The Welfare Cost Of Capital Immobility And Capital Controls

This paper examines the macroeconomic welfare effects of interest risk premia and controls that limit international capital mobility. Using extended loanable funds analysis, it first demonstrates how perfect capital mobility maximises national income, contrary to a prevalent view that it is inimical to economic welfare. As a corollary, the analysis then shows that capital controls, irrespective of their form, generally reduce national income and economic welfare by widening real cross-border interest differentials. Capital controls in the form of quantitative controls, such as the Chilean unremunerated reserve requirement system, and explicit taxes on foreign investment flows impose similar welfare losses. However, quantitative controls are relatively more costly than options to tax capital flows, due to revenue effects.

Costly Enforcement of Property Rights and the Coase Theorem

We examine a setting in which property rights are initially ambiguously defined. Whether the parties go to court to remove the ambiguity or bargain and settle privately, they incur enforcement costs. When the parties bargain, a version of the Coase theorem holds. Despite the additional costs of going to court, other ex post ine.ciencies, and the absence of incomplete information, however, going to court may be an equilibrium or ex ante Pareto-superior over settlement; this is especially true in dynamic settings whereby a court decision saves on future enforcement costs. When the parties do not negotiate and go to court the Coase theorem ceases to hold, and a simple rule for the initial assignment of rights maximizes net surplus.

Costly Enforcement of Property Rights and the Coase Theorem

We examine a setting in which property rights are initially ambiguously defined. Whether the parties go to court to remove the ambiguity or bargain and settle privately, they incur enforcement costs. When the parties bargain, a version of the Coase theorem holds. Despite the additional costs of going to court, other ex post ine.ciencies, and the absence of incomplete information, however, going to court may be an equilibrium or ex ante Pareto-superior over settlement; this is especially true in dynamic settings whereby a court decision saves on future enforcement costs. When the parties do not negotiate and go to court the Coase theorem ceases to hold, and a simple rule for the initial assignment of rights maximizes net surplus

The Welfare Cost Of Capital Immobility And Capital Controls

This paper examines the macroeconomic welfare effects of interest risk premia and controls that limit international capital mobility. Using extended loanable funds analysis, it first demonstrates how perfect capital mobility maximises national income, contrary to a prevalent view that it is inimical to economic welfare. As a corollary, the analysis then shows that capital controls, irrespective of their form, generally reduce national income and economic welfare by widening real cross-border interest differentials. Capital controls in the form of quantitative controls, such as the Chilean unremunerated reserve requirement system, and explicit taxes on foreign investment flows impose similar welfare losses. However, quantitative controls are relatively more costly than options to tax capital flows, due to revenue effects

Probing thermal transport and layering in disk media using scanning thermal microscopy

With the advent of heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) [1] the thermal transport properties of magnetic recording media have become a key performance characteristic. In particular it is important that lateral heat transport is minimised in order to heat only the localised bit area and conversely that vertical heat transport is optimised for fast cooling of the medium essential for the thermal stability of written bits. Magnetic media are multilayered and highly structured on the nanoscale rendering classical treatment of thermal transport inapplicable and the likelihood that the transport is dominated by interfaces and dimensions rather than bulk material properties. A technique for measuring thermal transport on the nanoscale is therefore highly desirable in the design of new magnetic media. In this study we explore the potential of scanning thermal microscopy (SThM) to resolve thermal transport on the nanoscale and use a multilayered, grain segregated conventional disk

How robust are the surface temperature fingerprints of the Atlantic Overturning Meridional Circulation on monthly time‐scales?

It has been suggested that changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) can drive sea surface temperature (SST) on monthly timescales [Duchez et al., 2016]. However, with only 11 years of continuous observations, the validity of this result over longer, or different, time‐periods is uncertain. In this study, we use a 120‐yr long control simulation from a high‐resolution climate model to test the robustness of the AMOC fingerprints. The model reproduces the observed AMOC seasonal cycle and its variability, and the observed 5‐month lagged AMOC‐SST fingerprints derived from 11‐years of data. However, the AMOC‐SST fingerprints are very sensitive to the particular time‐period considered. In particular, both the Florida current and the upper mid ocean transport produce highly inconsistent fingerprints when using time‐periods shorter than 30 years. Therefore, several decades of RAPID observations will be necessary to determine the real impact of the AMOC on SSTs at monthly time‐scales

Probing thermal transport and layering in disk media using scanning thermal microscopy

With the advent of heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) [1] the thermal transport properties of magnetic recording media have become a key performance characteristic. In particular it is important that lateral heat transport is minimised in order to heat only the localised bit area and conversely that vertical heat transport is optimised for fast cooling of the medium essential for the thermal stability of written bits. Magnetic media are multilayered and highly structured on the nanoscale rendering classical treatment of thermal transport inapplicable and the likelihood that the transport is dominated by interfaces and dimensions rather than bulk material properties. A technique for measuring thermal transport on the nanoscale is therefore highly desirable in the design of new magnetic media. In this study we explore the potential of scanning thermal microscopy (SThM) to resolve thermal transport on the nanoscale and use a multilayered, grain segregated conventional disk

Nanometre scale 3D nanomechanical imaging of semiconductor structures from few nm to sub-micrometre depths

Multilayer structures of active semiconductor devices (1), novel memories (2) and semiconductor interconnects are becoming increasingly three-dimensional (3D) with simultaneous decrease of dimensions down to the few nanometres length scale (3). Ability to test and explore these 3D nanostructures with nanoscale resolution is vital for the optimization of their operation and improving manufacturing processes of new semiconductor devices. While electron and scanning probe microscopes (SPMs) can provide necessary lateral resolution, their ability to probe underneath the immediate surface is severely limited. Cross-sectioning of the structures via focused ion beam (FIB) to expose the subsurface areas often introduces multiple artefacts that mask the true features of the hidden structures, negating benefits of such approach. In addition, the few tens of micrometre dimension of FIB cut, make it unusable for the SPM investigation

Phonon bottleneck in GaAs/AlxGa1-xAs quantum dots

We report low-temperature photoluminescence measurements on highly-uniform GaAs/AlxGa1-xAs quantum dots grown by droplet epitaxy. Recombination between confined electrons and holes bound to carbon acceptors in the dots allow us to determine the energies of the confined states in the system, as confirmed by effective mass calculations. The presence of acceptor-bound holes in the quantum dots gives rise to a striking observation of the phonon-bottleneck effect