cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Sources of Inflation in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper explores the sources of inflation in Sub-Saharan Africa by examining the relationship between inflation, the output gap and the real money gap. Using heterogeneous panel co-integration estimation techniques, we estimate co-integrating vectors for the production function and the real money demand function to recover the structural output and money gaps for 17 African countries. The central finding is that both gaps contain significant information regarding the evolution of inflation, albeit with a larger role played by the money gap. There is no significant evidence of asymmetry in the relationship. Copyright 2008 The author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.
The Debt-Contracting Value of Accounting Numbers and Financial Covenant Renegotiation

Building on incomplete contract theory, I investigate whether the likelihood of renegotiating financial covenants is affected by the debt-contracting value of borrowers’ accounting numbers. The deb...
What Leona Helmsley Can Teach Us about the Charitable Deduction

When Leona Helmsley, the New York hotel and real estate heiress, died in August 2007, she left a will naming both human and canine beneficiaries. However, one of the unnamed beneficiaries of this estate plan is surely the body of scholars interested in studying the role of philanthropy in the United States. By directing that an estimated $8 billion be used for the benefit of dogs, Mrs. Helmsley brought into high relief policy issues regarding the appropriateness of the unlimited charitable deduction, particularly as it applies to perpetual private foundations.
Reputation and Adverse Selection: Theory and Evidence from eBay

Adverse selection among sellers on eBay is prevalent, as shown by many authors, and ever since Akerlof [1970], it is known that adverse selection can hinder trade. In this paper, I study how actors in a marketplace can introduce mechanisms to overcome adverse selection, and I focus on one mechanism employed by eBay: sellers’ reputation. Using a unique data set that follows sellers on eBay over time, I show that reputation, according to various measures, is a major determinant of variations in the prices of homogeneous goods sold on eBay, in particular, for iPods. Inspired by this observation, I develop a model of firm dynamics where firms have heterogeneous qualities that are unobservable by consumers. Reputation is used as a signal of private information to buyers in order to improve allocations. I structurally estimate this model to uncover deep parameters of buyers’ utility and sellers’ costs as well as sellers’ unobservable qualities. The estimated model suggests that reputation has a positive effect on the expected profits of high quality sellers and their market shares. I perform a counterfactuals to establish the value of reputation. Removing reputation mechanisms put in place by eBay significantly increases the market share of low quality sellers and decreases the market share of high quality sellers. This will lowers the price in the market which as a result lowers the quantity of items sold in the market. Finally, the counterfactual shows that buyers’ welfare is significantly improved as a result of the reputation mechanism.
Mod-2 dihedral Galois representations of prime conductor

For all odd primes N up to 500000, we compute the action of the Hecke operator T_2 on the space S_2(Gamma_0(N), Q) and determine whether or not the reduction mod 2 (with respect to a suitable basis) has 0 and/or 1 as eigenvalues. We then partially explain the results in terms of class field theory and modular mod-2 Galois representations. As a byproduct, we obtain some nonexistence results on elliptic curves and modular forms with certain mod-2 reductions, extending prior results of Setzer, Hadano, and Kida.
Modeling the Effects of Peremptory Challenges on Jury Selection and Jury Verdicts

Attorneys try to shape jury selection by exercising peremptory challenges (sometimes called peremptory strikes), which allow them to eliminate potential jurors without justification or explanation. Peremptory challenges have long been controversial, and for decades the terms of the debate have largely been fixed. Proponents claim that peremptory challenges help ensure an impartial jury by permitting attorneys to remove jurors who might be biased or predisposed against their side—jurors at the extremes of the pool, who will not be able to evaluate the facts fairly and render an impartial verdict. The result, proponents say, is a jury composed of jurors in the moderate middle, open to both sides and able to come to a fair decision. As Justice Scalia wrote for the Supreme Court in Holland v. Illinois:
USING SENTENCE ENHANCEMENTS TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN DETERRENCE AND INCAPACITATION

Differentiating empirically between deterrence and incapacitation is difficult since both are a function of expected punishment. In this article we demonstrate that the introduction of sentence enhancements provides a direct means of measuring deterrence. Because the criminal would have been sentenced to prison even without the law change, there is no additional incapacitation effect from the sentence enhancement in the short run. Therefore, any immediate decrease in crime must be due to deterrence. We test the model using California’s Proposition 8, which imposed sentence enhancements for a selected group of crimes. Proposition 8 appears to reduce eligible crimes by 4 percent in the year following its passage and 8 percent 3 years after passage. These immediate effects are consistent with deterrence. The impact of the law continues to increase 5‐7 years after its passage, suggesting that incapacitation may be important as well.
Public opinion and the politics of the killer robots debate

