The McCarran-Walter Act:A Contradictory Legacy on Race, Quotas, and Ideology

The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 ended the blanket exclusion of immigrants based on race and created the foundation for current immigration law, but imposed a racialized immigration quota system and new ideological grounds for exclusion

Percolation line of stable clusters in supercritical fluids

We predict that self-bound clusters of particles exist in the supercritical phase of simple fluids. These clusters, whose internal temperature is lower than the global temperature of the system, define a percolation line that starts at the critical point. This line should be physically observable. Possible experiments showing the validity of these predictions are discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, corrected some typo

A note on market completeness with American put options

We consider a non necessarily complete financial market with one bond and one risky asset, whose price process is modelled by a suitably integrable, strictly positive, càdlàg process $S$ over $[0, T]$. Every option price is defined as the conditional expectation under a given equivalent (true) martingale measure $\mathbb P$, the same for all options. We show that every positive contingent claim on $S$ can be approximately replicated (in $L^2$-sense) by investing dynamically in the underlying and statically in all American put options (of every strike price $k$ and with the same maturity $T$). We also provide a counter-example to static hedging with European call options of all strike prices and all maturities $t\leq T$.

Evolution of Complexity in Out-of-Equilibrium Systems by Time-Resolved or Space-Resolved Synchrotron Radiation Techniques

Out-of-equilibrium phenomena are attracting high interest in physics, materials science, chemistry and life sciences. In this state, the study of structural fluctuations at different length scales in time and space are necessary to achieve significant advances in the understanding of structure-functionality relationship. The visualization of patterns arising from spatiotemporal fluctuations is nowadays possible thanks to new advances in X-ray instrumentation development that combine high resolution both in space and in time. We present novel experimental approaches using high brilliance synchrotron radiation sources, fast detectors and focusing optics, joint with advanced data analysis based on automated statistical, mathematical and imaging processing tools. This approach has been used to investigate structural fluctuations in out-of-equilibrium systems in the novel field of inhomogeneous quantum complex matter at the crossing point of technology, physics and biology. In particular, we discuss how nanoscale complexity controls the emergence of high temperature superconductivity (HTS), myelin functionality and formation of hybrid organic-inorganic nanostructures. The emergent complex geometries, opening novel venues to quantum technology and to development of quantum physics of living systems, are discussedComment: 18 pages, 7 figure

Multivariate utility maximization with proportional transaction costs and random endowment

In this paper we deal with a utility maximization problem at finite horizon on a continuous-time market with conical (and time varying) constraints (particularly suited to model a currency market with proportional transaction costs). In particular, we extend the results in Campi and Owen (2011) to the situation where the agent is initially endowed with a random and possibly unbounded quantity of assets. We start by studying some basic properties of the value function (which is now defined on a space of random variables), then we dualize the problem following some convex analysis techniques which have proven very useful in this field of research. We finally prove the existence of a solution to the dual and (under an additional boundedness assumption on the endowment) to the primal problem. The last section of the paper is devoted to an application of our results to utility indifference pricing.Transaction costs ; Foreign exchange market ; Multivariate utility function ; Optimal portfolio ; Duality theory ; Random endowment ; Utility-based pricing

Close-Form Pricing of Benchmark Equity Default Swaps Under the CEV Assumption

Equity Default Swaps are new equity derivatives designed as a product for credit investors.Equipped with a novel pricing result, we provide closedform values that give an analytic contribution to the viability of cross-asset trading related to credit risk.Cross-Asset Trading of Credit Risk;Constant-Elasticity-of-Variance (CEV) Diffusion

On the spot-futures no-arbitrage relations in commodity markets

In commodity markets the convergence of futures towards spot prices, at the expiration of the contract, is usually justified by no-arbitrage arguments. In this article, we propose an alternative approach that relies on the expected profit maximization problem of an agent, producing and storing a commodity while trading in the associated futures contracts. In this framework, the relation between the spot and the futures prices holds through the well-posedness of the maximization problem. We show that the futures price can still be seen as the risk-neutral expectation of the spot price at maturity and we propose an explicit formula for the forward volatility. Moreover, we provide an heuristic analysis of the optimal solution for the production/storage/trading problem, in a Markovian setting. This approach is particularly interesting in the case of energy commodities, like electricity: this framework indeed remains suitable for commodities characterized by storability constraints, when standard no-arbitrage arguments cannot be safely applied