Temperature equilibration in a fully ionized plasma: electron-ion mass ratio effects

Brown, Preston, and Singleton (BPS) produced an analytic calculation for energy exchange processes for a weakly to moderately coupled plasma: the electron-ion temperature equilibration rate and the charged particle stopping power. These precise calculations are accurate to leading and next-to-leading order in the plasma coupling parameter, and to all orders for two-body quantum scattering within the plasma. Classical molecular dynamics can provide another approach that can be rigorously implemented. It is therefore useful to compare the predictions from these two methods, particularly since the former is theoretically based and the latter numerically. An agreement would provide both confidence in our theoretical machinery and in the reliability of the computer simulations. The comparisons can be made cleanly in the purely classical regime, thereby avoiding the arbitrariness associated with constructing effective potentials to mock up quantum effects. We present here the classical limit of the general result for the temperature equilibration rate presented in BPS. We examine the validity of the m_electron/m_ion --> 0 limit used in BPS to obtain a very simple analytic evaluation of the long-distance, collective effects in the background plasma.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, small change in titl

Reassessing the History of U.S. Hazardous Waste Disposal Policy - Problem Definition, Expert Knowledge and Agenda-Setting

The authors show that in the 1940\u27s technical consensus began to develop about the effects of land-based waste disposal on groundwater degradation. They go on to explain why this understanding was only slowly reflected in federal legislation

The effects of borrowing rates on intra-firm disequilibria between equity prices and CDS premiums – evidence from dynamic panel analysis.

Cointegration techniques are used to estimate the long run equilibrium relationship between a firm’s CDS premium and its equity price, for a panel of large-cap US firms. From these results, the estimated disequilibrium in daily CDS premiums, with respect to equity prices, is constructed. Dynamic panel methods are employed to show the importance of lagged changes in libor rates as determinants of the estimated disequilibrium. Evidence is found that the extent to which the markets deviate from equilibrium will increase as one-month libor rates rise, but, counter-intuitively, will decrease (return towards equilibrium) as longer term libor rates rise

A Discourse on Diversity: the impact of management team heterogeneity on firm performance.

Quantile models are used to test the association between management team gender, ethnic and educational diversity and firm performance, employing an IV technique developed by Chernozhukov and Hansen (2008) to address the potential endogeneity issues. Estimated associations between measures of diversity and firm EBITDA margins are close to zero across much of the dependent variable distribution, but increase in magnitude for higher margin firms. No evidence of a statistically significant causal relationship between gender and ethnic diversity and firm EBITDA margins is found. Marginal evidence of a statistically significant association between margins and educational diversity is found for high margin firms

Non-Cointegration and Econometric Evaluation of Models of Regional Shift and Share

This paper tests for cointegration between regional output of an industry and national output of the same industry. An equilibrium economic theory is presented to argue for the plausibility of cointegration, however, regional economic forecasting using the shift and share framework often acts as if cointegration does not exist. Data analysis on broad industrial sectors for 20 states finds very little evidence for cointegration. Forecasting models with and without imposing cointegration are than constructed and used to forecast out of sample. The simplest, non-cointegrating models are the best.