cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Energy regionalism and diffusion in Africa: How political actors created the ECOWAS Center for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency

Abstract In 2010, the members of ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) opened the ECOWAS Center for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (ECREEE). In this first academic study of ECREEE, I use the diffusion theoretical framework to analyze the organization's founding, with a focus on the actors who created the organization. I find that three extra-regional states – Austria, Brazil, and Spain – are the key players behind the creation and support of ECREEE. The states supporting the organization all have self-identities as leaders in renewable energy as well as, in the case of Austria and Spain, long-term commitments to provide development aid to West Africa. Finally, a political entrepreneur with a long-term interest in sustainable energy and connections to the UN, private industry, and the Global Forum on Sustainable Energy, an NGO she founded, had a critical role in creating ECREEE. I summarize several initiatives before concluding with suggestions for further research on this topic, including using in-field research to learn more about the diffusion mechanisms and how African actors have shaped the institutions to meet goals that might differ from the extra-regional players.
Volatility in the knowledge economy

Summary. We seek to explain the economic volatility of the last 6 years, in particular the rapid expansion and contraction of the knowledge sectors. Our hypothesis is that these sectors amplify the business cycle due to their increasing returns to scale, growing faster than others in an upswing and contracting faster in a downswing. To test this hypothesis we postulate a general equilibrium model with two sectors: one with increasing returns that are external to the firm and endogenously determined – the knowledge sector – and the other with constant returns to scale. We introduce a new measure of volatility of output, a ‘real beta’, and derive a ‘resolving’ equation, from which we prove that the increasing return sectors exhibit more volatility then other sectors. We validate the main results on US macro economic data of real GDP by industry (2-3 digits SIC codes) of the 1977–2001 period, and provide policy conclusions.
Converting Pirates Without Cannibalizing Purchasers: The Impact of Digital Distribution on Physical Sales and Internet Piracy

The availability of digital channels for media distribution has raised many important questions for marketers, notably, whether digital distribution channels will cannibalize physical sales and whether legitimate digital distribution channels will dissuade consumers from using (illegitimate) digital piracy channels. We address these two questions using the removal of NBC content from Apple's iTunes store in December 2007, and its restoration in September 2008, as natural shocks to the supply of legitimate digital content, and we analyze the impact of this shock on demand through BitTorrent piracy channels and the Amazon.com DVD store. To do this we collected two large data sets from Mininova.com and Amazon.com, documenting levels of piracy and DVD sales for both NBC and other major networks' content around these events. We analyze these data in a difference-in-difference model and find that NBC's decision to remove its content from iTunes in December 2007 is causally associated with an 11.4% increase in the demand for NBC's pirated content. This is roughly equivalent to an increase of 48,000 downloads a day for NBC's content and is approximately twice as large as the total legal purchases on iTunes for the same content in the period preceding the removal. We also find evidence of a smaller, and statistically insignificant, decrease in piracy for the same content when it was restored to the iTunes store in September 2008. Finally, we see no change in demand for NBC's DVD content at Amazon.com associated with NBC's closing or reopening of its digital distribution channel on iTunes.
AN EXPLICIT IMPLIED VOLATILITY FORMULA

We show that an explicit approximate implied volatility formula can be obtained from a Black–Scholes formula approximation that is 2% accurate. The relative error of the approximate implied volatility is uniformly bounded for options with any moneyness and with arbitrary large or small option maturities and volatilities, including for long dated options and options on highly volatile underlying assets. For options within a large trading range, such as options with maturity less than five years and implied volatility less than 150%, the error of the approximate implied volatility relative to the Black–Scholes implied volatility is less than 10% points.
The marketing role of IPOs: evidence from internet stocks

This paper explores the potential marketing benefits of going public and of IPO underpricing. We examine the impact of IPO underpricing on website traffic, which is a direct measure of product market performance for internet firms. If underpricing attracts media attention and creates valuable publicity, we expect an increase in web traffic following the IPO. We find that web traffic growth in the month after the IPO is positively and significantly associated with initial returns, and the effect is economically significant. We also investigate media reaction to initial returns for a broader sample of IPOs. The results suggest that the marketing benefits of underpricing extend beyond the internet sector and the “hot issues” market of the late 1990s.
Balance sheet outlier detection using a graph similarity algorithm

Graph similarity measurement has been used in many applications, such as computational biology, text mining, pattern recognition, and computer vision. In this paper, we apply similarity measurement on graphs to measure structural differences in financial statements. Unconventional financial statement structures may potentially reveal deceptive intention of hiding certain information while making technically “correct” financial statements. Furthermore, unconventional financial statements may also lead to investment opportunities if legitimacy is not questioned. We construct an algorithm based on the metric of string edit distance as an approximation of graph similarity, and apply the Levenshtein algorithm with modified string edit costs to measure string edit distance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this algorithm in capturing the sensitive changes of balance sheet structures by applying the algorithm in two experiments. The first experiment shows the algorithm is sensitive to all three basic edits (namely deletion, insertion and substitution) on a particular balance sheet, and the second experiment shows more than 90% clustering accuracy on real balance sheets.
Depraved Indifference Murder in the Context of DWI Homicides in New York

Depraved indifference murder is a homicide offense created for unintentional killings that exhibit such a flagrant disregard for the value of human life that they should be punished as seriously as intentional murder. Classic examples of such conduct include shooting a gun wildly in a crowded barroom or placing a bomb in a busy public space - cases where the offender does not intend to kill a specific person, but is fully aware of the high probability that someone will be killed. Prosecutors sometimes bring charges of depraved murder in DWI homicides where gruesome facts or public outrage elicit a desire - or opportunity - for increased punishment. Such was the case in the recent murder conviction of Martin Heidgen.This note argues that the overwhelming majority of DWI homicides fail to fit the murder prescription, and that to bring a charge of murder in these cases is a misapplication and overextension of the New York murder statute. The nature of the conduct, the risk involved, and the mental state of the offender all indicate that a DWI offense does not rise to the level of depraved indifference murder. Nevertheless, as a result of increased public awareness of drunk driving, overzealous prosecution, outraged local communities, and unsympathetic jurors, convictions are obtained that are unjust, and offenders receive punishment that is not commensurate with their conduct. Recent changes in New York homicide law provide an adequate and effective scheme of punishment for DWI homicides and eliminate the need to force a charge of depraved indifference murder in cases where it does not belong.
Proximal gradient method for huberized support vector machine

The support vector machine (SVM) has been used in a wide variety of classification problems. The original SVM uses the hinge loss function, which is non-differentiable and makes the problem difficult to solve in particular for regularized SVMs, such as with $$\ell _1$$l1-regularization. This paper considers the Huberized SVM (HSVM), which uses a differentiable approximation of the hinge loss function. We first explore the use of the proximal gradient (PG) method to solving binary-class HSVM (B-HSVM) and then generalize it to multi-class HSVM (M-HSVM). Under strong convexity assumptions, we show that our algorithm converges linearly. In addition, we give a finite convergence result about the support of the solution, based on which we further accelerate the algorithm by a two-stage method. We present extensive numerical experiments on both synthetic and real datasets which demonstrate the superiority of our methods over some state-of-the-art methods for both binary- and multi-class SVMs.
Incomplete Markets and Volatility

Abstract This paper shows that the precautionary motive, combined with asset incompleteness, is a major source of volatility and indeterminacy in financial markets. Price fluctuations originate from agents' efforts to insure themselves through time by borrowing and lending instead of shifting income across states of nature by trading risky assets. A high interest rate at a future date reduces the potential for future consumption smoothing via borrowing, which leads to a strong precautionary motive and a low interest rate in the current period. The negative feedback between future and current rates generates fluctuations. This logic is developed in SPEC, a CARA-normal exchange economy with many periods and endogenous interest rates. When there is an intermediate level of market incompleteness and sufficient investor impatience, fluctuations in the real interest rate can be large, even though the aggregate endowment is constant. SPEC has a unique equilibrium under a finite horizon; on the other hand, with a finite number of infinitely lived agents, there exists a robust continuum of equilibria that are neither bubbles nor sunspots. Journal of Economic Literature . Classification Numbers: C61, D52, D58, G11, G12.
The Wheatley Report on Reforming LIBOR: A Step in the Right Direction?

Many have called it the largest financial scandal of all time; “the banking industry’s tobacco moment.” The ongoing investigations into the manipulation of the LIBOR rate, used in a variety of financial instruments, ranging from retail loans to derivate swap agreements, has proven that substantial regulatory reform of financial markets is in order globally. Michel Barnier, European Commissioner responsible for internal markets and services, rightly noted in a speech to the European Parliament that “[w]e have to get rid of this ‘everything is allowed, everything is permitted’ attitude.” In particular, Barnier noted that self-regulation is no longer a viable option. The setting of LIBOR was to be based on a system of integrity and truthfulness, allowing banks to submit estimated rates at which they realistically expected to borrow in the interbank lending market. However, because of lack of oversight bank submitters and traders were motivated by greed, which transformed a market based on free-market ideals, trust, and self-regulation into a market of collusion, cheating, and manipulation. The fictitious LIBOR rate was being used both by individuals who were unaware of the scandal and those that were purposefully negotiating with rate submitters of their own banks and others in order to profit from a fudged rate. The publication of individual bank submissions each day, which was intended to be a mechanism of transparency and a sort of incentive for banks to submit accurate rates, actually motivated contributing bank managers to order rate submitters to submit rates that were lower than the accurate rate at which the bank was borrowing so as to avoid negative stigma in a market of financial stress. The LIBOR benchmark was no longer representative of actual borrowing costs: it was a fictional rate negotiated between banks to their benefit, which resulted in potential losses for those individuals with contracts on the other side of the spectrum. Following the initiation of investigations into the manipulation of the setting of the LIBOR benchmark, the Chancellor of the Exchequer asked Martin Wheatley, managing director of the Financial Services Authority (“FSA”), to consider whether the findings of manipulation and false submissions call for a wider policy response. Wheatley proposed a ten-point plan centered on three main conclusions for the reform of LIBOR and restoration of its credibility. This paper discusses generally what the LIBOR rate is supposed to represent and what actually occurred during the scandal. Secondly, I provide a detailed analysis of what financial regulation is and why it is an essential element of a benchmark based on integrity and fairness. Thirdly, I give a detailed description of Martin Wheatley’s recommendations and his reasoning behind them. Lastly, I discuss the implications of Martin Wheatley’s final report and challenge the viability of the proposed recommendations and regulatory system.
Can Corporate Governance Reforms Increase Firm Market Values? Event Study Evidence from India

A central problem in conducting an event study of the valuation effects of corporate governance reforms is that most reforms affect all firms in a country. Share price changes may reflect the reforms, but could also reflect other information. We address this identification issue by studying India's adoption of major governance reforms (Clause 49). Clause 49 requires, among other things, audit committees, a minimum number of independent directors, and CEO/CFO certification of financial statements and internal controls. The reforms were sponsored by the Confederation of Indian Industry (an organization of large Indian public firms), applied initially to larger firms, and reached smaller public firms only after a several-year lag. The difference in effective dates offers a natural experiment: large firms are the treatment group for the reforms; small firms provide a control group for other news affecting India generally. The May 1999 announcement by Indian securities regulators of plans to adopt what became Clause 49 is accompanied by a 4 percent increase in the price of large firms over a two-day event window (the announcement date plus the next trading day), relative to smaller public firms; the difference grows to 7 percent over a five-day event window and 10 percent over a two-week window. Mid-sized firms had an intermediate reaction. Faster-growing firms gained more than other firms, consistent with firms that need external equity capital benefiting more from governance rules. Cross-listed firms gained more than other firms, suggesting that local regulation can sometimes complement, rather than substitute for, the benefits of cross-listing. The positive reaction of large Indian firms contrasts with the mixed reaction to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (which is similar to Clause 49 in important respects), suggesting that the value of mandatory governance rules may depend on a country's prior institutional environment.
Beyond Coase: Emerging Technologies and Property Theory

INTRODUCTION 2190 I. EXAMPLES OF NEW PROPERTY RIGHTS 2193 A. Spectrum 2194 1. Shannon’s Law and the Cumulative Nature of Interference 2194 2. Geographic Discontinuities 2195 3. Interference from Transmission on Other Frequencies 2198 B. The Internet 2200 1. The Cumulative Nature of Interference 2200 2. Geographic Discontinuities 2200 C. Electric Power 2202 1. The Cumulative Nature of Interference 2202 2. Geographic Discontinuities 2202 II. KEY IMPLICATIONS FOR PROPERTY THEORY 2204 A. Interdependencies: The Key Determinant of the Boundaries of Property 2205 B. The Complexity of Identifying Sources of Interference 2206 C. The Intractability of Attributing Harm 2207 1. The “Substantial Factor” Test 2208 2. Enterprise Liability 2209
Over-optimism in forecasts by official budget agencies and its implications

The paper studies forecasts of real growth rates and budget balances made by official government agencies among 33 countries. In general, the forecasts are found: (i) to have a positive average bias, (ii) to be more biased in booms, and (iii) to be even more biased at the 3-year horizon than at shorter horizons. This over-optimism in official forecasts can help explain excessive budget deficits, especially the failure to run surpluses during periods of high output: if a boom is forecasted to last indefinitely, retrenchment is treated as unnecessary. Many believe that better fiscal policy can be obtained by means of rules such as ceilings for the deficit or, better yet, the structural deficit. But we also find: (iv) countries subject to a budget rule, in the form of euroland's Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), make official forecasts of growth and budget deficits that are even more biased and more correlated with booms than do other countries. This effect may help explain frequent violations of the SGP. The question becomes how to overcome governments' tendency to satisfy fiscal targets by wishful thinking rather than by action. Chile in 2000 created structural budget institutions that may have solved the problem. Independent expert panels, insulated from political pressures, are responsible for estimating the long-run trends that determine whether a given deficit is deemed structural or cyclical. The result is that Chile's official forecasts of growth and the budget have not been overly optimistic, even in booms. Unlike many countries in the North, Chile took advantage of the 2002-7 expansion to run budget surpluses, and so was able to ease in the 2008-9 recession.
Government Failure in Urban Transportation

