Income Inequality and Economic Growth in the U.S. :A Panel Cointegration Approach

The purpose of this paper is to examine the empirical relationship between income inequality and economic growth using U.S. state-level data during the post-war period. We construct a sample of 48 U.S. states with annual observations over the period 1945 to 2001. With this sample the number of time series observations is relatively large and of the same order of magnitude as the number of groups. This allows for the exploitation of new cointegrated dynamic panel data techniques. Our findings indicate that the long-run relationship between inequality and growth is negative in nature, though this negative relationship appears to be larger for low-income states.

A New State-Level Panel of Annual Inequality Measures Over the Period 1916 – 2005

This paper introduces a new panel of annual state-level income inequality measures over the ninety year period 1916-2005. Among many of the states inequality followed a Ushaped pattern over the past century, peaking both before the Great Depression and again at the time of the new millennium. The new panel reveals significant state-level variations, both before the year 1945, and regionally. While Northeastern states are strongly correlated with aggregate U.S. trends, we find many of the Western states have little overall correlation over the past century. The availability of this new panel may prove useful to empirical researchers interested in all aspects of income inequality, particularly given the panel’s unusually large number of both time-series and crosssectional observations.

Mergers and acquisitions in Germany: social setting and regulatory framework

The paper describes the legal and economic environment of mergers and acquisitions in Germany and explores barriers to obtaining and executing corporate control. Various cases are used to demonstrate that resistance by different stakeholders including minority shareholders, organized labour and the government may present powerful obstacles to takeovers in Germany. In spite of the overall convergence of European takeover and securities trading laws, Germany still shows many peculiarities that make its market for corporate control distinct from other countries. Concentrated share ownership, cross shareholdings and pyramidal ownership structures are frequent barriers to acquiring majority stakes. Codetermination laws, the supervisory board structure and supermajority requirements for important corporate decisions limit the execution of control by majority shareholders. Bidders that disregard the German preference for consensual solutions and the specific balance of powers will risk their takeover attempt be frustrated by opposing influence groups. Revised version forthcoming in "The German Financial System", edited by Jan P. Krahnen and Reinhard H. Schmidt, Oxford University Press

Inflation Driven by Unification Energy

We examine the hypothesis that inflation is primarily driven by vacuum energy at a scale indicated by gauge coupling unification. Concretely, we consider a class of hybrid inflation models wherein the vacuum energy associated with a grand unified theory condensate provides the dominant energy during inflation, while a second "inflaton" scalar slow-rolls. We show that it is possible to obtain significant tensor-to-scalar ratios while fitting the observed spectral index.Comment: 5 double column pages, 1 figure. V2: Updated to resemble version published in PR

Software breadboard study

The overall goal of this study was to develop new concepts and technology for the Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby (CRAF), Cassini, and other future deep space missions which maximally conform to the Functional Specification for the NASA X-Band Transponder (NXT), FM513778 (preliminary, revised July 26, 1988). The study is composed of two tasks. The first task was to investigate a new digital signal processing technique which involves the processing of 1-bit samples and has the potential for significant size, mass, power, and electrical performance improvements over conventional analog approaches. The entire X-band receiver tracking loop was simulated on a digital computer using a high-level programming language. Simulations on this 'software breadboard' showed the technique to be well-behaved and a good approximation to its analog predecessor from threshold to strong signal levels in terms of tracking-loop performance, command signal-to-noise ratio and ranging signal-to-noise ratio. The successful completion of this task paves the way for building a hardware breadboard, the recommended next step in confirming this approach is ready for incorporation into flight hardware. The second task in this study was to investigate another technique which provides considerable simplification in the synthesis of the receiver first LO over conventional phase-locked multiplier schemes and in this approach, provides down-conversion for an S-band emergency receive mode without the need of an additional LO. The objective of this study was to develop methodology and models to predict the conversion loss, input RF bandwidth, and output RF bandwidth of a series GaAs FET sampling mixer and to breadboard and test a circuit design suitable for the X and S-band down-conversion applications

Exploiting Data Representation for Fault Tolerance

We explore the link between data representation and soft errors in dot products. We present an analytic model for the absolute error introduced should a soft error corrupt a bit in an IEEE-754 floating-point number. We show how this finding relates to the fundamental linear algebra concepts of normalization and matrix equilibration. We present a case study illustrating that the probability of experiencing a large error in a dot product is minimized when both vectors are normalized. Furthermore, when data is normalized we show that the absolute error is less than one or very large, which allows us to detect large errors. We demonstrate how this finding can be used by instrumenting the GMRES iterative solver. We count all possible errors that can be introduced through faults in arithmetic in the computationally intensive orthogonalization phase, and show that when scaling is used the absolute error can be bounded above by one