Zenon’s flour: grains of truth from Tel Kedesh

According to one of the Zenon papyri, In 259 BCE the Ptolemaic courier Zenon stopped at the site of Kedesh, located today in northern Israel, to pick up some flour. In our excavations at this site from 1999-2011, we uncovered an enormous public administrative building with several storerooms filled with large jars. In one room fourteen locally made storage jars lined the walls. Phytoliths taken from the jars turned out to be identifiable as Triticum aestivum, commonly known as bread wheat. This may allow a scientific identification of “Syrian wheat,” a strain first mentioned in third century BCE Egyptian papyri as part of a package of agricultural innovations introduced by Ptolemy II Philadelphus.Accepted manuscrip

Summary of workshop on recent developments in consumer credit and payments

On September 24-25, 2009, the Research Department and the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia held their fifth joint conference to present and discuss the latest research on consumer credit and payments. Sixty participants attended the conference, which included seven research papers on topics such as securitization and distressed loan renegotiation, consumer disclosure, data breaches and identity theft, and the effects of the U.S. financial crisis on global retail lending. In this article, Mitchell Berlin summarizes the papers presented at the conference.Mortgage loans ; Foreclosure ; Payday loans ; Identity theft ; Consumer protection ; Bank loans

Pottery in the computer age

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Bank credit standards

Banks' lending standards at times seem too stringent and at other times too lax. The pattern seems to indicate that banks lend more easily in good times but tighten credit standards in lean times. But such a lending pattern may also be attributable to changes in borrowers' default risk over the business cycle or changes in the demand for loans, which rises and falls with GDP. Is there a systematic reason why banks might be too lax or too stringent in their lending? Economists have proposed a number of models to explain a bank lending cycle, including changes in bank capital, competition, or herding behavior. In "Bank Credit Standards," Mitchell Berlin discusses these models and the empirical evidence for each.

That thing venture capitalist do

Although many people know the term venture capital, not many people know precisely what role venture capitalists play in the economy. How do they identify entrepreneurs with promising new ideas? What kinds of services do they provide to these entrepreneurs? Mitchell Berlin answers these and other questions as he describes "that thing venture capitalists do."Venture capital

Jack of all trades? Product diversification in nonfinancial firms

While financial firms keep searching for the secret formula to make profits out of providing multiple financial services under one roof, nonfinancial firms seem headed in the opposite direction. What can financial firms learn from the experience of diversified nonfinancial firms and those firms that have increased their focus? Mitchell Berlin examines this question and offers some possible explanations as to why nonfinancial firms have found it so hard to profit from diversification.Nonbank activities

Can we explain banks' capital structures?

Bank capital has been much in the news during the recent financial crisis. In 2008 and 2009 the U.S. government injected $235 billion of capital into the banking system as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). In 2009, bank regulators carried out a full-scale evaluation of the capital adequacy of 19 large banking organizations, ultimately requiring 10 of these organizations to increase their capital levels. While most commentators agree that regulatory capital levels are too low for large organizations — especially large organizations that create systemic risks — financial economists have only recently been paying attention to what factors actually govern banks’ capital choices. In “Can We Explain Banks’ Capital Structures?,” Mitchell Berlin discusses how understanding bank capital decisions over the 20-year period prior to the recent crisis can provide insights that may help us to evaluate reform proposals.Bank capital

Geometrical Properties of Conformal Field Theories Coupled to Two-Dimensional Quantum Gravity

In this work we discuss an approach due to F. David to the geometry of world sheets of non-critical strings in quasiclassical approximation. The gravitational dressed conformal dimension is related to the scaling behavior of the two-point function with respect to a distance variable. We show how this approach reproduces the standard gravitational dressing in the next order of perturbation theory. With the same technique we calculate the intrinsic Hausdorff dimension of a world sheet.Comment: 10 pages, TeX, no figure

Dancing with wolves: syndicated loans and the economics of multiple lenders

A firm’s passage from borrowing from a single lender to using multiple lenders is often viewed as an inevitable progression in the life of a firm. While there is a strong element of truth in this view, it is also incomplete. The underlying economics of moving from one lender to many involves more than simply asking whether the firm’s revenues are large enough to cover the costs of adding more lenders or of acquiring a public debt rating. The U.S. syndicated loan market provides a useful laboratory for exploring the economics of multiple lenders. In “Dancing with Wolves: Syndicated Loans and the Economics of Multiple Lenders,” Mitchell Berlin discusses recent research on the syndicated loan market that has attempted to answer questions related to firms’ use of multiple lenders.Loans

Debt maturity: What do economists say? What do CFOs say?

Mitchell Berlin discusses recent theories of how firms choose their debt maturity. Some of these theories are very useful for explaining how chief financial officers (CFOs) choose the maturity of their firms’ debt. However, CFOs seem to believe that they can predict future interest rates and time their borrowings accordingly, and this behavior fundamentally conflicts with most economic theories.Debt management