cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Taming the pseudoholomorphic beasts in $\mathbb{R} \times (S^1 \times S^2)$

For a closed oriented smooth 4–manifold X with b+2(X)>0, the Seiberg–Witten invariants are well-defined. Taubes’ “ SW= Gr” theorem asserts that if X carries a symplectic form then these invariants are equal to well-defined counts of pseudoholomorphic curves, Taubes’ Gromov invariants. In the absence of a symplectic form, there are still nontrivial closed self-dual 2–forms which vanish along a disjoint union of circles and are symplectic elsewhere. This paper and its sequel describe well-defined integral counts of pseudoholomorphic curves in the complement of the zero set of such near-symplectic 2–forms, and it is shown that they recover the Seiberg–Witten invariants over ℤ∕2ℤ. This is an extension of “ SW= Gr” to nonsymplectic 4–manifolds. The main result of this paper asserts the following. Given a suitable near-symplectic form ω and tubular neighborhood 𝒩 of its zero set, there are well-defined counts of pseudoholomorphic curves in a completion of the symplectic cobordism (X−𝒩,ω) which are asymptotic to certain Reeb orbits on the ends. They can be packaged together to form “near-symplectic” Gromov invariants as a function of spin-c structures on X.
The X-ray View of Abell 3120

Identification of Abell 3120 as a galaxy cluster has recently been questioned with alternative suggestions including a fossil remnant of a group merger, non-thermal emission from a radio galaxy, and projected emission from a filamentary string of galaxies. We report on our analysis of the Chandra observation and evaluate these hypotheses based on our results. Abell 3120 shows X-ray emission extending 158 kpc, well beyond the central galaxy. The spatial distribution of X-rays in the core more closely follows the radio emission showing a jet-like structure extending to the north that is misaligned with the stellar light distribution of the central galaxy. At larger radii, the X-ray emission is aligned with the SE-NW running axis of the galaxy distribution in the cluster core. Modeling the X-ray spectrum excludes purely non-thermal emission. The emission-weighted temperature is 1.93-2.19 keV and the 0.3-10 keV luminosity is 1.23 × 1043 erg s–1. Abell 3120 appears to be a poor cluster with Virgo and MKW 4 as peers. The best-fitting model consists of a thermal component and a second component that may be either thermal or non-thermal, with luminosity ~25% of the total X-ray luminosity. While a more detailed spatial-spectral search failed to detect a central active galactic nucleus, there is some evidence for an extended hard X-ray component. Cooler gas, 1.28-1.80 keV, was detected in the central 20 kpc. The second thermal component marginally requires a higher redshift, >0.12, which may be due to a second cluster in the rich surrounding environment consisting of nearly a thousand cataloged galaxies.
Star Cluster Formation and Destruction in the Merging Galaxy NGC 3256

We use the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope to study the rich population of young massive star clusters in the main body of NGC 3256, a merging pair of galaxies with a high star formation rate (SFR) and SFR per unit area (ΣSFR). These clusters have luminosity and mass functions that follow power laws, dN/dL ∝ L α with α = −2.23 ± 0.07, and dN/dM ∝ M β with β = −1.86 ± 0.34 for τ < 10 Myr clusters, similar to those found in more quiescent galaxies. The age distribution can be described by dN/dτ ∝ τ γ , with γ ≈ −0.67 ± 0.08 for clusters younger than about a few hundred million years, with no obvious dependence on cluster mass. This is consistent with a picture where ~80% of the clusters are disrupted each decade in time. We investigate the claim that galaxies with high ΣSFR form clusters more efficiently than quiescent systems by determining the fraction of stars in bound clusters (Γ) and the CMF/SFR statistic (CMF is the cluster mass function) for NGC 3256 and comparing the results with those for other galaxies. We find that the CMF/SFR statistic for NGC 3256 agrees well with that found for galaxies with ΣSFR and SFRs that are lower by 1–3 orders of magnitude, but that estimates for Γ are only robust when the same sets of assumptions are applied. Currently, Γ values available in the literature have used different sets of assumptions, making it more difficult to compare the results between galaxies.
Information symmetries in irreversible processes.

