Myth Making in the Heartland – Did Agriculture Elect the New President?

This essay addresses the role of America’s farmers in electing President Donald Trump. This role may not have been as large as the agricultural community and others have suggested. Additionally, this essay cautions the agricultural community against taking too much credit for the election of a politician and party whose interests are often at odds with agricultural interests

Minimality and irreducibility of symplectic four-manifolds

We prove that all minimal symplectic four-manifolds are essentially irreducible. We also clarify the relationship between holomorphic and symplectic minimality of K\"ahler surfaces. This leads to a new proof of the deformation-invariance of holomorphic minimality for complex surfaces with even first Betti number which are not Hirzebruch surfaces.Comment: final version; cosmetic changes only; to appear in International Mathematics Research Notice

Cyclic group actions and embedded spheres in 4-manifolds

In this note we derive an upper bound on the number of 2-spheres in the fixed point set of a smooth and homologically trivial cyclic group action of prime order on a simply-connected 4-manifold. This improves the a priori bound which is given by one half of the Euler characteristic of the 4-manifold. The result also shows that in some cases the 4-manifold does not admit such actions of a certain order at all or that any such action has to be pseudofree.Comment: 13 pages; to appear in Proc. Amer. Math. So

Assessing Monetary Policy Effects Using Daily Fed Funds Futures Contracts

This paper develops a generalization of the formulas proposed by Kuttner (2001) and others for purposes of measuring the effects of a change in the fed funds target on Treasury yields of different maturities. The generalization avoids the need to condition on the date of the target change and allows for deviations of the effective fed funds rate from the target as well as gradual learning by market participants about the target. The paper shows that parameters estimated solely on the basis of the behavior of the fed funds and fed funds futures can account for the broad calendar regularities in the relation between fed funds futures and Treasury yields of different maturities. Although the methods are new, the conclusion is quite similar to that reported by earlier researchers-- changes in the fed funds target seem to be associated with quite large changes in Treasury yields, even for maturities up to ten years.