Testing factorization

We briefly review the status of factorization in $b$-decays. We discuss several experimental tests of its nature and stress their importance. We show that decays into mesons which have small decay constants or spin greater than one (`designer mesons') offer a variety of new opportunities.Comment: Invited talk at the 9th International Symposium on Heavy Flavor Physics (HF9), 10-13 September 2001, Caltech, Pasadena. To be published in the proceedings; 8 pages, 1 figure, uses aippro

Work organization and preferences dynamics

We present a model with intergenerational transmission of preferences providing a joint explanation of preference evolution and of work organization changes in a society. We focus on the preference for autonomy, defined as an individual's degree of initiative and the value they attach to self direction. We show that the economy has several steady states with different levels of worker autonomy and of the degree of coercion in the work place. The Industrial Revolution and the recent return of flexible forms of organization enable us to illustrate the existence of organizational path dependency. Indeed, the current technological shocks, impacting on the long-run distribution of preferences, modify the future possibilities of adoption of new organizational forms.Cultural transmission, work organization, industrial revolution, historical path dependency.

Pauli-Villars regularization in DLCQ

Calculations in a (3+1)-dimensional model indicate that Pauli-Villars regularization can be combined with discrete light-cone quantization (DLCQ) to solve at least some field theories nonperturbatively. Discrete momentum states of Pauli-Villars particles are included in the Fock basis to automatically generate needed counterterms; the resultant increase in basis size is found acceptable. The Lanczos algorithm is used to extract the lowest massive eigenstate and eigenvalue of the light-cone Hamiltonian, with basis sizes ranging up to 10.5 million. Each Fock-sector wave function is computed in this way, and from these one can obtain values for various quantities, such as average multiplicities and average momenta of constituents, structure functions, and a form-factor slope.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure; LaTeX, aiproc.sty, epsf.sty; to appear in the proceedings of the Eleventh International Light-Cone Workshop on New Directions in QCD, Kyungju, Korea, June 20-25, 199