scholarly journals The Puzzle of the Antebellum Fertility Decline in the United States: New Evidence and Reconsideration

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Haines ◽  
J. David Hacker
Author(s):  
Mauricio Drelichman ◽  
Hans-Joachim Voth

Why do lenders time and again loan money to sovereign borrowers who promptly go bankrupt? When can this type of lending work? As the United States and many European nations struggle with mountains of debt, historical precedents can offer valuable insights. This book looks at one famous case—the debts and defaults of Philip II of Spain. Ruling over one of the largest and most powerful empires in history, King Philip defaulted four times. Yet he never lost access to capital markets and could borrow again within a year or two of each default. Exploring the shrewd reasoning of the lenders who continued to offer money, the book analyzes the lessons from this historical example. Using detailed new evidence collected from sixteenth-century archives, the book examines the incentives and returns of lenders. It provides powerful evidence that in the right situations, lenders not only survive despite defaults—they thrive. It also demonstrates that debt markets cope well, despite massive fluctuations in expenditure and revenue, when lending functions like insurance. The book unearths unique sixteenth-century loan contracts that offered highly effective risk sharing between the king and his lenders, with payment obligations reduced in bad times. A fascinating story of finance and empire, this book offers an intelligent model for keeping economies safe in times of sovereign debt crises and defaults.


2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristopher Velasco ◽  
Pamela Paxton ◽  
Robert W. Ressler ◽  
Inbar Weiss ◽  
Lilla Pivnick

Since the creation of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) in 1964 and AmeriCorps in 1993, a stated goal of national service programs has been to strengthen the overall health of communities across the United States. But whether national service programs have such community effects remains an open question. Using longitudinal cross-lagged panel and change-score models from 2005 to 2013, this study explores whether communities with national service programs exhibit greater subjective well-being. We use novel measures of subjective well-being derived from tweeted expressions of emotions, engagement, and relationships in 1,347 U.S. counties. Results show that national service programs improve subjective well-being primarily by mitigating threats to well-being and communities that exhibit more engagement are better able to attract national service programs. Although limited in size, these persistent effects are robust to multiple threats to inference and provide important new evidence on how national service improves communities in the United States.


Author(s):  
Brandon L. Garrett

In recent years, the involvement of prosecutors in post-conviction proceedings has begun to change from a strictly adversarial to a more investigative and remedial posture. Particularly in the United States, prosecutors’ offices have taken the affirmative responsibility to conduct post-conviction investigations of closed cases. A growing number of exonerations occur because prosecutors themselves agree to review new evidence of innocence or locate it themselves. Prosecutors have created specialized conviction integrity units tasked with reviewing such cold cases. They have created units to conduct other types of audits and reviews to investigate systemic issues, including regarding forensic evidence and police misconduct. They have even, in some offices, conducted investigations of their own conduct. Although most offices may follow a traditional model in which work largely consists in defending final convictions, there has been a notable trend towards experimentation with reconception of the post-conviction role of prosecutors. This chapter describes each of those changes and describes their implications for post-conviction criminal procedure.


1994 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Lynn ◽  
Claudia Pagliari

SummaryChildren's intelligence increased in the United States by approxi-mately 3 IQ points per decade over the period 1932–78. New evidence shows that these increases have been sustained during the last 20 years. Two recent studies indicate that the rates of increase for 1972–89 and 1978–89 were 3·3 and 3·5 IQ points per decade respectively.


2012 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 168-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARIANNE H. WANAMAKER

Economists frequently hypothesize that industrialization contributed to the United States’ nineteenth-century fertility decline. I exploit the circumstances surrounding industrialization in South Carolina between 1881 and 1900 to show that the establishment of textile mills coincided with a 6–10 percent fertility reduction. Migrating households are responsible for most of the observed decline. Higher rates of textile employment and child mortality for migrants can explain part of the result, and I conjecture that an increase in child-raising costs induced by the separation of migrant households from their extended families may explain the remaining gap in migrant-native fertility.


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