The productive role of public infrastructure: A critical review of recent literature

The publication of two empirical articles by Aschauer in 1989 brought a renewed interest in the study of the productive role of public infrastructure. Since then, many empirical studies as well as a few surveys have been published not only in regional science journals but also in main stream economics journals. The interest in the subject and the controversy are both high, which constitute two major ingredients for our critical review of recent literature. Our purpose in this paper is to evaluate the recent contributions identifying approaches followed, results obtained, major shortcomings of the empirical evidence produced, areas of strong controversy and promising methodologies for future research.

Electron heating and mechanical properties of graphene

The heating of electrons in graphene by laser irradiation, and its effects on the lattice structure, are studied. Values for the temperature of the electron system in realistic situations are obtained. For sufficiently high electron temperatures, the occupancy of the states in the $\sigma$ band of graphene is modified. The strength of the carbon-carbon bonds changes, leading to the emergence of strains, and to buckling in suspended samples. While most applications of `strain engineering' in two dimensional materials focus on the effects of strains on electronic properties, the effect studied here leads to alterations of the structure induced by light. This novel optomechanical coupling can induce deflections in the order of $\sim 50$ nm in micron size samples

Marked Gibbs measures via cluster expansion

We give a sufficiently detailed account on the construction of marked Gibbs measures in the high temperature and low fugacity regime. This is proved for a wide class of underlying spaces and potentials such that stability and integrability conditions are satisfied. That is, for state space we take a locally compact separable metric space $X$ and a separable metric space $S$ for the mark space. This framework allowed us to cover several models of classical and quantum statistical physics. Furthermore, we also show how to extend the construction for more general spaces as e.g., separable standard Borel spaces. The construction of the marked Gibbs measures is based on the method of cluster expansion.Comment: 51 page

The cooperative endorsement of a strategic game

This note provides a way to translate a strategic game to a characteristic cooperative game assuming that the set of players of the cooperative game is the set of pure actions of the strategic game. Coalitions generated with only one action for each player and the total coalition characterize the Core. We calculate the worth of the total coalition to guarantee the non-emptyness condition. In particular, for a two-player game, this value is equal to the maximal sum of the diagonals.Cooperative games, core