Automatic Fiscal Stabilisers

This paper looks at the use of automatic fiscal stabilisers, particularly in relation to New Zealand’s experience over the past business cycle. Allowing the automatic stabilisers to operate in response to cyclical fluctuations in output is likely to yield efficiency gains in a country with a sound fiscal position and a credible approach to medium-term fiscal stability. However, automatic stabilisation does increase the potential for fiscal ill discipline. A risk is that an imprudent Government could allow the automatic stabilisers to operate during a downturn and not bank the gains in the upturn. The discipline imposed by the FRA in New Zealand helps ensure that the Government acts prudently. And a sound underlying fiscal position ensures that when policy action is required, it can be undertaken in a measured manner. Reflecting this, the New Zealand Government has allowed the automatic stabilisers to operate to a greater extent during the most recent recession than during the 1991 recession.

Prospects for constrained supersymmetry at s=33\sqrt{s}=33 TeV and s=100\sqrt{s}=100 TeV proton-proton super-colliders

Discussions are underway for a high-energy proton-proton collider. Two preliminary ideas are the $\sqrt{s}=33$ TeV HE-LHC and the $\sqrt{s}=100$ TeV VLHC. With Bayesian statistics, we calculate the probabilities that the LHC, HE-LHC and VLHC discover SUSY in the future, assuming that nature is described by the CMSSM and given the experimental data from the LHC, LUX and Planck. We find that the LHC with $300$/fb at $\sqrt{s}=14$ TeV has a $15$-$75$ probability of discovering SUSY. Should that run fail to discover SUSY, the probability of discovering SUSY with $3000$/fb is merely $1$-$10$. Were SUSY to remain undetected at the LHC, the HE-LHC would have a $35$-$85$ probability of discovering SUSY with $3000$/fb. The VLHC, on the other hand, ought to be definitive; the probability of it discovering SUSY, assuming that the CMSSM is the correct model, is $100$.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figures. Matches version published in Eur.Phys.J. C. Results and conclusions unchange

Emissions Trading, Electricity Industry Restructuring and Investment in Pollution Abatement

The NOx State Implementation Plan Call was designed to facilitate cost effective reductions of nitrogen oxides emissions from large stationary sources (primarily electricity generators) through the introduction of an emissions trading program. I investigate the relationship between economic regulation and firms' long-run response to the incentives created by this emissions trading program. I estimate a discrete choice model of the firm's compliance decision, controlling for unit-level variation in compliance costs and using exogenous variation in state-level electricity industry restructuring activity to identify an e¤ect of electricity market regulation on generators' environmental compliance strategy choices. I present evidence that differences in economic regulation across states have resulted in a disproportionate amount of the mandated emissions reductions occurring in more regulated electricity markets. Unfortunately, these are the areas least in need of pollution control.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Examining a right-handed quark mixing matrix with bb-tags at the LHC

Encouraged by a hint in a search for right-handed $W$ bosons at the LHC, we investigate whether the unitarity of a right-handed quark mixing matrix and the equality of the left- and right-handed quark mixing matrices could be tested at the LHC. We propose a particular test, involving counting the numbers of $b$-tags in the final state, and simulate the test at the event level with Monte-Carlo tools for the forthcoming $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV LHC run. We find that testing unitarity with 20/fb will be challenging; our test successfully rejects unitarity if the right-handed quark mixing matrix is non-unitary, but only in particular cases. On the other hand, our test may provide the first opportunity to test the unitarity of a right-handed quark mixing matrix and with 3000/fb severely constrains possible departures from unitarity in the latter. We refine our previous work, testing the equality of quark mixing matrices, with full collider simulation. With 20/fb, we are sensitive to mixing angles as small as $30^\circ$, and with 3000/fb, angles as small as $7.5^\circ$, confirming our preliminary analysis. We briefly investigate testing the unitarity of the SM CKM matrix with a similar method by studying semileptonic $t\bar t$ production, concluding that systematics make it particularly difficult.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, matches version to appear in Nuclear Physics