cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
LEMMA: A Multi-view Dataset for LEarning Multi-agent Multi-task Activities

Understanding and interpreting human actions is a long-standing challenge and a critical indicator of perception in artificial intelligence. However, a few imperative components of daily human activities are largely missed in prior literature, including the goal-directed actions, concurrent multi-tasks, and collaborations among multi-agents. We introduce the LEMMA dataset to provide a single home to address these missing dimensions with meticulously designed settings, wherein the number of tasks and agents varies to highlight different learning objectives. We densely annotate the atomic-actions with human-object interactions to provide ground-truths of the compositionality, scheduling, and assignment of daily activities. We further devise challenging compositional action recognition and action/task anticipation benchmarks with baseline models to measure the capability of compositional action understanding and temporal reasoning. We hope this effort would drive the machine vision community to examine goal-directed human activities and further study the task scheduling and assignment in the real world.
Combining antiplatelet and anticoagulant therapy in cardiovascular disease

Up to 10% of the >3 million Americans with atrial fibrillation will experience an acute coronary syndrome or undergo percutaneous coronary intervention. Therefore, concurrent indications for multiple antithrombotic agents is a common clinical scenario. Although each helps reduce thrombotic risk, their combined use significantly increases the risk of major bleeding events, which can be life threatening. In the past 5 years, a number of randomized clinical trials have explored different combinations of anticoagulation plus antiplatelet agents aimed at minimizing bleeding risk while preserving low thrombotic event rates. In general, shorter courses with fewer antithrombotic agents have been found to be effective, particularly when direct oral anticoagulants are combined with clopidogrel. Combined use of very low-dose rivaroxaban plus aspirin has also demonstrated benefit in atherosclerotic diseases, including coronary and peripheral artery disease. Use of proton pump inhibitor therapy while patients are taking multiple antithrombotic agents has the potential to further reduce upper gastrointestinal bleeding risk in select populations. Applying this evidence to patients with multiple thrombotic conditions will help to avoid costly and life-threatening adverse medication events.
A Highly Expressing, Soluble, and Stable Plant-Made IgG Fusion Vaccine Strategy Enhances Antigen Immunogenicity in Mice Without Adjuvant

Therapeutics based on fusing a protein of interest to the IgG Fc domain have been enormously successful, though fewer studies have investigated the vaccine potential of IgG fusions. In this study, we systematically compared the key properties of seven different plant-made human IgG1 fusion vaccine candidates using Zika virus (ZIKV) envelope domain III (ZE3) as a model antigen. Complement protein C1q binding of the IgG fusions was enhanced by: 1) antigen fusion to the IgG N-terminus; 2) removal of the IgG light chain or Fab regions; 3) addition of hexamer-inducing mutations in the IgG Fc; 4) adding a self-binding epitope tag to create recombinant immune complexes (RIC); or 5) producing IgG fusions in plants that lack plant-specific β1,2-linked xylose and α1,3-linked fucose N-linked glycans. We also characterized the expression, solubility, and stability of the IgG fusions. By optimizing immune complex formation, a potently immunogenic vaccine candidate with improved solubility and high stability was produced at 1.5 mg IgG fusion per g leaf fresh weight. In mice, the IgG fusions elicited high titers of Zika-specific antibodies which neutralized ZIKV using only two doses without adjuvant, reaching up to 150-fold higher antibody titers than ZE3 antigen alone. We anticipate these findings will be broadly applicable to the creation of other vaccines and antibody-based therapeutics.
Toxoplasma gondii PPM3C, a secreted protein phosphatase, affects parasitophorous vacuole effector export

The intracellular parasite Toxoplasma gondii infects a large proportion of humans worldwide and can cause adverse complications in the settings of immune-compromise and pregnancy. T. gondii thrives within many different cell types due in part to its residence within a specialized and heavily modified compartment in which the parasite divides, termed the parasitophorous vacuole. Within this vacuole, numerous proteins optimize intracellular survival following their secretion by the parasite. We investigated the contribution of one of these proteins, TgPPM3C, predicted to contain a PP2C-class serine/threonine phosphatase domain and previously shown to interact with the protein MYR1, an essential component of a putative vacuolar translocon that mediates effector export into the host cell. Parasites lacking the TgPPM3C gene exhibit a minor growth defect in vitro, are avirulent during acute infection in mice, and form fewer cysts in mouse brain during chronic infection. Phosphoproteomic assessment of TgPPM3C deleted parasite cultures demonstrated alterations in the phosphorylation status of many secreted vacuolar proteins including two exported effector proteins, GRA16 and GRA28, as well as MYR1. Parasites lacking TgPPM3C are defective in GRA16 and GRA28 export, but not in the export of other MYR1-dependant effectors. Phosphomimetic mutation of two GRA16 serine residues results in export defects, suggesting that de-phosphorylation is a critical step in the process of GRA16 export. These findings provide another example of the emerging role of phosphatases in regulating the complex environment of the T. gondii parasitophorous vacuole and influencing the export of specific effector proteins from the vacuolar lumen into the host cell.
SearchFromFree: Adversarial Measurements for Machine Learning-based Energy Theft Detection

Energy theft causes large economic losses to utility companies around the world. In recent years, energy theft detection approaches based on machine learning (ML) techniques, especially neural networks, are becoming popular in the research community and shown to achieve state-of-the-art detection performance. However, in this work, we demonstrate that the well-trained ML models for energy theft detection are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In particular, we design an adversarial measurement generation approach that enables the attacker to report extremely low power consumption measurements to utilities while bypassing the ML energy theft detection. We evaluate our approach with three kinds of neural networks based on a real-world smart meter dataset. The evaluation results demonstrate that our approach is able to significantly decrease the ML models’ detection accuracy, even for black-box attackers.
Learning Energy-Based Models by Diffusion Recovery Likelihood

While energy-based models (EBMs) exhibit a number of desirable properties, training and sampling on high-dimensional datasets remains challenging. Inspired by recent progress on diffusion probabilistic models, we present a diffusion recovery likelihood method to tractably learn and sample from a sequence of EBMs trained on increasingly noisy versions of a dataset. Each EBM is trained with recovery likelihood, which maximizes the conditional distribution of the data at a certain noise level given their noisy versions at a higher noise level. Optimizing recovery likelihood is more tractable than marginal likelihood, as sampling from the conditional distributions is much easier than sampling from the marginal distributions. After training, synthesized images can be generated by the sampling process that initializes from Gaussian white noise distribution and progressively samples the conditional distributions at decreasingly lower noise levels. Our method generates high fidelity samples on various image datasets. On unconditional CIFAR-10 our method achieves FID 9.60 and inception score 8.58, superior to the majority of GANs. Moreover, we demonstrate that unlike previous work on EBMs, our long-run MCMC samples from the conditional distributions do not diverge and still represent realistic images, allowing us to accurately estimate the normalized density of data even for high-dimensional datasets.
Deep Reinforcement Learning with Enhanced Safety for Autonomous Highway Driving

In this paper, we present a safe deep reinforcement learning system for automated driving. The proposed framework leverages merits of both rule-based and learning-based approaches for safety assurance. Our safety system consists of two modules namely handcrafted safety and dynamically-learned safety. The handcrafted safety module is a heuristic safety rule based on common driving practice that ensure a minimum relative gap to a traffic vehicle. On the other hand, the dynamically-learned safety module is a data-driven safety rule that learns safety patterns from driving data. Specifically, the dynamically-leaned safety module incorporates a model lookahead beyond the immediate reward of reinforcement learning to predict safety longer into the future. If one of the future states leads to a near-miss or collision, then a negative reward will be assigned to the reward function to avoid collision and accelerate the learning process. We demonstrate the capability of the proposed framework in a simulation environment with varying traffic density. Our results show the superior capabilities of the policy enhanced with dynamically-learned safety module.
Not Very Material but Hardly Immaterial: China's Bombed Embassy and Sino-American Relations

In 1999 Sino-American relations experienced intense strain as a result of NATO’s Kosovo intervention, and in particular by the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade by an American B-2 bomber. Why did the bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade in the spring of 1999 touch such a raw nerve among the Chinese people and leadership? With the coming of the tenth anniversary of these events, what still needs to be explained is how Chinese and Americans could draw such divergent conclusions about that which they’ve never disagreed on—the incontestable fact of the embassy’s demolition—and how the fact that what Americans called “a mistake” could almost completely derail Sino-American relations, which President Clinton in his very successful visit to China a year before had called a “strategic partnership.” Based on a series of semistructured interviews the author did in Beijing and Washington with 28 Chinese and 30 American experts, this research draws a number of important conclusions in this regard. First, intensifying and even defining the conflict were a number of important perceptual gaps. Second, given the dispute over the intentionality of the embassy bombing, the conflict boiled down not to clashing interests, per se, but rather to issues of trust and beliefs about motives and intentions. Third, poor handling of the embassy bombing by both governments deepened the conflict and the alienation both sides felt. Fourth, underlying the lack of trust and the perceptual gaps between the two sides was “Fundamental Attribution Error.”
The social phobia diagnostic questionnaire: preliminary validation of a new self-report diagnostic measure of social phobia.

