cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
It is not how long it is, but how you make it long – waiting lines in a multi-step service process

Accurate signals are essential to ensure the integrity of the feedback mechanism in systems. But in a multi-step service process such as a restaurant business, where the flow capacities of the service steps are not identical, visible signals may not indicate the true magnitude to which the system should respond. Specifically, the visible standing queue may not reflect the full length of the waiting line. And if potential customers cannot accurately judge the actual length of the waiting line, varying meal prices to regulate queue length would not be an effective feedback mechanism. Instead, queue length can be more effectively controlled by correctly identifying and widening the most binding bottleneck. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Equity market timing and capital structure: International evidence

Abstract We investigate the equity market timing hypothesis of capital structure in major industrialized (G-7) countries. As claimed by its proponents, we find that leverage of firms is negatively related to the historical market-to-book ratio in all G-7 countries. However, this negative relationship cannot be attributed to equity market timing. We find no association between equity issues and market-to-book ratios at the time of equity financing decisions by Japanese firms. Firms in all G-7 countries, except Japan, undo the effect of equity issuance and the impact of equity market timing attempts on leverage is short lived. This is inconsistent with the prediction of the equity market timing hypothesis and more in line with dynamic trade-off model.
Customer concentration and loan contract terms

Abstract We study pricing and non-pricing features of loan contracts to gauge how the credit market evaluates a firm’s customer-base profile and supply-chain relations. Higher customer concentration increases interest rate spreads and the number of restrictive covenants featured in newly initiated as well as renegotiated bank loans. Customer concentration also abbreviates the maturity of those loans as well as the relationship between firms and their banks. These effects are intensified by customers’ financial distress, the level of relationship-specific investments, and the use of trade credit in customer–supplier relations. Our evidence shows that a deeper exposure to a small set of large customers bears negative consequences for a firm’s relations with its creditors, revealing limits to integration along the supply chain.
The effect of culture and power on cooperation in commons dilemmas: Implications for global resource management

This study adopted a contextual framework to examine whether an interaction between group culture and economic power influences self-interest in a simulated commons dilemma. Full-time managers enrolled in executive MBA programs in Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, and the United States (US) made decisions in an asymmetric commons dilemma. Relative to managers from the US and Germany, Israeli managers were more likely to follow an individually rational decision-making approach, taking more resources in a high versus low economic power condition. In contrast, managers from Hong Kong in a high economic power condition followed a collectively rational approach, voluntarily taking fewer resources. Egocentrism mediated this interaction effect of group culture and economic power for the Israeli managers who were more egocentric and believed it was fair to harvest more resources in a high power condition. However, egocentrism did not mediate the interaction effect for managers from Hong Kong. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings highlight the importance of studying the proximal effect of group culture on contextual factors, such as economic power asymmetry, that influence cooperation in social dilemmas.
Vettes and lemons on eBay

This paper empirically tests whether there are asymmetric information problems in the market for used Chevrolet Corvettes sold on eBay. The first test is based on a result from Akerlof (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1970). If there is asymmetric information in the used market, bidders should place a premium on a new Corvette, all else equal. The paper finds little systematic evidence of a new car premium. The second test is based on a result from Bajari and Hortacsu (Rand Journal of Economics 34(2):329–355, 2003). If there is asymmetric information, then bidders will prefer to bid late in the auction in order to conceal their private information from other bidders. The paper fails to find evidence of more late bidding on used Corvettes relative to new Corvettes. The third test is based on the idea that if there is asymmetric information then there may be a winner’s curse problem in these auctions. The paper fails to find evidence consistent with bidders avoiding the winner’s curse. The results are not consistent with asymmetric information problems in the market for used Corvettes sold on eBay. It is not clear however, whether this result generalizes to other cars sold on eBay or cars sold in the off-line market.
Do Firms Use the Deferred Tax Asset Valuation Allowance to Manage Earnings

This study utilizes a sample comprised of Fortune 500 firms to examine earnings management via changes in the deferred tax asset valuation allowance. The study extends existing research in three ways. First, we document that the earnings effect of a valuation allowance change often cannot be determined from financial statement disclosures. Based on an analysis of sample firms' income tax footnotes, we offer suggestions to improve disclosure policy. Second, prior research uses the net change in the valuation allowance account as a proxy for the earnings effect of valuation allowance changes. We argue that the amount reported in the effective tax rate reconciliation is a better measure of the income statement effect and document certain significant differences between the measures. Third, prior research employs cross‐sectional regression models in an effort to make generalizations about earnings management behavior. In contrast, we use a contextual approach to assess whether observed valuation allowance cha...
A New Method of Estimating Risk Aversion

