On US politics and IMF Lending

The political factors, which shape IMF lending to LDCs, have attracted much attention. The same goes for the role and influence of the US. However, formal modelling is scant. In this paper, we assume that the US is principal within the IMF and seeks to maximize its impact on the policy stance of debtor countries. We derive the optimal loan allocation mechanism, and test the hypothesis that the probability of an IMF loan is increasing in the amount of political concessions countries make. A political concession is defined as the distance between a country’s bliss point and its actual policy stance measured relative to the US. We propose a bliss-point proxy and test our hypothesis in a sample of 68 countries during the period 1986-94. There is support for our hypothesis in the data. Finally, we show that omitting bliss points may lead to endogeneity bias in empirical work.IMF lending; political factors

Pseudorapidity Distribution of Charged Particles in PbarP Collisions at root(s)= 630GeV

Using a silicon vertex detector, we measure the charged particle pseudorapidity distribution over the range 1.5 to 5.5 using data collected from PbarP collisions at root s = 630 GeV. With a data sample of 3 million events, we deduce a result with an overall normalization uncertainty of 5%, and typical bin to bin errors of a few percent. We compare our result to the measurement of UA5, and the distribution generated by the Lund Monte Carlo with default settings. This is only the second measurement at this level of precision, and only the second measurement for pseudorapidity greater than 3.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, LaTeX format. For ps file see http://hep1.physics.wayne.edu/harr/harr.html Submitted to Physics Letters

Predictability associated with extratropical transition of tropical cyclones as defined by operational ensemble prediction systems

The poleward movement of a decaying tropical cyclone often results in a rapidly-moving, explosively-deepening midlatitude cyclone. The re-intensification of the remnant tropical cyclone as an extratropical cyclone depends on the phasing between the decaying tropical cyclone and a midlatitude environment that is favorable for midlatitude cyclogenesis (Klein et al. 2001). Because of the typical rapid translation speed (Jones et al. 2003) of the decaying tropical cyclone, accurate extended-range prediction of the phasing between the remnant tropical circulation and the midlatitude environment into which it is moving is critical.This research has been supported by the Office of Naval Research, Marine Meteorology