This paper assesses governmental performance in its investment, provision and regulation of urban transportation. Attention is given to public bus and rail transit and road transportation. Evidence based on urban transport in US cities reveals substantial allocative and technical inefficiencies that have led to large public transit deficits and severe highway congestion. I argue that it is futile to expect public officials to remedy the situation by pursuing more efficient policies such as congestion pricing and weighing costs and benefits when deciding transit service. The problem is that urban transportation policy is largely shaped by entrenched political forces that inhibit constructive change. The only realistic way to improve the system is to shield it from those influences and expose it to market forces by privatising it. This position is supported by empirical evidence based on simulations for the US and the UK's early experience with privatisation.
The Life Cycle of Corporate Venture Capital

This paper investigates why industrial firms conduct Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) investment in entrepreneurial companies. I test alternative views on CVC by exploiting the entry, investment, and termination decisions of CVC divisions. CVC entry concentrates in firms that experience deteriorations of internal innovation. At the investment stage, CVCs select startups with a similar technological focus but that have a non-overlapping knowledge base, and they integrate technologies generated from these ventures that create strategic value. CVCs are terminated when parent firms’ innovation recovers. Overall, the strategic desire to fix innovation weaknesses after adverse shocks motivates firms to adopt CVCs.Received November 15, 2017; editorial decision March 2, 2019 by Editor Francesca Cornelli. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.
Understanding the Endogeneity Between Firm Value and Shareholder Rights

I explore the relation between firm value and the shareholder rights-based Governance Index “G,” which has become a popular measure of governance quality among researchers and investors. I show that the relation is not spuriously driven by unobservable firm heterogeneity or an assortment of observable firm characteristics, such as firm growth potential and profitability. The causality seems to run from G to firm value, rather than from firm value to G. My results suggest that granting more rights to shareholders could be an effective way to reduce agency costs and enhance firm value.
Rhetorical Questions Concerning Justice and Equality in Educational Opportunities

What role does equality play in a conception of justice? Although Aristotle forever linked justice to equality,3 he also understood that the principle of equality could not itself resolve any important jurisprudential question. Aristotle’s maxim that “like cases should be treated in a like manner” and its corollary that “unlike cases should be treated in an unlike manner”4 are both tautological.5 The principle of equality begs the question of which people affected by a law should have equal status or rights.6 Even if a regime presumes that all persons
Stock and Option Grants with Performance-based Vesting Provisions

W e assemble a sample of 983 equity-based awards that include either an accelerated- or a contingent-vesting provision tied to firm performance and explore the frequency, contractual nature, usage, and implications of such awards. We find that performance-vesting (p-v) provisions specify meaningful performance hurdles and provide significant incentives for executives. The propensity to use p-v provisions is positively related to the arrival of a new CEO and the proportion of outsiders on the board of directors and negatively related to prior stock performance. Performance-vesting firms have significantly better subsequent operating performance than control firms. Abnormal accounting performance does not arise from earnings management or discernible differences in financial or investment policy. (JEL G34, J33, M52)
Intellectual Property and Americana, or Why IP Gets the Blues

This Essay examines briefly some “cultural models” of the twentieth century for insights applicable to “business models” of the twenty-first century. It does so in light of an early proposition of the law and economics of intellectual property law. Intellectual property lawyers got fascinated by “business models” around the time that two emerging trends converged roughly a decade ago. First, the distributed technical architecture of the Internet was realized commercially and socially via the original Napster file-sharing technology, which enabled massive unauthorized distribution of copyrighted musical recordings in digital form. From the standpoint of the businesses themselves, Napster and its legitimate cousins—eBay and Amazon.com— threatened to submerge the distinction between business models used by firms that created or distributed intellectual property, on the one hand, and the objects of intellectual property rights themselves, on the other. Second, and around the same time, the
Making System Dynamics Useful: A Personal Memoir*

During the many years that I was a founding member of the MIT Industrial Dynamics (ID) Group, later System Dynamics (SD), I focused on trying to apply SD concepts, tools and techniques to the real world and to having real impact. That orientation originated from listening to Jay Forrester as he related his personal history and communicated his personal values to our group and to me individually in his forceful and influential manner. Here I review that history and some lessons I learned. As this is a personal memoir I do not attempt to review the entire field, but concentrate entirely on my years of activity in the System Dynamics field from 1958 to 1993 and on the aspects most familiar to me, i.e. my own teaching and research and the work of Pugh-Roberts Associates, Inc.
Prosecutorial discretion, hidden costs, and the death penalty: The case of Los Angeles county

