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Land market regulations are often justified by the assumption that activities of foreign and nonagricultural investors drive up land prices in countries with low land price levels. However, empirical knowledge about the dynamics of agricultural land prices across borders is sparse. Using the German reunification as a natural experiment, we study the effect of the former inner German border on the dynamics of agricultural land prices in East and West Germany. We apply a land price diffusion model with an error correction specification that estimates to what extent agricultural land markets are spatially integrated. A novel feature of our model is its ability to distinguish price diffusion within states and across state borders. We find that local agricultural land markets in Germany are linked by a long-run equilibrium relationship. Spatial market integration, however, does not hold among all counties in our study area. Regarding our main research question, we provide evidence for a persistent border effect given that the fraction of spatially integrated counties is larger within states than across the former border. Moreover, we observe non-significant error correction terms for many counties along the former border. From a policy perspective, it is striking to realize that even 25 years after German reunification, pronounced land price differences persist. It is quite likely that price diffusion through existing borders within the EU would take even more time given language barriers, different administrative procedures for land acquisitions, different tax systems, and information asymmetries between domestic and foreign market participants.

It is a well established fact, that – in the case of classical random graphs like variants of Gn,p or random regular graphs – spectral methods yield efficient algorithms for clustering (e. g. colouring or bisec- tion) problems. The theory of large networks emerging recently provides convincing evidence that such networks, albeit looking random in some sense, cannot sensibly be described by classical random graphs. A vari- ety of new types of random graphs have been introduced. One of these types is characterized by the fact that we have a fixed expected degree sequence, that is for each vertex its expected degree is given. Recent theoretical work confirms that spectral methods can be success- fully applied to clustering problems for such random graphs, too – pro- vided that the expected degrees are not too small, in fact ≥ log6 n. In this case however the degree of each vertex is concentrated about its expectation. We show how to remove this restriction and apply spectral methods when the expected degrees are bounded below just by a suitable constant. Our results rely on the observation that techniques developed for the classical sparse Gn,p random graph (that is p = c/n) can be transferred to the present situation, provided we consider a suitably normalized ad- jacency matrix: We divide each entry of the adjacency matrix by the product of the expected degrees of the incident vertices. Given the host of spectral techniques developed for Gn,p this observation should be of independent interest.

The present volume consists of eight studies dealing with various aspects of Prosodic Phonology (see Booij 1983, Nespor & Vogel 1986 and much current work). The languages dealt with below include English, German, Italian, Luganda, Ndebele, Persian, Polish, Spanish, and Tamil.

A measurement is presented of the $\mathrm {Z}/\gamma ^{*} \rightarrow \tau \tau $ cross section in $\text {pp}$ collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13\hbox { TeV}$ , using data recorded by the CMS experiment at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $2.3\hbox { fb}^{-1}$ . The product of the inclusive cross section and branching fraction is measured to be $\sigma (\text {pp} \rightarrow \mathrm {Z}/\gamma ^{*}\text {+X}) \, \mathcal {B}(\mathrm {Z}/\gamma ^{*} \rightarrow \tau \tau ) = 1848 \pm 12\,(\text {stat}) \pm 67\text { (syst \,+\,lumi)}\text { pb} $ , in agreement with the standard model expectation, computed at next-to-next-to-leading order accuracy in perturbative quantum chromodynamics. The measurement is used to validate new analysis techniques relevant for future measurements of $\tau $ lepton production. The measurement also provides the reconstruction efficiency and energy scale for $\tau $ decays to hadrons $\,+\,\nu _{\tau }$ final states, determined with respective relative uncertainties of 2.2 and 0.9%. The European physical journal / C 78(9), 708 (2018). doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-018-6146-9 Published by Springer, Heidelberg

