The Post

About the book: Asserting the need for social science historians to examine their own field, this wide-ranging volume offers an intellectual history and critical evaluation of interdisciplinary social science and social science historiography. The editors present a creative, experimental mix of topics and genres spanning a range of contemporary thought in the field-exploring the past, present, and future of social science history. This book comes at a time when there is great academic interest in the future of the disciplines and in their place within the organization of university education

Quantifying the effects of higher world oil prices on recource allocation and living standards in an energy poor open economy

The OPEC Cartel's spectacular success in raising real world oil prices over the past decade has brought about substantial net resource transfers from energy poor to energy rich countries within the world economy. In accomodating these resource transfers both energy exporting and importing economies have been confronted with adjustment pressures. Of course the intensity and nature of these adjustment pressures has differed substantially between countries according to amongst other things a country's resource endowment, its net trade position with respect to oil and other energy based products and the degree of openness of its economy to world trade. Our concern in this paper is with quantifying the short and medium term adjustment pressures imposed on the South Korean economy assuming continued increases in real world oil prices. The results are derived from a multisectoral general equilibrium model. A feature of the model is its design flexibility and simple solution algorithm. We exploit this in the present study by comparing results for a range of experiments to accommodate differing assumptions about the Korean macroeconomic environment, labour market behaviour and Korean export demand. While the numerical results refer specifically to Korea, it is to be hoped that by rationalising them in terms of the underlying structural features inherent in the Korean economy the paper provides some guidance on the sorts of adjustment pressures likely to confront energy poor open economies assuming a continued movement in the world terms of trade towards oil.

Minimal convex extensions and finite difference discretization of the quadratic Monge-Kantorovich problem

We present an adaptation of the MA-LBR scheme to the Monge-Amp{\`e}re equation with second boundary value condition, provided the target is a convex set. This yields a fast adaptive method to numerically solve the Optimal Transport problem between two absolutely continuous measures, the second of which has convex support. The proposed numerical method actually captures a specific Brenier solution which is minimal in some sense. We prove the convergence of the method as the grid stepsize vanishes and we show with numerical experiments that it is able to reproduce subtle properties of the Optimal Transport problem

Encyclopaedia Curvatonis

We investigate whether the predictions of single-field models of inflation are robust under the introduction of additional scalar degrees of freedom, and whether these extra fields change the potentials for which the data show the strongest preference. We study the situation where an extra light scalar field contributes both to the total curvature perturbations and to the reheating kinematic properties. Ten reheating scenarios are identified, and all necessary formulas allowing a systematic computation of the predictions for this class of models are derived. They are implemented in the public library ASPIC, which contains more than 75 single-field potentials. This paves the way for a forthcoming full Bayesian analysis of the problem. A few representative examples are displayed and discussed.Comment: 16 pages without appendices (total 55 pages), 93 figures. matches the published version (JCAP