I show existing evidence on labor supply behavior places an upper bound on risk aversion in the expected utility model. I derive a formula for the coefficient of relative risk aversion (γ) in terms of the ratio of the income elasticity of labor supply to wage elasticity and degree of complementarity between consumption and labor. I bound the degree of complementarity using data on consumption choices when labor supply varies across states. Using labor supply elasticity estimates, I find a mean estimate of γ ≈ 1, then show generating γ > 2 requires that wage increases cause sharper labor supply reductions. (JEL D81 J22 )
Slavery and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital

How much do sins visited upon one generation harm that generation's future sons, daughters, grandsons, and granddaughters? I study this question by comparing outcomes for former slaves and their children and grandchildren to outcomes for free blacks (pre-1865) and their children and grandchildren. The outcome measures include literacy, whether a child attends school, months spent in school, years of schooling, and two measures of adult occupation. Using a variety of different comparisons (for example, within versus across regions) I find that it took roughly two generations for the descendants of slaves to catch up to the descendants of free black men and women, for those outcomes that I observe. In other words, by 1920 the remaining legacy of slavery is such that all blacks are affected equally, not just the actual descendants of slaves. There is some evidence that this convergence was facilitated by intermarriage among slave and free families. The finding of convergence is consistent with modern estimat...
Defending against speculative attacks: The policy maker's reputation

Abstract This paper studies how speculative attacks and regime change arise from the interaction between a policy maker's reputation for defending against speculative attacks and speculators' learning of the policy maker's type. If speculators receive conditionally independent and identically distributed private signals about the policy maker's type in every period, then no matter how precise their per-period private signals are, there can be no equilibrium with attacks. If the speculators receive private signals whose precision increases as a power function of the time with the power strictly greater than two, there exist infinitely many equilibria with attacks, but this equilibrium multiplicity arises from the timing of the attacks only. In such a case, the set of status quos surviving in any equilibrium is strictly larger than in the case of a short-lived policy maker.
Judge or Jury? Determining Deception or Misrepresentation under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act

This Note explores the conflict among the federal circuit courts as to whether a judge or jury should decide if the language contained in a collection letter is false, misleading, or deceptive to the least sophisticated consumer under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). Some circuits, such as the Second and Ninth Circuits, hold that this issue is a question of law, appropriate for the judge to decide. In contrast, the Seventh Circuit finds this to be a question of fact, and requires the plaintiff to submit extrinsic evidence in the form of professional surveys in order to reach the jury. Other circuits, such as the Sixth Circuit, submit close cases under 15 U.S.C. § 1692e of the FDCPA to the jury (without requiring extrinsic evidence), while holding that § 1692g cases are an issue of law. This Note examines the legislative history of and case law relating to the FDCPA and argues that all circuits should treat § 1692g and § 1692e actions consistently, at least when the § 1692e claim is limited to the text of the letter and no other facts are disputed (i.e., the collection letter “speaks for itself”). This Note then argues that policy considerations favor the Second and Ninth Circuits’ approach of treating the issue as a question of law because the need for uniform application of a federal statute is paramount. This is especially true in the area of debt collection, because many debt collectors utilize the same collection letters in multiple states. Finally, this Note argues that the Seventh Circuit’s requirement that a debtor present extrinsic evidence to survive summary judgment contradicts the purpose of the FDCPA. Because the FDCPA was designed to provide a remedy for citizens of all means, the requirement of producing expensive and time-consuming extrinsic evidence is a needless barrier that thwarts the legislative intent behind the FDCPA.
Micro–Level Catallactic Public Finance

This paper seeks to provide a sketch of a micro-level explanation of public finance. De Viti De Marco (1936) and Buchanan (1949) provide initial starting points for understanding this view of public finance, which was subsequently extended by Wagner (1992, 2007a) and Yoon (2000), among others. While these scholars focus on the fiscal commons created by communal property rights within public sectors, this paper focuses on the power to tax and provide public goods. Building off of Hebert and Wagner (2013), this paper provides a catallactic explanation of taxation and provision of public goods within the individualistic state, where the state is represented as the sum of its individual members acting in a collective capacity.
What good is moral reasoning

The role of reasoning in our moral lives has been increasingly called into question by moral psychology. Not only are intuitions guiding many of our moral judgments and decisions, with reasoning only finding post-hoc rationalizations, but reasoning can sometimes play a negative role, by finding excuses for our moral violations. The observations fit well with the argumentative theory of reasoning (Mercier H, Sperber D, Behav Brain Sci, in press-b), which claims that reasoning evolved to find and evaluate arguments in dialogic contexts. This theory explains the strong confirmation bias that reasoning displays when it produces arguments, which in turn explains its tendency to rationalize our decisions. But this theory also predicts that people should be able to evaluate arguments felicitously and that, as a result, people should reason better in groups, when they are confronted with other people's arguments. Groups are able to converge on better moral judgments. It is argued that reasoning and argumentation play an important role in our everyday moral lives, and a defense of the value of reasoning for moral change is offered.
Uncovering expected returns: Information in analyst coverage proxies

Abstract We show that analyst coverage proxies contain information about expected returns. We decompose analyst coverage into abnormal and expected components using a simple characteristic-based model and show that firms with abnormally high analyst coverage subsequently outperform firms with abnormally low coverage by approximately 80 basis points per month. We also show abnormal coverage rises following exogenous shocks to underpricing and predicts improvements in firms’ fundamental performance, suggesting that return predictability stems from analysts more heavily covering underpriced stocks. Our findings highlight the usefulness of analysts’ actions in expected return estimations, and a potential inference problem when coverage proxies are used to study information asymmetry and dissemination.
A Rude Awakening: Internet Shakeout in 2000

This study explores various value-drivers of business-to-consumer ("B2C") Internet companies' share prices both before and after the market correction in the spring of 2000. Although many market observers had predicted that the shakeout would eventually occur (e.g., Perkins and Perkins 1999), the ultimate and previously unanswered challenge lay identifying which stocks would fall and which ones would survive the shakeout. We develop an empirical valuation model and provide evidence that the Internet stocks that this model suggests were relatively over-valued prior to the Internet stock market correction experienced relatively larger drops in their price-to-sales ratios when the shakeout occurred. This result is robust to the inclusion of competing explanatory variables suggested by the economics literature related to industry rationalizations. We examine the ability of a valuation model comprised of both financial (accounting) variables and nonfinancial web traffic metrics to explain Internet companies' market values during each of 1999 and 2000. Our findings suggest that the reach and stickiness web traffic performance measures are value-relevant to the share prices of Internet companies in each of 1999 and 2000. Our findings of significance for the year 2000 contradict the recent claims of some analysts that web traffic measures are no longer important. We also explore the valuation role of our proxy for B2C companies' current rate of "cash burn" and find that this proxy is a significant value-driver in each of 1999 and 2000, but with differential valuation implications for each period. Our results suggest that the market was favorably disposed towards Internet companies' aggressive cash expenditures in 1999, but appeared to adopt a more critical view of Internet companies' cash burn rates in 2000. Our results further suggest that investors adopted a more skeptical attitude towards expenditures on intangible investments as the Internet sector began to mature. We find that investors appear to implicitly capitalize product development (R&D) and advertising expenses (customer acquisition costs) during the earlier period when the market was more optimistic about the prospects of B2C companies. However, only product development costs are implicitly capitalized into value, on average, subsequent to the shakeout in the spring of 2000. Finally, we provide statistical evidence to support the conjecture that different parameter vectors characterize the estimated market valuation models for each of 1999 and 2000. Overall, our study provides a preliminary view of the shakeout and maturation of one of the most important New Economy industries to emerge to date-the Internet.
Rational Beliefs and Security Design

This article studies the security-design problem of a cash-constrained firm facing investors with diverse beliefs. Investor "rational beliefs" are modeled as varying and yet rational in the sense of Kurz (1994). With two investors, optimal designs are similar under rational beliefs and rational expectations. With many investors, however, optimal securities under rational beliefs maximize investor differences of opinion, while under rational expectations optimal designs minimize disagreements. We demonstrate that the common practice of issuing multiple securities backed by a single asset is optimal under rational beliefs but not under rational expectations. Researching market beliefs can create substantial value for firms. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.
Against Moral Rights

Normally when you buy something, you can do what you want with it. If you buy a chair, or a dress, or a car, you can alter it, embellish it, neglect it, abuse it, destroy it, or throw it away. But if you buy a work of art, your freedom to do what you want with that object—your own property—is severely curtailed. This is because artists have powerful special rights, called “moral rights,” unlike the creators of other objects. Moral rights allow an artist to
Ratings Shopping and Asset Complexity: A Theory of Ratings Inflation

