Coping with economic shocks: Consumption Smoothing and the 1998 Russian Financial Crisis

Applying quantile regression techniques to Russian data we investigate the channels through which individuals experience changes in their well being. We find that married individuals in non-rural households with university-educated heads are less vulnerable to severe welfare shocks. For the most vulnerable individuals the labour market plays a key role in transmitting the effects of aggregate shocks through the unemployment channel whereas those individuals able to maintain their employment status are more able to cope with economic shocks. While increases in pension payments help individuals to cope with shocks, it transpires that vulnerable individuals rely more broadly on the support of relatives and the produce of their garden plots and dachas

Achieving the G20 gender equality target by tackling sexual exploitation through legal uniformity, extra territoriality and corporate responsibility

Exploitation of some individuals and groups by others is a depressingly familiar aspect of human society which enables one individual or group to succeed at the expense of another. Whilst not seeking to downplay abuse of men and male children, this paper focuses on sexual exploitation of women and girls, whether through direct violence, the imposition of fear or coercion, and whether or not for financial motivation. We have chosen sexual exploitation because, as we shall see, it is predominantly directed at women and girls and has uniquely traumatic effect. Sexual exploitation may occur within territorial boundaries but it has become increasingly transnational through travelling abusers (often serial intimate partners), human trafficking and online sexual exploitation (which has a particular effect on the progress of female children ). Law and policy have both developed separate approaches in relation to sexual exploitation within relationships as opposed to where it occurs for profit. In our view, any policy or legislative distinction between domestic and organised sexual crime is artificial, unnecessary and counter-productive. The common manipulation of the intimate partner relationship for commercial sexual exploitation is an obvious example of the failure of this approach. Tackling this as purely commercial or purely domestic ignores vital causes and consequences. Although the causes of sexual exploitation may differ depending on the relationship between victim and exploiter, the result is the same: an exploited victim. Importantly, the longer term consequences for the victims are often the same whether the exploitation takes place in a purely domestic or commercial context.Health consequences from sexual exploitation are well researched. Women and girls are inhibited by the lack of empowerment this brings in reaching their full potential. This has a knock on effect in the workforce of any state, with a consequent effect on economic prosperity. In November 2014, the G20 countries committed to a “goal of reducing the gap in participation rates between men and women [in the G20 countries] by 25% by 2025, taking into account national circumstances, to bring more than 100 million women into the labour force in order to significantly increase global growth and reduce poverty and inequality”. It has been said that there are three key levers to achieve female workforce participation – social change in the sense of changing norms and stereotypes about work undertaken, policy change in relation to incentives and child care and workplace change closing gaps in wages and increasing the number of women in leadership positions . This paper seeks to add a fourth dimension in the context of empowering women by tackling sexual exploitation. We suggest the need to focus on legal uniformity, extra territoriality and corporate responsibility. We argue that there is a link between legal and policy approaches to sexual exploitation and the successful empowerment of women through employment. If equality is a genuine goal then the policy on sexual exploitation needs to be addressed at global level in the context of law and economic progress

Patterns of sexual behaviour: the law of evidence: back to the future in Australia and England

A recent Victorian Court of Appeal ruling [in Australia] has sparked concerns that a clamp down on the way child abuse cases are handled could thwart convictions. The Court of Appeal justices ruled only cases that are "remarkably" similar would go before the same jury, making it harder for allegations from multiple complainants to be heard together. There are concerns that this will reduce the number of convictions for sexual offences, especially for those against children. This article explores the approach in England and Wales, and Australia to evidence of a pattern of behaviour, focussing on when it is adduced in cases involving sexual abuse. We first consider the shared common law history of the two jurisdictions before exploring how common law and legislative changes have led to surprisingly different positions in the two countries. We conclude by suggesting a simpler and more rational approach which has started to emerge and could be adopted in both countries, and indeed should be considered in any jurisdiction

Macroeconomic Stability, Governance and Growth: Empirical Lessons from the Post-Communist Transition

Using panel data for the period 1989-2006 we revisit the empirics of economic growth in the context of the post-communist transition. We pay particular attention to the mechanisms of causation and to the potential endogeneity of the macroeconomic stability indicators considered to be important in the existing literature. Carefully employing a variety of econometric techniques we consistently find that macroeconomic instability is bad for economic growth. We find some evidence that institutions of governance are important for economic growth through their influence on the macroeconomic environment. That is, good institutions are conducive to macroeconomic stability which in turn positively impacts upon economic growth. We also find, in contrast with other work, that investments in education have had a strong positive impact on growth in transition while other 'standard' economic growth determinants remain less important. These findings are shown to be robust to a variety of econometric approaches, specifications and time spans

Low error measurement-free phase gates for qubus computation

We discuss the desired criteria for a two-qubit phase gate and present a method for realising such a gate for quantum computation that is measurement-free and low error. The gate is implemented between qubits via an intermediate bus mode. We take a coherent state as the bus and use cross-Kerr type interactions between the bus and the qubits. This new method is robust against parameter variations and is thus low error. It fundamentally improves on previous methods due its deterministic nature and the lack of approximations used in the geometry of the phase rotations. This interaction is applicable both to solid state and photonic qubit systems.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. Published versio

Correlated Multiphoton Holes

We generate bipartite states of light which exhibit an absence of multiphoton coincidence events between two modes amid a constant background flux. These `correlated photon holes' are produced by mixing a coherent state and relatively weak spontaneous parametric down-conversion using a balanced beamsplitter. Correlated holes with arbitrarily high photon numbers may be obtained by adjusting the relative phase and amplitude of the inputs. We measure states of up to five photons and verify their nonclassicality. The scheme provides a route for observation of high-photon-number nonclassical correlations without requiring intense quantum resources.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, comments are welcom

Loss-Induced Limits to Phase Measurement Precision with Maximally Entangled States

The presence of loss limits the precision of an approach to phase measurement using maximally entangled states, also referred to as NOON states. A calculation using a simple beam-splitter model of loss shows that, for all nonzero values L of the loss, phase measurement precision degrades with increasing number N of entangled photons for N sufficiently large. For L above a critical value of approximately 0.785, phase measurement precision degrades with increasing N for all values of N. For L near zero, phase measurement precision improves with increasing N down to a limiting precision of approximately 1.018 L radians, attained at N approximately equal to 2.218/L, and degrades as N increases beyond this value. Phase measurement precision with multiple measurements and a fixed total number of photons N_T is also examined. For L above a critical value of approximately 0.586, the ratio of phase measurement precision attainable with NOON states to that attainable by conventional methods using unentangled coherent states degrades with increasing N, the number of entangled photons employed in a single measurement, for all values of N. For L near zero this ratio is optimized by using approximately N=1.279/L entangled photons in each measurement, yielding a precision of approximately 1.340 sqrt(L/N_T) radians.Comment: Additional references include

Jaynes Cummings treatment of superconducting resonators with dielectric loss due to two-level systems

We perform a quantum mechanical analysis of superconducting resonators subject to dielectric loss arising from charged two-level systems. We present numerical and analytical descriptions of the dynamics of energy decay from the resonator within the Jaynes-Cummings model. Our analysis allows us to distinguish the strong and weak coupling regimes of the model and to describe within each regime cases where the two-level system is unsaturated or saturated. We find that the quantum theory agrees with the classical model for weak coupling. However, for strong coupling the quantum theory predicts lower loss than the classical theory in the unsaturated regime. Also, in contrast to the classical theory, the photon number at which saturation occurs in the strong coupling quantum theory is independent of the coupling between the resonator and the two-level system.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure