cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Elections and Markets: The Effect of Partisanship, Policy Risk, and Electoral Margins on the Economy

Rational partisan theory's exclusive focus on electoral uncertainty ignores the importance of policy uncertainty for the economy. I develop a theory of policy risk to account for this uncertainty. Using an innovative measure of electoral probabilities based on Iowa Electronic Markets futures data for the United States from 1988 to 2000, I test both theories. As predicted by rational partisan theory, positive changes in the probability that the Left wins the Presidency or the Congress lead to increases in nominal interest rates, implying that expectations of inflation have increased. As predicted by the policy risk theory, positive changes in the electoral probability of incumbent governments and divided governments lead to significant declines in interest rates, implying that expectations of inflation risk have decreased. And as an extension to both theories, I find that electoral margins matter for the economy—partisan and policy risk effects depend not only on which party controls the government, but ho...
A Right To Remain Psychotic? A New Standard For Involuntary Treatment In Light Of Current Science

Mass shootings, such as the killing of school children and staff in Newtown, Connecticut, have provided brutal reminders of inadequacies in our nation’s mental health system. In the wake of these shootings, President Obama asserted that “[w]e are going to need to work on making access to mental health care as easy as access to a gun.” But what should society do when the person needing mental health treatment refuses care — when the problem is not rooted in access but in free will? When is involuntary treatment justified? In deciding whether to forcibly medicate, multiple interests come into play, including patient autonomy, public safety, and the patient’s medical welfare. As a society, we have overemphasized patient autonomy and underemphasized patient welfare to the detriment not only of the patient’s well being but also of public safety — and even to the detriment of patient autonomy itself. This Article briefly examines the history of the involuntary treatment debate and how society arrived at the present imbalance. It then considers the implications of current scientific research on the brain and the nature of severe mental illness, using schizophrenia as an illustrative example. The Article explains how current involuntary treatment standards could be revised to reflect this scientific understanding and continue protecting a patient’s civil rights without making undue sacrifices of the patient’s long-term health and well-being. It also defends the proposed new standard against potential constitutional challenges.The new standard would allow involuntary treatment for a limited number of years after onset of severe psychotic symptoms under specified conditions. It would also provide for more access to medical information by patients’ immediate family members and primary caretakers. The standard reflects (1) research showing the vital importance of early treatment for long-term prognosis and prevention of irreversible injury to the brain; (2) statistics suggesting the particular vulnerability of a maturing brain; (3) a respect for autonomy and the patient’s ultimate agency to reject treatment if no satisfactory treatment option can be found; (4) consideration of factors that uniquely affect autonomy concerns when patients are severely psychotic; and (5) research demonstrating that family involvement can greatly benefit treatment outcomes. Because brain science is currently an area of explosive growth and discovery, this Article recognizes that any involuntary treatment standard will need to be continually re-examined and revised in light of scientific progress.
Overbidding in Value Elicitation: When Consumers Report Inflated Reservation Prices, and What to Do About It

A common goal of value elicitation is to determine consumers’ reservation prices (i.e., maximum willingness to pay) for goods and services. Because the results of such studies are often used as inputs in decision making, it is important to understand when reservation prices estimated in value elicitation studies are likely to be biased, and how to correct for such biases. Experiment 1 of this study investigated attributes of the context in which consumers’ values are elicited that may lead to consumers overbidding their true reservation prices. The results demonstrate that the likelihood of overbidding is high when consumers perceive that they will not have to pay their stated reservation price, and particularly high when they also perceive that stating a high reservation price will increase the likelihood of subsequently receiving a good. Experiment 2 demonstrated that priming budget considerations prior to value elicitation produced value estimates closer to the actual price of a good compared to a condition in which budget was not primed. Implications for the practice of value elicitation and the use of estimates provided by such studies in decision making are discussed.
The Replacement Problem

Abstract A prototypical vintage capital model of economic growth is developed, where the decision to replace old technologies with new ones is modeled explicitly. Technological change is investment specific. Depreciation in this environment is an economic, not a physical, concept. The vintage capital economy's balanced-growth paths and transitional dynamics are analyzed. The transitional dynamics are markedly different from the standard neoclassical growth model.
Public Wrongs and Private Bills: Indemnification and Government Accountability in the Early Republic

Students of the history of administrative law in the United States regard the antebellum era as one in which strict common law rules of official liability prevailed. Yet conventional accounts of the antebellum period often omit a key institutional feature. Under the system of private legislation in place at the time, federal government officers were free to petition Congress for the passage of a private bill appropriating money to reimburse the officer for personal liability imposed on the basis of actions taken in the line of duty. Captain Little, the officer involved in one oft-cited case, Little v. Barreme, pursued this avenue of indemnification successfully. As a result, the ultimate loss associated with that officer’s good faith effort to enforce federal law fell on the government rather than on the officer himself. This paper fills out the picture of government accountability in the early nineteenth century by clarifying the practice of congressional indemnification. After identifying cases in which officers sought indemnity from Congress through a petition for private relief, we examine the way official liability, as administered by the courts, interacted with private legislation, as administered by Congress, to shape the incentives of government officers to comply with the law. We find that a practice of relatively routine indemnification took the sting out of sovereign immunity, a doctrine that key players – including James Madison and John Marshall – treated as thinly formalistic. We also find that Congress assumed responsibility for deciding when federal officers were entitled to indemnity for acts taken in the scope of employment. The antebellum system thus contrasts sharply with modern government accountability law. Jurists today tend to regard sovereign immunity as a barrier to relief, rather than a principle of forum allocation that preserves legislative primacy in the adoption of money bills. Moreover, courts today often refrain from deciding the question of formal legality in an effort to strike a proper balance between the victim’s interest in accountability and the official’s interest in immunity. Whatever the wisdom of the resulting body of qualified immunity law, the doctrine reflects judicial control of matters that the early republic had assigned to the legislative branch.
Does the midpoint of range earnings forecasts represent managers’ expectations?

The accounting literature has used the midpoint of range forecasts in various research settings, assuming that the midpoint is the best proxy for managers’ earnings expectations revealed in range forecasts. We argue that given managers’ asymmetric loss functions regarding earnings surprises, managers are unlikely to place their true earnings expectations at the midpoint of range forecasts. We predict that managers’ true expectations are close to the upper bound of range forecasts. We find evidence consistent with these predictions in 1996–2010, especially in the recent decade. Despite their role as sophisticated information intermediaries, analysts barely unravel the pessimistic bias that managers embed in range forecasts. Furthermore, we find that the upper bound rather than the midpoint better represents investors’ interpretation of managers’ expectations in recent times. Our study cautions researchers to refine their research designs that use management range forecasts and sheds light on the role of financial analysts in the earnings expectations game.
Trans-Substantivity and the Processes of American Law

The term “trans-substantive” refers to doctrine that, in form and manner of application, does not vary from one substantive context to the next. Transsubstantivity has long influenced the design of the law of civil procedure, and whether the principle should continue to do so has prompted a lot of debate among scholars. But this focus on civil procedure is too narrow. Doctrines that regulate all the processes of American law, from civil litigation to public administration, often hew to a trans-substantive norm. This Article draws upon administrative law, the doctrine of statutory interpretation, and the law of civil procedure to offer a more complete account of trans-substantivity that explains the principle in all of the contexts in which it surfaces. This inquiry leads to a novel defense of trans-substantivity as a principle of doctrinal design. Trans-substantivity is justified as a response to deficits in the performance of institutions that craft and administer interpretive, procedural, and administrative law. This defense not only challenges the prevailing skepticism in procedural scholarship regarding the principle’s normative appeal. It also provides a metric to determine when doctrine should remain trans-substantive, and when doctrine may legitimately splinter into substance-specific strains. INTRODUCTION 1192 I. TRANS-SUBSTANTIVITIES 1196 A. Process Law 1197 1. The term 1197 2. Trans-substantivity as a process law principle 1201 B. The Trans-Substantivity Spectrum in Process Law 1203 ∗ Professor of Law, University of Arizona Rogers College of Law. This Article benefited from presentations at Denver University, the University of Arizona, the University of CaliforniaDavis, and Yale Law School. I received invaluable comments from Todd Aagaard, Bruce Ackerman, Derek Bambauer, Jane Bambauer, Bob Ellickson, Bill Eskridge, Heather Gerken, John Langbein, Daniel Markovits, Toni Massaro, Nina Rabin, Judith Resnik, Roy Spece, and John Witt. DO NOT DELETE 2/25/2014 1:26 PM BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW 2013 1192 II. TRANS-SUBSTANTIVITY’S ENTRENCHMENT IN THE 20TH CENTURY 1207 A. Trans-Substantivity’s Ascendancy 1209 B. Trans-Substantivity’s Entrenchment 1213 III. A JUSTIFICATION FOR TRANS-SUBSTANTIVITY IN PROCESS LAW .. 1218 A. The Costs and Benefits of Trans-Substantivity 1220 B. The Judiciary and Process Law 1222 1. Judicial Upkeep of Process Law 1222 2. Trans-substantivity in judge-made process law 1227 a. Lawmaking legitimacy.. 1228 b. Competency.. 1230 c. Coordination.. 1232 C. Process Law Made by Other Institutions 1234 IV. IMPLICATIONS FOR DOCTRINAL DESIGN 1236 A. Court-Made Substance-Specific Process Law 1237 1. Motivations for substance-specificity 1238 a. Fidelity. 1238 b. Institutional efficacy.. 1239 2. When should judge-made process law be substance-specific?1243 B. Trans-Substantivity and the Slide Toward SubstanceSpecificity 1248 V. CONCLUSION 1250
No Compelling Interest: The "Birth Control" Mandate and Religious Freedom

