli Cristiano
Published: October 2023

This book sets out to explore the generation of technological knowledge and the introduction of technological change. Cristiano Antonelli enters this new area of debate by arguing that increasing returns in the production of knowledge apply, albeit under a very specific and contextual set of complementary conditions. Increasing returns can take place within technological districts and clusters where qualified interactions among connected innovators make it possible to take advantage of the modular indivisibility and cumulativeness of technological knowledge. Antonelli illustrates his argument by reference to technological systems and complementarities, irreversibility, and collective knowledge; by examining the role of learning and technological communication as key factors in defining the rate and direction of change within technological systems; and by identifying technological districts and clusters within a theoretical framework which values local externalities, irreversibility, and endogenous structural change. "The Microeconomics of Technological Systems" proposes a general, interpretative framework which identifies, qualifies, and specifies the specific context and processes which make it possible for increasing returns to apply in the localized production of technological knowledge and change. In so doing, it builds on the results of systematic explorations of the microdynamics of technological knowledge and change over a large number of European technological districts and clusters centred on new communication and mechanical engineering technologies.
The Econometrics of Macroeconomic Modelling
Authors: Bardsen Gunnar , Eitrheim Øyvind , Jansen Eilev S , Nymoen Ragnar
Published: October 2023

Macroeconometric models, in many ways the flagships of the economist's profession in the 1960s, came under increasing attack from both theoretical economist and practitioners in the late 1970s. Critics referred to their lack of microeconomic theoretical foundations, ad hoc models of expectations, lack of identification, neglect of dynamics and non-stationarity, and poor forecasting properties. By the start of the 1990s, the status of macroeconometric models had declined markedly, and had fallen completely out of, and with, academic economics. Nevertheless, unlike the dinosaurs to which they often have been likened, macroeconometric models have never completely disappeared from the scene. This book describes how and why the discipline of macroeconometric modelling continues to play a role for economic policymaking by adapting to changing demands, in response, for instance, to new policy regimes like inflation targeting. Model builders have adopted new insights from economic theory and taken advantage of the methodological and conceptual advances within time series econometrics over the last twenty years. The modelling of wages and prices takes a central part in the book as the authors interpret and evaluate the last forty years of international research experience in the light of the Norwegian 'main course' model of inflation in a small open economy. The preferred model is a dynamic model of incomplete competition, which is evaluated against alternatives as diverse as the Phillips curve, Nickell-Layard wage curves, the New Keynesian Phillips curve, and monetary inflation models on data from the Euro area, the UK, and Norway. The wage price core model is built into a small econometric model for Norway to analyse the transmission mechanism and to evaluate monetary policy rules. The final chapter explores the main sources of forecast failure likely to occur in a practical modelling situation, using the large-scale nodel RIMINI and the inflation models of earlier chapters as case studies.
Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840
Authors: Leask Nigel
Published: October 2023

The decades between 1770 and 1840 are rich in exotic accounts of the ruin-strewn landscapes of Ethiopia, Egypt, India, and Mexico. Yet it is a field which has been neglected by scholars and which - unjustifiably - remains outside the literary canon. In this pioneering book, Nigel Leask studies the Romantic obsession with these 'antique lands', drawing generously on a wide range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel books, as well as on recent scholarship in literature, history, geography, and anthropology. Viewing the texts primarily as literary works rather than 'transparent' adventure stories or documentary sources, he sets out to challenge the tendency in modern academic work to overemphasize the authoritative character of colonial discourse. Instead, he addresses the relationship between narrative, aesthetics, and colonialism through the unstable discourse of antiquarianism, exploring the effects of problems of creditworthiness, and the nebulous epistemologicial claims of 'curiosity' (a leitmotif of the accounts studied here), on the contemporary status of travel writing. Attentive to the often divergent idioms of elite and popular exoticism, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing plots the transformation of the travelogue through the period, as the baroque particularism of curiosity was challenged by picturesque aesthetics, systematic 'geographical narrative', and the emergence of a 'transcendental self' axiomatic to Romantic culture. In so doing it offers an important reformulation of the relations between literature, aesthetics, and empire in the late Enlightenment and Romantic periods.
The Lender of Last Resort: Alternative Views and Historical Experience
Authors: Bordo Michael D
Published: October 2023

