bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Industry Concentration, Syndication Networks, and Competition in the U.K. Private Equity Market for Management Buyouts
Authors: Meuleman Miguel , Wright Mike
Published: February 2013

This article considers industry concentration, syndication networks, and competition in the U.K. private equity market for management buyouts. It provides empirical evidence of the effect of industry market structures on syndicate relationships. This article also studies interfirm cooperation through syndication in the private equity market and determines if this decreases the extent of competition and subsequently affects the prices private equity firms are willing to pay to get buyout targets.
Fund Size, Limited Attention, and Private Equity Valuation
Authors: Cumming Douglas , Dai Na
Published: February 2013

This article discusses fund size, limited attention, and the valuation of venture capital- and private equity-backed firms. It determines that decreasing performance and distorted valuations are associated with larger private equity funds, and determine that these effects are due to the limited attention of fund managers. Some of the concepts discussed in this article include ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions and portfolio companies. It also shows that the most reputable private equities pay a lower price for portfolio companies of similar quality and that fund size and valuations of portfolio companies have a convex relationship. A relevant positive association between limited attention and valuation is also noted. This article concludes that fund size is generally positively associated with the negotiation power of private equity.
Private Equity Investors, Corporate Governance, and Performance of Ipo Firms
Authors: Filatotchev Igor
Published: February 2013

This article is concerned with the complicated interrelationships between corporate governance, the performance of IPO firms, and private equity financiers. It studies the effectiveness of firm-level signals that are connected to private equity ownership patterns and then compares the governance roles of two types of IPO private equity investors, namely the “informal” and “formal” private equity investors. This article also demonstrates how performance can vary depending on governance structures.
Private Equity Activism and the Consequences for Targets and Rivals In Germany
Authors: Mietzner Mark , Schweizer Denis
Published: February 2013

This article analyzes a detailed data set of publicly listed companies in Germany. It considers the reactions of the short-term capital market to announcements that private equity funds are targeting publicly listed companies, as well as the related effects for industry rivals. It lists the differences between new institutional investors and traditional shareholders, with regards to their skill sets, their ability to become successful active shareholders, and their perceptions. This article also reviews previous empirical studies.
Private Equity in China
Authors: Jingu Takeshi
Published: February 2013

This article records the development of the private equity market in China. It presents some data on the structure, governance, and performance of China's private equity. It then notes the possibility that Asia may become increasingly dominant and one of the most relevant economic regions in the world as the twenty-first century progresses. It also studies the extent to which the changes in the private equity-related laws and regulations in China have affected the development of private equity in China. This article shows that since the Chinese capital markets still need to develop completely, private equity has mostly been an offshore activity. The capital markets for growth companies in China are also analyzed.
Vipe Financing: Venture (Capital) Investments in Public Equity
Authors: Chaplinsky Susan , Haushalter David
Published: February 2013

Venture investments in public equities (VIPEs) are a subset of private investments in public equities (PIPEs), which are sales of privately placed equity and equity-linked securities in companies with publicly listed shares. This article examines a large sample of VIPEs and attempts to answer the following questions: Has there been a significant increase in VIPEs over time? What are the typical characteristics of the firms receiving funding from VIPEs? Which securities and terms do venture capital firms (VCs) most frequently use? How do the public firms receiving funding from VCs perform after the issue? Because the cash flow rights obtained in PIPEs primarily pay off based on the issuer's postissue stock performance, the last question addresses how successful are the companies that VCs fund, and, to a large extent, how successful are the VCs themselves.
Valuing Common and Preferred Shares in Venture Capital Financing
Authors: Leisen Dietmar
Published: February 2013

This article compares five different methodologies to value common and preferred shares with liquidation rights in a single-period setup of venture capital financing: the venture capital (VC) method; discounted cash-flow valuation with the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM); discounted cash-flow valuation with market model in logs; a risk-preference-based approach; and the real options approach. The risk preference and the real option methodologies are the only ones that can properly account for the contingency in preferred stock. With small financings and small multiples the choice of methodology is not critical; however, with stronger preference rights, the VC method, the CAPM, and the market model in logs have difficulty coping with the contingencies, while the risk preference and the real option approach do well. The real option approach is fast and straightforward to implement as it requires only the venture value as input, which can be determined easily and accurately by any of the other four methodologies; the risk preference approach depends critically on unknown parameters and is computationally more intense.
Financial Contracting in U.S. Venture Capital: Overview and Empirical Evidence
Authors: Bengtsson Ola
Published: February 2013

This article reviews the financial contracts that are used in U.S. venture capital (VC) equity investments. It first discusses the conceptual reasons why VC contracts form a good testing ground for theoretical arguments pertaining to the design of financial contracts. It then describes the overall design of VC contracts and explains some of the most common and economically important contract terms. For these purposes, it presents summary statistics on cash flow contingencies from a broad recent data set of 1,804 unique VC contracts, and on control rights from a recent data set of 182 contracts. It proceeds by discussing the empirical results pertaining to the allocation of cash flow and control rights in VC contracts. The article concludes by discussing directions for future research on VC contracts.
Time-Inconsistent Preferences and Venture Capital Contracting
Authors: Utset Manuel A.
Published: February 2013

This article covers time-inconsistent (TI) preferences and venture capital contracting. The first part provides an overview of the transactional hazards faced by venture capitalists and the governance devices used to provide entrepreneurs with proper incentives. The second part begins by setting forth a general model of TI preferences. It then extends it to the venture capital context, using it to explain the behavior of TI entrepreneurs and time-consistent (TC) venture capitalists. It ends by discussing the role played by venture capital contracts in causing entrepreneurs to internalize the costs of their TI agency misconduct. The third part first examines the agency relationship between TI venture capitalists and TC investors in venture capital funds. It then introduces the concept of “hidden-risk contracting” to describe the relationship between entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and investors and, in particular, the role of venture capitalists in transmitting positive and negative externalities between entrepreneurs and investors.
The Impact of Venture Capital on Innovation
Authors: Dessí Roberta , Yin Nina
Published: February 2013

This article begins by reviewing the empirical evidence on the impact of venture capital on innovation. It identifies some of the key challenges to empirical research in this area and discusses the methods that have been used to address them. There is evidence of a substantial impact of venture capital on innovation, measured by patent counts, at the industry level (at least for the United States). Although estimates vary, on average a dollar of venture capital appears to be three to four times more potent in stimulating innovation than a dollar of traditional corporate R&D. There is no corresponding evidence of a significant impact of venture capital on innovation at the individual-firm level. The article discusses possible explanations for this difference, including the difficulties of adequately controlling for the endogeneity of venture capital investment at the firm level.
Comparative Psychoneuroimmunology/Ecoimmunology: Lessons from Simpler Model Systems
Authors: Adamo Shelley A.
Published: February 2013

Immune-behavioral interactions are widespread throughout the animal kingdom. For example, decreased feeding after immune activation is common in animals. Work with insects suggests that changes in feeding behavior during an immune response (e.g., illness-induced anorexia) may be a behavioral method of biasing multifunctional physiological pathways toward immune function. Work on insects also suggests that stress hormones help to reconfigure the immune system in order to optimize its performance during the physiological shifts required for “flight-or-fight.” The effects of stress hormones on immune function appear maladaptive only when compared to what the animal could do under optimal conditions. Work with insects also cautions against overly simplistic interpretations of immune assay results. A comparative approach to psychoneuroimmunology will increase our understanding of the adaptive function of immune-behavioral interactions. Understanding why these connections exist is of both practical and theoretical importance.
Prevention in Pursuit of Social Justice
Authors: Kenny Maureen E. , Medvide Mary Beth
Published: February 2013

Abstract Although prevention is in many ways aligned with social justice goals, it often falls short of accomplishing the level of social change critical for the advancement of social justice. Progress toward social justice requires a careful blend of person-focused ameliorative activity with transformative social change. Professionals must be equipped with multicultural competencies, insight into power dynamics, and skills in outreach, advocacy, collaboration, empowerment, social action, and political literacy, among other skills. Although most prevention activity is not fully transformative, numerous examples can be identified of activities that further social justice. Further strides in the promotion of social justice through prevention will require changes in the training, credentialing, and remuneration of psychologists.
An Extended Talmudic Search Model
Authors: Liebermann Yehoshua
Published: February 2013

The search for market information is an essential part of the purchasing process. In many consumer behavior models, the search stage is key to understanding and formulating consumers' response to both internal and external stimuli that motivate buying. Whereas the study of internal search focuses on the cognitive resources of the consumer whose cost of utilization is not measurable in typical economic units, external search is associated with a set of more readily measurable economic variables. This article focuses on the extended Talmudic search model. Talmudic law recognizes the cost of search to both buyers and sellers. Two Mishnaic paragraphs bear out the notion of search costs. Both deal with the laws of fraud in sales transactions, based on the biblical verse, “And if thou sell a sale unto thy neighbor, or acquirest aught of they neighbour's hand, ye shall not deceive.” Talmudic discussions are quite often of a more theoretical, even abstract nature.
Optimal Precautions and the Law of Fire Damages
Authors: Rosenberg Jacob
Published: February 2013

This article presents an example of the use of economic analysis to understand Jewish law. The model used is an application of the economic analysis of law, which has become increasingly prominent in the philosophy and study of law. Economic analysis of law deals not only with those aspects of law that are usually regarded as purely “economic,” but also with more general categories of law, such as property rights, torts, and family law. Indeed, it can be said to deal with all aspects of civil and criminal law. Following this new approach, this article seeks to apply the economic analysis of law to Jewish tort law and, specifically, to laws relating to fire damage. It explains the economies of the laws of fire damage followed by proper care and due care as well as efficient care. This article enumerates a graphical illustration of the unilateral care model; an analysis of differential care concludes the article.
Ethical Demands on Creditors in Jewish Tradition
Authors: Domb Yoel
Published: February 2013

This article demonstrates that Judaism has a unique and valuable ethical contribution to the legal culture that developed over time regarding the recovery of loans. Until recently, other traditions considered borrowers slaves at the mercy of their creditors, and, even today, borrowers in many countries can be imprisoned. However, Judaism from its outset fought to protect the personal rights and freedoms of the borrower. This approach reached its apex in the Talmud, where the lender is enjoined not to make contact with the borrower and to avoid even chance meetings with him if it may cause embarrassment. This article discusses ancient legal systems that provide a creditor with a wide range of tools for retrieving loans. Some systems allowed taking the borrower himself as forced collateral against the loan. This article further explains the ethical underpinnings of the Jewish approach to debt and Debt retrieval laws. A discussion on corporate creditor ethics winds up this article.
Interloping Behavior in the Marketplace in Jewish Law
Authors: Jachter Howard
Published: February 2013

Jewish law demands ethical competition in the marketplace. A pillar of Jewish Law in this regard is the Talmud's teaching that “One who intrudes on an impoverished person chasing a crust of bread is regarded as a wicked person.” This article focuses on the interpoling nature of Jewish laws. This article further explains various issues as discussed in the various Jewish texts especially the Talmud. The financial means of the various parties are discussed in detail. Experts on Judaism and Jewish texts are frequently quoted throughout this article. The Talmud phrases the prohibition in terms of “a poor man” pursuing an item. Accordingly, Rema limits the prohibition to interfering with a poor man's attempt to acquire an item. This is followed by a discussion on the seller's perspective and also his preference. This article also explains cases of interpoling behavior through the compounding case of Ani ha-mehapekh. A discussion on Rabbinic rulings concludes this article.
Payment for Organ Donation in Jewish Law
Authors: Rosner Fred , Reichman Edward
Published: February 2013

Payment for organ donation in Jewish Law is the essence of this article. In Judaism, a physician's license to heal the sick is considered divinely given. The Talmud drives this from the Biblical phrase, “And he shall surely heal.” In fact, according to Maimonides, a physician is obligated to heal the sick, induce remission of illness, and prolong life. Human organ transplantation began nearly half a century ago. Since then, organ donations have been insufficient to meet the needs of patients with diseased organs. This article traces the Halakhic and Talmudic precedents for selling body parts. There is Talmudic precedent for selling body parts, but not organs, and not in a medical or therapeutic context. This article further explains Jewish law forbids receiving financial compensation for fulfilling a meritorious act. Clauses pertaining to organ donation such as obligations to save a life, ownership rights over one's body form the concluding part of this article.
Jewish Environmental Ethics
Authors: Klein Yehuda L. , Weiser Jonathan
Published: February 2013

Jewish environmental ethics is the essence of this chapter. The objective of this article is to explore the philosophical foundations of sustainable development. It discusses the contending worldviews that inform our relationship with the natural world and show how they affect our understanding of the concept of sustainability. In particular, this chapter reviews the ethical assumptions that underlie anthropocentric, ecocentric, and theocentric environmentalisms. This article further reviews the ethical assumptions that underlie anthropocentric, ecocentric, and theocentric environmentalisms. Foundations of neoclassical welfare economics is explained in detail. Classical utilitarian theory allows us to construct a measure of social welfare, the total welfare of a community, by summing individual welfare measures across all the individuals in that community. Concepts like theocentric environmentalism are explained in details. It draws upon the Biblical view of man's relationship with nature. This article draws an extensive comparative study between anthropocentric environmentalism and ecocentric environmentalism.
Economic Substance and The Laws of Interest: A Comparison of Jewish and U.S. Federal Tax Law
Authors: Chodorow Adam
Published: February 2013

Both Jewish law and U.S. Federal tax law define interest broadly as a payment for the use of money. Nonetheless, the two systems diverge widely when determining whether particular transactions involve interest. This article compares the different approaches to the laws of interest found in these two systems, in an effort to reveal how underlying goals, practical constraints, and the structure of the legal system affects the development of the law. This article explains the laws of interest. The Torah mentions ribbit three times. The first occurs in Exodus the second mention is found in Leviticus and the final occurs in Deuteronomy. Moving forward this article explains the federal taxation of interest which says that interest is not banned under the federal tax laws, but it is often treated differently from other types of payments. A detailed analysis comparing the Jewish and the US approaches to interest concludes this article.
Talmudic Monetary Theory: Currency In Rabbinic Halakhah
Authors: Schiffman Lawrence H.
Published: February 2013

This article focuses on the concept of Talmudic Monetary Theory and the position and usage of currency in Rabbinic Halakhah. The Talmudic literary corpus represents the collective exploration of issues of Jewish religious law by the rabbinic leadership of the Jewish people from the last two millennia bce through the Islamic conquest of the Near East in the seventh century ce. The article argues that the Talmudic rabbis had unique and original ideas on the nature and function of currency. The article investigates the monetary theories that lie behind the rabbinic laws found in tractate Bava Metsi’a. The article provides perspectives on the views of the ancient rabbis regarding a number of issues of economic theory: nature of currency and commodities, relationship of the value of currency to price fluctuations, inflation. It also explains the concepts of barter and currency as well as the nature of currency as explained in Judaic texts.
Vars, Cointegration, and Common Cycle Restrictions
Authors: Anderson Heather M. , Vahid Farshid
Published: February 2013

This article argues that the vector autoregressive (VAR) models with cointegration and common cycles (or weaker forms of rank restrictions) can be usefully viewed as observable factor models. The factors are linear combinations of lagged levels and lagged differences, and as such, these observable factors have forecasting potential. This potential is illustrated in both a Monte Carlo and empirical setting, and the difficulties in developing “rules of thumb” for forecasting in multivariate systems are demonstrated. The article is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a synopsis of the literature on VARs with common trends, common cycles, and other common features. Section 3 extends the Monte Carlo analysis in Lin and Tsay (1996) to illustrate how model selection and the imposition of short- and long-run restrictions affect forecasts. Section 4 studies the forecasting performance of several reduced-rank multivariate models of an updated version of the Litterman (1986) data set, while Section 5 concludes.
Forecasting With Nonlinear Time Series Models
Authors: Kock Anders Bredahl , Teräsvirta Timo
Published: February 2013

This article considers nonlinear forecasting models, such as switching-regime models. These models are typically “small” compared to vector autoregressive and factor models, being either univariate or single-equation models, but tend to nest a linear relationship and so invite an assessment of whether allowing for nonlinearity improves forecast accuracy. The article is organized as follows. Section 2 considers a number of parametric time series models. Some universal approximators, including neural network models, are studied in Section 3. Forecasting several periods ahead with nonlinear models is the topic of Section 4. Forecasting with chaotic systems is briefly considered in Section 5. Comparisons of linear and nonlinear forecasts of economic time series are discussed in Section 6, and studies comprising a large number of series are discussed in Section 7. Section 8 contains a limited forecast accuracy comparison between recursive and direct forecasts. Final remarks and suggestions for further reading can be found in Section 9.
Forecasting With DSGE Models
Authors: Christoffel Kai , Coenen Günter , Warne Anders
Published: February 2013

This article reviews and illustrates the methodology of forecasting with dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models using Bayesian methods. It discusses an algorithm for estimating the predictive distribution of the observed variables based on draws from the posterior distribution of the DSGE model parameters and simulation of future paths for the variables with the model. The article is organized as follows. Section 2 sketches the new area-wide model (NAWM) and briefly reports on its empirical implementation. Section 3 discusses how the predictive distribution of a DSGE model can be estimated and then presents the alternative forecasting models that are used in the empirical analysis. Section 4 covers the forecast evaluation of the NAWM, focusing first on point forecasts and then on density forecasts. Section 5 summarizes the main findings and concludes.
Improving the Role of Judgment in Economic Forecasting
Authors: Goodwin Paul , Önkal Dilek , Lawrence Michael
Published: February 2013

This article first explores the variety of ways in which judgment plays a role in economic forecasting before outlining the potential problems associated with these applications of judgment. It then discusses the effectiveness of methods that have been designed to improve judgment in other areas of forecasting and assesses the extent to which these methods can be usefully employed by economic forecasters.
Nowcasting
Authors: BańBura Marta , Giannone Domenico , Reichlin Lucrezia
Published: February 2013

This article presents a statistical framework for estimating the current state of the economy (together with the recent past and near future) in a way in which the latest releases of high-frequency economic data can be incorporated, and in a way in which the impact of the latest release on the forecast can be readily assessed (providing a narrative to the changes in the estimate/forecast over time as more information accrues). It is organized as follows. Section 2 defines the problem of nowcasting in general and relates it to the concept of news in macroeconomic data releases. Section 3 explains the details of the approach. Section 4 discusses related literature. Section 5 illustrates the characteristics of the model via an application to the nowcast of GDP and inflation in the euro area. Section 6 discusses issues for further research, while Section 7 concludes.
Marketing and Sales
Authors: Franses Philip Hans
Published: February 2013

Sales forecasts are important for inventory management and for marketing. Inventories can be kept at appropriate levels, and marketing efforts can be addressed in the event that sales projections do not meet a firm's aspirations. This article discusses forecasting methods for durable products, such as high-definition television and hybrid cars, and methods for regularly purchased stock keeping unit (SKU) products like food products. Section 2 begins with durable products. The typical model used for forecasting is the Bass (1969) model, or one of its many variants, which can be extended to capture sales of sequential generations, and multilevel versions are also available. This section reviews various recent developments concerning the Bass model. Section 3 deals with forecasting SKU-level sales data. Due to the fact that such forecasts have to be made on a frequent basis, and also for many products at the same time, it is quite common to have automated programs generate forecasts and to have managers give those forecasts a final twist. Recently this practice has become the topic of much research because of the availability of detailed databases. A review of the findings in this literature is provided. The final section suggests a summary of the current state of the art and gives a few further research topics.
American Indian Poetry at the Dawn of Modernism
Authors: Parker Robert Dale
Published: February 2013

Scholars and readers of American poetry in general and American Indian poetry in particular generally assume that American Indian poetry begins in the late 1960s with the American Indian Renaissance. Even among scholars of American Indian literature, let alone scholars of American poetry in general, few readers can name more than, at most, a few American Indian poets before N. Scott Momaday. But indigenous people in what is now the United States have written poetry since the time of Anne Bradstreet, and the 1890s and the early twentieth century brought an effusion of Indian-written poetry. Poems by more than ninety different American Indians writing from 1900 to 1930 have been found. The anthology Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 showcases the work of eighty-three poets and provides a bibliography that lists almost 150 Indian poets up to 1930. While Indian poets wrote about the same range of topics as non-Indian poets, they also brought their interests and experiences as Indians to bear on their poems. This article discusses how these poems address colonialism and the federal government, land, the condition of the world in general, nature, Christianity, love, war, other Indian peoples, and the temptation to internalize anti-Indian ways of thinking.
“Jeweled Bindings”
Authors: Girard Melissa
Published: February 2013

This article charts the making-conventional of modernist women's poetry: a critical and institutional process that began in the modernist era, accelerated with the New Criticism, and persists stubbornly into our present moment. It argues that modernist women poets continue to face charges of sentimentality and, hence, conventionality even today. Although the article focuses on Bogan, Millay, Taggard, and Wylie, it suggests the need to take a decidedly unsentimental look at a much broader field of modernist women's poetries. Sentimentalism, in this modernist context, is a compromise position. It has given us a language for revaluing this poetry, but one that never quite fit. To correct these longstanding misconceptions, we need to restore to these poets the distinctively modernist discourses that they produced and that once surrounded their poetries.
Cézanne’s Ideal of “Realization”
Authors: Altieri Charles
Published: February 2013

This article elaborates what American modernist poets shared as they tried to appropriate aspects of the painters' projects while refusing slavish imitation and visible envy of the painters' centrality. There is much more at stake than learning how to adapt painterly collage. To adapt to a modernism defined primarily in the visual arts, they would have reconciled on their own terms the contrast in the epigraphs between Fry's formalism and Lawrence's sense of Cézanne's introducing a new relationship to matter and to energy. Because the best and most influential grappling with these issues is believed to take place in the later work of Cézanne, the article concentrates on the implicit theorizing that frames his use of the term “réalization” for his painterly quest. This concern puts the energies that form carries into dialogue with the possibilities of an artist providing a new yet plausible sense of the real, despite rejecting traditional representational paths to realist ends. It is argued that modernist poets adapt virtually the same strategies for their grappling with how a different medium might provide its own convincing access to what it could treat as reality.
American Poetry, Prayer, and the News
Authors: Ramazani Jahan
Published: February 2013

Twentieth-century American poetry metabolizes a variety of discursive genres, including fiction, song, theory, advertising, letters, and the law. To adapt Mikhail Bakhtin's terms, it dialogizes “literary and extraliterary languages,” “intensifying” and “hybridizing” them, making them collide and rub up against one another. But Bakhtin famously theorized poetry as monologic and exclusionary, “suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse, any allusion to alien discourse,” “destroying all traces of social heteroglossia and diversity of language”: “The language of the poetic genre is a unitary and singular Ptolemaic world outside of which nothing else exists and nothing else is needed.” Close analysis of twentieth-century American poems in relation to their generic others reveals a vastly more dialogic conception of poetry. This article focuses on poetry's ambivalent interactions with two of its generic others: the news and prayer as representing two widely divergent positions on a broad discursive spectrum. How do modern and contemporary American poems that engage with the news respond to journalism's mimeticism, presentism, and transparency? How do poems that adapt prayer respond to its ahistoricity, ritualism, and recursiveness? Do modern and contemporary American poetry more nearly resemble one or the other of its discursive cousins? How does American poetry overlap with, and distinguish itself from, these intergenres?
Fieldwork in New American Poetry
Authors: Shaw Lytle
Published: February 2013

Often in close dialogue with the place-based poetries of William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson, the New American poets of the 1950s and 1960s sought to dismantle and reinvent the concept of history both by reorienting it toward notions of temporality borrowed from anthropology and by grounding it within concrete spatial locations. This reinvention at once mobilized previously excluded versions of the cultural past and authorized new modes of lived experience in the present, especially in the place-based rural social formations poets increasingly constructed. To frame these emergent models of living, poets reinvented themselves as “fieldworkers” in the dual sense of working with spatially specific locations and with the authority of the disciplinary fields that might explain or contextualize those literal spaces. Over the course of the 1960s the poetry of a lone researcher offering his results to futurity was no longer seen as sufficient. Poets sought, instead, to live the experimental polis now, to enact it in daily life. As they did so, they externalized many features of Olson's practice in particular—turning his personal cosmology into a range of more public discourses. This article traces this process by charting how transformative readings of Olson were crucial to two seemingly opposite discourses that emerged in the 1960s: the back-to-the-land ecopoetics of Gary Snyder, grounded in part in his familial compound, Kitkitdizze, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains; and the Black Nationalism of Amiri Baraka, grounded in the city of Newark, New Jersey.
Disability Poetics
Authors: Davidson Michael
Published: February 2013

This article presents an overview of disability poetics that addresses not only poets associated with the movement but also a wide range of poets not typically associated with their disabilities. It argues that disability poetics does not describe a movement or an aesthetic so much as a spectrum of positions around embodiment—from poets like Eigner who seldom referred to his neurological condition to self-consciously “crip” poets for whom poetry is an arm (or leg) of the disability rights movement. It also describes the degree to which poetry is constituted by and within ideas of embodiment, from the “oral” tradition to the foot metric to the most recent versions of stand-up (or sit-down) performance. The twin terms resonate loudly in the U.S. context where ideas of embodiment have been synonymous with antinomian positions of self-reliance and independence, and for which dependence and communality are deemed threatening or, in the worst case, un-American. A disability poetics, while forged within the liberating ethos of the Independent Living movement, creates a site where the putative normalcy of bodies, sensations, and agency can be understood differently. If this has been poetry's ancient heritage, it is also disability's utopian horizon.
Green Reading
Authors: Keller Lynn
Published: February 2013

This article suggests that the canon of poetic works considered by ecocritics needs to expand so as to include not only more writing based in environments other than “nature” and “wilderness” but also more linguistically experimental, “postmodern” writing. It discusses a few key “nature poets” in order to identify some significant issues in modern American nature poetry involving the relation of humankind and human culture to the green world. It then looks beyond nature poetry to other environmental tropes and beyond conventionally realist writing to other poetics.
Transnationalism and Diaspora in American Poetry
Authors: Yu Timothy
Published: February 2013

This article explores how literary-critical understanding of modern and contemporary American poetry is shifting under the pressure of transnational and diasporic forces. Drawing on several case studies aimed at illuminating what it means to read American poetry transnationally, it argues that transnational and diasporic perspectives encourage us to view the United States as a node of political, economic, and cultural exchange, in which the crossing of borders has become constitutive of Americanness rather than external to it, and invite us to examine how such border crossings are registered in the content and it invite forms of modern and contemporary American poetry. In contrast to the seeming solidity of national identities, diasporic identifications are often ambivalent, acknowledging the pull of multiple histories while remaining at a critical distance from any single location.
Initial Impressions of Others
Authors: Uleman James S. , Saribay S. Adil
Published: February 2013

“Initial impressions” bring together personality and social psychology like no other field of study—“personality” because (1) impressions are about personalities, and (2) perceivers’ personalities affect these impressions; and “social” because (3) social cognitive processes of impression formation, and (4) sociocultural contexts have major effects on impressions. To make these points, we first review how people explicitly describe others: the terms we use, how these descriptions reveal our theories about others, the important roles of traits and types (including stereotypes) in these descriptions, and other prominent frameworks (e.g., narratives and social roles). Then we highlight recent research on the social cognitive processes underlying these descriptions: automatic and controlled attention, the many effects of primes (semantic and affective) and their dependence on contexts, the acquisition of valence, spontaneous inferences about others, and the interplay of automatic and control processes. Third, we examine how accurate initial impressions are, and what accuracy means, as well as deception and motivated biases and distortions. Fourth, we review recent research on effects of target features, perceiver features, and relations between targets and perceivers. Finally, we look at frameworks for understanding explanations, as distinct from descriptions: attribution theory, theory of mind, and simulation theory.
Personality, Social Psychology, and Psychopathology
Authors: Costanzo Philip R. , Hoyle Rick H. , Leary Mark R.
Published: February 2013

In this chapter, we first consider the historical and conceptual roots of the tripartite, but at times rocky, marriage of the fields of personality, social, and abnormal psychology. After briefly describing the hopes of early 20th-century scholars to array the study of normal and abnormal behavior, thought, and feeling on the same conceptual continua, we call for the rekindling of these conjunctive hopes. Indeed, we argue that with the advent of current cross-cutting developments in cognitive, socioemotional, and biological perspectives in the broader domain of the behavioral sciences, that the time is ripe for rearranging the marriage among these fields. In order to provide a conceptual frame for such a conjunctive effort, we return to Lewinian field theory and its definition of forces of locomotion in the life space as a particularly notable way to put the examination of normal and abnormal psychology in the same theoretical space. By addressing some critical ideational themes in the domains of personality and social psychology, we attempt to illustrate the overlap of these themes with the ideas and questions of scholars of abnormal behavior. Of course, in deploying a Lewinian model our analyses turn to the dynamics of person x environment interactions in the regions of the life space. In doing so we define the phenomena of meaning-making and the multiple “worldview” existential models in social and personality psychology as the forces constituting the primary dynamics defining the permeability of adaptive regions of the “life space” or phenomenal field. We illustrate these dynamics by detailed consideration of human adaptation in two critical regions or domains of life experience in the behavioral field: the domain of regulatory transactions and the domain of acceptance, social affection, and relationships. While these domains certainly do not exhaust all regions of the life space, we argue that they are particularly pertinent for parsing continua of normal-to-abnormal adaptation and conjoining the nature of psychopathology with the everyday struggles of personal and social significance to all humans. We conclude our analysis by rather unabashed advocacy, not specifically for the model we explore, but for scholarship that is aimed at developing models that link the normal to what we refer to as the abnormal or psychopathological. As humans, the cloths of our selves and our environments are made from common as well as individually unique fibers. We conclude that to disambiguate how such fibers are woven together to frame the forces driving our travels from blissful adaptation to painful maladjustment should be a primary agenda for our interconnected sciences of human behavior.
Traumatic Stress Disorders in Children and Adolescents
Authors: La Greca Annette M. , Taylor Cortney J. , Herge Whitney M.
Published: February 2013

Many children and adolescents who experience potentially traumatic events, such as natural disasters, acts of violence, physical injuries, child abuse, and life-threatening medical illnesses, display significant stress symptoms. In fact, these potentially traumatic events can lead to the development of acute stress disorder (ASD) and/or posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and cause significant psychological impairment. In this chapter, we discuss the types of potentially traumatic events that lead to ASD or PTSD in youth, as well as various aspects of trauma exposure. We next review available evidence on the definition, prevalence, and course of ASD and PTSD in youth, and the risk factors associated with their development. To date, relatively few studies have examined ASD and existing evidence calls into question the validity of dissociative symptoms as part of the existing ASD diagnostic criteria for youth. In contrast, many studies have evaluated PTSD and its symptoms in youth exposed to trauma, although PTSD prevalence rates vary substantially depending on a host of factors, including the type of traumatic event experienced, the degree of exposure to the event, and the informant for PTSD symptoms, among other factors. We also discuss developmental considerations for the ASD and PTSD diagnoses and directions for future research. The chapter closes with a brief summary of proposed changes to the diagnostic criteria for ASD and PTSD in youth that are being considered for the DSM-5.
Risk and Protective Factors for Traumatic Stress Disorders
Authors: King Lynda A. , Pless Kaiser Anica , Schuster Wachen Jennifer , Potter Carrie M. , Park Crystal L. , Spiro Avron , King Daniel W.
Published: February 2013

This chapter provides an overview of risk and protective factors that may account for posttraumatic responses. In addition to risk and protective factors specifically for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the outcomes of resilience and posttraumatic growth are considered. Emphasis is placed on the importance of a longitudinal and especially a lifespan developmental framework to understand both the short- and long-term implications of trauma exposure and the factors that influence its consequences. A brief introduction to methodological approaches for documenting longitudinal change is presented, followed by suggestions for future research.
Promising Psychological Treatments
Authors: Kearns Megan C. , Rothbaum Barbara O.
Published: February 2013

Exposure to traumatic events is highly prevalent, which has led to the creation of multiple psychosocial and pharmacological treatment approaches for individuals who subsequently develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite the availability of existing empirically supported treatments for PTSD, research indicates that a significant subset of patients fail to respond to treatment. As a result, there is a great need for the development of novel and innovative treatments that can address the diverse needs of individuals with trauma histories and that can alleviate symptoms of traumatic stress in a greater number of individuals. The following chapter outlines numerous promising treatments, including couple and family-based approaches, technological approaches, emotion-based therapies, pharmacological treatments, and treatments designed to address comorbidity. Although many of these approaches are in preliminary stages of development and require further study, they represent important progress in helping clinicians better serve the many needs of individuals with PTSD.
Introduction: The Contours of Contemporary Free-Will Debates (Part 2)
Authors: Kane Robert
Published: February 2013

This article describes the contours of contemporary debates about free will and provides an overview of the topics in this volume. It considers the following issues: free will and conflicting views about persons; the determinist question and modern science; the compatibility question and arguments for incompatibilism; classical compatibilism; new compatibilist approaches to freedom and responsibility; moral responsibility and alternative possibilities; libertarian or incompatibilist theories of free will; further views and debates on hard determinism, hard incompatibilism, free-will skepticism, illusionism, revisionism, promises, and rollbacks; neuroscience, psychology, experimental philosophy, and free will; divine foreknowledge, human freedom, and theological dimensions of free-will debates.
Contemporary Compatibilism: Mesh Theories and Reasons-Responsive Theories
Authors: McKenna Michael
Published: February 2013

This article considers two of the most widely discussed types of new compatibilist theories under the headings of “mesh theories” and “reasons-responsive theories.” The first part of the article examines hierarchical theories, focusing initially on Frankfurt's theory, which is the most widely discussed of such theories. It considers three kinds of objections that have been made of Frankfurt's hierarchical theory—concerning manipulation, weakness of will, and“identification” with higher-order desires. The second part turns to reasons-responsive compatibilist views of free agency. Such views require that for agents to be free and responsible, they must be “responsive to reasons,” in the sense that they must be able to recognize and evaluate reasons for action, and be able to act in some manner that is sensitive to a suitable range of reasons.
Alternatives for Libertarians
Authors: Clarke Randolph
Published: February 2013

This article discusses objections to all three kinds of libertarian theory. It first reprises and further develops criticisms of noncausalist and event-causal (EC) libertarian theories. It argues that libertarian theories of both kinds face as yet unresolved problems including issue about luck and control, the requirements of intentional action, and the role of psychological causes in free agency. It then turns to agent-causal theories. It explains reasons for doubting the possibility of “causation by an enduring substance, which does not consist in causation by events involving that substance” (such as agent-causal theorists propose), and concludes on a skeptical note about the viability of libertarian accounts of free will generally.
Rethinking Free Will: New Perspectives on an Ancient Problem
Authors: Kane Robert
Published: February 2013

This article discusses and defends a “centered” EC libertarian view of free will that places the indeterminism in choices or decisions themselves. Libertarian views were either agent-causal or noncausalist, or some combination of the two. The possibility of an alternative (centered) causal indeterminist or EC view was suggested by a number of thinkers. This article discusses these refinements after summarizing the centered EC theory and motivations for formulating it. It considers issues about self-forming actions, efforts of will, the phenomenology of free decision making, the relation of the theory to neuroscience, complex dynamical systems, agency and control of decisions given indeterminism, and responses to alleged regresses attending the view, including issues about the first self-forming actions of childhood. It also responds to a number of different versions of the so-called “luck objection” against libertarian free will.