Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Can the Strategy of Western Development Narrow Down China's Regional Disparity?

The main causes of the faster growth in China's eastern coastal area, and thus for the rise in income disparity between eastern and western regions, are the rapid increases in foreign trade and foreign investment resulting not only from the government's coastal development strategy but also from inherent advantages of the eastern coastal area. Since 1999, the development strategy for western China has focused on the injection of large amounts of capital, but fiscal constraints make this strategy unsustainable. China's government should allow mobility of the labor force across regions to play a bigger role in solving the income disparity problem.
On Feature Strength: Three Minimalist Approaches to Overt Movement

Procrastinate (Chomsky 1993) favors covert movement; therefore, when movement is overt, it must have been forced to operate early by some special requirement, one that Chomsky codes into strong features. I compare Chomsky's three successive theories of strong features and argue that two ellipsis phenomena, pseudogapping and sluicing, provide evidence bearing on the nature of strong features. I argue that movement or ellipsis can rescue a derivation with a strong feature, and I conclude that PF crash is relevant either directly, as in Chomsky 1993, or indirectly, as in the theory presented in Chomsky 1995a augmented by the multiple-chain theory of pied-piping (especially as interpreted by Ochi (1998)).
The Principle of Minimal Compliance

The syntactic literature discusses a number of phenomena in which a constraint that rules out a certain class of syntactic dependencies fails to rule out structures containing both an ill-formed dependency and a well-formed dependency; well-formed dependencies seem to be able to help dependencies that would be ill formed in isolation. In this article I attempt to provide a unified account of these phenomena. I postulate a principle that allows the computational system to ignore parts of a syntactic structure that have already been checked with respect to a particular constraint.
Does the Market Value Environmental Performance?

Previous studies that attempt to relate environmental to financial performance have often led to conflicting results due to small samples and subjective environmental performance criteria. We report on a study that relates the market value of firms in the S&P 500 to objective measures of their environmental performance. After controlling for variables traditionally thought to explain firm-level financial performance, we find that bad environmental performance is negatively correlated with the intangible asset value of firms. The average intangible liability for firms in our sample is 380 millionapproximately 9 of the replacement value of tangible assets. We conclude that legally emitted toxic chemicals have a significant effect on the intangible asset value of publicly traded companies. A 10 reduction in emissions of toxic chemicals results in a 34 million increase in market value. The magnitude of these effects varies across industries, with larger losses accruing to the traditionally polluting industries.
Stock Market Development and Cross-Country Differences in Relative Prices

We document a positive correlation between stock market capitalization and price levels (wages) within the group of countries with poorly developed stock markets and a negative correlation between these two variables within the group of countries with more developed stock markets. This paper argues that there is a causal relationship behind these correlations. Stock markets initially stimulate growth, pushing the demand for nontradables and increasing prices and wages. Stock markets also promote a shift toward more capital-intensive technologies in the tradable sector, increasing the migration of workers to services and eventually putting downward pressure on wages and prices.
Shops and the City: Evidence on Local Externalities and Local Government Policy from Big-Box Bankruptcies

Abstract We report three findings. First, using evidence from chain bankruptcies and data on 12 million to 18 million establishments per year, we show that large retailers produce significant positive spillovers. Second, local governments respond to the size of these externalities. When a town’s boundaries allow it to capture a larger share of retail spillovers, it is more likely to offer retail subsidies. Third, these subsidies partially crowd out private sector mechanisms that also subsidize large retailers, such as shopping malls. These facts provide powerful evidence of the Coase theorem at work and highlight a concern for local development policies even when externalities can be targeted.
The Grammatical Ingredients of Counterfactuality

Counterfactual constructions convey the meaning that the speaker believes a certain proposition not to hold. This article investigates the morphosyntactic composition of counterfactual conditionals and counterfactual wishes and the question of how the form of counterfactuals is related to their meaning. Across languages, there are combinations of tense, mood, and aspect morphemes that are used repeatedly in the expression of counterfactuality. I discuss the role of all three components.
The Revolving Door: Duration and Recidivism in IMF Programs

Quarterly evidence on participation in IMF programs for the period 19742003 is examined using the techniques of hazard analysis and error-correction estimation. Three hypotheses are proposed and tested. An increase in cumulative prior participation in IMF programs is found to cause a reduction on average in the length of a new spell of participation. The length of time between participation spells is reduced significantly with an increase in prior participation in IMF programs. Reserve adequacy is shown to be significantly and positively affected by participation in IMF programs. The results support a revolving door explanation of participation in IMF programs.
Geographic Concentration as a Dynamic Process

The degree of geographic concentration of individual manufacturing industries in the U.S. has declined only slightly in the last twenty years. At the same time, new plant births, plant expansions, contractions and closures have shifted large quantities of employment across plants, firms, and locations. This paper uses data from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Research Database to examine how relatively stable levels of geographic concentration emerge from this dynamic process. While industries' agglomeration levels tend to remain fairly constant, we find that there is greater variation in the locations of these agglomerations. We then decompose aggregate concentration changes into portions attributable to plant births, expansions, contractions, and closures, and find that the location choices of new firms and differences in growth rates have played the most significant role in reducing levels of geographic concentration, while plant closures have tended to reinforce agglomeration. Finally, we look at coagglomeration patterns to test three of Marshall's theories of industry agglomeration: (1) agglomeration saves transport costs by proximity to input suppliers or final consumers, (2) agglomeration allows for labor market pooling, and (3) agglomeration facilitates intellectual spillovers. While there is some truth behind all three theories, we find that industrial location is far more driven by labor mix than by any of the other explanatory variables.
Finance-Led Growth in the OECD since the Nineteenth Century: How Does Financial Development Transmit to Growth?

Abstract It is well established in the literature that financial development (FD) is conducive to growth, and yet the channels through which FD affects growth are not well understood. Using a unique new panel data set for 21 OECD countries over the past 140 years, this paper examines the extent to which FD transmits to growth through ideas production, savings, fixed investment, and schooling. Unionization and agricultural share are used as instruments for FD. The empirical results show that FD influences growth through all four channels. In particular, ideas production is found to be the most important channel through which FD affects growth.
The Labor Supply Effects of the Social Security Earnings Test

The Social Security earnings test taxes away benefits at a 33-50 rate once earnings pass a threshold amount. I investigate the response to three past changes in the earnings test rules, each applying to some age groups and not others. I find that beneficiaries bunch in substantial numbers just below the earnings threshold, and the bunching shifts when the earnings test rules change. These shifts in the budget constraint are incorporated into an econometric model to identify income and substitution effects. The estimation yields significant elasticities that suggest considerable deadweight loss suffered by working beneficiaries.
Case and the Event Structure of Nominalizations

This article explores the distribution of morphological case in Spanish nominalizations and shows that there is a connection between morphological case and event structure. Most nominals govern genitive case de on their internal arguments but some allow or require a different morpheme, a, reminiscent of differential object marking. I argue that the event structure of the nominalization is the crucial factor in choice of a, inasmuch as a is limited to process nominals that do not entail a change of state. The same distinction between process and change-of-state nominals is then extended to two other empirical puzzles regarding the interpretation of genitive arguments in nominalizations. I present a formal analysis assuming a syntax of events inspired by Ramchand (2008).
ICT Adoption and Productivity in Developing Countries: New Firm Level Evidence from Brazil and India

This paper uses a unique new data set on nearly a thousand manufacturing firms in Brazil and India to investigate the determinants of ICT adoption and its impact on performance in both countries. The descriptive evidence shows that Brazilian firms on average use ICT more intensively than their Indian counterparts but changes over time have been rather similar in both places. Within countries ICT intensity is strongly related to size, ownership structure, share of administrative workers and education. The econometric evidence documents a strong relationship between ICT capital and productivity in both countries, even after controlling for several other factors, including firm-specific fixed-effects. The rate of return of ICT investment seems to be much larger than usually found in more developed countries. Specific types of organisational changes matter for the return of ICT, but only for high adopters. Firms report several constraints to ICT investment in both countries and power disruption seems to significantly depress adoption and returns to ICT expenditures in India. This may be indicative of the impact of a cluster of poor institutions and/or infrastructure on performance.
Late Merger of Degree Clauses

In this article, we propose that degree heads and degree clauses form a constituent not at the point where the degree head is merged, but after QR of the degree head and countercyclic merger of the degree clause. We derive a generalization originally outlined in Williams 1974 that the scope of the comparative degree quantifier is exactly as high as the site of attachment of the degree clause. This generalization is shown to follow from the derivational mechanism of countercyclic merger and a semantic property of the comparative degree head, namely, its nonconservativity
Limits on Allomorphy: A Case Study in Nominal Suppletion

Reporting on a study of 79 languages (see ), I argue that (morpho)syntactic structure plays a crucial role in two observed asymmetries: (a) in nouns, number-driven root suppletion is common while case-driven root suppletion is virtually unattested, and (b) in contrast to lexical nouns, pronouns commonly supplete for both number and case. I propose that the structural difference between lexical nouns and pronouns, combined with locality effects as proposed in Distributed Morphology (DM; Halle and Marantz 1993), accounts for the two asymmetries. This raises the question whether these asymmetries can be captured in frameworks that deny that hierarchical syntactic structure plays a role in the morphology, such as word-and-paradigm approaches (e.g., Anderson 1992, Stump 2001).
Rational Bias in Yield Curve Forecasts

Empirical studies of forecasts often fail to reconcile the rational expectations hypothesis with a minimum mean square error objective function. Recent studies, however, have argued that observed bias may be rational in certain advising games, or for objective functions that include publicity or forecasting reputation as additional arguments. This paper analyzes multistep forecasting behavior for individuals forecasting bond yields in the Blue Chip Financial Survey over the 19871996 period and uncovers statistically significant evidence supportive of Ehrbeck and Waldmann's rational stubbornness. I find that forecasters rationally place too much weight on their previous forecasts in an attempt to mimic the behavior of more able forecasters (perhaps attempting to fool their clients). Jointly, I also find that this pattern of under-revision is positively correlated with mean square forecasting errors. Rational stubbornness is sensitive to the forecasting horizon as well as bond maturity.
Can At-Scale Drug Provision Improve the Health of the Targeted in Sub-Saharan Africa?

The single largest item in the US foreign aid health budget is antiretroviral therapy (ART) for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Many supply- and demand-side factors in sub-Saharan Africa could cause smaller than expected epidemiological effects of this at-scale drug provision. We provide what appears to be the first quasi-experimental evidence on the effect of at-scale drug provision in a poor country, using the phased rollout of ART in Zambia, a setting where approximately one in six adults are HIV positive. Combining anthropometric data from national household surveys and a spatially based triple-difference specification, we find that local ART introduction increased the weight of high HIV likelihood adult women. This finding from a clinically difficult setting suggests that the generalized challenges of scalability of ART for adult health in sub-Saharan Africa are surmountable.
danceroom Spectroscopy: At the Frontiers of Physics, Performance, Interactive Art and Technology

ABSTRACT danceroom Spectroscopy is an interactive audiovisual art installation and performance system driven by rigorous algorithms commonly used to simulate and analyze nanoscale atomic dynamics. danceroom Spectroscopy interprets humans as “energy landscapes,” resulting in an interactive system in which human energy fields are embedded within a simulation of thousands of atoms. Users are able to sculpt the atomic dynamics using their movements and experience their interactions visually and sonically in real time. danceroom Spectroscopy has so far been deployed as both an interactive sci-art installation and as the platform for a dance performance called Hidden Fields.
Perceptually Grounded Faithfulness in Harmonic Serialism

Steriade (2008) argues that faithfulness constraints in Optimality Theory are perceptually grounded: the faithfulness of a phonological mapping is directly proportional to the perceptual similarity between the input and the output of that mapping. For example, when a phonological process like place assimilation, voice assimilation, or deletion affects a medial consonant cluster /VC1C2V/, it usually targets C1 rather than C2. The explanation is that changing C1 is less of a change perceptually than changing C2, because C2’s prevocalic position gives it stronger perceptual cues than C1. Formally, this difference in strength of perceptual cues is reflected in the ranking of faithfulness constraints: processes affecting C1 violate lower-ranking faithfulness constraints than processes affecting C2. A mapping has an input and an output, and faithfulness constraints require an input and an output to compare. In the standard parallel version of Optimality Theory, referred to here as P-OT, the input to every mapping is the underlying representation and the output is the surface representation (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004). When this property of P-OT is combined with perceptually grounded faithfulness, a problem arises (Blumenfeld 2006, Flemming 2006, 2008a,b, Gallagher 2006, Jun 2002, McCarthy 2008b, Wilson 2001): underlying representations lack information that is important for perception. For example, the release of a stop consonant contains important perceptual cues for its place of articulation. In most if not all languages, the distribution of release is determined by the grammar, not the lexicon: stops are released prevocalically, but they may be unreleased (depending on the language) preconsonantally. If important perceptual cues like release are not already determined in underlying representation, how can faithfulness be perceptually grounded?
The Decline of Income Inequality in China: Assessments and Explanations*

This paper shows that the trend of worsening income distribution in China has been reversed. We ascertain the robustness of this decline using five nationwide household survey and different inequality indicators. Attempts are then made to uncover the underlying reasons. Major findings include: (1) The decline is largely due to improvement in the distribution of transfer income although its share in the total income is small and diminishing; (2) Occupational income, particularly its component of wage income, plays an important role; and (3) Other drivers include the expansion of the middle-income group, rapid urbanization, and the shrinking disparity within Eastern China.
3D Architectural Projection, Light Wall