Recent liquidity assistance to failing savings and loans and banks (some insolvent and some large) in the U.S. and similar rescues abroad have prompted renewed interest in the topic of the lender of last resort. Under the classical doctrine, the need for a lender of last resort arises in a fractional reserve banking system when a banking panic, defmed as a massive scramble for high-powered money, threatens the money stock and, hence, the level of economic activity. The lender of last resort can allay an incipient panic by timely assurance that it will provide whatever high-powered money is required to satisfy the demand, either by offering liberal access to the discount window at a penalty rate or by open market purchases.
Myths about the Lender of Last Resort
Authors: Goodhart Charles
Published: October 2023

There are few issues so subject to myth, sometimes unhelpful myths that tend to obscure rather than to illuminate real issues, as is the subject of whether a central bank (or an international fmancial institution (IFI) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF)), should act as a lender of last resort (LOLR).
Financial Contagion
Authors: Allen Franklin , Gale Douglas
Published: October 2023

There is a long tradition of regarding dislocation in the fmancial sector as a cause of economic fluctuations (Friedman and Schwartz 1963; Bernanke 1983; Bernanke and Gertler 1989). According to this view, fmancial crises are important because they raise the costs of intermediation and restrict credit, which in turn restrain the level of activity in the real sector and ultimately can lead to periods of low growth and recession.
Forum Shopping and Venue in Transnational Litigation
Authors: Bell Andrew S
Published: October 2023

The rules by which a venue is selected and settled upon for the resolution of any given transnational dispute have fostered a complex, fascinating and burgeoning body of law of great commercial significance. As courts and legislatures seek to fashion sophisticated yet practical jurisdictional responses to this issue, practitioners strive to maximize their clients' prospects of success by securing their own preferred venue. For so long as different forums yield the prospect of different outcomes in the resolution of any given dispute, litigation about where to litigate is inevitable. Forum shopping is the province of plaintiffs and defendants alike. This book examines the fascinating competition to win the battle for venue in transnational litigation. It first identifies and analyses the pre-conditions and incentives for forum shopping. These serve to explain not only the frequent intensity of interlocutory litigation relating to questions of venue but also the reason why much transnational litigation settles once the issue of venue is resolved, in turn underlining the practical significance of the subject. The guiding principle of the 'natural forum' - the common law's conceptual response to disputed questions of venue - is subjected to detailed analysis and compared with the more orderly response of jurisdiction-regulating conventions, most successfully effected in EU Regulation 44/2001 and its progenitor, the Brussels Convention. Then the various techniques of what can be called 'reverse forum shopping' including the evolving law relating to anti-suit injunctions and its interplay with the concept of international judicial comity are considered in detail. Finally, the book examines the role of, and the law relating to, jurisdiction and arbitration agreements in transnational litigation, including the manifold techniques by which parties seek to (and frequently do) extricate themselves from these forum-selection arrangements.
Partnership in Controlled Decentralization: Local Governments and the Ministry of Home Affairs
Authors: Akizuki Kengo
Published: October 2023

The phrase, kan-kan settai, has often been in the headlines of major newspapers in Japan in recent years. Meaning ‘officials treating officials’, the phrase refers to the widespread practice of central bureaucrats being pampered with extravagant dinners and gifts by local officials seeking special favours. What people are angry about is that these treats are all paid for from official accounts. Such behaviour is now the target of much criticism, and deservedly so. It clearly belies the image held by some people outside Japan that bureaucrats here are impartial and incorruptible. But it also reflects an important underlying characteristic of Japanese governance in the post-war period, namely, the symbiotic relationship of central and local authorities in the development process. This relationship has changed in the post-war period through a process which is best described as ‘controlled decentralization’, a term which captures both the reality of control and the inevitability of decentralization in Japan.
Municipal Amalgamations
Authors: Mabuchi Masaru
Published: October 2023