We study dynamical reversibility in stationary stochastic processes from an information-theoretic perspective. Extending earlier work on the reversibility of Markov chains, we focus on finitary processes with arbitrarily long conditional correlations. In particular, we examine stationary processes represented or generated by edge-emitting, finite-state hidden Markov models. Surprisingly, we find pervasive temporal asymmetries in the statistics of such stationary processes. As a consequence, the computational resources necessary to generate a process in the forward and reverse temporal directions are generally not the same. In fact, an exhaustive survey indicates that most stationary processes are irreversible. We study the ensuing relations between model topology in different representations, the process’s statistical properties, and its reversibility in detail. A process’s temporal asymmetry is efficiently captured using two canonical unifilar representations of the generating model, the forward-time and reverse-time e-machines. We analyze example irreversible processes whose e-machine representations change size under time reversal, including one which has a finite number of recurrent causal states in one direction, but an infinite number in the opposite. From the forward-time and reverse-time e-machines, we are able to construct a symmetrized, but nonunifilar, generator of a process—the bidirectional machine. Using the bidirectional machine, we show how to directly calculate a process’s fundamental information properties, many of which are otherwise only poorly approximated via process samples. The tools we introduce and the insights we offer provide a better understanding of the many facets of reversibility and irreversibility in stochastic processes.
Deep Sparse Representation-Based Classification

We present a transductive deep learning-based formulation for the sparse representation-based classification (SRC) method. The proposed network consists of a convolutional autoencoder along with a fully connected layer. The role of the autoencoder network is to learn robust deep features for classification. On the other hand, the fully connected layer, which is placed in between the encoder and the decoder networks, is responsible for finding the sparse representation. The estimated sparse codes are then used for classification. Various experiments on three different datasets show that the proposed network leads to sparse representations that give better classification results than state-of-the-art SRC methods. The source code is available at: github.com/mahdiabavisani/DSRC .
Advanced technologies and instrumentation and the National Science Foundation

Over its more than thirty-year history, the Advanced Technologies and Instrumentation (ATI) program has provided grants to support technology development for ground-based astronomy. Research from this program has advanced adaptive optics, high resolution and multi-object spectroscopy, optical interferometry and synoptic surveys, to name just a few. Previous and ongoing scientific advances span the entire field of astronomy, from studies of the Sun to the distant universe. Through a combination of literature assessment and individual case studies, we present a survey of ATI funded research for optical-infrared astronomy. We find that technology development unfolds over a time period that is longer than an individual grant. A longitudinal perspective shows that substantial scientific gains have resulted from investments in technology.
Arithmetic of curves on moduli of local systems

We investigate the arithmetic of algebraic curves on coarse moduli spaces for special linear rank two local systems on surfaces with fixed boundary traces. We prove a structure theorem for morphisms from the affine line into the moduli space. We show that the set of integral points on any nondegenerate algebraic curve on the moduli space can be effectively determined.
Acoustic-electroelastic modeling of piezoelectric disks in high-intensity focused ultrasound power transfer systems:

Contactless ultrasound power transfer (UPT) has emerged as one of the promising techniques for wireless power transfer. Physical processes supporting UPT include the vibrations at a transmitting/ac...
What's between KISS and KIDS: A Keep It Knowledgeable (KIKS) Principle for Cognitive Agent Design.

The two common design principles for agent-based models, KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and KIDS (Keep It Descriptive, Stupid) offer limited traction for developing cognitive agents, who typically have strong ties to research findings and established theories of cognition. A KIKS principle (Keep It Knowledgeable, Stupid) is proposed to capture the fact that cognitive agents are grounded in published research findings and theory, rather than simply selecting parameters in an ad-hoc way. In short, KIKS suggests that modelers should not focus on how many parameters, but should instead focus on choosing the right research papers and implement each of their key parameters and mechanisms. Based on this principle, a design process for creating cognitive agents based on cognitive models is proposed. This process is centered around steps that cognitive agent designers are already consider (e.g., literature search, validation, implementing a computational model). However, the KIKS process suggests two differences. First, KIKS calls for reporting explicit metadata on the empirical and theoretical relationships that an agent's cognitive model is intended to capture. Each such relationship should be associated with a published paper that supports it. This metadata would serve a valuable purpose for comprehending, validating, and comparing the cognitive models used by different agents. Second, KIKS calls for validation tests to be specified before creating an agent's cognitive model computationally. This process, known as test-driven design, can be used to monitor the adherence of a cognitive agent to its underlying knowledge base as it evolves through different versions. Implications, advantages, and limitations of the proposed process for KIKS are discussed.
Quadrilaterals inscribed in convex curves

We classify the set of quadrilaterals that can be inscribed in convex Jordan curves, in the continuous as well as in the smooth case. This answers a question of Makeev in the special case of convex curves. The difficulty of this problem comes from the fact that standard topological arguments to prove the existence of solutions do not apply here due to the lack of sufficient symmetry. Instead, the proof makes use of an area argument of Karasev and Tao, which we furthermore simplify and elaborate on. The continuous case requires an additional analysis of the singular points, and a small miracle, which then extends to show that the problems of inscribing isosceles trapezoids in smooth curves and in piecewise $C^1$ curves are equivalent.
The arithmetic Hodge index theorem and rigidity of dynamical systems over function fields

