Optimism, Pessimism, and the Gains from Trade

This paper examines the debate over the gains from trade when international differences in the risk perception of heterogeneous managers provide the basis for trade: the relatively optimistic country exports the risky commodity whereas the relatively pessimistic country exports the certain commodity. We show that optimal trade policy depends on the choice of the welfare criterion, as ex-ante and ex-post criteria often lead to opposing conclusions. The more optimistic country is always better off ex-ante whereas it can end up worse off ex-post. The more pessimistic country may be worse off/better off ex-ante but better off/worse off according to the ex-post welfare criterion.Idiosyncratic Risk, Optimism, Pessimism, Heterogeneity, Trade Losses, ex-ante and ex-post welfare

On Being Intimate with Ruin: Reading Decay in Middlesex

Blanchard argues for an intimate attention to the ruin in Middlesex and Detroit as a means of exploring the geo-bio-politics of decay as a problem of our socio-ecological present

Events and Piecewise Deterministic Dynamics in Event-Enhanced Quantum Theory

We enhance the standard formalism of quantum theory to enable events. The concepts of experiment and of measurement are defined. Dynamics is given by Liouville's equation that couples quantum system to a classical one. It implies a unique Markov process involving quantum jumps, classical events and describing sample histories of individual systems.Comment: to appear in Phys. Lett. A, 12 pages, Latex article.st

K_1-injectivity for properly infinite C*-algebras

One of the main tools to classify \cst-algebras is the study of its projections and its unitaries. It was proved by Cuntz in \cite{Cu81} that if $A$ is a \textit{purely infinite} simple \cst-algebra, then the kernel of the natural map for the unitary group \U(A) to the $K$-theory group $K_1(A)$ is reduced to the connected component \U^0(A), i.e. $A$ is \textit{$K_1$-injective} (see \S 3). We study in this note a finitely generated \cst-algebra, the $K_1$-injectivity of which would imply the $K_1$-injectivity of all unital \textit{properly infinite} \cst-algebras.Comment: Quanta of Maths (Clay Math. Institute), 48--5