The history of the municipality in Japan is that of its amalgamation. In 1883 there were 71,497 municipalities in Japan. From 1883 to 1898, the number of municipalities decreased to 14,289 as a direct result of municipal amalgamation. Five-sixths of municipalities disappeared in those 16 years. From the end of the last century to 1950, amalgamation efforts continued, although they were not as conspicuous. The second drastic change took place from 1950 to 1960. During this period, the total number of municipalities decreased from 10,443 to 3,526. Now there are about 3,245 municipalities. In this way, the average area of municipalities has grown steadily through amalgamation.
The Pursuit and Assessment of Happiness can be Self-Defeating
Authors: Schooler Jonathan W , Ariel Y Dan , Loewenstein George
Published: October 2023

All sentient creatures presumably favor pleasure over pain. However, only humans, with their unique capacity for planning and self-reflection, have the capacity to deliberately attempt to conduct their lives so as to maximize their hedonic experience. The fact that we are able to consider the potential short- and long-term hedonic benefits of our actions, does not mean of course that it is necessarily advisable to attempt to deliberately maximize happiness.
Self-Signaling and Diagnostic Utility in Everyday Decision Making
Authors: Bodner Ronit , Prelec Drazen
Published: October 2023

By choosing one alternative over another, we reveal something about our preferences, not just to others but also to ourselves. In a previous paper (Bodner and Prelec, 1997), we described how the model of a utility maximizing individual could be expanded to include diagnostic utility as a distinct source of satisfaction. We review the basic elements of that proposal here.
The Dynamics of Violence
Authors: Hart Peter
Published: October 2023

When did war come to twentieth-century Ireland? The home rule crisis of 1912-14 introduced guns and armies into party politics, but the oncoming confrontation between nationalists, unionists, and the British government was shunted aside by the greater war in Europe. ‘Crisis’ in 1914 was succeeded by rebellion in 1916. In April of that year revolutionary conspirators id manage to turn Dublin into a battlefield for a week. Nevertheless, the small numbers mustered by the army of the Irish republic and the limited scope of their enterprise only earned the title of ‘rising’ (albeit the Rising).
Theoretical Foundations
Authors: Shanon Benny
Published: October 2023

There is a story, which I have read somewhere, to the effect that Mohammed once compared a scholar or philosopher who writes about mysticism without having had any mystical experience to a donkey carrying a load of books.
Producer Groups and the Decollectivization of the Mongolian Pastoral Economy
Authors: Sneath David
Published: October 2023

This chapter examines the decollectivization of Mongolian pastoralism, and analyses the types of groups and institutional frames within which economic activity was conducted in the collective, pre-collective and post-collective eras. The self-provisioning domestic group with small numbers of livestock is contrasted with large-scale pastoral institutions, two institutional settings that have been symbiotically related in the past. It is argued that while large-scale pastoralist operations can provide a number of benefits and economies of scale, institutions capable of providing these to the majority of pastoral households in the current climate are unlikely to emerge through the operation of market forces alone. It falls to policy makers to establish a climate that can support larger scale pastoral operations, or other institutions capable of providing equivalent benefits.
Costs and Constraints in the Economy of the Mind
Authors: Elster Jon
Published: October 2023

Mental states-motivations and beliefs-cause behavior. We can go on to ask about the causes of the causes: What explains the beliefs and motivations of the agent? In this chapter, I consider motivations as causal determinants of mental states. This will partly involve recharting familiar territory of motivated belief formation. I also argue, however, for the existence and importance of motivated motivations. My main contention is that while economists have emphasized the costs of forming motivated mental states and ignored the constraints on the process, the writings of psychologist suffer from the opposite one-sidedness. By drawing on both bodies of literature, one can form a more complete picture.
Understanding Under- and Over-reaction
Authors: Massey Cade , Wu George
Published: October 2023

