Juries in serious fraud trials

John Hansen outlines the advantages and disadvantages of four alternatives to trial by jury for serious fraud trials presented in a Home Office consultation paper. Article by Mr Justice Hansen, Executive High Court Judge, New Zealand published in Amicus Curiae - Journal of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and its Society for Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London

On pp-adic LL-functions for Hilbert modular forms

We construct $p$-adic $L$-functions associated with $p$-refined cohomological cuspidal Hilbert modular forms over any totally real field under a mild hypothesis. Our construction is canonical, varies naturally in $p$-adic families, and does not require any small slope or non-criticality assumptions on the $p$-refinement. The main new ingredients are an adelic definition of a canonical map from overconvergent cohomology to a space of locally analytic distributions on the relevant Galois group and a smoothness theorem for certain eigenvarieties at critically refined points.Comment: 88 page

Scattering amplitudes from finite-volume spectral functions

A novel proposal is outlined to determine scattering amplitudes from finite-volume spectral functions. The method requires extracting smeared spectral functions from finite-volume Euclidean correlation functions, with a particular complex smearing kernel of width $\epsilon$ which implements the standard $i\epsilon$-prescription. In the $L \to \infty$ limit these smeared spectral functions are therefore equivalent to Minkowskian correlators with a specific time ordering to which a modified LSZ reduction formalism can be applied. The approach is presented for general $m \to n$ scattering amplitudes (above arbitrary inelastic thresholds) for a single-species real scalar field, although generalization to arbitrary spins and multiple coupled channels is likely straightforward. Processes mediated by the single insertion of an external current are also considered. Numerical determination of the finite-volume smeared spectral function is discussed briefly and the interplay between the finite volume, Euclidean signature, and time-ordered $i\epsilon$-prescription is illustrated perturbatively in a toy example.Comment: 22 pages, 2 figures, CERN-TH-2019-035, CP3-Origins-2019-006 DNRF9

On the Causal Links between FDI and Growth in Developing Countries

We analyse the Granger-causal relationships between foreign direct investment (FDI) and GDP in a sample of 31 developing countries covering the period 1970-2000. Using estimators for heterogeneous panel data we find bi-directional causality between the FDI/GDP ratio and the level of GDP. FDI is found to have a lasting impact on the level of GDP, while GDP has no long run impact on the FDI/GDP ratio. In that sense FDI causes growth. Furthermore, in a model for GDP and FDI as a fraction of gross capital formation (GCF) we also find long run effects of shifts in the mean level of FDI/GCF. We interpret this finding as evidence in favour of the hypotheses that FDI has an impact on GDP via knowledge transfers and adoption of new technology.economic growth; foreign direct investment; Granger causality; panel data

The Track Record on Takings Legislation: Lessons from Democracy\u27s Laboratories

This report by the Georgetown Environmental Law & Policy Institute, entitled The Track Record on Takings Legislation: Lessons from Democracy\u27s Laboratories, examines the experiences of Florida, Oregon, and several other states with legislation implementing the property rights agenda. The report is the first comprehensive effort to systematically identify and evaluate the on-the-ground consequences of so-called takings compensation laws. The major findings of the report are that the takings agenda has undermined community protections by forcing a roll back of existing legal rules and/or by exerting a chilling effect on new legislative activity, special interests such as developers and timber companies have been the primary beneficiaries of takings legislation, the takings laws have fomented and exacerbated neighbor-neighbor conflicts over land use issues, the takings agenda has conferred large windfalls on certain owners either in the form of taxpayer-funded awards or special exemptions from the rules that apply to the rest of the community, and the property rights agenda has undermined the democratic process. Contrary to a common argument made by proponents of this type of legislation, requiring the government to pay to regulate does not lead government officials to make a more nuanced appraisal of the costs and benefits of regulations, apparently because the salience of fiscal costs to government officials far outweighs the relatively more diffuse political benefits of community and homeowner protection

Leveraging native language information for improved accented speech recognition

Recognition of accented speech is a long-standing challenge for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, given the increasing worldwide population of bi-lingual speakers with English as their second language. If we consider foreign-accented speech as an interpolation of the native language (L1) and English (L2), using a model that can simultaneously address both languages would perform better at the acoustic level for accented speech. In this study, we explore how an end-to-end recurrent neural network (RNN) trained system with English and native languages (Spanish and Indian languages) could leverage data of native languages to improve performance for accented English speech. To this end, we examine pre-training with native languages, as well as multi-task learning (MTL) in which the main task is trained with native English and the secondary task is trained with Spanish or Indian Languages. We show that the proposed MTL model performs better than the pre-training approach and outperforms a baseline model trained simply with English data. We suggest a new setting for MTL in which the secondary task is trained with both English and the native language, using the same output set. This proposed scenario yields better performance with +11.95% and +17.55% character error rate gains over baseline for Hispanic and Indian accents, respectively.Comment: Accepted at Interspeech 201

SME Growth and Survival in Vietnam: Did Direct Government Support Matter?

In this paper we provide evidence on the survival and growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam relying on three partly overlapping enterprise surveys sampled during the period 1990-2002. Our empirical results indicate that classical determinants of performance including firm age, firm size, location, ownership, degree of capital intensive production and the type of activity are also important in Vietnam. In addition to the traditional indicators we analyze the effect of government support. Government credit assistance during start-up contributed significantly to the growth of Vietnamese SMEs in the late 1990s, but the importance of this kind of support may be diminishing as new firms do not seem to benefit from this form of support. In contrast, the importance of legal advice appears to be increasing.SME dynamics; government policy; Vietnam

A new approach for efficient simulation of Coulomb interactions in ionic fluids

We propose a simplified version of local molecular field (LMF) theory to treat Coulomb interactions in simulations of ionic fluids. LMF theory relies on splitting the Coulomb potential into a short-ranged part that combines with other short-ranged core interactions and is simulated explicitly. The averaged effects of the remaining long-ranged part are taken into account through a self-consistently determined effective external field. The theory contains an adjustable length parameter sigma that specifies the cut-off distance for the short-ranged interaction. This can be chosen to minimize the errors resulting from the mean-field treatment of the complementary long-ranged part. Here we suggest that in many cases an accurate approximation to the effective field can be obtained directly from the equilibrium charge density given by the Debye theory of screening, thus eliminating the need for a self-consistent treatment. In the limit sigma -> 0, this assumption reduces to the classical Debye approximation. We examine the numerical performance of this approximation for a simple model of a symmetric ionic mixture. Our results for thermodynamic and structural properties of uniform ionic mixtures agree well with similar results of Ewald simulations of the full ionic system. In addition we have used the simplified theory in a grand-canonical simulation of a nonuniform ionic mixture where an ion has been fixed at the origin. Simulations using short-ranged truncations of the Coulomb interactions alone do not satisfy the exact condition of complete screening of the fixed ion, but this condition is recovered when the effective field is taken into account. We argue that this simplified approach can also be used in the simulations of more complex nonuniform systems.Comment: To be published in Journal of Chemical Physic