We examine the influence of two distinct regime changes in US border security on the number of persons traveling from the US into Mexico on day trips. In contrast to increases in overall US tourism to Mexico and rapidly growing trade linkages, day trips to Mexico fell by over 20 % between 2000 and 2012. In the popular press, the reduction in short visits is widely attributed to a rising tide of violence in the Mexican border states, more specifically to a rise in the rate of homicides as a result of the emergence, or radical transformation, of a drug war in Mexico. We show that changes in the US border regime caused a large reduction of day trips and border tourism, and in doing so had a large negative effect on the Mexican border. We situate this result within the literature devoted to analyzing the effects of changes in international documents on tourist flows.
This article examines the early regulation of futures markets in the 1920s and 1930s. We contrast the analysis of speculation developed by the Grain Futures Administration (GFA) with Holbrook Working’s. Within the GFA we focus on Paul Mehl, who directed the statistical analysis of order flows, trade volumes, and positions that supported the GFA’s policy recommendations. In retrospect Working was the most prominent academic analyst of futures markets. The relationship between the GFA and Working was complex and at times intimately collaborative, but the New Deal provoked sharp disagreement. Working rejected the tighter trading rules advocated by the GFA as counterproductive and tried to persuade the Secretary of Agriculture to embrace a discretionary approach to regulation based upon his analysis of neighboring futures prices (the Working curve) and his distinctive conception of “perfect markets”—a nuanced version of the subsequent efficient market hypothesis.
At nearly the same moment, Jeremy Bentham and Henry Thornton adopted diametrically opposed approaches to stabilizing the financial system. Henry Thornton eloquently defended the Bank of England’s actions as the lender of last resort and saw its discretionary management of liquidity as the key stabilizer of the credit system. In contrast, Jeremy Bentham advocated the imposition of strict bank regulations and examinations, without which, he predicted, Britain would soon experience a systemic crisis—which he called “universal bankruptcy.” There are strong parallels but also dramatic differences with our recent attempts to reduce systemic risk within financial systems. The Basel III bank regulatory framework effectively intertwines Bentham’s and Thornton’s diametrically opposed approaches to stabilizing banks. Yet Bentham’s and Thornton’s concerns regarding the stability of the wider financial system remain alive today due to financial innovation and the politics of responding to financial crises.
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