The ability to detect change accurately is vital for economic as well as social success. Consider four very different examples. A baseball manager must decide whether his pitcher has “lost his stuff.” A doctor must determine whether a patient”s health has taken a turn for the worse. A production manager is unsure of whether a manufacturing line is out of control. A central bank needs to determine whether an economy has slipped into recession. In each case, the state of the world may have changed from one “regime” to another. These examples illustrate some of the difficulties associated with detecting change. First, the “signal”in each instance (an errant pitch, a sudden drop in blood pressure, a sharp increase in defective goods, or a precipitous drop in the stock market) is noisy, and thus there is a need to separate the “signal”from the “noise.”Second, a decision-maker must balance between making one of two mistakes. She can over-react (i.e. act as if the world has changed, when it in fact has not) or underreact (i.e. act as if the world has remained the same, when it in fact has changed).
Self-serving Beliefs and the Pleasure of Outcomes
Authors: Mellers Barbara , McGraw A Peter
Published: October 2023

People like to think well of themselves. Most endorse high levels of self-esteem (Greenwald 1980; Baumeister, Tice, and Hutton 1989). They believe they will experience more good outcomes and fewer bad outcomes than similar others (Weinstein 1980). They see themselves as more ethical, more productive, more charitable, and simply better on just about any socially desirable outcome (Alicke 1985). They often attribute their successes to strong skills rather than good luck and their failures to bad luck rather than weak skills (Cohen 1964; Weiner et al. 1971). Finally, they believe they have more influence over chance than reality dictates (Langer 1975; Langer and Roth 1975).
The Dark Side of Opportunity: Regret, Disappointment, and the Cost of Prospects
Authors: Tykocinski Orit E , Pittman Thane S
Published: October 2023

Having opportunities is something we all wish for. We think of opportunities as favorable combinations of circumstances, allowing us a chance to better our standing and progress toward our goals. But far less attention is usually paid to the dark side of opportunities, to the fact that sometimes we would have been better off if certain opportunities had never crossed our doorstep or come to our attention. A closer look reveals that opportunities are sometimes linked to negative emotions; when favorable opportunities are missed we often experience regret, and when the outcomes of opportunities fall short of our hopes and expectations we may experience disappointment. In this chapter we review two different lines of research investigating two phenomena related to the psychological cost of having opportunities: Inaction inertia and retroactive pessimism.
The Genealogical Imagination
Authors: Woolf Daniel
Published: October 2023

There Can Be little doubt that during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries English men and women became interested in the histories of their own families in ways they had not been previously. The cultural assumptions and social conventions driving such interests are apparent in the various remarks quoted in the last chapter. Students of the history of historiography have been quick to point out the great strides in historical methodology which are owed to the principal architects of systematic family history, the heralds, and have rightly singled out particular famous examples, from Camden to Dugdale, for their erudition and attention to detail. They have also pointed out the degree to which accurate family history, based on documentary and physical evidence (such as monuments) was a slow process of development, with snares of error impeding the path towards a rigorous and sceptical establishment of genealogies. This picture is too simplistic. While it is correct as to the scholarly virtues and insights of certain leading antiquaries, some but not all of whom were heralds, it overstates the collective importance of the heralds as a group. Moreover, it again assumes that the driving impulse behind the advances in historical method during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a small number of highly educated individuals, while failing to allot any credit to the efforts of the very families which they were studying. To some degree this is a consequence of a rather anachronistic projection of our modern distinction between the ‘professional’ and the ‘amateur’, a division of historical labour that is virtually worthless before the late nineteenth century. It also reflects a lingering positivist notion of the gradual progress of historical knowledge, as the myths and legends accepted by a credulous Middle Ages were gradually dispelled by a heroic few.