I use monthly data on industrial production to estimate the distribution of international business cycle correlations since the 1980’s, with focus on the current turmoil. The degree of international correlation in national business cycles since the end of 2008 is unprecedented in three decades. From 2008M12, an upward shift in the cross-sectional distribution of cycles synchronization is sizeab...

Asymmetric cycles with more than half of the cycle spent shortening enhance the mechanical power output of muscle during flight and vocalisation. However, strategies that enhance muscle mechanical power output often compromise efficiency. In order to establish whether a trade-off necessarily exists between power and efficiency, we investigated the effects of asymmetric muscle length trajectorie...

We present a theory of why some countries negotiate trade agreements during economic downturns. We argue that political leaders can gain from such agreements because of the signals they send to their publics. Publics are less likely to blame leaders for bad economic conditions when they have implemented sound economic policies, such as signing and implementing agreements designed to liberalize ...

A trade-off between the sensory modalities of vision and hearing is likely to have occurred in echolocating bats as the sophisticated mechanism of laryngeal echolocation requires considerable neural processing and has reduced the reliance of echolocating bats on vision for perceiving the environment. If such a trade-off exists, it is reasonable to hypothesize that some genes involved in visual ...

This paper introduces food quality as a new parameter, together with energy, to determine an optimal cooling time between defrost cycles. A new defrost-on-demand scheme is proposed. It uses a feedback loop consisting of on-line model updating and estimation as well as a model based optimization. This scheme automatically adjusts the time interval between defrost cycles with varying operating co...

The behavioral-inheritance relations of [7, 8] can be used to compare the life cycles of objects de ned in terms of Petri nets. They yield partial orders on object life cycles (OLCs). Based on these orders, we de ne concepts such as the greatest common divisor and the least common multiple of a set of OLCs. These concepts have practical relevance: In component-based design, work ow management, ...

In 1958, A.W. Phillips discovered a strong negative correlation between inflation and unemployment in United Kingdom data. Continuing controversy surrounds the long-run trade-off suggested by a curve he drew through these observations. We conduct a wide-ranging investigation of the post-war U.S. Phillips correlations and Phillips curve. Many economists view the Phillips correlations as chimeric...

This paper analyzes the impact of country specific risk on a firm’s choice between serving a foreign market through exports or affiliates sales. We find that country pairs with less correlated business cycles trade more, relative to multinational production. Moreover, the stochastic properties of world output fluctuations affect the cross country patterns of trade flows and foreign affiliate sa...

We propose a model of cycles of distrust and conflict. Overlapping generations of agents from two groups sequentially play coordination games under incomplete information about whether the other side consists of “extremists” who will never take the good/trusting action. Good actions may be mistakenly perceived as bad/distrusting actions. We also assume that there is limited information about th...