Are Crises Good for Long-Term Growth? The Role of Political Institutions

This paper provides empirical evidence for the importance of institutions in determining the outcome of crises on long-term growth. Once unobserved country-specific effects and other sources of endogeneity are accounted for, political institutions affect growth through their interaction with crises. The results suggest that only countries with strong democracies, high levels of political competition and external constraints on government can potentially benefit from crises and use them as opportunities to enhance long-term output per capita and productivity growth.

Locally equivalent Floer complexes and unoriented link cobordisms

We show that the local equivalence class of the collapsed link Floer complex $cCFL^\infty(L)$, together with many $\Upsilon$-type invariants extracted from this group, is a concordance invariant of links. In particular, we define a version of the invariants $\Upsilon_L(t)$ and $\nu^+(L)$ when $L$ is a link and we prove that they give a lower bound for the slice genus $g_4(L)$. Furthermore, in the last section of the paper we study the homology group $HFL'(L)$ and its behaviour under unoriented cobordisms. We obtain that a normalized version of the $\upsilon$-set, introduced by Ozsv\'ath, Stipsicz and Szab\'o, produces a lower bound for the 4-dimensional smooth crosscap number $\gamma_4(L)$.Comment: Remark 1.3 and acknowledgements were change

The concordance invariant tau in link grid homology

We introduce a generalization of the Ozsv\'ath-Szab\'o $\tau$-invariant to links by studying a filtered version of link grid homology. We prove that this invariant remains unchanged under strong concordance and we show that it produces a lower bound for the slice genus of a link. We show that this bound is sharp for torus links and we also give an application to Legendrian link invariants in the standard contact 3-sphere