In one of the fundamental results of Arakelov's arithmetic intersection theory, Faltings and Hriljac (independently) proved the Hodge Index Theorem for arithmetic surfaces by relating the intersection pairing to the negative of the N\'eron-Tate height pairing. More recently, Moriwaki and Yuan-Zhang generalized this to higher dimension. In this work, we extend these results to projective varieties over transcendence degree one function fields. The new challenge is dealing with non-constant but numerically trivial line bundles coming from the constant field via Chow's $K/k$-trace functor. As an application of the Hodge Index Theorem, we also prove a rigidity theorem for the set of canonical height zero points of polarized algebraic dynamical systems over function fields. For function fields over finite fields, this gives a rigidity theorem for preperiodic points, generalizing previous work of Mimar, Baker-DeMarco, and Yuan-Zhang.
Vitamin D Status and COVID-19 Clinical Outcomes in Hospitalized Patients.

Context: Populations severely affected by COVID-19 are also at risk for vitamin D deficiency. Common risk factors include older age, chronic illness, obesity, and non-Caucasian race. Vitamin D defi...
Collective behavior in the kinetics and equilibrium of solid-state photoreaction

Abstract There is current interest in developing photoactive materials that deform on illumination. The strategy is to develop new photoactive molecules in solution, and then to incorporate these in the solid-state either by crystallization or by inserting them into polymers. This letter shows that the kinetics and the nature of the photo-induced phase transitions are profoundly different in single molecules (solution) and in the solid state using a lattice spin model. In solution, where the molecules act independently, the photoreaction follows first-order kinetics. However, in the solid state where the photoactive molecules interact with each other and therefore behave collectively during reaction, photoreactions follow the sigmoidal kinetics of nucleation and growth as in a first-order phase transition. Further, we find that the exact nature of the photo-induced strain has a critical effect on the kinetics, equilibrium, and microstructure formation. These predictions agree qualitatively with experimental observations, and provide insights for the development of new photoactive materials.
Adaptive Sampling using POMDPs with Domain-Specific Considerations

We investigate improving Monte Carlo Tree Search based solvers for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), when applied to adaptive sampling problems. We propose improvements in rollout allocation, the action exploration algorithm, and plan commitment. The first allocates a different number of rollouts depending on how many actions the agent has taken in an episode. We find that rollouts are more valuable after some initial information is gained about the environment. Thus, a linear increase in the number of rollouts, i.e. allocating a fixed number at each step, is not appropriate for adaptive sampling tasks. The second alters which actions the agent chooses to explore when building the planning tree. We find that by using knowledge of the number of rollouts allocated, the agent can more effectively choose actions to explore. The third improvement is in determining how many actions the agent should take from one plan. Typically, an agent will plan to take the first action from the planning tree and then call the planner again from the new state. Using statistical techniques, we show that it is possible to greatly reduce the number of rollouts by increasing the number of actions taken from a single planning tree without affecting the agent’s final reward. Finally, we demonstrate experimentally, on simulated and real aquatic data from an underwater robot, that these improvements can be combined, leading to better adaptive sampling. The code for this work is available at https://github.com/uscresl/AdaptiveSamplingPOMCP.
Lower Bounds for Testing Complete Positivity and Quantum Separability

In this work we are interested in the problem of testing quantum entanglement. More specifically, we study the separability problem in quantum property testing, where one is given n copies of an unknown mixed quantum state \(\varrho \) on \(\mathbb {C}^d \otimes \mathbb {C}^d\), and one wants to test whether \(\varrho \) is separable or \(\epsilon \)-far from all separable states in trace distance. We prove that \(n = \varOmega (d^2/\epsilon ^2)\) copies are necessary to test separability, assuming \(\epsilon \) is not too small, viz. \(\epsilon = \varOmega (1/\sqrt{d})\).
Viewmaker Networks: Learning Views for Unsupervised Representation Learning

Many recent methods for unsupervised representation learning involve training models to be invariant to different "views," or augmented versions of an input. However, designing these views requires considerable human expertise and experimentation, hindering widespread adoption of unsupervised representation learning methods across domains and modalities. To address this, we propose viewmaker networks: generative models which learn to produce input-dependent views for contrastive learning. We train these networks jointly with the main network to produce adversarial lp perturbations for an input, which yields challenging yet faithful views without extensive human tuning. Our learned views enable comparable transfer accuracy to the the well-studied SimCLR augmentations when applied on CIFAR-10, while significantly outperforming baseline augmentations in speech (+9% absolute) and IMU sensor (+17% absolute) domains. We also show how viewmaker views can be combined with SimCLR views to improve robustness to common image corruptions. Our method provides a roadmap for reducing the amount of expertise and effort needed for unsupervised learning, potentially extending its benefits to a much wider set of domains.
Industrial Connectedness and Business Cycle Comovements

