Small Business: Big Challenge

In recent years, the contributions of small business to the American economy have become increasingly apparent. Small firms are a significant source of new jobs, and play crucial roles in the development of new technologies and provision of economic opportunities. Small businesses may be especially critical to the regional economies of upstate New York, where a number of large employers have either moved their operations or scaled back their workforces. As a result, it is important to understand the factors that affect small business growth in the region. Recognizing the growing importance of small firms to the upstate New York economy, the Buffalo Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in partnership with the Center for Governmental Research (CGR) surveyed small businesses in western and central New York State. Small business owners know firsthand the challenges of operating a business in the region, and their insight is vital to comprehending what is necessary for future job growth

The Great Recession in Buffalo-Niagara

At the end of the last decade, the U.S. experienced its most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. The so-called “Great Recession” shocked the economies of virtually every metropolitan area in the nation. Officially, the recession began in December of 2007 and ended in June 2009. But for much of the country, recovery has been very slow; over three years since the expansion began the nation had gained back less than half of the jobs it had lost during the downturn. This brief examines the Great Recession’s effect on the Buffalo-Niagara metro’s economy and compares the region’s performance to that of the nation as a whole. The relative performance of the region has been mixed. For the first time in decades, the recession has been milder in the Buffalo-Niagara metropolitan area than in the U.S. overall, starting later and resulting in lower levels of joblessness. This change is tied to the decline of the region’s manufacturing base, which has left the economy more diverse and less volatile than in the past. However, stability has come at a price. More often than not, the service jobs that have been growing in the region pay lower wages than the manufacturing jobs they have replaced, and thus have tended to suppress workers’ wages

Population Trends in Buffalo-Niagara

Like a number of places in the nation’s manufacturing belt, the Buffalo-Niagara metropolitan area has been losing population over the past several decades. This decline reflects the ongoing population shift from the Northeast and Midwest to warmer places in the South and West, as well as the considerable loss of manufacturing jobs in the region. In recent decades, some large metros experiencing domestic out-migration have seen their populations bolstered by migrants from abroad. But while the Buffalo metro’s rate of out-migration has been roughly average, the rates of both domestic and international in-migration have been very low. Like many cities across the U.S., the City of Buffalo has seen a considerable decline in its population since WWII as growth shifted to the suburbs. As a result, the City of Buffalo has represented a shrinking share of its metro’s total population

Recent progress on truncated Toeplitz operators

This paper is a survey on the emerging theory of truncated Toeplitz operators. We begin with a brief introduction to the subject and then highlight the many recent developments in the field since Sarason's seminal paper in 2007.Comment: 46 page

Consequences of the Spanish integration in the EU on the trade of Catalonia

The aim of this paper is to analyse, according to the new trade theories, the changes in the trade of Catalonia -a Spanish region- from the trade liberalisation due to the Spanish integration in the European Community. Concretely we examine if the changes in trade are predominantly of the intra-industry type or on the contrary they are, above all, of inter-industry type. Measures of intra-industry trade (IIT), marginal intra-industry trade (MIIT) and unmatched changes in trade are examined and calculated using the SITC classification on Catalonia for the years 1985 and 1994, studying the share of these changes as well as their amount. This research allows us to determine the consequences of trade liberalisation in the sense that the change in the pattern of trade triggers off other outstanding effects, specially referred to the structural adjustment. The adjustment costs are expected to be lower if the increase of the trade is of the intra-industry type since in this case the adjustment will imply productive factors moving within the same industry. These adjustment costs are analysed relating the measures of MIIT to structural economic variables such as production. Keywords: Regional Integration, Adjustment Costs, Intra-Industry Trade.

On Wishart distribution

This paper proposes a unified approach that enables the Wishart distribution to be studied simultaneously in the real, complex, quaternion and octonion cases. In particular, the noncentral generalised Wishart distribution, the joint density of the eigenvalues and the distribution of the maximum eigenvalue are obtained for real normed division algebras.Comment: 11 page