cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Semi-scaling cosmic strings

We develop a model of string dynamics with back-reaction from both scaling and non-scaling loops taken into account. The evolution of a string network is described by the distribution functions of coherence segments and kinks. We derive two non-linear equations which govern the evolution of the two distributions and solve them analytically in the limit of late times. We also show that the correlation function is an exponential, and solve the dynamics for the corresponding spectrum of scaling loops.
Data-driven analysis of relight variability of jet fuels induced by turbulence

Abstract For safety purposes, reliable reignition of aircraft engines in the event of flame blow-out is a critical requirement. Typically, an external ignition source in the form of a spark is used to achieve a stable flame in the combustor. However, such forced turbulent ignition may not always successfully relight the combustor, mainly because the state of the combustor cannot be precisely determined. Uncertainty in the turbulent flow inside the combustor, inflow conditions, and spark discharge characteristics can lead to variability in sparking outcomes even for nominally identical operating conditions. Prior studies have shown that of all the uncertain parameters, turbulence is often dominant and can drastically alter ignition behavior. For instance, even when different fuels have similar ignition delay times, their ignition behavior in practical systems can be completely different. In practical operating conditions, it is challenging to understand why ignition fails and how much variation in outcomes can be expected. The focus of this work is to understand relight variability induced by turbulence for two different aircraft fuels, namely Jet-A and a variant named C1. A detailed, previously developed simulation approach is used to generate a large number of successful and failed ignition events. Using this data, the cause of misfire is evaluated based on a discriminant analysis that delineates the difference between turbulent initial conditions that lead to ignition or failure. From the discriminant analysis, a compressed sensing algorithm is then applied to help pinpoint the locations of relevant turbulent features. Findings from the discriminant analysis are confirmed with the time history of near kernel properties. Next, a clustering strategy is used to identify ignition and misfire modes. With this approach, it was determined that the cause of ignition failure is different for the two fuels. While it was found that Jet-A is influenced by fuel entrainment, C1 was found to be more sensitive to small scale turbulence features. A larger variability is found in the ignition modes of C1, which can be subject to extreme events induced by kernel breakdown.
Outcomes of mechanically ventilated patients with COVID-19 associated respiratory failure.

Purpose The outcomes of patients requiring invasive mechanical ventilation for COVID-19 remain poorly defined. We sought to determine clinical characteristics and outcomes of patients with COVID-19 managed with invasive mechanical ventilation in an appropriately resourced US health care system. Methods Outcomes of COVID-19 infected patients requiring mechanical ventilation treated within the Inova Health System between March 5, 2020 and April 26, 2020 were evaluated through an electronic medical record review. Results 1023 COVID-19 positive patients were admitted to the Inova Health System during the study period. Of these, 164 (16.0%) were managed with invasive mechanical ventilation. All patients were followed to definitive disposition. 70/164 patients (42.7%) had died and 94/164 (57.3%) were still alive. Deceased patients were older (median age of 66 vs. 55, p <0.0001) and had a higher initial d-dimer (2.22 vs. 1.31, p = 0.005) and peak ferritin levels (2998 vs. 2077, p = 0.016) compared to survivors. 84.3% of patients over 70 years old died in the hospital. Conversely, 67.4% of patients age 70 or younger survived to hospital discharge. Younger age, non-Caucasian race and treatment at a tertiary care center were all associated with survivor status. Conclusion Mortality of patients with COVID-19 requiring invasive mechanical ventilation is high, with particularly daunting mortality seen in patients of advanced age, even in a well-resourced health care system. A substantial proportion of patients requiring invasive mechanical ventilation were not of advanced age, and this group had a reasonable chance for recovery.
A Joint Learning Approach based on Self-Distillation for Keyphrase Extraction from Scientific Documents.

Keyphrase extraction is the task of extracting a small set of phrases that best describe a document. Most existing benchmark datasets for the task typically have limited numbers of annotated documents, making it challenging to train increasingly complex neural networks. In contrast, digital libraries store millions of scientific articles online, covering a wide range of topics. While a significant portion of these articles contain keyphrases provided by their authors, most other articles lack such kind of annotations. Therefore, to effectively utilize these large amounts of unlabeled articles, we propose a simple and efficient joint learning approach based on the idea of self-distillation. Experimental results show that our approach consistently improves the performance of baseline models for keyphrase extraction. Furthermore, our best models outperform previous methods for the task, achieving new state-of-the-art results on two public benchmarks: Inspec and SemEval-2017.
The kernel of newform Dedekind sums