Background. The development and validation of the Social Phobia Diagnostic Questionnaire (SPDQ), a new self-report diagnostic instrument for social phobia is described in three separate studies.Study 1. The participants were 125 undergraduates seeking help for an anxiety disorder of whom 60 had social phobia. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis was conducted comparing SPDQ diagnoses and clinician-based Anxiety Disorder Interview Schedule-IV (ADIS-IV) diagnoses of social phobia. Diagnoses made by the SPDQ showed an 85% specificity, an 82% sensitivity and kappa agreement with the ADIS-IV of 0·66.Study 2. The participants were 462 undergraduates who completed the SPDQ and a battery of additional questionnaires. The SPDQ had good internal consistency (α=0·95), good split-half reliability (r=0·90) and strong convergent and discriminant validity.Study 3. The participants were 145 undergraduates who completed the SPDQ at two time points separated by 2 weeks as well as several additional questionnaires. Scores on the SAD, FNE and SISST of SPDQ categorized undergraduates were also compared to scores on these measures from 35 clinical community participants to determine the clinical validity of the SPDQ. The SPDQ had strong 2-week test–retest reliability and good convergent and discriminant validity. Undergraduates diagnosed with social phobia by the SPDQ were not significantly different on the SAD, FNE and SISST from the socially phobic community sample, but both groups had significantly higher scores than undergraduates identified by the SPDQ as not meeting criteria for social phobia, demonstrating clinical validity of the SPDQ.Conclusions. These three studies provide preliminary evidence of the strong psychometric properties of the SPDQ as a measure to identify socially phobic participants.
Wrongdoing Without Motives: Why Victor Tadros is Wrong About Wrongdoing and Motivation

A central principle in Victor Tadros’s book, The Ends of Harm, is the means principle (MP) which holds that it is, with limited exceptions, impermissible to use another as a means. Tadros defends a subjective, intention-focused interpretation of the MP, according to which to use another as a means is to form plans or intentions in which the other serves as a tool for advancing one’s ends. My thesis here is that Tadros’s defense of the subjective interpretation of the MP is unsuccessful. To make that case I argue for three claims. First, the subjective interpretation has implausibly harsh implications in certain cases, implying that certain people would be guilty of much more serious wrongs than they can plausibly be thought to have committed. Second, the cases that Tadros offers to argue that the subjective interpretation of the MP must be right are better interpreted as showing that it is impermissible to act on an illicit intention – one that would direct an agent under certain, foreseeable circumstances to perform impermissible acts – than that it is impermissible to act for an illicit reason. Third, while Tadros correctly rejects the objective, causal-role-focused interpretation of the MP – according to which to use another as a means is for the other to play the causal role of means to the good which might be offered to justify the act one performs – there is another way of defending the significance of causal roles, one that has implications that track those of the MP fairly closely. I argue elsewhere at length for this other principle, which I call the Restricting Claims Principle. Here I simply sketch the basic idea in a way sufficient to show that one can escape the dilemma that the MP faces without grabbing either the subjective or the objective horn, and without moving into a consequentialist world in which it is permissible to punish the innocent for the sake of the general welfare.
Applying latent trait analysis in the evaluation of prospects for cross-selling of financial services

Abstract Identification of the order in which households acquire financial services has important implications for market segmentation and cross-selling strategies. This study illustrates a procedure by which financial institutions, based on internal records, can estimate the likelihood that a customer will purchase/use additional services. The methodology discussed in this study positions financial services and investors along the same continuum according to the particular ownership pattern. The location of an investor indicates his financial expertise and resources, while the location of a financial service measures the level of expertise/resources needed for ownership of that service. A key feature of the methodology is its ability to predict the probability of ownership of some financial services given information on (non-)ownership of other services. This study concludes with an illustration applying the methodology for targeting customers for cross-selling efforts.
Tests of equilibrium macroeconomics using contemporaneous monetary data

