Money,Prices and the Silver Industry during the Price Revolution

The discovery of American silver has been commonly viewed in the literature as the moving force behind the sustained rise of prices experienced by Western Europe from the early 16th to the mid-17th century. However, the mechanical connection between the money supply and the general price level implied by the Quantity Theory oversimplifies the analysis of a period characterized by different trends, some of which cannot be easily explained by the monetarist story: (i) Central Europe silver mining boomed between 1451 and 1540 following a phase of scarcity of money that was especially severe between the end of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th century; (ii) European prices started to rise before American silver was significantly imported to the Continent; (iii) the rapid expansion of American mining coincided with the decline of the European silver industry (1540–1618); and finally (iv) Mexican and Peruvian bullion production evidenced a downward course during the period 1628–1697, but no alteration in the rising trend of European prices occurred in response. It is argued instead that the classical theory of value and distribution, emphasizing costs of production as determinants of the ‘natural’ value of commodities including precious metals, can accommodate the facts in a more consistent manner than the monetarist view.     

Relevance of Fundraising Charities’ Content-Marketing Objectives: Perceptions of Donors,Fundraisers, and Their Consultants

Many fundraising charities invest heavily in content marketing, often using consultants to direct their content-marketing efforts. Thus it is vital to establish whether certain key aims of content marketing suggested by literature in the field actually match the aspects of content marketing deemed most important by charity donors. This paper examines the significance attached by samples of charities, donors, and content-marketing consultancies to four possible major objectives of content marketing—the attainment of high–search-engine-results-page rankings, image enhancement through impression management, the stimulation of public perceptions of organizational transparency, and the creation of messages that “go viral.” Several major differences in perceptions emerged among the three groups, with substantial implications for how fundraising charities should manage their content-marketing programs and activities. Charity managements need to consider carefully and critically the possible returns on large-scale expenditures intended to pursue the putative aims of content marketing that are routinely advocated by practitioner and academic literature.     

Unbundling democracy: Political rights and civil liberties

Much recent political economy and political science literature views democracy in terms of political rights. This view, often referred to as electoral democracy, is particularly pronounced in the empirical literature. We reincorporate the role of civil liberties, which are at the core of modern democracy, in two ways. We identify four fundamental sources of potential differences in the evolution of political rights and civil liberties. We present systematic, robust and varied empirical evidence on the direct impact of two of these potential sources of differences using cross-national panel data and accounting for the modernization hypothesis. We obtain two noteworthy empirical results: civil liberties exhibit greater persistence than political rights in affecting subsequent outcomes; and, our main result, civil liberties are complementary to political rights when affecting subsequent outcomes, while the reverse is not the case. Consequently, one must incorporate civil liberties as a determinant of electoral democracy. More generally, both dimensions must be considered to understand the setbacks recently experienced by many democracies, despite their holding of free and fair elections.     

The last visitation of the plague in Sweden: the case of Bräkne‐Hoby in 1710–11

In an earlier study of the plague in Colyton, Devon, the household distribution of deaths was studied to see whether this provided a method of identifying the causative disease. In this article, a known epidemic of plague in the Swedish parish of Bräkne‐Hoby was studied as a means of testing out the generality of the household distribution of deaths. It was discovered that, in this case, the very heavy mortality was due to two radically different means of spreading the disease, initially the classic bubonic one through the rat flea, and latterly, and somewhat surprisingly, the pneumonic one, through the infection of the inhabitants by their own friends and neighbours.     

State Income Taxes and Interstate Migration

This paper examines the comprehensive IRS data set of state-state migration flows for evidence that differences in state income tax rates are associated with migration patterns. Using annual data on moves between every pair of states, pooled time-series cross-section regressions indicate that in the 1992–2010 period states with higher top marginal income tax rates experienced relatively greater outmigration of taxpayers and gross income. To illustrate the magnitude of the tax effect, we estimate that by 2010 cumulative losses since the enactment of New Jersey’s 2004 “millionaires’ tax” were as much as 42,000 taxpayers and $6.9 billion in annual adjusted gross income. These results suggest that sustained, relatively high income tax rates could gradually erode a state’s population and revenue base.     

Real Existing Regionalism: The Region between Talk,Territory and Technology

In this essay, we propose the notion of real existing ‘lived’ regionalism as a rejoinder to the normative and ideological debates around new regionalism. Regional forms have shown little convergence in this age of globalized regionalization. Instead of an ideational construct or set of predictable practices, we argue that regionalism is a contested product of discourses (talk), territorial relationships (territory) and technologies (material and of power). The concept of real existing regionalism confronts the tensions between the discursive constructions and normative interventions characterizing much current regionalist debate and the territorial politics and technologies reflecting, generating and directing new state spatial strategic choices. The essay demonstrates the utility of the real existing regionalism framework through an analysis of the greenbelt, transport planning and post‐ suburbanization in Southern Ontario. We argue that regulatory institutions capture the Toronto region in a mix of rhetorical and technological change that complies with neither preconceived notions of regionalization nor the pessimism of total regional dysfunctionality. Rather, the lived experience of regionalization illuminates the emergent assemblages, multiplicity of everyday flows and ongoing multiscalar negotiations of diverse communities that produce the real existing region.