cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Performance Analysis of Adaptive Dynamic Tube MPC

Model predictive control (MPC) is an effective method for control of constrained systems but is susceptible to the external disturbances and modeling error often encountered in real-world applications. To address these issues, techniques such as Tube MPC (TMPC) utilize an ancillary offline-generated robust controller to ensure that the system remains within an invariant set, referred to as a tube, around an online-generated trajectory. However, TMPC is unable to modify its tube and ancillary controller in response to changing state-dependent uncertainty, often resulting in overly-conservative solutions. Dynamic Tube MPC (DTMPC) addresses these problems by simultaneously optimizing the desired trajectory and tube geometry online. Building upon this framework, Adaptive DTMPC (ADTMPC) produces better model approximations by reducing model uncertainty, resulting in more accurate control policies. This work presents an experimental analysis and performance evaluation of TMPC, DTMPC, and ADTMPC for an uncertain nonlinear system. In particular, DTMPC is shown to outperform TMPC because it is able to dynamically adjust to changing environments, limiting aggressive control and conservative behavior to only the cases when the constraints and uncertainty require it. Applied to a pendulum testbed, this enables DTMPC to use up to 30% less control effort while achieving up to 80% higher speeds. This performance is further improved by ADTMPC, which reduces the feedback control effort by up to another 35%, while delivering up to 34% better trajectory tracking. This analysis establishes that the DTMPC and ADTMPC frameworks yield significantly more effective robust control policies for systems with changing uncertainty, goals, and operating conditions.
The Influence of Price Discount Versus Bonus Pack on the Preference for Virtue and Vice Foods

Abstract The authors find that consumers prefer a bonus pack to a price discount for virtue foods but they prefer a price discount to a bonus pack for vice foods. Prior research has shown that, all else being equal, consumers prefer bonus packs to price discounts. The authors propose that this preference does not hold for vice food, because consumers cannot generate good justifications for buying such food when a bonus pack is offered because this would mean consuming more of the vice. However, a price discount on a vice food can be justified because it acts as a guilt-mitigating mechanism. For virtue foods, the absence of both anticipated postconsumption guilt and the resultant need to justify leads consumers to prefer a bonus pack to a price discount. The authors demonstrate the proposed effect and test its underlying process across five experiments.
Exchange Rate Economics: 1986

In the past fifteen years key exchange rates have moved in larger and more persistent ways than advocates of flexible rates in the late 1960s would have left anyone free to imagine. Certainly there was no expectation of constancy for nominal exchange rates. But real exchange rate movements of 30 or forty percent were definitely not suggested as a realistic possibility. Moreover where these large movements did occur they did not obviously appear to be connected with fundamentals, and hence seemed difficult to explain in terms of the exchange rate theories at hand. The persistence of rate movements was as surprising as the rapid unwinding of apparent misalignments when they did ultimately occur. The past fifteen years provide a natural dividing line between the Keynesian and monetary approaches of the 1960s, and the more recent analysis that takes into account exchange rate expectations and portfolio issues, which took off in the early 1970s as well as the brand-new approaches that concentrate on (partial equilibrium) microeconomics. To review these ideas the paper starts with a brief look at the U.S. experience with flexible exchange rates. From there it proceeds to the Mundell-Fleming model as a comprehensive framework of analysis. The following sections deal with persistent effects of policy disturbances, links between exchange rates and prices, the political economy of exchange rate movements and the question of policies toward excess capital mobility.
THE INFLUENCE OF PRICE WATERHOUSE & CO. ON THE CAP, THE APB, AND IN THE EARLY YEARS ON THE FASB

Price Waterhouse & Co., for decades the premier public accounting firm in the United States, which audits a large number of “blue chip” companies, has, directly and indirectly, been a large and frequent presence in the U.S. standard-setting arena. It is the purpose of this paper to document this presence and to determine whether it had a discernible effect on the outcomes of the standard setters' deliberations. The conclusion is that, appearances notwithstanding, there has been no evidence of a noticeable effect.
Migrating with Black Swans: Climate Risk and Retirement Planning

This article combines the thoughts of several authors to describe the migration of retirees through the retirement phase of their lives during a time of climate change. Taleb [2007] introduced the concept of the Black Swan, the (hopefully) infrequent but significant disruption of investment returns. Bernstein [2013] discussed sources of risk in portfolio design and the concept of deep risk, the long-term loss of real capital. Frank, Mitchell, and Blanchett [2012], among others, demonstrated how retirees move through retirement, frequently adjusting to changes in market performance and personal expectations of longevity. Nordhaus [2013] investigated the potential effects of climate change on economic performance and equity returns. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports outlined many of the possible underlying climate changes that are likely to drive these risks and necessitate adjustment on the part of retirees. These sources, and others, motivate this article’s exploration of climate change, its economic implications, and how retirees might cope as they migrate through their final years. Suggestions are made for how financial planners should prepare themselves and their clients for climate change–related risks.
Mortgage Prepayment and Default Behavior with Embedded Forward Contract Risks in China’s Housing Market

Most condominiums in China are sold forward on a pre-sale market, where purchasers and developers transact on an underlying property that is not yet completed. During the pre-sale period home buyers face a significant forward contract risk. However, home buyers can borrow mortgages from banks so that they can effectively share the forward contract risk with banks. This explains the phenomenon of irregularly high early-stage default and prepayment rates observed in residential mortgage lending in China, where there are few, if any, financial incentives for mortgage borrowers to exercise either put or call options. Mortgages collateralized by forward housing assets are riskier than are those with underlying assets traded on the spot market. However, currently Chinese mortgage banks charge the same rate to all mortgage borrowers. This inefficiency in risk sharing between mortgage borrowers’ groups in the forward and spot housing markets leads to mispricing in secondary mortgage sales and mortgage-backed security trading.
Monitoring Immigration Enforcement

More than two-thirds of the unauthorized immigrant population—roughly 8 million out of 11.2 million—is in our nation’s workforce, and growing evidence suggests that unauthorized workers are more likely than their authorized counterparts to experience workplace-related violations. Although scholars have begun shifting their focus to the agencies empowered to regulate immigrants in the workplace, important questions remain unanswered. Why, for example, has the Department of Labor, our nation’s top labor enforcement agency, struggled to protect unauthorized workers against this exploitation despite the scope and seriousness of the problem? And why has Immigration and Customs Enforcement, our nation’s top immigration enforcement agency, resisted taking into account the labor consequences of their actions? Our ignorance is becoming increasingly indefensible given that agencies often have the final word within an immigration universe characterized by legislative stasis. A closer look reveals a peculiar dynamic: ICE has relatively little interest in regulating the relationship between employers and unauthorized workers, while the DOL has a relatively high interest but lacks the autonomy to effectively do so—a dynamic that tends to foster interagency conflict, ultimately enabling the problem of labor exploitation to persist. What is the way out? Borrowing the insights of administrative law scholars, this Article argues that increasing the ability of the DOL to monitor immigration enforcement decisions can help minimize the externalities that ICE actions ordinarily force the DOL to absorb. This monitoring framework constrains
The Bias of the RSR Estimator and the Accuracy of Some Alternatives

This paper analyzes the implications of cross-sectional heteroskedasticity in the repeat sales regression (RSR). RSR estimators are essentially geometric averages of individual asset returns because of the logarithmic transformation of price relatives. We show that the cross-sectional variance of asset returns affects the magnitude of the bias in the average return estimate for each period, while reducing the bias for the surrounding periods. It is not easy to use an approximation method to correct the bias problem. We suggest an unbiased maximum likelihood alternative to the RSR that directly estimates index returns, which we term MLRSR. The unbiased MLRSR estimators are analogous to the RSR estimators but are arithmetic averages of individual asset returns. Simulations show that these estimators are robust to time-varying cross-sectional variance and that the MLRSR may be more accurate than RSR and some alternative methods.
Is the Concept of Obligation Moralized

Conceptual jurisprudence is concerned to explicate the concept of law and other concepts central to core legal practices, as we understand them. The centrality of obligation-talk to legal practice is obvious, as the very point of litigation is to resolve disputes regarding the obligations of the various parties. In this essay, I argue that the general concept of obligation – of which social, legal, and moral obligation are subtypes – includes a conceptual moral constraint. Just as only a very good person can count as a “saint,” only a system of norms that satisfies certain moral norms can count as giving rise to “obligations.” Accordingly, I argue, as a conceptual matter, that only those institutional systems of social norms that satisfy some threshold level of moral respectability have the capacity to create obligations.
Did bankruptcy reform fail? An empirical study of consumer debtors