This paper introduces the 3D architectural projection project Light Wall projected onto the Seoul Museum of Art building (Fig. 1). On the facade of this over-100-year-old building, 3D animated art work is projected calculating and using the complicated contour as a part of the 3D artwork. The decorative facade is not suitable for a normal projection, but the project pronounces loudly the traditional facade using digital-based registration technology. This project does not tone down the physical specificities for the virtual image, but makes reality intermix with the virtual [1].
Venture Capital Investment and the Post-IPO Performance of Entrepreneurial Firms: Evidence from the People's Republic of China

We examine the effects of venture capital (VC) investment on the performance (measured by return on assets, return on equity, and Tobin's Q) and growth (measured by growth of total sales and total number of employees) of entrepreneurial firms in the People's Republic of China (PRC) after an initial public offering (IPO). Firm-level panel data analysis shows that VC investment contributes to the long-term performance and growth of entrepreneurial firms after an IPO. Meanwhile, we observe a significant and positive relationship between corporate governance of firms and VC investment. However, we do not find that experience or specialization of VC firms influences the effects of venture investment on post-IPO performance or growth of entrepreneurial firms in the PRC.
Temperature Variability and Mortality: Evidence from 16 Asian Countries

This paper presents an empirical analysis devised to understand the complex relationship between extreme temperatures and mortality in 16 Asian countries where more than 50% of the world's population resides. Using a country-year panel on mortality rates and various measures of high temperatures for 1960–2015, the analysis produces two primary findings. First, high temperatures significantly increase annual mortality rates in Asia. Second, this increase is larger in countries with cooler climates where high temperatures are infrequent. These empirical estimates can help inform climate change impact projections on human health for Asia, which is considered to be highly vulnerable to climate change. The results indicate that unabated warming until the end of the century could increase annual mortality rates by more than 40%, highlighting the need for concrete and rapid actions to help individuals and communities adapt to climate change.
Consumption Recovery and Economic Rebalancing in China∗

Boosting consumption has been a policy strategy for rebalancing the Chinese economy. The official statistics, however, show persistently declining consumption as a share of GDP during the past decade. In this paper, we provide a more complete picture of Chinese consumption by piecing together data from official and unofficial sources. Our estimations suggest that the consumption share rebounded from 2008, after a period of decline. This may provide the first piece of evidence that the rebalancing of the Chinese economy is already under way as a result of changes in factor markets, especially rapid increase in labor income, that have resulted in increases in household income as a share of GDP and improvement in income distribution across households.
Conditional Forecasts in Dynamic Multivariate Models

In the existing literature, conditional forecasts in the vector autoregressive (VAR) framework have not been commonly presented with probability distributions. This paper develops Bayesian methods for computing the exact finite-sample distribution of conditional forecasts. It broadens the class of conditional forecasts to which the methods can be applied. The methods work for both structural and reduced-form VAR models and, in contrast to common practices, account for parameter uncertainty in finite samples. Empirical examples under both a flat prior and a reference prior are provided to show the use of these methods.
Verb Movement in Embedded Clauses in West Flemish

This article analyzes aspects of the distribution of West Flemish verbs in terms of Kayne's (1994) antisymmetry approach. The distribution of the auxiliary in the Infinitivus pro Participio (IPP) construction provides evidence for three functional heads in the lower middle field: Neg, T, and F2. The word order in the IPP construction is derived by head movement of the auxiliary and XP-movement of the IPP complement. The IPP complement moves to [Spec, FP2] to check its formal features; the finite auxiliary moves either to F2 or to a higher functional head, T or Neg; the nonfinite auxiliary remains in F2. The analysis accounts for the finite/nonfinite asymmetry in the distribution of the negative affix en. The article includes concrete proposals for the implementation of feature checking.
Demographic Changes, Saving, and Current Account in East Asia

This paper analyzes the empirical relationships among demographic changes, saving, and current account balances in East Asia. The panel Vector-Auto Regressive (VAR) model shows that an increase in the dependency rate, especially the elderly dependency rate, significantly lowers saving rates and subsequently worsens current account balances. The result implies that the future aging of the population in East Asia would have a significant impact on global capital flows and current account imbalances.
Aging and Property Prices: A Theory of Very-Long-Run Portfolio Choice and Its Predictions on  Japanese Municipalities in the 2040s*

In this paper we investigate the effect of aging population on property (land) prices. A theory of very-long-run portfolio choice is developed for a transition economy from young and growing to rapidly aging population and applied to estimate property price inflation in Japanese municipal markets. The results are stunning. The simulation results in which income factors are assumed to be fixed at the 2005-10 growth level suggest that the average residential property price (land price) in the Japanese municipalities may decrease by as much as 19 percent from the present to 2020, 24 percent to 2030, and 32 percent to 2040.