Sovereign debt renegotiations take an average of nine years for bank loans but only one year for bonds. Our paper provides an explanation to this finding by highlighting one key difference between bank loans and bonds: bank debt is rarely traded, while bond debt is heavily traded on the secondary market. The secondary market plays a crucial information revelation role in shortening renegotiatio...

In this paper we shall be concerned with generalizing the ideas of ’metric’ and geodesic for a complex manifold M : we emphasize that our curves will be complex ones; a metric will be, informally speaking, a symmetric quadratic form on the holomorphic tangent space at each point p ∈ M , holomorphically depending on the point itself; of course, it couldn’t have any ’signature’, but, by simmetry,...

When autonomous robots begin to share the human living and working spaces, safety becomes paramount. It is legally required that the safety of such systems is ensured, e. g. by certification according to relevant standards such as IEC 61508. However, such safety considerations are usually not addressed in academic robotics. In this paper we report on one such successful endeavour, which is conc...

This paper offers a detailed assessment of the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) effect in eight Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC8). Several features distinguish this study from others: First, we investigate a variety of specifications of extended models. Nonhomogeneity of wages, deviations from PPP in tradables and demand side variables are found to importantly contribute to explain inflation...

a significant and substantial fall in short-circuit current and potential difference was observed. The changes began after a lag period of at least 10 min and continued over a period of 60 min. The decrease in short-circuit current at the end of 1 h averaged 44%. The same fraction from the urine of normal subjects produced no significant change in either short-circuit current or potential diffe...

This paper examines various implications of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs), namely Customs Unions (CUs) and Free Trade Areas (FTAs), in the context of a multi-country general equilibrium model based on comparative advantage considerations. We calibrate the model to represent countries with symmetric endowments, and compare the impact of those agreements with free trade and a non-cooperati...

A Particle-Into-Liquid Sampler – Total Organic Carbon (PILS-TOC) and fraction collector system was flown aboard a Twin Otter aircraft sampling prescribed burning emissions in South Carolina in November 2011 to obtain smoke marker measurements. The fraction collector provided 2 min time-integrated offline samples for carbohydrate (i.e., smoke markers levoglucosan, mannosan, and galactosan) analy...

In recent years, reductions in institutional barriers to international investment and in non-tax costs of transferring capital have left the existence of international corporate tax differentials as one of the most significant remaining causes of distortion to the optimum global allocation of resources. In the debate as to how to reduce this distortion, two main schools of thought have emerged....

The Galactic center harbors some of the most massive star clusters known in the Galaxy: the Arches and the Quintuplet. Based on the Chandra observations of these clusters (PI: Wang) which recently became public, I discuss the X-ray emission from the massive stars in these clusters. Confirming the general trend for Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars being X-ray dim, none of them is detected in the Quintuplet...