An analysis of EU and US productivity developments (a total economy and industry level perspective)

The 1990s witnessed some important shifts in the underlying growth performances of the EU and US economies, with a significant gap opening up in terms of GDP, and more importantly, GDP per capita, growth rates. From a situation over the period 1980-1995 when EU and US living standards were growing at roughly an equivalent rate, the second half of the 1990s saw the emergence of a significant growth gap in favour of the US. These EU-US differences are mirrored at the EU Member State level, with simple measures of dispersion indicating that individual country divergences relative to the average EU performance have grown by close to 50 per cent in the 1990s compared with the 1980s. These extra- and intra-EU divergences in economic fortunes have been the subject of intense research efforts in recent years, with policy makers keen to decipher the reasons for their own respective outturns and to further refine the “magic formula†for boosting their long run growth performances. The present study will contribute to this ongoing debate regarding the sources of growth in general, with specific attention being devoted to productivity determinants given their importance in shaping medium to long run changes in living standards.GDP, United States, US, productivity, labour productivity, industry, industry level analysis, Denis, McMorrow, R�ger

The Quasi-1D S=1/2 Antiferromagnet Cs2CuCl4 in a Magnetic Field

Magnetic excitations of the quasi-1D S=1/2 Heisenberg antiferromagnet (HAF) Cs2CuCl4 have been measured as a function of magnetic field using neutron scattering. For T<0.62 K and B=0 T the weak inter-chain coupling produces 3D incommensurate ordering. Fields greater than Bc =1.66 T, but less than the field (~8 T) required to fully align the spins, are observed to decouple the chains, and the system enters a disordered intermediate-field phase (IFP). The IFP excitations are in agreement with the predictions of Muller et al. for the 1D S=1/2 HAF, and Talstra and Haldane for the related 1/r^2 chain (the Haldane-Shastry model). This behaviour is inconsistent with linear spin-wave theory.Comment: 10 pages, 4 encapsulated postscript figures, LaTeX, to be published in PRL, e-mail comments to [email protected]

Temperature Evolution of the Quantum Gap in CsNiCl3

Neutron scattering measurements on the one-dimensional gapped S=1 antiferromagnet, CsNiCl3, have shown that the excitation corresponding to the Haldane mass gap Delta at low temperatures persists as a resonant feature to high temperatures. We find that the strong upward renormalisation of the gap excitation, by a factor of three between 5 and 70K, is more than enough to overcome its decreasing lifetime. We find that the gap lifetime is substantially shorter than that predicted by the scaling theory of Damle and Sachdev in its low temperature range of validity. The upward gap renormalisation agrees with the non-linear sigma model at low temperatures and even up to T of order 2Delta provided an upper mass cutoff is included.Comment: Latex, 3 figures, accepted by Pysical Review

Toward an Ecclesiastical Professional Ethic: Lessons from the Legal Profession

As the Catholic Church struggles with the aftermath of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, some have explored the possibility of an ecclesiastical code of professional conduct. Lawyers\u27 long and storied history with professional codes offers a cautionary tale to those exploring an ecclesiastical code of ethics. As priests to our secular religion of law, lawyers are called forth and mandated by a competent authority to function in a defined role, the specifics of which are reflected, in part, in lawyer codes. As lawyers moved from Canons of Ethics (1908) to a Code of Professional Responsibility (1969) to Rules of Professional Conduct (1983, revised in 2002), the provisions grew more directive. They are designed to assist in the regulation of the profession, which results in provisions that are crafted to define baselines of conduct that justify punishment if the actor falls below that base. The natural tendency of codes is to move toward specificity, with a corresponding danger of losing sight of the fundamental values that drive the code. An ecclesiastical code will face similar pressures. In addition, lessons from the legal profession suggest other challenges and opportunities of an ecclesiastical code. First, who gets to craft the first draft, quite apart from the complex question of adoption, will reveal much about the goals and likely success of a code. Second, such a code must acknowledge and confront the inherent limitations of all rules: identifying the optimum level of discretion and understanding the role of fact-finding within a code. Third, drafters must understand - as they inevitably do - the necessity of ethical awareness as a precondition for the effectiveness of any code. Fourth, as a code articulates the contours of the role-differentiated behavior of the professional, it must be sufficiently flexible to reflect the challenges of role-differentiated behavior. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a code of conduct by its nature focuses on the function of the individual professional and can be an awkward, and often ineffective, vehicle for addressing the need for changes in the institutional structures within which the professional functions. Against these challenges sits a huge and incredibly important benefit - education

Lawyers and the New Institutionalism

Drawing on the sociological theory of new institutionalism, this essay explores the ethical behavior and decision-making of lawyers by reference to the organizational context in which lawyers work. As the new institutionalism predicts, lawyers develop powerful assimilated informal norms, practices, habits, and customs that sometimes complement and other times supplant formal substantive law on professional conduct. Structural choices in practice settings influence the creation of these informal norms. The challenge for the legal profession, and particularly academics who teach legal ethics, is how to prepare law students and lawyers better to recognize and analyze the norms in their practice setting and to encourage management choices within practice settings that more likely provide norms that enhance rather than degrade ethical decision-making

Zacharias’s Prophecy: The Federalization of Legal Ethics Through Legislative, Court, and Agency Regulation

In his 1994 seminal article on Federalizing Legal Ethics, Prof. Fred Zacharias examined the need for a national and uniform code of ethics for attorneys. Prof. Zacharias was correct that there has been increasing pressure to federalize legal ethics, but that process is occurring not through articulation of national norms but rather through decentralized contextualization of attorney conduct norms. Federal agencies that direct securities practice, immigration, tax, patent, labor and many other areas of federal practice are increasingly supplementing state regulations to specifically regulate the attorneys who appear before their agencies. Targeted substantive federal law and treaty obligations also increasingly apply to attorneys. The effect is to slowly move the center of gravity of attorney regulation toward a complex web of federal regulation in the many areas that involve federal interests. This process offers some important benefits of contextualization and carries some risk, including conflicts between federal and state norms. Our robust experience with federalism provides a mechanism to work through these tensions and differences

Zacharias\u27s Prophecy: The Federalization of Legal Ethics Through Legislative, Court, and Agency Regulation

This Article will carry on Professor Zacharias’s profound insights and prophecies by examining the trends in direct regulation of attorneys through federal law, with a particular focus on expanding agency regulation. We will also touch on international trends that draw on federal treaty obligations to implement international norms of attorney conduct

Experimental Proof of a Magnetic Coulomb Phase

Spin ice materials are magnetic substances in which the spin directions map onto hydrogen positions in water ice. Recently this analogy has been elevated to an electromagnetic equivalence, indicating that the spin ice state is a Coulomb phase, with magnetic monopole excitations analogous to ice's mobile ionic defects. No Coulomb phase has yet been proved in a real magnetic material, as the key experimental signature is difficult to resolve in most systems. Here we measure the scattering of polarised neutrons from the prototypical spin ice Ho2Ti2O7. This enables us to separate different contributions to the magnetic correlations to clearly demonstrate the existence of an almost perfect Coulomb phase in this material. The temperature dependence of the scattering is consistent with the existence of deconfined magnetic monopoles connected by Dirac strings of divergent length.Comment: 18 pages, 4 fig