The relevance of primary dealers for public bond issues

We analyze the role of different kinds of primary and secondary market interventions for the government's goal to maximize its revenues from public bond issuances. Some of these interventions can be thought of as characteristics of a "primary dealer system". After all, we see that a primary dealer system with a restricted number of participants may be useful in case of only restricted competition among sufficiently heterogeneous market makers. We further show that minimum secondary market turnover requirements for primary dealers with respect to bond sales seem to be in general more adequate than the definition of maximum bid-ask-spreads or minimum turnover requirements with respect to bond purchases. Moreover, official price management operations are not able to completely substitute for a system of primary dealers. Finally it should be noted that there is in general no reason for monetary compensations to primary dealers since they already possess some privileges with respect to public bond auction

Images of isogeny classes on modular elliptic curves

Let K be a number field and E/K a modular elliptic curve, with modular parametrization $X_0(N) \to E$ defined over K. The purpose of this note is to study the images in E of classes of isogenous points in X_0(N).Comment: LaTeX, 2 pages, to appear in Math. Res. Let

Special subvarieties of Drinfeld modular varieties

We explore an analogue of the Andr\'e-Oort conjecture for subvarieties of Drinfeld modular varieties. The conjecture states that a subvariety $X$ of a Drinfeld modular variety contains a Zariski-dense set of complex multiplication (CM) points if and only if $X$ is a "special" subvariety (i.e. $X$ is defined by requiring additional endomorphisms). We prove this conjecture in two cases. Firstly when $X$ contains a Zariski-dense set of CM points with a certain behaviour above a fixed prime (which is the case if these CM points lie in one Hecke orbit), and secondly when $X$ is a curve containing infinitely many CM points without any additional assumptions.Comment: 22 pages, significant rewrit

Higher Heegner points on elliptic curves over function fields

Let E be a modular elliptic curve defined over a rational function field k of odd characteristic. We construct a sequence of Heegner points on E, defined over a $Z_p^{\infty}$-tower of finite extensions of k, and show that these Heegner points generate a group of infinite rank. This is a function field analogue of a result of C.Cornut and V.VatsalComment: 14 Pages, LaTeX; Minor changes made; To appear in Journal of Number Theor

Sine kernel asymptotics for a class of singular measures

We construct a family of measures on \bbR that are purely singular with respect to Lebesgue measure, and yet exhibit universal sine-kernel asymptotics in the bulk. The measures are best described via their Jacobi recursion coefficients: these are sparse perturbations of the recursion coefficients corresponding to Chebyshev polynomials of the second kind. We prove convergence of the renormalized Christoffel-Darboux kernel to the sine kernel for any sufficiently sparse decaying perturbation

Ehrhart f*-coefficients of polytopal complexes are non-negative integers

The Ehrhart polynomial $L_P$ of an integral polytope $P$ counts the number of integer points in integral dilates of $P$. Ehrhart polynomials of polytopes are often described in terms of their Ehrhart $h^*$-vector (aka Ehrhart $\delta$-vector), which is the vector of coefficients of $L_P$ with respect to a certain binomial basis and which coincides with the $h$-vector of a regular unimodular triangulation of $P$ (if one exists). One important result by Stanley about $h^*$-vectors of polytopes is that their entries are always non-negative. However, recent combinatorial applications of Ehrhart theory give rise to polytopal complexes with $h^*$-vectors that have negative entries. In this article we introduce the Ehrhart $f^*$-vector of polytopes or, more generally, of polytopal complexes $K$. These are again coefficient vectors of $L_K$ with respect to a certain binomial basis of the space of polynomials and they have the property that the $f^*$-vector of a unimodular simplicial complex coincides with its $f$-vector. The main result of this article is a counting interpretation for the $f^*$-coefficients which implies that $f^*$-coefficients of integral polytopal complexes are always non-negative integers. This holds even if the polytopal complex does not have a unimodular triangulation and if its $h^*$-vector does have negative entries. Our main technical tool is a new partition of the set of lattice points in a simplicial cone into discrete cones. Further results include a complete characterization of Ehrhart polynomials of integral partial polytopal complexes and a non-negativity theorem for the $f^*$-vectors of rational polytopal complexes.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figur