Wirtbarkeit : Cosmopolitan Right and Innkeeping

After defining Cosmopolitan Right as being limited to the conditions of “hospitality,” Kant includes “Wirtbarkeit” in brackets, a word which connotes innkeeping. Moreover, significant similarities obtain between the relevant passages of the Perpetual Peace and those of the Digest of Justinian on the obligations of ships’ masters, innkeepers, and stable keepers. Unlike ordinary householders, hospitality for innkeepers is a legal obligation, not a matter of philanthropy: they are deemed public officials with limited discretion to refuse travelers, and as fiduciaries of their guests strictly liable for losses to their property. Accordingly, this article attempts to explain Cosmopolitan Right at least in part by analogy to the private law of innkeeping. On this basis, it engages in the central philosophical debate about Cosmopolitan Right by accounting for Cosmopolitan Right solely from the “innate” right to freedom, rather than from “acquired” facts such as land or resource distributions or historical injustices

Trade liberalization, poverty, and food security in India:

food security, Nutrition, Computable general equilibrium (CGE), Globalization, Markets, trade,

Trade Liberalization, Poverty and Food Security in India

This paper attempts to assess the impact of trade liberalization on growth, poverty, and food security in India with the help of a national level computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. It shows that GDP growth and income poverty reduction that might occur following trade liberalization need not necessarily result in an improvement in the food security / nutritional status of the poor. Evidence from simulations of (partial) trade reforms reflecting a possible Doha-like scenario show that the bottom 30% of the population in both rural and urban areas suffer a decline in calorie and protein intake, in contrast to the rest of the population, even as all households increase their intake of fats. Thus, the outcome on food security / status with regard to individual nutrients depends crucially on the movements in the relative prices of different commodities along with the change in income levels. These results show that trade policy analysis should consider indicators of food security in addition to overall growth and poverty traditionally considered in such studies.Doha negotiations, India trade policy, poverty, food security, CGE model

Load Balancing via Random Local Search in Closed and Open systems

In this paper, we analyze the performance of random load resampling and migration strategies in parallel server systems. Clients initially attach to an arbitrary server, but may switch server independently at random instants of time in an attempt to improve their service rate. This approach to load balancing contrasts with traditional approaches where clients make smart server selections upon arrival (e.g., Join-the-Shortest-Queue policy and variants thereof). Load resampling is particularly relevant in scenarios where clients cannot predict the load of a server before being actually attached to it. An important example is in wireless spectrum sharing where clients try to share a set of frequency bands in a distributed manner.Comment: Accepted to Sigmetrics 201

Economic co-operation in South Asia: The Dilemma of SAFTA and beyond

This paper attempts to evaluate the Pareto optimality of SAFTA for all the member states. Besides, the welfare optimality of three other alternative sets of coordinated trade policies that go beyond SAFTA has also been studied here. These include (a) extended preferential trading between SAFTA and three other major trading blocs (ASEAN, NAFTA and EU27), (b) coordinated full trade liberalisation (carried out unilaterally or as part of a multilateral agreement) by South Asian countries, and (c) SAFTA plus a customs union (two variants with 5 and 10 CET). The analysis, using the standard static GTAP model, shows that the welfare basis for establishing SAFTA or for deeper trade policy coordination is not very strong. Nor is it obvious that cooperation among the South Asia would be forthcoming given the anticipated welfare impacts.

Can coercive formulations lead to fast and accurate solution of the Helmholtz equation?

A new, coercive formulation of the Helmholtz equation was introduced in [Moiola, Spence, SIAM Rev. 2014]. In this paper we investigate $h$-version Galerkin discretisations of this formulation, and the iterative solution of the resulting linear systems. We find that the coercive formulation behaves similarly to the standard formulation in terms of the pollution effect (i.e. to maintain accuracy as $k\to\infty$, $h$ must decrease with $k$ at the same rate as for the standard formulation). We prove $k$-explicit bounds on the number of GMRES iterations required to solve the linear system of the new formulation when it is preconditioned with a prescribed symmetric positive-definite matrix. Even though the number of iterations grows with $k$, these are the first such rigorous bounds on the number of GMRES iterations for a preconditioned formulation of the Helmholtz equation, where the preconditioner is a symmetric positive-definite matrix.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figure

Collective modes and superflow instabilities of strongly correlated Fermi superfluids

We study the superfluid phase of the one-band attractive Hubbard model of fermions as a prototype of a strongly correlated s-wave fermion superfluid on a lattice. We show that the collective mode spectrum of this superfluid exhibits, in addition to the long wavelength sound mode, a sharp roton mode over a wide range of densities and interaction strengths. We compute the sound velocity and the roton gap within a generalized random phase approximation (GRPA) and show that the GRPA results are in good agreement, at strong coupling, with a spin wave analysis of the appropriate strong-coupling pseudospin model. We also investigate, using this two-pronged approach, the breakdown of superfluidity in the presence of a supercurrent. We find that the superflow can break down at a critical flow momentum via several distinct mechanisms - depairing, Landau instabilities or dynamical instabilities - depending on the dimensionality, the interaction strength and the fermion density. The most interesting of these instabilities is a charge modulation dynamical instability which is distinct from previously studied dynamical instabilities of Bose superfluids. The charge order associated with this instability can be of two types: (i) a commensurate checkerboard modulation driven by softening of the roton mode at the Brillouin zone corner, or, (ii) an incommensurate density modulation arising from superflow-induced finite momentum pairing of Bogoliubov quasiparticles. We elucidate the dynamical phase diagram showing the critical flow momentum of the leading instability over a wide range of fermion densities and interaction strengths and point out implications of our results for experiments on cold atom fermion superfluids in an optical lattice.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures. Corrected 3d phase diagram. References added. Minor changes in tex