Moves towards Authentic Freedom. Church and State in Switzerland, and Beyond

Many of the Swiss Cantons have regulated the relations between church and state by establishing, in their public law, corporations at the levels of the municipality and of the canton. The role and the rights of these corporations, especially obligatory membership in them, is the object of ongoing political and legal debate. Both on the side of the courts and of the church, the present system has come under scrutiny, while the corporation representatives and also a majority of the population seem intent on maintaining it. This paper explains and examines the presently valid church-state relations, focusing on the Canton of Zurich, and looks at the suggestions for reform elaborated by an experts’ commission instituted by the Conference of Swiss Bishops. In conclusion, it presents some more general reflections on the challenges to individual and corporative religious freedom today, in Switzerland and beyond

Trace ideals for Fourier integral operators with non-smooth symbols II

We consider Fourier integral operators with symbols in modulation spaces and non-smooth phase functions whose second orders of derivatives belong to certain types of modulation space. We establish continuity and Schatten-von Neumann properties of such operators when acting on modulation spaces.Comment: 25 page

Peirce's sign theory as an open-source R package.

Throughout Peirce’s writing, we witness his developing vision of a machine that scientists will eventually be able to create. Nadin (2010) raised the question:Why do computer scientists continue to ignore Peirce’s sign theory? A review of the literature on Peirce’s theory and the semiotics machine reveals that many authors discussed the machine;however, they donot differentiate between a physical computer machine and its software. This paper discusses the problematic issues involved in converting Peirce’s theory into a programming language, machine and software application. We demonstrate this challenge by introducing Peirce’s sign theory as a software application that runs under an open-source R environmen

From Frazier-Jawerth characterizations of Besov spaces to Wavelets and Decomposition spaces

This article describes how the ideas promoted by the fundamental papers published by M. Frazier and B. Jawerth in the eighties have influenced subsequent developments related to the theory of atomic decompositions and Banach frames for function spaces such as the modulation spaces and Besov-Triebel-Lizorkin spaces. Both of these classes of spaces arise as special cases of two different, general constructions of function spaces: coorbit spaces and decomposition spaces. Coorbit spaces are defined by imposing certain decay conditions on the so-called voice transform of the function/distribution under consideration. As a concrete example, one might think of the wavelet transform, leading to the theory of Besov-Triebel-Lizorkin spaces. Decomposition spaces, on the other hand, are defined using certain decompositions in the Fourier domain. For Besov-Triebel-Lizorkin spaces, one uses a dyadic decomposition, while a uniform decomposition yields modulation spaces. Only recently, the second author has established a fruitful connection between modern variants of wavelet theory with respect to general dilation groups (which can be treated in the context of coorbit theory) and a particular family of decomposition spaces. In this way, optimal inclusion results and invariance properties for a variety of smoothness spaces can be established. We will present an outline of these connections and comment on the basic results arising in this context

The Valuation of Agricultural Land and the Influence of Government Payments

Factor Markets Coordination: Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), Brussels, BelgiumAgricultural and Food Policy, Land Economics/Use,

The Valuation of Agricultural Land and the Influence of Government Payments

This study gives an overview of the theoretical foundations, empirical procedures and derived results of the literature identifying determinants of land prices. Special attention is given to the effects of different government support policies on land prices. Since almost all empirical studies on the determination of land prices refer either to the net present value method or the hedonic pricing approach as a theoretical basis, a short review of these models is provided. While the two approaches have different theoretical bases, their empirical implementation converges. Empirical studies use a broad range of variables to explain land values and we systematise those into six categories. In order to investigate the influence of different measures of government support on land prices, a meta-regression analysis is carried out. Our results reveal a significantly higher rate of capitalisation for decoupled direct payments and a significantly lower rate of capitalisation for agri-environmental payments, as compared to the rest of government support. Furthermore, the results show that taking theoretically consistent land rents (returns to land) and including non-agricultural variables like urban pressure in the regression implies lower elasticities of capitalisation. In addition, we find a significant influence of the land type, the data type and estimation techniques on the capitalisation rate.

The inner kernel theorem for a certain Segal algebra

The Segal algebra ${\textbf{S}}_{0}(G)$ is well defined for arbitrary locally compact Abelian Hausdorff (LCA) groups $G$. Despite the fact that it is a Banach space it is possible to derive a kernel theorem similar to the Schwartz kernel theorem, of course without making use of the Schwartz kernel theorem. First we characterize the bounded linear operators from ${\textbf{S}}_{0}(G_1)$ to ${\textbf{S}}_{0}'(G_2)$ by distributions in ${\textbf{S}}_{0}'(G_1 \times G_2)$. We call this the "outer kernel theorem". The "inner kernel theorem" is concerned with the characterization of those linear operators which have kernels in the subspace ${\textbf{S}}_{0}(G_1 \times G_2)$, the main subject of this manuscript. We provide a description of such operators as regularizing operators in our context, mapping ${\textbf{S}}_{0}'(G_1)$ into test functions in ${\textbf{S}}_{0}(G_2)$, in a $w^{*}$-to norm continuous manner. The presentation provides a detailed functional analytic treatment of the situation and applies to the case of general LCA groups, without recurrence to the use of so-called Wilson bases, which have been used for the case of elementary LCA groups. The approach is then used in order to describe natural laws of composition which imitate the composition of linear mappings via matrix multiplications, now in a continuous setting. We use here that in a suitable (weak) form these operators approximate general operators. We also provide an explanation and mathematical justification used by engineers explaining in which sense pure frequencies "integrate" to a Dirac delta distribution