Inefficiencies in Public Electricity Provision and Impacts on Firms in Karachi’s Manufacturing Sector

The private costs of electricity supply failures are substantial and inimical to industrial productivity. Using results from a small sample survey of manufacturing firms in Karachi, the study documented the causes, extent and incidence of the failures, identified and classified the firms’ private responses, and estimated the capital share of internally produced power and the associated costs. The results are reported here to engender discussion for developing a policy model of infrastructure provision suited to a developing country like Pakistan. The most encouraging options are those that allow for cooperative provision amongst firms with concurrent reforms in the regulatory and institutional environments. An optimal policy will allow inter-firm trading of electricity making the power market competitive. Those firms that already have extensive private generating capacity due to weak public supply will realise scale economies by selling electric power to lower the costs of private provision. Competition in electricity supply implies that industrial users will find attractive substitutes in the private sector. This will lead to a reduction in the demand on public service, already limited in quantity and quality in key urban-industrial locations like Karachi.

MSSM A-funnel and the Galactic Center Excess: Prospects for the LHC and Direct Detection Experiments

The pseudoscalar resonance or "A-funnel" in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model~(MSSM) is a widely studied framework for explaining dark matter that can yield interesting indirect detection and collider signals. The well-known Galactic Center excess (GCE) at GeV energies in the gamma ray spectrum, consistent with annihilation of a $\lesssim 40$ GeV dark matter particle, has more recently been shown to be compatible with significantly heavier masses following reanalysis of the background. In this paper, we explore the LHC and direct detection implications of interpreting the GCE in this extended mass window within the MSSM A-funnel framework. We find that compatibility with relic density, signal strength, collider constraints, and Higgs data can be simultaneously achieved with appropriate parameter choices. The compatible regions give very sharp predictions of 200-600 GeV CP-odd/even Higgs bosons at low tan$\beta$ at the LHC and spin-independent cross sections $\approx 10^{-11}$ pb at direct detection experiments. Regardless of consistency with the GCE, this study serves as a useful template of the strong correlations between indirect, direct, and LHC signatures of the MSSM A-funnel region.Comment: 32 pages and 9 figure

COVID-19 Crisis: India's Macroeconomic Policy Response and Future Challenges

The Indian economy was ranked as the 5th largest economy in 2019 (Myers, 2020). The country overtook France and Germany to secure the ranks of the top five largest economies of the world. On an optimistic note, it has been growing steadily at a growth rate above 5 percent in the 2009-2019 time period. However, the world ranking is expected to change owing to the external shocks imposed by the Novel Coronavirus to all economies of the world. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are known to cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). A novel coronavirus (CoV) is a new strain of coronavirus that has not been previously identified in humans (WHO, 2020). The real impact of this disease has been studied by various scientists after it was declared as a pandemic in January 2020 by World Health Organization. Being a Fast-spreading infectious disease, COVID-19 has taken a serious toll on human health with countries reporting an alarming number of positive cases and consequent deaths within a short period of time. Ruling Governments of all the affected countries face a serious challenge of saving lives and the economy side by side. As the majority of the affected countries imposed lockdown and work-from-home options (except the essential services and industries), the economic activities. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.431825

The Sorrows of the Dead

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Indirect Probes of the MSSM after the Higgs Discovery

We study the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) with minimal flavor violation (MFV), imposing constraints from flavor physics observables and MSSM Higgs searches, in light of the recent discovery of a 125 GeV Higgs boson by ATLAS and CMS. We analyze the electroweak vacuum stability conditions to further restrict the MSSM parameter space. In addition, a connection to ultraviolet physics is shown via an implementation of renormalization group running, which determines the TeV-scale spectrum from a small set of minimal supergravity parameters. Finally, we investigate the impact from dark matter direct detection searches. Our work highlights the complementarity of collider, flavor and dark matter probes in exploring the MSSM, and shows that even in a MFV framework, flavor observables constrain the MSSM parameter space well beyond the current reach of direct SUSY particle searches.Comment: 28 pages, 15 figures; v2, updated with new LHCb and direct A->tau tau results from HCP 2012, references adde