The possibility that today’s drones could become tomorrow’s killer robots has attracted the attention of people around the world. Scientists and business leaders, from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk, recently signed a letter urging the world to ban autonomous weapons. Part of the argument against these systems is that they violate the public conscience provision of the Martens Clause due to public opposition, making them illegal under international law. What, however, does the US public think of these systems? Existing research suggests widespread US public opposition, but focused on support for autonomous weapons in a vacuum. This paper uses two survey experiments to test the conditions in which public opposition rises and falls. The results demonstrate that public opposition to autonomous weapons is contextual. Fear of other countries or non-state actors developing these weapons makes the public significantly more supportive of developing them. The public also becomes much more willing to actually use autonomous weapons when their use would protect US forces. Beyond contributing to ongoing academic debates about casualty aversion, the microfoundations of foreign policy, and weapon systems, these results suggest the need for modesty when making claims about how the public views new, unknown technologies such as autonomous weapons.
Impact Angle Control of Interplanetary Shock Geoeffectiveness: A Statistical Study

We present a survey of interplanetary (IP) shocks using Wind and ACE satellite data from January 1995 to December 2013 to study how IP shock geoeffectiveness is controlled by IP shock impact angles. A shock list covering one and a half solar cycle is compiled. The yearly number of IP shocks is found to correlate well with the monthly sunspot number. We use data from SuperMAG, a large chain with more than 300 geomagnetic stations, to study geoeffectiveness triggered by IP shocks. The SuperMAG SML index, an enhanced version of the familiar AL index, is used in our statistical analysis. The jumps of the SML index triggered by IP shock impacts on the Earth's magnetosphere are investigated in terms of IP shock orientation and speed. We find that, in general, strong (high speed) and almost frontal (small impact angle) shocks are more geoeffective than inclined shocks with low speed. The strongest correlation (correlation coefficient R = 0.78) occurs for fixed IP shock speed and for varied IP shock impact angle. We attribute this result, predicted previously with simulations, to the fact that frontal shocks compress the magnetosphere symmetrically from all sides, which is a favorable condition for the release of magnetic energy stored in the magnetotail, which in turn can produce moderate to strong auroral substorms, which are then observed by ground-based magnetometers.
Causal transportability with limited experiments

We address the problem of transferring causal knowledge learned in one environment to another, potentially different environment, when only limited experiments may be conducted at the source. This generalizes the treatment of transportability introduced in [Pearl and Bareinboim, 2011; Bareinboim and Pearl, 2012b], which deals with transferring causal information when any experiment can be conducted at the source. Given that it is not always feasible to conduct certain controlled experiments, we consider the decision problem whether experiments on a selected subset Z of variables together with qualitative assumptions encoded in a diagram may render causal effects in the target environment computable from the available data. This problem, which we call z-transportability, reduces to ordinary transportability when Z is all-inclusive, and, like the latter, can be given syntactic characterization using the do-calculus [Pearl, 1995; 2000]. This paper establishes a necessary and sufficient condition for causal effects in the target domain to be estimable from both the non-experimental information available and the limited experimental information transferred from the source. We further provides a complete algorithm for computing the transport formula, that is, a way of fusing experimental and observational information to synthesize an unbiased estimate of the desired causal relation.
Remixing Music with Visual Conditioning

We propose a visually conditioned music remixing system by incorporating deep visual and audio models. The method is based on a state of the art audio-visual source separation model which performs music instrument source separation with video information. We modified the model to work with user-selected images instead of videos as visual input during inference to enable separation of audio-only content. Furthermore, we propose a remixing engine that generalizes the task of source separation into music remixing. The proposed method is able to achieve improved audio quality compared to remixing performed by the separate-and-add method with a state-of-the-art audiovisual source separation model.
Merit Aid, College Quality and College Completion: Massachusetts' Adams Scholarship as an In-Kind Subsidy.

Abstract We analyze a Massachusetts merit aid program that gives high-scoring students tuition waivers at in-state public colleges with lower graduation rates than available alternative colleges. A regression discontinuity design comparing students just above and below the eligibility threshold finds that students are remarkably willing to forgo college quality and that scholarship use actually lowered college completion rates. These results suggest that college quality affects college completion rates. The theoretical prediction that in-kind subsidies of public institutions can reduce consumption of the subsidized good is shown to be empirically important. (JEL H75, I22, I23, I28)
Forecasting asymmetries in aggregate stock market returns: Evidence from conditional skewness

