STRENGTHENING THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION’S BUDGETARY AND ECONOMIC SURVEILLANCE CAPACITY SINCE GREECE AND THE EURO DEBT CRISIS: A STUDY OF FIVE DIRECTORATES-GENERAL

Has the executive role of the European Commission changed since the euro debt crisis? Intergovernmentalists point to the increased role of the member states and the Council at the expense of the Commission and other supranational institutions. This paper examines how the Commission has responded to the expansion of fiscal and economic rules such as the regulations that strengthen the EU’s statistical competence and the Six-Pack and Two-Pack. Based on interviews conducted with key staff, we find that these rules have created significant coordination, information, and analytical demands on the Commission. The latter has enhanced its horizontal and vertical coordination efforts, prioritized staff for the Directorate-Generals conducting surveillance activities, added DGs to these efforts, and reorganized their organizational structures to promote a deeper understanding of the member states’ fiscal and economic policies. Using a principal-agent approach this paper explains how the Commission has increased its role in European integration process

Systematic Power Counting in Cutoff Effective Field Theories for Nucleon-Nucleon Interactions and the Equivalence With PDS

An analytic expression for the ${}^1S_0$ phase shifts in nucleon-nucleon scattering is derived in the context of the Schr\"odinger equation in configuration space with a short distance cutoff and with a consistent power counting scheme including pionic effects. The scheme treats the pion mass and the inverse scattering length over the intrinsic short distance scale as small parameters. Working at next-to-leading order in this scheme, we show that the expression obtained is identical to one obtained using the recently introduced PDS approach which is based on dimensional regularization with a novel subtraction scheme. This strongly supports the conjecture that the schemes are equivalent provided one works to the same order in the power counting.Comment: 6 pages; replaced version has corrected typos (We thank Mike Birse for pointing them out to u

Earthquake slip surfaces identified by biomarker thermal maturity within the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake fault zone.

Extreme slip at shallow depths on subduction zone faults is a primary contributor to tsunami generation by earthquakes. Improving earthquake and tsunami risk assessment requires understanding the material and structural conditions that favor earthquake propagation to the trench. We use new biomarker thermal maturity indicators to identify seismic faults in drill core recovered from the Japan Trench subduction zone, which hosted 50 m of shallow slip during the Mw9.1 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake. Our results show that multiple faults have hosted earthquakes with displacement ≥ 10 m, and each could have hosted many great earthquakes, illustrating an extensive history of great earthquake seismicity that caused large shallow slip. We find that lithologic contrasts in frictional properties do not necessarily determine the likelihood of large shallow slip or seismic hazard

Statistical Agencies and Responses to Financial Crises: Eurostat, Bad Banks, and the ESM

We demonstrate the important role that the European Statistical Agency - Eurostat - plays in shaping tools for responding to banking crises. From 2009, Eurostat used its position as the interpreter of member state budget statistical rules to implement increasingly stringent rules for how financial crisis responses would affect public budgets. Rather than mere technical details, these rules affected crisis responses. Elected politicians, and especially those under bailout programs, have strong incentives to minimise the direct budgetary effects of aiding failing financial institutions. By establishing and enforcing new rules about which crisis reponses directly hit member state budgets and which did not, Eurostat created incentives to choose certain policies. We explore this process by examining the creation of bad banks and the European Stability Mechanism. Our paper makes an original contribution to both the study of the European banking union and the general role that statistical agencies can play in shaping crisis responses

SPIFI: a Direct-Detection Imaging Spectrometer for Submillimeter Wavelengths

The South Pole Imaging Fabry-Perot Interferometer (SPIFI) is the first instrument of its kind -a direct-detection imaging spectrometer for astronomy in the submillimeter band. SPIFI ’s focal plane is a square array of 25 silicon bolometers cooled to 60 mK; the spectrometer consists of two cryogenic scanning Fabry-Perot interferometers in series with a 60-mK bandpass filter. The instrument operates in the short submillimeter windows (350 and 450 μm) available from the ground, with spectral resolving power selectable between 500 and 10,000. At present, SPIFI’s sensitivity is within a factor of 1.5-3 of the photon background limit, comparable with the best heterodyne spectrometers. The instrument ’s large bandwidth and mapping capability provide substantial advantages for specific astrophysical projects, including deep extragalactic observations. We present the motivation for and design of SPIFI and its operational characteristics on the telescope