The Organizational Evolution of Markets for Wood Products in the Southern United States

This paper represents the first case study attempt to develop a transaction cost conceptual model to describe industry evolution of the paper and lumber industries in the Southern United States around the late 1800s and early 1900s. We use transaction cost theory to explain the co-evolution of markets for wood products noting that variation in the level and type of investments made in physical and human capital assets needed to manage paper and lumber miller operations had a significant influence on the use of wood dealer systems compared to more vertically organized business arrangements. We identify some testable hypotheses and areas of future research.Industry Evolution, Contracting, Property Rights, Vertical Integration, Forest Products, Industrial Organization, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, L14, L24, L73, J24,

On thermodynamic and quantum fluctuations of cosmological constant

We discuss from the condensed-matter point of view the recent idea that the Poisson fluctuations of cosmological constant about zero could be a source of the observed dark energy. We argue that the thermodynamic fluctuations of Lambda are much bigger. Since the amplitude of fluctuations is proportional to V^{-1/2}, where V is the volume of the Universe, the present constraint on the cosmological constant provides the lower limit for V, which is much bigger than the volume within the cosmological horizon.Comment: 4 pages, version submitted to JETP Letter

Coordinate Confusion in Conformal Cosmology

A straight-forward interpretation of standard Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) cosmologies is that objects move apart due to the expansion of space, and that sufficiently distant galaxies must be receding at velocities exceeding the speed of light. Recently, however, it has been suggested that a simple transformation into conformal coordinates can remove superluminal recession velocities, and hence the concept of the expansion of space should be abandoned. This work demonstrates that such conformal transformations do not eliminate superluminal recession velocities for open or flat matter-only FRLW cosmologies, and all possess superluminal expansion. Hence, the attack on the concept of the expansion of space based on this is poorly founded. This work concludes by emphasizing that the expansion of space is perfectly valid in the general relativistic framework, however, asking the question of whether space really expands is a futile exercise.Comment: 5 pages, accepted for publication in MNRAS Letter