Abstract Newform Dedekind sums are a class of crossed homomorphisms that arise from newform Eisenstein series. We initiate a study of the kernel of these newform Dedekind sums. Our results can be loosely described as showing that these kernels are neither “too big” nor “too small.” We conclude with an observation about the Galois action on Dedekind sums that allows for significant computational efficiency in the numerical calculation of Dedekind sums.
Symplectic geometry and connectivity of spaces of frames

Frames provide redundant, stable representations of data which have important applications in signal processing. We introduce a connection between symplectic geometry and frame theory and show that many important classes of frames have natural symplectic descriptions. Symplectic tools seem well-adapted to addressing a number of important questions about frames; in this paper, we focus on the frame homotopy conjecture posed in 2002 and recently proved by Cahill, Mixon, and Strawn, which says that the space of finite unit norm tight frames is connected. We give a simple symplectic proof of a generalization of the frame homotopy conjecture, showing that spaces of complex frames with arbitrary prescribed norms and frame operators are connected. To spark further investigation, we also suggest a number of fundamental questions in frame theory which seem amenable to a symplectic approach.
Allen–Cahn min-max on surfaces

We use a min-max procedure on the Allen–Cahn energy functional to construct geodesics on closed, $2$‑dimensional Riemannian manifolds, as motivated by the work of Guaraco [Gua18]. Borrowing classical blowup and curvature estimates from geometric analysis, as well as novel Allen–Cahn curvature estimates due to Wang–Wei [WW19], we manage to study the fine structure of potential singular points at the diffuse level, and show that the problem reduces to that of understanding “entire” singularity models constructed by del Pino–Kowalczyk–Pacard [dPKP13] with Morse index $1$. The argument is completed by a Morse index estimate on these singularity models.
Implications of Priority Access in Markets with Experts: Evidence from Online Marketplace Lending.

Platform governance mechanisms such as market access control help to align all market players towards a common value proposition. Our study focuses on an important market access control mechanism: ...
A New Progressivism

Based on an address for a conference on Law and Transformation in South Africa, this paper explores problems with two twentieth-century approaches to government: the way of markets and the way of planning. It urge that the New Progressivism simultaneously offers (1) a distinctive conception of government’s appropriate means, an outgrowth of the late-twentieth-century critique of economic planning, and (2) a distinctive understanding of government’s appropriate ends, an outgrowth of evident failures with market arrangements and largely a product of the mid-twentieth-century critique of laissez faire. It emphasizes the need to replace bans and commands with appropriate incentives, and to attend to social norms and social meanings in leading human behavior in welfare-promoting directions. The ultimate goal is to promote some of the goals associated with America’s New Deal and Europe’s social democracy, but without using the crude, inflexible, and often counterproductive methods associated with those approaches. Some attention is devoted to the effects of globalization, the AIDS crisis, crime prevention, and the role of economic growth. Introduction: Means and Ends The German psychologist Dietrich Dorner has done some fascinating experiments designed to see whether people can engage in successful social engineering. Dorner’s experiments are run via computer. Participants are asked to solve problems faced by the inhabitants of some region of the world; the problems may involve poverty, poor medical care, inadequate fertilization of crops, sick cattle, insufficient water, or excessive hunting and fishing. Through the magic of the computer, many policy initiatives are available (improved care of cattle, childhood immunization, drilling more wells), and participants can choose among them. Once particular initiatives are chosen, the computer projects, over short periods and then over decades, what is likely to happen in the region. In these experiments, success is entirely possible; some initiatives will actually make for effective and enduring improvements. But most of the participants—even the most educated and professional ones—produce calamities. They do so because * This paper is based on a keynote address on a conference on Law and Transformation in South Africa; readers are asked to make allowances for a paper originally intended for oral presentation. I am grateful to Lesley Wexler for superb research assistance and to Martha Nussbaum and Theunis Roux for many helpful comments and discussions. 1 Dietrich Dorner, The Logic of Failure (1997).
Sunspot Fluctuations in Asset Prices and Business Cycles in Japan Over 1986–1999

If individuals receive utility directly from the value of their wealth, equilibrium may be indeterminate so that sunspot equilibria may exist. In such an equilibrium, the price of an asset may fluctuate stochastically, as a result of spontaneous revisions of agents’ expectations. A neoclassical growth model with such a utility function is used to show that those fluctuations in asset prices can generate co-movement among output, consumption and investment, even without assuming non-convex technology. In particular, numerical results show that the model can replicate well the business cycles in Japan over the period 1986–1999.
Going-concern judgments: An experimental test of the self-fulfilling prophecy and forecast accuracy

