The Economics of Badmouthing: Libel Law and the Underworld of the Financial Press in France before World War I

This article analyzes the economics of “badmouthing” in the context of the pre-1914 French capital market. We argue that badmouthing was a means through which racketeering journals sought to secure property rights over issuers’ reputation. We provide a theoretical study of the market setup that emerged to deal with such problems, and we test our predictions using new evidence from contemporary sources.badmouthing, capital market, reputation.

Cigarette Money and Black Market Prices around the 1948 German Miracle

This paper is an empirical study of the distribution of black prices among 120 Bavarian locations at two dates, the beginning of July, 1947 and the end of June, 1948. It shows huge differences in the liquidity of those goods either when measured with the coefficient of variation or the number of locations in which those goods were traded. The main finding is that liquidity of cigarette was very high either when measured by the coefficient of variation and or the number of counties that traded them. This made them special, even when compared with a pure fiat object such as the US dollar. Consistently with the insights of the modern theory of money, the high liquidity of cigarettes is indicative of its use as money.

The Failure of a Clearinghouse: Empirical Evidence. ECMI Working Paper No. 6 / December 2017

This paper provides the first detailed empirical analysis of the failure of a derivatives clearinghouse: the Caisse de Liquidation, which defaulted in Paris in 1974. Using archival data, we find three main causes of the failure: i) a weak pool of investors, ii) the inability to contain the growth of a large member position and iii) risk-shifting decisions by the clearinghouse. Riskshifting incentives aligned the clearinghouse’s interests with those of the defaulting member, induced delays in the liquidation of the defaulted position and led attempts at privatee This paper provides the first detailed empirical analysis of the failure of a derivatives clearinghouse: the Caisse de Liquidation, which defaulted in Paris in 1974. Using archival data, we find three main causes of the failure: i) a weak pool of investors, ii) the inability to contain the growth of a large member position and iii) risk-shifting decisions by the clearinghouse. Riskshifting incentives aligned the clearinghouse’s interests with those of the defaulting member, induced delays in the liquidation of the defaulted position and led attempts at private renegotiation to fail. Our results hav This paper provides the first detailed empirical analysis of the failure of a derivatives clearinghouse: the Caisse de Liquidation, which defaulted in Paris in 1974. Using archival data, we find three main causes of the failure: i) a weak pool of investors, ii) the inability to contain the growth of a large member position and iii) risk-shifting decisions by the clearinghouse. Riskshifting incentives aligned the clearinghouse’s interests with those of the defaulting member, induced delays in the liquidation of the defaulted position and led attempts at private renegotiation to fail. Our results have implications for current policy debates on the design and resolution of clearing institutions

Side-slipping of a radiating particle

Radiation reaction is revisited, first in a new classical aproach, where the physical particle 4-momentum is redefined as the energy-momentum flux across the future light cone and is not parallel to the 4-velocity. Then in a semi-classical approach, it is shown that, when emitting a photon, the particle "side-slips" transversaly to its initial momentum, justifying the non-colinearity between momentum and mean velocity. Side-slipping is finally checked in a pure quantum mechanical treatment of synchrotron radiation.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures. presented at the Int. Conf. QEDSP 2001, dedicated to the 90th anniversary of A.I.Akhiezer, Kharkov (Ukraine) Oct. 30 - Nov. 3, 2001 To appear in the proceeding

The price of media capture and the looting of newspapers in interwar France

This paper develops a new insight enabling the empirical study of media capture: minority shareholders of newspapers and readers face similar risks. Both are adversely affected when corrupt insiders use the newspaper for personal profit and receive invisible revenues. This means that relevant data on influence and exploitation of newspaper has been hiding in plain sight in stock exchange or over-the-counter prices, since stock transactions reflect the value of this capture. Empirical data is consistent with increasing levels of looting in France during the 1930s. We provide a comparison with Britain and argue that Britain managed to protect its newspapers better

InSiDDe: A server for designing artificial disordered proteins

InSiDDe (In Silico Disorder Design) is a program for the in silico design of intrinsically disordered proteins of desired length and disorder probability. The latter is assessed using IUPred and spans values ranging from 0.55 to 0.95 with 0.05 increments. One to ten artificial sequences per query, each made of 50 to 200 residues, can be generated by InSiDDe. We describe the rationale used to set up InSiDDe and show that an artificial sequence of 100 residues with an IUPred score of 0.6 designed by InSiDDe could be recombinantly expressed in E. coli at high levels without degradation when fused to a natural molecular recognition element (MoRE). In addition, the artificial fusion protein exhibited the expected behavior in terms of binding modulation of the specific partner recognized by the MoRE. To the best of our knowledge, InSiDDe is the first publicly available software for the design of intrinsically disordered protein (IDP) sequences. InSiDDE is publicly available online

Economic crises and the eligiblity for the lender of last resort: Evidence from 19th century France

This paper uses panel econometric techniques to estimate a macro-financial model for fee and commission income over total assets for a broad sample of euro area banks. Using the estimated parameters, it conducts a scenario analysis projecting the fee and commission income ratio over a three years horizon conditional on the baseline and adverse macroeconomic scenarios used in the 2016 EU-wide stress test. The results indicate that the fee and commission income ratio is varying in particular with changes in its own lag, the shortterm interest rate, stock market returns and real GDP growth. They also show that the fee and commission income ratio projections are more conservative under the adverse scenario than under the baseline scenario. These findings suggest that stress tests assuming scenario-independent fee and commission income projections are likely to be awed

Late Devonian (Frasnian) Asteropygine trilobites from the Frasnes area, southern border of Dinant synclinorium, Belgium

The Frasnian representatives of Asteropyginae in the Frasnes area (south Belgium) have long been relatively well-documented when compared to other trilobites in the Devonian of the Ardennes (Belgium, northern France). However, examination of the type material and new collecting by the authors indicate that a taxonomic review has become necessary. Two new species of Bradocryphaeus are recorded, B. vanherlei sp. nov. and B. neptuni sp. nov.; one additional species, B. sp. 20, is known from the pygidium alone. New material is recorded of Bradocryphaeus maillieuxi (Richter & Richter), which has hitherto been scantily illustrated in the literature. The cephalon of Heliopyge helios (Richter & Richter) is redescribed on the basis of new specimens and its holotype pygidium refigured

Bagehot for Beginners : The Making of Lender of Last Resort Operations in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

International audienceIn this article we develop new tools to survey the development of lending-of-last-resort operations in the mid-nineteenth century. One finding is that free lending and extensive liquidity support against good collateral developed gradually after 1847, and was already a fact of life before Bagehot published Lombard Street. Another is that the extension of the Bank of England's lender-of-last-resort function went along with a reduction of its exposure to default risks, in contrast with accounts that have associated lending of last resort with moral hazard. Finally, we provide a new interpretation of the 'high rates' advocated by Bagehot. We suggest they were meant to prevent banks from free-riding on the safety offered by the central bank, and were aimed at forcing them to keep lending during crises so as to maintain a critical degree of liquidity in the money market