This article analyzes the processing of homicide cases in Los Angeles County from 1996 to 2008 to measure the time-costs of pursuing cases capitally and to examine how prosecutorial discretion in homicide charging is exercised in this jurisdiction. To answer these questions, we explore two related outcomes: (1) the odds of a “death-notice” filing and (2) time-to-resolution. According to Model 1, death-eligible cases with multiple special circumstances are significantly more likely to be prosecuted capitally than those with only one special circumstance. In light of the limited financial information regarding capital punishment at the county level, Models 2-4 utilize Cox Proportional Hazard regression to investigate the time-costs associated with death-eligibility. Estimates indicate that capital cases take significantly longer to reach resolution than noncapital cases. Furthermore, the filing of special circumstances increases survival time in noncapital cases. In addition to highlighting the time-costs of trying cases capitally, these findings reveal those associated with the prosecution of special circumstance cases, even when the death penalty is not ultimately sought. By examining capital costs at the county level, this analysis contributes to the ongoing policy reform debate in California that aims to address the state’s “dysfunctional” death penalty system.
Debt, Leases, Taxes, and the Endogeneity of Corporate Tax Status

We provide evidence that corporate tax status is endogenous to financing decisions, which induces a spurious relation between measures of financial policy and many commonly used tax proxies. Using a forward-looking estimate of before-financing corporate marginal tax rates, we document a negative relation between operating leases and tax rates, and a positive relation between debt levels and tax rates. This is the first unambiguous evidence supporting the hypothesis that low tax rate firms lease more, and have lower debt levels, than high tax rate firms. MANY THEORIES OF CAPITAL STRUCTURE imply that, all else equal, the incentive to use debt financing increases with a firm's marginal tax rate due to the tax deductibility of interest expense (e.g., Modigliani and Miller (1963), DeAngelo and Masulis (1980)). Conversely, leasing models generally predict that firms with low marginal tax rates employ relatively more leases than do firms with high marginal tax rates. The logic behind the leasinlg prediction is that leases allow for the transfer of tax shields from firms that cannot fully utilize the associated tax deduction (lessees) to firms that can (lessors) (e.g., Myers, Dill, and Bautista (1976), Smith and Wakeman (1985), Ross, Westerfield, and Jaffe (1996)). Despite these straightforward predictions, empirically testing for tax effects is difficult because a spurious relation exists between. the financing decision and many commonly used tax proxies. Specifically, both interest expense and lease payments are tax deductible. Thus, a firm that finances its operations with debt or leases reduces its taxable income, potentially lowering its expected marginal tax rate. If not properly addressed, this endogeneity of the tax rate can bias an experiment in favor of finding a negative
Constraints on Cold Magnetized Shocks in Gamma-Ray Bursts

We consider a model in which the ultrarelativistic jet in a gamma-ray burst (GRB) is cold and magnetically accelerated. We assume that the energy flux in the outflowing material is partially thermalized via internal shocks or a reverse shock, and we estimate the maximum amount of radiation that could be produced in such magnetized shocks. We compare this estimate with the available observational data on prompt γ -ray emission in GRBs. We find that, even with highly optimistic assumptions, the magnetized jet model is radiatively too inefficient to be consistent with observations. One way out is to assume that much of the magnetic energy in the post-shock, or even pre-shock, jet material is converted to particle thermal energy by some unspecified process, and then radiated. This can increase the radiative efficiency sufficiently to fit observations. Alternatively, jet acceleration may be driven by thermal pressure rather than magnetic fields. In this case, which corresponds to the traditional fireball model, sufficient prompt GRB emission could be produced either from shocks at a large radius or from the jet photosphere closer to the centre.
The joint effects of materiality thresholds and voluntary disclosure incentives on firms’ disclosure decisions

Abstract Under GAAP, SEC and exchange listing rules, managers must disclose material information. We construct a disclosure specification incorporating managers’ obligation to disclose material information and voluntary disclosure incentives. We demonstrate that tests of the incentives to voluntarily disclose information must recognize such information is often disclosed because of an underlying duty to disclose. Our empirical tests isolating the impact of materiality on firms’ disclosures have greater explanatory power over empirical tests that do not. Voluntary disclosure incentives better explain disclosure when the information is less likely to be material. Tests of voluntary disclosure theories ignoring materiality likely lead to incorrect inferences.
Hormone Replacement Therapy, or Just Eat More Meat: The Technological Hare vs. The Regulatory Tortoise

Is meat with its high fat content the real culprit, or is it the FDA-approved growth hormones, the same hormones that have been rejected in Europe, that should bear the blame? Why is eating less meat associated with a lower incidence of many types of cancer? Could it be chemical overload? American women are about five times more likely to develop breast cancer than are women in less developed countries.
Are more data always better for factor analysis

