1,089 research outputs found
The London Market Excess of Loss Spiral
No full textThis thesis explores the London Market Excess of Loss Spiral (“LMX Spiral”), a phenomenon based upon excess of loss reinsurance contracts that developed within the London reinsurance market of the 1980s. The unwinding of the LMX Spiral was a key factor in the crisis the Lloyd’s insurance market had to face in the early 1990s. However, whilst the crisis resulted in a wave of litigation in the English courts, there is no legal appraisal of the additional element of risk brought by the LMX Spiral itself. The case law instead focuses on the duties of the underwriters and various agents that fuelled its development.This situation is unsatisfactory for two reasons. Firstly, reinsurance spirals are a potential side-effect of XL reinsurance markets and therefore other spirals may develop in the future. Secondly, this thesis shows that once a reinsurance spiral reaches a certain point, it becomes unsustainable, generating instability within the relevant reinsurance market.This thesis provides a detailed legal appraisal of reinsurance spirals and a new analysis of excess of loss reinsurance contracts. The first part sets out the relevant legal principles and describes the LMX Spiral and its impact; listing, for the first time, the “Spiral Effects” identified through reports and actuarial models. The second part reviews the case law and assesses the legal nature of the excess of loss “Spiral Contracts” at the core of any reinsurance spiral, concluding that the Spiral Effects can distort the Spiral Contracts to the point where they become simple contracts of indemnity. The third part explores the nature of excess of loss reinsurance in light of the review of the Spiral Contracts, submitting that excess of loss reinsurance contracts cover both the liability of the reinsured and the relevant insured peril
On the Sherlocks, Jane Coleman and County Kildare in the Eighteen Forties
Get PDFIn the late 1980s and early 1990s the author acquired about 30,000 letters written mainly in the 1840s. These pertained to estates throughout Ireland managed by the firm of James Robert Stewart and Joseph Kincaid, hereafter denoted SK. Until the letters – called the SK correspondence in what follows – became the author’s property, they had not seen light of day since the 1840s. Addressed mainly to the firm’s office in Dublin, they were written by landlords, tenants, the partners in SK, local agents, etc. After about 200 years in operation as a land agency, the firm in which members of the Stewart family were the principal partners – Messrs J. R. Stewart & Son(s) from the mid- 1880s onwards – ceased operations in the mid-1980s. Since 1994 the author has been researching the SK correspondence of the 1840s. It gives many new insights into economic and social conditions in Ireland during the decade of the great famine, and into the operation of Ireland’s most important land agency during those years. It is intended ultimately to publish details on several of the estates managed by SK in a study more comprehensive than the present article, in book form. The proposed title is Landlords, tenants, famine: business of an Irish land agency in the 1840s, a draft of which has now been completed. A majority of the letters in that study are on themes some of which one might expect - rents, distraint (seizure of assets in lieu of rent); ‘voluntary’ surrender of land in return for ‘compensation’ upon quitting quietly; formal ejectment (a matter of last resort on estates managed by SK); landlordassisted emigration (on a scale much more extensive than most historians of Ireland in the 1840s appear to believe); petitions from tenants; complaints by tenants, both about other tenants and about local agents; landlord-financed and other relief of distress both before and during the great famine; major works of improvement (on almost all of the estates managed by SK which have been investigated in detail in the draft book); applications by SK, on behalf of landlords, for government loans to finance improvements; recommendations of agricultural advisers hired by SK, etc. Thus, most of the SK correspondence is about aspects of estate management. But the firm of SK was not only a manager of land. The correspondence reveals only two estates in Kildare, each of them relatively small, managed by SK in the 1840s. These were the lands of the Sherlocks near Naas and of Jane Coleman in the Kilcullen district. The correspondence on these properties differs substantively from most of those discussed in detail in the draft of Landlords, tenants, famine: first, it is relatively small in quantity, and secondly, it contains relatively little on the core aspects of estate management indicated above. Much of that on the Sherlocks focuses on misfortunes among family members, while the correspondence on Jane Coleman highlights the benevolence of that proprietor.
The theory of eucharistic presence in the early Caroline divines, examined in its European theological setting
No full textThe question of Christ's presence in the eucharist was an issue
which caused great controversy in the Reformation period, and which
continued to evoke dispute during the seventeenth century. Various
interpretations of the Caroline divines' teaching on the eucharistic
presence have been offered, but often they seem either to indicate the
theological position of the writer rather than that of the theologians
considered, or to ignore the broader context of eucharistic doctrine.
The purpose of this study, therefore, was 1. to investigate the
theology of eucharistic presence in the thinking of several seventeenth-century
Anglican divines, and 2. to examine their teaching in relation
to the sixteenth-century Anglican heritage and the various continental
sacramental doctrines, Reformed, Lutheran, Roman Catholic and Eastern
Orthodox.
To accomplish this goal, eight theologians were chosen for examination:
Adrianus Saravia, Lancelot Andrewes, John Cosin, Richard
Montague, William Forbes, William Laud, Jeremy Taylor and Herbert
Thorndike. When available, nineteenth-century editions of their works
were used; otherwise, seventeenth-century texts were employed.
Similarly, modern editions of Roman, Orthodox, Lutheran and Reformed
writings were utilized when possible. Thy examination of eucharistic
teaching included seven major points: 1. the sacrament as mystery,
2. eucharistic change, 3. the relationship between Christ's body and
the bread, 4. eucharistic communion, 5. the nature of Christ's body in
the sacrament, 6. consecration, and 7. adoration in the eucharist.
This study has shown that there was great diversity in the
thinking of the Caroline divines (although they did not treat the
subject of eucharistic presence with equal detail or depth); no
unified understanding of sacramental presence was expressed. Reformed
ideas inherited from the previous century remained strong, but new
tendencies toward other understandings of the eucharist can be
discerned. The period, therefore, can be seen to represent a new
stage in the history of Anglican eucharistic doctrine
The Sedimentology, Stratigraphy and Depositional History of the Lower Cretaceous Viking Formation at Caroline and Garrington, Alberta, Canada
No full textTitle: The Sedimentology, Stratigraphy and Depositional History of the Lower Cretaceous Viking Formation at Caroline and Garrington, Alberta, Canada, Author: Stephen D. Davies, Location: ThodeThe Lower Cretaceous (Albian) Viking Formation at
Caroline and Garrington, Alberta contains two regionally
extensive erosion surfaces, VE3 and VE4, separating three
allocyclic members, B/C, D, and E. These erosion surfaces,
along with two possible correlative conformities at lower
stratigraphic levels, can be mapped over large areas of the
Alberta Basin allowing for the creation of a Viking
Allostratigraphy. The basal allomember cored in the study area is
informally termed B/C and is made up of burrowed siltstones
deposited in an offshore marine setting. It is overlain by the
regionally extensive ravinement surface VE3, which rises
"steplike" towards the southwest. Allomember D, which overlies
this unconformity, is composed of a shallowing upward
succession of storm-dominated facies resulting from
progradation of the shoreface towards the northeast.
Allomember E is a complex succession of facies deposited over
the regionally extensive ravinement surface VE4 during the
final relative rise of the Boreal sea. Within Allomember E are
up to six coarse grained, sheetlike beds sharply interbedded
with marine shales. These interbeds are the result of
basinward progradation of coarse sediment during periods of
stillstand in the overall transgression, under the mixed
influence of storms and tides. The coarse grained deposits originated at "steps" in the VE4 topography, representing
successive positions of the retreating paleoshoreline, · and
were swept basinward by. tides and storms over older,
stratigraphically deeper "steps" and newly deposited shales.
The coarse grained interbeds in Allomember E become thinner
and finer in any one vertical section, reflecting the
continued transgression of the shoreline towards the
southwest. The boundaries of the Caroline and Garrington fields are
determined by the extent of the sheetlike coarse grained
deposits of Allomember E, and by the location of the postdepositionally
determined oil-water contacts. Caroline and
Garrington are producing from different stratigraphic
intervals. caroline is producing from a shale-encased coarse
grained interbed termed E3 (the Viking "A pool" of industry).
At Garrington, this interbed is very thin, muddy and therefore
unproductive. The Garrington field, in contrast, is producing
from the stratigraphically lower coarse grained interval (VE4-
CM2), which directly overlies the VE4 surface.ThesisMaster of Science (MS
A Primer on Innovation and Growth. Bruegel policy brief 2006/06, October 2006
Get PDFSummary. In sharp contrast with the post-war period, over the last 10 years income per head in the EU has begun to decline in comparison to that of the US. Against this background, the revival of growth and productivity has become an overriding priority of European policymakers. While fostering innovation has become a necessity in Europe, R&D investments alone will not do the job
Productivity in Higher Education/ Kevin Stange, Kevin Strange, Caroline M. Hoxby.
No full textIn English.How do the benefits of higher education compare with its costs, and how does this comparison vary across individuals and institutions? These questions are fundamental to quantifying the productivity of the education sector. The studies in Productivity in Higher Education use rich and novel administrative data, modern econometric methods, and careful institutional analysis to explore productivity issues. The authors examine the returns to undergraduate education, differences in costs by major, the productivity of for-profit schools, the productivity of various types of faculty and of outcomes, the effects of online education on the higher education market, and the ways in which the productivity of different institutions responds to market forces. The analyses recognize five key challenges to assessing productivity in higher education: the potential for multiple student outcomes in terms of skills, earnings, invention, and employment; the fact that colleges and universities are "multiproduct" firms that conduct varied activities across many domains; the fact that students select which school to attend based in part on their aptitude; the difficulty of attributing outcomes to individual institutions when students attend more than one; and the possibility that some of the benefits of higher education may arise from the system as a whole rather than from a single institution. The findings and the approaches illustrated can facilitate decision-making processes in higher education.Hoxby, Caroline M. / Stange, Kevin -- Staiger, Douglas -- Hoxby, Caroline M. -- Minaya, Veronica / Scott-Clayton, Judith -- Riehl, Evan / Saavedra, Juan E. / Urquiola, Miguel -- Altonji, Joseph G. / Zimmerman, Seth D. -- Courant, Paul N. / Turner, Sarah -- Vlieger, Pieter De / Jacob, Brian / Stange, Kevin -- Deming, David J. / Lovenheim, Michael / Patterson, Richard -- Carrell, Scott E. / Kurlaender, Michal -- Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction / 1. What Health Care Teaches Us about Measuring Productivity in Higher Education / 2. The Productivity of US Postsecondary Institutions / 3. Labor Market Outcomes and Postsecondary Accountability: Are Imperfect Metrics Better Than None? / 4. Learning and Earning: An Approximation to College Value Added in Two Dimensions / 5. The Costs of and Net Returns to College Major / 6. Faculty Deployment in Research Universities / 7. Measuring Instructor Effectiveness in Higher Education / 8. The Competitive Effects of Online Education / 9. Estimating the Productivity of Community Colleges in Paving the Road to Four- Year College Success / Contributors -- Author Index -- Subject Index1 online resource (392 p.)