Abstract This paper provides a time-series test for the Differences-of-Opinion theory proposed by Hong and Stein (2003) [Hong, H., Stein, J.C., 2003. Differences of opinion, short-sales constraints and market crashes. Review of Financial Studies 16, 487–525.] in the aggregate market, thus extending the cross-sectional test of Chen et al. (2001) [Chen, J., Hong, H., Stein, J.C.. 2001. Forecasting crashes: trading volume, past returns and conditional skewness in stock prices. Journal of Financial Economics 61, 345–381.] for this theory across individual stocks. An autoregressive conditional density model with a skewed-t distribution is used to estimate the effects of past trading volume on return asymmetry. Using NYSE and AMEX data from 1962 to 2000, we find that the prediction of the Hong–Stein model that negative skewness will be most pronounced under high trading volume conditions is not supported in our time-series analysis with market data.
Market Maker Inventories and Stock Prices

Empirical studies linking liquidity provision to asset prices follow naturally from inventory models. Liquidity suppliers and market markers profit from providing immediacy to less patient investors, but have limited inventory-carrying and risk-bearing capacity. Similarly, limits to arbitrage arguments rely on certain market participants accommodating buying or selling pressure. These liquidity suppliers/arbitrageurs are willing to accommodate trades—and, therefore, hold suboptimal portfolios—only if they are able to buy (sell) at a discount (premium) relative to future prices. Thus, large liquidity-supplier inventories should coincide with large buying or selling pressure, which causes price movements that subsequently reverse themselves. By identifying and studying the inventories of traders who are central to the trading process and whose primary roll is to provide liquidity—New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) market
Special interest groups and the allocation of public funds

I propose a fully rational model of government contracting that explains differences in local government spending from grants and other income. In this model, violations of fungibility arise from dynamic interactions between politicians and interest groups with the ability to raise funds for the local government. The predictions of the model are tested by exploiting unique features of windfalls received by states under a settlement with the tobacco industry. Although windfalls are legally unrestricted, the median state increased spending on tobacco control programs from zero to $2.30 per capita upon receipt of funds. The marginal propensity to spend on such programs is 0.20 from settlement revenue and zero from overall income. States which were not involved in the settlement lawsuits spend less. These results cannot be explained by existing models in the literature.
The effects of capital structure change on security prices: A study of exchange offers

Abstract This study considers the impact of capital structure change announcements on security prices. Statistically significant price adjustments in firms' common stock, preferred stock and debt related to these announcements are documented and alternative causes for these price changes are examined. The evidence is consistent with both corporate tax and wealth redistribution effects. There is also evidence that firms make decisions which do not maximize stockholder wealth. In addition, a new approach to testing the significance of public announcements on security returns is presented.
Performance consequences of mandatory increases in executive stock ownership

Abstract We examine a sample of firms that adopt “target ownership plans”, under which managers are required to own a minimum amount of stock. We find that prior to plan adoption, such firms exhibit low managerial equity ownership and low stock price performance. Managerial equity ownership increases significantly in the two years following plan adoption. We also observe that excess accounting returns and stock returns are higher after the plan is adopted. Thus, for our sample of firms, the required increases in the level of managerial equity ownership result in improvements in firm performance.
Framing and taxation: Evaluation of tax policies involving household composition

Three studies of attitudes toward tax policies were conducted on the World Wide Web. The results show several framing and other effects. In penalty aversion, subjects preferred bonuses over penalties, when policies differed only in how they were formally described. In the Schelling effect, subjects inconsistently preferred both higher bonuses (for children) for the poor than for the rich and higher penalties (for being childless) for the rich than for the poor. In the neutrality bias, subjects preferred one form of accommodation for marriage, namely separate filing – which has no marriage bonuses or penalties but violates a norm of treating equal-earning couples alike – more when it was presented in a format that emphasized the effect of marriage (where it is neutral) than in one that emphasized the effect of the number of earners in a couple (where it is not neutral). In the status-quo effect, subjects preferred the specified starting point to any change. Finally, in the metric effect, subjects favored more progression in tax burdens when taxes were expressed in percent than when they were expressed in dollars. The research suggests a framework for thinking about framing more generally. Subjects approach a given choice or decision problem with strong independent norms or ideals, such as, here, “do no harm,” “avoid penalties,” “treat likes alike,” “help children,” and “expect the rich to pay more than the not-rich.” They then evaluate the choice-problem based on the norm made most salient by the formal presentation, ignoring the others. This leads to preference reversals and shifts in a complex area such as tax, where independently attractive ideals are often in conflict. The research suggests that popular perceptions of tax system fairness are vulnerable to structural instability on account of the inherent incompatibility of independently attractive goals. Models of public policy formation that take into account public opinion must therefore take into account the framing of issues in the popular understanding.
Conditions of Confinement at Sentencing: The Case of Seriously Disordered Offenders

