Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Public Policy, Private Preferences, and the Japanese Trade Pattern

Abstract As nontariff forms of trade protection proliferate it has become more difficult to analyze the impact of trade policy on trade flows. In a number of well-known papers researchers have attempted to infer the impact of trade policy indirectly by ascribing to trade policy the differences between actual and predicted trade flows. Much of the work has been applied to analysis of Japanese trade policy, and the conclusions of these studies have differed widely. Some previous research has also ascribed a role to the keiretsu, or networks of affiliated firms, in explaining Japan's apparently distinctive trade performance. This paper presents a model that integrates data on factor endowments, observable protection in traditional and nontraditional forms, and the keiretsu. It extends existing research in two principal ways. First, alternative cross-national models of comparative advantage are nested to permit the identification of critical modeling assumptions underlying the divergent conclusions of the previous studies. Second, the results of the indirect method are externally validated by confronting these inferences with data on trade policy and the keiretsu. The results indicate that trade policy and the keiretsu have an important impact on Japanese trade performance.
The Effects of Worker Heterogeneity on Duration Dependence: Low-Back Claims in Workers Compensation

We estimate models of workers compensation claim duration for a sample of Canadian workers with serious low-back injuries. The models extend recent duration research by allowing worker characteristics to affect duration dependence through the nonlocation parameters of the duration distribution. We compare results for modified Weibull models and piecewise-constant hazard rate models of duration dependence. The results show that workers' responses to elapsed claim duration vary significantly with their characteristics and with economic incentives to return to work. Further, allowing for heterogeneity in duration dependence effects can dramatically change the coefficient estimates of the variables that determine the location parameter of the duration distribution.
General Model-Based Filters for Extracting Cycles and Trends in Economic Time Series

A class of model-based filters for extracting trends and cycles in economic time series is presented. These lowpass and bandpass filters are derived in a mutually consistent manner as the joint solution to a signal extraction problem in an unobserved-components model. The resulting trends and cycles are computed in finite samples using the Kalman filter and associated smoother. The filters form a class which is a generalization of the class of Butterworth filters, widely used in engineering. They are very flexible and have the important property of allowing relatively smooth cycles to be extracted from economic time series. Perfectly sharp, or ideal, bandpass filters emerge as a limiting case. Applying the method to quarterly series on U.S. investment and GDP shows a clearly defined cycle.
Patent Citations and the Geography of Knowledge Spillovers: Evidence from Inventor- and Examiner-added Citations

I report new evidence for localized knowledge spillovers identified by within-patent variations in the geographic matching rates of citations added by inventors and citations added by examiners. Evaluated at the mean citation lag, inventor citations are 20% more likely than examiner citations to match the country of origin of their citing patent, whereas U.S. inventor citations are 25% more likely to match the state or metropolitan area of their citing patent. The localization of intranational knowledge spillovers declines with the passage of time, but international borders present a persistent barrier to spillovers.
Inequality and Redistribution: Evidence from U.S. Counties and States, 18901930

Does economic inequality affect redistributive policy? This paper turns to U.S. county data on land inequality over the period 1890 to 1930 to help address this fundamental question in political economy. Redistributive policy was primarily decided at the local level during this period, making county-level data particularly informative. Examining within-state variation also reduces the potential impact of latent institutional and political variables. The paper also uses a variety of identification strategies, including historic variables as well as county weather and crop characteristics, as instruments for land inequality. The evidence consistently suggests that greater inequality is significantly associated with less redistribution. This negative relationship is especially large in heavily rural counties, where concentrated landownership implied that landed elites also controlled the majority of economic production.
Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction

of Fluxus works (Flux Wedding, FluxMass, Flux Funeral, among others) that disrupt such dichotomy, but perhaps Lushetich’s argument would have gained if, at times, it did not reflect upon itself. In general, this chapter is complemented by the sixth, which examines the problem of value and sets to “demonstrate that the Fluxus systems of exchange operate within distinctly Gramscian frameworks” (p. 25). Chapter 7, “The Logic and Legacy of Fluxing,” serving as the conclusion to this book-length study, summarizes the theoretical frame, artistic practice and legacy of Fluxus. In this sense, this book is valuable for anyone interested in praxis-bound theorizations of contemporary art. Each chapter is summarized in a “concluding thoughts” section, which intimates its controlling idea and ensures that, on the whole, they do not drift away from the general framework. The book also includes a preface, a list of illustrations and a useful index and a bibliography.
Democracy, Ethnic Fragmentation, and Internal Conflict: Confused Theories, Faulty Data, and the Crucial Case of Papua New Guinea

