Why Did Rhode Island have Slower Employment Growth than the Nation During the Recovery Period, 2009-16?

[Excerpt] When most of the nation was recovering from the Great Recession, Rhode Island was on a different path. From June 2009 to June 2016, national employment increased by 10.1 percent while employment in Rhode Island increased by only 5.1 percent. To examine why Rhode Island lagged behind employment growth rates nationwide, this Beyond the Numbers article compares industry employment growth trends in Rhode Island with overall growth trends over the 2009–16 period for the United States, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program. This 7-year period generally coincides with the national economic recovery, which officially began in June 2009. Using methodology that can be used for any state, this article isolates the impact of industry job growth on overall statewide job growth. The analysis suggests that had employment growth in the state’s largest supersector, education and health services, matched that of the national average, the gap between overall state employment growth and the national average would have closed by more than half. Specifically, job losses in the colleges and universities industry, within the educational services sector, and the hospital subsector, within the healthcare and social assistance sector, were responsible for depressed overall growth in this supersector and the state overall

On the shape of capillarity droplets in a container

We provide a quantitative description of global minimizers of the Gauss free energy for a liquid droplet bounded in a container in the small volume regime.Comment: 37 pages, 3 figure

Not Always Sparse: Flooding Time in Partially Connected Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper we study mobile ad hoc wireless networks using the notion of evolving connectivity graphs. In such systems, the connectivity changes over time due to the intermittent contacts of mobile terminals. In particular, we are interested in studying the expected flooding time when full connectivity cannot be ensured at each point in time. Even in this case, due to finite contact times durations, connected components may appear in the connectivity graph. Hence, this represents the intermediate case between extreme cases of fully mobile ad hoc networks and fully static ad hoc networks. By using a generalization of edge-Markovian graphs, we extend the existing models based on sparse scenarios to this intermediate case and calculate the expected flooding time. We also propose bounds that have reduced computational complexity. Finally, numerical results validate our models

'The Accidental Birth of Hate Crime in Transnational Criminal Law: 'Discrepancies' in the Prosecution for "Incitement to Genocide" during the Nuremberg Process involving the cases of Julius Streicher, Hans Fritzsche and Carl Schmitt.'

This volume of three interrelated studies aims to explore the various contingencies through which individuals responsible, to various degrees, for promoting expressions of racist hate were subjected to markedly different types of legal responses within the landmark Nuremberg trials programme. These contingencies, together with loose judicial reasoning, complicate scholarly efforts to identify the historical emergence of this type of transnational hate crime, and to illustrate the complications that arise when seeking to ascertain its implications as a precedent. It needs to be emphasised at the outset that what follows is not a comprehensive study of the origins of the criminalisation of hate speech in general as this would have to include a full comparative survey of all domestic laws and their judicial interpretation, application and institutional enforcement. In addition, the interaction between domestic, regional and international criminalisations would also have to be addressed in what would amount to a massive multi-volume study, beyond the scope of this study. It is acknowledged that a strong case can be made for a more comprehensive approach, placing the contents of what follows within this wider context of transnational regulation. For example, there has clearly been a measure of interaction, albeit of an inconsistent type, between US immigration and naturalisation law and practice, and international criminal law relating to hate speech, with the Streicher case expressly referred to as a precedent for the idea that "persecution," as a subset of crimes against humanity, can include racist and anti-Semitic propaganda

International agreements on product standard: an incomplete contracting theory

We propose a theory of international agreements on product standards. The key feature of the model is that agreements are viewed as incomplete contracts. In particular, these do not specify standards for products that may arise in the future. One potential remedy to contractual incompleteness is a dispute settlement procedure (DSP) that provides arbitration in states of the world that are not covered by the ex ante agreement. We identify conditions under which a DSP can provide ex-ante efficiency gains, and examine how these gains depend on the fundamentals of the problem. Another potential remedy to contractual incompleteness is given by rigid rules, i.e. rules that are not product-specific. We argue that the nondiscrimination rule is the only rule of this kind that increases ex ante efficiency for any probability distribution over potential products. Finally we show that, under relatively weak conditions, the optimal ex-ante agreement is structured in three parts: (i) a set of clauses that specify standards for existing products; (ii) a rigid nondiscrimination rule, and (iii) a dispute settlement procedure. Although the model focuses on the case of product standards, the analysis suggests a more general incomplete-contracting theory of trade agreements.