Changes in the distribution of banking offices

The past twenty years have been marked by major structural and regulatory changes in the banking industry. This article explores the relationships between these changes and the distribution of "brick and mortar" banking offices between 1975 and 1995. The analysis explores how population shifts, deregulation, and mergers, acquisitions, and failures may have influenced changes in the number and location of banking offices. Special attention is given to changes in banking office distributions across neighborhoods grouped by the median income of their residents and their central city, suburban, or rural location.Banks and banking ; Banking structure

20 questions on Adaptive Dynamics

Abstract Adaptive Dynamics is an approach to studying evolutionary change when fitness is density or frequency dependent. Modern papers identifying themselves as using this approach first appeared in the 1990s, and have greatly increased up to the present. However, because of the rather technical nature of many of the papers, the approach is not widely known or understood by evolutionary biologists. In this review we aim to remedy this situation by outlining the methodology and then examining its strengths and weaknesses. We carry this out by posing and answering 20 key questions on Adaptive Dynamics. We conclude that Adaptive Dynamics provides a set of useful approximations for studying various evolutionary questions. However, as with any approximate method, conclusions based on Adaptive Dynamics are valid only under some restrictions that we discuss

Searches for Lepton Flavour Violation at a Linear Collider

We investigate the prospects for detection of lepton flavour violation in sparticle production and decays at a Linear Collider (LC), in models guided by neutrino oscillation data. We consider both slepton pair production and sleptons arising from the cascade decays of non-leptonic sparticles. We study the expected signals when lepton-flavour-violating (LFV) interactions are induced by renormalization effects in the Constrained Minimal Supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model (CMSSM), focusing on the subset of the supersymmetric parameter space that also leads to cosmologically interesting values of the relic neutralino LSP density. Emphasis is given to the complementarity between the LC, which is sensitive to mixing in both the left and right slepton sectors, and the LHC, which is sensitive primarily to mixing in the right sector. We also emphasize the complementarity between searches for rare LFV processes at the LC and in low-energy experiments.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

Geographic liberalization and the accessibility of banking services in rural areas

This study assesses the degree to which the liberalization of geographic banking restrictions has lived up to its promise of enhancing service accessibility in rural areas. The empirical framework is distinguished by a focus on changes in accessibility, as opposed to levels. While previous research has produced mixed results on the benefits of greater geographic powers for service accessibility in rural communities, the results reported here point unambiguously to a positive relationship between expansion opportunities and accessibility. Both OLS and ordinallevel probit regressions indicate that geographic banking liberalizations, particularly those leading to greater branching opportunities, have been associated with relatively strong growth in the number of banking offices serving rural areas.Rural areas ; Banks and banking

Detection of MSSM Higgs bosons from supersymmetric particle cascade decays at the LHC

In the context of the Minimal Supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model, we study the production of Higgs bosons at the Large Hadron Collider via cascade decays of scalar quarks and gluinos. We focus on the cascades involving heavier charginos and neutralinos, which decay into the neutral $h,A,H$ and charged $H^\pm$ bosons and lighter charginos and neutralinos, but we will also discuss direct decays of third--generation squarks into their lighter partners and Higgs bosons as well as top quark decays into $H^\pm$ bosons. We show that the production rates of relatively light Higgs bosons, M_\Phi \lsim 250 GeV, via these mechanisms can be rather large in some areas of the parameter space. Performing a fast detector simulation analysis that takes into account the signals and the various backgrounds, we show that the detection of the neutral Higgs bosons through their decays into $b\bar{b}$ pairs, and of the charged Higgs particles through the $\tau^\pm \nu$ signature, is possible at the LHC.Comment: 44 pages, latex, 17 figure

Rare k-decays

This article reviews the current situation in the field of rare K decays: the relevant phenomenology, the present experimental situation, and prospects for the near future. Study of rare K decays can make a significant contribution in a number of different frontier areas of research in high-energy physics. In the area of CP violation, study of such rare decays as K(L)0 --> pi0e+e-, K(L)0 --> pi0mu+mu-, K(L)0 --> pi0nunuBAR, and muon polarization in K(L)0 --> mu+mu- can provide important complementary information to what has been learned from the decay K(L)0 --> pipi. Even though experiments with sufficient accuracy to make a meaningful study of CP violation are still a few years away, significant progress has been made in this general area during the last decade. A second major area of interest in the field of rare K decays is the search for processes forbidden in the Standard Model, e.g., K(L)0 --> mue and K+ --> pi+mu+e-. Various extensions of the Standard Model predict that these processes will occur with branching fractions in the range of 10(-10) to 10(-15). Experiments of the last decade have pushed the limits into the 10(-10) to 10(-11) range, and further improvements in sensitivity of one to two orders of magnitude can be expected in the next few years. K decays allow one also to study higher-order weak-interaction processes such as K(L)0 --> mu+mu-, K(L)0 --> e+e-, K+ --> pi+nunuBAR, which are forbidden to first order in the Standard Model. Because of strong suppression, these decay modes offer potential windows on new physics; in addition, they may offer the most reliable measurement of V(td), one of the elements of the weak mixing matrix in the quark sector. The studies of the mu+mu- channel have achieved data samples of close to 1000 events; the other two modes should be observed for the first time in the next few years. Finally, as a byproduct of these studies, one has been able to look simultaneously for new light particles into which the K meson could decay. Limits obtained for various hypothetical particles are summarized.Physic

Search for Tau Flavour Violation at the LHC

We explore the prospects for searches at the LHC for sparticle decays that violate $\tau$ lepton number, in the light of neutrino oscillation data and the seesaw model for neutrino masses and mixing. We analyse the theoretical and phenomenological conditions required for tau flavour violation to be observable in \chi_2 \to \chi + \tau^\pm \mu^\mp decays, for cosmologically interesting values of the relic neutralino LSP density. We study the relevant supersymmetric parameter space in the context of the Constrained Minimal Supersymmetric Extension of the Standard Model (CMSSM) and in SU(5) extensions of the theory. We pay particular attention to the possible signals from hadronic tau decays, that we analyse using PYTHIA event simulation. We find that a signal for \tau flavour-violating \chi_2 decays may be observable if the branching ratio exceeds about 10%. This may be compatible with the existing upper limit on \tau \to \mu \gamma decays if there is mixing between right-handed sleptons, as could be induced in non-minimal SU(5) GUTs.Comment: 24 pages, 10 fig