Falling long-term interest rates worldwide have led some policy-makers to speculate on the emergence of a glut of global saving (Bernanke, 2005). The global trend contrasts markedly with that of the United States, where the public discussion has focused on an ongoing decline of private saving and the re-emergence of large budget deficits. The absence of saving in the United States, in conjuncti...

Metabolic efficiency depends on the balance between supply and demand of metabolites, which is sensitive to environmental and physiological fluctuations, or noise, causing shortages or surpluses in the metabolic pipeline. How cells can reliably optimize biomass production in the presence of metabolic fluctuations is a fundamental question that has not been fully answered. Here we use mathematic...

This paper attempts to explain the fundamental cause of China’s growing imbalance problems. Economic data confirm that the key structural imbalance problems, such as overinvestment, large current account surpluses, low consumption share of GDP and income inequality, have all deteriorated over the past few years, despite continuous policy efforts to correct these problems. We argue that the key ...

Abstract: Theoretical literature seeking to explain public-debt accumulation exploded in recent years as debt crises emerged in many nations. However, empirical evaluation of political-economy theories has lagged that of basic economic-conditions models. This paper joins those beginning to redress the imbalance, operationalizing and evaluating standard electoral and partisan budget-cycles argum...

Overview Man-portable air defence systems have received increasing political attention in recent years, because of the demonstrable risk that they pose to both military and civilian aircraft. They have been catalogued in some of the most poorly secured national stockpiles. In many more cases, questions remain about their numbers and the security measures in place to protect them from diversion....

The paper shows that common fiscal rules, such as a limit to the deficit-output ratio, induce an ‘‘escape clause’’–type fiscal policy, similar to that studied for monetary policy by Flood and Isard (1988 and 1989) and Lohmann (1992): The government resorts to an active stabilization (for example, countercyclical) policy only during ‘‘exceptional times’’ by running deficits in recession phases a...

We give a convergence proof for the approximation by sparse collocation of Hilbert-space-valued functions depending on countably many Gaussian random variables. Such functions appear as solutions of elliptic PDEs with lognormal diffusion coefficients. We outline a general L2-convergence theory based on previous work by Bachmayr et al. (2016) and Chen (2016) and establish an algebraic convergenc...

This paper investigates how defined benefit pensions deficits/surpluses influence UK company valuation under the fair value accounting regime that became mandatory in 2006 with the introduction of IAS 19. Using a sample of FTSE firms from 2006 to 2012 we find that reported pension deficits significantly reduce the market value of a company, with the market valuation of deficits being larger tha...

The effects of uniting separated markets, each monopolized by a producer, into a globalized oligopolistic market, which is regarded as a non-cooperative game, are investigated. The cases where such globalization degrades the profits or surpluses of all producers, are examined. Linear demand and production functions are considered. The revenues of producers and consumers are assumed to be indepe...

We address the question of aggregating the preferences of voters in the context of participatory budgeting. We scrutinize the voting method currently used in practice, underline its drawbacks, and introduce a novel scheme tailored to this setting, which we call “Knapsack Voting”. We study its strategic properties we show that it is strategy-proof under a natural model of utility (a dis-utility ...