Factors estimated from large macroeconomic panels are being used in an increasing number of applications. However, little is known about how the size and the composition of the data affect the factor estimates. In this paper, we question whether it is possible to use more series to extract the factors, and yet the resulting factors are less useful for forecasting, and the answer is yes. Such a problem tends to arise when the idiosyncratic errors are cross-correlated. It can also arise if forecasting power is provided by a factor that is dominant in a small dataset but is a dominated factor in a larger dataset. In a real time forecasting exercise, we find that factors extracted from as few as 40 pre-screened series often yield satisfactory or even better results than using all 147 series. Weighting the data by their properties when constructing the factors also lead to improved forecasts. Our simulation analysis is unique in that special attention is paid to cross-correlated idiosyncratic errors, and we also allow the factors to have stronger loadings on some groups of series than others. It thus allows us to better understand the properties of the principal components estimator in empirical applications.
Life insurance policy termination and survivorship

Abstract There has been some work, e.g. Carriere (1998), Valdez (2000b) , and Valdez (2001), leading to the development of statistical models in understanding the mortality pattern of terminated policies. However, there is a scant literature on the empirical evidence of the true nature of the relationship between survivorship and persistency in life insurance. When a life insurance contract terminates due to voluntary non-payment of premiums, there is a possible hidden cost resulting from mortality antiselection. This refers to the tendency of policyholders who are generally healthy to select against the insurance company by voluntarily terminating their policies. In this article, we explore the empirical results of the survival pattern of terminated policies, using a follow-up study of the mortality of those policies that terminated from a portfolio of life insurance contracts. The data has been obtained from a major insurer which traced the mortality of their policies withdrawn, for purposes of understanding the mortality antiselection, by obtaining their dates of death from the Social Security Administration office. Using a representative sample of this follow-up data, we modeled the time until a policy lapses and its subsequent mortality pattern. We find some evidence of mortality selection and we consequentially examined the financial cost of policy termination.
Dominant designs, innovation shocks, and the follower's dilemma

A dominant design is thought to usher in a period of intense competition based on cost, causing an often-fierce industry shakeout. We aim to challenge the foundations of the dominant design literature, and develop new insights about the evolution of competition. We argue that strategic repositioning and elevated exit rates are often observed long before the emergence of a dominant design, and that a key cause is the introduction of a particular product for which demand is unexpectedly high (an �innovation shock�). This introduction creates a dilemma for followers, which we suggest is resolved based on followers' comparative adjustment costs. We test implications of these ideas on data from the early U.S. auto industry, treating Ford's Model T as the innovation shock.
The impact of the agencies on conventional fixed-rate mortgage yields

Between the early 1980s and 1986, the share of new conforming (under $153,000 in 1986) conventional fixed-rate mortgages (FRMs) that went into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage pools increased from under 5% to over 50%. The impact of these agencies moving from negligible participants to dominant players in this market is investigated in this study by an analysis of yields on 4,900 loans closed in California during May–June 1978 and 1,800 closed in May–June 1986.
Liquidity, the Value of the Firm, and Corporate Finance*

The theory of corporate finance has been based on the idea that a company's market value is determined mainly by just two variables: the company's expected aftertax operating cash flows or earnings, and the risk associated with producing them. The authors argue that there is another important factor affecting a company's value: the liquidity of its own securities, debt as well as equity. The paper supports this argument by reviewing the large and growing body of evidence showing that differences—and, perhaps even more important, sudden changes—in liquidity can have major effects on the pricing of corporate stocks and bonds or, equivalently, on investors' required returns for holding them. The authors also suggest that the liquidity of a company's securities can be managed by corporate policies and actions. For those companies whose value is likely to be increased by having more liquid securities—which is by no means true of all companies (for example, mature firms with little need for outside equity are likely to benefit from having more concentrated ownership and hence less liquidity)—management should consider actions such as reducing leverage and substituting dividends for stock repurchases as well as measures designed to increase the effectiveness of their disclosure and investor relations program and the size of their retail investor base.
When Actions Speak Louder Than Words: The Relevance of Subsequent Party Conduct to Treaty Interpretation

The way in which a treaty is implemented by the parties can provide important evidence as to its interpretation. This article proposes that subsequent party conduct is primarily relevant to the exercise of treaty interpretation where that conduct demonstrates the parties' agreement to the interpretation of the treaty's terms, and the agreed interpretation comes within the four corners of the treaty text. Otherwise, subsequent party conduct may produce other legal consequences such as through the operation of estoppel.
Who Did the Audit? Audit Quality and Disclosures of Other Audit Participants in PCAOB Filings

ABSTRACT: We empirically test whether audit quality is affected when part of an SEC issuer's audit is outsourced to auditors other than the principal auditor (“participating auditors”). We find a significantly negative market reaction and a significant decline in earnings response coefficients (ERCs) for experimental issuers disclosed for the first time as having participating auditors involved in their audits. However, we find no market reaction and no decline in ERCs for a matching sample of issuers that are not disclosed as using participating auditors, nor for issuers disclosed for the second or third time as using participating auditors. We also find actual audit quality as measured by absolute value of performance-matched discretionary accruals is lower for the experimental issuers, although we find no difference in audit fees paid by the experimental and matching issuers in a multivariate model. Our findings suggest that the PCAOB's proposed rule requiring disclosure of the use of other auditors i...
Recent tectonic activity on Pluto driven by phase changes in the ice shell

The New Horizons spacecraft has found evidence for geologic activity on the surface of Pluto, including extensional tectonic deformation of its water ice bedrock see Moore et al. (2016). One mechanism that could drive extensional tectonic activity is global surface expansion due to the partial freezing of an ocean. We use updated physical properties for Pluto and simulate its thermal evolution to understand the survival of a possible subsurface ocean. For thermal conductivities of rock less than 3 W m−1 K−1, an ocean forms and at least partially freezes, leading to recent extensional stresses in the ice shell. In scenarios where the ocean freezes and the ice shell is thicker than 260 km, ice II forms and causes global volume contraction. Since there is no evidence for recent compressional tectonic features, we argue that ice II has not formed and that Pluto's ocean has likely survived to present day.
Treating Offshore Submerged Lands as Public Lands: A Historical Perspective

When President Harry Truman proclaimed federal control over the United States’ continental shelf in 1945, he did so primarily to secure the energy resources—oil and gas—embedded in those submerged lands. Nevertheless, the mineral wealth of the continental shelf spurred two critical legal battles over their control and disposition: first, whether the federal government had any interest in the first three miles of continental shelf; and second, if so, whether the federal government had authority to regulate the continental shelf under traditional federal public land laws, such as the Minerals Leasing Act. Congress’s reactions to federal courts’ resolutions of these questions, embodied in 1953 in the Submerged Lands Act and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, continue to provide the foundations for state and federal management of the nation’s continental shelf and its energy resources. Nevertheless, the Outer Continental Shelf’s status as federal public lands remains ambiguous. This Article takes a historical approach to assessing that issue, reviewing the traditional definition of federal “public lands” and the historical context of the public lands issues that arose for the Outer Continental Shelf. It concludes that the Outer Continental Shelf, from a natural resources perspective, qualifies as the newest of the federal public lands, but it also acknowledges that—unlike for many other public lands—federal statutes repeatedly and consistently exclude the states from gaining ownership of those submerged lands.
Recognizing Reality-Unification of Official and Parallel Market Exchange Rates

Some central banks have maintained overvalued official exchange rates, while unable to ensure that supply of foreign exchange meets legitimate demand for current account transactions at that price. A parallel exchange rate market develops, in such circumstances; and when the spread between the official and parallel rates is both substantial and sustained, price levels in the economy typically reflect the parallel market exchange rate. “Recognizing reality” by allowing economic agents to use a market clearing rate benefits economic activity without necessarily leading to more inflation. But a unified, market-clearing exchange rate will not stabilize without a supportive fiscal and monetary context. A number of country case studies are included; my thanks to Jie Ren for pulling together all the data for the country case studies, and the production of the charts.
Wait-and-See or Step In? Dynamics of Interventions

We study when and how intervention to stop a project is optimally used in a repeated relationship between a principal and a policymaker. The policymaker is privately informed about his ability, where a higher ability policymaker has a lower cost of producing a good project. He also privately chooses how much effort to supply on the project. Before the project is completed, the principal receives a signal about its outcome and can intervene to stop it from taking effect. Intervention may prevent a bad outcome, but no intervention leads to better learning about the policymakerâ€™s ability. In the benchmark with observable effort, it is optimal to intervene only when the policymakerâ€™s reputation is sufficiently low. If effort is not observable, the optimal response features switching between intervention and no intervention on the equilibrium path. The model rationalizes intervention technologies implemented in practice by supranational agreements and governing coalitions.
COVID-19 and the CPI: Is Inflation Underestimated?