Abstract Statement on Auditing Standards No. 59 requires auditors to assess whether substantial doubt exists about a client’s ability to remain a going concern. This study reports an experimental economic test of a game-theoretic model of that judgment. Competing behavioral predictions are based on loss avoidance, risk seeking, altruism, and adversarial play. We also examine how strategic dependence affects auditors’ and clients’ propensity to depart from equilibrium. The auditor conveys to the client a forecast on business survival and the intention to express a clean or going-concern opinion. The client can attempt to avoid a going-concern opinion and its potential self-fulfilling prophecy effect by switching auditors. Several subjects played pure strategies consistent with loss avoidance, adversarial play, and risk seeking. Nevertheless, the experimental results support the model’s prediction that the first treatment variable, self-fulfilling prophecy, leads auditors to express fewer going-concern opinions and leads clients to switch auditors more frequently, particularly when the audit evidence has low forecast accuracy. The second treatment variable, forecast accuracy, also has a significant effect on subject behavior. However, in contrast to the model’s predictions, inaccurate forecasts did not lead auditors to express more clean opinions but led clients to switch auditors more frequently.
Combining Top-Down and Bottom-Up Accountability: Evidence from a Bribery Experiment

Monitoring corruption typically relies on top-down interventions aimed at increasing the probability of external controls and/or the severity of punishment. An alternative approach to fighting corruption is to rely on bottom-up monitoring. This paper investigates the effectiveness of an accountability system that combines bottom-up monitoring and top-down auditing using data from a specifically designed bribery lab experiment. I compare “public officials’” tendency to ask for bribes under: 1) no monitoring; 2) conventional top-down auditing, and 3) an accountability system that gives citizens the possibility to report corrupt officials, knowing that reports lead to top-down auditing with some low probability (the same as in 2). The experimental results suggest that “combined” accountability systems can be highly effective in curbing corruption, even when citizens’ “voice” leads to formal top-down punishment with a relatively low probability.
Sublime Jurisprudence: On the Ethical Education of the Legal Imagination in Our Time

The broad dissemination of digital communication technologies is raising disturbing questions about the nature of truth as representation. This epistemological crisis shares an uncanny affinity with the crisis of representation that lay at the heart of the baroque era during the 17th century in Europe. The resolution of that crisis, through the work of Descartes and others, came on the heels of a philosophical shift from the image to the sign. Not incidentally, that move was accompanied by significant political and juridical developments, including: the origin of legal positivism, the rise of conventionalism (or nominalism), the disenchantment of nature and the decline of natural law, and the emergence of the modern nation-state. The semiotic model today, however, is strained to the breaking point. Infinitely mutable digital signs proliferate as copies of copies; signifiers have been shorn of the signified. The ensuing mutation of the Cartesian sign into the digital image has been accompanied by significant political and juridical developments. Individual autonomy, universal reason, and calculative rationality - the traditional foundation for core Liberal values - are being challenged by digital practices. Like the baroque crisis of visuality that preceded it, the current crisis of the digital neo-baroque will not ease until confidence is restored not only in acceptable forms of truth as representation, but also in the mimetic faculty itself, which is to say, in the human capacity to represent self and others. 'Sublime jurisprudence' is a metaphysical model that seeks to address this need.
Comparative Domestic Constitutionalism: Rethinking Criminal Procedure Using the Administrative Constitution

The Administrative Procedure Act1 (APA) is as much a constitution as a statute.2 As with all constitutions, the nature of the APA goes far in determining the topography of the procedural landscape that grows upon it. The Act regulates agency procedure by creating a transsubstantive procedural floor applicable to virtually all agencies that may be, and often is, supplemented by substance-specific procedures that Congress and agencies establish. (Courts, importantly, are forbidden by Supreme Court precedent from imposing procedural requirements that exceed those contained in the APA.) To the geographically inclined, the APA is the floor of a broad procedural valley; across the valley lie scattered hills of substance-specific procedure piled up by agencies and legislatures based on judgments about which procedures befit which agencies. The resulting landscape is an uneven terrain in which all agencies share a basic procedure, but procedural requirements as a whole differ from agency to agency and, consequently, subject matter to subject matter. This administrative constitution accords agencies wide discretion to enact rules and adjudicate controversies, which courts review for “reasonableness.”3 When courts do overturn an agency’s action — or, rarely, a congressional delegation — they tend to do so through the imposition of rules that generate incentives for structured processes, rather than through commands that impose specific procedures for agency actors to follow. United States v. Mead Corp.,4 for example, dangles Chevron deference5 as a carrot to entice Congress and agencies
Undoing Race? Reconciling Multiracial Identity with Equal Protection

The number of multiracial individuals in America, many of whom define their racial identity in different ways, has grown dramatically in recent years and continues to increase. From this demographic shift a movement seeking unique racial status for multiracial individuals has emerged. The multiracial movement is distinguishable from other race-based movements in that it is primarily driven by identity rather than the quest for political, social, or economic equality. It is not clear how equal protection doctrine, which is concerned primarily with state-created racial classifications, will or should accommodate multiracialism. Nor is it clear how to best reconcile the recognition of individual identity with the continuing need to address group-based racial discrimination and subordination. In this Essay, I explore the potential impact of multiracialism—and multiracial identity in particular—on the future of racial classifications under equal protection doctrine.
Workers' assessments of three flexible manufacturing systems

This article explores workers' reactions to three flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) through their responses to the Job Diagnostic Survey and other questionnaire items. Data from two installations are compard to data presented in previous studies of a third installation and to samples of workers on stand-alone machines. One of the new cases was characterized by its semi-autonomous team organization, while the other new installation was organized along rather conventional lines. Three results are highlighted. First, the skill requirements of FMS jobs were seen by workers as greater than the skill requirements of both stand-alone conventional and NC equipment. Second, workers on both these new FMSs expressed equally high levels of satisfaction and motivation, considerably higher than that found in the earlier study. Third, an understanding of these worker reactions to FMSs requires a detailed characterization of their specific tasks and technologies.
PRODUCT BUNDLING AND INCENTIVES FOR MERGERS AND STRATEGIC ALLIANCES

This paper analyzes firms’ choice between a merger and a strategic alliance in bundling their product with other complementary product. We consider a framework in which firms can improve profits only from product bundling. While mixed bundling is not profitable, pure bundling is because pure bundling reduces consumers’ choices, and thus, softens competition among firms. Firms benefit the most from this reduced competit ion if they form an alliance. Firms do not gain as much from a merger because, internalizing the complementarity between the two products, a merged firm is inclined to pursue aggressive pricing to gain market share. Yet, firms may be motivated to choose a merger over an alliance because of foreclosure possibility as foreclosure is not possible under strategic alliance. However, in response, unmerged rivals can use a strategic alliance to avert foreclosure. Hence, the possibility of counter-bundling via strategic alliance by rivals reduces the incentives for merger. In equilibrium,
Adapting Copyright for the Mashup Generation

Growing out of the rap and hip hop genres as well as advances in digital editing tools, music mashups have emerged as a defining genre for post-Napster generations. Yet the uncertain contours of copyright liability as well as prohibitive transaction costs have pushed this genre underground, stunting its development, limiting remix artists’ commercial channels, depriving sampled artists of fair compensation, and further alienating netizens and new artists from the copyright system. In the real world of transaction costs, subjective legal standards, and market power, no solution to the mashup problem will achieve perfection across all dimensions. The appropriate inquiry is whether an allocation mechanism achieves the best overall resolution of the trade-offs among authors’ rights, cumulative creativity, freedom of expression, and overall functioning of the copyright system. By adapting the long-standing cover license for the mashup genre, Congress can support a charismatic new genre while affording fairer compensation to owners of sampled works, engaging the next generations, and channeling disaffected music fans into authorized markets.
Conservation at the Crossroads: Reauthorization of the 1985 Farm Bill Conservation Provisions

Professor Linda Malone discusses conservation provisions in the Food Security Act of 1985, which incentivize farmers to not use fragile land for production. The Act is vulnerable to politically vulnerable, but has the ability to be one of the most significant conversation methods to present date. The article focuses on a summary of the act, important amendments and proposed reforms for conservation, and a discussion of the most promising reform methods.
Integrating Computing in the Statistics and Data Science Curriculum: Creative Structures, Novel Skills and Habits, and Ways to Teach Computational Thinking

Nolan and Temple Lang argued for the fundamental role of computing in the statistics curriculum. In the intervening decade, the statistics education community has acknowledged that computational sk...
Ronald Reagan and the politics of declining union organization

New union members in the United States are typically gained through workplace elections. We find that the annual number of union elections fell by 50 per cent in the early 1980s. A formal model indicates that declining union election activity may be due to an unfavourable political climate which raises the costs of unionization, even though the union win–rate remains unaffected. We relate the timing of declining election activity to the air–traffic controllers’ strike of 1981, and the appointment of the Reagan Labor Board in 1983. Empirical analysis shows that the fall in election activity preceded these developments.
The effects of dollar appreciation on sectoral labor market adjustments: Theory and evidence

Abstract We examine the extent to which exchange rate fluctuations affect sectoral employment and wages in the United States. We introduce a theoretical rational expectation model that decomposes movements in the exchange rate into anticipated and unanticipated components. The model demonstrates the effects of demand and supply channels on the response of the nominal wage and labor employment to changes in the exchange rate. The evidence indicates that the deflationary effect dominates on industrial nominal wage in manufacturing and transportation industries in the face of dollar appreciation. More importantly, there is evidence of a decrease in employment growth in several industries in response to dollar appreciation, which is statistically significant in construction and at the aggregate level. This evidence is consistent with a decrease in labor demand given the loss of competitiveness of U.S. products following dollar appreciation. There are negative effects of dollar appreciation on labor market conditions in the United States. Nonetheless, dollar appreciation is consistent with an increase in employment growth in the mining sector where the share of imports is the largest among U.S. industries.
Environmental-Community Psychology in the Study of Disasters: The Importance of Socio-Spatial Links

The psychosocial literature in contexts of socio-natural disasters has mainly focused on the study of the psychological consequences for the people affected, paying less attention to psycho-socioenvironmental factors. In this article, we aim to highlight the relevance of community environmental psychology for analyzing both the subjective aspects of people-place relationships and the community relations of the towns hit by disasters. To do this, we present a conceptual framework community psychology and environmental psychology categories which are relevant for studying what we call socio-spatial links in socio-natural disaster situations. This perspective is illustrated by presenting the results of a study carried out with a mixed methodology, which describes how these links emerge in people who have lived in communities affected by earthquakes, a tsunami, and a volcanic eruption in 4 Chilean towns. Responses to the scales of place attachment, place identity, residential satisfaction, sense of community, and civic participation were analyzed in a non-probability (convenience) sample (n = 628), along with reports of 17 focus groups (n = 117) on the constructed meanings of public space. It is concluded that the articulation of environmental and community psychology broadens our understanding of elements of power and dispute in the territory, while also making psychosocial flaws visible in post-disaster reconstruction solutions.
The Real Effects of Hedge Fund Activism: Productivity, Asset Allocation, and Labor Outcomes

This paper studies the long-term effect of hedge fund activism on firm productivity using plant-level information from the U.S. Census Bureau. A typical target firm improves production efficiency in the 3 years after intervention, with stronger improvements in business strategy-oriented interventions. Plants sold after intervention improve productivity significantly under new ownership, suggesting that capital redeployment is an important channel for value creation. Employees of target firms experience stagnation in work hours and wages despite an increase in labor productivity. Additional tests refute alternative explanations attributing the improvement to mean reversion, management's voluntary reforms, industry consolidation shocks, or activists' stock-picking abilities
Older Clients with Questionable Legal Competence: Elder Law Practitioners and Treating Physicians

Issues frequently arise in Elder Law practice concerning the cognitive and emotional ability of an older individual to make legally significant decisions. The physicians who have treated the person whose competence is being called into question, and/or the medical records generated by the treating physicians, often are sought by attorneys as sources of factual evidence regarding the patient’s symptoms and behaviors, clinical diagnoses, and treatments offered and dispensed. The attorney/physician interaction in this arena may be less than ideal. This essay examines some of the reasons for such interprofessional friction and makes suggestions for productively addressing the tension in a manner likely to benefit the allegedly incompetent person.
The American keiretsu and universal banks: Investing, voting and sitting on nonfinancials’ corporate boards ☆

Abstract This paper investigates the equity investments and voting rights that American banks control through their trust business. The paper also studies whether the voting rights American banks control through their trust business help explain their presence on firms’ corporate boards. We find that on average the largest 100 American banks control 10% of the voting rights of S&P 500 firms. We also find that there are several firms in the S&P 500 index in which the top banks control more than 20% of their voting rights, and several firms in the country in which these banks control more than 60% of their voting rights. Our investigation into the presence of American bankers on corporate boards shows that bankers are more likely to join the boards of firms in which they control a large voting stake. We also find that banks’ lending relationships help explain bankers’ board memberships. Our results further show that bankers who have both a voting stake in a firm and a lending relationship with it have a higher likelihood of joining the firm's board of directors.
Challenges to Mismeasurement Explanations for the U.S. Productivity Slowdown

The U.S. has been experiencing a slowdown in measured labor productivity growth since 2004. A number of commentators and researchers have suggested that this slowdown is at least in part illusory, because real output data have failed to capture the new and better products of the past decade. I conduct four disparate analyses, each of which offers empirical challenges to this “mismeasurement hypothesis.” First, the productivity slowdown has occurred in dozens of countries, and its size is unrelated to measures of the countries’ consumption or production intensities of information and communication technologies (ICTs, the type of goods most often cited as sources of mismeasurement). Second, estimates from the existing research literature of the surplus created by internet-linked digital technologies fall far short of the $2.7 trillion or more of “missing output” resulting from the productivity growth slowdown. The largest—by some distance—is less than one-third of the purportedly mismeasured GDP. Third, if measurement problems were to account for even a modest share of this missing output, the properly measured output and productivity growth rates of industries that produce and service ICTs would have to have been multiples of their measured growth in the data. Fourth, while measured gross domestic income has been on average higher than measured gross domestic product since 2004—perhaps indicating workers are being paid to make products that are given away for free or at highly discounted prices—this trend actually began before the productivity slowdown and moreover reflects unusually high capital income rather than labor income (i.e., profits are unusually high). In combination, these complementary facets of evidence suggest that the reasonable prima facie case for the mismeasurement hypothesis faces real hurdles when confronted with the data.
Target Marketing of Subprime Loans: Racialized Consumer Fraud & Reverse Redlining

This article, presented at Brooklyn Law School’s 2009 Sparer Public Interest Law Symposium on a panel entitled Stopping the Next Subprime Crisis, is part of a larger project of information and strategy-sharing among academics, policy analysts and attorneys involved in foreclosure and predatory lending prevention. The article marshals and analyzes evidence of discriminatory and deceptive marketing practices by subprime mortgage lenders and brokers. It also supports current proposals for policy reforms that could address the misuse of new marketing technologies in this context.
Forecasting with distributional scaling

Option pricing and allocation tools in portfolio construction should be prospective – based on assumptions about how prices will change in the future. Most capital market assumptions used in portfolio construction are based on retrospective analysis, boiling down to simple calculations of historical correlations. A better method is to take advantage of the self-similarity of returns where tick-by-tick returns are scaled up to daily returns, or where daily returns are scaled up to monthly returns. Distributional scaling can be used for this purpose.
Using earnings forecasts to simultaneously estimate firm-specific cost of equity and long-term growth

A growing body of literature in accounting and finance relies on implied cost of equity (COE) measures. Such measures are sensitive to assumptions about terminal earnings growth rates. In this paper we develop a new COE measure that is more accurate than existing measures because it incorporates endogenously estimated long-term growth in earnings. Our method extends Easton et al. (J Account Res, 40, 657–676, 2002) method of simultaneously estimating sample average COE and growth. Our method delivers COE (growth) estimates that are significantly positively associated with future realized stock returns (future realized earnings growth). Moreover, the predictive ability of our COE measure subsumes that of other commonly used COE measures and is incremental to commonly used risk characteristics. Our implied growth measure fills the void in the earnings forecasting literature by robustly predicting earnings growth beyond the five-year horizon.
Advertising Strategies in Electronic Retailing: A Differential Games Approach

We consider advertising problems under an information technology (IT) capacity constraint encountered by electronic retailers in a duopolistic setting. There is a considerable amount of literature on advertising games between firms, yet introducing an IT capacity constraint fundamentally changes this problem. In the presence of information processing constraints, although advertising may still cause a customer to switch, it may not result in a sale, i.e., the customer may be lost by both firms. This situation could occur when customers have a limited tolerance for processing delays and leave the website of a firm because of slow response. In such situations, attracting more traffic to a firm's site (by increasing advertising expenditure) may not generate enough additional revenue to warrant this expenditure. We use a differential game formulation to obtain closed-form solutions for the advertising effort over time in the presence of IT capacity constraints. Based on these solutions, we present several useful managerial insights.
Dividend policy at firms accused of accounting fraud

Recent studies and some policy experts have posited that dividends indicate higher-quality earnings. In this study, we test this conjecture by comparing the dividend policies of firms accused of accounting fraud to those of firms not accused of accounting fraud. Specifically, we examine whether alleged fraud firms are as likely to be dividend payers as non-fraud firms, and whether managers of dividend-paying fraud firms increase dividends at the same rate as managers of non-fraud firms. Our data reveal that dividend paying status is negatively associated with the probability of committing accounting fraud. In addition, we also find that, during the alleged fraud period, the earnings–dividends relation is weaker for the alleged fraud firms relative to firms not accused of fraud. Finally, using propensity score match tests, the data provide evidence that managers of alleged fraud firms increase dividends less often than managers of firms not accused of fraud, consistent with the alleged fraud firms not being able to match the dividend policies of firms not accused of fraud. Overall, our results suggest that dividends, especially dividend increases, are associated with higher earnings quality.
An economic case for CSR: The comparative efficiency of for-profit firms in meeting consumer demand for social goods

Research Summary We develop a formal model of CSR, with both a for-profit and a non-profit organization providing social goods to needy recipients and competing for resources from consumers. We show that CSR results in financial benefit if it is either related to the firm's core business, or non-overlapping with non-profit efforts, but only leads to social benefit if both conditions apply, with these relationships being moderated by the firm's core business capabilities. Our article thus makes a case for CSR based on the comparative efficiency of for-profits in providing social goods relative to non-profits, while also highlighting the potential divergence between the financial and social impact of CSR. In addition, it offers new insights into the heterogeneity of CSR, and the role of non-profits and hybrids. Managerial Summary Firms that undertake socially responsible actions are often rewarded for these actions by supporters of social causes, enabling the firms to make additional profits from CSR. Whether CSR is socially beneficial, however, depends on how the firm compares to a non-profit serving the same cause. CSR activities that are non-overlapping with existing non-profit efforts, and that are closely related to the firm's core business, are likely to most strongly benefit society, especially when undertaken by high-performing firms. Where this is not the case, CSR adds little social value and may even be harmful. Managers seeking to maximize both firm profits and social welfare through CSR should thus ask themselves: What is my firm's unique advantage in serving this cause relative to alternative providers, for example, non-profits?
Supply constraints and housing prices

Abstract We analyze the effects of supply constraints on housing prices. For plausible parameterizations, loosening regulatory constraints in individual jurisdictions would have little effect on prices, while coordinated loosening across markets could have large price effects.
Sequencing and Scheduling in Robotic Cells: Recent Developments

A great deal of work has been done to analyze the problem of robot move sequencing and part scheduling in robotic flowshop cells. We examine the recent developments in this literature. A robotic flowshop cell consists of a number of processing stages served by one or more robots. Each stage has one or more machines that perform that stage's processing. Types of robotic cells are differentiated from one another by certain characteristics, including robot type, robot travel-time, number of robots, types of parts processed, and use of parallel machines within stages. We focus on cyclic production of parts. A cycle is specified by a repeatable sequence of robot moves designed to transfer a set of parts between the machines for their processing. We start by providing a classification scheme for robotic cell scheduling problems that is based on three characteristics: machine environment, processing restrictions, and objective function, and discuss the influence of these characteristics on the methods of analysis employed. In addition to reporting recent results on classical robotic cell scheduling problems, we include results on robotic cells with advanced features such as dual gripper robots, parallel machines, and multiple robots. Next, we examine implementation issues that have been addressed in the practice-oriented literature and detail the optimal policies to use under various combinations of conditions. We conclude by describing some important open problems in the field.
International Trade under Oligopoly Conditions

Abstract The paper gives a simple representation of how oligopoly affects the general theory of international trade.Three points are emphasized: the simplicity of trade under oligopoly in the Ricardian model; the equationsdescribing the general equilibrium of a world economy with any number of goods, countries, and factorsunder oligopolistic conditions and an integrated world market; and a complete description of the solutionof a Mill–Ricardo–Cournot model with oligopoly in one sector and perfect competition in the other. 1. Introduction “National industries and national trade react and react on one another,but the dominant force is that of the industry. The main courses of tradeare governed by the relations between the surrounding industries, in thesame way as watercourses are governed by the contours of the hill....Butthe water reacts on the hills and trade reacts on the industry; but the indus-trial history of any country would have been different if her opportunitiesfor foreign trade had been different.”Alfred Marshall,
Auditor Industry Specialization and Earnings Quality

This study examines the association between measures of earnings quality and auditor industry specialization. Prior work has examined the association between auditor brand name and earnings quality, using auditor brand name to proxy for audit quality. Recent work has hypothesized that auditor industry specialization also contributes to audit quality. Extending this literature, we compare the absolute level of discretionary accruals (DAC) and earnings response coefficients (ERC) of firms audited by industry specialists with those of firms not audited by industry specialists. We restrict our study to clients of Big 6 (and later Big 5) auditors to control for brand name. Because industry specialization is unobservable, we use multiple proxies for it. After controlling for variables established in prior work to be related to DAC and the ERC, we find clients of industry specialist auditors have lower DAC and higher ERC than clients of nonspecialist auditors. This finding is consistent with clients of industry ...
A Taxonomy of International Rule of Law Institutions

This article revises and updates a seminal article written by the author in 1998, which was the first attempt to tally how many and what kind of international courts and tribunals existed at that point in time. It contained a chart that placed international courts and tribunals in a larger context, listing them alongside quasi-judicial bodies, implementation-control and other dispute settlement bodies. The present article has three aims. The first is to provide an update, since several new bodies have been created or have become active in the last decade. The second aim is a bit more ambitious. It is time to revise some of the categories and criteria of classification used back in 1998. More than a decade of scholarship in the field by legal scholars and political scientists has made it possible to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon. The abundance of data over a sufficiently long time-span is making it possible to start moving away from a mere ‘folk taxonomy’ towards a more rigorous scientific classification. The hallmark of truly scientific classifications is that classifying is only the final step of a process, and a classification only the means to communicate the end results. Besides making it possible to discover and describe, scientific classifications crucially enable prediction of new entities and categories. Thus, the third aim of this article is to attempt to discern some trends and make some predictions about future developments in this increasingly relevant field of international law and relations.
Semiparametric Power Envelopes for Tests of the Unit Root Hypothesis

This paper derives asymptotic power envelopes for tests of the unit root hypothesis in a zero-mean AR(1) model. The power envelopes are derived using the limits of experiments approach and are semiparametric in the sense that the underlying error distribution is treated as an unknown infinite-dimensional nuisance parameter. Adaptation is shown to be possible when the error distribution is known to be symmetric and to be impossible when the error distribution is unrestricted. In the latter case, two conceptually distinct approaches to nuisance parameter elimination are employed in the derivation of the semiparametric power bounds. One of these bounds, derived under an invariance restriction, is shown by example to be sharp, while the other, derived under a similarity restriction, is conjectured not to be globally attainable.
Aggregate earnings and why they matter

The accounting literature has traditionally focused on firm-level studies to examine the capital market implications of earnings and other accounting variables. We first develop the arguments for studying capital market implications at the aggregate level as well. A central issue is that diversification makes equity investors at least partially and potentially almost completely immune to several firm-level properties of earnings by holding diversified portfolios. Diversification is particularly important when assessing the welfare consequences of random errors in accounting measurement (imperfect accruals) and, to the extent it is independent across firms, of deliberate manipulation (earnings management). Consequently, some firm-level metrics of association, timeliness, value relevance, conservatism and other earnings properties do not map easily into investor welfare. Similarly, earnings-related risk manifests itself to equity investors largely through systematic earnings risk (covariation with aggregate earnings and/or other macroeconomic indicators). We conclude that the design and evaluation of financial reporting must adopt at least in part an aggregate perspective. We then summarize the literature in accounting, economics and finance on aggregate earnings and stock prices. Our review highlights the importance of studying earnings at the aggregate level.
Patenting Nature: A Problem of History

The practice of patenting genetic material is currently under sharp attack. Recent litigation has forced the courts to grapple with the doctrinal basis for patenting DNA sequences identical to those found in nature. Faced with conflicting authorities and difficult policy questions, courts have leaned heavily on history to guide—or at least to justify—their decisions. This article explores the history in question. It traces the patent law’s changing treatment of “products of nature” in an attempt to untangle the origins of present-day patentability arguments. The evidence suggests that the historical foundations of the bar on patenting products of nature are surprisingly shaky. The article also reveals how isolated biological materials first came to be patented. This task, I argue, requires looking not only to court decisions, but also to the history of patent practice. My principal vehicle for doing so is the case of Parke-Davis & Co. v. H. K. Mulford Co., a century-old decision by Judge Learned Hand, which now stands as a central (and much disputed) precedent for the patenting of DNA sequences. Parke-Davis arose at a key moment in the sociology of intellectual property, when the American pharmaceutical industry first learned to embrace the power of patents. The article shows how Parke-Davis came to prominence in half-understood form during the biotechnology era, and how the decision’s original rationale suddenly seems poised to play a major role in resolving the gene patent question. * Assistant Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School. The author is grateful for the thoughts of Derek Bambauer, Frederic Bloom, Anisha Dasgupta, Rochelle Dreyfuss, Robin Effron, Daniel Hulsebosch, Osagie Imasogie, Daniel Kevles, Brian Lee, Irina Manta, Michael Risch, Joshua Sarnoff, Katherine Strandburg, Kara Swanson, Jane Yakowitz Bambauer, and participants in the NYU Law School Innovation Policy Colloquium and in junior-faculty workshops at Fordham and Brooklyn Law Schools. A Brooklyn Law School Dean’s Summer Research Stipend supported research for the project. 258 STANFORD TECHNOLOGY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 16:229 INTRODUCTION 258 I. PATENTABLE SUBJECT MATTER AND THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY 264 A. Patent Law 101 264 B. Problems of Nature 266 II. SEARCHING FOR THE ORIGINS OF THE PRODUCT-OF-NATURE DOCTRINE ......... 268 A. The Unpatentability of Natural Laws and Principles 268 B. The Murky Origins of the Product-of-Nature Doctrine 271 C. The Advent of “Useful Difference” 276 III. SCIENTIFIC INDUSTRY, PATENT CULTURES, AND PATENT LAW IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY 280 A. American Pharmaceuticals and Patent Skepticism 280 B. Synthetic Drugs and the German Invasion 282 IV. THE ADRENALIN PATENT 284 A. Patenting Adrenalin 285 B. Adrenalin on Trial 289 C. Was Parke-Davis Rightly Decided? 293 V. THE PRACTICE AND LAW OF PATENTING NATURE AFTER PARKE-DAVIS 296 A. Practice 296 B. Law 299 C. A New View of Parke-Davis at the Federal Circuit? 306 CONCLUSION 310
Growth and accounting choice

We investigate for a positive relation between growth and the aggressiveness of accounting choices. The motivation is that this relation is an unexamined and very general implication from most exis...