At sentencing, a judge can often foresee that an individual, given his major mental disorder and other vulnerabilities, will experience serious harm in prison. These harms may include psychological deterioration and mental distress, attempted suicide, or victimization by staff or other inmates. In response, some jurisdictions allow a judge to commit a disordered offender for treatment in lieu of incarceration, while others designate need for treatment and undue offender hardship as mitigating factors for use at sentencing. None of these measures, however, goes far enough to protect vulnerable prisoners. This Article builds a case for expanding judges’ sentencing power by authorizing them to tailor the conditions of confinement for vulnerable offenders with major mental disorders when certain conditions are necessary to fulfill the purposes of punishment or for its humaneness. It defends the premise that vulnerability is a legitimate source of concern for sentencing judges, addresses concerns of judicial competence and undue infringement into correctional affairs, and evaluates a number of possible sentencing conditions that judges could order. Potential conditions, which vary in cost and degree of intrusiveness, could include requiring comprehensive mental health evaluations, disqualifying facilities with insufficient mental health or protective resources, specifying types of facilities where an offender will serve or begin his sentence, and mandating certain treatment in prison.
Foreign Direct Investment, Employment Volatility and Cyclical Dumping

This paper analyses the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the patterns of cyclical dumping (exporting at a price below marginal cost). We consider a global economy where manufacturing is monopolistic-competitive, and productivity is subject to country-specific shocks. Labour is risk averse and immobile across countries, and entrepreneurs are risk neutral. Labour employment and income are governed by implicit contracts, which offer stable real income and volatile employment. Capacity investment is irreversible, and is done prior to the resolution of uncertainty. If investment in manufacturing capacity is characterized by returns to scale, higher volatility of productivity shocks is shown to induce producers to diversify internationally by means of FDI. The resultant integrated equilibrium is characterized by greater volatility of employment, as the multinational effectively reallocates employment from a low-realized-productivity to a high-realized-productivity country. We derive a simple condition characterizing cyclical dumping--it occurs when the percentage shortfall of the realized employment exceeds Lerner's ratio of market power (the inverse of the demand elasticity). Cyclical dumping is more frequent in more competitive and more labour-intensive industries. FDI is shown both to improve welfare, and to increase the incidences of cyclical dumping. Copyright @ 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Consumer reactions to food safety crises.

For marketers, health professionals, and parents, improving nutrition is essentially a process of encouraging consumers to make healthful choices that improve their well-being. What happens, however, when we believe contamination, terrorism, or a genetic incidence threatens a part of the food supply? Sometimes such crises influence the recall, redesign, and communication efforts of individual companies; other times they threaten entire industries. After showing how consumer attitudes toward food safety are formed, this review distinguishes four different segments of consumers who would be most influenced and most influential during a food crisis. De-coupling the risk response behavior of consumers into the separate components of risk perception and risk attitude shows how they will react differently in a food safety crisis situation. Using these insights, suggestions are made as to the implications this has for pre-crisis preparations and post-crisis responses. While pre-crisis preparations can eliminate the crisis altogether, post-crisis responses can help manage a crisis when it does occur.
Simple and Weighted Unfolding Threshold Models for the Spatial Representation of Binary Choice Data

This paper describes the development of an unfold ing methodology designed to analyze "pick any" or "pick any/n" binary choice data (e.g., decisions to buy or not to buy various products). Maximum likeli hood estimation procedures are used to obtain a joint space representation of both persons and objects. A review of the relevant literature concerning the spatial treatment of such binary choice data is presented. The nonlinear logistic model type is described, as well as the alternating maximum likelihood algorithm used to estimate the parameter values. The results of an appli cation of the spatial choice model to a synthetic data set in a monte carlo analysis are presented. An appli cation concerning consumer (intended) choices for nine competitive brands of sports cars is discussed. Future research may provide a means of generalizing the model to accommodate three-way choice data.
Clarifying the Curative Admissibility Doctrine: Using the Principles of Forfeiture and Deterrence to Shape the Relief for an Opponent's Evidentiary Misconduct

Suppose that during trial, the opposing attorney deliberately violates an evidentiary rule in a way that causes your client to suffer a wrongful, adverse verdict. Of course, you have the option of filing an ethics complaint against the opposing attorney with the state bar organization, but there is certainly no assurance that the bar will undo the wrong your client has suffered. First, there is no guarantee that the bar will impose any meaningful sanction on the offending attorney. Moreover, even if the bar eventually takes some action against the attorney, there may be a substantial delay between the filing of the bar complaint and the imposition of discipline on the attorney. Finally, even when the bar ultimately imposes a severe sanction on the attorney, that sanction is no substitute for the verdict that your client was wrongfully denied. To some extent, the curative admissibility doctrine is intended to afford your client the relief that the bar discipline system fails to provide.1 By virtue of that doctrine, if the opposing attorney injects inadmissible evidence into the record, the trial judge may allow the injured party to respond in kind to cure the damage done by the introduction of the inadmissible evidence.2 The relief is immediate rather than delayed; instead of awaiting the outcome of a bar disciplinary proceeding following the trial, the injured party is granted relief during the trial itself. Further, the relief is far more likely to be adequate. If the judge permits the injured party to introduce otherwise inadmissible evidence that effectively counteracts the evidence injected by the opposing attorney, the rebuttal evidence may very well prevent a miscarriage of justice.
Why does skill intensity vary across cities? The role of housing cost☆

Abstract The ratio of skilled (college graduate) to unskilled (non-college graduate) workers (the skill intensity ratio, SIR) varies substantially across cities and the variance in the SIR has increased significantly since 1970. Recent research finds that the ratio of skilled to unskilled worker earnings (the skilled wage ratio, SWR) also varies significantly. The “income elasticity hypothesis” (IEH) holds that if, as empirical evidence suggests, the income elasticity of demand for housing is significantly below unity, then the SWR should vary inversely with house prices. This implication of the IEH has been confirmed in empirical tests and leads to a further consequence of the IEH. If the SWR varies inversely with house prices, the SIR should vary directly as employers substitute more skilled workers when the SWR falls. This provides the opportunity for a new test of the IEH which is conducted here. The results strongly confirm, consistent with the IEH, that housing cost is an important determinant of variation in the SIR across cities.
Edgeworth box economies with multiple equilibria

We derive sufficient conditions for the existence of multiple equilibria in two-good, two-agent pure exchange economies with heterogeneous but symmetric preferences with identical Bernoulli utilities. When preferences are non-homothetic (for example, quadratic, quasi-linear, or HARA), multiple equilibria are possible even with identical endowments.
Level-k mechanism design

Non-equilibrium models of choice (e.g. level-k reasoning) have significantly different, sometimes more accurate, predictions in games than does Nash equilibrium. When it comes to the maximal set of functions that are implementable in mechanism design, however, they turn out to have similar implications. Focusing on single-valued rules, we discuss the role and implications of different behavioural anchors (arbitrary level-0 play), and prove a level-k revelation principle. If a function is level-k implementable given any level-0 play, it must obey a slight weakening of standard strict incentive constraints. Further, the same condition is also sufficient for level-k implementability, although the role of specific level-0 anchors is more controversial for the sufficiency argument. Nonetheless, our results provide tight characterizations of level-k implementable functions under a variety of level-0 play, including truthful, uniform, and atomless anchors.
Salesforce Contracting Under Demand Censorship

We study salesforce contracting in an environment where excess demand results in lost sales and the demand information is censored by the inventory level. In our model, a firm contracts with a risk-neutral sales agent with limited liability whose effort increases the demand stochastically. The firm designs the incentive contract and invests in inventory; the agent decides the sales effort. We find that the sales-quota-based bonus contract is optimal in such an environment, and the quota should be set equal to the inventory level when the first-best solution is not attainable. We further reveal that demand censorship can introduce peculiar effects on the optimal sales effort and service level that the firm implements. From our analysis of the additive and multiplicative effort cases, we find that in the additive effort case, it can be optimal, under demand censorship, for the firm to induce an effort and maintain a service level both greater than those under the first-best solution. Scenarios also exist where the firm should induce zero effort. For the multiplicative effort case, the optimal sales effort under demand censorship is lower than the first-best effort, whereas the optimal service level is higher than the first-best service level. The agent earns zero rent in the additive effort case but may earn a positive rent in the multiplicative effort case. Finally, our numerical analysis shows that demand censorship can have a significant negative impact on the value of contracting with the sales agent, especially when the sales margin is low and the market uncertainty is high.
The transfer problem with three agents once again: Characterization, uniqueness and stability

Abstract An earlier paper in this Journal [Chichilnisky (1980)] gave for the first time sufficient conditions for the transfer paradox to occur in 3-agent economies, with stable markets. This paper comments on several other papers written about these results, and extends the results further. Here we give necessary as well as sufficient conditions for the transfer problem to occur in an economy with three agents, at a unique and Walrasian stable equilibrium.
Children’s Transitional Rights

This article reflects upon the contribution that psychoanalysis can make to our understanding of children’s rights in a liberal legal system. The question of children’s rights has been richly debat...
Making Partnerships Work for Mom and Pop and Everyone Else

Entities treated as partnerships for tax purposes cover the spectrum from small Mom and Pop operations to mammoth enterprises owned by sophisticated partners. Designing tax law to govern this diverse array of entities is a challenging exercise since rules that are well suited to provide simplicity for entities at the small, unsophisticated end of the continuum may be poorly designed for preventing manipulation by entities at the large, sophisticated end of the continuum. However, a careful examination of how tax rules can best promote simplicity reveals opportunities for reform that would make the law more appropriate for entities all along the continuum.
Revenue Driven Resource Allocation: Funding Authority, Incentives, and New Product Development Portfolio Management

The first step in transforming strategy from a hopeful statement about the future into an operational reality is to allocate resources to innovation and new product development (NPD) programs in a portfolio. Resource allocation and NPD portfolio decisions often span multiple levels of the organization's hierarchy, leading to questions about how much authority to bestow on managers and how to structure incentives for NPD. In this study, we explore how funding authority and incentives affect a manager's allocation of resources between existing product improvement (relatively incremental projects) and new product development (more radical projects). Funding may be either fixed or variable depending on the extent to which the manager has the authority to use revenue derived from existing product sales to fund NPD efforts. We find that the use of variable funding drives higher effort toward improving existing products and developing new products. However, variable funding has a subtle side effect: it induces the manager to focus on existing product improvement to a greater degree than new product development, and the relative balance in the NPD portfolio shifts toward incremental innovation. In addition, we highlight a substitution effect between explicit incentives (compensation parameters) and implicit incentives (career concerns). Explicit incentives are reduced as career concerns become more salient.
A Note on Dropping Experimental Subjects who Fail a Manipulation Check

Dropping subjects based on the results of a manipulation check following treatment assignment is common practice across the social sciences, presumably to restrict estimates to a subpopulation of subjects who understand the experimental prompt. We show that this practice can lead to serious bias and argue for a focus on what is revealed without discarding subjects. Generalizing results developed in Zhang and Rubin (2003) and Lee (2009) to the case of multiple treatments, we provide sharp bounds for potential outcomes among those who would pass a manipulation check regardless of treatment assignment. These bounds may have large or infinite width, implying that this inferential target is often out of reach. As an application, we replicate Press, Sagan, and Valentino (2013) with a design that does not drop subjects that failed the manipulation check and show that the findings are likely stronger than originally reported. We conclude with suggestions for practice, namely alterations to the experimental design.
Identity Theft in Cyberspace: Crime Control Methods and Their Effectiveness in Combating Phishing Attacks

This article discusses the growing identity theft problem in cyberspace, focusing specifically on phishing attacks. Victims of identity theft and phishing attacks suffer direct financial losses, though the real price these crimes exact is in the time and money spent trying to rebuild a victim’s credit and good name. Society also suffers through business losses, generally passed on to consumers through higher costs for goods and credit, and, more importantly, through loss of consumer confidence in conducting business online.Section II presents an overview of identity theft through a discussion of associated costs, laws, and stakeholders. Section III presents facts and statistics on the phishing problem. Section IV sets up a structure for analyzing identity theft crime control methods based on primary, secondary, and tertiary responses to crime. The primary level includes victim self-help measures, the secondary level involves private-party architecture solutions, and the tertiary level includes public law enforcement efforts. The article then discusses recent developments in fighting identity theft at each level, focusing on new laws and services that help consumers secure their identity, advances in private-party methods to detect and prevent fraud, and new and proposed changes to criminal laws used in the battle against identity theft. It will discuss the effectiveness of these new developments on phishing attacks and critically examine who is best equipped to combat the phishing problem. The article concludes that no single crime control method alone will be enough to combat phishing. Only a combined approach, incorporating strategies from each level, will diminish the phishing problem.
Efficient Structures for Innovative Social Networks

What lines of communication among members of an organization are most productive in the early, ideation phase of innovation? We investigate this question with a recombination and selection model of knowledge transfer operating through a social network. We find that ideation is accelerated when people in the organization dynamically churn through a large (ideally the entire population) set of conversational partners over time, which naturally begets short path lengths and eliminates information bottlenecks. Group meetings, in which the content of conversations is available to all for consideration, are another way to learn in parallel and accelerate the ideation process, although for complex problems they may not offer significant advantages over the best decentralized networks. The idealized core-periphery graphs emerge as an important family on the time--cost efficient frontier. New sociometrics for the analyses of innovation processes emerge from this investigation.
Monopsony Exploitation in Professional Sport: Evidence from Major League Baseball Position Players, 2000–2011

Some professional athletes still face monopsony power in labor markets, underscoring the importance of estimating players' marginal revenue product to assess its effects. We introduce two new empirical approaches, spline revenue functions and fixed‐effects stochastic production functions, into the standard Scully (1974) approach to marginal revenue product estimation and calculate Monopsony Exploitation Ratios (MERs) for position players in Major League Baseball over the 2001–2011 seasons. Estimates indicate that MERs are about 0.89 for rookie players, 0.75 for arbitration eligible players, and 0.21 for free agents. Recent collective bargaining agreements have reduced MERs for free agents, but had no effect on MERs for other players. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
NETWORKS VERSUS MARKETS IN INTERNATIONAL TRADE

Abstract I propose a network/search view of international trade in differentiated products. I present evidence that supports the view that proximity and common language/colonial ties are more important for differentiated products than for products traded on organized exchanges in matching international buyers and sellers, and that search barriers to trade are higher for differentiated than for homogeneous products. I also discuss alternative explanations for the findings.
Morphological Reconstruction Improves Microvessel Mapping in Super-Resolution Ultrasound

Generation of super-resolution (SR) ultrasound (US) images, created from the successive localization of individual microbubbles in the circulation, has enabled the visualization of microvascular structure and flow at a level of detail that was not possible previously. Despite rapid progress, tradeoffs between spatial and temporal resolution may challenge the translation of this promising technology to the clinic. To temper these tradeoffs, we propose a method based on morphological image reconstruction. This method can extract from ultrafast contrast-enhanced US (CEUS) images hundreds of microbubble peaks per image (312-by-180 pixels) with intensity values varying by an order of magnitude. Specifically, it offers a fourfold increase in the number of peaks detected per frame, requires on the order of 100 ms for processing, and is robust to additive electronic noise (down to 3.6-dB CNR in CEUS images). By integrating this method to an SR framework, we demonstrate a sixfold improvement in spatial resolution, when compared with CEUS, in imaging chicken embryo microvessels. This method that is computationally efficient and, thus, scalable to large data sets may augment the abilities of SR-US in imaging microvascular structure and function.
Centralized collision-free polynomial trajectories and goal assignment for aerial swarms

Abstract Computationally tractable methods are developed for centralized goal assignment and planning of collision-free polynomial-in-time trajectories for systems of multiple aerial robots. The method first assigns robots to goals to minimize total time-in-motion based on initial trajectories. By coupling the assignment and trajectory generation, the initial motion plans tend to require only limited collision resolution. The plans are then refined by checking for potential collisions and resolving them using either start time delays or altitude assignment. Numerical experiments using both methods show significant reductions in the total time required for agents to arrive at goals with only modest additional computational effort in comparison to state-of-the-art prior work, enabling planning for thousands of agents.
Auditory cortex is susceptible to lexical influence as revealed by informational vs. energetic masking of speech categorization.

Abstract Speech perception requires the grouping of acoustic information into meaningful phonetic units via the process of categorical perception (CP). Environmental masking influences speech perception and CP. However, it remains unclear at which stage of processing (encoding, decision, or both) masking affects listeners’ categorization of speech signals. The purpose of this study was to determine whether linguistic interference influences the early acoustic–phonetic conversion process inherent to CP. To this end, we measured source level, event related brain potentials (ERPs) from auditory cortex (AC) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) as listeners rapidly categorized speech sounds along a /da/ to /ga/ continuum presented in three listening conditions: quiet, and in the presence of forward (informational masker) and time-reversed (energetic masker) 2-talker babble noise. Maskers were matched in overall SNR and spectral content and thus varied only in their degree of linguistic interference (i.e., informational masking). We hypothesized a differential effect of informational versus energetic masking on behavioral and neural categorization responses, where we predicted increased activation of frontal regions when disambiguating speech from noise, especially during lexical-informational maskers. We found (1) informational masking weakens behavioral speech phoneme identification above and beyond energetic masking; (2) low-level AC activity not only codes speech categories but is susceptible to higher-order lexical interference; (3) identifying speech amidst noise recruits a cross hemispheric circuit (ACleft → IFGright) whose engagement varies according to task difficulty. These findings provide corroborating evidence for top-down influences on the early acoustic–phonetic analysis of speech through a coordinated interplay between frontotemporal brain areas.
Changing Places, Changing Taxes: Exploiting Tax Discontinuities

President Trump’s decision to move his official state of residence from high-tax New York to no (income)-tax Florida has brought public attention to an issue that has long troubled scholars, designers and administrators of income tax systems: how the interaction of tax rules deferring the taxation of income and tax rules based on residency allows taxpayers to reduce and even avoid taxation of their deferred income. These discontinuities in tax treatment may lead to excessive migration, as well as reductions in state income tax revenues and distortions in the design of state taxing mechanisms. This Article explains what states would have to do to eliminate these avoidance opportunities. However, it also points out that many of these policy changes would create other tax discontinuities. Ultimately, it leaves open the question whether making any of these changes would lead to fewer financial and behavioral distortions.
C-SAW: A Framework for Graph Sampling and Random Walk on GPUs

Many applications require to learn, mine, analyze and visualize large-scale graphs. These graphs are often too large to be addressed efficiently using conventional graph processing technologies. Fortunately, recent research efforts find out graph sampling and random walk, which significantly reduce the size of original graphs, can benefit the tasks of learning, mining, analyzing and visualizing large graphs by capturing the desirable graph properties. This paper introduces C-SAW, the first framework that accelerates Sampling and Random Walk framework on GPUs. Particularly, C-SAW makes three contributions: First, our framework provides a generic API which allows users to implement a wide range of sampling and random walk algorithms with ease. Second, offloading this framework on GPU, we introduce warp-centric parallel selection, and two novel optimizations for collision migration. Third, towards supporting graphs that exceed the GPU memory capacity, we introduce efficient data transfer optimizations for out-of-memory and multi-GPU sampling, such as workload-aware scheduling and batched multi-instance sampling. Taken together, our framework constantly outperforms the state of the art projects in addition to the capability of supporting a wide range of sampling and random walk algorithms.
SQUIRL: Robust and Efficient Learning from Video Demonstration of Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Tasks

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated its potential to learn complex robotic manipulation tasks. However, RL still requires the robot to collect a large amount of real-world experience. To address this problem, recent works have proposed learning from expert demonstrations (LfD), particularly via inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), given its ability to achieve robust performance with only a small number of expert demonstrations. Nevertheless, deploying IRL on real robots is still challenging due to the large number of robot experiences it requires. This paper aims to address this scalability challenge with a robust, sample-efficient, and general meta-IRL algorithm, SQUIRL, that performs a new but related long-horizon task robustly given only a single video demonstration. First, this algorithm bootstraps the learning of a task encoder and a task-conditioned policy using behavioral cloning (BC). It then collects real-robot experiences and bypasses reward learning by directly recovering a Q-function from the combined robot and expert trajectories. Next, this algorithm uses the learned Q-function to re-evaluate all cumulative experiences collected by the robot to improve the policy quickly. In the end, the policy performs more robustly (90%+ success) than BC on new tasks while requiring no experiences at test time. Finally, our real-robot and simulated experiments demonstrate our algorithm’s generality across different state spaces, action spaces, and vision-based manipulation tasks, e.g., pick-pour-place and pick-carry-drop.
Operational Disruptions, Firm Risk, and Control Systems

Problem definition: Operational disruptions can impact a firm’s risk, which manifests in a host of operational issues, including a higher holding cost for inventory, a higher financing cost for cap...
Immunologic and Epidemiologic Drivers of Norovirus Transmission in Daycare and School Outbreaks.

BACKGROUND Norovirus outbreaks are notoriously explosive, with dramatic symptomology and rapid disease spread. Children are particularly vulnerable to infection and drive norovirus transmission due to their high contact rates with each other and the environment. Despite the explosive nature of norovirus outbreaks, attack rates in schools and daycares remain low with the majority of students not reporting symptoms. METHODS We explore immunologic and epidemiologic mechanisms that may underlie epidemic norovirus transmission dynamics using a disease transmission model. Towards this end, we compared different model scenarios, including innate resistance and acquired immunity (collectively denoted 'immunity'), stochastic extinction, and an individual exclusion intervention. We calibrated our model to daycare and school outbreaks from national surveillance data. RESULTS Including immunity in the model led to attack rates that were consistent with the data. However, immunity alone resulted in the majority of outbreak durations being relatively short. The addition of individual exclusion (to the immunity model) extended outbreak durations by reducing the amount of time that symptomatic people contribute to transmission. Including both immunity and individual exclusion mechanisms resulted in simulations where both attack rates and outbreak durations were consistent with surveillance data. CONCLUSIONS The epidemiology of norovirus outbreaks in daycare and school settings cannot be well described by a simple transmission model in which all individuals start as fully susceptible. More studies on how best to design interventions which leverage population immunity and encourage more rigorous individual exclusion may improve venue-level control measures. See video abstract at http://links.lww.com/EDE/B795.
Stability and dynamics of optically levitated dielectric disks in a Gaussian standing wave beyond the harmonic approximation

This article describes the coupling between rotation and translational modes in levitated dielectric nanodisks trapped in a Gaussian standing wave. The coupling arises from a third order term in the potential due to the Gaussian and standing wave geometry of the beam.