COVID-19 changed consumers’ spending patterns, making the CPI weights suddenly obsolete. In most regions, adjusting the CPI weights to account for the changes in spending patterns increases the estimate of inflation over the early months of the pandemic. Under-weighting of rising food prices and over-weighting of falling transport prices are the main causes of the underestimation of inflation. Updated CPI weights should be developed as soon as is feasible, but flux in spending patterns during the pandemic complicates the development as quickly as 2021 of weights that represent post-pandemic spending patterns.
Do FDI Firms Employ More Workers than Domestic Firms for Each Dollar of Assets

This paper studies whether FDI firms employ more workers than domestic firms for each dollar of assets. Using the Orbis database and its ownership structure information, we show that, in most economies, domestic firms tend to employ more workers per asset than FDI firms. The result remains robust across individual industries in the case study of the United Kingdom. The analysis of the switchers (ownership changes from domestic to foreign or vice versa) suggests that ownership changes do not have an immediate impact on the employment per asset. This result suggests that different patterns of employment per asset seem to come from technological differences rather than from different ownership structures.
Divisor Varieties of Symmetric Products

The geometry of divisors on algebraic curves has been studied extensively over the years. The foundational results of this Brill-Noether theory imply that on a general curve, the spaces parametrizing linear series (of fixed degree and dimension) are smooth, irreducible projective varieties of known dimension. For higher dimensional varieties, the story is less well understood. Our purpose in this paper is to study in detail one class of higher dimensional examples where one can hope for a quite detailed picture, namely (the spaces parametrizing) divisors on the symmetric product of a curve.
Localization and IDS Regularity in the Disordered Hubbard Model within Hartree–Fock Theory

Using the fractional moment method it is shown that, within the Hartree–Fock approximation for the disordered Hubbard Hamiltonian, weakly interacting Fermions at positive temperature exhibit localization, suitably defined as exponential decay of eigenfunction correlators. Our result holds in any dimension in the regime of large disorder and at any disorder in the one dimensional case. As a consequence of our methods, we are able to show Holder continuity of the integrated density of states with respect to energy, disorder and interaction.
Continuous Profit Maximization: A Study of Unconstrained Dr-Submodular Maximization

Profit maximization (PM) is to select a subset of users as seeds for viral marketing in online social networks, which balances between the cost and the profit from influence spread. We extend PM to formulate a continuous PM under the general marketing strategies (CPM-MS) problem, whose domain is on integer lattices. The objective function of our CPM-MS is dr-submodular, but nonmonotone. It is a typical case of unconstrained dr-submodular maximization (UDSM) problem, and taking it as a starting point, we study UDSM systematically in this article, which is very different from those studied by existing researchers. First, we introduce the lattice-based double greedy algorithm, which can obtain a constant approximation guarantee. However, there is a strict and unrealistic condition that requiring the objective value is nonnegative on the whole domain or else no theoretical bounds. Thus, we propose a lattice-based iterative pruning technique. It can shrink the search space effectively, thereby greatly increasing the possibility of satisfying the nonnegative objective function on this smaller domain without losing approximation ratio. Then, to overcome the difficulty to estimate the objective value of CPM-MS, we adopt reverse sampling strategies and combine it with lattice-based double greedy, including pruning, without losing its performance but reducing its running time. The entire process can be considered as a general framework to solve the UDSM problem, especially for applying to social networks. Finally, we conduct experiments on several real data sets to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithms.
Confining and channeling sound through coupled resonators

Confining sound is of significant importance for the manipulation and routing of acoustic waves. We propose a Helmholtz resonator (HR) based subwavelength sound channel formed at the interface of two metamaterials for this purpose. The confinement is quantified through (i) a substantial reduction of the pressure and (ii) an increase in a specific acoustic impedance (defined by the ratio of the local pressure to the sound velocity)—to a very large value outside the channel. The sound confinement is robust to frequency as well as spatial disorder at the interface, as long as the interface related edge mode is situated within the bandgap. A closed acoustic circuit was formed by introducing controlled disorder in the HR units at the corners, indicating the possibility of confining sound to a point.
The Galactic Chemical Evolution of Chlorine

We measured $^{35}$Cl abundances in 52 M giants with metallicities between -0.5 $<$ [Fe/H] $<$ 0.12. Abundances and atmospheric parameters were derived using infrared spectra from CSHELL on the IRTF and from optical echelle spectra. We measured Cl abundances by fitting a H$^{35}$Cl molecular feature at 3.6985 $\mu$m with synthetic spectra. We also measured the abundances of O, Ca, Ti, and Fe using atomic absorption lines. We find that the [Cl/Fe] ratio for our stars agrees with chemical evolution models of Cl and the [Cl/Ca] ratio is broadly consistent with the solar ratio over our metallicity range. Both indicate that Cl is primarily made in core-collapse supernovae with some contributions from Type Ia SN. We suggest other potential nucleosynthesis processes, such as the $\nu$-process, are not significant producers of Cl. Finally, we also find our Cl abundances are consistent with H II and planetary nebular abundances at a given oxygen abundance, although there is scatter in the data.