Abstract While aggregate shocks account for most business cycle fluctuations, sectoral shocks have become relatively more important since the 1980s. Previous studies show that sectoral shocks propagate through industry supply chains. Typically, sectors are defined by similarities in function and/or market. While some industries have supply chains within their own sector (vertical), others have supply chains across a number of sectors (horizontal). Similarity in these supply chain characteristics appear to be a determining factor in how industries comove. Using industrial production data of 82 four-digit NAICS industries over the period 1972 to 2019, this comovement is analyzed in a panel Markov-switching model incorporating a number of features relevant for sub-national analysis: (i) industry-specific trends that differentiate cyclical downturns from secular declines; (ii) a national-level business cycle; and (iii) factors that represent industrial comovement. While national-level shocks are typically still the most important driver of cyclical fluctuations, endogenously clustering by industry comovement highlights the role of sectoral shocks.
To own or not to own: Stock loans around dividend payments

Abstract In a standard stock loan, the borrower reimburses the lender any dividends paid while the loan is outstanding. Since these substitute dividends may be taxed differently than dividend payments themselves, some investors have incentives to either remove their shares from lendable supply–if they pay high taxes on substitute dividends–or lend out their shares to arbitrageurs–if they pay high taxes on dividends. Consistent with these incentives, we find a significant tightening of the equity lending market on dividend record days driven by both a contraction of supply and an expansion of demand–although the demand effect appears to dominate. We then exploit the plausibly exogenous nature of these shifts to causally link tightness in the lending market to wider effective spreads in the stock market.
Credit Reform, Negative Subsidies, and FHA

After several years' experience with the new budgetary treatment of federal credit activity, or credit reform, it is appropriate to consider how this innovation is working. One objective of the new approach was to provide both estimates of the cost of credit assistance and a means of monitoring the performance of those estimates over time. In at least one—admittedly difficult—case, FHA single-family mortgage insurance, the reform is not succeeding in reporting the performance of the subsidy estimate because the agency's budget submissions are not consistent with the new accounting. This failure may result from the agency's inability to accept or adopt the fundamental changes in accounting concepts affected by credit reform. This article attempts to explain some of those changes and to show how they may be used to provide relevant information in the budget.
A Monologue on the Taxation of Business Gifts

When this essay was written, law reviews were publishing a lot of "dialogues," and the author decided, probably stupidly, that a monologue would be appropriate for a humor symposium in the BYU Law Review. Well-hidden among the sophomoric humor is a serious rumination on the tax treatment of business gifts, including discussions of the Supreme Court's 1960 decision in Commissioner v. Duberstein and section 274(b) of the Internal Revenue Code.
Multiple hypothesis evaluation in auditing

In many audit tasks, auditors evaluate multiple hypotheses to diagnose the situation. Research suggests this is a complex task that individuals have difficulty performing. Further, there is little guidance in professional standards or literature dealing with the many complexities present in the audit environment. Using probability theory, this study derives the appropriate revision of likelihoods for multiple hypotheses given different realistic audit conditions. The analysis shows that the relationships among the hypotheses dramatically impact the use of audit evidence and the resulting pattern of probability revisions. We also identify testable hypotheses to guide future research and discuss practice implications regarding ways to improve the effectiveness of analytical procedures.
Pinning Model in Random Correlated Environment: Appearance of an Infinite Disorder Regime

We study the influence of a correlated disorder on the localization phase transition in the pinning model (Random polymer models, 2007). When correlations are strong enough, an infinite disorder regime arises: large and frequent attractive regions appear in the environment. We present here a pinning model in random binary ( $$\{-1,1\}$$ -valued) environment. Defining infinite disorder via the requirement that the probability of the occurrence of a large attractive region is sub-exponential in its size, we prove that it coincides with the fact that the critical point is equal to its minimal possible value, namely $$h_c(\beta )=-\beta $$ . We also stress that in the infinite disorder regime, the phase transition is smoother than in the homogeneous case, whatever the critical exponent of the homogeneous model is: disorder is therefore always relevant. We illustrate these results with the example of an environment based on the sign of a Gaussian correlated sequence, in which we show that the phase transition is of infinite order in presence of infinite disorder. Our results contrast with results known in the literature, in particular in the case of an IID disorder, where the question of the influence of disorder on the critical properties is answered via the so-called Harris criterion, and where a conventional relevance/irrelevance picture holds.
COVID-19 Attack Rate Increases with City Size