This assessment concept paper provides a methodological approach for the formative assessment and summative assessment of GIZ’s International Water Stewardship Programme (IWaSP) and its component partnerships. IWaSP promotes partnerships between the private sector (corporations and SMEs), the public sector and the society to tackle shared water risks and to manage water equitably to meet competing demands. This evaluative assessment concept describes the generic approach of the assessment, the cycle for the assessment of partnerships, the country coordination and the programme. The overall goal of the assessment is to provide evidence for taxpayers in the donor countries and for citizens in the partnership countries. It also aims to examine the relevance of the programme’s approach, its underlying assumptions, and the heterogeneity of stakeholders and their specific interests. Since the assessment is also formative feedback to GIZ and IWaSP stakeholders, it aims to guide the future implementation of the partnerships and the programme. The assessment is guided by several generic principles: assessing for learning (formative assessment); assessment of learning (summative assessment); iteration; structuring complex problems; unblocking results; and conformity with other assessment criteria set out by the OECD the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and GIZ’s Capacity Works success factors (GTZ 2010). These generic criteria are adapted to the three levels of the IWaSP structure. First, the assessment cycle for partnerships includes the validation of stakeholders (mapping), the analysis of secondary literature, face-to-face interviews and a process for feeding back the findings. Generic tools are provided to guide the assessment, such as a list of key documents and an interview guide. Partnerships will undergo a baseline, interim assessment and final assessment. As progress varies across individual IWaSP partnerships, the steps taken by each partnership to assess shared water risks, prioritise and agree interventions, are expected to differ slightly. In response to these differences the sequencing and content of the assessment may need to be adapted for the different partnerships. Second, the country-level assessment considers issues such as the coordination of partnerships within a country, scoping strategies, and interaction between partnership and the programme. Information gathered during the partnership assessment feeds into the country-level assessment. Third, the assessment cycle for the programme involves a document and monitoring plan analysis, reflection on the different perspectives of the programme staff, country staff and external stakeholders. The final section is concerned with reporting. Several annexes are provided relating to the organisation and preparation of the assessment, including question guidelines and analysis procedures.

GFZ acts as a global analysis center of the International GNSS Service (IGS) and provides ultra-rapid (last 24h), rapid (last day), and final (last week) solutions for GPS and GLONASS. The ultra-rapid solution series is published eight times per day with a delay of around three hours. The 3D seismic velocity models are results of a local earthquake tomography which is performed to illuminate the crustal and uppermost mantle structure beneath the southern Puna plateau and to test the delamination hypothesis. The Southern Puna is distinctive from the rest of the Central Andean plateau in having a higher topographic elevation, a thinner lithosphere and in being flanked to the south by the Chilean flat slab region. Previous investigations involving geochemical, geological and geophysical observations, have invoked lithospheric delamination to explain the distinctive magmatic and structural history, elevation and lithospheric thickness of the region. In the present study, Vp and Vp/Vs ratios were obtained using travel time variations recorded by 75 temporary seismic stations between 2007 and 2009. The earthquakes catalog (Mulcahy et al., 2014) contains 1903 local earthquakes (25077 P- and 14059 S-picks). A minimum 1D model is derived with software VELEST (Kissling et al., 1995). The 3D tomographic inversion is performed with software SIMULPS (Thurber, 1983; Evans et al., 1994). Spread values are used to define well resolved model domains (6 for Vp and 5.5 for Vp/Vs), which are calculated from the model resolution matrix (Toomey & Foulger, 1989). The data are provided as one tar.gz archive. Individual ASCII files contain, at each depth from 0 to 200 km: - Vp model (model.vp.depth_???km), format: longitude, latitude, depth, Vp perturbation, absolute Vp - Vp/Vs model (model.vpvs.depth_???km), format: longitude, latitude, depth, Vp/Vs perturbation, absolute Vp/Vs - spread values for Vp (spread.vp.depth_???km), format: longitude, latitude, depth, spread value - spread values for Vp/Vs model (spread.vpvs.depth_???km), format: longitude, latitude, depth, spread value

Understanding physical processes prior and during eruptions remains challenging, due to uncertainties about subsurface structures and undetected processes within the volcano. Here, the authors use a dedicated fibre-optic cable to obtain strain data and identify volcanic events and image hidden near-surface volcanic structural features at Etna volcano, Italy. In the paper Jousset et al. (2022), we detect and characterize strain signals associated with explosions, and we find evidences for non-linear grain interactions in a scoria layer of spatially variable thickness. We also demonstrate that wavefield separation allows us to incrementally investigate the ground response to various excitation mechanisms, and we identify very small volcanic events, which we relate to fluid migration and degassing. We recorded seismic signals from natural and man-made sources with 2-m spacing along a 1.5-km-long fibre-optic cable layout near the summit of actives craters of Etna volcano, Italy. Those results provide the basis for improved volcano monitoring and hazard assessment using DAS. This data publication contains the full data set used for the analysis. This data set comprises strain-rate data from 1 iDAS interrogator (~750 traces), velocity data from 15 geophones and 4 broadband seismometers, and infrasonic pressure data from infrasound sensors. For further explanation of the data and related processing steps, please refer to Jousset et al. (2022).

The approach outlined in the present paper is based on observations made with African languages. Although the 1000-odd African languages display a remarkable extent of structural variation, there are certain structures that do not seem to occur in Africa. Thus, to our knowledge, an African language having anything that could be called an ergative case or a numeral classifier system has not been discovered so far. It may turn out that our approach can, in a modified form, be made applicable to languages outside Africa. This , however, is a possibility that has not been considered here. The present approach is based essentially on diachronic findings in that it uses observations on language evolution in order to account for structural differences between languages. Thus, it has double potential: apart from describing and explaining typological diversity it can also be material to reconstructing language history.