International Aspects of the Great Depression and the Crisis of 2007: Similarities, Differences, and Lessons

We focus on two international aspects of the Great Depression--financial crises and international trade—and try to discern lessons for the current economic crisis. Both downturns featured global banking crises which were generated by boom-slump macroeconomic cycles. During both crises, world trade collapsed faster than world incomes and the trade decline was highly synchronized across countries. In the Depression, income losses and rises in trade barriers explain trade’s collapse. Due to vertical specialization and more intense trade in durables today’s trade collapse is due to uncertainty and small shocks to trade costs hitting international supply chains. So far, the global economy has avoided the global trade wars and banking collapses of the Depression perhaps due to improved policy. Even so, the global economy remains susceptible to large shocks due to financial innovation and technological change as recent events illustrate.Great Depression, Crisis of 2007

An Empirical Analysis of Cigarette Addiction

We use a framework suggested by a model of rational addiction to analyze empirically the demand for cigarettes. The data consist of per capita cigarettes sales (in packs) annually by state for the period 1955 through 1985. The empirical results provide support for the implications of a rational addiction model that cross price effects are negative (consumption in different periods are complements), that long-run price responses exceed short-run responses, and that permanent price effects exceed temporary price effects. A 10 percent permanent increase in the price of cigarettes reduces current consumption by 4 percent in the short run and by 7.5 percent in the long run. In contrast, a 10 percent increase in the price for only one period decreases consumption by only 3 percent. In addition, a one period price increase of 10 percent reduces consumption in the previous period by approximately .7 percent and consumption in the subsequent period by 1.5 percent. These estimates illustrate the importance of the intertemporal linkages in cigarette demand implied by rational addictive behavior.

The Economic Theory of Illegal Goods: The Case of Drugs

This paper concentrates on both the positive and normative effects of punishments that enforce laws to make production and consumption of particular goods illegal, with illegal drugs as the main example. Optimal public expenditures on apprehension and conviction of illegal suppliers obviously depend on the extent of the difference between the social and private value of consumption of illegal goods, but they also depend crucially on the elasticity of demand for these goods. In particular, when demand is inelastic, it does not pay to enforce any prohibition unless the social value is negative and not merely less than the private value. We also compare outputs and prices when a good is legal and taxed with outputs and prices when the good is illegal. We show that a monetary tax on a legal good could cause a greater reduction in output and increase in price than would optimal enforcement, even recognizing that producers may want to go underground to try to avoid a monetary tax. This means that fighting a war on drugs by legalizing drug use and taxing consumption may be more effective than continuing to prohibit the legal use of drugs.

New Physics Effects in B→K(∗)ννB \to K^(*) \nu \nu Decays

We present a model-independent analysis of rare B decays, $B \to K^{(*)} \nu \nu$. The effect of possible new physics is written in terms of dimension-6 four-fermi interactions. The lepton number violating scalar- and tensor-type interactions are included, and they induce $B \to K^{(*)} \nu \nu ({\bar \nu} {\bar \nu})$ decays. We show systematically how the branching ratios and missing mass-squared spectrum depend on the coefficients of the four-fermi interactions.Comment: 20 pages with 7 figure

Germanium:gallium photoconductors for far infrared heterodyne detection

Highly compensated Ge:Ga photoconductors have been fabricated and evaluated for high bandwidth heterodyne detection. Bandwidths up to 60 MHz have been obtained with corresponding current responsivity of 0.01 A/W

Discrete Ambiguities in the Measurement of the Weak Phase Gamma

Several time-independent methods have been devised for measuring the phase gamma of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa unitarity triangle. It is shown that such measurements generally suffer from discrete ambiguity which is at least 8-fold, not 4-fold as commonly stated. This has serious experimental implications, which are explored in methods involving B->DK decays. The measurement sensitivity and new physics discovery potential are estimated using a full Monte Carlo detector simulation with realistic background estimates.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, fixed typ

Leptonic Flavor and CP Violation

We discuss how neutrino oscillation experiments can probe new sources of leptonic flavor and CP violation.Comment: 8 pages, latex, no figures. Invited talk given at KAON 2001, Pisa, Italy, June 12 - 17, 200

Organization of Multinational Activities and Ownership Structure

We develop a model in which multinational investors decide about the modes of organization, the locations of production, and the markets to be served. Foreign investments are driven by market-seeking and cost-reducing motives. We further assume that investors face costs of control that vary among sectors and increase in distance. The results show that (i) production intensive sectors are more likely to operate a foreign business independent of the investment motive, (ii) that distance may have a non-monotonous effect on the likelihood of horizontal investments, and (iii) that globalization, if understood as reducing distance, leads to more integration

Thermodynamic identities and particle number fluctuations in weakly interacting Bose--Einstein condensates

We derive exact thermodynamic identities relating the average number of condensed atoms and the root-mean-square fluctuations determined in different statistical ensembles for the weakly interacting Bose gas confined in a box. This is achieved by introducing the concept of {\it auxiliary partition functions} for model Hamiltonians that do conserve the total number of particles. Exploiting such thermodynamic identities, we provide the first, completely analytical prediction of the microcanonical particle number fluctuations in the weakly interacting Bose gas. Such fluctuations, as a function of the volume V of the box are found to behave normally, at variance with the anomalous scaling behavior V^{4/3} of the fluctuations in the ideal Bose gas.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Can We Identify Lensed Gamma Ray Bursts?

A gravitationally lensed gamma-ray burst (GRB) would appear as multiple bursts with identical light curves, separated in time and differing only by the scaling of their amplitudes. However, noise may make them difficult to identify as lensed images. Furthermore, faint, intrinsically similar, yet distinct light curves may be falsely identified as lensing events. In this paper we develop two statistical tests to distinguish noisy burst light curves. We use Fourier analysis techniques to analyze the signals for both intrinsic variability and variability due to noise. We are able to determine the noise level, and we compare the bursts only at frequency channels that are signal dominated. Utilizing these methods, we are able to make quantitative statements about whether two bursts are distinct. We apply these statistics to scaled versions of two subbursts of GRB 910503--- subbursts previously investigated by Wambsganss (1993) using a different statistical test. We find that our methods are able to distinguish these bursts at slightly smaller amplitudes than those at which Wambsganss's method succeeds. We then apply our techniques to ``candidate" lensing events taken from the BATSE catalogue, and we find that nearly all of them, except for the very shortest ones (durations \aproxlt 0.3 ~s), are distinguishable. We therefore expect that a majority of bursts will be disinguishable from one another.Comment: 28 pages, plain TeX (Figures Available as Post Script Files