Abstract This paper uses contemporaneous monetary data to carry out econometric tests of the ‘equilibrium’ approach to modelling the relation between monetary disturbances and macroeconomic fluctuations. The theoretical analysis introduces into an equilibrium macroeconomic model the availability of preliminary data on current monetary aggregates and the process of accumulation of revised monetary data. The econometric analysis tests two hypothesis derived from this extended model. One hypothesis concerns the neutrality of perceived monetary policy. The econometric results imply rejection of this hypothesis. The other hypothesis concerns the non-neutrality of errors in preliminary monetary data. The econometric results fail to reject the contrary of this hypothesis. These tests provide strong evidence against the reality of the equilibrium approach.
Information and Communication Technologies for Direct Poverty Alleviation: Costs and Benefits

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) are powerful tools for empowerment and income generation in developing countries. The cost-effectiveness of different ICTs does vary between developed and less developed countries, however. This article reviews the potential efficacy of radio, telephony and the Internet as tools of direct poverty alleviation in the latter. While the requirements for their successful utilisation make radio and telephone far more suitable technologies for the poor, traditional ICTs can act as a sustainable intermediary for them to gain indirect access to the power of the Internet. Governments should concentrate on opening up private and community provision of broadcasting and widening access to telephone services, so that they can effectively play this intermediary role.
Dodging the Taxman: Why the Treasury’s Anti-Abuse Regulation is Unconstitutional

To combat abusive tax shelters, the Department of the Tresury promulgated a general anti-abuse regulation applicable to all of subchapter K of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. The Treasury targeted subchapter K because unique aspects of the partnership tax laws—including its aggregateentity dichotomy—foster creative tax manipulation. In the anti-abuse regulation, the Treasury attempted to “codify” existing judiciallycreated anti-abuse doctrines, such as the business-purpose and economic-substance doctrines. Also, and more surprisingly, the Treasury directed those applying subchapter K to use a purposivist approach to interpretation and to reject textualism.
Read This Note or Else!: Conviction Under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c) for Recklessly Making a Threat

What does it mean to make a threat, and under what circumstances can a speaker be convicted for making one? This Note examines these questions in light of Elonis v. United States, a Supreme Court case decided in June 2015. There, the Court held that when a speaker subjectively intends a statement be taken as a threat or knows that it will be taken as a threat, she may be convicted under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c). The Court did not decide whether a speaker who recklessly makes a threat may be convicted under the statute. This Note argues that convicting a reckless speaker would be consistent with both principles of statutory interpretation and the First Amendment. It advocates for this result particularly because it would protect victims of domestic violence.This Note argues that courts should interpret the statute to allow a speaker who makes a threat recklessly to be convicted for three reasons. First, such interpretation is consistent with principles of statutory interpretation. Second, it is consistent with the First Amendment. Finally, this interpretation is appropriate because threats are an integral part of a pattern of domestic abuse, and given this unique power structure, defining the crime in this way protects the victims. Precedent supports using policy to interpret a statute, and courts should do so here.
Chevron and Deference in State Administrative Law

Chevron1 solves a multidimensional conundrum. Whether and how courts should defer to agencies, when those agencies interpret the statutes that grant them authority to make law, is a complex constitutional puzzle. But any solution to that puzzle also reverberates as a matter of political theory, of jurisprudence, and of public administration. Chevron‘s principle, that courts should defer to any reasonable interpretation by an agency of ambiguities in a statute that empowers it to act with the force of law,2 is pragmatic, responsive, and elegant with respect to bedeviling issues in each of these domains. As a matter of constitutional law, Chevron provides an account of congressional delegation of executive power, explicit but especially implicit, that is genuinely plausible and that is consistent with a genuine doctrine of separation of powers.3 As a matter of political theory, Chevron offers a workable equilibrium between the elitism of technocrats and the imperative for democratically accountable politics.4 As a matter of jurisprudence, its formula gives serious content to the principle that courts must say what the law is, while still assuring to agencies genuine deference, rather than a faux psuedo-deference by which courts defer to agencies when and if they agree with them.5 From the perspective of statutory law, Chevron famously does not cite the federal Administrative Procedure Act6 (APA).7 But, in its structure,
Using Annual Report Sentiment as a Proxy for Financial Distress in U.S. Banks

abstractCurrent measures of bank distress find marginal value in predictive variables beyond a capital adequacy ratio and tend to miss extreme events impacting the entire sector. The authors advoca...
The detrimental effects of power on confidence, advice taking, and accuracy.