Just three years ago, Congress enacted controversial amendments to the Bankruptcy Code. The proponents claimed that the changes would drive the "can pay" debtors (of which there were supposedly many) from the bankruptcy courts with tough new income-based eligibility requirements. And indeed, after the enactment of the amendments, the number of people filing for bankruptcy plunged. In this Article - the initial report of the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project - the authors analyze the first national, random sample of post-amendments bankruptcy filers. Contrary to the advocates' claim that high-income filers would be driven from the system and, by implication, that those remaining would have more modest incomes, the data show no change in the income levels of bankruptcy filers after the amendments. These findings thus cast doubt on the suggestion that those purged from the bankruptcy courts - approximately 800,000 in 2007 alone based on trend extrapolation - were high-income deadbeats; they instead appear to have been ordinary American families in serious financial distress. The data also show that debtors filing for bankruptcy in 2007 have even greater debt loads than their counterparts from 2001, a development that seems to track a national trend of increasing consumer debt. The findings thus align with at least two predictions of some legal scholars. The first is that the bankruptcy reform bill was not aimed at high-income abusers but was instead a general assault on all debtors, regardless of their financial circumstances. The second is that debtors are waiting longer - and incurring more debt - before ultimately seeking bankruptcy relief, consistent with the so-called "sweat box" theory of credit card lending.
Educational Justice and the Recognition of Marriage

This article describes a fundamental dimension, ignored in the literature, of the ethical basis of the fiduciary relationship. It considers and rejects an account of the fiduciary relationship based on contract. It develops, instead, a virtue-based approach to the fiduciary relationship founded upon the goods of faithfulness, beneficence, clarity of thought, and dedication to the truth.This article proposes that the relationship between teacher and student is fiduciary. It develops the thesis that a primary or secondary school teacher has especially high duties to the student: obligations, resembling those of a guardian, a trustee, an executor, and an attorney, of fidelity, zealous devotion to the well-being of the other party, and full disclosure. This article does not endorse this approach for the positive law. It is not here proposed that teachers be held legally liable for violations of those obligations. The topic of this article, rather, is ethics. The teacher, it is here proposed, is morally a fiduciary.Teachers in primary and secondary schools are ethically fiduciaries in a special way because they exercise, exemplify, and transmit fiduciary virtues and, preeminently, the intellectual virtues.This Article sketches a few implications of virtue-based fiduciary ethics and proposes some implications for teachers pertinent to the recognition of marriage.
The politics of intellectual property rights regimes: An empirical study of new technology use in entrepreneurship

Abstract This study examines interactions between political processes and intellectual property rights regimes that can influence the propensity of early-stage entrepreneurs to employ the latest available technologies in their ventures. We argue that the effects of intellectual property regimes are moderated by the nature of a country׳s political system, including the influence of Pirate parties, which advocate for minimal intellectual property enforcement. We combine large-panel cross-country survey data on entrepreneurs and country-level measures of polity (democracy versus autocracy) and intellectual property rights with a new measure (created by the authors) estimating the influence of Pirate parties. Results indicate that entrepreneurs in more democratic (high polity) countries enjoy higher levels of technology usage as intellectual property rights strengthen. By contrast, entrepreneurs in more autocratic (low polity) countries are less likely to use the latest technology as intellectual property rights strengthen. The influence of Pirate parties makes strengthening intellectual property rights more positive for technology use in entrepreneurship. These results contribute to the literature examining institutional and political determinants of high-value forms of entrepreneurship—which may hinge on the extent to which entrepreneurs׳ interests are considered by technology and intellectual property policy-makers.
Relationships between Integrity–Related Variables, Work Performance, and Trustworthiness in English and Spanish

Employees (N = 92) from the USA and Mexico completed questionnaires that measured rule–breaking, drug use, and attitudes toward theft. Integrity–related variable clusters had significant intercorrelations. Rule–breaking correlated with supervisor evaluations of work performance in Spanish and with trustworthiness in English.
Collateral Consequences in the American States

Objective This article seeks to analyze varying collateral-consequences policies—laws restricting the rights and privileges of people who have had contact with the criminal-justice system, particularly those with conviction records—in the American states. Methods State policies in eight areas are examined, coded, and combined into an eight-point scale, which then serves as the dependent variable for a regression analysis. The analysis models such restrictions as products of ideological and partisan, racial, and criminal-justice-based predictors. Results Neither Democratic Party influence nor crime levels appear to influence significantly state collateral-sanctions levels; more liberal citizen ideology predicts slightly more lenient policies, while harsher restrictions accompany rising state incarceration rates. Racial variables press in opposite directions: within the model, scores rise as a state's black population increases, but fall as the percentage of African Americans in the state legislature rises. Conclusion Formally creatures of civil rather than criminal law, these “collateral” restrictions appear to possess important affinities with other punitive policies in the United States, yet also resist unambiguous linkage to ideological, criminal-justice, and racial predictors.
The Ties That Bind: Reevaluating The Role Of Legal Presumptions Of Paternity

