Banks on Board: German and American Corporate Governance, 1870–1914

This examination of the foundations of German and American corporate governance highlights the role of money-centered banks, both as board members in large corporations and as intermediaries on the stock exchange. German banks, by acting as surrogate regulators, became institutional stabilizers, and German regulators encouraged banks to participate in corporate boards in order to overcome agency problems in firms and to control speculation. American investment banks, prior to 1914, often managed to overcome regulatory obstacles, which enabled them to wield more power over corporations than their legendary German counterparts. American banks had more opportunities to intervene in the event of panics, bankruptcies, foreign investment, and corporate consolidation. In contrast to Germany, the United States increasingly imposed regulations that circumscribed the supervisory role of banks as board members.

Modeling Soot Formation in a Stirred Reactor

The formation of carbonaceous particulate matter and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons has recently been studied (Stouffer, et al, 2002 and Reich, et al, 2003) in a toroidal well-stirred reactor using ethylene as the fuel, with and without the additive ethanol. In the later work, modeling of the gas-phase species was performed and compared to the experimental trends. In the present study, a modified version of the CHEMKIN-based code for ‘perfectly stirred reactors’ has been used to model soot particle formation, including computations of particle mass and smoke number. Detailed soot formation routines have been extracted from Hall and coworkers (1997), who modeled soot formation in flames. Experimental trends are accurately modeled by the code with quantitative accuracies generally within 50%. The importance of accurate knowledge and control of reactor temperature is discussed. In fact, scatter in the original experimental study can be largely attributed to inadequate temperature control. Speculation for differences between the model and experiment are offered while additive effects and the well known ‘soot bell’ are discussed. For the initial experiments examined by Stouffer et al, the effect of the additive is largely due to temperature differences.