A New International Division of Labor in Europe: Offshoring and Outsourcing to Eastern Europe

Europe is reorganizing its international value chain. I document these changes in Europe’s international organization of production with new survey data of Austrian and German firms investing in Eastern Europe. I show estimates of the share of intra-firm trade between Austria and Germany on the one hand and Eastern Europe on the other. Furthermore, I present empirical evidence of the drivers of the new division of labor in Europe. I find among other things that falling trade costs and falling corruption levels as well as improvements in the contracting environment in Eastern Europe are affecting the level of intra-firm imports from Eastern Europe. They are also favoring outsourcing over offshoring. Low organizational costs of hierarchies and large costs of hold-up (when there are no alternative investors in Old Europe or no alternative suppliers in Eastern Europe) are favoring offshoring over outsourcing. Tax holidays granted by host countries in Eastern Europe also mildly affect the organizational choice

The center of pure complex braid groups

Brou\'e, Malle and Rouquier conjectured in that the center of the pure braid group of an irreducible finite complex reflection group is cyclic. We prove this conjecture, for the remaining exceptional types, using the analogous result for the full braid group due to Bessis, and we actually prove the stronger statement that any finite index subgroup of such braid group has cyclic center

Dynamical Bounds for Sturmian Schr\"{o}dinger Operators

The Fibonacci Hamiltonian, that is a Schr\"{o}dinger operator associated to a quasiperiodical sturmian potential with respect to the golden mean has been investigated intensively in recent years. Damanik and Tcheremchantsev developed a method and find a non trivial dynamical upper bound for this model. In this paper, we use this method to generalize to a large family of Sturmian operators dynamical upper bounds and show at sufficently large coupling anomalous transport for operators associated to irrational number with a generic diophantine condition. As a counter example, we exhibit a pathological irrational number which do not verify this condition and show its associated dynamic exponent only has ballistic bound. Moreover, we establish a global lower bound for the lower box counting dimension of the spectrum that is used to obtain a dynamical lower bound for bounded density irrational numbers

The Vanishing Barter Economy in Russia: A Test of the Virtual Economy Hypothesis? Reply to Barry Ickes

This paper is a reply to Barry Ickes' critique of my paper “Trust versus Illusion: What is Driving Demonetization in Russia?” in which I show that the data reject Barry Ickes' Virtual Economy explanation of barter in Russia in favor of an institutional explanation based on the lack of trust

Something to Die for. The Individual as Interruption of the Political in Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political

This article aims to question the anti-individualist stance in Carl Schmitt's concept of the political by uncovering the historical bias of Schmitt's anti-individualism, seen here as one of the main driving forces behind his argument. For Schmitt, the political can take place only when a collectivity is able to declare war to another collectivity on the basis of feeling existentially threatened by the latter. As such, Schmitt's framework implies the inescapable possibility of war, as the condition which makes possible the political. Acknowledging the previous criticisms of Schmitt raised by John Rawls and Iris Marion Young, this article takes a different path by pointing to certain historically tacit assumptions in 1927 Germany which Schmitt took for granted, but which are not suitable for a contemporary political theory. The demonstration is done first by showing how the structure of interruption functions in the works of Schmitt, then showing how he conceives of the individual as a possible interruption of the political in history, and then placing this structure of interruption in the historical context of Schmitt's writing

SELFAS2 : radio emission from cosmic ray air showers. Effect of realistic air refractive index

Using the simulation code SELFAS2, we present predictions of the radio signal emitted by extensive air showers (EAS) during their development in the atmosphere. The radio emission in the MHz range coming from air showers is the superposition of two mechanisms: the variation of the transverse current due to the systematic opposite drift of electrons and positrons in the Earth's magnetic field and the variation of the charge excess due to the electrons in excess in the shower front. In this paper, we stress particularly the effect of the realistic air refractive index on the radio signal predicted by SELFAS2.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure