cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Funding a Grandchild's College Education

This article considers various techniques that grandparents might use in helping fund their grandchildren's college education. The techniques analyzed include outright gifts, college savings bonds (both state and federal), prepaid tuition plans, so-called section 529 college savings plans, and education IRAs. Each technique is analyzed from the following perspectives: income taxation, gift and estate taxes, control over the funds, eligibility implications for Medicaid long-term care benefits, and impact on needs-based financial aid.
The politics of accounting standard-setting: A review of empirical research

We provide an overview of the empirical literature on the politics of accounting standard-setting, focusing on the US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). Although it is clear from casual observation that politics sometimes plays a first-order role in the determination of accounting standards, we argue that more can be done to improve our understanding of this important topic. Based on our review, we outline what we see to be a number of potentially fruitful directions for future research.
COLLECTIVE PREFERENCES, OBLIGATIONS, AND RATIONAL CHOICE

Can teams and other collectivities have preferences of their own, preferences that are not in some way reducible to the personal preferences of their members? In short, are collective preferences possible? In everyday life people speak easily of what we prefer, where what is at issue seems to be a collective preference. This is suggested by the acceptability of such remarks as ‘My ideal walk would be . . . along rougher and less well-marked paths than we prefer as a family’. One can imagine, indeed, that each member of a given family prefers something other than what the family prefers. What, then, do the collective preferences of everyday understanding amount to?
Informed Traders and Balanced Books

We explore sports gambler and bookmaker behavior by examining the pregame price movements of sports contracts listed on the Tradesports betting exchange. The vast majority of prior gambling studies that examine the price efficiency of bookmaker-style betting markets and the associated informational processing ability of bettors rely on the balanced book assumption. But, on Tradesports, bet prices are directly observable and therefore we are not required to assume that the point spreads set by bookmakers are a reliable proxy for the market’s dollar-weighted vote on contest outcome. We find that pregame NBA and NFL contract price movements are reliable predictors of future contract values. The magnitude of these movements is sufficient to remove the possibility of profit-taking by tipoff/kickoff. Results are consistent with the notion that in bookmaker-style NBA betting markets there exist informed traders and that lines are set at levels that balance wagers on either side of the bet. However, NFL bookmakers may allow (or perhaps encourage) imbalanced wagering in order to exploit relatively unskilled NFL bettors.
Extracurricular International Criminal Law

This article unpacks the jurisprudential footprints of international criminal courts and tribunals in domestic civil litigation in the United States conducted under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). The ATS allows victims of human rights abuses to file tort-based lawsuits for violations of the laws of nations. While diverse, citations to international cases and materials in ATS adjudication cluster around three areas: (1) aiding and abetting as a mode of liability; (2) substantive legal elements of genocide and crimes against humanity; and (3) the availability of corporate liability. The limited capacity of international criminal courts and tribunals portends that domestic tort claims as avenues for redress of systematic human rights abuses will likely grow in number. The experiences of US courts of general jurisdiction as receivers of international criminal law instruct upon broader patterns of transnational legal migration and reveal an unanticipated extracurricular legacy of international criminal courts and tribunals.
Financial constraints and future tax outcome volatility

We investigate whether variation in the volatility of tax outcomes across firms is associated with the extent of financial constraints. We document a positive association between current‐period financial constraints and the volatility of cash effective tax rates in subsequent periods. We find that this positive association becomes more pronounced as firms avoid more cash taxes. These results suggest that as financial constraints increase, the benefits of cash tax savings more likely outweigh the costs associated with more volatile tax outcomes. Recent research documents a negative association between financial constraints and the level of cash taxes paid. Our evidence suggests that tax strategies adopted by more financially constrained firms to increase cash tax savings come at the price of more volatile future tax rates.
Source of Health Insurance Coverage and Employment Survival Among Newly Disabled Workers: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study

We use prospective longitudinal data on newly disabled older workers to examine the effect of employer sponsorship of health insurance (ESHI) on post-onset employment and disability insurance claiming. We compare outcomes of workers with ESHI and no access to spousal coverage prior to onset with outcomes of two comparison groups: individuals with ESHI who also have access to spousal coverage and those who are covered by a spouse’s employer prior to onset. We find evidence of “employment lock” among the 20 percent of individuals whose disabilities do not impact their immediate physical capacity but are associated with high medical costs.
Land Abundance, Interest/Profit Rates, and Nineteenth-Century American and British Technology

Virtually all sectors of the nineteenth-century American economy were less capital-intensive than their British counterparts. This resulted from persistently higher American interest/profit rates, due in turn to American land abundance. The paper adduces the evidence in support of these propositions, and explores their interrelationships through the use of a linear model inspired by the writings of David Ricardo.
Responses to Entry in Multi-Sided Markets: The Impact of Craigslist on Local Newspapers

How do firms respond to entry in multi-sided markets? We address this question by studying the impact of Craigslist, a website providing classified-advertising services, on local U.S. newspapers. We exploit temporal and geographical variation in Craigslist's entry to show that newspapers with greater reliance on classified-ad revenue experience a larger drop in classified-ad rates after Craigslist's entry. The impact of Craigslist's entry on the classified-ad side appears to propagate to other sides of the newspapers' market. On the subscriber side, these newspapers experience an increase in subscription prices, a decrease in circulation, and an increase in differentiation from each other. On the display-ad side, affected newspapers experience a decrease in display-ad rates. We also find evidence that affected newspapers are less likely to make their content available online. Finally, we estimate that Craigslist's entry leads to $5.0 billion year 2000 dollars in savings to classified-ad buyers during 2000--2007. This paper was accepted by Sandra Slaughter, information systems.
Vultures, Hyenas, and African Debt: Private Equity and Zambia (Private Equity Symposium)

A 2007 U.K. court case involving Donegal, a private equity fund, and the Republic of Zambia, has contributed to an ongoing debate about the operation of so-called vulture funds in African and other developing countries. Donegal sued Zambia for more than fifty-five million U.S. dollars in connection with a debt owed by Zambia to Romania for Zambia’s acquisition of agricultural machinery from Romania pursuant to a credit agreement dated April 17, 1979. Donegal acquired the Zambian debt from Romania in 1999 at some eleven percent of face value. Although the Donegal court explicitly limited its scrutiny to the legal questions raised by the case rather than questions of morality and humanity, the moral and ethical considerations connected with the activities of vulture investors are significant. This is particularly true in Africa, which in the post-colonial period has experienced poor economic performance in both absolute and relative terms, as well as significant and even increasing levels of poverty. Poverty has exacerbated political instability in Africa. African institutional, political, and economic contexts have bearing on the operation of so-called 'vulture funds', which are typically private equity or hedge funds that seek to profit by repurchasing debt at a discount and then collecting from the debtor country at face value or an even higher amount. Commercial transactions such as the Donegal-Zambia relationship should be considered in light of the realities of such contexts.
MNCs, Rents, and Corruption: Evidence from China

How does multinational corporation (MNC) activity affect corruption in developing countries? The existing literature tends to suggest that economic integration helps reduce corruption, as it increases market competition and efficiency and promotes the diffusion of good governance. In this article, I argue that such a generalization oversimplifies the consequences of MNC activity in host countries. The entry and presence of MNCs may contribute to rent creation in developing countries, thereby leading to a high level of corruption. To test this argument, I conduct a case study on China and draw from original data of filed corruption cases to construct measures of corruption. I find that provinces with more MNC activity are strongly associated with more corruption. The results are robust and consistent when possible endogeneity, law enforcement, and alternative measures of corruption are considered. This finding has important implications for domestic governance in developing countries.
Marriage Age, Social Status, and Intergenerational Effects in Uganda

This study examines whether Ugandan women who marry at younger ages fare differently on a wide range of later-life outcomes than women who marry at later ages. Using a nationally representative data set, I identify the plausibly causal impacts of women’s marriage age by using age at menarche as an instrumental variable. Results indicate that a one-year delay in marriage for Ugandan women leads to higher educational attainment (0.5–0.75 years), literacy (10 percentage points), and labor force participation (8 percentage points). I also explore intergenerational effects of later marriage and find that the children of mothers who marry later have higher BMI (0.11 kg/m2) and hemoglobin levels (0.18 g/dl), and they are also less likely to be anemic (4 percentage points). Finally, I present evidence suggesting that the observed effects might be mediated through an enhancement of women’s agency within their household and positive assortative matching in the marriage market. By pointing to the beneficial consequences of delaying marriage, this research calls for concerted policy action to prevent child marriage.
The Conservatism Principle and the Asymmetric Timeliness of Earnings: An Event-Based Approach*

We test the asymmetric timeliness hypothesis by using information in extreme events as a measure of good/bad news. Our focus on extreme events is motivated by two arguments. First, the accounting concept of materiality in conjunction with litigation risk influences managers and auditors to make more conservative choices with respect to material events. Second, focusing on extreme shocks minimizes the probability that accounting slack may obscure the effect of asymmetric timeliness (Beaver and Ryan 2005). We identify individual events using short-window extreme returns, since long-window returns would aggregate the effect of multiple events and thus limit our ability to detect the asymmetry. Taken together, these features of our research design provide a more powerful test of asymmetric timeliness. Consistent with prior studies, we document that the correlation between bad news and concurrent earnings is significantly higher than that between good news and concurrent earnings. Our analysis of extreme events also enables us to document higher correlation of good news with earnings two or more quarters ahead. This is in contrast to prior studies that were unable to document asymmetry in the relation between returns and subsequent earnings in the opposite direction to that between returns and concurrent earnings. Our paper contributes to the growing literature on conservatism by modifying the Basu methodology to enhance the power of the test of asymmetric timeliness.
On the Value of Commitment and Availability Guarantees When Selling to Strategic Consumers

This paper studies the role of product availability in attracting consumer demand. We start with a newsvendor model, but additionally assume that stockouts are costly to consumers. The seller sets an observable price and an unobservable stocking quantity. Consumers anticipate the likelihood of stockouts and determine whether to visit the seller. We characterize the rational expectations equilibrium in this game. We propose two strategies that the seller can use to improve profits: (i) commitment (i.e., the seller, ex ante, commits to a particular quantity) and (ii) availability guarantees (i.e., the seller promises to compensate consumers, ex post, if the product is out of stock). Interestingly, the seller has an incentive to overcompensate consumers during stockouts, relative to the first-best benchmark under which social welfare is maximized. We find that first-best outcomes do not arise in equilibrium, but can be supported when the seller uses a combination of commitment and availability guarantees. Finally, we examine the robustness of these conclusions by extending our analysis to incorporate dynamic learning, multiple products, and consumer heterogeneity.
The Mystery and the Mastery of the Judicial Power

What do law clerks do at the Supreme Court? One day this question took me entirely by surprise. Not because of its substance: I have repeatedly answered this question ever since Justice Clarence Thomas invited me to serve as his clerk for October Term 1992. As with so much else in law, context had triumphed over content. While teaching my first-year legislation class at the University of Minnesota, I asked a student to resolve the apparent tension between Justice Antonin Scalia's willingness to consult The Federalist Papers as the "legislative history" of the United States Constitution and Justice Scalia's outspoken opposition to the use of ordinary legislative history in statutory interpretation. Perhaps because Justice Scalia simply puts greater trust in James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay than he does in the youthful legislative assistants who draft most of the committee reports on Capitol Hill? The student struck back, and furiously. What, he asked, of the reliance the entire legal profession places on Supreme Court opinions entrusted to similarly youthful law clerks? If legislative and judicial documents are merely work product or original works of authorship produced by the youthful, anonymous, and unaccountable agents of House members, Senators, and Supreme Court Justices, can anyone trust what passes for law around here?
Budgeting, Psychological Contracts, and Budgetary Misreporting

This study examines the effect of psychological contract breach on budgetary misreporting. Psychological contracts are mental models or schemas that govern how employees understand their exchange r...
Examiner citations, applicant citations, and the private value of patents

Abstract Examiner citations to a patent are stronger predictors than applicant citations of a widely used measure of patent value: whether a patent has been (or will be) renewed.
Are special items informative about future profit margins

Most proponents of using profit margins in forecasting models suggest that unusual items be removed from income to create a core profit margin. We investigate the appropriateness of this assumption over short and long horizons. Specifically, we explore the association between profit margins and special items over windows of increasing length, from one to five years. We find that the association between past special items and future profit margins differs markedly between firms with low and high core profitability. For low profitability firms, past special items have no association with future profit margins, even over windows of five years. In sharp contrast, for high profitability firms, negative special items are associated with lower future profit margins. This suggests that some firms maintain high core profitability by becoming serial chargers and special items differ from core earnings only to the extent that the allocation process induces timing errors in reported earnings.
Why Are Firms Rigid? A General Framework and Empirical Tests

We present a general framework for understanding why firms are slow to make major strategic changes in a wide range of empirical settings. We then apply this framework to investigate, more specifically, the relationship between firm age and scope in hedge funds. Our empirical analyses demonstrate that younger hedge funds outperform older hedge funds both before and after the launch of a new fund. Based on our framework, these results suggest that age-based rigidity in hedge funds is more attributable to internal political frictions that influence project selection than to constraints associated with exchange partners or implementation costs. We conclude by discussing how our framework can be used to identify the dominant source of rigidity in other contexts.
Time-Varying Margin Requirements and Optimal Portfolio Choice

This paper studies the optimal consumption and portfolio problem of an investor with recursive preferences who is subject to time-varying margin requirements. The level of the requirements at each moment is determined by contemporaneous volatility of returns, which is stochastic and may have jumps. I show that the nonstandard hedging demand produced by margin requirements increases with their persistence and volatility. However, for realistic values of parameters, the hedging demand is small even in the presence of jumps, and contemporaneous jumps in prices have a much stronger effect on optimal portfolio than jumps in constraints.
A Therapeutic Jurisprudence Approach to Dealing with Coercion in the Mental Health System

This article describes the approach of therapeutic jurisprudence, an interdisciplinary form of legal scholarship that has a law reform agenda. It then illustrates the approach by applying it to the question of when coercion might be appropriate in the area of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization and treatment and, when appropriate, how clinicians, judges, and lawyers should act so as to minimize coercion's potentially anti-therapeutic effects and maximize the therapeutic potential of law in this area. The article considers areas of psychological research involving the relative effectiveness of coercion and voluntary choice in the area of hospitalization and treatment, and on what makes patients feel coerced in these contexts. The article seeks to reshape legal rules and legal and clinical practices relating to involuntary hospitalization and treatment to reflect a therapeutic jurisprudence orientation.
The Supply of Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosures Among U.S. Firms

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a dramatically expanding area of activity for managers and academics. Consumer demand for responsibly produced and fair trade goods is swelling, resulting in increased demands for CSR activity and information. Assets under professional management and invested with a social responsibility focus have also grown dramatically over the last 10 years. Investors choosing social responsibility investment strategies require access to information not provided through traditional financial statements and analyses. At the same time, a group of mainstream institutional investors has encouraged a movement to incorporate environmental, social, and governance information into equity analysis, and multi-stakeholder groups have supported enhanced business reporting on these issues. The majority of research in this area has been performed on European and Australian firms. We expand on this literature by exploring the CSR disclosure practices of a size- and industry-stratified sample of 50 publicly traded U.S. firms, performing a content analysis on the complete identifiable public information portfolio provided by these firms during 2004. CSR activity was disclosed by most firms in the sample, and was included in nearly half of public disclosures made during that year by the sample firms. Areas of particular emphasis are community matters, health and safety, diversity and human resources (HR) matters, and environmental programs. The primary venues of disclosure are mass media releases such as corporate websites and press releases, followed closely by disclosures contained in mandatory filings. Consistent with prior research, we identify industry effects in terms of content, emphasis, and reporting format choices. Unlike prior research, we can offer only mixed evidence on the existence of a size effect. The disclosure frequency and emphasis is significantly different for the largest one-fifth of the firms, but no identifiable trends are present within the rest of the sample. There are, however, identifiable size effects with respect to reporting format choice. Use of websites is positively related to firm size, while the use of mandatory filings is negatively related to firm size. Finally, and also consistent with prior literature, we document a generally self-laudatory tone in the content of CSR disclosures for the sample firms.
Ideological Orientations, LGBT Contact, and Formation of LGBT Policy Position*

Objective We seek to understand how political ideology and LGBT contact experiences exert influence on an individual's level of LGBT policy support. Methods We apply multivariate regression and posterior simulation‐based conditional process analysis using data collected from a recent national survey of 1,500 American adults. Results We find that LGBT contact moderates the effects of individuals’ political ideology on the formation of their LGBT policy preference in distinctive ways. Furthermore, such analytical results hold nuanced differences depending on the specific topic of LGBT policy in consideration. Conclusion These findings are significant in terms of previous understandings of the contact theory of attitude change. Regarding the formation of policy positions, it is not simply contact, ideology, or the combination of the two that is influential. Instead, there appears to be a distinction in attitudinal valence toward what a specific policy represents, and thus the support for LGBT equality in that domain.
Job Referral Networks and the Determination of Earnings in Local Labor Markets

Despite their documented importance in the labor market, little is known about how workers use social networks to find jobs and their resulting effect on earnings. I use geographically detailed US employer-employee data to infer the role of social networks in connecting workers to jobs in high-paying firms. To identify social interactions in job search, I exploit variation in social network quality within small neighborhoods. Workers are more likely to change jobs, and more likely to move to a higher-paying firm, when their neighbors are employed in high-paying firms. Furthermore, local referral networks help match high-ability workers to high-paying firms.
Hostile Resistance to Hedge Fund Activism