Incorporating input from others can enhance decision quality, yet often people do not effectively utilize advice. We propose that greater power increases the propensity to discount advice, and that a key mechanism explaining this effect is elevated confidence in one’s judgment. We investigate the relationships across four studies: a field survey where working professionals rated their own power and confidence and were rated by coworkers on their level of advice taking; an advice taking task where power and confidence were self-reported; and two advice taking experiments where power was manipulated. Results consistently showed a negative relationship between power and advice taking, and evidence of mediation through confidence. The fourth study also revealed that higher power participants were less accurate in their final judgments. Power can thus exacerbate the tendency for people to overweight their own initial judgment, such that the most powerful decision makers can also be the least accurate.
Thick Disks in the Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields

Thick disk evolution is studied using edge-on galaxies in two Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Field Parallels. The galaxies were separated into 72 clumpy types and 35 spiral types with bulges. Perpendicular light profiles in F435W, F606W and F814W (B, V and I) passbands were measured at 1 pixel intervals along the major axes and fitted to sech^2 functions convolved with the instrument line spread function (LSF). The LSF was determined from the average point spread function (PSF) of ~20 stars in each passband and field, convolved with a line of uniform brightness to simulate disk blurring. A spread function for a clumpy disk was also used for comparison. The resulting scale heights were found to be proportional to galactic mass, with the average height for a 10^9.5-10^10.5 Msun galaxy at z=1.5-2.5 equal to 0.63+-0.24 kpc. This value is probably the result of a blend between thin and thick disk components that cannot be resolved. Evidence for such two-component structure is present in an inverse correlation between height and midplane surface brightness. Models suggest that the thick disk is observed best between the clumps, and there the average scale height is 1.06+-0.43 kpc for the same mass and redshift. A 0.63+-0.68 mag V-I color differential with height is also evidence for a mixture of thin and thick components.
All-units discounts and double moral hazard

Abstract An all-units discount is a price reduction applied to all units purchased if the customer's total purchases equal or exceed a given quantity threshold. Since the discount is paid on all units rather than marginal units, the tariff is discontinuous and exhibits a negative marginal price (“cliff”) at the threshold that triggers the discount. This paper shows that all-units discounts arise in optimal agency contracts between upstream and downstream firms that face double moral hazard. I present conditions under which all-units discounts dominate two-part tariffs and other continuous tariffs. I also examine these tariffs when the upstream market faces a threat of entry. In the case considered, all-units discounts deter entry by less efficient rivals without distorting price and investment, whereas continuous tariffs either accommodate such entry or deter it by distorting price and investment.
Medellin's Clear Statement Rule: A Solution for International Delegations

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Medellin v. Texas1 raised many fascinating structural constitutional issues about the relationship between federal courts and international courts, the delegation of federal power to international organizations, and the role of the President in the enforcement of international court judgments against the states. Yet, Chief Justice John G. Roberts’s opinion for the Court managed to avoid direct discussion of any of these issues. Instead, it focused almost exclusively on the doctrine of non-self-execution. The Court’s determination that the relevant treaties were non-self-executing lies at the heart of its decision. The focus on non-self-execution, however, does not mean that the complicated structural problems raised by Medellin do not exist. Rather, in this short essay, I argue that the problem of international delegations is crucial to understanding and justifying Chief Justice Roberts’s application of the non-self-execution doctrine in Medellin. As I will explain, the Medellin Court required a clear statement of an intent to delegate powers to an international tribunal. This approach, I argue, has the functional benefit of limiting and controlling (but not prohibiting) the delegation of judicial power to international tribunals. In this essay, I do not consider questions such as Medellin’s consistency with past precedent or with the original meaning of the text of the U.S. Constitution. Although such questions are important, I focus here on providing pragmatic justifications for the Medellin Court’s application of the non-self-execution doctrine. My goal is to establish that the “delegation” problem lay at the heart of the Medellin case and to explain how non-self-execution provides the best functional solution to this problem.
Economic Growth and Financial Statement Verification

We use a proprietary data set of financial statements collected by banks to examine whether economic growth is related to the use of financial statement verification in debt financing. Exploiting the distinct economic growth and contraction patterns of the construction industry over the years 2002–2011, our estimates reveal that banks reduced their collection of unqualified audited financial statements from construction firms at nearly twice the rate of firms in other industries during the housing boom period before 2008. This reduction was most severe in the regions that experienced the most significant construction growth. These trends reversed during the subsequent housing crisis in 2008–2011 when construction activity contracted. Moreover, using bank- and firm-level data, we find a strong negative (positive) relation between audited financial statements during the growth period, and subsequent loan losses (construction firm survival) during the contraction period. Collectively, our results reveal that macroeconomic fluctuations produce temporal shifts in the overall level of financial statement verification and temporal shifts in verification are related to bank loan portfolio quality and borrower performance.
THE EFFECTS OF COLLATERALIZABLE INCOME AND DEBT OVERHANG ON ENTREPRENEURIAL INVESTMENT IN AN OPEN REGIONAL ECONOMY

