Measuring the Value Added by Money in Trade

The paper tests the proposition that money generates value in trade. It examines the data for 5,746 Russian companies for 1997 and finds that money accounts for 24.6 percent of their value-added. The functional form of the return on money in trade is determined to be positive and marginally declining. The paper imputes that Russian GDP lost 8.1 percent in 1997 because of diminished use of money in trade. It hypothesizes that the severity of the Great Depression in the USA of 1930s could have been significantly reduced if the proposed barter networks were implemented at the time.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40021/2/wp635.pd

An Infinitesimal pp-adic Multiplicative Manin-Mumford Conjecture

Our results concern analytic functions on the open unit $p$-adic poly-disc in $\mathbb{C}^n_p$ centered at the multiplicative unit and we prove that such functions only vanish at finitely many $n$-tuples of roots of unity $(\zeta_1-1,\ldots,\zeta_n-1)$ unless they vanish along a translate of the formal multiplicative group. For polynomial functions, this follows from the multiplicative Manin-Mumford conjecture. However we allow for a much wider class of analytic functions; in particular we establish a rigidity result for formal tori. Moreover, our methods apply to Lubin-Tate formal groups beyond just the formal multiplicative group and we extend the results to this setting.Comment: 14 pages, minor corrections, slightly strengthened the statement of the main theorem. Accepted for publication in Journal de Th\'eorie des Nombres de Bordeau

Effective Tax Rates in Transition

The paper addresses the question of effective tax rates for Russian economic sectors in transition. It presents a detailed account of fiscal environment for 1995 and compares statutory obligations with reported tax liabilities. The paper finds that taxation did not contribute to recession, as some observors believed at the time. It extends research by questioning the role that inflation played distorting revenue structure. When the costs of intermediate inputs are adjusted for inflation, many sectors have negative residual revenue, which is indicative of recession. Yet, modeling tax changes to correct the situation does not produce positive results, for the tax share in the cost structure of many sectors is small and cannot compensate for inflationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39762/3/wp378.pd

On Area Comparison and Rigidity Involving the Scalar Curvature

We prove a splitting theorem for Riemannian n-manifolds with scalar curvature bounded below by a negative constant and containing certain area-minimising hypersurfaces (Theorem 3). Thus we generalise [25,Theorem 3] by Nunes. This splitting result follows from an area comparison theorem for hypersurfaces with non-positive Sigma-constant (Theorem 4) that generalises [23, Theorem 2]. Finally, we will address the optimality of these comparison and splitting results by explicitly constructing several examples

Lower bounds for the density of locally elliptic It\^{o} processes

We give lower bounds for the density $p_T(x,y)$ of the law of $X_t$, the solution of $dX_t=\sigma (X_t) dB_t+b(X_t) dt,X_0=x,$ under the following local ellipticity hypothesis: there exists a deterministic differentiable curve $x_t, 0\leq t\leq T$, such that $x_0=x, x_T=y$ and $\sigma \sigma ^*(x_t)>0,$ for all $t\in \lbrack 0,T].$ The lower bound is expressed in terms of a distance related to the skeleton of the diffusion process. This distance appears when we optimize over all the curves which verify the above ellipticity assumption. The arguments which lead to the above result work in a general context which includes a large class of Wiener functionals, for example, It\^{o} processes. Our starting point is work of Kohatsu-Higa which presents a general framework including stochastic PDE's.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009117906000000458 in the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org