Are lives a substitute for livelihoods ? Terrorism, security, and U.S. bilateral imports

What is the impact of terrorism on trade through higher security at the borders? The authors set up a theory which shows that the impact goes not only from terrorism to trade. Higher trade with a partner might, in turn, increase the probability of terrorism acts and make security measures more costly for total welfare. To identify the true impact of terrorism, their theory allows for a strategy to condition out the latter mechanism. The authors show in particular how past incidents perpetrated in third countries (anywhere in the world except the origin or targeted country) constitute good exogenous factors for current security measures at the borders. Their tests suggest that terrorist incidents have a small effect on U.S. imports on average, but a much higher effect for those origin countries at the top of the distribution of incidents. In addition, the level of the impact is up to three times higher when the acts result ina relatively high number of victims, the products are sensitive to shipping time, and the size of the partner is small. The authors further show how terrorism affects the number of business visas given by the United States, thereby affecting significantly U.S. imports in differentiated products. These results suggest that security to prevent terrorism does matter for trade.International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Transport Security,Economic Theory&Research,Country Strategy&Performance,Free Trade

Debt, debt relief, and growth : a bargaining approach

This report compares and identifies two ways that Governments can"up-front"the adjustment effort: accumulating reserves; and engaging in an equity swap. The authors compare these methods with a constant rescheduling agreement which assumes that no reserves can be accumulated and that tax collections go to the creditors. The paper analyzes the outcome of a"memoryless"rescheduling agreement. The model exhibits two potential Laffer curves effects. In one, the lenders would want to reduce the vulnerability of the debtor to their sanctions (that is, required taxation). In the other, the debtor would actually prefer less growth than more. The role of reserves is studied and it is determined that their use can improve a country's welfare, over the case of the rescheduling agreement. The country must, however, be able to commit itself to a tax rate before negotiations start. Otherwise, reserves are useless. Debt-equity swaps are also studied. The outcome - always Pareto - dominates the outcome of the rescheduling equilibrium. Banks always gain a fraction of the country's capital above the share of output that they gain in the rescheduling equilibrium. Thus, banks are relatively less"impatient"than the country to reach a debt-relief agreement.Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Financial Intermediation,Strategic Debt Management

Modeling Franco-German Relations in the Postwar Era

The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.A central question is how and when can states create international institutions to avoid resorting to war. A stated purpose of European integration after the war was to preserve peace between France and Germany. It is not clear, however, what institutional features of European integration were designed to achieve this goal. Using game theory, Verdier will explore three distinct ways of modeling the problem and identify the aspects of the known historical reality that are captured by each model.Mershon Center for International Security Studiesproject summar

European Integration as a Solution to War

We seek to establish the conditions in which binding international institutions can serve as a solution to preventive war. Scholars of international integration portray institutions as a response to problems of incomplete information, transaction costs and other barriers to welfare improvement for their members. In contrast, we show that international institutions can have binding properties that solve credible commitment problems among member states -even in the case of volatile preventive war dilemmas. Our primary case is post-war Europe. We show that European integration since the early 1950s was conceived as a means of committing a temporarily weakened West Germany not to use its future power to pursue military ends in Europe, thereby obviating a preventive war against it. The various institutions that form part of the European Communities, now the European Union, still bear the mark of this goal. In this article, we establish the game theoretic conditions for the existence of binding international institutions as a solution to preventive war. We also provide evidence that the model is a good approximation of what political elites had in mind in the wake of World War II. KEY WORDS ♦ credible commitment ♦ European integration ♦ institutional solutions to conflict ♦ integration theory ♦ power transition ♦ preventive war This article establishes the conditions in which binding international institutions -usually associated with political and economic integration among states -can serve as a solution to preventive war. Most theories of integration suggest that states integrate in order to solve problems of incomplete information and reduce transaction costs and other barriers to welfare improvement for their members. In contrast, we argue that integration can serve to establish a credible commitment that removes the risk of future conflict among states of unequal power. Specifically, we suggest European Journal of International Relation

“Je veux apprendre la France”

Dans un centre social du XVIIIe arrondissement de Paris, des migrants de 16 à 25 ans récemment arrivés en France sont accueillis par Marion, enseignante de français. La connaissance de la langue véhiculaire conditionne l’entrée de ces jeunes dans cette société nouvelle à de nombreux égards. Afin de leur permettre d’en décrypter les rouages, Marion a six mois pour leur enseigner les bases du français. Alternant cours de vocabulaire et visites culturelles, Je veux apprendre la France est le journal intime de cette initiation

Hypotheses in urban ecology: building a common knowledge base

Urban ecology is a rapidly growing research field that has to keep pace with the pressing need to tackle the sustainability crisis. As an inherently multi-disciplinary field with close ties to practitioners and administrators, research synthesis and knowledge transfer between those different stakeholders is crucial. Knowledge maps can enhance knowledge transfer and provide orientation to researchers as well as practitioners. A promising option for developing such knowledge maps is to create hypothesis networks, which structure existing hypotheses and aggregate them according to topics and research aims. Combining expert knowledge with information from the literature, we here identify 62 research hypotheses used in urban ecology and link them in such a network. Our network clusters hypotheses into four distinct themes: (i) Urban species traits & evolution, (ii) Urban biotic communities, (iii) Urban habitats and (iv) Urban ecosystems. We discuss the potentials and limitations of this approach. All information is openly provided as part of an extendable Wikidata project, and we invite researchers, practitioners and others interested in urban ecology to contribute additional hypotheses, as well as comment and add to the existing ones. The hypothesis network and Wikidata project form a first step towards a knowledge base for urban ecology, which can be expanded and curated to benefit both practitioners and researchers

Design Status of the CLIC 3-TeV Beam Delivery System and Damping Rings

We describe the present design status of beam delivery and damping rings for CLIC at 3 TeV cm energy, and outline our future plans. The beam delivery system comprises collimation, final focus and post-IP exit line. Critical design aspects include halo collimation, machine protection, beam removal, and thermal stability analysis. In order to attain the design spot size at the collision point, the damping rings must provide beams of extremely small emittances. In this paper, we focus on collimation and spent beam

Differential Forms on Log Canonical Spaces

The present paper is concerned with differential forms on log canonical varieties. It is shown that any p-form defined on the smooth locus of a variety with canonical or klt singularities extends regularly to any resolution of singularities. In fact, a much more general theorem for log canonical pairs is established. The proof relies on vanishing theorems for log canonical varieties and on methods of the minimal model program. In addition, a theory of differential forms on dlt pairs is developed. It is shown that many of the fundamental theorems and techniques known for sheaves of logarithmic differentials on smooth varieties also hold in the dlt setting. Immediate applications include the existence of a pull-back map for reflexive differentials, generalisations of Bogomolov-Sommese type vanishing results, and a positive answer to the Lipman-Zariski conjecture for klt spaces.Comment: 72 pages, 6 figures. A shortened version of this paper has appeared in Publications math\'ematiques de l'IH\'ES. The final publication is available at http://www.springerlink.co