Strategic trade policy : how new? how sensible?

This paper reviews some recent developments in the theory of trade policy that have to do with imperfect competition, strategic interactions as a result of oligopoly, and economies of scale. All these developments have been described as the"new international economics."In the view of some they represent major breakthroughs. One purpose of this paper is to examine how new some of this is and how it relates to the orthodox theory. The paper will focus on one major aspect of these developments, namely"Brander-Spencer profit sharing"and its policy implications. The conclusion is that it relates closely to the existing framework of the orthodox theory of trade policy.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Trade Policy,General Technology

Global Imbalances and the Paradox of Thrift

Global imbalances refer to current account surpluses and deficits. This is a form of international intertemporal trade, and the neoclassical approach suggests that there are gains from trade, and hence there may be no problem created by global imbalances. This paper presents qualifications to this argument. A crucial concept is the "return journey", namely the need for borrowers to pay interest (or dividends) and eventually to be able to repay. Thus savings must lead to investment, which provides the future resources to enable the return journey. If borrowing is used to finance current consumption, wars, or unwise ("unfruitful") investment, such as excessive housing construction, the result will be a crisis. In this way the high net savings of some countries actually led to the recent crisis. This is a new version of Keynes’ “paradox of thrift” The central issue on which this paper focuses is the failure of high net savings by the “savings glut” countries to lead to fruitful investment in other countries, both in the United States and in developing countries. Hence a crisis was caused by the lack of provision for the return journey.Global imbalances, paradox of thrift, financial crisis, instability of capital flows, world savings glut, quantitative easing

Criticality in Formal Languages and Statistical Physics

We show that the mutual information between two symbols, as a function of the number of symbols between the two, decays exponentially in any probabilistic regular grammar, but can decay like a power law for a context-free grammar. This result about formal languages is closely related to a well-known result in classical statistical mechanics that there are no phase transitions in dimensions fewer than two. It is also related to the emergence of power-law correlations in turbulence and cosmological inflation through recursive generative processes. We elucidate these physics connections and comment on potential applications of our results to machine learning tasks like training artificial recurrent neural networks. Along the way, we introduce a useful quantity which we dub the rational mutual information and discuss generalizations of our claims involving more complicated Bayesian networks.Comment: Replaced to match final published version. Discussion improved, references adde

Ready for ACA? How Community Health Centers Are Preparing for Health Care Reform

Community health centers (CHCs) are a cornerstone of the health care safety net. They are the primary source of care for many low-income populations, including both those newly insured under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and those who were left out and will remain uninsured. The ACA provides challenges and opportunities for CHCs, which will require significant changes in infrastructure and care delivery approaches to meet those challenges. This policy brief assesses the progress made by CHCs in Los Angeles County in meeting a number of key indicators of ACA readiness in early 2014. The authors find that 39 percent of CHCs are well prepared, 23 percent have made some progress, and the rest are at the initial phases of preparation and/or lack adequate resources to meet the requirements. CHCs in the latter group will require help to embark on strategic improvements in infrastructure and care deliver

Identification of γ-ray emission from 3C 345 and NRAO 512

For more than 15 years, since the days of the Energetic Gamma-Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET) on board the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO; 1991−2000), it has remained an open question why the prominent blazar 3C 345 was not reliably detected at γ-ray energies ≥ 20 MeV. Recently a bright γ-ray source (0FGL J1641.4+3939/1FGL J1642.5+3947), potentially associated with 3C 345, was detected by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on Fermi. Multiwavelength observations from radio bands to X-rays (mainly GASP-WEBT and Swift) of possible counterparts (3C 345, NRAO 512, B3 1640 + 396) were combined with 20 months of Fermi-LAT monitoring data (August 2008 − April 2010) to associate and identify the dominating γ-ray emitting counterpart of 1FGL J1642.5+3947. The source 3C 345 is identified as the main contributor for this γ-ray emitting region. However, after November 2009 (15 months), a significant excess of photons from the nearby quasar NRAO 512 started to contribute and thereafter was detected with increasing γ-ray activity, possibly adding flux to 1FGL J1642.5+3947. For the same time period and during the summer of 2010, an increase of radio, optical and X-ray activity of NRAO 512 was observed. No γ-ray emission from B3   1640 + 396 was detected

Electronic transport in graphene with particle-hole-asymmetric disorder

We study the conductivity of graphene with a smooth but particle-hole-asymmetric disorder potential. Using perturbation theory for the weak-disorder regime and numerical calculations we investigate how the particle-hole asymmetry shifts the position of the minimal conductivity away from the Dirac point $\varepsilon = 0$. We find that the conductivity minimum is shifted in opposite directions for weak and strong disorder. For large disorder strengths the conductivity minimum appears close to the doping level for which electron and hole doped regions ("puddles") are equal in size