BMS symmetry, soft particles and memory

In this work, we revisit unitary irreducible representations of the Bondi-Metzner-Sachs (BMS) group discovered by McCarthy. Representations are labelled by an infinite number of super-momenta in addition to four-momentum. Tensor products of these irreducible representations lead to particle-like states dressed by soft gravitational modes. Conservation of 4-momentum and supermomentum in the scattering of such states leads to a memory effect encoded in the outgoing soft modes. We note there exist irreducible representations corresponding to soft states with strictly vanishing four-momentum, which may nevertheless be produced by scattering of particle-like states. This fact has interesting implications for the S-matrix in gravitational theories.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figure

The Small Business Credit Gap: Some New Evidence

What is the magnitude of credit constraint or credit gap affecting small businesses? This paper provides estimates of credit gap, defined as the difference between the desired and actual levels of debt for credit- constrained small businesses using the data from the National Survey of Small Business Finances. The estimated credit gap is approximately 20 percent – credit constrained small business on the average would desire 20 percent more debt. This credit gap varies considerably across industries, with service, manufacturing, and wholesale industries facing a significantly larger gap than firms in other industries. Evidence also indicates that relationship banking helps to narrow the credit gap. From a policy perspective, our results indicate that credit policies will be more effective if they are customized to industry needs.Lending Relationship, Small Business Finance, Credit Constraints

Giant planets: Clues on current and past organic chemistry in the outer solar system

The giant planets of the outer solar system - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune - were formed in the same flattened disk of gas and dust, the solar nebula, as the terrestrial planets were. Yet, the giant planets differ in some very fundamental ways from the terrestrial planets. Despite enormous differences, the giant planets are relevant to exobiology in general and the origin of life on the Earth in particular. The giant planets are described as they are today. Their basic properties and the chemistry occurring in their atmospheres is discussed. Theories of their origin are explored and aspects of these theories that may have relevance to exobiology and the origin of life on Earth are stressed

Performance Incentives, Performance Pressure and Executive Turnover

We examine the relationship between the optimal incentive contract and the firm’s decision to fire a manager for poor performance. We first derive some theoretical results using a simple principal-agent model, and then examine the empirical evidence on the incidence of forced turnover among CEOs with different compensation contracts. We find that CEOs with steeper compensation contracts (i.e., with greater incentives) are more likely to be fired following poor firm performance. Logit estimations indicate that among firms that make a net loss in a given year, a CEO receiving incentives at the 60th percentile level is 26.55% more likely to be fired than a CEO with incentives at the 40th percentile. The corresponding figure for firms whose ROA is below the industry average level is 15.07%, and for firms whose stock return is below the market return is 15.86%. The results are robust to various performance and incentive measures. Overall, our re-sults indicate that CEOs with greater incentives also face greater performance pressures.Incentive Contracts, Executive Compensation, Equity-based compensation, Management Turnover

Holographic operator mapping in dS/CFT and cluster decomposition

The bulk to boundary mapping for massive scalar fields is constructed, providing a de Sitter analog of the LSZ reduction formula. The set of boundary correlators thus obtained defines a potentially new class of conformal field theories based on principal series representations of the global conformal group. Conversely, we show bulk field operators in de Sitter may be reconstructed from boundary operators. While consistent at the level of the free field theory, the boundary CFT does not satisfy cluster decomposition. The resulting conformal field theory does not satisfy the basic axioms of Euclidean quantum field theory due to Osterwalder and Schrader, so is likely not well-defined once interactions are included.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figur