Power politics and princely debts: why Germany's common currency failed, 1549–56†

Using new sources, this article examines how in the years around 1550 Charles V and the imperial estates came close to creating a common currency for the Holy Roman Empire. The article analyses whose interests prevailed in the negotiations and how, despite the resistance of some important actors, the Imperial diet of 1551 was able to unanimously agree on the currency bill. It also analyses why the common currency still failed: This was the case because of the desire of many princes to ease the repayment of their debts by establishing a bimetallic currency, and even more importantly because of Charles V's attempt to weaken the Elector of Saxony by undervaluing the taler. In this, Charles exploited the diet's implicit ex‐ante agreement with him to set the rates at which old money was allowed to continue in circulation. His manipulations provoked resistance, raised the costs of implementing the common currency, and caused its failure.     

Comparing post-operative resource consumption following transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) and conventional aortic valve replacement in the UK

Objective:

To define the in-hospital and 6-month post-discharge resource use, following Transcatheter Aortic Valve Implantation (TAVI) and conventional Aortic Valve Replacement (AVR) surgery within a single UK hospital.

Methods:

A local service evaluation of patients undergoing TAVI or AVR between January 2011 and May 2012 captured data until 6-months post-procedure, collected from hospital records and via a General Practitioner questionnaire. The main end-points were mortality, time in ITU/HDU, hospital length of stay (LoS), discharge destination, re-admission, and post-discharge primary/secondary care resource use. Sub-group analyses were performed for AVR patients aged ≥80 (AVR?≥?80) and with EuroSCORE of ≥10 (AVR ES?≥?10) to allow more direct comparison with ‘TAVI type’ patients.

Results:

Results are given as means (standard deviation) for TAVI (n?=?51), AVR (n?=?188), AVR?≥?80 (n?=?48), and AVR ES?≥?10 (n?=?47), respectively, unless otherwise stated. Age in years was 83.0 (8.1), 71.2 (13.1), 84.1 (2.7), 79.4 (7.1); EuroSCORE was 24.7 (11.9), 8.1 (6.4), 12.0 (6.0), and 16.5 (6.6); post-operative LoS (days) was 11.5 (11.2), 10.9 (10.8), 14.3 (16.7), and 15.2 (17.7). For discharged patients, 0%, 7%, 13%, and 9% had unplanned cardiac-related re-admissions within 30-days of discharge. Time to first readmission was 74.6 (34.0), 35.0 (34.2), 20.8 (9.7), and 22.6 (14.3) days.

Limitations:

This was a single-center retrospective evaluation, not prospectively powered to confirm differences in outcomes.

Conclusions:

Despite TAVI being performed in an older, higher risk population, LoS was similar to AVR. Most strikingly there were no cardiac-related re-admissions within 30-days for TAVI and time to first re-admission was significantly longer. This evaluation suggests that TAVI is clinically appropriate and provides economic advantages in both the hospital and post-discharge setting in this high risk group. Many patients undergoing TAVI are considered unfit for surgery and, hence, TAVI offers a treatment that delivers similar results to traditional AVR without the high risk associated with surgery.     

To trust or not to trust smart consumer products: a literature review of trust-building factors

Management Review Quarterly - Numerous “smart” consumer products are already available on the market, and the diversity of such smart products is expected to increase considerably in...     

Discouraging Rainforest Transformation: An Ex-ante Policy Impact Analysis

Despite extensive efforts made by national and international certification agencies, Indonesian smallholder farmers’ participation in palm oil certification schemes adoption remains low. A fundamental obstacle is the smallholder practice of rainforest transformation into oil palm plantation which is forbidden by the agencies. In this context, we investigate three policies that could lead to a reduction in rainforest deforestation by smallholders: price premium on certified palm oil; the provision of environmental information; contributor recognition. In order to evaluate the influence of the policies ex-ante, we conduct a social dilemma experiment involving rubber and oil palm smallholders in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. The findings indicate that the price premium and provision of context-specific environmental information could reduce rainforest transformation. However, a statistically significant effect of contributor recognition was not found.     

Co-monotonicity of optimal investments and the design of structured financial products

We prove that, under very weak conditions, optimal financial products on complete markets are co-monotone with the reversed state price density. Optimality is meant in the sense of the maximization of an arbitrary preference model, e.g., expected utility theory or prospect theory. The proof is based on a result from transport theory. We apply the general result to specific situations, in particular the case of a market described by the Capital Asset Pricing Model or the Black–Scholes model, where we derive a generalization of the two-fund-separation theorem and give an extension to APT factor models and structured products with several underlyings. We use our results to derive a new approach to optimization in wealth management, based on a direct optimization of the return distribution of the portfolio. In particular, we show that optimal products can (essentially) be written as monotonic functions of the market return. We provide existence and nonexistence results for optimal products in this framework. Finally we apply our results to the study of bonus certificates, show that they are not optimal, and construct a cheaper product yielding the same return distribution.     

Discrete credit barrier models

The model introduced in this article is designed to provide a consistent representation for both the real-world and pricing measures for the credit process. We find that good agreement with historical and market data can be achieved across all credit ratings simultaneously. The model is characterized by an underlying stochastic process that takes on values on a discrete lattice and represents credit quality. Rating transitions are associated with barrier crossings and default events are associated with an absorbing state. The stochastic process has state-dependent volatility and jumps which are estimated by using empirical migration and default rates. A risk-neutralizing drift is estimated to consistently match the average spread curves corresponding to all the various ratings.     

HOW COOPERATIVE ARE SAVINGS AND CREDIT COOPERATIVES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES?: AN ANALYSIS OF DATASETS FROM UGANDA

Building successful savings and credit cooperatives (SACCOs) that actually embody the cooperative principles is a challenge to development agencies. Although SACCOs form the majority of microfinance providers in many developing countries, the most recent literature on microfinance governance and performance has given little reference to the longstanding body of relevant cooperative literature. SACCO representation in microfinance datasets is biased. Drawing on so‐far unexploited datasets of Ugandan SACCOs and savings groups, this paper empirically analyses policy debate regarding SACCO‐ and savings group regulation. The findings point to the relevance of practically implementing the principle of ‘cooperation between cooperatives’ to ensure effective governance at SACCO level. Moreover, the paper introduces two new measures, based on members' savings and shares, which could become useful tools to track the application of cooperative principles in developing countries, and hence improve evidence‐based policy‐making for SACCOs.     

中国经济复苏将经历一段曲折之路

【美国《华尔街日报》5月25日】中国经济似乎正在丧失增长动力，一些经济领域在一度出现井喷式增长后，目前显现了增速放缓迹象，不过经济学家们说，现在就断言中国的经济复苏已经终止还为时尚早。