Trade agreements with limited punishments

This paper shows that free trade can never be achieved when punishment for deviation from a trade agreement is limited to ‘a withdrawal of equivalent concessions’. This is where retaliation is not allowed to entail higher tariffs than those set by the initial deviant, and is the most severe form of punishment allowed under WTO rules. If, in addition, deviations from agreements are also limited in some way, then efficient self-enforcing tariff reductions must be gradual

On the resolution power of Fourier extensions for oscillatory functions

Functions that are smooth but non-periodic on a certain interval possess Fourier series that lack uniform convergence and suffer from the Gibbs phenomenon. However, they can be represented accurately by a Fourier series that is periodic on a larger interval. This is commonly called a Fourier extension. When constructed in a particular manner, Fourier extensions share many of the same features of a standard Fourier series. In particular, one can compute Fourier extensions which converge spectrally fast whenever the function is smooth, and exponentially fast if the function is analytic, much the same as the Fourier series of a smooth/analytic and periodic function. With this in mind, the purpose of this paper is to describe, analyze and explain the observation that Fourier extensions, much like classical Fourier series, also have excellent resolution properties for representing oscillatory functions. The resolution power, or required number of degrees of freedom per wavelength, depends on a user-controlled parameter and, as we show, it varies between 2 and \pi. The former value is optimal and is achieved by classical Fourier series for periodic functions, for example. The latter value is the resolution power of algebraic polynomial approximations. Thus, Fourier extensions with an appropriate choice of parameter are eminently suitable for problems with moderate to high degrees of oscillation.Comment: Revised versio

On theories of random variables

We study theories of spaces of random variables: first, we consider random variables with values in the interval $[0,1]$, then with values in an arbitrary metric structure, generalising Keisler's randomisation of classical structures. We prove preservation and non-preservation results for model theoretic properties under this construction: i) The randomisation of a stable structure is stable. ii) The randomisation of a simple unstable structure is not simple. We also prove that in the randomised structure, every type is a Lascar type