From Moral Responsibility to Legal Responsibility in the Conduct of War

Different societies came to consider certain behaviors as morally wrong, and, in time, due to a more or less general practice, those behaviors have also become legally prohibited. While, nowadays, the existence of legal responsibility of states and individuals for certain reprehensible acts committed during an armed conflict, international or non-international, is hard to be disputed, an inquiry into the manner in which the behavior of the belligerents has come to be considered reveals long discussions in the field of morals and theory of morality, and, especially, regarding the different manner of establishing the elements to whom obedience is rather owed (the divinity, the sovereign, the law) and the relations between these. Hence, the present paper aims at analyzing the connections between moral responsibility and legal responsibility for wrongful behaviur during war in a diachronic approach, along with the major shifts in paradigm (codification and individual liability). Understanding morality as practice, convention, custom, we are arguing that the nowadays requirement of liability for war crimes appeared due to an assumed intention and practice of the decision-making entities (the sovereign, the state) and, ultimately, to a decision-making process of the most influential states

Production and financial decisions under uncertainty

This paper proposes a model of an incomplete markets economy with pro- duction, in which the firm acts as financial innovator by issuing claims against its stock. The firm’s objective is to maximize its adjusted value, which is the sum of the market value and the shareholders’ surplus from their trades in the stock markets. If a firm maximizes its adjusted value, then its financial policy is relevant (i.e., Modigliani-Miller theorem does not hold), equilibrium outcomes are stable to shareholders’ renegotiation and endogenously incomplete markets typically arise at the equilibrium. If the firm is competitive in the financial markets, the adjusted value coincides with the Grossman-Hart objective.firm’s objective, incomplete markets, shareholder preferences

Some Business Cycles Consequences of Signing Trade Agreements: The Case of NAFTA

This paper investigates the effects of signing a trade agreement on the correlations of the business cycle fluctuations of consumption, investment and output between two countries. We construct an international business cycle model with trade costs and we calibrate it to the United States and Mexico in order to estimate the impact of NAFTA on their co-movements. Although there exist some discrepancies between the theory and data in the degree of correlation, the direction of change corresponds to the one in the data.International Business Cycles; Trade Agreements; International Co-movements

Some Business Cycle Consequences of Trade Agreements:The Case of the North American Free Trade Agreement

This paper investigates the effects of signing a trade agreement on the correlations of the business cycle fluctuations of consumption, investment and output between two countries. We construct an international business cycle model with trade costs and we calibrate it to the United States and Mexico in order to estimate the impact of NAFTA on their co-movements. Although there exist some discrepancies between the theory and data in the degree of correlation, the direction of change corresponds to the one in the data.International Business Cycles, Trade Agreements, International Co-movements

Trade Openness and Output Volatility

This paper studies the effect of trade openness on output volatility. We find that trade openness generally increased output volatility, although this effect was stronger and more significant during 1950-1975 than during 1975-2000. However, if we split the sample into developed and developing countries, we observe that more openness increased volatility in developing countries, while it helped smooth output in developed countries. We also find that the size of the government may have increased volatility in less developed countries. Part of the positive relation between openness and volatility may be explained by the positive relation between openness and government size. Another important finding of this paper is that once we control for government size and some measures of external risk, such as terms of trade volatility and export concentration index, the effect of openness on the output volatility turns out to be negative.Trade; Openness; Volatility

Thermodynamic optimization of global circulation and climate

The constructal law of generation of flow structure is used to predict the main features of global circulation and climate. The flow structure is the atmospheric and oceanic circulation. This feature is modelled as convection loops, and added to the earth model as a heat engine heated by the Sun and cooled by the background. It is shown that the dissipation of the power produced by the earth engine can be maximized by selecting the proper balance between the hot and cold zones of the Earth, and by optimizing the thermal conductance of the circulation loops. The optimized features agree with the main characteristics of global circulation and climate. The robustness of these predictions, and the place of the constructal law as a selfstanding principle in thermodynamics, are discussed

Constructal theory of global circulation and climate

The constructal law states that every flow system evolves in time so that it develops the flow architecture that maximizes flow access under the constraints posed to the flow. Earlier applications of the constructal law recommended it as a self-standing law that is distinct from the second law of thermodynamics. In this paper, we develop a model of heat transport on the earth surface that accounts for the solar and terrestrial radiation as the heat source and heat sink and with natural convection loops as the transport mechanism. In the first part of the paper, the constructal law is invoked to optimize the latitude of the boundary between the Hadley and the Ferrel cells, and the boundary between the Ferrel and the Polar cells. The average temperature of the earth surface, the convective conductance in the horizontal direction as well as other parameters defining the latitudinal circulation also match the observed values. In the second part of the paper, the constructal law is invoked in the analysis of atmospheric circulation at the diurnal scale. Here the heat transport is optimized against the Ekman number. Even though this second optimization is based on very different variables than in the first part of the paper, it produces practically the same results for the earth surface temperature and the other variables. The earth averaged temperature difference between day and night was found to be approximately 7 K, which matches the observed value. The accumulation of coincidences between theoretical predictions and natural flow configuration adds weight to the claim that the constructal law is a law of nature

Optimal behavior of viscoelastic flow at resonant frequencies

The global entropy generation rate in the zero-mean oscillatory flow of a Maxwell fluid in a pipe is analyzed with the aim at determining its behavior at resonant flow conditions. This quantity is calculated explicitly using the analytic expression for the velocity field and assuming isothermal conditions. The global entropy generation rate shows well-defined peaks at the resonant frequencies where the flow displays maximum velocities. It was found that resonant frequencies can be considered optimal in the sense that they maximize the power transmitted to the pulsating flow at the expense of maximum dissipation.Comment: Paper accepted to be published in Phys. Rev.

Supplement to ``Martingale properties of self-enforcing debt''

We present some complementary results to Bidian and Bejan (2012). Part 1 provides necessary and sufficient transversality conditions for an agent's optimization problem. They are extensions to stochastic environments of the conditions given by Kocherlakota (1992), or alternatively, extensions to nonzero debt constraints of the corresponding conditions in Forno2003}. Part \ref{ap:B} presents an elementary proof of the characterization of NTT debt limits (Theorem 3.5 in the main paper) for the case when debt constraints bind in bounded time, that requires no martingale techniques or boundedness assumptions on the discounted debt limits. Part \ref{ap:C} complements results in Section 5.1 (in the main paper), showing that all the equilibria that can sustain bubbles under an interdiction to trade can be achieved from fixed, zero initial wealth for the agents. Thus endogeneity of debt limits causes multiplicity of not only asset prices (through bubbles), but also of real equilibrium allocations.rational bubbles, transversality conditions, endogenous debt limits, not-too-tight constraints, self-enforcing debt, limited enforcement