In 1966 Hans Blumenberg published Die Legitimitat der Neuzeit, which launched the Lowith-Blumenberg debate over the nature of secularization and the legitimacy of the modern age. ' The widespread discussion the book generated prompted Blumenberg to prepare a revised and expanded three-volume edition between 1973 and 1976. A decade later, with the debate still going strong, Robert M. Wallace mad...

such that the smaller polyhedra have pairwise disjoint interiors. Note that there is not an additional assumption, say, that the smaller polyhedra meet face to face. Two polyhedra P and Q are scissors congruent if there are dissections P = P1 ∪ ...∪Pn and Q = Q1 ∪ ...∪Qn such that each Pk is isometric to Qk. Sometimes, one requires that all the isometries are orientation-preserving, but in fact...

This paper outlines the major features of three solvers entered in this years CPAI solver competition. The solvers shared the same underlying architecture which is described in detail in the following paper, the base solver is rjw (submitted by Richard Wallace) which Diarmuid-rndi and Diarmuid-wtdi (both submitted by Diarmuid Grimes) are built on. Furthermore the solvers all used constraint wei...

Poverty is a common experience for children growing up in the United States. Although only about one in five children are in poverty each year, roughly one in three will spend at least one year living in a poor household. Child poverty is a significant concern to researchers and policymakers because early childhood poverty is linked to a multitude of worse outcomes, including reduced academic a...

This essay articulates the principles and practices of New Monetarism, our label for a recent body of work on money, banking, payments, and asset markets. We first discuss methodological issues distinguishing our approach from others: New Monetarism has something in common with Old Monetarism, but there are also important differences; it has little in common with Keynesianism. We describe the p...

We study models of the formation of citation networks in a setting where authors/firms care about their citations and are rational. The effect of these two features on the diffusion of useful ideas in a setting with complete information about past citations leads to multiplicity of equilibria. With field-specific norms, however, uniqueness obtains. Asymmetric information about quality and strat...

Microlending is growing in Eastern Europe, Russia and China as a flexible means to widen access to financial services, both to help alleviate poverty and to encourage private-sector activity. We describe mechanisms that allow these programs to successfully penetrate new segments of credit markets. These features include direct monitoring, regular repayment schedules, and the use of non-refinanc...

This paper considers the feasibility of a flexible system of active labour market policy which would adjust to the changing phases of the business cycle, and would dispense with the necessity to reinvent systems from scratch in every phase of every cycle. The proposed system would have an expenditure allocation which varied with the levels of short-term and long-term unemployment, and would all...

We introduce a model in which agents face random and unobservable needs to transact over time. We characterize the optimal setup for incentive compatible transactions, the optimal payment system. The existence of an equilibrium in which agents transact through a payment system might require certain caps on short-term borrowing. Networks that have knowledge of agents’ histories support efficient...

This paper proposes a new channel to explain the positive price-volume correlation in the housing market. I study a simple overlapping generations model in the presence of heterogeneous agents. In the model, (i) consumer investors are forward looking and heterogeneous both in their holding periods and in their ownership preference, (ii) the underlying time varying macro fundamental is persisten...