The current outbreak of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) poses an unprecedented global health and economic threat to interconnected human societies. Until a vaccine is developed, strategies for controlling the outbreak rely on aggressive social distancing. These measures largely disconnect the social network fabric of human societies, especially in urban areas. Here, we estimate the growth rates and reproductive numbers of COVID-19 in US cities from March 14th through March 19th to reveal a power-law scaling relationship to city population size. This means that COVID-19 is spreading faster on average in larger cities with the additional implication that, in an uncontrolled outbreak, larger fractions of the population are expected to become infected in more populous urban areas. We discuss the implications of these observations for controlling the COVID-19 outbreak, emphasizing the need to implement more aggressive distancing policies in larger cities while also preserving socioeconomic activity.
Chevron at the Roberts Court: Still Failing After All These Years

This Essay looks at how Chevron deference1 has fared at the U.S. Supreme Court since John G. Roberts became Chief Justice.2 As followers of U.S. administrative law know, the Court‘s 1984 Chevron decision famously created an apparently new two-step process for reviewing federal agency decisions interpreting statutes they administer. Since then, the Chevron decision has been the most-cited Supreme Court administrative law decision, and the Chevron doctrine has spawned legions of law review articles analyzing its numerous twists and turns. This Essay looks at Chevron deference at the Roberts Court from three distinct angles. First, the Essay examines the voting records of individual Justices in cases citing Chevron to illuminate each Justice‘s commitment to deference to agency statutory construction. Second, the Essay qualitatively examines a select sample of opinions citing Chevron, to see whether the Roberts Court has been any more successful than its predecessor in constructing a coherent Chevron doctrine. Third, the Essay looks closely at how the Roberts Court has handled one of the most vexing issues under Chevron, namely the boundary between Chevron deference and judicial review under other standards of judicial review such as the arbitrary or capricious standard that governs all reviewable agency action. To the first point, in an earlier article,3 I presented data on Justices‘ voting records. In that article, I looked at all of the Supreme Court decisions during Chief Justice Roberts‘ first four Terms in which Chevron was applied by the majority or cited in a dissent.4 What I found was that the Court generally split along familiar ideological lines, with liberals
Computerizing Audit Studies.

Abstract This paper briefly discusses the history, benefits, and shortcomings of traditional audit field experiments to study market discrimination. Specifically it identifies template bias and experimenter bias as major concerns in the traditional audit method and demonstrates through an empirical example that computerization of a resume or correspondence audit can efficiently increase sample size and greatly mitigate these concerns. Finally, it presents a useful meta-tool that future researchers can use to create their own resume audits.
Catching Fire: A Case Study Illustration of the Need for an Interdisciplinary Clinical Case Partnership and Resulting Student Successes

There is an increasing pressure calling for legal education’s evolution into building more practical competencies to better prepare law students for practice upon graduation. Collaborative learning between law students and social work students in a clinical setting enriches their respective educations well beyond their respective traditional curricula. By working together, the students learn other methods on how to handle different clients and their unique situations and how to work with someone of a different disciplinary expertise with the same client. This article begins with a law student’s mishandling of an initial client interaction, discusses the advantages of an interdisciplinary education with social work students and then reimagines the initial encounter after the law student has been taught by an interdisciplinary partnership between law and social work schools. Law students gain a better and broader perspective when working alongside social work students to tackle problems that they not only f...
Robust–efficient credibility models with heavy-tailed claims: A mixed linear models perspective

Abstract In actuarial practice, regression models serve as a popular statistical tool for analyzing insurance data and tariff ratemaking. In this paper, we consider classical credibility models that can be embedded within the framework of mixed linear models. For inference about fixed effects and variance components, likelihood-based methods such as (restricted) maximum likelihood estimators are commonly pursued. However, it is well-known that these standard and fully efficient estimators are extremely sensitive to small deviations from hypothesized normality of random components as well as to the occurrence of outliers. To obtain better estimators for premium calculation and prediction of future claims, various robust methods have been successfully adapted to credibility theory in the actuarial literature. The objective of this work is to develop robust and efficient methods for credibility when heavy-tailed claims are approximately log-location–scale distributed. To accomplish that, we first show how to express additive credibility models such as Buhlmann–Straub and Hachemeister ones as mixed linear models with symmetric or asymmetric errors. Then, we adjust adaptively truncated likelihood methods and compute highly robust credibility estimates for the ordinary but heavy-tailed claims part. Finally, we treat the identified excess claims separately and find robust–efficient credibility premiums. Practical performance of this approach is examined–via simulations–under several contaminating scenarios. A widely studied real-data set from workers’ compensation insurance is used to illustrate functional capabilities of the new robust credibility estimators.
Incentives and Tournaments in Public Organizations

This essay discusses an integrative economic theory that reconciles rank-order tournaments with the traditional public administration concern for accountability in government. Recent reforms have concentrated on organizational designs that flow from piece-rate approaches to employee compensation and have ignored the incentive-compatibility aspects of traditional personnel systems. My claim is that promotion tournaments in public organization hierarchies are perhaps more efficient than the pay-for-performance systems often called for in traditional principal-agent approaches.
Is Equality A Totally Empty Idea

Professor Peter Westen's essay asserting that the concept of equality has no substantive content whatsoever usefully brushes aside much of the equal-protection rhetoric that, as Westen carefully explains, appropriately belongs to substantive due process.' However, his absolutist position is open to challenge. I would like to posit one hypothetical case that I used in my classes when I taught Constitutional Law that I think contradicts Professor Westen's the-
What does the public want police to do during pandemics? A national experiment

Research Summary: We administered a survey experiment to a national sample of 1068 U S adults in April 2020 to determine the factors that shape support for various policing tactics in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic Respondents were sharply divided in their views about pandemic policing tactics and were least supportive of policies that might limit public access to officers or reduce crime deterrence Information about the health risks to officers, but not to inmates, significantly increased support for “precautionary” policing, but not for “social distance” policing The information effect was modest, but may be larger if the information came from official sources and/or was communicated on multiple occasions Other factors that are associated with attitudes toward pandemic policing include perceptions of procedural justice, altruistic fear, racial resentment, and authoritarianism Policy Implications: When considered together with other evidence, one clear takeaway from our study is that the public values police patrols and wants officers on call, even during pandemics Another is that people who believe the police are procedurally just are more willing to trust officers in times of crisis and to empower them to enforce new laws, such as social distancing ordinances Our results thus support continued procedural justice training for officers A third takeaway is that agencies must proactively communicate with the public about the risks their officers face when responding to public health crises or natural disasters, in addition to how they propose to mitigate those risks They must also be amenable to adjusting in response to community feedback © 2021 American Society of Criminology
Does Income Smoothing Improve Earnings Informativeness

This paper uses a new approach to examine whether income smoothing garbles earnings information or improves the informativeness of past and current earnings about future earnings and cash flows. We measure income smoothing by the negative correlation of a firm's change in discretionary accruals with its change in premanaged earnings. Using the approach of Collins et al. (1994), we find that the change in the current stock price of higher‐smoothing firms contains more information about their future earnings than does the change in the stock price of lower‐smoothing firms. This result is robust to decomposing earnings into cash flows and accruals and to controlling for firm size, growth, future earnings variability, private information search activities, and cross‐sectional correlations.
Welfare Effects of Transparency in Foreign Exchange Markets: the Role of Hedging Opportunities

The paper studies the impact of more transparency on the risk-sharing opportunities in the foreign exchange market and the associated implications on ex ante welfare. Transparency is measured in this model by the informational content of publicly observable signals about exchange rate developments. The authors find that in this model more transparency improves welfare in economies that are poorly endowed with capital and/or where investors are not very risk-averse, while welfare is reduced in economies with large capital endowments and/or where investors are highly risk-averse.
Economic and Financial Determinants of Credit Risk Premiums in the Sovereign CDS Market

We specify and estimate no-arbitrage models for sovereign CDS contracts by assuming that the country’s default intensity depends on observable economic and …nancial indicators. We estimate these models using a sample of twenty-eight countries, three CDS maturities, and over a decade of daily data. The models provide a good …t. The impact of the economic and …nancial variables on spreads is consistent with economic intuition. Spreads increase as a function of stock market and exchange rate volatility, but decrease as a function of interest rates and stock market returns. The magnitudes of these impacts vary substantially across countries and over time. Estimated risk premiums are also highly time-varying and peak during the 2008 …nancial crisis for nearly all countries. For European countries, the risk premiums are also high during the Eurozone debt crisis. In periods of market stress and high CDS spreads, the increase in market risk premiums is even larger than the increase in default probabilities. The cross-sectional variation in risk premiums across countries is high, also in non-crisis periods.
Corporate Distributions and the Income Tax: A Consideration of the Inconsistency Between Subchapter C and Its Underlying Policy

