Public Goods in Trade: On the Formation of Markets and Political Jurisdictions

The current debate in Western Europe centers on the relationship between economic and political integration. To address this problem, we construct a simple general equilibrium model in which the returns to trading are directly affected by the availability of a public good. In our model, heterogeneous agents choose both a club and a market to belong to. In the club, agents vote over the public good, are taxed to finance this good, and receive access to it when they trade. In the market, they are randomly matched with a partner. If a match occurs between traders of different clubs, they both suffer a transactions cost. We show that, in general, the political boundaries established by the clubs can be distinct from market borders, leading to international trade between members of different clubs. Further, as the region develops, markets become wider (eventually leading to a common market) and the desire to avoid transaction costs initially leads to political unification. At still higher levels of development, however, where transaction costs are less important, traders prefer the diversity offered by multiple clubs.

Gender Inequality in the Division of Household Labour in Tanzania

This study examined the gender norms and the language used for rationalising gender inequality regarding the division of household labour in Tanzania. Tanzanian university students and secondary students participated in interviews, focus groups, and surveys for this study. Findings suggest that Tanzanian men have very traditional expectations regarding gender roles while Tanzanian women have more progressive expectations. Some gender norms, including the expectation that women should be responsible for the children and should do more work than men overall, were demonstrated. Naturalisation, the attempt to justify an inequality such as sexism by claiming that the disparity is simply natural, was used to explain inequalities; as was minimisation, the attempt to justify an inequality by reducing the significance of the problem. Lastly, cultural sexism attempted to justify gender inequality by explaining the differences between genders as a result of cultural practices rather than sexism

Cosmologies with Two-Dimensional Inhomogeneity

We present a new generating algorithm to construct exact non static solutions of the Einstein field equations with two-dimensional inhomogeneity. Infinite dimensional families of $G_1$ inhomogeneous solutions with a self interacting scalar field, or alternatively with perfect fluid, can be constructed using this algorithm. Some families of solutions and the applications of the algorithm are discussed.Comment: 9 pages, one postscript figur

Quasianalyticity in certain Banach function algebras

Let X be a perfect, compact subset of the complex plane. We consider algebras of those functions on X which satisfy a generalized notion of differentiability, which we call F-differentiability. In particular, we investigate a notion of quasianalyticity under this new notion of differentiability and provide some sufficient conditions for certain algebras to be quasianalytic. We give an application of our results in which we construct an essential, natural uniform algebra A on a locally connected, compact Hausdorff space X such that A admits no non-trivial Jensen measures yet is not regular. This construction improves an example of the first author (2001)

Penrose Limits, the Colliding Plane Wave Problem and the Classical String Backgrounds

We show how the Szekeres form of the line element is naturally adapted to study Penrose limits in classical string backgrounds. Relating the "old" colliding wave problem to the Penrose limiting procedure as employed in string theory we discuss how two orthogonal Penrose limits uniquely determine the underlying target space when certain symmetry is imposed. We construct a conformally deformed background with two distinct, yet exactly solvable in terms of the string theory on R-R backgrounds, Penrose limits. Exploiting further the similarities between the two problems we find that the Penrose limit of the gauged WZW Nappi-Witten universe is itself a gauged WZW plane wave solution of Sfetsos and Tseytlin. Finally, we discuss some issues related to singularity, show the existence of a large class of non-Hausdorff solutions with Killing Cauchy Horizons and indicate a possible resolution of the problem of the definition of quantum vacuum in string theory on these time-dependent backgrounds.Comment: Some misprints corrected. Matches the version in print. To appear in Classical & Quantum Gravit

Swiss cheeses and their applications

Swiss cheese sets have been used in the literature as useful examples in the study of rational approximation and uniform algebras. In this paper, we give a survey of Swiss cheese constructions and related results. We describe some notable examples of Swiss cheese sets in the literature. We explain the various abstract notions of Swiss cheeses, and how they can be manipulated to obtain desirable properties. In particular, we discuss the Feinstein-Heath classicalisation theorem and related results. We conclude with the construction of a new counterexample to a conjecture of S. E. Morris, using a classical Swiss cheese set