Trade and Synchronization in a Multi-Country Economy

Substantial evidence suggests that countries or regions with stronger trade linkages tend to have business cycles that are more synchronized. The standard international business cycle framework cannot replicate this nding. In this paper, we study a multi-country model of international trade with vertical trade linkages, imperfect competition, and variable markups. We embed it in a real business cycle framework by including aggregate technology shocks and allowing for a variable labor supply. A carefully calibrated version of the theoretical economy that ts the model to data on the bilateral trade volume between 210 distinct country-pairs explains between 20 and 41 percent of the relation between trade intensity and business cycle synchronization. We provide empirical evidence supporting the model's predictions for the association between trade costs and business cycle synchronization, and exchange rate volatility and business cycle synchronization.Trade Integration, Business Cycle Synchronization

The art of tropical travel, 1768-1830

Book synopsis: Georgian Geographies provides an innovative interdisciplinary examination of the geographical nature of culture and society in eighteenth-century Britain and the British world. The book's introduction identifies the key areas of study as the geographical constitution of empire, the Enlightenment and the public sphere. These themes are explored by examining the connections between space, place and landscape in the eighteenth century in relation to the emergent empire in the Caribbean and north-west America, and in Britain itself. The topics considered include landscape painting, London's art world, geography's book, mapping, the geography of erotic fiction, provincial science, and the production of domestic space in the early English novel. It will be an essential contribution to eighteenth-century studies for research and teaching staff, postgraduates and advanced undergraduate students in geography, history, literary studies, the history of art, postcolonial studies and the history of science

On the gradient estimates for evolution operators associated to Kolmogorov operators

We determine sufficient conditions for the occurrence of a pointwise gradient estimate for the evolution operators associated to nonautonomous second order parabolic operators with (possibly) unbounded coefficients. Moreover we exhibit a class of operators which satisfy our conditions

UNASUR: Developments in the Defense Area

The article summarizes the last developments in South America towards a common defense area, referring to the history and origins of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR).Fil: Gil, Luciana Victoria. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Electrical permittivity and resistivity time lapses of multiphase DNAPLs in a lab test

Dense Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids (DNAPLs) induce variation in electromagnetic characteristics of the ground e.g. electric permittivity and resistivity. The most used indirect methods in the mapping of these physical characteristics are electrical resistivity and ground penetrating radar. To better understand the effect of DNAPL release on electrical permittivity and resistivity in a water saturated medium, we carried out a controlled laboratory experiment where the host material was simulated by glass beads and the DNAPL by HFE-7100 (hydrofluoroether). The experiment measured the electric resistivity and permittivity of each fluid, the multi-phase fluid system, and the host material, along with time-lapse electrical resistivity and GPR measurements in a controlled cell. We found that the different phases of DNAPL within a saturated medium (free, dissolved and gaseous phase) affect the physical characteristics differently. The reflection pull-up behind contaminated sediments, which is normally detected by GPR, was mainly inferred from the HFE free phase. The dissolved phase causes small variations in electric permittivity not usually readily detected by GPR measurements. Both the dissolved and free HFE phases induce variation in resistivity. The study showed that GPR and electrical resistivity differ in sensitivity to the different HFE phases, and can be complementary in the characterization of DNAPL contaminated sites

Non autonomous parabolic problems with unbounded coefficients in unbounded domains

Given a class of nonautonomous elliptic operators \A(t) with unbounded coefficients, defined in \overline{I \times \Om} (where $I$ is a right-halfline or $I=\R$ and \Om\subset \Rd is possibly unbounded), we prove existence and uniqueness of the evolution operator associated to \A(t) in the space of bounded and continuous functions, under Dirichlet and first order, non tangential homogeneous boundary conditions. Some qualitative properties of the solutions, the compactness of the evolution operator and some uniform gradient estimates are then proved