The issue of whether the sale of shares to an issuer shall be treated as a dividend or as received in exchange for a capital asset has troubled Congress, courts, and commentators since the Revenue Act of 1913. If a corporation redeems some of its shares or distributes all of its assets in complete liquidation, the transaction is generally described as having the characteristics of a divided to the extent the distribution is ‘out of earnings and profits' and the characteristics of a sale to the extent that it terminates the equity interest of the redeemed party. In light of the existence of equally compelling analogies, each suggesting the opposite treatment, it has been suggested that in determining the appropriate treatment of distribution in complete liquidation or redemption, analogizing the transaction to a sale or a dividend is of limited value.A critical error permeates this analysis. The assumption is made that to the extent that a corporate distribution is ‘out of earnings and profits,’ the distribution is analogous to a dividend. This assumption leads proponents of reform to suggest dividend treatment, or its equivalent, for distributions in redemption of some or all of a corporation's shares. Meaningful suggestions for reform must, however, begin with an understanding of when a distribution is, or is not, analogous to a dividend under the present system - that is, with an understanding of how one must define a dividend to comport with the fundaments of the present system.This Article suggests that although one part of a corporate distribution may be analogous to a sale and the remainder to a dividend, there is no overlap of, or competition between, analogies. This lack of overlap is apparent when one realizes that a dividend and a sale are methods of realizing different types of gain, rather than alternative methods of realizing the same type of gain. This Article examines the basic conceptual model underlying the present system of taxing corporate distributions, describes the appropriate treatment of corporate distributions that is suggested by an understanding of the underlying concepts, and indicates the discrepancies between the present Code and this model.
The Impact of Capital Structure on Efficient Sourcing and Strategic Behavior

We model the capital structure choice of a firm that operates under imperfect competition. Extant literature demonstrates that debt commits a firm to an aggressive output stance, which is an advantage to the firm under Cournot competition. However, empirical evidence, indicates that debt is a disadvantage under imperfect competition. We reconcile the theory with the evidence by incorporating firms' relations with their suppliers, in a model of strategic firmrival interactions. Under imperfect competition and incomplete contracting, we show that although debt financing improves a firm's input sourcing efficiency it could also benefit the firm's rivals by lowering their input costs. This effect offsets the benefits due to aggressive product market strategies that result from increased debt. Under certain conditions this subsidy effect is sufficiently strong that debt is suboptimal in equilibrium and leads to an increase in rival's shareholder value.
Popular Originalism? The Tea Party Movement and Constitutional Theory

The United States Constitution is currently the subject of a heated political debate. Tea Party activists have invoked the constitution as the foundation of their conservative political philosophy. These activists are engaged in “popular originalism,” using popular constitutionalism, constitutional interpretation outside of the courts, to invoke originalism as constitutional method. The Tea Party movement thus highlights the relationship between originalism and popular constitutionalism, two prominent trends in constitutional theory. Both fields study legal history to illuminate constitutional meaning, but originalists and popular constitutionalists draw diverging lessons from that history. Originalists look to history to determine fixed original meaning, which they hold to be binding on contemporary interpreters regardless of subsequent historical or political developments. Popular constitutionalists study how constitutional interpretation has been influenced by historical developments, and explore the use of constitutional theory to bolster constitutional arguments. This essay explores the convergence and divergence between originalism and popular constitutionalism, and questions whether popular originalism is feasible given originalists’ fidelity to the original text. The essay concludes by asking what popular originalism can teach about us constitutional interpretation and democracy. While modern originalism began as a critique of judicial over-reaching into the political process, it has evolved into a justification for courts to overturn democratic measures. Paradoxically, then, the popular originalism of the Tea Party may achieve its only success, not through the democratic process, but in the federal courts.
"Artillery Lends Dignity to What Otherwise Would Be a Common Brawl": An Essay on Post-Modern Warfare and the Classification of Captured Adversaries

This essay allows the writer to enter a fluid fray being played out almost day-by-day in the media and, of course, where it counts: in the administration of President George W. Bush. Conscious of the ebbs and drifts of both the current debates and desperately anxious not to be preempted by the march of a swiftly moving time frame, this essay suggests an approach to U.S. integration of generally accepted rules for the treatment of POWs that will advance both the war on terrorism and America's need to embrace the reality of the globalization of humanistic mores and notions about justice without surrendering our sovereignty.
Asymmetric Timeliness and the Resolution of Investor Disagreement and Uncertainty at Earnings Announcements

This study finds that greater asymmetric timeliness of earnings in reflecting good and bad news is associated with slower resolution of investor disagreement and uncertainty at earnings announcemen...
Content sharing in a social broadcasting environment: evidence from twitter

The rise of social broadcasting technologies has greatly facilitated open access to information worldwide, not only by powering decentralized information production and consumption, but also by expediting information diffusion through social interactions like content sharing. Voluntary information sharing by users in the context of Twitter, the predominant social broadcasting site, is studied by modeling both the technology and user behavior. A detailed data set about the official content-sharing function on Twitter, called retweet, is collected and the statistical relationships between users' social network characteristics and their retweeting acts are documented. A two-stage consumption-sharing model is then estimated using the conditional maximum likelihood estimatio (MLE) method. The empirical results convincingly support our hypothesis that weak ties (in the form of unidirectional links) are more likely to engage in the social exchange process of content sharing. Specifically, we find that after a median quality tweet (as defined in the sample) is consumed, the likelihood that a unidirectional follower will retweet is 3.1 percentage point higher than the likelihood that a bidirectional follower will do so.
On Distributed Model-Free Reinforcement Learning Control With Stability Guarantee

Distributed learning can enable scalable and effective decision making in numerous complex cyber-physical systems such as smart transportation, robotics swarm, power systems, etc. However, stability of the system is usually not guaranteed in most existing learning paradigms; and this limitation can hinder the wide deployment of machine learning in decision making of safety-critical systems. This letter presents a stability-guaranteed distributed reinforcement learning (SGDRL) framework for interconnected linear subsystems, without knowing the subsystem models. While the learning process requires data from a peer-to-peer (p2p) communication architecture, the control implementation of each subsystem is only based on its local states. The stability of the interconnected subsystems will be ensured by a diagonally dominant eigenvalue condition, which will then be used in a model-free RL algorithm to learn the stabilizing control gains. The RL algorithm structure follows an off-policy iterative framework, with interleaved policy evaluation and policy update steps. We numerically validate our theoretical results by performing simulations on four interconnected sub-systems.
The Optimal Concentration of Creditors

Our model assumes that creditors need to expend resources to collect on claims. Consequently, because diffuse creditors suffer from mutual free-riding (Holmstrom (1982)), they fare worse than concentrated creditors (e.g., a house bank). The model predicts that measures of debt concentration relate positively to creditors’ (aggregate) debt collection expenditures and positively to management’s chosen expenditures to resist paying. However, collection activity is purely redistributive, so social waste is larger when creditors are concentrated. If borrower quality is not known, the best firms choose the most concentrated creditors and pay higher expected yields. COORDINATION FAILURE AMONG MULTIPLE CLAIMANTS ,b ethey creditors or owners, is a subject well studied in the academic literature. Such coordination failure can lead to takeover failures (Grossman and Hart (1980)) or bank-runs (e.g., Diamond and Dybvig (1983), Morris and Shin (1999)), or can generally reduce the probability of successful renegotiation to a proposed reorganization plan when renegotiation requires simultaneous assent by many claimants (e.g., �
The information content of option ratios

Abstract A broad stream of research shows that information flows into underlying stock prices through the options market. For instance, prior research shows that both the Put–Call Ratio (P/C) and the Option-to-Stock Volume Ratio (O/S) predict negative future stock returns. In this paper, we compare the level of information contained in these two commonly used option volume ratios. First, we find that P/C ratios contain more predictability about future stock returns at the daily level than O/S ratios. Second, in contrast to our first set of results, O/S ratios contain more predictability about future returns at the weekly and monthly levels than P/C ratios. In fact, our tests show that while P/C ratios contain predictability about future daily returns and, to some extent, future weekly returns, the return predictability in P/C ratios is fleeting. O/S ratios, on the other hand, significantly predict negative returns at all levels: daily, weekly, and monthly. While Pan and Poteshman (2006) show that signed P/C ratios, which require proprietary data, have predictive power, we find that unsigned P/C ratios, which do not require proprietary data, also have predictive power.
Horizontal Enforcement and the ILC’s Proposed Draft Articles on the Immunity of State Officials from Foreign Criminal Jurisdiction

The Nuremberg principles affirmed by the U.N. General Assembly and formulated by the International Law Commission (ILC) provide that “[t]he fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible Government official does not relieve him (sic) from responsibility under international law.” Few would dispute this basic principle. More contested is the question of who has authority to impose consequences on individuals for international crimes committed on behalf of states. This is because, if an individual has acted with actual or apparent state authority, imposing consequences on the individual without her state’s consent runs counter to traditional notions of state sovereignty and noninterference.
The dark side of individual blockholder philanthropy

We examine the market reaction to charitable pledges by individual blockholders of public firms. As this philanthropy may signal a weakening preference for wealth maximization and may be indicative of distraction or relaxed monitoring, these agency costs may overwhelm any reputation benefits. We find decreased firm value and lower pay‐for‐performance sensitivity, the effects of which are most severe where monitoring needs are high, the blockholder is a director, or when the firm has ex ante high corporate social responsibility ratings. Our results are robust to controlling for prior charitable foundation involvement, busy director–blockholders, dual‐class share structures, blockholder exit, and pre‐pledge firm sentiment.
Providing information systems with full hypermedia functionality

The architecture of a system-level hypermedia engine, designed both to manage full hypermedia functionality for an information system and to bind interface-oriented front-end systems is presented. The engine dynamically superimposes a hypermedia representation over a back-end application's knowledge components and processes. A set of minimal requirements for integrating the hypermedia engine is described. The more sophisticated and cooperative the information system, the higher the level of hypermedia support the engine will provide. >