After Recess: Historical Practice, Textual Ambiguity, and Constitutional Adverse Possession

The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Recess Appointments Clause in NLRB v. Noel Canning stands as one of the Supreme Court’s most significant endorsements of the relevance of “historical gloss” to the interpretation of the separation of powers. This Article uses the decision as a vehicle for examining the relationship between interpretive methodology and historical practice, and between historical practice and textual ambiguity. As the Article explains, Noel Canning exemplifies how the constitutional text, perceptions about clarity or ambiguity, and “extra-textual” considerations such as historical practice operate interactively rather than as separate elements of interpretation. The decision also provides a useful entry point into critically analyzing the concept of constitutional “liquidation,” which the majority in Noel Canning seemed to conflate with historical gloss but which seems more consistent with the approach to historical practice reflected in Justice Scalia’s concurrence in the judgment. Finally, this Article argues that the historical gloss approach, when applied cautiously and with sensitivity to the potential concerns raised by Justice Scalia and others, is not vulnerable to the charge of licensing executive aggrandizement by “adverse possession.

Topological phases of fermions in one dimension

In this paper we show how the classification of topological phases in insulators and superconductors is changed by interactions, in the case of 1D systems. We focus on the TR-invariant Majorana chain (BDI symmetry class). While the band classification yields an integer topological index $k$, it is known that phases characterized by values of $k$ in the same equivalence class modulo 8 can be adiabatically transformed one to another by adding suitable interaction terms. Here we show that the eight equivalence classes are distinct and exhaustive, and provide a physical interpretation for the interacting invariant modulo 8. The different phases realize different Altland-Zirnbauer classes of the reduced density matrix for an entanglement bipartition into two half-chains. We generalize these results to the classification of all one dimensional gapped phases of fermionic systems with possible anti-unitary symmetries, utilizing the algebraic framework of central extensions. We use matrix product state methods to prove our results.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, v2: references adde

Secular drivers of the global real interest rate

Long-term real interest rates across the world have fallen by about 450 basis points over the past 30 years. The co-movement in rates across both advanced and emerging economies suggests a common driver: the global neutral real rate may have fallen. In this paper we attempt to identify which secular trends could have driven such a fall. Although there is huge uncertainty, under plausible assumptions we think we can account for around 400 basis points of the 450 basis points fall. Our quantitative analysis highlights slowing global growth as one force that may have pushed down on real rates recently, but shifts in saving and investment preferences appear more important in explaining the long-term decline. We think the global saving schedule has shifted out in recent decades due to demographic forces, higher inequality and to a lesser extent the glut of precautionary saving by emerging markets. Meanwhile, desired levels of investment have fallen as a result of the falling relative price of capital, lower public investment, and due to an increase in the spread between risk-free and actual interest rates. Moreover, most of these forces look set to persist and some may even build further. This suggests that the global neutral rate may remain low and perhaps settle at (or slightly below) 1% in the medium to long run. If true, this will have widespread implications for policymakers — not least in how to manage the business cycle if monetary policy is frequently constrained by the zero lower bound

Disentangling interacting symmetry protected phases of fermions in two dimensions

We construct fixed point lattice models for group supercohomology symmetry protected topological (SPT) phases of fermions in 2+1D. A key feature of our approach is to construct finite depth circuits of local unitaries that explicitly build the ground states from a tensor product state. We then recover the classification of fermionic SPT phases, including the group structure under stacking, from the algebraic composition rules of these circuits. Furthermore, we show that the circuits are symmetric, implying that the group supercohomology phases can be many body localized. Our strategy involves first building an auxiliary bosonic model, and then fermionizing it using the duality of Chen, Kapustin, and Radicevic. One benefit of this approach is that it clearly disentangles the role of the algebraic group supercohomology data, which is used to build the auxiliary bosonic model, from that of the spin structure, which is combinatorially encoded in the lattice and enters only in the fermionization step. In particular this allows us to study our models on 2d spatial manifolds of any topology and to define a lattice-level procedure for ungauging fermion parity.Comment: 17 + 13 pages, 16 figures, v3 published versio

Income inequality, income, and internet searches for status goods : a cross-national study of the association between inequality and well-being

Is there a positive association between a nation’s income inequality and concerns with status competition within that nation? Here we use Google Correlate and Google Trends to examine frequency of internet search terms and find that people in countries in which income inequality is high search relatively more frequently for positional brand names such as Prada, Louis Vuitton, or Chanel. This tendency is stronger among well-developed countries. We find no evidence that income alone is associated with searches for positional goods. We also present evidence that the concern with positional goods does not reflect non-linear effects of income on consumer spending, either across nations or (extending previous findings that people who live in unequal US States search more for positional goods) within the USA. It is concluded that income inequality is associated with greater concerns with positional goods, and that this concern is reflected in internet searching behaviour

Dietary patterns and non-communicable disease risk in Indian adults : secondary analysis of Indian Migration Study data

Acknowledgements The authors thank the IMS study team members and field staff involved in the generation and processing of IMS data. Financial support: This study forms part of the Sustainable and Healthy Diets in India (SAHDI) project supported by the Wellcome Trust ‘Our Planet, Our Health’ programme (grant number 103932). The Wellcome Trust had no role in the design, analysis or writing of this article. The IMS was funded by Wellcome Trust (grant number GR070797MF). L.A.’s PhD studentship is funded by the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Projected health effects of realistic dietary changes to address freshwater constraints in India : a modelling study

Acknowledgements This study forms part of the Sustainable and Healthy Diets in India project supported by the Wellcome Trust's Our Planet, Our Health programme (grant number 103932). LA's PhD is funded by the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health. SA is supported by a Wellcome Trust Capacity Strengthening Strategic Award-Extension phase (grant number WT084754/Z/08/A). We would like to thank Zaid Chalabi (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) for providing valuable guidance on the modelling methods.Peer reviewedPublisher PD