An Analysis of Repayment Among Clients of the Microfinance Institution Esperanza International, Dominican Republic

This research considers default among borrowers of Esperanza International, a microfinance institution in the Dominican Republic. Though Esperanza holds high repayment rates, it is of value to examine the 3 to 5 percent of clients that have not had success with the program. If success is defined as repayment and can be correlated with socioâ€economic characteristics, it may point towards the development of remedial programs and/or interventions. In coordination with organizational interests, this study examines 15,104 loans divided amongst 8,991 borrowers between April 2005 and October 2007. Default for each loan (defined as the failure to repay any quota for 120 days) is considered against gender, marital status, number of dependents, level of education, age, size of loan, type of microenterprise, and regional office. Results of a first linear regression indicate that regional office is most important among included variables. This is followed by education, gender, and marital status †with women, those with less education, and those classified as cohabitating defaulting less often. A second linear regression indicates that an alternate categorical division of microenterprise does not improve the variable’s significance. Two final regressions consider default separately among borrowers that were and were not identified as Dominicanâ€Haitian. These results showed that Dominicanâ€Haitians defaulted least often when widowed or married, and defaulted most often at the Santo Domingo office. Overall these results call for further investigation, particularly into dissimilarities among Esperanza’s various branches.Financial Economics,

From particle segregation to the granular clock

Recently several authors studied the segregation of particles for a system composed of mono-dispersed inelastic spheres contained in a box divided by a wall in the middle. The system exhibited a symmetry breaking leading to an overpopulation of particles in one side of the box. Here we study the segregation of a mixture of particles composed of inelastic hard spheres and fluidized by a vibrating wall. Our numerical simulations show a rich phenomenology: horizontal segregation and periodic behavior. We also propose an empirical system of ODEs representing the proportion of each type of particles and the segregation flux of particles. These equations reproduce the major features observed by the simulations.Comment: 10 page

A 3D Printed Toolbox for Opto-Mechanical Components

Nowadays is very common to find headlines in the media where it is stated that 3D printing is a technology called to change our lives in the near future. For many authors, we are living in times of a third industrial revolution. Howerver, we are currently in a stage of development where the use of 3D printing is advantageous over other manufacturing technologies only in rare scenarios. Fortunately, scientific research is one of them. Here we present the development of a set of opto-mechanical components that can be built easily using a 3D printer based on Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) and parts that can be found on any hardware store. The components of the set presented here are highly customizable, low-cost, require a short time to be fabricated and offer a performance that compares favorably with respect to low-end commercial alternatives.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

Vacuum stability conditions of the economical 3-3-1 model from copositivity

By applying copositivity criterion to the scalar potential of the economical $3-3-1$ model, we derive necessary and sufficient bounded-from-below conditions at tree level. Although these are a large number of intricate inequalities for the dimensionless parameters of the scalar potential, we present general enlightening relations in this work. Additionally, we use constraints coming from the minimization of the scalar potential by means of the orbit space method, the positivity of the squared masses of the extra scalars, the Higgs boson mass, the $Z'$ gauge boson mass and its mixing angle with the SM $Z$ boson in order to further restrict the parameter space of this model.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures, added text and references. Matches published versio

Comment on ``Scaling Laws for a System with Long-Range Interactions within Tsallis Statistics''

In their recent Letter [Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 4233 (1999)], Salazar and Toral (ST) study numerically a finite Ising chain with non-integrable interactions decaying like 1/r^(d+sigma) where -d <= sigma <= 0 (like ST, we discuss general dimensionality d). In particular, they explore a presumed connection between non-integrable interactions and Tsallis's non-extensive statistics. We point out that (i) non-integrable interactions provide no more motivation for Tsallis statistics than do integrable interactions, i.e., Gibbs statistics remain meaningful for the non-integrable case, and in fact provide a {\em complete and exact treatment}; and (ii) there are undesirable features of the method ST use to regulate the non-integrable interactions.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

A bottom-up approach to the strong CP problem

The strong CP problem is one of many puzzles in the theoretical description of elementary particle physics that still lacks an explanation. While top-down solutions to that problem usually comprise new symmetries or fields or both, we want to present a rather bottom-up perspective. The main problem seems to be how to achieve small CP violation in the strong interactions despite large CP violation in weak interactions. Observation of CP violation is exclusively through the Higgs--Yukawa interactions. In this paper, we show that with minimal assumptions on the structure of mass (Yukawa) matrices they do not contribute to the strong CP problem and thus we can provide a pathway to a solution of the strong CP problem within the structures of the Standard Model and no extension at the electroweak scale is needed. However, to address the flavor puzzle, models based on minimal SU(3) flavor groups leading to the proposed flavor matrices are favored. Though we refrain from an explicit a UV completion of the Standard Model, we provide a simple requirement those models should have to intrinsically not show a strong CP problem.Comment: 12 pages; v2: extended discussion, title changed to be more genera