Participatory democracy and urban governance in France: Are they still utopian views?

This paper aims at questionning the relevance of the current use of the notion of governance in urban economics. As a starting point, the lack of an appropriate background ( due to the kind of participating actors, the way they are organized and deal with common problems), will be supposed to shackle practical experiences which are in relation to urban governance. Consequently, these experiences could not be easily spreaded, contrary to the main theoerical belief. Our empirical field will concern the current government of French cities during the last two decades. Thus, contrary to the prevailing trend of the literature, the reasons why urban governement of French cities would not entail an increasing level of urban governance and participative democracy will be developed. In order to test our main assumption, terminological borrowed words in relation to governance, municipal and metropolitan institutionnal constraints, and finally weaknesses of citizens associations will be successively taken into account.

Do local public finances influence the economic growth of cities ? The case of the 324 cities of the Tarn Department (France)

This paper aims at questioning the link between local finances and the economic dynamism of cities. This issue is based on the frequently stressed cases (by the media) of uncontrolled expenses of cities, increased level of local taxes and negative effects on local economics. This situation has been experimented in the cities of Briançon, Angoulême, and even in the little village of Eyne (Eastern Pyrenees) which had the biggest level of debt per inhabitant of the whole Europe in the beginning of the nineties. Therefore, as a starting point, the lack of neutral link between urban management and local attractive power of cities will be assumed. The relevance of the following assumptions will be considered : * assumption n°1 : the choice of the financial way to manage a city would positively influence economic dynamism, provided it would express the agreement with a “budgetary orthodoxy convention”.* assumption n°2 : conversely, local public management, insofar as it is based (notably) on debts and refers to what could be called “keynesian convention” would negatively influence the attractive power of cities.Thus, everything else equal, the more a city would be granted with important saving resources, the more it could afford to finance it own investments (or increased investments with a given rate of self-financing), the less financial expenses would lessen the functioning resources of the following year, etc … Moreover, a healthy financial management would improve the probability of a city to attract households and firms : if debts and local taxes can be restricted to a law level (in respect to the national average level, to the one of close competing cities …), then this law yearly increase of local taxes would not seem to shackle the dynamics of locations within a given city. The empirical part of this paper deals with the test of the relevance of the previous assumptions. Our sample is composed with all the 324 cities of the French Department of Tarn. The specific features of this sample are : the important number of statistical observations, the fact that all the cities of a local level, between metropolitan areas and Regions, are considered, the diversity of environments (rural, urban, agriculture, industry, dynamic or depressed industrial sectors), high of low proximity with an European metropolitan area (Toulouse), The attractive power of Tarn cities will be estimated by the increase (or decrease) of population. The assumptions will be tested thanks to ordinary least square regressions, and factor analysis. The database includes budgetary variables (budgets of cities, resources, expenses, savings, fiscal wealth, debts, investments, …), fiscal variables (local taxes, income tax, …) and also distances from each city to Toulouse, expressed in kilometres and in time. The conclusions will be detailed in terms of local planning, by comparing the impact of distance to fiscal “fixed” expenses.

A few evidences about the current growth of French cities

Public intervention has never been neutral for the dynamics of French territories. Nevertheless, how could the fact that henceforward decisions are mostly taken at a global level be taken into account ? Facing the globalization of firms''''productive and spatial strategies, how could local actors'''' concerns really influence the future of their territories ? Can we contend that an irreversible stage of "counter-keynesian revolution" has been reached, as to local public policies ? The main idea which we be developed in this paper will try to challenge this commonly assumed impairment of the power of local public policies in the field of urban dynamics. Thus, the creation of strategic urban plans will be stressed as a major promoting and stimulating action in order to enhance the level of economic growth of cities. This assertion lies on the preliminary statement of the fresh outbreak of uncertainties which has been entailed by the globalization of economics. Thus, this paper will intend to show to which extent the existence of strategic urban plans and municipal policies may succeed in solving the uncertainties which could otherwise shackle urban growth and dynamism. The first section describes the data and presents the variables, the assumed effects of which will be tested. Section 2 deals with several regression diagnostics which will be checked in our ordinary least squares regressions. Section 3 questions the relevance of the assumptions and presents the results for the growth of 214 French cities from 1982 to 1996.

