Budget Referendums and Government Spending: Evidence from Swiss

New government spending must be approved by a referendum of citizens in many Swiss cantons. This decisionmaking procedure seems like a simple way to address citizen-legislator agency problems, but little systematic evidence is available concerning its effect on spending outcomes. We estimate spending regressions for Swiss cantons using panel data from 1986 to 1997. After controlling for demographics and other determinants of spending, mandatory referendums on new spending are found to reduce the size of the budget by 17% for the median canton.Budget referendums, initiatives, government spending

Hikami's observations on unified WRT invariants and false theta functions

The object of this article is a family of $q$-series originating from Habiro's work on the Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev invariants. The $q$-series usually make sense only when $q$ is a root of unity, but for some instances, it also determines a holomorphic function on the open unit disc. Such an example is Habiro's unified WRT invariant $H(q)$ for the Poincar\'{e} homology sphere. In 2007, Hikami observed its discontinuity at roots of unity. More precisely, the value of $H(\zeta)$ at a root of unity is $1/2$ times the limit value of $H(q)$ as $q$ tends towards $\zeta$ radially within the unit disc. In this article, we explain the appearance of the $1/2$-factor and generalize Hikami's observations by using Bailey's lemma and the theory of false theta functions.Comment: 29 page

Control of particle charge by atmospheric pressure plasma jet (APPJ): A review

Atmospheric pressure plasma jets (APPJs) have more advantages regarding flexibility of operation than low pressure plasmas. Because the ions and/or electrons in the APPJ can be arbitrarily extracted to a gas-phase space by changing the DC bias voltage and efficiently deposited onto particle surfaces in an external electric field, this operating technique can be applied towards controlling particle charge. Several methods to control the particle charge using an APPJ system have already been reported. This article summarizes the specifications and operations of these systems, their mechanisms of charge transfer, and methods for particle charging, based on previously reported work. The methods are categorized into three groups, i.e., direct charging of particles, direct charging of a powder bed, and indirect charging of particles, and the corresponding experimental setups, procedures, results, and discussions are presented