We use a two-period model to analyze the contractual relationship between en- trepreneurs and venture capitalists in an open regional economy. First, we describe the first best investment contract, we study the second best investment contract in the presence of private informa- tion, and then we examine the impact of an exogenous second-period income endowment (collateraliz- able income) on investment by entrepreneurs. Next, we analyze the interaction between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists when the regional government (RG) must pay off a per capita debt (debt over- hang) which it finances by taxing successful second-period entrepreneurs. We show that a rise in the per capita debt has an effect on investment that is analogous to a fall in the second-period income endowment. In addition, the overhang of the RG's debt discourages entrepreneurial investment.
Family Mediation after Hendershott: The Case for Uniform Domestic Violence Screening and Opt-In Provision in Montana

In Hendershott v. Westphal, the Montana Supreme Court held that § 40-4-301(2) of the Montana Code Annotated absolutely bars mediation in family law cases involving domestic violence. Yet neither the Court nor the statute prescribes a method by which to screen for such cases. In this article, the author argues that a uniform, statewide screening method is the only way by which to implement this policy. The author also argues that Hendershott should be interpreted narrowly and Montana should allow parties to opt in to mediation and other forms of alternative dispute resolution. The Court’s understanding of domestic violence is outdated: its opinion equates domestic violence with only one type of abuse — the stereotypical case involving a pattern of violent or potentially violent coercive control. Family law cases that do not involve such a pattern may be appropriate for mediation and alternative dispute resolution.
No Booze? You May Lose: Why Drinkers Earn More Money than Nondrinkers

A number of theorists assume that drinking has harmful economic effects, but data show that drinking and earnings are positively correlated. We hypothesize that drinking leads to higher earnings by increasing social capital. If drinkers have larger social networks, their earnings should increase. Examining the Gen-eral Social Survey, we find that selfreported drinkers earn 1014 percent more than abstainers, which replicates results from other data sets. We then attempt to differentiate between social and nonsocial drinking by comparing the earn-ings of those who frequent bars at least once per month and those who do not. We find that males who frequent bars at least once per month earn an addi-tional 7 percent on top of the 10 percent drinkers’ premium. These results sug-gest that social drinking leads to increased social capital.
Conference Presentations and the Disclosure Milieu

Conference presentations differ from other voluntary disclosures in that the audience for the disclosure is co-located with managers in a well-defined physical and social setting, or “disclosure milieu.” The milieu affects the degree to which conference participants can update their prior beliefs about the firm with information signals obtained through interactions with management and other informed participants. While the average abnormal stock return and volume reactions to presentations are positive, there is a great deal of cross-sectional variation as indicated by negative median reactions. We find that conference characteristics that determine the nature of the audience and its interactions, such as sponsor, location, size, and industry-focus, are significantly associated with the market reaction, consistent with the disclosure milieu explaining the cross-sectional variation in the information content of the presentation. We also find that conference characteristics explain changes in subsequent analyst and institutional investor following, consistent with the disclosure milieu creating differences in access to management by potential new investors and analysts.
An empirical analysis of the determinants and pricing of corporate bond clawbacks

Abstract This paper presents empirical analysis of the factors that affect a firm's decision to use a clawback provision in debt and the yield impact of including the clawback provision. The results show that relatively smaller firms with low credit rating and low profitability favor the usage of clawback provisions. We also find that debt with clawback provisions have the highest yield spread followed by callable bonds and straight debt. Convertible bonds that offer investors the option to convert to equity have lower yield spread. This implies that issuers can trade off flexibility for higher interest cost and that the clawback feature may be a significant financial innovation which reduces information asymmetry and creates an entry point for small firms to gain access to the public bond markets.
Prudent Investors: The Asset Allocation of Public Pension Plans

After 2000, the vast majority of defined benefit (DB) pension plans encountered a decrease in their funding ratios, largely due to a drop in asset prices. It is possible that public sector pension plans may have acted imprudently by chasing returns, once they encountered underfunding. We identify four indicators for DB plans' imprudent investment behavior: no portfolio rebalancing, employer conflicts of interest, trustee conflicts of interest, and failure to implement best investment practices. To see if public sector pension plans rebalance their portfolios, we use data from the Federal Reserve's Flow of Funds, dating from 1952 to 2007. To test for the remaining three hypotheses, we use data from the Census' State and Local Government Employee Retirement Systems data base, where consistent data for state and local government plans are available from 1993 to 2005. Our results suggest that there is no evidence that public sector plans systematically engaged in imprudent investment behavior and that this did not systematically differ after 2000 from the earlier period.
THE POISON PILL IN JAPAN: THE MISSING INFRASTRUCTURE

