2,397 research outputs found
In Search of WTO Trade Effects: Preferential Trade Agreements Promote Trade Strongly, But Unevenly
The literature measuring the impact of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTA) and WTO membership on trade flows has produced remarkably diverse results. Rose’s (2004) seminal paper reports a range of specifications that show no WTO effects, but Subramanian and Wei (2007) contend that he does not fully control for multilateral resistance (which could bias WTO estimates). Subramanian and Wei (2007) address multilateral resistance comprehensively to report strong WTO trade effects for industrialized countries but do not account for unobserved bilateral heterogeneity (which could inflate WTO estimates). We unify these two approaches by accounting for both multilateral resistance and unobserved bilateral heterogeneity, while also allowing for individual trade effects of PTAs. WTO effects vanish and remain robustly insignificant once multilateral resistance, unobserved bilateral heterogeneity, and individual PTA effects are introduced. The result is robust to the use of alternative definitions and coding conventions for WTO membership that have been employed by Rose (2004), Tomz et al. (2007), or by Subramanian and Wei’s (2007).
The two-loop five-particle amplitude in supergravity
We compute for the first time the two-loop five-particle amplitude in
supergravity. Starting from the known integrand, we perform an
integration-by-parts reduction and express the answer in terms of uniform
weight master integrals. The latter are known to evaluate to non-planar
pentagon functions, described by a 31-letter symbol alphabet. We express the
final result for the amplitude in terms of uniform weight four symbols,
multiplied by a small set of rational factors. The amplitude satisfies the
expected factorization properties when one external graviton becomes soft, and
when two external gravitons become collinear. We verify that the soft
divergences of the amplitude exponentiate, and extract the finite remainder
function. The latter depends on fewer rational factors, and is independent of
one of the symbol letters. By analyzing identities involving rational factors
and symbols we find a remarkably compact representation in terms of a single
seed function, summed over all permutations of external particles. Finally, we
work out the multi-Regge limit, and present explicitly the leading logarithmic
terms in the limit. The full symbol of the IR-subtracted hard function is
provided as an ancillary file.Comment: 22 pages, 1 figure, 8 ancillary file
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High rate of extrapair paternity in a human population demonstrates diversity in human reproductive strategies.
Among nonhuman species, social monogamy is rarely accompanied by complete fidelity. Evolutionary theory predicts that the rate of extrapair paternity (EPP) should vary according to socioecological conditions. In humans, however, geneticists contend that EPP is negligible and relatively invariable. This conclusion is based on a limited set of studies, almost all of which describe European-descent groups. Using a novel, double-blind method designed in collaboration with a community of Himba pastoralists, we find that the rate of EPP in this population is 48%, with 70% of couples having at least one EPP child. Both men and women were very accurate at detecting cases of EPP. These data suggest that the range of variation in EPP across human populations is substantially greater than previously thought. We further show that a high rate of EPP can be accompanied by high paternity confidence, which highlights the importance of disaggregating EPP from the notion of "cuckoldry.
Emergence of turbulence in an oscillating Bose-Einstein condensate
We report on the experimental observation of vortices tangle in an atomic BEC
of Rb-87 atoms when an external oscillatory perturbation is introduced in the
trap. The vortices tangle configuration is a signature of the presence of a
turbulent regime in the cloud. We also show that this turbulent cloud has
suppression of the aspect ratio inversion typically observed in quantum
degenerate bosonic gases during free expansion. Instead, the cloud expands
keeping the ratio between their axis constant. Turbulence in atomic superfluids
may constitute an alternative system to investigate decay mechanisms as well as
to test fundamental theoretical aspects in this field.Comment: accepted for Phys. Rev. Let
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