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)<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.