For years scientists have urged national leaders to tackle climate change, based on the assumption that prevention efforts would require the coordinated actions of entire nations to be effective. But as anyone who has watched the past 15 years of international climate negotiations can attest, most countries are still reluctant to take meaningful steps to lower their production of greenhouse gas...

This paper investigates whether the Japanese people were happy and unhappy with the general election conducted on September 11, 2005, in which the Prime Minister, Koizumi, won a landslide victory. We conducted a large survey just after the election to ask people how happy they were and which party they had supported. Although there are consistent tendencies that supporters of ruling parties wer...

This paper estimates the markup for the Mexican manufacturing sector to detect the impact of trade liberalization on market power. Using Hall’s proposal that states that a procyclical Solow residual is an indication of market power, this research estimates the markup for different periods to detect the change in market power after trade liberalization was implemented. We account for the potenti...

MOST PEOPLE AGREE that stock prices sometimes behave in strange ways. Going beyond this simple observation typically proves more difficult. For at least the past quarter century, economists have been well aware that the variation of stock prices does not nicely match the familiar bell-shaped normal distribution.1 The problem is too many extreme movements. Very large increases or decreases would...

We propose a public-key signature and encryption application which strongly relies on identity-based public-key cryptography. By alternately using obvious identity information like names and essential image data of the involved parties as public keys we preserve all advantages gained by identity-based public-key schemes, mainly including the absence of a public-key infrastructure [1]. On the ot...

Gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB) has become a common drug of abuse. It is especially popular at rave parties, where many people can be exposed at one time. GHB is also used by body builders as an anabolic agent, and has reportedly been used as a date-rape drug. Currently it is being investigated for several legitimate medical applications, including narcolepsy treatment and alcohol or opioid withdra...

Who Is the Enemy? We examine who benefits when there is a strong leader in place, and those who benefit when a situation lacks a proper leader. There are fractious terrorist groups who seek to serve the same people in common cause against a common enemy. The groups compete for rents obtained from the public by engaging in actions against the common enemy. We derive a condition under which the c...