New-Consensus Macroeconomic Governance in a Keynesian world, and the Keynesian alternative

The paper presents both the New Consensus and Keynesian equilibrium within the usual fourcompetitive macro-markets structure. It gives theoretical explanations of the perniciouseffects that the NCM governance, which has been designed for ergodic stationary regimes,brings about in Keynesian non-ergodic regimes. It put forward Keynesian principles ofgovernance which include monetary, budgetary and fiscal instruments, and suggest newdirections for the positive and normative analysis of macro-policies.Fiscal policy, Macroeconomic governance, Monetary policy, Post-Keynesian

A meta-analysis of the magnetic line broadening in the solar atmosphere

A multi-line Bayesian analysis of the Zeeman broadening in the solar atmosphere is presented. A hierarchical probabilistic model, based on the simple but realistic Milne-Eddington approximation to the solution of the radiative transfer equation, is used to explain the data in the optical and near infrared. Our method makes use of the full line profiles of a more than 500 spectral lines from 4000 $\AA$ to 1.8 $\mu$m. Although the problem suffers from a strong degeneracy between the magnetic broadening and any other remaining broadening mechanism, the hierarchical model allows to isolate the magnetic contribution with reliability. We obtain the cumulative distribution function for the field strength and use it to put reliable upper limits to the unresolved magnetic field strength in the solar atmosphere. The field is below 160-180 G with 90% probability.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in A&A. Fixed reference

Destabilizing competition and institutional stabilizersThe contribution of J.M. Keynes

Orthodox economics rests on the belief that if markets were fully competitive, there would be general efficiency. The current financial malfunctions, accordingly, would not result from free competition, but rather from insufficient competition. This statement is strong, for it rests on a sophisticated conceptual framework within which there is no dysfunction when perfect competition prevails. But it is also strongly unrealistic, for it rejects public interventions even when markets obviously lost there bearings in the storm. In fact much of those who referred to the orthodox approach before the financial crisis, are now, inconsistently, claiming for public interventions. This short paper argues that there is a consistent way of thinking about necessary public interventions. Indeed, John Maynard Keynes focus on fundamental uncertainty consequences questioned the supposed virtues of competition and offered the most elaborated alternative as for thinking about the current turnmoils and designing the necessary stabilizers.Equilibrium, competition, stability, institutional stabilizers

Between the cup and the lip

The paper states that, although Post Keynesian interest rules may be feasible and sustainable in favourable circumstances, there is a shared difficulty as for the setting of long-term interest rates in a context of strong uncertainty and shifting liquidity preference. According to Keynes theory of the interest rate, the variation in the long-term interest rate that authorities are seeking for must correspond to the market convention, in order to preserve the state of the confidence and avoid disruptive shifts in the demand for money. It is argued that authorities should therefore announce a long-term interest rate target in accordance with the normative objective the opinion has debated on and agreed with. Also, such a conventional target cannot be very distant from the current rate, and the short-term rates authorities control should be adjusted gradually (but not slowly). Moving the interest rate convention is harder to get in the context of the current crisis, because of the deleterious effects on private and public accounts, and thereby on the state of confidence, that the innumerable amounts of bad debts have carried. We put forward strong arguments in favour of reducing the amount of bad debts by means of temporary large public deficits and accommodating monetary policies (which is not to say permanent large deficits and inflationary policies), even though long-term interest rate do not respond much to the short-term impulses of central banks.interest rate; rule; convention; monetary policy; financial crisis

The macroeconomic governance of the European Monetary Union: A Keynesian perspective

Extending Asensio's closed-economy framework (2005a,b) to a monetary union, we show that theprinciples of governance which emanate from the so called "New Consensus in Macroeconomics"(NCM), and therefore have been designed for presumed stationary regimes, may cause severedysfunctions, such as depressive macroeconomic policies and unemployment traps, in non-ergodicregimes. The Keynesian approach, on the other hand, pleads in favour of important changes in thecurrent governance of the eurozone. First, since the European Central Bank can not repress distributiveinflationary pressures without having non-temporary depressive effects on aggregate demand andemployment, authorities should recognize that the best way for controlling this type of inflation restson a consensual distribution of income. Second, authorities should abandon any "optimal rule"designed in order to stabilize the economy near to an imaginary "natural" trend. Keynesian uncertaintyrather suggests a gradual and pragmatic approach to macroeconomic policy. From this perspective, weshow that the European Monetary Union could take advantage of the complementarity between thecommon monetary policy and the national budgetary and fiscal instruments.Monetary policy, Fiscal policy, Monetary union, Macroeconomic governance,Post-Keynesian

Applications of an exact counting formula in the Bousso-Polchinski Landscape

The Bousso-Polchinski (BP) Landscape is a proposal for solving the Cosmological Constant Problem. The solution requires counting the states in a very thin shell in flux space. We find an exact formula for this counting problem which has two simple asymptotic regime one of them being the method of counting low $\Lambda$ states given originally by Bousso and Polchinski. We finally give some applications of the extended formula: a robust property of the Landscape which can be identified with an effective occupation number, an estimator for the minimum cosmological constant and a possible influence on the KKLT stabilization mechanism.Comment: 43 pages, 11 figures, 2 appendices. We have added a new section (3.4) on the influence of the fraction of non-vanishing fluxes in the KKLT mechanism. Other minor changes also mad

On the inversion of Stokes profiles with local stray-light contamination

Obtaining the magnetic properties of non-resolved structures in the solar photosphere is always challenging and problems arise because the inversion is carried out through the numerical minimization of a merit function that depends on the proposed model. We investigate the reliability of inversions in which the stray-light contamination is obtained from the same observations as a local average. In this case, we show that it is fundamental to include the covariance between the observed Stokes profiles and the stray-light contamination. The ensuing modified merit function of the inversion process penalizes large stray-light contaminations simply because of the presence of positive correlations between the observables and the stray-light, fundamentally produced by spatially variable systematics. We caution that using the wrong merit function, artificially large stray-light contaminations might be inferred. Since this effect disappears if the stray-light contamination is obtained as an average over the full field-of-view, we recommend to take into account stray-light contamination using a global approach.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Consequences of moduli stabilization in the Einstein-Maxwell landscape

A toy landscape sector is introduced as a compactification of the Einstein-Maxwell model on a product of two-spheres. Features of the model include: moduli stabilization, a distribution of the effective cosmological constant of the dimensionally reduced 1+1 spacetime, which is different from the analogous distribution of the Bousso-Polchinski landscape, and the absence of the so-called "alpha-star"-problem. This problem arises when the Kachru-Kallosh-Linde-Trivedi stabilization mechanism is naively applied to the states of the Bousso-Polchinski landscape. The model also contains anthropic states, which can be readily constructed without needing any fine-tuning.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, replaced to match the published versio

Determination of the cross-field density structuring in coronal waveguides using the damping of transverse waves

Time and spatial damping of transverse magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) kink oscillations is a source of information on the cross-field variation of the plasma density in coronal waveguides. We show that a probabilistic approach to the problem of determining the density structuring from the observed damping of transverse oscillations enables us to obtain information on the two parameters that characterise the cross-field density profile. The inference is performed by computing the marginal posterior distributions for density contrast and transverse inhomo- geneity length-scale using Bayesian analysis and damping ratios for transverse oscillations under the assumption that damping is produced by resonant absorption. The obtained distributions show that, for damping times of a few oscillatory periods, low density contrasts and short inho- mogeneity length scales are more plausible in explaining observations. This means that valuable information on the cross-field density profile can be obtained even if the inversion problem, with two unknowns and one observable, is a mathematically ill-posed problem.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepte