The Antebellum Tariff on Cotton Textiles Revisited

Recent research has suggested that the antebellum U.S. cotton textile industry would have been wiped out had it not received tariff protection. We reaffirm Taussig's judgment that the U.S. cotton textile industry was largely independent of the tariff by the 1830s. American and British producers specialized in quite different types of textile products that were poor substitutes for one another. The Walker tariff of 1846, for example, reduced the duties on cotton textiles from nearly 70 percent to 25 percent and imports soared as a result, but there was little change in domestic production. Using data from 1826 to 1860, we estimate the responsiveness of domestic production to fluctuations in import prices and conclude that the industry could have survived even if the tariff had been completely eliminated.

High Tech R&D Subsidies: Estimating the Effects of Sematech

Sparked by concerns about their shrinking market share, 14 leading U.S. semiconductor producers, with the financial assistance of the U.S. government in the form of 100 million in annual subsidies, formed a joint R&D consortium -- Sematech -- in 1987. Using Compustat data on all U.S. semiconductor firms, we estimate the effects of Sematech on members' R&D spending, profitability, investment, and productivity. In so doing we test two hypotheses: the `commitment' hypothesis that Sematech obligates member firms to spend more on high- spillover R&D, and the `sharing' hypothesis that Sematech reduces duplication of member R&D spending. Whereas the commitment hypothesis provides a rationale for the government subsidies, the sharing hypothesis does not. We find that Sematech induced members to cut their overall R&D spending on the order of 300 million per year, providing support for the sharing hypothesis.

Deep Spectroscopy of the MV∼−14.8M_V\sim -14.8 Host Galaxy of a Tidal Disruption Flare in A1795

A likely tidal disruption of a star by the intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) of a dwarf galaxy was recently identified in association with Abell 1795. Without deep spectroscopy for this very faint object, however, the possibility of a more massive background galaxy or even a disk-instability flare from a weak AGN could not be dismissed. We have now obtained 8 hours of Gemini spectroscopy which unambiguously demonstrate that the host galaxy is indeed an extremely low-mass $(M_\ast\sim 3\times 10^8\; {\rm M}_{\odot})$ galaxy in Abell 1795, comparable to the least-massive galaxies determined to host IMBHs via other studies. We find that the spectrum is consistent with the X-ray flare being due to a tidal disruption event rather than an AGN flare. We also set improved limits on the black hole mass $({\rm log}[M_{\bullet}/{\rm M}_{\odot}] \sim 5.3 - 5.7)$ and infer a 15-year X-ray variability of a factor of $> 10^4$. The confirmation of this galaxy-black hole system provides a glimpse into a population of galaxies that is otherwise difficult to study, due to the galaxies' low masses and intrinsic faintness, but which may be important contributors to the tidal disruption rate.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. Accepted by MNRA

Perception of soundscapes : an interdisciplinary approach

This paper takes an overall view of findings from the Positive Soundscape Project, a large inter-disciplinary soundscapes study. Qualitative fieldwork (soundwalks and focus groups) have found that soundscape perception is influenced by cognitive effects such as the meaning of a soundscape and its components, and how information is conveyed by a soundscape, for example on the behaviour of people within the soundscape. Three significant clusters were found in the language people use to describe soundscapes: sound sources, sound descriptors and soundscape descriptors. Results from listening tests and soundwalks have been integrated to show that the two principal dimensions of soundscape emotional response seem to be calmness and vibrancy. Further, vibrancy seems to have two aspects: organisation of sounds and changes over time. The possible application of the results to soundscape assessment and design are briefly discussed