Toluene inhalation in adolescent rats reduces flexible behaviour in adulthood and alters glutamatergic and GABAergic signalling
Get PDFToluene is a commonly abused inhalant that is easily accessible to adolescents. Despite the increasing incidence of use, our understanding of its long-term impact remains limited. Here, we used a range of techniques to examine the acute and chronic effects of toluene exposure on glutameteric and GABAergic function, and on indices of psychological function in adult rats after adolescent exposure. Metabolomics conducted on cortical tissue established that acute exposure to toluene produces alterations in cellular metabolism indicative of a glutamatergic and GABAergic profile. Similarly, in vitro electrophysiology in Xenopus oocytes found that acute toluene exposure reduced NMDA receptor signalling. Finally, in an adolescent rodent model of chronic intermittent exposure to toluene (10 000 ppm), we found that, while toluene exposure did not affect initial learning, it induced a deficit in updating that learning when response-outcome relationships were reversed or degraded in an instrumental conditioning paradigm. There were also group differences when more effort was required to obtain the reward; toluene-exposed animals were less sensitive to progressive ratio schedules and to delayed discounting. These behavioural deficits were accompanied by changes in subunit expression of both NMDA and GABA receptors in adulthood, up to 10 weeks after the final exposure to toluene in the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and ventromedial striatum; regions with recognized roles in behavioural flexibility and decision-making. Collectively, our data suggest that exposure to toluene is sufficient to induce adaptive changes in glutamatergic and GABAergic systems and in adaptive behaviour that may underlie the deficits observed following adolescent inhalant abuse, including susceptibility to further drug-use.Teri M. Furlong, Jhodie R. Duncan, Laura H. Corbit, Caroline D. Rae, Benjamin D. Rowlands, Anthony D. Maher, Fatima A. Nasrallah, Carol J. Milligan, Steven Petrou, Andrew J. Lawrence, Bernard W. Ballein
Brain energy metabolism: A roadmap for future research
Get PDFAlthough we have learned much about how the brain fuels its functions over the last decades, there remains much still to discover in an organ that is so complex. This article lays out major gaps in our knowledge of interrelationships between brain metabolism and brain function, including biochemical, cellular, and subcellular aspects of functional metabolism and its imaging in adult brain, as well as during development, aging, and disease. The focus is on unknowns in metabolism of major brain substrates and associated transporters, the roles of insulin and of lipid droplets, the emerging role of metabolism in microglia, mysteries about the major brain cofactor and signaling molecule NAD+, as well as unsolved problems underlying brain metabolism in pathologies such as traumatic brain injury, epilepsy, and metabolic downregulation during hibernation. It describes our current level of understanding of these facets of brain energy metabolism as well as a roadmap for future research.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
A Queer Response to Caroline Bergvall’s Hyphenated Practice: Towards an Interdependent Model of Reading
Get PDFWhen literary critics approach highly experimental works, we are confronted with a problem: it is not always clear to us what the work means. Readers of such work may find themselves bereft. We don’t know what to do when we open a book and find texts like the one reproduced on the front cover of Reading Experimental Writing, from Caroline Bergvall’s Drift. Have a look. What do you see? I see very narrow lines in the shape of a stanza, and at fi rst don’t realise I am looking at a drawing. Is this a drawing of unreadable lines of text? There are lots and lots of lines in this section that is called ‘LINES’ but doesn’t name itself as such until the penultimate page of the book.3 The question arises, what is a reader to do without language? Is there an alternative to feeling bereft of meaning? We are used to working hard, yes, but we expect that at some point the meaning of the work will become clear. If it does not, we imagine that the problem is outside of us. Despite decades-long debates about the death of the author, we feel her absence: the author has not offered us a clear path. But what has she offered? In this chapter, I argue that Caroline Bergvall’s ‘hyphenated practice’, experienced in the first pages of Drift as the juxtaposition of writing with drawing, calls for and models a new understanding of the relation between writer and reader, one that models what we can do when we fi d ourselves in the dark, when meaning is unclear, when we don’t know how to find our wa
Dissimilarity is used as evidence of category membership in multidimensional perceptual categorization: a test of the similarity-dissimilarity generalized context model
Get PDFIn exemplar models of categorization, the similarity between an exemplar and category members constitutes evidence that the exemplar belongs to the category. We test the possibility that the dissimilarity to members of competing categories also contributes to this evidence. Data were collected from two 2-dimensional perceptual categorization experiments, one with lines varying in orientation and length and the other with coloured patches varying in saturation and brightness. Model fits of the similarity-dissimilarity generalized context model were used to compare a model where only similarity was used with a model where both similarity and dissimilarity were used. For the majority of participants the similarity-dissimilarity model provided both a significantly better fit and better generalization, suggesting that people do also use dissimilarity as evidence
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