Abstract Many identify inflated credit ratings as one contributor to the recent financial-market turmoil. We develop an equilibrium model of the market for ratings and use it to examine possible origins of and cures for ratings inflation. In the model, asset issuers can shop for ratings—observe multiple ratings and disclose only the most favorable—before auctioning their assets. When assets are simple, agencies’ ratings are similar and the incentive to ratings shop is low. When assets are sufficiently complex, ratings differ enough that an incentive to shop emerges. Thus, an increase in the complexity of recently issued securities could create a systematic bias in disclosed ratings, despite the fact that each ratings agency produces an unbiased estimate of the asset's true quality. Increasing competition among agencies would only worsen this problem. Switching to an investor-initiated ratings system alleviates the bias, but could collapse the market for information.
Activist monetary policy and exchange-rate overshooting: The Deutsche mark/dollar rate

Abstract After a decade of generalized floating, it is clear that bilateral exchange rates exhibit more variability than the economic aggregates—relative prices, incomes, and money supplies—which generally comprise the fundamentals of theories of exchange-rate determination. Dornbusch's overshooting hypothesis is the best known explanation of this phenomenon. This paper shows that accommodative monetary policy (with respect to prices) has the potential to cause the economy to switch from exchange rate overshooting to undershooting. Using constrained maximum likelihood methods, the model is estimated for Germany and the United States. The results provide strong evidence in support of the overshooting hypothesis for the Deutsche mark/dollar exchange rate.
Symmetry, Adversarialism, Scholarly Convention, and Latent Print Identification: A Reply to Merlino and Springer

This paper is a reply to Merlino and Springer’s reply to my response to their article in a special issue of the journal on the impact on Daubert on forensic science. In this reply, I accept Merlino and Springer’s apology for the appearance of an ad hominem attack on me in their article and make my own apologies for some misconstruals I made of their position. However, I argue that their reply continues to mischaracterize the testimony that I gave in the case at issue, People v. Hyatt, as well as the position of so-called “critics” of latent print identification in general. The reply further notes that, paradoxically, Merlino and Springer appear to agree with the testimony I gave: that the reliability of latent print identification has not been empirically validated. The reply closes with some reflections that suggest that the superficially appealing tendency to bash “adversarialism” in debates over expert evidence, in fact, be somewhat misguided.
The long-term labor market consequences of graduating from college in a bad economy

Abstract This paper studies the labor market experiences of white-male college graduates as a function of economic conditions at time of college graduation. I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth whose respondents graduated from college between 1979 and 1989. I estimate the effects of both national and state economic conditions at time of college graduation on labor market outcomes for the first two decades of a career. Because timing and location of college graduation could potentially be affected by economic conditions, I also instrument for the college unemployment rate using year of birth (state of residence at an early age for the state analysis). I find large, negative wage effects of graduating in a worse economy which persist for the entire period studied. I also find that cohorts who graduate in worse national economies are in lower-level occupations, have slightly higher tenure and higher educational attainment, while labor supply is unaffected. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that the labor market consequences of graduating from college in a bad economy are large, negative and persistent.
Equality in Criminal Law: The Two Divergent Western Roads

Every western society embraces the ideal of equality before the criminal law. However, as this article observes, that ideal is understood differently in the United States and Continental Europe. American law generally demands that all citizens face an equal threat of punishment, while continental European law generally demands that all citizens face an equal threat of investigation and prosecution. This contrast raises a sharp normative challenge: Is it better to think of equality before the criminal law as pre-conviction equality or post-conviction equality? The article makes the case that pre-conviction of the Continental kind is normatively superior. It then asks why American law has opted for what seems a normatively inferior solution, identifying a variety of factors in American culture and the common law tradition that have encouraged the belief that true equality lies in the equal threat of punishment rather than in the equal threat of prosecution.
Quantile Hedging in a semi-static market with model uncertainty

With model uncertainty characterized by a convex, possibly non-dominated set of probability measures, the agent minimizes the cost of hedging a path dependent contingent claim with given expected success ratio, in a discrete-time, semi-static market of stocks and options. Based on duality results which link quantile hedging to a randomized composite hypothesis test, an arbitrage-free discretization of the market is proposed as an approximation. The discretized market has a dominating measure, which guarantees the existence of the optimal hedging strategy and helps numerical calculation of the quantile hedging price. As the discretization becomes finer, the approximate quantile hedging price converges and the hedging strategy is asymptotically optimal in the original market.
Do Consumers Exploit Precommitment Opportunities? Evidence from Natural Experiments Involving Liquor Consumption

This paper provides evidence concerning the extent to which consumers of liquor employ commitment devices. One widely recommended commitment strategy is to regulate alcohol consumption by deliberately manipulating availability. The paper assesses the prevalence of the “availability strategy” by evaluating the effects of policies that would influence its effectiveness – specifically, changes in allowable Sunday sales hours. It finds that consumers increase their liquor consumption in response to extended Sunday on-premises sales hours, but not in response to extended off-premises sales hours. The latter finding is inconsistent with widespread use of the availability strategy.
VARMA representation of DSGE models

This note develops simple conditions from which to determine the most concise VARMA representation of a given DSGE model. It is proven analytically that the Smets and Wouters (2007) model has exact VARMA(3,2) representation. In this model, the largest possible subset of structural parameters which is locally identifiable from the entire likelihood is also so merely from the subset of identifiable VARMA parameters.
Measuring the Effect of Bankruptcy Laws on Entrepreneurship Across Countries

Two recent papers examine the impact of corporate bankruptcy laws on new business start-ups in 29 countries over 1990 - 2008 (Peng et al., 2010; Lee et al., 2010). In this commentary, I briefly point out two significant issues which future researchers might want to consider. First, several countries in the data examined had changed their personal and corporate bankruptcy laws over the years studied. It is statistically inappropriate and inaccurate to treat bankruptcy laws as time invariant, as in Peng et al. (2010) and Lee et al. (2010), particularly in view of the dramatic changes in bankruptcy laws over time in so many countries. Second, Peng et al. (2010) and Lee et al. (2010) have a misplaced focus on corporate bankruptcy law while ignoring personal bankruptcy law. This focus is at odds with theory and prior work on topic which relates entrepreneurship to personal bankruptcy law.
The Timing and Method of Payment in Mergers when Acquirers Are Financially Constrained

Although acquisitions are a popular form of investment, the link between firms’ financial constraints and acquisition policies is not well understood. We develop a model in which financially constrained bidders approach targets, decide how much to bid and whether to bid in cash or in stock. In equilibrium, financial constraints do not affect the identity of the winning bidder, but they lower bidders’ incentives to approach the target. Auctions are initiated by bidders with low constraints or high synergies. The use of cash is positively related to synergies and the acquirer’s gains from the deal and negatively to financial constraints.
Patience vs. impatience of traders: Formation of the value-at-price distribution through competition for liquidity

The ability to postpone one's execution in the market without penalty in search of a better price is an important strategic advantage in high-frequency trading. To elucidate competition between traders one has to formulate to a quantitative theory of formation of the execution price from market expectations and quotes. Equilibrium theory was provided in 2005 by Foucault, Kadan and Kandel. I derive an asymptotic distribution of the bids/offers as a function of the ratio of patient and impatient traders using the dynamic version of the Foucault, Kadan and Kandel limit order book (LOB) model. Our version of the LOB model allows stylized, but sufficiently realistic representation of the trading markets. In particular, dynamic LOB allows simulation of the distribution of execution times and spreads from high-frequency quotes. Significant analytic progress is made toward framing of short-term trading as competition for immediacy of execution between traders under imperfect information. The results are qualitati...
A Monte Carlo study of growth regressions

Using Monte Carlo simulations, this paper evaluates the bias properties of estimators commonly used to estimate growth regressions derived from the Solow model. We explicitly allow for measurement error, country-specific fixed effects and regressor endogeneity. An OLS estimator applied to a single cross-section of variables averaged over time (the between estimator) performs best in terms of the extent of bias on each of the estimated coefficients. Fixed-effects and the Arellano–Bond GMM estimator overstate the speed of convergence under a wide variety of assumptions, while the between estimator understates it. Finally, fixed effects and Arellano–Bond bias towards zero the slope estimates on the human and physical capital accumulation variables, while the between estimator and the Blundell–Bond system GMM estimator bias these coefficients upwards.
THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS: LEGAL CLAIMS AND IMMIGRATION OUTSIDE THE LAW

This Article analyzes the rights of unauthorized migrants and elucidates how these noncitizens are incompletely but importantly integrated into the U.S. legal system. I examine four topics: (1) state and local laws targeting unauthorized migrants, (2) workplace rights and remedies, (3) suppression of evidence from an unlawful search or seizure, and (4) the right to effective counsel in immigration court. These four inquiries show how unauthorized migrants—though unable to assert individual rights as directly as U.S. citizens in the same circumstances—can nevertheless assert rights indirectly and obliquely by making transsubstantive arguments that fall into five general patterns. The first is an institutional competence argument that the wrong decisionmaker acted. The second is an argument that an unauthorized migrant was wronged by a comparatively culpable person. The third is a citizen proxy argument that sustaining an unauthorized migrant’s claim will protect a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. The fourth is that an unauthorized migrant may be unable to challenge the substance of a decision, yet may mount a successful procedural surrogate challenge to the way that decision was reached. The fifth is a phantom norm argument that, even if a government action withstands constitutional challenge, it violates a statute or regulation. These patterns illustrate how typical doctrinal relationships and litigation strategies—for example, choosing between equal protection and preemption arguments, or between seeking redress for harms to individuals and harms to groups—shift significantly for unauthorized migrants. These patterns of oblique rights reflect a pervasive national ambivalence about immigration outside the law.
Power, Fairness and Constrained Choice in Agricultural Markets: A Synthesizing Framework

