Some Economics of Act Water Resources: Determining Initial "Cap" Entitlements for the Act

The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) became a full participant in the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) Initiative in 1998. This opened the opportunity for the ACT to establish water trading arrangements with the other MDB member States. Provisions to facilitate this trade are currently being developed. In addition, the ACT is required to negotiate an initial “Cap” level with the other MDB members before water trading can begin. The Cap defines the amount of water resources for which each State has extractive rights, and is based on 1993/94 levels of water utilising development. This paper investigates alternative trading strategies that could be used to “build” Cap over time, and explores the implications for negotiation of the initial ACT Cap endowment.water resources, water markets, trading strategy, Australian Capital Territory, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Inventories, Fluctuations and Business Cycles. Working paper #4

The paper looks at the role of inventories in U.S. business cycles and fluctuations. It concentrates upon the goods producing sector and constructs a model that features both input and output inventories. A range of shocks are present in the model, including sales, technology and inventory cost shocks. It is found that the presence of inventories does not change the average business cycle characteristics in the U.S. very much. The model is also used to examine whether new techniques for inventory control might have been an important contributing factor to the decline in the volatility of US GDP growth. It is found that these would have had little impact upon the level of volatility.

Some Methods for Assessing the Need for Non-linear Models in Business Cycle Analysis and Forecasting

There is a long tradition in business cycle analysis of arguing that non-linear models are needed to explain the business cycle. In recent years many non-linear models have been fitted to data on GDP for many countries, but particularly for the U.S. In this paper we set our criteria to evaluate the success of non-linear models in explaining the cycle and then evaluate three recent models in the light of these criteria. We find that the models are capable of explaining the "shape" of expansions, something linear models cannot do, but do so at the cost of making expansions longer than they should be and in producing transition probabilities to recessions that are too low.business cyles, non-linear models

Phase Behavior of Short Range Square Well Model

Various Monte Carlo techniques are used to determine the complete phase diagrams of the square well model for the attractive ranges $\lambda = 1.15$ and $\lambda = 1.25$. The results for the latter case are in agreement with earlier Monte Carlo simulations for the fluid-fluid coexistence curve and yield new results for the liquidus-solidus lines. Our results for $\lambda = 1.15$ are new. We find that the fluid-fluid critical point is metastable for both cases, with the case $\lambda = 1.25$ being just below the threshold value for metastability. We compare our results with prior studies and with experimental results for the gamma-II crystallin.Comment: 8 figures, 1 tabl

Returns to overeducation and undereducation: evidence for the hospitality sector in Andalusia

The objetive of this piece of work is to estimate the returns to overeducation and infraeducation for those people who are working in the hospitality sector in Andalusia. Using a cross-section of workers from a representative survey carried out with European funds (project IFD97-0858), we compare educational attainment of workers and job-required education (reported by workers and managers) in order to obtain a general especification of the earnings function from allocation models of the labor market. These models contain the human capital specification and the job competition specification as special cases. The results show as an earnings especification that includes the possibility of mismatch between educational attainment and requirement is superior to one that only incorporates one or other of the two sides of the matching process. When we use the opinions of workers (managers) about educational requirements, the rate of return to years of adecuate education is 3,27% (3,64%). The rate of returns to overeducation is 1,4% (1,93%) and the penalty for each year of undereducation is 1,81% (2,25%) reduction in wages.

Triggering Soft Bombs at the LHC

Very high multiplicity, spherically-symmetric distributions of soft particles, with $p_T$ ~ few hundred MeV, may be a signature of strongly-coupled hidden valleys that exhibit long, efficient showering windows. With traditional triggers, such "soft bomb" events closely resemble pile-up and are therefore only recorded with minimum bias triggers at a very low efficiency. We demonstrate a proof-of-concept for a high-level triggering strategy that efficiently separates soft bombs from pile-up by searching for a "belt of fire": A high density band of hits on the innermost layer of the tracker. Seeding our proposed high-level trigger with existing jet, missing transverse energy or lepton hardware-level triggers, we show that net trigger efficiencies of order 10% are possible for bombs of mass several hundred GeV. We also consider the special case that soft bombs are the result of an exotic decay of the 125 GeV Higgs. The fiducial rate for "Higgs bombs" triggered in this manner is marginally higher than the rate achievable by triggering directly on a hard muon from associated Higgs production.Comment: 38 pages, 5 tables, 14 figure

The Influence of Self-Esteem and Stress on Academic Performance in College Students

The research sought to examine if there was an association between performance self-esteem (i.e., self-worth regarding academic performance) and stress (perceived and physiological) on end of semester grade point average (GPA) in college students. It is hypothesized that the effect of performance self-esteem on GPA at the end of the semester will vary by stress. In the two part longitudinal study participants completed measures to assess performance self-esteem and perceived stress. Participants also provided two saliva samples to assess the steroid hormone cortisol, before and after an acute lab stressor task. Participants were for permission for the researchers to access their official GPA from the University’s registrar. The results showed the effects of perceived stress and performance self-esteem on GPA varied by sex. Physiological stress was not found to have an association with GPA and did not interact with performance selfesteem to predict GPA

A Finite-Size Scaling Study of a Model of Globular Proteins

Grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations are used to explore the metastable fluid-fluid coexistence curve of the modified Lennard-Jones model of globular proteins of ten Wolde and Frenkel (Science, v277, 1975 (1997)). Using both mixed-field finite-size scaling and histogram reweighting methods, the joint distribution of density and energy fluctuations is analyzed at coexistence to accurately determine the critical-point parameters. The subcritical coexistence region is explored using the recently developed hyper-parallel tempering Monte Carlo simulation method along with histogram reweighting to obtain the density distributions. The phase diagram for the metastable fluid-fluid coexistence curve is calculated in close proximity to the critical point, a region previously unattained by simulation.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures, 2 Table