What the Black Lives Matter Movement Demands of Ethnic Studies Scholars

“Come in. Sit down. Close your eyes. Be silent and listen.” Melody engulfed the room. Our bodies unwittingly swayed softly to rhythms that conjured Ancestral memories. The bald, brown-skinned, goateed, dashiki-wearing man in front of the room exuded both warmth and strength. As a fourteen year-old ninth grader, the constancy of my giggle was interrupted by the sanctity of the space. Squeaks of the crotchety wooden desks that formed a large circle joined the music that hummed from the old record player at the front of the room. Minutes felt like days. Sound transported us through time and space and as the song came to an end, Mr. Navies instructed us, in a voice that prolonged the Spirit of what we had just experienced, “Now, write down your thoughts.” Silently, we scribbled down the ideas, poems, and stories that danced out of our Souls. We were greeted this way every single morning in African American History, Black Gold English, Black Male-Female Relationships, and the dozens of classes that comprised the Black Studies Department curriculum at Berkeley High School. At the close of each week, we would share our writings with the class, inspired by “classical Black musicians” from Charlie Parker, to Thelonius Monk, to Billie Holliday. Dassine, LaRae, Trinice, and Tomorrow would share poems. Ameer, always sat directly to my left and would break up the passionate tear-eliciting prose shared by others, with stories and jokes so hilarious that Mr. Navies would sometimes have to turn his back and hurriedly race across the room to shield his laughter from the class

US fiscal indicators, inflation and output

In this paper we explore the information content of a large set of fiscal indicators for US real output growth and inflation. We provide evidence that fluctuations in certain fiscal variables contain valuable information to predict fluctuations in output and prices. The distinction between federal and state-local fiscal indicators yields useful insights and helps define a new set of stylized facts for US macroeconomic conditions. First, we find that variations in state-local indirect taxes as well as state government surplus or deficit help predict output growth. Next, the federal counterparts of these indicators contain valuable information for inflation. Finally, state-local expenditures help predict US inflation. A set of formal and informal stability tests confirm that these relationships are stable. The fiscal indicators in questions are also among the ones that yield the best in-sample and out-of-sample performances

Fiscal policy and lending relationships

This paper studies how fiscal policy affects credit market conditions. First, it conducts a FAVAR analysis showing that the credit spread responds negatively to an expansionary government spending shock, while consumption, investment, and lending increase. Second, it illustrates that these results are not mimicked by a DSGE model where the credit spread is endogenized via the inclusion of a banking sector exploiting lending relationships. Third, it demonstrates that introducing deep habits in private and government consumption makes the model able to replicate empirics. Sensitivity checks and extensions show that core results hold for a number of model calibrations and specifications. The presence of banks exploiting lending relationships generates a financial accelerator effect in the transmission of fiscal shocks

The calculation of the distance to a nearby defective matrix

In this paper a new fast algorithm for the computation of the distance of a matrix to a nearby defective matrix is presented. The problem is formulated following Alam & Bora (Linear Algebra Appl., 396 (2005), pp.~273--301) and reduces to finding when a parameter-dependent matrix is singular subject to a constraint. The solution is achieved by an extension of the Implicit Determinant Method introduced by Spence & Poulton (J. Comput. Phys., 204 (2005), pp.~65--81). Numerical results for several examples illustrate the performance of the algorithm.Comment: 12 page

ParaExp using Leapfrog as Integrator for High-Frequency Electromagnetic Simulations

Recently, ParaExp was proposed for the time integration of linear hyperbolic problems. It splits the time interval of interest into sub-intervals and computes the solution on each sub-interval in parallel. The overall solution is decomposed into a particular solution defined on each sub-interval with zero initial conditions and a homogeneous solution propagated by the matrix exponential applied to the initial conditions. The efficiency of the method depends on fast approximations of this matrix exponential based on recent results from numerical linear algebra. This paper deals with the application of ParaExp in combination with Leapfrog to electromagnetic wave problems in time-domain. Numerical tests are carried out for a simple toy problem and a realistic spiral inductor model discretized by the Finite Integration Technique.Comment: Corrected typos. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1607.0036