On GIT quotients of Hilbert and Chow schemes of curves
The aim of this note is to announce some results on the GIT problem for the Hilbert and Chow scheme of curves of degree d and genus g in P^{d-g}, whose full details will appear in a subsequent paper. In particular, we extend the previous results of L. Caporaso up to d>4(2g-2) and we observe that this is sharp. In the range 2(2g-2)<d<7/2(2g-2), we get a complete new description of the GIT quotient. As a corollary, we get a new compactification of the universal Jacobian over the moduli space of pseudo-stable curves.
On the birational geometry of the universal Picard variety
We compute the Kodaira dimension of the universal Picard variety P_{d,g} parameterizing line bundles of degree d on curves of genus g under the assumption that (d-g+1,2g-2)=1. We also give partial results for arbitrary degrees d and we investigate for which degrees the universal Picard varieties are birational.