Payroll Taxes, Social Insurance and Business Cycles

Payroll taxes represent a major distortionary influence of governments on labor markets. This paper examines the role of payroll taxation and the social safety net for cyclical fluctuations in a nonmonetary economy with labor market frictions and unemployment insurance, when the latter is only imperfectly related to search effort. A balanced social insurance budget renders gross wages more rigid over the cycle and, as a result, strengthens the model’s endogenous propagation mechanism. For conventional calibrations, the model generates a negatively sloped Beveridge curve as well as substantial volatility and persistence of vacancies and unemployment. herunterladen.Business cycles, labor markets, payroll taxes, unemployment, consumptiontightness puzzle

Fifty years of the CERN Proton Synchrotron : Volume 2

This report sums up in two volumes the first 50 years of operation of the CERN Proton Synchrotron. After an introduction on the genesis of the machine, and a description of its magnet and powering systems, the first volume focuses on some of the many innovations in accelerator physics and instrumentation that it has pioneered, such as transition crossing, RF gymnastics, extractions, phase space tomography, or transverse emittance measurement by wire scanners. The second volume describes the other machines in the PS complex: the proton linear accelerators, the PS Booster, the LEP pre-injector, the heavy-ion linac and accumulator, and the antiproton rings.Comment: 58 pages, published as CERN Yellow Report https://cds.cern.ch/record/1597087?ln=e

Rollover risk, network structure and systemic financial crises

The breakdown of short-term funding markets was a key feature of the global financial crisis of 2007/8. Combining insights from the literature on global games and network growth, we develop a simple model that sheds light on how network topology interacts with the funding structure of financial institutions to determine system-wide crises. We show how the arrival of bad news about a financial institution leads others to lose confidence in it and how this, in turn, spreads across the entire interbank network. The rate of system-wide bank failure is rendered endogenous, depending crucially on both the rate at which bad news arrives and on the maturity of debt contracts. The conditions under which the financial system makes a sharp transition from a dense network of credit relations to a sparse network where credit freezes readily occur are characterized. Our results also emphasize the role of hysteresis – once broken, credit relations take a long time to re-establish as a result of common knowledge of the equilibrium. Our findings shed light on the nature of public policy responses both during and after the crisis.interbank networks, credit crisis, liquidity freeze

Laplace Functional Ordering of Point Processes in Large-scale Wireless Networks

Stochastic orders on point processes are partial orders which capture notions like being larger or more variable. Laplace functional ordering of point processes is a useful stochastic order for comparing spatial deployments of wireless networks. It is shown that the ordering of point processes is preserved under independent operations such as marking, thinning, clustering, superposition, and random translation. Laplace functional ordering can be used to establish comparisons of several performance metrics such as coverage probability, achievable rate, and resource allocation even when closed form expressions of such metrics are unavailable. Applications in several network scenarios are also provided where tradeoffs between coverage and interference as well as fairness and peakyness are studied. Monte-Carlo simulations are used to supplement our analytical results.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figures, Submitted to Hindawi Wireless Communications and Mobile Computin

Sampling from a system-theoretic viewpoint: Part I - Concepts and tools

This paper is first in a series of papers studying a system-theoretic approach to the problem of reconstructing an analog signal from its samples. The idea, borrowed from earlier treatments in the control literature, is to address the problem as a hybrid model-matching problem in which performance is measured by system norms. In this paper we present the paradigm and revise underlying technical tools, such as the lifting technique and some topics of the operator theory. This material facilitates a systematic and unified treatment of a wide range of sampling and reconstruction problems, recovering many hitherto considered different solutions and leading to new results. Some of these applications are discussed in the second part