The (un)fairness of agricultural markets is frequently invoked, especially by farmers. But fairness is difficult to define and measure. In this paper we link fairness and power with the concept of constrained choice to develop a framework for assessing fairness in agricultural markets. We use network exchange theory to define power from the dependencies that exist in agricultural networks. The structure of agricultural networks and the options that agricultural producers have to participate in agricultural networks affect the degree to which they are dependent on others within the network. Dependency, in turn, affects the choices that agricultural producers have. We consider both the number and nature of these choices. We argue that constraining or limiting choices—both in number and type—violates principles of justice. Importantly, network exchange theory provides a method for assessing constraints in choices and, hence, the fairness of agricultural markets. Such an assessment could potentially lead to new policies that safeguard the liberties of marketplace participants. We present a brief case to illustrate how this framework can inform on the fairness of agricultural markets and conclude with considerations of what this means for policy, particularly in the arena of anti-trust.
Rational Choice with Complex Products: Consumer Valuation of Annuities

32 Introduction A major concern for individuals entering retirement is managing longevity risk, the risk of outliving one’s resources. Because lifespans are uncertain, a consumer is exposed to the risk of outliving their retirement savings. The life annuity eliminates income uncertainty and provides stable consumption by paying the consumer a regular income until death in exchange for a lump sum of money. The primary benefit of annuitization is the ability to transfer longevity risk to an institution, such as an insurance company, pension or government, at a reasonable cost. Because life annuities provide significant benefits to retirees, the lack of demand for life annuities is a puzzle that is not well understood. It has been hypothesized that some combination of ambiguity aversion, the desire to leave inheritances, and liquidity needs reduce annuity demand. However, a life annuity is a complex financial product unfamiliar to many consumers. The inability to assess the value of a life annuity with any reasonable degree of accuracy requires numeracy skills and financial knowledge that may be beyond the reach of an average individual investor.
Hateful People or Hateful Bots?: Detection and Characterization of Bots Spreading Religious Hatred in Arabic Social Media

Arabic Twitter space is crawling with bots that fuel political feuds, spread misinformation, and proliferate sectarian rhetoric. While efforts have long existed to analyze and detect English bots, Arabic bot detection and characterization remains largely understudied. In this work, we contribute new insights into the role of bots in spreading religious hatred on Arabic Twitter and introduce a novel regression model that can accurately identify Arabic language bots. Our assessment shows that existing tools that are highly accurate in detecting English bots don't perform as well on Arabic bots. We identify the possible reasons for this poor performance, perform a thorough analysis of linguistic, content, behavioral and network features, and report on the most informative features that distinguish Arabic bots from humans as well as the differences between Arabic and English bots. Our results mark an important step toward understanding the behavior of malicious bots on Arabic Twitter and pave the way for a more effective Arabic bot detection tools.
Losing the Paper - Mortgage Assignments, Note Transfers and Consumer Protection

In this article, I survey the state of the mortgage loan transfer system, the legal rules that govern it, and the widening gap between those rules and the practices in the secondary mortgage market just prior to the 2008 crisis. The review includes some empirical assessment of the extent of errors and execution problems; the damage done by "robo-signing;" the Mortgage Electronic Registration System ("MERS") and note delivery practices; and the extent to which courts will prevent or reverse foreclosure sales based on those errors and problems. I then examine why existing legal structures, for both paper-based and electronic transfers, are not working, and the extent to which they have failed, I also identify the key consumer and investor protection values and interests (finality, transparency, fraud protection, and so forth) that must be addressed by the law governing secondary market transfers of home loans. I conclude by outlining options for reforming the mortgage loan transfer system, including the use of a single document merging the note and mortgage, and a structure for the registration of a single authoritative electronic version of the mortgage/note and of all changes in parties to, and terms of, the transaction. Professor of Law, Valparaiso Law School. Special thanks to Whitney Dickison, Christopher Erickson and Anne Zygaldo for their invaluable assistance with the MERS foreclosure record survey and with additional legal research.
Searching Ordered Sets: Evaluations from Sequences under Search

Consumers often search for and choose from ordered sets, commonly from options listed from best to worst. Normatively, such declining orderings maximize expected value from search and should lead to more positive evaluations of the experience compared to searching improving orderings. We demonstrate, however, that amount of search moderates consumers’ evaluations of declining versus improving orderings. Search from different orderings exposes consumers to sequences of options characterized by different key psychological moments (trend and end) as well as to different levels of average quality. Greater search can lead to more positive evaluations for improving versus declining orderings because consumers experience more positive moments on which to base their evaluation. Supporting the proposed model, we show that overall evaluations are influenced by differences in these key moments over and above quality changes of the set.
The Once and Future New York Stock Exchange: The Regulation of Global Exchanges

On June 2, 2006, NYSE Group, Inc. (NYSE Group), the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, Inc. (NYSE), announced a plan to merge with Euronext NV (Euronext), creating the first trans-Atlantic linkup of stock and derivatives markets. Euronext is a Dutch holding company that, since 2000, has been operating, through subsidiaries, the former stock exchanges of Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels and Lisbon. In 2001, Euronext also acquired the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE). Euronext is the first pan-European exchange trading cash and derivatives and equities and bonds. The London Stock Exchange (LSE) also has been the object of trans-national takeover attention, having received bids from Deutsche Borse, Macquarie Bank of Australia and the Nasdaq Stock Market (Nasdaq).
Expanding Asylum Law's Pattern-or-Practice-of-Persecution Framework to Better Protect LGBT Refugees

In 2009, the Ninth Circuit issued the only published opinion to day finding an asylum applicant eligible for protection based in part on the native country’s pattern or practice of persecution against gay men. This Article posits the infrequently used pattern-or-practice-of-persecution framework as uniquely compatible with assessing persecution on account of an applicant’s membership in an LGBT-based social group. To illustrate this compatibility and the need to expand the framework, this Article discusses the pattern or practice of persecution the Ninth Circuit identified in Jamaica and uses Jamaica as a case study to support specific proposed guidelines and legal presumptions in favor of asylum eligibility.
Online Cashback Pricing: A New Affiliate Strategy for E-Business.

This paper examines the impact of the cashback mechanism on online merchants’ affiliate and pricing strategies. Through reimbursing a portion of the transactional amount to consumers in a form of cashback, merchants are able to practice seconddegree price discrimination. We develop an analytical framework which explicitly considers the implementation cost associated with the underlying promotional vehicle. We first identify the conditions under which affiliate strategy is profitable. Surprisingly, the promotional “low” price could be actually “high”, relative to the uniform price when cashback is absent. We also propose channel coordination as a remedy to mitigate market inefficiency caused by double marginalization. Finally, we extend our model to a duopoly setting and find that a merchant can benefit from its rival’s move into the cashback market. Under some conditions both merchants have no incentive to move alone but prefer its rival to do so.
A Return to Form for the Exceptions Clause

This Article challenges the prevailing doctrinal, political, and academic view that the Exceptions Clause—which provides that “the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make” —gives Congress a license to strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction. Properly interpreted, the facially ambiguous clause instead allows Congress to shift cases within the Court’s jurisdiction from appellate to original form. The word “Exceptions,” that is to say, applies not to “Jurisdiction” but rather to “appellate.” In its initial draft, the clause unmistakably affected only the form, not the existence, of jurisdiction: “[T]his supreme jurisdiction shall be appellate only, except in those instances, in which the legislature shall make it original . . . .” The Article traces the devolution of that clear language into the final nebulous version, explaining at each step of the editing process why the Constitutional Convention delegates tinkered with the wording. As a result of what the delegates thought were innocuous changes, the legislative exceptions power became susceptible to the misconception that it was confiscatory. It was meant instead to be transformative, allowing Congress to empower the Supreme Court by shifting important cases from appellate to original form. In short, the clause was designed not to eliminate cases, but to expedite them.
Transparency and Financial Regulation in the European Union: Crisis and Complexity

2 See, e.g., International Monetary Fund, Global Financial Stability Report: Meeting New Challenges to Stability and Building a Safer System, xi (Apr. 2010) (“A key concern is that room for policy maneuvers in many advanced economies has either been exhausted or become much more limited. Moreover, sovereign risks in advanced economies could undermine financial stability gains and extend the crisis. The rapid increase in public debt and deterioration of fiscal balance sheets could be transmitted back to banking systems or across borders.”)
The Illusion of Wealth and Its Reversal

AbstractResearch on choice architecture is shaping policy around the world, touching on areas ranging from retirement economics to environmental issues. Recently, researchers and policy makers have begun paying more attention not just to choice architecture but also to information architecture, or the format in which information is presented to people. In this article, the authors investigate information architecture as it applies to consumption in retirement. Specifically, in three experiments, they examine how people react to lump sums versus equivalent streams of monthly income. Their primary question of interest is whether people exhibit more or less sensitivity to changes in retirement wealth expressed as lump sums (e.g., $100,000) or monthly equivalents (e.g., $500 per month for life). They also test whether people exhibit an “illusion of wealth,” by which lump sums seem more adequate than monthly amounts in certain conditions, as well as the opposite effect, in which lump sums seem less adequate. T...
Optimizing Information Freshness Through Computation–Transmission Tradeoff and Queue Management in Edge Computing

Edge computing applications typically require generated data to be preprocessed at the source and then transmitted to an edge server. In such cases, transmission time and preprocessing time are coupled, yielding a tradeoff between them to achieve the targeted objective. This paper presents analysis of such a system with the objective of optimizing freshness of received data at the edge server. We model this system as two queues in tandem whose service times are independent but the transmission service time is monotonically dependent on the computation service time in mean value. This dependence captures the natural decrease in transmission time due to lower offloaded computation. We analyze various queue management schemes in this tandem queue where the compute queue has a single server, Poisson packet arrivals, general independent service and no extra buffer to save incoming packets. The transmit queue has a single server receiving packets from the compute queue with memoryless service time. We consider the transmit queue in two forms: (i) No data buffer and (ii) One unit data buffer and last come first serve with discarding. We analyze various non-preemptive as well as preemptive cases. We perform stationary distribution analysis and obtain closed form expressions for average age of information (AoI) and average peak AoI. Our numerical results illustrate analytical findings on how computation and transmission times could be traded off to optimize AoI and reveal a consequent tradeoff between average AoI and average peak AoI.
Man versus machine? Self-reports versus algorithmic measurement of publications

This paper uses newly available data from Web of Science on publications matched to researchers in Survey of Doctorate Recipients to compare the quality of scientific publication data collected by surveys versus algorithmic approaches. We illustrate the different types of measurement errors in self-reported and machine-generated data by estimating how publication measures from the two approaches are related to career outcomes (e.g., salaries and faculty rankings). We find that the potential biases in the self-reports are smaller relative to the algorithmic data. Moreover, the errors in the two approaches are quite intuitive: the measurement errors in algorithmic data are mainly due to the accuracy of matching, which primarily depends on the frequency of names and the data that was available to make matches, while the noise in self reports increases over the career as researchers' publication records become more complex, harder to recall, and less immediately relevant for career progress. At a methodological level, we show how the approaches can be evaluated using accepted statistical methods without gold standard data. We also provide guidance on how to use the new linked data.
Stress Field Prediction in Cantilevered Structures Using Convolutional Neural Networks

The demand for fast and accurate structural analysis is becoming increasingly more prevalent with the advance of generative design and topology optimization technologies. As one step toward accelerating structural analysis, this work explores a deep learning based approach for predicting the stress fields in 2D linear elastic cantilevered structures subjected to external static loads at its free end using convolutional neural networks (CNN). Two different architectures are implemented that take as input the structure geometry, external loads, and displacement boundary conditions, and output the predicted von Mises stress field. The first is a single input channel network called SCSNet as the baseline architecture, and the second is the multi-channel input network called StressNet. Accuracy analysis shows that StressNet results in significantly lower prediction errors than SCSNet on three loss functions, with a mean relative error of 2.04% for testing. These results suggest that deep learning models may offer a promising alternative to classical methods in structural design and topology optimization. Code and dataset are available at this https URL
Diffusions interacting through a random matrix: universality via stochastic Taylor expansion

Consider $$(X_{i}(t))$$ solving a system of N stochastic differential equations interacting through a random matrix $${\mathbf {J}} = (J_{ij})$$ with independent (not necessarily identically distributed) random coefficients. We show that the trajectories of averaged observables of $$(X_i(t))$$ , initialized from some $$\mu $$ independent of $${\mathbf {J}}$$ , are universal, i.e., only depend on the choice of the distribution $$\mathbf {J}$$ through its first and second moments (assuming e.g., sub-exponential tails). We take a general combinatorial approach to proving universality for dynamical systems with random coefficients, combining a stochastic Taylor expansion with a moment matching-type argument. Concrete settings for which our results imply universality include aging in the spherical SK spin glass, and Langevin dynamics and gradient flows for symmetric and asymmetric Hopfield networks.
Social Learning and Solar Photovoltaic Adoption

Growing literature points to the effectiveness of leveraging social interactions and nudges to spur adoption of prosocial behaviors. This study investigates a large-scale behavioral intervention de...