Money,Mortgages, and the Conquest of America

In colonial America, land acquired new liquidity when it became liable for debts. Though English property law maintained a firm distinction between land and chattel for centuries, in the American colonies, the boundary between the categories of real and personal property began to disintegrate. There, the novelty of easy foreclosure and consequent easy alienation of land made it possible for colonists to obtain credit, using land as a security. However, scholars have neglected the first instances in which a newly unconstrained practice of mortgage foreclosure appeared—the transactions through which colonists acquired land from indigenous people in the first place. In this article, I explore these early transactions for land, which took place across fundamental differences between colonists’ and native communities’ conceptions of money, land, and exchange itself. I describe how difference and dependence propelled the growth of the early American contact economy to make land into real estate, or the fungible commodity on the speculative market that it remains today.     

Rehumanizing Birth and Death in America

THESIS: Despite spending more on medical care than any other country in the world, the United States still boasts some of the worst patient outcomes of any developed nation. This disparity is especially true of how Americans give birth and die.  These natural human transitions have become catastrophically expensive and leave patients and their families traumatized from unnecessary interventions. This article examines the costs and outcomes associated with the medicalization of birth and death and argues that alternatives exist that improve patient outcomes while lowering costs. Access to these alternatives will require changing current regulatory and reimbursement structures and providing trained support staff to help families navigate beginning- and end-of life decisions.     

Using Data Combination of Fundamental Variable-Based Forecasts and Poll-Based Forecasts to Predict the 2013 German Election

In this paper I present an election forecasting approach to predict the vote share of the governing coalition in German national elections. The model is composed of two independent prediction components: the first is based on poll data, the second on fundamental variables. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages when used in isolation. The basic idea is to use both and find a better informed overall forecast. The predictions are combined using a shrinkage estimator, where the predictions are weighted by their respective prediction uncertainty. The uncertainty of the poll prediction is modelled time-dependent. The result is a dynamic model allowing for predictions longer before the elections highly relying on fundamental variables. With the elections coming closer predictions rely more and more on the polling data.