Electoral Budget Cycles: The case of the Argentine Provinces

This paper presents subnational evidence of electoraly-motivated changes in the level of public expenditures, budgetary deficits and composition of public expenditures in Argentina. The empirical study is made using a dynamic panel data analysis (GMM) for 22 provinces during period 1985-2001. We find evidence of political cycles in policies around the election date. Results shows that deficits and public expenditures increase in election years. Evidence also suggest that expenditures shift toward more visible public investment and away from current consumption goods.Electoral Budget Cycles, Argentina, Political Economy, Fiscal Policy

Causal hierarchy of multipartite Bell nonlocality

As with entanglement, different forms of Bell nonlocality arise in the multipartite scenario. These can be defined in terms of relaxations of the causal assumptions in local hidden-variable theories. However, a characterisation of all the forms of multipartite nonlocality has until now been out of reach, mainly due to the complexity of generic multipartite causal models. Here, we employ the formalism of Bayesian networks to reveal connections among different causal structures that make a both practical and physically meaningful classification possible. Our framework holds for arbitrarily many parties. We apply it to study the tripartite scenario in detail, where we fully characterize all the nonlocality classes. Remarkably, we identify new highly nonlocal causal structures that cannot reproduce all quantum correlations. This shows, to our knowledge, the strongest form of quantum multipartite nonlocality known to date. Finally, as a by-product result, we derive a non-trivial Bell-type inequality with no quantum violation. Our findings constitute a significant step forward in the understanding of multipartite Bell nonlocality and open several venues for future research.Comment: 6 pages + appendix, 3 figures, 3 tables. Minor errors corrected, discovery of strongest form of quantum multipartite non-locality known so far added. v3: text improved. v4: Accepted by Quantu

Diphoton production at hadron colliders: transverse-momentum resummation at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy

We consider the transverse-momentum (qT) distribution of a diphoton pair produced in hadron collisions. At small values of qT , we resum the logarithmically-enhanced perturbative QCD contributions up to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. At intermediate and large values of qT, we consistently combine resummation with the known next-to-leading order perturbative result. All perturbative terms up to order \alpha_S^2 are included in our computation which, after integration over qT, reproduces the known next-to-next-to-leading order result for the diphoton pair production total cross section. We present a comparison with LHC data and an estimate of the perturbative accuracy of the theoretical calculation by performing the corresponding variation of scales. In general we observe that the effect of the resummation is not only to recover the predictivity of the calculation at small transverse momentum, but also to improve substantially the agreement with the experimental data.Comment: 17 pages, 16 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1007.235

Redox modulation of plant developmental regulators from the class I TCP transcription factor family

TEOSINTE BRANCHED1-CYCLOIDEA-PROLIFERATING CELL FACTOR1 (TCP) transcription factors participate in plant developmental processes associated with cell proliferation and growth. Most members of class I, one of the two classes that compose the family, have a conserved cysteine at position 20 (Cys-20) of the TCP DNA-binding and dimerization domain. We show that Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) class I proteins with Cys-20 are sensitive to redox conditions, since their DNAbinding activity is inhibited after incubation with the oxidants diamide, oxidized glutathione, or hydrogen peroxide or with nitric oxide-producing agents. Inhibition can be reversed by treatment with the reductants dithiothreitol or reduced glutathione or by incubation with the thioredoxin/thioredoxin reductase system. Mutation of Cys-20 in the class I protein TCP15 abolished its redox sensitivity. Under oxidizing conditions, covalently linked dimers were formed, suggesting that inactivation is associated with the formation of intermolecular disulfide bonds. Inhibition of class I TCP protein activity was also observed in vivo, in yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) cells expressing TCP proteins and in plants after treatment with redox agents. This inhibition was correlated with modifications in the expression of the downstream CUC1 gene in plants. Modeling studies indicated that Cys-20 is located at the dimer interface near the DNA-binding surface. This places this residue in the correct orientation for intermolecular disulfide bond formation and explains the sensitivity of DNA binding to the oxidation of Cys-20. The redox properties of Cys-20 and the observed effects of cellular redox agents both in vitro and in vivo suggest that class I TCP protein action is under redox control in plants.Fil: Viola, Ivana Lorena. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Agrobiotecnología del Litoral. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto de Agrobiotecnología del Litoral; ArgentinaFil: Güttlein, Leandro. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Agrobiotecnología del Litoral. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto de Agrobiotecnología del Litoral; ArgentinaFil: Gonzalez, Daniel Hector. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Agrobiotecnología del Litoral. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto de Agrobiotecnología del Litoral; Argentin

Political competition and societal veto players: the politics of pension reform in Southern Europe

While Southern European countries have pursued a series of pension reforms since the early 1990s, significant variation arises across them. Focusing on the concept of political replacement risk (the probability of a government being electorally punished for pursuing a given policy) and the changes in the labor movement's organizational structure, this article seeks to elucidate the differences in reform outcomes, in Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain. Our analysis shows that significant reforms are implemented when governments face a high political replacement risk and the labor movement has undergone changes in its structure. By contrast, governments facing a stronger labor movement will generally be less effective at passing significant reforms, unless they can secure a strong support over the necessity to implement reforms

Tightness for the interface of the one-dimensional contact process

We consider a symmetric, finite-range contact process with two types of infection; both have the same (supercritical) infection rate and heal at rate 1, but sites infected by Infection 1 are immune to Infection 2. We take the initial configuration where sites in $(-\infty,0]$ have Infection 1 and sites in $[1,\infty)$ have Infection 2, then consider the process $\rho_t$ defined as the size of the interface area between the two infections at time $t$. We show that the distribution of $\rho_t$ is tight, thus proving a conjecture posed by Cox and Durrett in [Bernoulli 1 (1995) 343--370].Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/09-BEJ236 the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

Existence, uniqueness and decay rates for evolution equations on trees

We study evolution equations governed by an averaging operator on a directed tree, showing existence and uniqueness of solutions. In addition we find conditions of the initial condition that allows us to find the asymptotic decay rate of the solutions as $t\to \infty$. It turns out that this decay rate is not uniform, it strongly depends on how the initial condition goes to zero as one goes down in the tree.Fil: del Pezzo, Leandro Martin. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Matemática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Mosquera, Carolina Alejandra. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Matemática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Julio Daniel. Universidad de Alicante; España. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

The unique continuation property for a nonlinear equation on trees

In this paper, we study the game p-Laplacian on a tree, that is, u(x) = α / 2 max y∈S(x) u(y) + min y∈S(x) u(y) + β m y∈S(x) u(y);here x is a vertex of the tree and S(x) is the set of successors of x. We study the family of the subsets of the tree that enjoy the unique continuation property, that is, subsets U such that u |U = 0 implies u ≡ 0.Fil: del Pezzo, Leandro Martin. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Matemática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Mosquera, Carolina Alejandra. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Matemática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Julio Daniel. Universidad de Alicante; España. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin