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This article studies a previously unknown asset market in eighteenth-century Sweden. It emerged as a result of a partial default in 1719, when large amounts of recently released fiat coins were converted into government liabilities. These could only be redeemed as a customs duty on international trade, the licent. As merchants had to acquire such assets to conduct their trade, tens of thousands of transactions were carried out on a secondary market over a period of more than 45 years. Networks of local merchants bought assets from initial holders and sold them on to intermediaries or merchants, who deposited the liabilities with a newly established government agency, the Debt Office. Here, hundreds of account holders could transfer the value of their deposits between them. When a licent payment was due, the amount was deducted from the merchant's account. Prices on the liabilities were low and sometimes volatile, but the long-term trend was rising. We have distinguished three types of market participants: a small group of very active users, most of them professional dealers or brokers; merchants who traded on a regular basis as they needed to pay the licent , or when a favorable opportunity appeared; and finally, those who traded sporadically. The emergence of this market was part of a financial expansion that occurred in many European countries at the same time, the closest equivalent being the segmented default in France after the abolition of John Law's system. This study aims to broaden our understanding of eighteenth-century financial developments, which have rarely been studied in a semi-peripheral European economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The objectives of the study were to describe outcomes of children with uncomplicated severe acute malnutrition (SAM) attending community-based management of acute malnutrition (CMAM) treatment centres in Accra Metropolitan Area (AMA) and explore factors associated with non-adherence to clinic visits and defaulting from the treatment programme.Design: A retrospective cohort study analysing routinely collected data on children with uncomplicated SAM enrolled into CMAM in 2017 was conducted.Setting: Study was conducted at seven sites comprising Princess Marie Louise Children's Hospital, three sub-metropolitan health facilities and three community centres, located in five sub-metropolitan areas in AMA.Participants: Children with uncomplicated SAM aged 6-59 months, enrolled from community-level facilities (pure uncomplicated SAM, PUSAM) or transferred after completing inpatient care (post-stabilisation uncomplicated SAM, PSSAM), participated in the study.Results: Out of 174 cases studied (105 PUSAM, sixty-nine PSSAM), 56·3 % defaulted, 34·5 % recovered and 8·6 % were not cured by 16 weeks. No deaths were recorded. Mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) increased by 2·2 (95 % CI 1·8, 2·5) mm/week with full compliance and 0·9 (95 % CI 0·6, 1·2) mm/week with more than two missed visits. In breast-feeding children, MUAC increased at a slower rate than in other children by 1·3 (95 % CI 1·0, 1·5) mm/week. Independent predictors of subsequent missed visits were diarrhoea and fever, while children with MUAC < 110 mm on enrolment were at increased risk of defaulting.Conclusion: A high default rate and a long time to recovery are challenges for CMAM in AMA. Efforts must be made to improve adherence to treatment to improve outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constitutional scholars emphasize the importance of an enduring, stable constitutional order, which North and Weingast (1989) argue is consistent with credible commitments to sustainable fiscal policies. However, this view is controversial and has received little empirical study. We use 19th-century US state-level data to estimate relationships between constitutional design and the likelihood of a government default. Results indicate that more entrenched and less specific constitutions are associated with a lower likelihood of default. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with Italian inter-war debts against the background of the contentious international issue of war reparations that many Allied nations wanted to link to war debt repayments. Italy, having first achieved an extremely large haircut by restructuring US and UK debts in 1925-6, defaulted in 1934, after the Lausanne conference of 1932 failed to deliver war debt forgiveness. We construct a new series of Italian foreign debt from 1925 to 1934 that is consistent with the unfolding of relevant historical events. Starting in 1926, our values are much lower than the currently available foreign debt series. The reason is that the current series do not take into account the large haircut that Finance Minister Volpi extracted from the London debt accord of 1926. Then, beginning in 1932, the values of our series exceed the currently available series because we date the formal Italian exit of the US war debt to 1934, whereas the current series dates it to 1932, at Lausanne. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To test an obesity prevention strategy derived from behavioural economics (optimal defaults plus delay), focused on changing the college dining hall service method.Design: After a uniform pre-load, participants attended an experimental lunch in groups randomized to one of three conditions: a nutrient-dense, lower-fat/energy lunch as an optimal default (OD); a less-nutrient-dense, higher-fat/energy lunch as a suboptimal default (SD); or a free array (FA) lunch. In the OD condition, students were presented a menu depicting healthier vegetarian and omnivore foods as default, with opt-out alternatives (SD menu) available on request with a 15 min wait. In the SD condition, the same menu format was used with the positioning of food items switched. In the FA condition, all choices were presented in uniform fonts and were available immediately.Setting: Private rooms designed to provide a small version of a college dining hall, on two campuses of a Northeastern US university.Subjects: First-year college students (n 129).Results: There was a significant main effect for condition on percentage of optimal choices selected, with 94 % of food choices in the OD condition optimal, 47 % in the FA condition optimal and none in the SD condition optimal. Similarly, energy intake for those in the SD condition significantly exceeded that in the FA condition, which exceeded that in the OD condition.Conclusions: Presenting menu items as optimal defaults with a delay had a significant impact on choice and consumption, suggesting that further research into its long-term applicability is warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper we present a novel construction of Marshall–Olkin (MO) multivariate exponential distributions of failure times as distributions of the first-passage times of the coordinates of multidimensional Lévy subordinator processes above independent unit-mean exponential random variables. A time-inhomogeneous version is also given that replaces Lévy subordinators with additive subordinators. An attractive feature of MO distributions for applications, such as to portfolio credit risk, is its singular component that yields positive probabilities of simultaneous defaults of multiple obligors, capturing the default clustering phenomenon. The drawback of the original MO fatal shock construction of MO distributions is that it requires one to simulate 2n-1 independent exponential random variables. In practice, the dimensionality is typically on the order of hundreds or thousands of obligors in a large credit portfolio, rendering the MO fatal shock construction infeasible to simulate. The subordinator construction reduces the problem of simulating a rich subclass of MO distributions to simulating an n-dimensional subordinator. When one works with the class of subordinators constructed from independent one-dimensional subordinators with known transition distributions, such as gamma and inverse Gaussian, or their Sato versions in the additive case, the simulation effort is linear in n. To illustrate, we present a simulation of 100,000 samples of a credit portfolio with 1,000 obligors that takes less than 18 seconds on a PC. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On an incomplete financial market, the stocks are modeled as pure jump processes subject to defaults. The exponential utility maximization problem is investigated characterizing the value function in term of Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (BSDEs), driven by pure jump processes. In general, in this setting, there is no unique solution. This is the reason why, the value function is proven to be the limit of a sequence of processes. Each of them is the solution of a Lipschitz BSDE and it corresponds to the value function associated with a subset of bounded admissible strategies. Given a representation of the jump processes driving the model, the aim of this note is to give a recursive backward scheme for the value function of the initial problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of default options on choice is a reliable, well-established behavioral finding. However, several different effects may lend to choosing defaults in an often indistinguishable manner, including loss aversion, inattention, information leakage, and transaction costs associated with switching. We introduce the notion of the “default pull” as the effect that even subtle default options have on decision makers’ uncertainty about their own preferences. The default pull shapes what a decision maker prefers by causing her to consider whether she prefers the default. We demonstrate default pull effects using a simple decision making task that strips away many of the usual reasons that defaults could affect choices, and we show that defaults can have substantial effects on choice, even when the default itself was not chosen.

Indebted cities were a widespread phenomenon during the Ancien Régime. However, some found ways to innovate the management of their municipal debt, whilst others fell prey to over-indebtedness or default. In this article we have left the success stories aside and focused on the latter. Using early modern Antwerp as a case study, we have disentangled the underlying mechanisms that ultimately lead to over-indebtedness and (in some cases) default. Whilst the economic climate and the relationship between city and state have been rightly identified as major factors in the previous literature, our contribution brings another element to the table, namely, the inflexibility of long-established rent arrangements and the entanglement between the ruling elite and the rentiers. We show that there was a strong overlap between both groups, which had a huge impact on the financial policy of cities during the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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Sovereign debts differ from other financial instruments because repayment ultimately depends on the issuers' willingness to pay. In turn, willingness to pay may be influenced by political, diplomatic or economic considerations. Based on an original database of Romanian bonds traded in Paris, this article shows that international diplomacy played an important role in the Romanian debt valuation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The impact of default options on choice is a reliable, well-established behavioral finding. However, several different effects may lend to choosing defaults in an often indistinguishable manner, including loss aversion, inattention, information leakage, and transaction costs associated with switching. We introduce the notion of the "default pull" as the effect that even subtle default options have on decision makers' uncertainty about their own preferences. The default pull shapes what a decision maker prefers by causing her to consider whether she prefers the default. We demonstrate default pull effects using a simple decision making task that strips away many of the usual reasons that defaults could effect choices, and we show that defaults can have substantial effects on choice, even when the default itself was not chosen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the settlement of foreign debt by the independent republics of early Spanish America. It states that most Spanish American countries accumulated significant external debt shortly after declaring independence. It explains that by 1829 these countries had defaulted and only settled their foreign debts and gained access to new credit years later. It asserts that war had a substantial influence on foreign debt service in that countries with limited resources tended to allocate those resources to emergency domestic debt service rather that to foreign debt repayment. It finds that countries with a long history of consistent debt service were more likely to continue to service their foreign debt in times of war than countries without such history.