Two countervailing themes have dominated world politics over the past decade: the continuing spread of democratic government and the explosion of intercommunal ethnic violence around the globe. In many cases, rising levels of internal conflict, particularly ethnic conflict, have accompanied transitions from authoritarian rule to democracy. The collapse of authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia has resulted in a threefold increase in the number of democratic regimes around the world. Despite recent backsliding in a number of regions, major transitions to democracy continue to occur in pivotal states such as Indonesia, Nigeria, and Russia. At the same time, however, the world has witnessed a change in the nature of armed conflict, toward intrastate violence and ethnic conflict. Most violent conflicts today occur not between states but within them: Of the 110 major armed conflicts between 1989 and 1999, only 7 were traditional interstate conflicts. The remaining 103 took place within existing states, mostly focused around ethnic issues. Between them, these parallel processes of democratization and ethnic conflict have defined the international agenda in the post--Cold War period. They have also refocused both scholarly and policy attention on the relationship between democratic politics, ethnic group demography, and internal conflict.
Job Loss Expectations, Realizations, and Household Consumption Behavior

Although the theoretical importance of expectations in decision-making is well known to economists, only a few empirical papers investigate the impact of individual subjective expectations on economic outcomes. This paper examines the link between expectations of future job losses and the subsequent impact that these expectations have on household consumption behavior. The first part of the paper documents the empirical relationship between job loss expectations and subsequent job losses. Subjective job loss expectations have significant predictive power in explaining future job losses even when standard demographic information known to be associated with the prevalence of job displacement is included in the analysis. Furthermore, higher subjective job loss probabilities are correlated with an increased expectation of future earnings declines. Overall, these results indicate that the variable for subjective job loss expectations is a meaningful predictor of subsequent displacement. Since a job displacement results in large and persistent earnings losses, job loss expectations should have an important impact on household consumption smoothing following a job loss. The second part of the paper finds that although a job loss significantly reduces household consumption, there is little evidence that the degree to which households anticipate job losses reduces the impact of displacement on consumption. Alternative models of interpreting responses to expectations questions and of household consumption behavior that may explain these results are discussed.
Is All Public Capital Created Equal?

This paper uses a VAR approach to investigate the effects of public investment on private-sector performance in the United States. This approach is consistent with the argument that the analysis of these effects requires the consideration of dynamic feedbacks among the different variables. Estimation results suggest that all types of public investment have a positive effect on private output. Core infrastructure investment in electric and gas facilities, transit systems, and airfields, as well as in sewage and water supply systems display the highest rates of return, 16.1 and 9.7, respectively, closely followed by investment in educational, hospital, and other public buildings with 8.9.
Gender and Scientists’ Views about the Value-Free Ideal

A small but growing body of philosophically informed survey work calls into question whether the value-free ideal is a dominant viewpoint among scientists. However, the survey instruments used in these studies have important limitations. Previous work has also made little headway in developing hypotheses that might predict or explain differing views about the value-free ideal among scientists. In this article, we review previous survey work on this topic, explain limitations of the survey instruments used, describe an improved survey, report results from an initial administration of it that strengthen and refine previous results, and develop two hypotheses that may account for gender effects found in the data. These hypotheses suggest that gender socialization and a greater tendency for female scientists to be aware of sexism in their fields makes them more likely to reject certain aspects of the value-free ideal.
Chaebol and Catastrophe: A New View of the Korean Business Groups and Their Role in the Financial Crisis

We present a model of industrial organization that has multiple stable equilibria and argue that the high-concentration equilibrium describes Korea's economy and the low-concentration equilibrium describes Taiwan's economy. Past industrial policy of the state may have put Korea's economy in the high-concentration equilibrium, but discontinuation of the policy did not cause the industrial organization to change because this is an economically viable equilibrium. The high-concentration equilibrium produces a narrower range of final goods than the low-concentration equilibrium, which explains why the 1996 collapse in semiconductor prices caused the less diversified Korean economy to contract more than the more diversified Taiwanese economy. More importantly, this collapse in demand caused Korea's economy to move to a new equilibrium that has a smaller number of business groups, as evidenced by the collapse of the second-tier chaebol and their absorption into the first-tier chaebol. This wave of bankruptcies, combined with the financially precarious state of the merchant banks, created an investor panic that precipitated the crisis, which began with the 17 November 1997 devaluation of the won. This is why economic fundamentals could explain the chaebol bankruptcies before that date and not those after that date. The logic of our model suggests that public policy should focus on reducing the vertical linkages within business groups and not on reducing their horizontal linkages as the current Big Deal program of the government is doing.
Comparing Income Mobility in Germany and the United States Using Generalized Entropy Mobility Measures