When facing hedge fund activists, target firms often fight back. Targets with agency problems and those confronting the threat of investor coordination frequently engage in hostile resistance by implementing governance changes associated with managerial entrenchment. The market negatively responds to hostile resistance, and unless hedge funds counterresist, these campaigns have worse operating performance, faster activist exit, and fewer mergers than do campaigns without hostile target resistance. By contrast, when hedge funds counterresist with proxy fights, lawsuits, or unsolicited tender offers, the impact of hostile target resistance is reversed, and these campaigns have similar outcomes to campaigns without hostile target resistance. Received September 8, 2016; editorial decision March 18, 2018 by Editor Francesca Cornelli.
Quadratic election law

The standard form of electoral system in the United States—plurality voting with one person, one vote—suffers from countless defects, many of which stem from its failure to enable people to register the intensity of their preferences for political outcomes when they vote. Quadratic voting, an elegant alternative system proposed by Glen Weyl, provides a theoretically attractive solution to this problem but is an awkward fit with America’s legal and political traditions. We identify the legal barriers to the adoption of quadratic voting, discuss modified versions that could pass muster, and show how even a modified version would address many of the pathologies of the existing system.
Idiosyncratic Volatility and the Cross Section of Expected Returns

This paper examines the cross-sectional relation between idiosyncratic volatility and expected stock returns. The results indicate that i) the data frequency used to estimate idiosyncratic volatility, ii) the weighting scheme used to compute average portfolio returns, iii) the breakpoints utilized to sort stocks into quintile portfolios, and iv) using a screen for size, price, and liquidity play critical roles in determining the existence and significance of a relation between idiosyncratic risk and the cross section of expected returns. Portfoliolevel analyses based on two different measures of idiosyncratic volatility (estimated using daily and monthly data), three weighting schemes (value-weighted, equal-weighted, inverse volatility-weighted), three breakpoints (CRSP, NYSE, equal market share), and two different samples (NYSE/AMEX/NASDAQ and NYSE) indicate that no robustly significant relation exists between idiosyncratic volatility and expected returns.
Evolutionary stability in a reputational model of bargaining

Abstract A large and growing literature on reputation in games builds on the insight that the possibility of one or more players being boundedly rational can have significant effects on equilibrium behavior. This literature leaves unexplained the presence of behavioral players in the first place, as well as the particular forms of irrationality assumed and the population shares of the various types. In this paper we endogenize departures from rationality on the basis of an evolutionary stability criterion, under the assumption that rational players incur a cost which reflects the greater sophistication of their behavior. This cost may be arbitrarily small. Within the context of a reputational model of bargaining, we show that evolutionary stability necessitates the presence of behavioral players. It also places significant joint restrictions on the set of behavioral types that can coexist, their respective population shares, and the long run population share of rational players.
Stochastic weighted graphs: Flexible model specification and simulation

Abstract In most domains of network analysis researchers consider networks that arise in nature with weighted edges. Such networks are routinely dichotomized in the interest of using available methods for statistical inference with networks. The generalized exponential random graph model (GERGM) is a recently proposed method used to simulate and model the edges of a weighted graph. The GERGM specifies a joint distribution for an exponential family of graphs with continuous-valued edge weights. However, current estimation algorithms for the GERGM only allow inference on a restricted family of model specifications. To address this issue, we develop a Metropolis–Hastings method that can be used to estimate any GERGM specification, thereby significantly extending the family of weighted graphs that can be modeled with the GERGM. We show that new flexible model specifications are capable of avoiding likelihood degeneracy and efficiently capturing network structure in applications where such models were not previously available. We demonstrate the utility of this new class of GERGMs through application to two real network data sets, and we further assess the effectiveness of our proposed methodology by simulating non-degenerate model specifications from the well-studied two-stars model. A working R version of the GERGM code is available in the supplement and is incorporated in the GERGM CRAN package.
Discrimination as a Competitive Device: The Case of Local Television News

Previous studies of discrimination have explored the role that customer prejudice may play in lowering the marginal revenue product of minority employees and, hence, lowering their equilibrium wages. I observe that variation in these types of customer preferences creates an incentive for firms to respond strategically by engaging in product differentiation via the characteristics of their employees. Analysis of data collected for local television news stations supports the predictions of this model of "competitive discrimination." There is a negative correlation between the racial, gender, and age compositions of competing news stations. Moreover, Nielsen ratings for station broadcasts indicate that viewers of stations with more black employees are less discriminatory than viewers of stations with fewer blacks. A similar result is found when examining the age and gender composition of employees.
Scaling of causal neural avalanches in a neutral model

The authors show that the scaling of causal neural avalanches in the neutral contact process is consistent with the scaling hypothesis near a critical point.
Guided Mid-IR and Near-IR Light within a Hybrid Hyperbolic-Material/Silicon Waveguide Heterostructure.

Silicon waveguides have enabled large-scale manipulation and processing of near-infrared optical signals on chip. Yet, expanding the bandwidth of guided waves to other frequencies will further increase the functionality of silicon as a photonics platform. Frequency multiplexing by integrating additional architectures is one approach to the problem, but this is challenging to design and integrate within the existing form factor due to scaling with the free-space wavelength. This paper demonstrates that a hexagonal boron nitride (hBN)/silicon hybrid waveguide can simultaneously enable dual-band operation at both mid-infrared (6.5-7.0 µm) and telecom (1.55 µm) frequencies, respectively. The device is realized via the lithography-free transfer of hBN onto a silicon waveguide, maintaining near-infrared operation. In addition, mid-infrared waveguiding of the hyperbolic phonon polaritons (HPhPs) supported in hBN is induced by the index contrast between the silicon waveguide and the surrounding air underneath the hBN, thereby eliminating the need for deleterious etching of the hyperbolic medium. The behavior of HPhP waveguiding in both straight and curved trajectories is validated within an analytical waveguide theoretical framework. This exemplifies a generalizable approach based on integrating hyperbolic media with silicon photonics for realizing frequency multiplexing in on-chip photonic systems.
Civil Engineering Education: A Preparation for Management

Many civil engineers, as they advance in their professional careers, become increasingly involved in technical and general management. The present trend towards quantitative management methods, which makes use of mathematical modeling and similar analytical techniques, is of particular interest to the management-oriented engineer. The paper reviews the educational preparation for management which is supplied through the typical CE undergraduate curriculum, and is made to the current ASCE policy, as evidenced by the ASCE Fellowships in Civil Engineering Management.
A Systematic Topology Optimization Approach for Optimal Stiffener Design

A systematic topology optimization based approach is proposed to design the optimal stiffener of three-dimensional shell/plate structures for static and eigenvalue problems. Optimal stiffener design involves the determination of the best location and orientation. In this paper, the stiffener location problem is solved by a microstructure-based design domain method and the orientation problem is modelled as an optimization orientation problem of equivalent orthotropic materials, which is solved by a newly developed energy-based method. Examples are presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed approach.
The fragmentation spectrum from space-time reciprocity

Analyzing the single inclusive annihilation spectrum of charged hadrons in e+e− collisions, I confront the hadronization hypothesis of local parton-hadron duality with a systematic resummation of the dependence on the small energy fraction. This resummation is based on the reciprocity between time-like and space-like splitting processes in 4 − 2ϵ-dimensions, which I extend to resum all the soft terms of the cross-section for inclusive jet production. Under the local-parton-hadron duality hypothesis, the resulting distribution of jets essentially determines the spectrum of hadrons as the jet radius goes to zero. Thus I take the resummed perturbative jet function as the non-perturbative fragmentation function with an effective infra-red coupling. I find excellent agreement with data, and comment on the mixed leading log approximation previously used to justify local parton-hadron duality.
SABRE populates ER domains essential for cell plate maturation and cell expansion influencing cell and tissue patterning

SABRE, which is found throughout eukaryotes and was originally identified in plants, mediates cell expansion, division plane orientation, and planar polarity in plants. How and where SABRE mediates these processes remain open questions. We deleted SABRE in Physcomitrium patens, an excellent model for cell biology. SABRE null mutants were stunted, similar to phenotypes in seed plants. Additionally, polarized growing cells were delayed in cytokinesis, sometimes resulting in catastrophic failures. A functional SABRE fluorescent fusion protein localized to dynamic puncta on regions of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) during interphase and at the cell plate during cell division. Without SABRE, cells accumulated ER aggregates and the ER abnormally buckled along the developing cell plate. Notably, callose deposition was delayed in ∆sabre, and in cells that failed to divide, abnormal callose accumulations formed at the cell plate. Our findings revealed a surprising and fundamental role for the ER in cell plate maturation.
Discrimination against the Unhealthy in Health Insurance

What ends do we expect health insurance to serve in our society? This unresolved question, which one scholar aptly terms “the struggle for the soul of health insurance” arises today in many settings. This struggle pits a “social solidarity” vision of health coverage (by which insurance permits the risk of medical costs to be spread broadly across society, so that healthy persons subsidize the care received by unhealthy persons) against an individualistic vision of health coverage (by which insurance enables each person to pay an amount that reflects as closely as possible his own anticipated cost of care). The tension between these two views may emerge, for example, in debates over proposals to require community rating of insurance premiums or to mandate that insurers cover particular services. Laws that prohibit discrimination in health insurance also highlight this tension. These laws—whether they apply directly to insurance issuers or to employers providing health insurance coverage as an employment benefit—seem to embody the social solidarity view that persons with particular traits should neither be denied a place in the insurance pool nor be subjected to inferior coverage. The application of these antidiscrimination laws to health insurance occupies center stage in controversies over whether employers are required to provide prescription contraceptive coverage for their employees and whether
Tornado-like vortices in the quasi-cyclostrophic regime of Coriolis-centrifugal convection

Coriolis-centrifugal convection ( C3) in a cylindrical domain constitutes an idealised model of tornadic storms, where the rotating cylinder represents the mesocyclone of a supercell thunderstorm. ...
Intergenerational effects of improving women’s property rights: evidence from India

This paper analyzes the intergenerational effects following the positive changes in women’s inheritance rights in India. Using the Indian Human Development Survey data for rural India and a differe...
Random Matrix Theory of the Isospectral twirling

In this paper, we present a systematic construction of probes into the dynamics of isospectral ensembles of Hamiltonians by the notion of Isospectral twirling, expanding the scopes and methods of ref.[1]. The relevant ensembles of Hamiltonians are those defined by salient spectral probability distributions. The Gaussian Unitary Ensembles (GUE) describes a class of quantum chaotic Hamiltonians, while spectra corresponding to the Poisson and Gaussian Diagonal Ensemble (GDE) describe non chaotic, integrable dynamics. We compute the Isospectral twirling of several classes of important quantities in the analysis of quantum many-body systems: Frame potentials, Loschmidt Echos, OTOCS, Entanglement, Tripartite mutual information, coherence, distance to equilibrium states, work in quantum batteries and extension to CP-maps. Moreover, we perform averages in these ensembles by random matrix theory and show how these quantities clearly separate chaotic quantum dynamics from non chaotic ones.
Stationary axisymmetric black holes with matter

We provide a geometric framework for the construction of non-vacuum black holes whose metrics are stationary and axisymmetric. Under suitable assumptions we show that the Einstein equations reduce to an Einstein-harmonic map type system and analyze the compatibility of the resulting equations. This framework will be fundamental to our forthcoming construction of metric-stationary axisymmetric bifurcations of Kerr solving the Einstein--Klein--Gordon system, and as such, we include specializations of all of our formulas to the case of a time-periodic massive scalar field.
Sharing Native Advertising on Twitter: Content Analyses Examining Disclosure Practices and Their Inoculating Influence

Based upon a 3-year data set of Tweets linking to native advertising from leading U.S. news publications, this study provides human content analyses (n = 1,527) of the practice of native advertisin...
RNAStructViz: Graphical base pairing analysis.

SUMMARY We present a new graphical tool for RNA secondary structure analysis. The central feature is the ability to visually compare/contrast up to three base pairing configurations for a given sequence in a compact, standardized circular arc diagram layout. This is complemented by a built-in CT-style file viewer and radial layout substructure viewer which are directly linked to the arc diagram window via the zoom selection tool. Additional functionality includes the computation of some numerical information, and the ability to export images and data for later use. This tool should be of use to researchers seeking to better understand similarities and differences between structural alternatives for an RNA sequence. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION https://github.com/gtDMMB/RNAStructViz/wiki.
Ransomware activity and blockchain congestion

Abstract I examine blockchain congestion episodes caused by more than 4,400 triggers for ransomware attacks over a two-year period. When demand for settlement exceeds blockchain capacity, blockchain users engage in fee competition to prioritize their transaction settlement. A typical surge in ransomware activity causes transaction fees to increase by 2.1% and up to 28% in extreme cases. Consistent with theory literature, some users forgo blockchain settlement when transaction fees increase. An event study around an extreme spike in ransomware activity supports the findings of the main analysis.
Uncovering transcriptional dark matter via gene annotation independent single-cell RNA sequencing analysis.

