Real Macroeconomic Stability and the Capital Account in Chile and Colombia

In 1995, when contagion from the tequila crisis was spreading in latin America, both Chile and Colombia were exempt from contagion and presented high rates of economic growth. Several analysts attribute this positive performance to the fact that both had undertaken prudential measures to avoid excessive exposure to short term capital flows and pressures towards excessive real exchange rate appreciation: Both countries were using a reserve requirement on short term foreign indebtedness, crawling-bands, and other instruments for reducing domestic vulnerability to capital flows. The parallelism between Chile and Colombia continued after the Asian crisis. In this period, despite the fact that short-term liabilities represented only a small share of foreign debt in both countries, vulnerability to the international financial crisis was high. In both, real interest rates rose sharply in 1998 and GDP growth was negative in 1999. The similarities between Chile and Colombia, however, do not go much farther. During the 1990s, GDP growth rates were very high in Chile while in Colombia they were below historical standards. Chile had fiscal surpluses and high private savings, while in Colombia there was a rapidly increasing fiscal deficit and falling domestic savings. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the macroeconomic policies of Chile and Colombia during the 1990s, in particular the exchange rate regimes, the capital account regulations, and the gestation and management of financial crises.

CONVERSION to ORGANIC FARMING in MAINLAND PORTUGAL

The objectives of the research were: i) to assess the in-conversion period as a barrier impeding farms conversion to organic; ii) to assess the potential of conversion-grade markets in removing this barrier; iii) to identify other barriers (drives) along the food chain impeding (easing) farms conversion in mainland Portugal. Results show that the in-conversion period is not the major barrier to conversion nor is a good idea the set-up of conversion grade markets to help Portuguese farms’ conversion. Conversion feasibility depends of the organic market premium prices, in intensive farms, and of the CAP organic agri-environmental area payments, in extensive farms.organic farming, conversion, conversion grade markets, market premium prices, CAP payments.

Macroeconomics of Capital Flows to Latin America: Experience and Policy Issues

This paper reviews recent experience with international capital flows in Latin America, and discusses the policy issues that surround them. The paper is predicated on three basic premises. Capital flows to the region are an important source of macroeconomic disturbance. Also, capital flows are very volatile. Large fluctuations in these flows are due in substantial part to factors external to Latin America. In addition, the fluctuations require a policy response. Policy should respond to sudden inflows or outflows of capital.

New Strongly Coupled Sector at the Tevatron and the LHC

We examine the possibility that a new strong interaction is accessible to the Tevatron and the LHC. In an effective theory approach, we consider a scenario with a new color-octet interaction with strong couplings to the top quark, as well as the presence of a strongly coupled fourth-generation which could be responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking. We apply several constraints, including the ones from flavor physics. We study the phenomenology of the resulting parameter space at the Tevatron, focusing on the the forward-backward asymmetry in top pair production, as well as in the production of the fourth-generation quarks. We show that if the excess in the top production asymmetry is indeed the result of this new interaction, the Tevatron could see the first hints of the strongly coupled fourth-generation quarks. Finally, we show that the LHC with $\sqrt{s}=7~$TeV and $1~{\rm fb}^{-1}$ integrated luminosity should observe the production of fourth-generation quarks at a level at least one order of magnitude above the QCD prediction for the production of these states.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figure

N-Relaxion: Large Field Excursions from a Few Site Relaxion Model

Relaxion models are an interesting new avenue to explain the radiative stability of the Standard Model scalar sector. They require very large field excursions, which are difficult to generate in a consistent UV completion and to reconcile with the compact field space of the relaxion. We propose an N-site model which naturally generates the large decay constant needed to address these issues. Our model offers distinct advantages with respect to previous proposals: the construction involves non-abelian fields, allowing for controlled high energy behaviour and more model building possibilities, both in particle physics and inflationary models, and also admits a continuum limit when the number of sites is large, which may be interpreted as a warped extra dimension.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures; v2: version to appear in PR

Contextual Information based on Pervasive Sound Analysis

In recent times, there has been a continuous increase in the ubiquity, processing power and sensing capabilities of modern smartphones. This has made possible the emergence of new technologies that allows users to keep track of information regarding their health, activities and location, even in indoor places were GPS signal is not available. These technologies typically rely on fusing and processing information coming from multiple sensors, such as the accelerometer or the magnetometer. This thesis proposes a framework for indoor location and activity recognition from new source of information: the sound perceived through the device’s microphone. It does so by extracting information relative to the user’s position and activities through machine learning and audio processing techniques. In the context of indoor location, the proposed SoundSignature algorithm allows the device to learn from labeled data and predict the location it is in. These locations may be different rooms or distinct regions of large places, such as open spaces. Another proposed algorithm, SoundSimilarity, further refines this positioning by comparing the sound signals from two or more devices in real time. A novel audio similarity metric identifies if the devices are close to one another, mitigating the potential errors of the SoundSignature algorithm. This also has many other use cases, such as detecting proximity between the user and devices. Finally, the Activity Monitoring algorithm allows the device to learn from labeled data to recognize the activity the user is performing. This information may be also used to further refine the location algorithm by recognizing location-dependent activities such as the closing of doors or watching television