As Justice Brennan observed in Michael H. v. Gerald D. so many years ago, we must “identify the point at which a tradition becomes firm enough to be relevant to our definition of liberty and the moment at which it becomes too obsolete to be relevant any longer.” This paper addresses one such tradition, the legal presumption of paternity, and examines it through the lens of equal protection, the changing roles of fatherhood, and the evolution of marriage.The concept of who is a parent must change to both satisfy equal protection as well as modern scientific and societal realities. The paper argues that historically the constitutionally protected right to parent has been improperly conferred on a marriage rather than on an individual, particularly with respect to unwed natural fathers. This paper focuses on the need for a change in recognition of relationships between natural fathers and their children, particularly natural fathers of children born to intact marriages.Through that lens, this paper traces the genesis of the legal presumption of paternity in the United States. It then undertakes an in depth review and analysis of the United States Supreme Court’s “unwed father” cases from Stanley v. Illinois to Michael H. from an equal protection perspective. After considering the equal protection concerns raised by the United States Supreme Court’s precedent, the paper proposes that, based on evolving notions of what fathers and marriages are today, the legal presumption should be relegated to an administrative convenience that is fully rebuttable and not limited by time. The paper then proposes that in order to accomplish this shift and fully recognize all biological parents’ rights, as well as the parental rights of others, another commonly held view must be challenged – that a child may only have two legal parents. The paper suggests that in such circumstances courts should recognize more than two parents in order to fully protect parental rights and the need for new parental forms is discussed. Finally, the article proposes how such changes might be effected to better protect individual parental rights.
Intermediaries in Entrepôt Trade: Hong Kong Re‐Exports of Chinese Goods

In this paper, we examine Hong Kong's role in intermediating trade between China and the rest of the world. Hong Kong traders distribute a large fraction of China's exports. Net of customs, insurance, and freight charges, re-exports of Chinese goods are much more expensive when they leave Hong Kong than when they enter. Hong Kong markups on re-exports of Chinese goods are higher for differentiated products, products with higher variance in export prices, and products sent to China for further processing. These results are consistent with the view that traders resolve informational problems in exchange. Additional results suggest that traders price discriminate across destination markets and use transfer pricing to shift income from high-tax countries to Hong Kong.
Estimation of risk-neutral densities using positive convolution approximation

This paper proposes a new nonparametric method for estimating the conditional risk-neutral density (RND) from a cross-section of option prices. The idea of the method is to -t option prices by -nding the optimal density in a special admissible set. The admissible set consists of functions, each of which may be represented as a convolution of a positive kernel with another density. The method is termed the positive convolution approximation (PCA). The important properties of PCA are that it (1) is completely agnostic about the data generating process, (2) controls against over-tting while allowing for small samples, (3) always produces arbitragefree estimators, and (4) is computationally simple. In a Monte-Carlo experiment, PCA is compared to several popular methods: mixtures of lognormals (with one, two, and three lognormals), Hermite polynomials, two regularization methods (for the RND and for implied volatilities), and sigma shape polynomials. PCA is found to be a promising alternative to the competitors. c 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
The Revenues-Expenditures Nexus: Evidence from Local Government Data

This paper examines the intertemporal linkages between local government expenditures and revenues. The main results that emerge from an analysis of fiscal data from 171 municipal governments over the period 1972-80 are that (1) one or two years are sufficient to summarize the relevant dynamic interrelationships; (2) there are important intertemporal linkages between expenditures, taxes, and grants; and (3) past revenues help predict current expenditures, but past expenditures do not alter the future path of revenues. This last finding is contrary to results that have emerged from previous analyses of federal fiscal data. Copyright 1989 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.
How to Make Rules for Lawyers: The Professional Responsibility of the Legal Profession

Using diverse lawyer regulatory issues that have arisen in the ABA, courts, and other venues across the last forty years, this Article examines in detail the methodology and styles of argumentation that lawyers use to support or defeat change. Regulatory issues addressed include non-lawyer ownership of law firms, fee-sharing with non-lawyers, collaborative law, and a requirement that fee agreements with clients be in writing, Recommendations for improvement in the process of rule making are offered.
Framing innovation: negotiating shared frames during early design phases

Members of newly formed design teams have different frames - implicit values, goals and assumptions - each of them hold about what problems are important and how they are best addressed. In the early, informal phases of design projects, these frames, and the degree to which they are shared within the team, have substantial consequences. However, little is known about the interactions and activities that reveal frames and support frame sharing in teams. Our study follows 22 newly-formed multi-disciplinary teams through the early phases of the design process in a New Product Development course. We used a mixed method, interdisciplinary approach to understand the dynamic process through which design frames are socially negotiated and shared. We identified core framing activities of design teams and propose a framing cycle of pseudo-frame setting, making individuals' frames explicit, making frame conflicts salient, and building a common frame.
Key performance indicators as supplements to earnings: Incremental informativeness, demand factors, measurement issues, and properties of their forecasts

The documented decline in the information content of earnings numbers has paralleled the emergence of disclosures, mostly voluntary, of industry-specific key performance indicators (KPIs). We find that the incremental information content conveyed by KPI news is significant for many KPIs yet diminished when details about the computation of the KPI are absent or when the computation changes over time. Consistent with analysts responding to investor information demand, we find that analysts are more likely to produce forecasts for a KPI when that KPI has more information content and when earnings are less informative. We also analyze the properties of analysts’ KPI forecasts and find that KPI forecasts are more accurate than mechanical forecasts and their accuracy exceeds that of earnings forecasts. Our study contributes to the literature on the information content of KPIs as well as research on the properties of analysts’ forecasts. We provide evidence on whether and how to regulate voluntary disclosures.
When does legal flexibility work in environmental law

Author(s): Biber, E; Eagle, J | Abstract: Environmental law scholars, practitioners, and policymakers have wrestled for some time with the implications of climate change for environmental law. There is widespread, although not universal, agreement that climate change requires greater flexibility in environmental legal systems. Flexibility - reduced procedural requirements for administrative agency decision making and less rigid substantive standards - would allow the agencies that implement environmental law to adapt to a future world characterized by dynamic, uncertain changes in natural resource systems. According to its proponents, flexibility would make it easier for agencies to more frequently update their management or regulatory decisions to respond to changed conditions, and also to facilitate adaptive management. However, there has been little exploration of the conditions under which flexibility improves or undermines the effectiveness of environmental law. This Article examines two areas of environmental law that have historically had a great deal of flexibility: hunting law and marine fisheries law. In both areas, management and regulatory decisions are updated on a regular basis by the relevant agencies, often annually. Procedural requirements for making decisions are often streamlined. And the substantive standards that apply to agency decisions are often quite broad and flexible, leaving substantial discretion to the agency. Yet these two areas of environmental law have experienced very different outcomes in terms of implementation: fisheries management in the United States is often perceived as failing, while hunting law is seen as quite successful in achieving its goals.
Some Animals are More Equal than Others: The Rehnquist Court and "Majority Religion"

The Rehnquist court began a revolutionin the law of church and state that the Roberts Court may continue. This article analyzes Justice Scalia's rhetoric in dissents in Lee v. Weisman and McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union to suggest that the aim of the revolution, having been first enunciated as "equality" for religions values and expression, has now shifted to transformation of the Establishment Clause dialogue to permit a favored place in public life for "majority religion."
Measuring intensity of technological change: The seismic approach

Abstract The abundance of typologies, within the economics of innovation, has resulted in the same name being used for different innovation types and the same innovation being classified under different typologies. The present research introduces the Scale of Innovation Intensity (SIIN) based on metataxonomy that subsumes other, less comprehensive taxonomies. The SIIN is similar to the seismic Mercalli's scale used to measure the intensity of earthquakes. The impact of technological change is measured by an indicator, called magnitude, based on the impact of technological innovations on the economic system. The theory is applied to some product and process innovations such as agricultural mechanization, aircraft technology, muffler catalytic, aluminum processing, etc. The results show that some innovations have a higher technological intensity and energy (economic impact) on well-being than others. Some concluding remarks are discussed in the final part of this research.
The Mirage of Exchange Rate Regimes for Emerging Market Countries

This paper argues that much of the debate on choosing an exchange rate regime misses the boat. It begins by discussing the standard theory of choice between exchange rate regimes, and then explores the weaknesses in this theory, especially when it is applied to emerging market economies. It then discusses a range of institutional traits that might predispose a country to favor either fixed or floating rates, and then turns to the converse question of whether the choice of exchange rate regime may favor the development of certain desirable institutional traits. The conclusion from the analysis is that the choice of exchange rate regime is likely to be of second order importance to the development of good fiscal, financial, and monetary institutions in producing macroeconomic success in emerging market countries. This suggests that less attention should be focused on the general question whether a floating or a fixed exchange rate is preferable, and more on these deeper institutional arrangements. A focus on institutional reforms rather than on the exchange rate regime may encourage emerging market countries to be healthier and less prone to the crises that we have seen in recent years.
Globalization and the Privatization of Welfare Administration in Indiana

This article explores the relationship of globalization to domestic law in the context of privatized welfare services in Indiana. It examines the ways that privatization can affect vulnerable populations such as welfare recipients by, in effect, partially dis-embedding the market from the state. It applies Karl Polanyi’s conception of a double movement to illustrate how the political process can, in effect, re-embed the market in the state. Utilizing Indiana’s recent experiences with welfare administration privatization, this article shows that re-embedding is not a simple question of reversing decisions already taken, but rather a complex sequencing of political and legal engagements. It recommends law reforms aimed at more easily triggering the kinds of political actions anticipated by Polanyi’s analysis.
Vertical Production Networks in Multinational Firms

In recent decades, growth of world trade has been driven largely by rapid growth of trade in intermediate inputs. Much of input trade involves multinational firms locating input processing in their foreign affiliates, thereby creating global vertical production networks. We use firm-level data on U.S. multinationals to examine trade in intermediate inputs for further processing between parent firms and their foreign affiliates. Among our main findings are that demand for imported inputs is higher when affiliates face lower trade costs, lower wages for less-skilled labor, and lower corporate income tax rates.
Racial Differences in Risky Asset Ownership: A Two-Stage Model of the Investment Decision-Making Process

The current study establishes a two-stage investment decision-making model in order to examine the impact of race on investment behavior. Results show that although Blacks are less likely to own stocks than Whites, once ownership is accounted for, there is no difference in the portfolio allocation to risky assets. The model indicates racial disparities in risky asset ownership, which may be attributable to differences in information exposure and barriers to investment markets. The results suggest that a voluntary savings initiative accompanied by a graduated savings component could help remove investment barriers and enable access to more productive investments.
Discussion of Why Do EPS Forecast Error and Dispersion Not Vary with Scale? Implications for Analyst and Managerial Behavior

Cheong and Thomas (2011) provide a new perspective on the behavior of the distribution of EPS forecast error magnitudes as a function of share price. Specifically, they explore several economic-based explanations, related to analyst and manager behavior, in order to understand why measures of EPS forecast error variation do not appear to vary with share price. In this discussion, I explore two additional issues, unrelated to the behavior of managers and analysts, which may significantly contribute to the observed lack of scale variation in EPS forecast error magnitudes in the United States: (1) EPS data in I/B/E/S are reported to the nearest penny, which may render detection of scale variation extremely difficult in a sample of U.S. firms, and (2) there are differences between the measurement of EPS forecast error variation in Cheong and Thomas relative to prior literature. I provided evidence that both issues confound the interpretation of the lack of scale variation observed in U.S. firms and have strong implications for future research exploring EPS forecast error magnitudes.
Estimating Optimal Decision Rules in the Presence of Model Parameter Uncertainty

This article proposes a bootstrap procedure for estimating the risk minimizing decision-rule from within a parameterized family of rules. The procedure is conceptually simple and applicable to a broad class of decision problems involving parameter uncertainty. Moreover, when applied to Markowitz's (1952) model of portfolio selection--a leading example in which parameter uncertainty arises--it is shown to be capable of generating decision rules with lower risk than estimators derived from conventional methods. Theoretical results establishing the asymptotic optimality of the procedure are also presented. Copyright The Author, 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.
Earth matter effect in 7Be solar neutrino experiments

We determine the sensitivity of the KamLAND and Borexino experiments to the neutrino regeneration effect in the Earth as a function of Δm2 and θ, using realistic numbers for the signal and background rates. We compare the results obtained with the χ2 method with those obtained from the conventional day-night asymmetry analysis. We also investigate how well one should be able to measure the neutrino oscillation parameters if a large day-night asymmetry is observed, taking the LOW solution as an example. We present an enlarged parameter space, which contains mixing angles greater than π/4 where the heavy mass eigenstate is predominantly νe, and determine the electron neutrino survival probability for this traditionally neglected scenario. We point out that this portion of the parameter space yields different physics results when dealing with the MSW solutions to the solar neutrino puzzle and should not be neglected.
GATT, DISPUTE SETTLEMENT AND COOPERATION*

This paper analyzes GATT and its dispute settlement procedure (DSP) in the context of a supergame model of international trade featuring both explicit and implicit agreements. An explicit agreement, such as GATT, may be violated at some positive cost in addition to retaliatory actions that might be induced by the violation. We interpret this cost as arising from “international obligation”, a phenomenon frequently mentioned in the legal literature on GATT. We focus on how international obligation affects two aspects of GATT-DSP: unilateral retaliation and the effect of inordinate delays in the operation of DSP.
Equality, Evolution and Partnership Law

Equal sharing in partnership law is an ancient rule that has never been adequately explained. An informal model utilizing Nash bargaining solutions and basic statistical principles suggests that it may be the transactions-cost minimizing rule. Evolutionary game theory also suggests how psychological dispositions favoring equal sharing may evolve. Psychological dispositions such as risk aversion are a familiar part of economic analysis of commercial law. However, other evolved dispositions, such as egalitarianism in certain settings, can also fit into economic legal analysis. Dispositions toward equal sharing and consensual governance in small productive groups may have evolved during the long period in which humans produced and shared food in small bands.
Arbitrators Without Powers? Disqualifying Counsel in Arbitral Proceedings

The abstract 'power' of an arbitral tribunal to 'exclude,' or 'disqualify,' counsel of one of the parties from the proceedings, should not be doubted. But the Devil, as usual, is lurking in the details. I discuss two critical contexts in which the question may arise — disqualification on the ground of some relationship with a member of the tribunal, and disqualification on the ground of some conflict of interest with another client arising out of a prior representation. Each is beginning to be the subject of a developing arbitral jurisprudence. And I think the overarching theme is the same: The tribunal ought not to be concerned with questions of deontology-ought not to think of itself as engaging in discipline at all — and thus not concerned with the particular content of national rules of professional conduct; the minimal definition of its task is to ensure the integrity of the process against the imputation of bias or unfairness between the parties. In this enterprise the elaboration of 'transnational rules' of conduct will have only a limited importance. Of course, standards intended to be applied in a variety of transnational settings can only find acceptance if they are consciously abstracted from heal legal cultures and refuse to make the difficult choices between them. At the same time they will also be closely congruent with the neo-liberal agenda that privileges arbitral autonomy, serving to forestall officious meddling by adventuresome state courts: What may be a further virtue is that transnational rules, precisely because of their regulatory sparseness, may direct the attention of arbitral tribunals to the core of what alone is critical - that is, to what is minimally necessary to ensure the fairness of the proceedings.
Volume autocorrelation, information, and investor trading

This study investigates whether the widely documented daily correlated trading volume of stocks is driven by individual investor trading, institutional trading, or both. We find that at least 95% of NYSE and AMEX stocks exhibit statistically significant, positive serial correlation. Volume autocorrelation decreases with the level of institutional ownership of a stock. We also show that the rate of arrivals of new information to the market contributes to the clustering of trades. When there is high information flow to the market, institutional trading generates a more pronounced effect on volume autocorrelation than individual investor trading. Our results are broadly consistent with the predictions of trading volume patterns suggested by most theoretical models of stock trading and by empirical research on investor trading.
Credit rating dynamics and Markov mixture models

Abstract Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, credit migration matrices, used in many credit risk and pricing applications, are typically assumed to be generated by a simple Markov process. Based on empirical evidence, we propose a parsimonious model that is a mixture of (two) Markov chains, where the mixing is on the speed of movement among credit ratings. We estimate this model using credit rating histories and show that the mixture model statistically dominates the simple Markov model and that the differences between two models can be economically meaningful. The non-Markov property of our model implies that the future distribution of a firm’s ratings depends not only on its current rating but also on its past rating history. Indeed we find that two firms with identical current credit ratings can have substantially different transition probability vectors. We also find that conditioning on the state of the business cycle or industry group does not remove the heterogeneity with respect to the rate of movement. We go on to compare the performance of mixture and Markov chain using out-of-sample predictions.
American Needle v. NFL: An Opportunity to Reshape Sports Law

This Feature will explore American Needle, Inc. v. NFL and its potential impact on professional sports in the United States. In August 2008, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that the National Football League (NFL) and its teams operate as a “single entity” for purposes of apparel sales. Because a single entity cannot conspire with itself, it cannot violate Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which prohibits concerted action that unreasonably restrains trade. The U.S. Supreme Court recently granted a writ of certiorari and will review American Needle in its 2009-2010 Term. As this Feature will detail, American Needle presents the most meaningful sports law controversy in recent memory. For the first time, a U.S. court of appeals has expressly recognized that in certain settings of collusive behavior, a professional sports league and its independently owned franchises may function as a single entity. American Needle offers the Supreme Court an opportunity to settle a longstanding source of confusion: how should antitrust law regulate the peculiar, perhaps incomparable, business entity known as a professional sports league?The stakes could not be higher. If the Supreme Court agrees with the Seventh Circuit or, as the NFL hopes, furnishes an even more sweeping recognition of single entity status, professional sports leagues could be shielded from Section 1 in a bevy of decision-making contexts that have traditionally been subject to Section 1 scrutiny. Particularly when compared to their past treatment, leagues could become uniquely sovereign and commanding. This Feature will begin by describing the litigants in American Needle and the underlying relationship between antitrust law and the NFL. The Feature will then turn to a substantive analysis of American Needle and its implications for the NFL and other organized associations of sports, including the National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Single entity recognition may benefit these organizations when they negotiate television contracts, restrain players’ salaries and employment autonomy, and execute exclusive contracts with sponsors and licensees, among other pursuits traditionally subject to Section 1 scrutiny. This Feature will conclude with a recommendation that the Court reject the NFL’s single entity defense on the grounds that it would belie legal precedent and mistakenly characterize league operations. The recommendation, however, will leave open the door for leagues to pursue, and for Congress to consider, targeted exemptions from Section 1.
Social capital as collective narratives and post‐disaster community recovery

This paper examines how social capital aids in post-disaster community recovery and redevelopment. While previous studies on social capital and post-disaster recovery have tended to focus on social...
A Micro-level Analysis of Recent Increases in Labor Force Participation among Older Workers

Aggregate data reveal a sizable increase in labor force participation rates since 2000 among American workers on the cusp of retirement, reverting back to levels for older men not seen since the 1970s. While these aggregate numbers are useful in that they document overall trends, they do not elucidate the reasons behind workers’ decisions. The Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally-representative, longitudinal survey of older Americans that spans 1992 to 2004, provides micro-level data regarding these retirement trends. Moreover, the HRS contains detailed information about the types of jobs older Americans are taking (e.g., full-time versus part-time, self-employed versus wage-and-salary, low-paying versus high-paying, blue collar versus white collar). This study capitalizes on the richness of the HRS data and explores labor force determinants and outcomes of older Americans, with an emphasis on retirees' choices in recent years. We present a cross-sectional and longitudinal description of the financial, health, and employment situation of older Americans. We then explore retirement determinants using multinomial logistic regression to model gradual retirement and logistic and OLS regression to model the work-leisure (whether to work) and hours intensity (how much to work) decisions of older workers. Evidence suggests that the majority of older Americans retire gradually, in stages, and that younger retirees continue to respond to financial incentives just as their predecessors did. In addition, the retirement decisions of younger and middle-aged retirees appear similar in the face of macro-level changes in the early part of this decade.
Economic Effects of Runs on Early “Shadow Banks”: Trust Companies and the Impact of the Panic of 1907

We study the effects of a contraction in financial intermediation on nonfinancial firms. The Panic of 1907 originated in the shadow banks of the time, New York’s trust companies. The runs were caused by a shock unrelated to the trust companies’ nonfinancial corporate clients. In the years following the panic, corporations affiliated with the worst-affected trusts made fewer capital investments, paid lower dividends, and suffered lower profitability and higher borrowing costs relative to firms without such connections. The shock to New York’s trust companies accounted for at least 18.4 percent of the decline in corporate investment in the United States in 1908.
Should ICSID Go Gangnam Style in Light of Non-Traditional Foreign Investments Including Those Spurred on by Social Media? Applying an Industry-Specific Lens to the Salini Test to Determine Article 25 Jurisdiction

The judicially created Salini test, commonly used to define investment under Article 25 of the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States (ICSID Convention), has received both support and opposition during the decade since its creation. This article argues that new kinds of economic activities may be less likely to qualify as investments under a strict application of the Salini test and that an industry-specific analysis to determine Article 25 jurisdiction is more appropriate. While the industrial side to foreign investment remains relevant in the information age, the power of social media allows for investments focused on intangible values that may not pass a strict application of the Salini test. Korean entertainment companies investing abroad serve as examples of new kinds of activities that meet ICSID’s development goals but nonetheless may be denied access to ICSID unless new ways to apply the Salini test are found.
Labor Market Trends Among Registered Nurses 2008-2011

This study uses recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and Registered Nurses (RNs) licensing exam to examine the recession's effect on the RN labor market. It then reports results of a survey of 518 hospital nursing officers conducted in 2008 and 2010 matched with institutional data from the American Hospital Association (AHA). These unique data show how the recession led hospitals to slow hiring despite accelerating attrition of retirement-age nurses; shift away from H1-B, agency, and, overtime work; and reduce training, and other benefits for new hires. More broadly, results show how nurse-staffing practices adapt to market conditions. Results also suggest reduced hospital support for nursing education may strain the supply of managerial and specialty nurses as baby-boom nurses retire.