Conventional scRNA-seq expression analyses rely on the availability of a high quality genome annotation. Yet, as we show here with scRNA-seq experiments and analyses spanning human, mouse, chicken, mole rat, lemur and sea urchin, genome annotations are often incomplete, in particular for organisms that are not routinely studied. To overcome this hurdle, we created a scRNA-seq analysis routine that recovers biologically relevant transcriptional activity beyond the scope of the best available genome annotation by performing scRNA-seq analysis on any region in the genome for which transcriptional products are detected. Our tool generates a single-cell expression matrix for all transcriptionally active regions (TARs), performs single-cell TAR expression analysis to identify biologically significant TARs, and then annotates TARs using gene homology analysis. This procedure uses single-cell expression analyses as a filter to direct annotation efforts to biologically significant transcripts and thereby uncovers biology to which scRNA-seq would otherwise be in the dark. Conventional single-cell RNA sequencing analysis rely on genome annotations that may be incomplete or inaccurate especially for understudied organisms. Here the authors present a bioinformatic tool that leverages single-cell data to uncover biologically relevant transcripts beyond the best available genome annotation.
An Empirical Bargaining Model with Left-Digit Bias: A Study on Auto Loan Monthly Payments

This paper studies price bargaining when both parties have left-digit bias when processing numbers. The empirical analysis focuses on the auto finance market in the United States, using a large dat...
Focusing microparticles in a microfluidic channel with ferrofluids

We report a novel on-chip microparticles focusing technique using stable magnetic nanoparticles suspension (i.e., ferrofluids). The principle of focusing is based on magnetic buoyancy forces exerted on non-magnetic particles within ferrofluids under non-uniform magnetic field. The design, modeling, fabrication, and characterization of the focusing scheme are presented. Focusing of 4.8, 5.8, and 7.3 μm microparticles at various flow rates are demonstrated in a microfluidic channel. Our scheme is simple, low-cost, and label-free compared to other existing techniques.
Publics, Scientists and the State: Mapping the Global Human Genome Editing Controversy

Literature on scientific controversies has inadequately attended to the impact of globalization and, more specifically, the emergence of China as a leader in scientific research. To bridge this gap in the literature, this article develops a theoretical framework to analyse global scientific controversies surrounding research in China. The framework highlights the existence of four overlapping discursive arenas: China's national public sphere and national expert sphere, the transnational public sphere and the transnational expert sphere. It then examines the struggles over inclusion/exclusion and publicity within these spheres as well as the within- and across-sphere effects of such struggles. Empirically, the article analyses the human genome editing controversy surrounding research conducted by scientists in China between 2015 and 2019. It shows how elite scientists negotiated expert–public relationships within and across the national and transnational expert spheres, how unexpected disruption at the nexus of the four spheres disrupted expert–public relationships as envisioned by elite experts, and how the Chinese state intervened to redraw the boundary between openness and secrecy at both national and transnational levels.
Histogram Preserving Image Transformations

Histograms are used to analyze and index images. They have been found experimentally to have low sensitivity to certain types of image morphisms, for example, viewpoint changes and object deformations. The precise effect of these image morphisms on the histogram, however, has not been studied. In this work we derive the complete class of local transformations that preserve or scale the magnitude of the histogram of all images. We also derive a more general class of local transformations that preserve the histogram relative to a particular image. To achieve this, the transformations are represented as solutions to families of vector fields acting on the image. The local effect of fixed points of the fields on the histograms is also analyzed. The analytical results are verified with several examples. We also discuss several applications and the significance of these transformations for histogram indexing.
Physics-Guided Machine Learning for Scientific Discovery: An Application in Simulating Lake Temperature Profiles

Physics-based models are often used to study engineering and environmental systems. The ability to model these systems is the key to achieving our future environmental sustainability and improving the quality of human life. This article focuses on simulating lake water temperature, which is critical for understanding the impact of changing climate on aquatic ecosystems and assisting in aquatic resource management decisions. General Lake Model (GLM) is a state-of-the-art physics-based model used for addressing such problems. However, like other physics-based models used for studying scientific and engineering systems, it has several well-known limitations due to simplified representations of the physical processes being modeled or challenges in selecting appropriate parameters. While state-of-the-art machine learning models can sometimes outperform physics-based models given ample amount of training data, they can produce results that are physically inconsistent. This article proposes a physics-guided recurrent neural network model (PGRNN) that combines RNNs and physics-based models to leverage their complementary strengths and improves the modeling of physical processes. Specifically, we show that a PGRNN can improve prediction accuracy over that of physics-based models (by over 20% even with very little training data), while generating outputs consistent with physical laws. An important aspect of our PGRNN approach lies in its ability to incorporate the knowledge encoded in physics-based models. This allows training the PGRNN model using very few true observed data while also ensuring high prediction accuracy. Although we present and evaluate this methodology in the context of modeling the dynamics of temperature in lakes, it is applicable more widely to a range of scientific and engineering disciplines where physics-based (also known as mechanistic) models are used.