The Eighteenth Century

This chapter has three sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry. Section 1 is by Eliza O’Brien; section 2 is by Elles Smallegoor and Sandro Jung; section 3 is by David E. Shuttleton

Transistorized Marx bank pulse circuit provides voltage multiplication with nanosecond rise-time

Base-triggered avalanche transistor circuit used in a Marx bank pulser configuration provides voltage multiplication with nanosecond rise-time. The avalanche-mode transistors replace conventional spark gaps in the Marx bank. The delay time from an input signal to the output signal to the output is typically 6 nanoseconds

Well-Ordered Philosophy? Reflections on Kitcher's Proposal for a Renewal of Philosophy.

In his recent article Philosophy Inside Out, Philip Kitcher presents a metaphilosophical outlook that aims at nothing less than a renewal of philosophy. His idea is to draw philosophers’ attention away from “timeless questions” in the so-called “core areas” of philosophy. Instead, philosophers should address questions that matter to human lives. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to reconstruct Kitcher’s view of how philosophy should be renewed; second, to point out some difficulties relating to his position. These difficulties concern the integration of his naturalism into the pragmatic vision of philosophy, the role of putative philosophical experts, and the ideal status of the program of well-ordered inquiry

A Note on Free Trade Agreement and Wage Bargaining Structure

Mezzeti and Dinopoulos (1991) show that a free trade agreement (trade liberalization) decreases wage rate. However, Naylor (1998) shows that trade liberalization increases wage rate. Both papers consider tariff as exogenously given. In this paper we show that these conflicting results can be nested into a model of international duopoly with a more general wage bargaining structure. Tariff is endogenously determined in our model. In addition, we also derive crucial implications of the wage bargaining structure on the sustainability of trade liberalizationwage bargaining structure, optimal tariff regime, free trade agreement

Organizational Structure and Product Market Competition

We analyze an interaction between a firm’s choice of organizational structure and competition in the product-market. Two organizational structures are considered, namely a centralized-organization, whereby formal authority is retained by a principal, and a decentralized-organization, whereby formal authority is delegated to an agent. We show that the choice of organizational structure hinges on a trade-off between operating-profit and managerial effort. The principal may prefer to choose an organizational structure that generates lower operating-profit to motivate the agent to work hard. The choice of organizational structure may also determine whether the rival is active in the market or forced to exit the market.Formal and Real Authority, Delegation Structure, Product Market Competition

On the Role of Local Content Requirement in Defusing the Threat of Quid-Pro-Quo FDI

We analyze local content requirement (LCR) and tariff in a two-country model of vertical market-structure with endogenous foreign direct investment (FDI). The foreign firm chooses whether to export or to undertake FDI. The host country anticipates the potential for FDI and selects tariff with or without LCR rate accordingly. Without LCR, the FDI imposes a threat on the host country and the threat exerts a tariff-liberalizing pressure. This FDI is often coined as quid-pro-quo FDI in the literature. In contrast, we show that with LCR the host government can defuse the threat of quid-pro-quo FDItariff, local content requirement, export, quid-pro-quo foreign direct investment