Comment on ``Granular Entropy: Explicit Calculations for Planar Assemblies''

A Comment on the Letter by Raphael Blumenfeld and Sam F. Edwards, [Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 114303 (2003)]

Capital Markets Integration and Labor Market Institutions

A major development in recent decades in industrialised countries is the decline in national savings rates. Over the same period, the labour’s share of national income has also declined in many industrialised countries. This paper seeks to provide a unified account of these developments. We show that globalization, in the form of increased capital mobility, provides incentives to implement labour market reforms that raise the returns to capital and improve efficiency. Nevertheless, in a world where aggregate savings reflect life-cycle motives and are mainly performed out of labour income, the associated fall in the labour share reduces aggregate savings and the pace of capital accumulation. This inefficient outcome is due to competition for capital between countries generating negative externalities.Unemployment, Factor mobility, Political economy, Globalization

International Political Spillovers: the case of labor market regulation

This paper explores how the political support for Labour Market Regulation (LMR) is affected by economic and political integration in a two country OLG model. We model LMR as wage regulation and analyse three institutional settings: Autarchy, Economic Union and Political Union. In Autarchy capital cannot flow across borders and each country sets its most preferred level of regulation. In the Economic Union capital markets are integrated, while political decisions are not. In the Political Union a common level of LMR is set at a centralized level. In Autarchy, LMR may endogenously arise if the economy is dynamically efficient. In this case, despite the distortions generated in the labour market, LMR increases the welfare of the young, because it raises their permanent income, their savings and the steady state capital stock. In the Economic Union, capital outflows make the implementation of LMR more costly and provide incentives for each country to undercut the rival in order to attract capital.Thus, a race-to-the-bottom takes place and the steady state level of LMR decreases, harming the young individuals. The Political Union restores, under symmetry, the autarchic outcome and welfare levels. The asymmetric case is also analysed.political economy; economic integration; unemployment

Anomalous Dimensions of Conformal Baryons

We determine the anomalous dimensions of baryon operators for the three color theory as function of the number of massless flavours within the conformal window to the maximum known order in perturbation theory. We show that the anomalous dimension of the baryon is controllably small, within the $\delta$-expansion, for a wide range of number of flavours. We also find that this is always smaller than the anomalous dimension of the fermion mass operator. These findings challenge the partial compositeness paradigm.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. Matches published versio

Beta Function and Anomalous Dimensions

We demonstrate that it is possible to determine the coefficients of an all-order beta function linear in the anomalous dimensions using as data the two-loop coefficients together with the first one of the anomalous dimensions which are universal. The beta function allows to determine the anomalous dimension of the fermion masses at the infrared fixed point, and the resulting values compare well with the lattice determinations.Comment: Version to match the published one in Phys. Rev. D. We added several tables demonstrating how well the prediction for the anomalous dimensions at the fixed point obtained via the all-orders beta function compares with the one obtained in perturbation theory. We added also a figur

Random walk, cluster growth, and the morphology of urban conglomerations

We propose a new model of cluster growth according to which the probability that a new unit is placed in a point at a distance $r$ from the city center is a Gaussian with mean equal to the cluster radius and variance proportional to the mean, modulated by the local density $\rho(r)$. The model is analytically solvable in $d=2$ dimensions, where the density profile varies as a complementary error function. The model reproduces experimental observations relative to the morphology of cities, determined via an original analysis of digital maps with a very high spatial resolution, and helps understanding the emergence of vehicular traffic.Comment: Physica A. To appea