Quantum Electrodynamics at Large Distances II: Nature of the Dominant Singularities

Accurate calculations of macroscopic and mesoscopic properties in quantum electrodynamics require careful treatment of infrared divergences: standard treatments introduce spurious large-distances effects. A method for computing these properties was developed in a companion paper. That method depends upon a result obtained here about the nature of the singularities that produce the dominant large-distance behaviour. If all particles in a quantum field theory have non-zero mass then the Landau-Nakanishi diagrams give strong conditions on the singularities of the scattering functions. These conditions are severely weakened in quantum electrodynamics by effects of points where photon momenta vanish. A new kind of Landau-Nakanishi diagram is developed here. It is geared specifically to the pole-decomposition functions that dominate the macroscopic behaviour in quantum electrodynamics, and leads to strong results for these functions at points where photon momenta vanish.Comment: 40 pages, 11 encapsulated postscript figures, latexed, math_macros.tex can be found on Archive. full postscript available from http://theorl.lbl.gov/www/theorgroup/papers/35972.p

Ernst Freund as Precursor of the Rational Study of Corporate Law

Gindis, David, Ernst Freund as Precursor of the Rational Study of Corporate Law (October 27, 2017). Journal of Institutional Economics, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2905547, doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2905547The rise of large business corporations in the late 19th century compelled many American observers to admit that the nature of the corporation had yet to be understood. Published in this context, Ernst Freund's little-known The Legal Nature of Corporations (1897) was an original attempt to come to terms with a new legal and economic reality. But it can also be described, to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, as the earliest example of the rational study of corporate law. The paper shows that Freund had the intuitions of an institutional economist, and engaged in what today would be called comparative institutional analysis. Remarkably, his argument that the corporate form secures property against insider defection and against outsiders anticipated recent work on entity shielding and capital lock-in, and can be read as an early contribution to what today would be called the theory of the firm.Peer reviewe