Based on a derivation of the asymptotic sampling distribution of the generalized entropy mobility measures, this paper provides a statistically rigorous analysis of income mobility in Germany and the United States using the panel data set PSID-SOEP equivalent data file. Several alternative measures of income aggregation, inequality measures, and groupings are considered to establish robustness. We find that, to a high degree of statistical confidence, post-government income mobility is much higher in Germany. Possible reasons for these findings are revealed through disaggregation of the samples by population subgroups.
Chaos Control on the Nanoscale

This paper is presented as part of the Leonardo special section Nanotechnology, Nanoscale Science and Art, guest edited by Tom Rockwell and Tami I. Spector. Published in collaboration with the Exploratorium and the Nanoscale Informal Science Education (NISE) Network. Partial support for publication of this article provided by the National Science Foundation under cooperative agreement #ESI-0532536. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.
The Effects of General Inflation and Idiosyncratic Cost Shocks on Within-Commodity Price Dispersion: Evidence from Microdata

This study investigates the dispersion of price levels within highly disaggregated markets by examining plant-level product records from the U.S. Census of Manufactures. The paper estimates the effects of inflation on price dispersion through cross-sectional variation in the drift rate of average input costs within a market, arguing that, in several models that relate inflation to price dispersion, the effects of cost increases on dispersion is similar to the effects of general inflation. We also disentangle the effects of aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks on price dispersion. In general, we find that the higher the drift rate of input costs of a given commodity, the larger the amount of price dispersion. The standard deviation of idiosyncratic shocks also is positively correlated with the degree of price dispersion.
Standardized Study Designs, Value Judgments, and Financial Conflicts of Interest in Research

The potential for financial conflicts of interest (COIs) to influence scientific research has become a significant concern. Some commentators have suggested that the development of standardized study protocols could help to alleviate these problems. This paper identifies two problems with this solution: (1) scientific research incorporates numerous methodological judgments that cannot be constrained by standardized protocols; and (2) standardization can hide significant value judgments. These problems arise because of four weaknesses of standardized guidelines: incompleteness, limited applicability, selective ignorance, and ossification. Therefore, the standardization of study designs should not serve as an alternative to addressing the interests and power relations that pervade science policy-making. Policy makers should take at least two steps to prevent powerful interest groups from co-opting standardized guidelines. First, their development and review should be made as transparent as possible and should be subjected to broadly-based deliberation. Second, standardized guidelines should be supplemented with efforts to scrutinize the conditions under which financial COIs tend to have the most worrisome effects so that additional steps can be taken to eliminate and mitigate those conditions.
Emerging Materiality: Reflections on Creative Use of Software in Electronic Music Composition

ABSTRACT The authors examine how materiality emerges from complex chains of mediation in creative software use. The primarily theoretical argument is inspired and illustrated by interviews with two composers of electronic music. The authors argue that computer mediated activity should not primarily be understood in terms of simple mediation, but rather as chains of complex mediation in which the dominant form of representation is metonymy rather than metaphor.
Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanović

With reference to the ongoing economic “crisis,” several European and American scholars discuss the concept and politics of precarity. As their conversation shows, precarity is inextricable from our ever-shifting understandings of bodies, labor, politics, the public sphere, space, life, the human, and what it means to live with others.
Empirical Matching Functions: Estimation and Interpretation Using State-Level Data

Using quarterly data to estimate state-level matching functions, we obtain point estimates that are slightly higher than are found with national gross flows data, likely because of inherent differences in the data sources. We also estimate matching functions separately by the source of the new hire, and show that the results are consistent with the assumptions of endogenous job search by the employed and a preference for employed applicants by firms. Thus, care must be taken in interpreting empirical matching functions, which are likely a reduced-form combination of a structural matching function and a job competition model.
The Lancaster Care Charter

