Labour Market Performance and Start-Up Costs: OECD Evidence

This paper is intended to make a contribution to the empirical literature explaining the rise ofunemployment since the 1970s in western economies by means of interactions betweenshocks and institutions. The contribution is twofold. First, the impact of a general feature ofdeveloped economies that has been surprisingly neglected in the literature is analyzed,namely, the employment shift from industry and agriculture to services. The secondcontribution of the paper is the focus on the interaction of that shock with the administrativeburdens on firm creation. The working hypothesis is that countries that impose high costs onthe creation of new companies are not able to create enough jobs in the service sector tosuccessfully absorb the workers released from the agriculture and industry sector. The resultis higher unemployment.Macroeconomics of unemployment, Panel data, Startup costs.

Sustained plankton blooms under open chaotic flows

We consider a predator-prey model of planktonic population dynamics, of excitable character, living in an open and chaotic fluid flow, i.e., a state of fluid motion in which fluid trajectories are unbounded but a chaotic region exists that is restricted to a localized area. Despite that excitability is a transient phenomenon and that fluid trajectories are continuously leaving the system, there is a regime of parameters where the excitation remains permanently in the system, given rise to a persistent plankton bloom. This regime is reached when the time scales associated to fluid stirring become slower than the ones associated to biological growth.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

Non-Unitarity vs sterile neutrinos at DUNE

Neutrino masses are one of the most promising open windows to physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). Several extensions of the SM which accommodate neutrino masses require the addition of right-handed neutrinos to its particle content. These extra fermions will either be kinematically accessible (sterile neutrinos) or not (deviations from Unitarity of the PMNS matrix) but at some point they will impact neutrino oscillation searches. We explore the differences and similitudes between the two cases and compare their present bounds with the expected sensitivities of DUNE. We conclude that Non-Unitarity (NU) effects are too constrained to impact present or near future neutrino oscillation facilities but that sterile neutrinos can play an important role at long baseline experiments.Comment: Talk and poster presented at NuPhys2016 (London, 12-14 December 2016). 8 pages, LaTeX, 4 eps figures. Based on arXiv:1609.0863