The coming of hostile takeovers to Japan has been anticipated, and anticipated, and anticipated. Each report of a reduction in the size of crossholdings among Japanese companies and in the size of Japanese bank stockholdings in their clients has given rise to an expectation that now, at last, hostile offers would emerge. It is not surprising that commentators looked forward, optimistically, to the arrival of a potentially disruptive takeover technique. The extended Japanese recession, together with management resistance to internally implemented restructurings and the barriers to externally imposed restructurings, has created the potential for substantial private and social gain from rationalizing production. Nonetheless, in Japan the much anticipated hostile takeovers did not materialize. In turn, the absence of takeovers resulted in little clamor for defensive tactics; without a threat on the horizon, no demand for protection developed. A number of events now suggest that the long wait for hostile transactions in Japan may be approaching its end. The combination of crossholdings, bank holdings and governmental stasis that has frozen Japanese corporate governance leaves hostile takeovers as one of the few external mechanisms for systemic change that existing institutions do not block or at least greatly impede. Most important, the institutional infrastructure that ultimately reduced the defensive impact of the poison pill in the United States does not now exist in Japan. Thus, the poison pill has the potential to be greatly more pernicious in Japan than it has been in the United States, both because of the absence of ameliorating institutions in Japan, and because the impact is likely to be greater because in Japan the forces for change in industrial organization outside the market for corporate control are significantly less strong than in the U.S.
Do personal taxes affect corporate financing decisions

Abstract The traditional view is that interest deductibility encourages firms to use debt financing; however, some argue that the personal tax disadvantage to interest offsets the corporate tax advantage. This paper investigates the degree to which personal taxes affect corporate financing decisions. In cross-sectional regressions that control for personal taxes, debt usage is positively correlated with tax rates in each year 1980–1994, with significant coefficients in almost every year. A specification that adjusts tax benefits for the personal tax penalty statistically dominates a specification that does not. The positive (negative) effect of corporate (personal) taxes on debt usage is distinctly identified.
Standardizing Government Standard-Setting Policy for Electronic Commerce

The U.S. government's policy towards open standards in electronic commerce is inconsistent. On the one hand, the Magaziner Report endorses the idea of interoperable standards and open standard-setting processes for electronic commerce. It also suggests that governments should not be involved in setting technical standards. Unfortunately, the Report also endorses government intervention in the standard-setting process in the case of encryption. Further, it recommends expanding intellectual property rights, without acknowledging the difficulties this can cause for open standards. Professor Lemley's article draws attention to this inconsistency, and suggests ways that the government could help promote open standards if it truly wished to do so.
Cross-Employee Redistribution Effects of Mandated Employee Benefits

Whether mandated employee benefit policies are efficient, depends on the ratio of aggregate value attached by employees to the benefit, compared to the aggregate employer cost of providing the benefit. The higher the aggregate value/cost ratio is, the stronger is the justification for implementing the policy. High value/cost ratios are indicative of the existence of market failures in the voluntary provision of the benefit. Mandated benefits, efficient or not, do not entail employer-employee redistributive outcomes. The fact that no employment rate changes can be traced following the enforcement of a mandate program is usually indicative of full employer cost shifting. Policy makers treat the magnitude of cost shifting, as a proxy of the value workers place on the benefit, disregarding the fact that full cost shifting can also result from the inelasticity of labor supply. When inelasticity of labor supply is responsible for full shifting of the costs of the mandate, workers are simply carrying the dead weight cost of the mandate. From an intra-employee perspective, it seems that the public is mainly concerned whether mandates are increasing the unemployment rate. This is true of the minimum wage discourse and the discussions pertaining to the prospects of mandatory employer-provided health insurance. Again, it is assumed that if employment rates are unharmed, the mandate is efficient and equitable since employees are financing the cost of the benefit through decreased wages (health insurance) or increased productivity (minimum wage). The fact that employers do not respond to mandates by decreasing total demand for labor, does not out rule intra-employee redistribution. Mandated benefit schemes, similar to voluntary benefit schemes, reinforce dual labor market practices, in which exempt employees are financing to some extent the costs of providing the benefit to covered employees. This structure of cross-subsidy is efficient from the employer's perspective. It raises productivity and commitment on the part of internal workers. However, it increases compensation disparity between internal and external labor market employees.
Distinction bias: Misprediction and mischoice due to joint evaluation