In the fall of 1991 the Munich Design Charter was published in Design Issues. This charter was written as a design-led “call to arms” on the future nations and boundaries of Europe. The signatories of the Munich Design Charter saw the problem of Europe, at that time, as fundamentally a problem of form that should draw on the creativity and expertise of design. Likewise, the Does Design Care…? workshop held at Imagination, Lancaster University in the autumn of 2017 brought together a multidisciplinary group of people from 16 nations across 5 continents, who, at a critical moment in design discourse saw a problem with the future of Care. The Lancaster Care Charter has been written in response to the vital question “Does Design Care…? ” and via a series of conversations, stimulated by a range of presentations that explored a range of provocations, insights, and more questions, provides answers for the contemporary context of Care. With nation and boundary now erased by the flow of Capital the Charter aims to address the complex and urgent challenges for Care as both the future possible and the responsibility of design. The Lancaster Care Charter presents a collective vision and sets out new pragmatic encounters for the design of Care and the care of Design.
Postverbal Subjects and the Mapping Hypothesis

Superficially postverbal subjects of free inversion languages such as, Italian are argued to be able to meet two distinct structural analyses: they may occupy either a VP-internal position, as more traditionally assumed, or a higher (preverbal and, actually, left-peripheral) position, with the remnant of the clause crossing leftward over them by dislocation or focus movement. These are all and only the possibilities expected under recent restrictive theories of phrase structure, like the one advocated by Kayne (1994), and are exactly those empirically realized. Evidence for this conclusion is based primarily on the, (existential/generic) interpretation of bare nouns and overt indefinites and is reinforced by extraction considerations. The whole analysis, based on the interpretation of Romance indefinites, is likely to support some version of Diesing's (1992) Mapping Hypothesis even more strongly than previous types of evidence did, including the original data from Germanic languages.
Regulatory Reform and Productivity Change in Indian Banking

Abstract This paper examines the impact of regulatory reform on productivity growth and its components for Indian banks from 1992 to 2009. We estimate parametric and nonparametric efficiency frontiers, followed by Divisia and Malmquist indexes of total factor productivity, respectively. To account for technology heterogeneity among ownership types, we use a metafrontier approach. Results are consistent across methodologies and show sustained productivity growth, driven mainly by technological progress. Furthermore, results indicate that different ownership types react differently to changes in the operating environment. The position of foreign banks becomes increasingly dominant, and their production technology becomes the best practice in the industry.
Quadratic Engel Curves and Consumer Demand

This paper presents a model of consumer demand that is consistent with the observed expenditure patterns of individual consumers in a long time series of expenditure surveys and is also able to provide a detailed welfare analysis of shifts in relative prices. A nonparametric analysis of consumer expenditure patterns suggests that Engel curves require quadratic terms in the logarithm of expenditure. While popular models of demand such as the Translog or the Almost Ideal Demand Systems do allow flexible price responses within a theoretically coherent structure, they have expenditure share Engel curves that are linear in the logarithm of total expenditure. We derive the complete class of integrable quadratic logarithmic expenditure share systems. A specification from this class is estimated on a large pooled data set of U.K. households. Models that fail to account for Engel curvature are found to generate important distortions in the patterns of welfare losses associated with a tax increase.
Happy Doctor Makes Happy Baby? Incentivizing Physicians Improves Quality of Prenatal Care

Abstract Physician-induced demand, whereby physicians alter patient treatment for personal gain, lies at the heart of concerns about publicly provided health care. However, little is known about how payment systems affect the ultimate outcome of patient health. Exploiting a unique policy induced variation in Denmark, I investigate the impact of physician payment contracts on infant health. In a difference-in-differences framework, I find that firstborn infants exposed in the womb to the care of general practitioners with capitation contracts have poorer infant health outcomes than infants exposed to fee-for-service contracts. The firstborn children of younger women primarily drive the effects.
Will Taiwan Be Marginalized by China?

This paper shows that Taiwan has benefited immensely from China's accession to the World Trade Organization, in terms of the expansion of its exports to China, owing to Taiwan's institutional and structural advantages. Behind the rapid expansion of trade and investment, however, Taiwan runs a high risk of hollowing out its domestic industries, a risk that is manifested in a decline in exports, a loss of control over logistics functions that serve the export industry, and the relocation of research and development activities to China. Taiwan is facing an uphill battle of keeping its capital- and knowledge-intensive industries at home while attempting to take advantage of low-cost Chinese labor to retain its position in the world market.