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In 1553-1554 one Pieter Bruegel purchased a corrody in Sint-Janshuis, a retirement home for former employees of the Marquises of Bergen, where he would receive necessities of life and a place to stay until he would pass away. The paper reconstructs the early financial history of the retirement home, demonstrating how it was unable to cope with inflation, and struggled to provide for the inmates. It is suggested therefore Bruegel did not merely retire into Sint-Janshuis, but purchased an extra ration of food, clothes and fuel: apparently his background as a barber-surgeon at one of the most prestigious courts of the Low Countries allowed him to pay for a relatively decent old age. Further evidence corroborates that compared to his fellow-inmates, Bruegel was relatively wealthy. The paper also discusses evidence linking the barber-surgeon to the painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose origins are almost completely unknown. Based on his name, estimated year of birth, and residence in Bergen op Zoom, the barber-surgeon is a strong candidate for the father of the famous painter. If we are correct in this, the latter would have come from an urban middle-class background with close ties to one of the most important courts in the Low Countries: the Renaissance palace Markiezenhof in Bergen op Zoom.

Dieser Artikel führt die Analyse von Finanzmärkten als ergänzende Methode der Geschichtsforschung ein. Exemplarisch wird die Wahrnehmung einschneidender Ereignisse vor und während des Zweiten Weltkrieges analysiert. Dieser Ansatz stellt eine Alternative zur Analyse schriftlicher Quellen dar, die oft unausgewogen und nicht repräsentativ für die Wahrnehmung der breiten Öffentlichkeit sind. Im Folgenden wird mit Hilfe der Analyse von Finanzmärkten die Wahrnehmung und Antizipation ausgewählter Ereignisse vor und während des Zweiten Weltkrieges in Frankreich, Deutschland, Dänemark und Norwegen untersucht. Zu diesem Zweck werden die Preise von Staatsanleihen dieser Länder, die an den Börsen von Zürich und Stockholm gehandelt wurden, analysiert. Die Ergebnisse hinterfragen einige etablierte Ansichten. So kann zum Beispiel gezeigt werden, dass die Invasion Norwegens von den Zeitgenossen antizipiert wurde. Obwohl beide Methoden, der traditionelle historiographische Ansatz und die Analyse von Finanzmärkten, letztlich auf Interpretation beruhen, beziehen sie sich doch auf vollkommen unterschiedliche Quellengattungen. Deshalb stellt die Analyse von Finanzmärkten eine gute Ergänzung des traditionellen Ansatzes dar. This article presents the analysis of financial markets as a supplementary method to the traditional historiographic approach by investigating the perception of events before and during World War II. This approach constitutes an alternative to written sources, which are often biased and commonly do not represent the opinions held in the wider public. In the following, the financial markets approach is used to analyse the perception and anticipation of events before and during the World War II in France, Germany, Denmark, and Norway. Thereby, price data of long-term government bonds for these countries traded in Zurich and Stockholm are used. The presented evidence challenges some common held views, e.g., it can be shown that the invasion of Norway was in part anticipated by contemporaries. Although both methods rely on interpretation the financial markets approach is based on a fundamentally different type of source. Therefore, it can be used as a supplement to the traditional approach. Historical Social Research Vol. 32, No. 4 (2007)

Data on the growth performances of countries with similar comparative (dis)advantage and political institutions reveal a striking variation across world regions. While some former autocracies such as the East Asian growth miracles have done remarkably well, others such as the Latin American economies have grown at much lower rates. In this paper, we propose a political economy explanation of these diverging paths of development by addressing the preferences of the country's political elite. We build a theoretical framework where factors of production owned by the political elites differ across countries. In each country, the incumbent autocrat will cater to the preferences of the elites when setting trade policy and the property rights regime. We show how stronger property rights may lead to capital accumulation and labor reallocation to the manufacturing sector. This, in turn, can lead to a shift in the comparative advantage, a decision to open up to trade and an inflow of more productive foreign capital. Consistent with a set of stylised facts on East Asia and Latin America, we argue that strong property rights are crucial for success upon globalization.

This study concerns the images of Sweden, Swedes and Swedishness which can be found in magazine articles, satirical cartoons and other media in Finland from the years 1918-1938. The following paper is a pilot study of relevant material for my Ph.D. thesis. Language: Swedish

Les auteurs élaborent un modèle discret affine à volatilité stochastique et asymétrie conditionnelle variable (modèle SVS). Leur approche a ceci d’intéressant qu’elle dissocie de façon cohérente la dynamique de la volatilité conditionnelle de celle de l’asymétrie conditionnelle. Elle permet une distribution asymétrique des rendements courants des actifs conditionnellement aux facteurs du moment et à l’information passée, asymétrie que les auteurs qualifient de « contemporaine ». Dans leur modèle, l’asymétrie conditionnelle découle de la combinaison explicite de l’effet de levier conditionnel et de l’asymétrie contemporaine. Les auteurs établissent les formules analytiques pour divers moments des rendements utiles pour l’estimation par la méthode des moments généralisés. En se servant de données relatives aux rendements journaliers de l’indice S&P 500 et aux options connexes, ils montrent que les modèles SVS à un et à deux facteurs décrivent mieux la distribution des rendements (tant historique que risque neutre) que les modèles GARCH affines existants. Leurs résultats ne tiennent pas à un surparamétrage, puisque les modèles SVS unifactoriels comptent le même nombre de paramètres que les modèles GARCH unifactoriels. We develop a discrete-time affine stochastic volatility model with time-varying conditional skewness (SVS). Importantly, we disentangle the dynamics of conditional volatility and conditional skewness in a coherent way. Our approach allows current asset returns to be asymmetric conditional on current factors and past information, what we term contemporaneous asymmetry. Conditional skewness is an explicit combination of the conditional leverage effect and contemporaneous asymmetry. We derive analytical formulas for various return moments that are used for generalized method of moments estimation. Applying our approach to S&P500 index daily returns and option data, we show that one- and two-factor SVS models provide a better fit for both the historical and the risk-neutral distribution of returns, compared to existing affine generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models. Our results are not due to an overparameterization of the model: the one-factor SVS models have the same number of parameters as their one-factor GARCH competitors.

Ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) have infrared luminosities L $_{IR}$ ��� 10$^{12}$ L $_{���}$, making them the most luminous objects in the infrared sky. These dusty objects are generally powered by starbursts with star formation rates that exceed 100 M $_{���}$ yr$^{���1}$, possibly combined with a contribution from an active galactic nucleus. Such environments make ULIRGs plausible sources of astrophysical high-energy neutrinos, which can be observed by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. We present a stacking search for high-energy neutrinos from a representative sample of 75 ULIRGs with redshift z ��� 0.13 using 7.5 yr of IceCube data. The results are consistent with a background-only observation, yielding upper limits on the neutrino flux from these 75 ULIRGs. For an unbroken E $^{���2.5}$ power-law spectrum, we report an upper limit on the stacked flux at 90% confidence level. In addition, we constrain the contribution of the ULIRG source population to the observed diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux as well as model predictions. The astrophysical journal 926(1), 59 (2022). doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ac3cb6 Published by Univ., Chicago, Ill. [u.a.]