Increasing criminal sanctions may reduce crime through two primary mechanisms: deterrence and incapacitation. Disentangling their effects is crucial, since each mechanism has different implications for optimal policy setting. I use the introduction of state add-on gun laws, which enhance sentences for defendants possessing a firearm during the commission of a felony, to isolate the deterrent ef...

The paper is concerned with the problem of state assignment and logic optimization of high speed finite state machines. The method is designed for PAL-based CPLDs implementations. Determining the number of logic levels of the transition function before the state encoding process, and keeping the constraints during the process is the main problem at hand. A number of coding bits, as well as code...

Unit labor cost (ULC) is defined as labor compensation per value added. It captures the cost competitiveness of industries and countries. As labor compensation is wage multiplied by hours worked or number of people employed, it is easy to show that ULC is wage divided by labor productivity. Thus, changes in ULC are often discussed in the context of wage increases and labor productivity. However...

In this script, we consider some technical issues of the implementation of non-linear solvers and time-stepping schemes for the discretization of partial differential equations. The approach described below was used, for example, in the simulation software package UG (cf. [2]) and this text aims to help new developers to understand the program interfaces in this tool. Nevertheless, we omit any ...

We show that the semigroups Sk,` having semigroup presentations 〈a, b : abk = b`a〉 are residually finite and finitely separable. Generally, these semigroups have finite separating images which are finite groups and other finite separating images which are semigroups of order-increasing transformations on a finite partially ordered set. These semigroups thus have vastly different residual and se...