Three essays on globalization and economic development

How do falling barriers to flows of trade and information both within and across countries affect economic livelihoods in developing countries? The three chapters presented in this PhD thesis aim to contribute to our understanding of this question

Two Steps forward, One Step back: Must the District Court Issue a Stay after a Decision Adverse to Arbitration Is Appealed, and to What Extent Are Arbitration Clauses Applied Retroactively Note

By creating new rules to fill in the gaps left by the FAA, the federal circuit courts may have muddied the waters of how and why parties assent to arbitration, and the ramifications of their decisions could change how and why parties bind themselves and each other to arbitration in the future. This note will address these issues in six remaining parts. Part II will briefly outline the pertinent facts of Levin. Part III addresses the circuit split on whether federal courts should issue an automatic stay of legislation pending an appeal to compel arbitration under § 16(a)(1)(A) of the FAA. Further, this part concerns the retroactive application of arbitration clauses in continuing relationships, and analyzes the manner in which some federal circuits have pieced together rules of contract interpretation with Supreme Court precedent regarding arbitration to arrive at the result ultimately reached by the Fourth Circuit in Levin. Part IV addresses how the Levin court applied the law to the facts of the case and its reasons for doing so. Part V contains the author\u27s own opinions and observations of the Fourth Circuit\u27s holding in Levin: that the Fourth Circuit was correct in its decision requiring automatic stays after a § 16(a)(1)(A) appeal, and that its decision regarding the circumstances under which arbitration clauses can be applied retroactively unnecessarily broadened the rules of contract interpretation for contracts containing arbitration agreements. Part VI closes the note with a summary of the issues addressed and some final thoughts on how Levin strengthened federal precedent in favor of arbitrability

Quantum Games in Open Systems using Biophysic Hamiltonians

We analyze the necessary physical conditions to model an open quantum system as a quantum game. By applying the formalism of Quantum Operations on a particular system, we use Kraus operators as quantum strategies. The physical interpretation is a conflict among different configurations of the environment. The resolution of the conflict displays regimes of minimum loss of information.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figs, accepted in Phys. Lett.

Retail globalization and household welfare:evidence from Mexico

The arrival of global retail chains in developing countries is causing a radical transformation in the way that households source their consumption. This paper draws on a new collection of Mexican microdata to estimate the effect of foreign supermarket entry on household welfare. The richness of the microdata allows us to estimate a general expression for the gains from retail FDI, and to decompose these gains into several distinct channels. We find that foreign retail entry causes large and significant welfare gains for the average household that are mainly driven by a reduction in the cost of living. About one quarter of this price index effect is due to pro-competitive effects on the prices charged by domestic stores, with the remaining three quarters due to the direct consumer gains from shopping at the new foreign stores. We find little evidence of significant changes in average municipality-level incomes or employment. We do, however, find evidence of store exit, adverse effects on domestic store profits and reductions in the incomes of traditional retail sector workers. Finally, we show that the gains from retail FDI are on average positive for all income groups but regressive, and quantify the opposing forces that underlie this finding

ICT and education: evidence from student homeaddresses

Governments are making it a priority to upgrade information and communication technologies (ICT) with the aim to increase available internet connection speeds. This paper presents a new strategy to estimate the causal effects of these policies, and applies it to the questions of whether and how ICT upgrades affect educational attainment. We draw on a rich collection of microdata that allows us to link administrative test score records for the population of English primary and secondary school students to the available ICT at their home addresses. To base estimations on exogenous variation in ICT, we notice that the boundaries of usually invisible telephone exchange station catchment areas give rise to substantial and essentially randomly placed jumps in the available ICT across neighboring residences. Using this design across more than 20,000 boundaries in England, we find that even very large changes in available internet speeds have a precisely estimated zero effect on educational attainment. Guided by a simple model we then bring to bear additional microdata on student time and internet use to quantify the potentially opposing mechanisms underlying the zero reduced form effect. We find that jumps in the available ICT have no significant effect on student time spent studying online or offline, or on their productivity. Finally, while faster connections appear to increase student consumption of online content, we find that the elasticity of student demand for online content with respect to its time cost is negative but bounded by -1

The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey: Redshift Identification of Single-Line Emission Galaxies

We present two methods for determining spectroscopic redshifts of galaxies in the DEEP2 survey which display only one identifiable feature, an emission line, in the observed spectrum ("single-line galaxies"). First, we assume each single line is one of the four brightest lines accessible to DEEP2: Halpha, [OIII] 5007, Hbeta, or [OII] 3727. Then, we supplement spectral information with BRI photometry. The first method, parameter space proximity (PSP), calculates the distance of a single-line galaxy to galaxies of known redshift in (B-R), (R-I), R, observed wavelength parameter space. The second method is an artificial neural network (ANN). Prior information, such as allowable line widths and ratios, rules out one or more of the four lines for some galaxies in both methods. Based on analyses of evaluation sets, both methods are nearly perfect at identifying blended [OII] doublets. Of the lines identified as Halpha in the PSP and ANN methods, 91.4% and 94.2% respectively are accurate. Although the methods are not this accurate at discriminating between [OIII] and Hbeta, they can identify a single line as one of the two, and the ANN method in particular unambiguously identifies many [OIII] lines. From a sample of 640 single-line spectra, the methods determine the identities of 401 (62.7%) and 472 (73.8%) single lines, respectively, at accuracies similar to those found in the evaluation sets.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, accepted to Ap