The cluster index of regularly varying sequences with applications to limit theory for functions of multivariate Markov chains

We introduce the cluster index of a multivariate regularly varying stationary sequence and characterize the index in terms of the spectral tail process. This index plays a major role in limit theory for partial sums of regularly varying sequences. We illustrate the use of the cluster index by characterizing infinite variance stable limit distributions and precise large deviation results for sums of multivariate functions acting on a stationary Markov chain under a drift condition

Precise large deviations for dependent regularly varying sequences

We study a precise large deviation principle for a stationary regularly varying sequence of random variables. This principle extends the classical results of A.V. Nagaev (1969) and S.V. Nagaev (1979) for iid regularly varying sequences. The proof uses an idea of Jakubowski (1993,1997) in the context of centra limit theorems with infinite variance stable limits. We illustrate the principle for \sv\ models, functions of a Markov chain satisfying a polynomial drift condition and solutions of linear and non-linear stochastic recurrence equations

Lattice instabilities in hexagonal NiSi: A NiAs prototype structure

We report a first-principles study of the hexagonal NiSi phase with the B81 strukturbericht designation. This structure, reported by Föll Philos. Mag. A 45, 31 1982, d’Heurle J. Appl. Phys. 55, 4208 1984, and Dai Appl. Phys. Lett. 75, 2214 1999, is actually only observed during annealing of Ni films on 111 silicon crystals. We discuss, in this paper, about its structural, energetic, vibrational, electronic, and elastic properties, computed by means of the density-functional and density-functional perturbative theory within the spinpolarized Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof functional. Two configurations with this crystallographic structure have been studied, noted h-NiSi and h-SiNi in the following. We show that theoretical and experimental lattice parameters are not compatible for both systems. A large discrepancy 8–10 % is evidenced, much larger than both experimental and simulation accuracies obtained for others Ni-Si systems. Moreover the vibrational spectra of h-NiSi and h-SiNi present both soft modes, indicating that in their ground states these systems are dynamically unstable. Using a band folding approach, we have analyzed modes for h-NiSi on a supercell, permitting us to identify eigenvectors associated to these instabilities. We have then relaxed the cell in accordance to these eigenvectors, and a final structure is thus proposed. To understand the mechanism at the origin of these negative frequencies in h-NiSi, electronic states around the Fermi level have been plotted, and we identify in the Fermi-surface potential nesting vectors, suggesting that an electron-phonon coupling mechanism could be at the origin of the instability. Whereas the ground state of “h-NiSi” seems not to be associated to the B81 system, we show that a stress in the basal plane could induce an increasein the c axis, restoring the agreement with experimental data

Tangent bundle formulation of a charged gas

We discuss the relativistic kinetic theory for a simple, collisionless, charged gas propagating on an arbitrary curved spacetime geometry. Our general relativistic treatment is formulated on the tangent bundle of the spacetime manifold and takes advantage of its rich geometric structure. In particular, we point out the existence of a natural metric on the tangent bundle and illustrate its role for the development of the relativistic kinetic theory. This metric, combined with the electromagnetic field of the spacetime, yields an appropriate symplectic form on the tangent bundle. The Liouville vector field arises as the Hamiltonian vector field of a natural Hamiltonian. The latter also defines natural energy surfaces, called mass shells, which turn out to be smooth Lorentzian submanifolds. A simple, collisionless, charged gas is described by a distribution function which is defined on the mass shell and satisfies the Liouville equation. Suitable fibre integrals of the distribution function define observable fields on the spacetime manifold, such as the current density and stress-energy tensor. Finally, the geometric setting of this work allows us to discuss the relationship between the symmetries of the electromagnetic field, those of the spacetime metric, and the symmetries of the distribution function. Taking advantage of these symmetries, we construct the most general solution of the Liouville equation an a Kerr-Newman black hole background.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, prepared for the proceedings of the Fifth Leopoldo Garc\'ia-Col\'in Mexican Meeting on Mathematical and Experimental Physics, Mexico, September 201

Infinite products of 2×22\times2 matrices and the Gibbs properties of Bernoulli convolutions

We consider the infinite sequences (A\_n)\_{n\in\NN} of $2\times2$ matrices with nonnegative entries, where the $A\_n$ are taken in a finite set of matrices. Given a vector V=\pmatrix{v\_1\cr v\_2} with $v\_1,v\_2>0$, we give a necessary and sufficient condition for $\displaystyle{A\_1... A\_nV\over|| A\_1... A\_nV||}$ to converge uniformly. In application we prove that the Bernoulli convolutions related to the numeration in Pisot quadratic bases are weak Gibbs