Public procurement in the presence of capital taxation

The paper considers governments' public procurement decision as a way of influencing industry structure. In a federation in which capital is mobile and capital taxation is harmonized, a home bias in public procurement can potentially be explained as an effort to increase the capital intensity of local production and to attract taxable capital. As a result, governments may prefer domestic firms to more efficient foreign firms. --procurement,tax competition,federalism

Euro membership and fiscal reaction functions : [Version 10 May 2013]

The paper uses fiscal reaction functions for a panel of euro-area countries to investigate whether euro membership has reduced the responsiveness of countries to shocks in the level of inherited debt compared to the period prior to succession to the euro. While we find some evidence for such a loss in prudence, the results are not robust to changes in the specification, such as an exclusion of Greece from the panel. This suggests that the current debt problems may result to a large extent from preexisting debt levels prior to entry or from a larger need for fiscal prudence in a common currency, while an adverse change in the fiscal reaction functions for most countries does not apply

Metaspin and dirishonic dark matter

The antisymmetry requirement of rishon bound state wave functions suggests a new rishon quantum number called M spin. From M spin conservation and the Nussinov-Weingarten-Witten theorem we predict the existence of a stable pseudoscalar dirishonic meson, called zeta, that is lighter than the lightest neutrino. Its mass is estimated as m(zeta) = 10^{-9} eV. This particle could make up the major part of cold dark matter in the Universe.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figur