Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question empirically, I combined data from ship records with data from various historical documents reporting slave ethnicities, and construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa’s slave trades between 1400 and 1900. I find a strong robust negative correlation b...

With the increasing number of documents that are available in digital form, also the number of digital historical documents is increasing (Berkvens, 2001). It cannot be assumed that standard IR systems perform well on historical documents: historical texts differ from modern texts in three ways (Hüning, 1996; Van Der Horst and Marschall, 1989): (a) vocabularies have changed, (b) spelling has ch...

Historical data is widely recognized as a rather complex type of data that contains records about multi-layered, context-sensitive entities and can often be represented as a graph. This paper describes the digital edition of the ”Urfehdebücher der Stadt Basel” as an example of how semantic web technologies can offer comprehensive tools in response to the challenges coming with historical data. ...

Temperature-based weather derivatives are written on an index which is normally defined to be a nonlinear function of average daily temperatures. Recent empirical work has demonstrated the usefulness of simple time-series models of temperature for estimating the payoffs to these instruments. This paper argues that a more direct and parsimonious approach is to model the time-series behaviour of ...

This paper presents an automatic keyword extraction method from historical document images. The proposed method is language independent because it is purely appearance based, where neither lexical information nor any other statistical language models are required. Moreover, since it does not need word segmentation, it can be applied to Eastern languages where they do not put clear spacing betwe...

While a host of economic variables have been identified in the literature with the apparent in-sample ability to predict the equity premium, Goyal and Welch (2007) find that these variables fail to deliver consistent out-of-sample forecast gains relative to the historical average. In this paper, we demonstrate that despite the failure of individual predictive regression model forecasts to outpe...

Collaborative processes can be knowledge and information intensive, especially in research-oriented environments. In the Humanities, the access to resources in a digital library is often combined with collaborative interpretation of the documents. This may involve cooperative negotiations between users, careful evaluation of available options, or discussions about the interpretation of certain ...

Many factors impact a city’s water consumption, including population distribution, average household income, water prices, water conservation programs, and climate. Of these, however, meteorological effects are considered to be the primary determinants of water consumption. In this study, the effects of climate on residential water consumption in Las Vegas, Nevada, were examined during the peri...