This research identifies a new source of failure to make accurate affective predictions or to make experientially optimal choices. When people make predictions or choices, they are often in the joint evaluation (JE) mode; when people actually experience an event, they are often in the single evaluation (SE) mode. The “utility function” of an attribute can vary systematically between SE and JE. When people in JE make predictions or choices for events to be experienced in SE, they often resort to their JE preferences rather than their SE preferences and overpredict the difference that different values of an attribute (e.g., different salaries) will make to their happiness in SE. This overprediction is referred to as the distinction bias. The present research also specifies when the distinction bias occurs and when it does not. This research contributes to literatures on experienced utility, affective forecasting, and happiness. Suppose that a person is faced with two job offers. She finds one job interesting and the other tedious. However, the interesting job will pay her only $60,000 a year, and the tedious job will pay her $70,000 a year. The person wants to choose the job that will give her the greatest overall happiness. To make that choice, she tries to predict the difference in happiness between earning $60,000 a year and earning $70,000 a year and also predict the difference in happiness between doing the interesting job and doing the tedious job. Is she able to make these predictions accurately? Is she able to choose the job that will indeed bring her the greater overall happiness?
Detecting Customer Trends for Optimal Promotion Targeting

Problem definition: Retailers have become increasingly interested in personalizing their products and services such as promotions. For this, we need new personalized demand models. Unfortunately, s...
CREDIT RISK MODELING WITH MISREPORTING AND INCOMPLETE INFORMATION

We propose a structural model for the valuation of defaultable securities of a firm which models the effect of deliberate misreporting done by insiders in the firm and unobserved by others. We derive exact formulas for equity and bond prices and approximate expressions for the conditional default probability, recovery rate, and credit spread under the proposed credit risk framework. We propose a novel estimation approach to structural model estimation which accounts for noisy observed asset values. We apply the proposed method to calibrate a simple version of our model to the case of Parmalat and show that the model is able to recover a certain amount of misreporting during the years of accounting irregularities.
The Boskin Commission Report: A Retrospective One Decade Later

The author summarizes the report’s methods, findings, and recommendations, and then reviews the comments and criticisms that appeared soon after the report was issued. Changes in CPI methodology are also summarized and assessed, as is recent research on related issues. Based on recent research, the author suggest that the bias estimate for 1995-96 should have been 1.2 to 1.3 percentage points, not 1.1 points. He estimates that the upward bias in the CPI has declined from the revised 1.2-1.3 percentage points in the Boskin era to about 0.8 points today. Yet he notes that the Boskin report, like most contemporary studies of quality change, failed to accord sufficient importance to the value of new products and increased longevity. Allowing for these, he concludes that the current upward bias in the US CPI is at least 1.0 percentage points per year.
Notes in Defense of the Iraq Constitution

This paper is a defense of sorts of the Iraqi constitution, arguing that the language used in it was wisely designed to allow some level of flexibility, such that highly divided political forces could find incremental solutions to the deep rooted sources of division that have plagued Iraqi society since its inception. That Iraq has found itself in such dreadful political circumstances since constitutional ratification is therefore not a function of the open ended constitutional bargain, but rather of the failure of Iraqi legal and political elites to make use of the space that the constitution provided them to develop such incremental resolutions.
Linking routines to operations capabilities: A new perspective

Abstract A typical approach to studying capabilities in the operations management literature is to assess the intended or realized competitive operational performance and their contribution to business and organizational objectives. While it is crucial to identify the operational performance that helps create competitive advantage, it is equally important to understand the means for delivering the needed performance at the operational level. Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV), we argue that routines are a critical source of operations capabilities and subsequently investigate operations capabilities by means of their underlying routines. Because a common problem to studying capabilities is the ambiguous and confusing definitions, we conduct an extensive literature review to address the semantic confusion among various definitions of capabilities and delineate it from other related terms. We identify improvement and innovation as two critical plant level capabilities, each consisting of a bundle of interrelated yet distinct routines. We then empirically measure the two capabilities as second-order latent variables and estimate their effects on a set of operational performance measures. The results suggest that routines form internally consistent bundles which are significantly related to operational performance. This supports our notion of “capabilities as routine bundles” that are difficult to imitate and thus a source of competitive advantage.