Following the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a regulation (the "Mandate") requiring employers of a certain size -- including religious institutions and businesses led by religious individuals -- to provide their employees health insurance covering birth control, sterilization, and emergency contraception, with no co-pay. The rationale underlying the Mandate was contained in an Institute of Medicine report (the "Report") commissioned by the Department. The Report claimed that birth control and emergency contraception were "preventive medical care" for women and girls, claiming that they would lead to less unintended pregnancy and the associated health consequences thereof. This article takes a very close look at the sources cited by the Report for its preventive health care claims. It concludes that the Report is poorly sourced, poorly reasoned, biased and incomplete. The Report fails to show, inter alia: that more accessible contraception and emergency contraception have lowered rates of unintended pregnancy or abortion over time; and that "free" contraception and emergency contraception will provoke greater usage. It also fails to attend to the substantial risk of harming women's individual and social health, by further delinking sex and procreation. Because the Mandate burdens the free exercise of religion, it must demonstrate a "compelling state interest" in order to survive a constitutional challenge. Given the weakness of the factual case for the Mandate, it cannot meet the "compelling state interest" test.
Bias in memory predicts bias in estimation of future task duration

Both anecdotal accounts and experimental evidence suggest that people underestimate how long it will take them to complete future tasks. A possible reason for this tendency is that people remember tasks as taking less time than they actually did, with these biased memories causing a corresponding bias in prediction. Two experiments were performed to determine whether or not a systematic bias in memory could explain a similar systematic bias in prediction. In support, it was found that (1) the tendency to underestimate future duration disappears when the task is novel, (2) there is similar bias in estimation of both past and future durations, and (3) variables that affect memory of duration, such as level of experience with the task and duration of delay before estimation, affect prediction of duration in the same way. It appears that, at least in part, people underestimate future event duration because they underestimate past event duration.
Exchange Efficiency with Weak Ownership Rights

We show that efficient exchange obtains independently of the degree to which a legal system protects the rights of owners. We study a number of different legal rules, including property rules (strong protection), liability rules (any party can take the owner's asset but must pay a legally determined compensation), and even rules that protect the owner's interests very weakly (liability rules with a very low compensation level). Efficiency is obtained as long as the degree of protection provided by law and by the bargaining protocol is not "too" inversely correlated with a party's valuation of the asset.
Patient advocacy and termination from managed care organizations. Do state laws protecting health care professional advocacy make any difference

This article examines the impact of state laws aimed at protecting health care professionals. During the last decade, as managed care has profoundly changed the way that health care is delivered in the U.S., many patients have complained about denial of care and their inability to challenge those denials. At the same time, some physicians have taken on the role of advocate, arguing on their patients' behalf for more and better care. More than fifteen states have enacted laws declaring that health care professionals (HCPs) cannot be terminated from or otherwise penalized by managed care organizations (MCOs) because of their advocacy. The article explores the history, implementation, and impact of these state advocacy protection statutes, looking at both substantive and procedural obstacles to their enforcement. The article is in four parts. The first section provides an introduction to the concept of advocacy and fiduciary duty, both at common law, and as presently interpreted. This introduction also looks at the phenomenon of HCPs' "deselection," i.e., the termination or non-renewal of HCP contracts with MCOs, emphasizing that the plural of anecdote is not data. The second section surveys the legislative and common law landscape surrounding HCP advocacy, and then examines state statutes that either explicitly or implicitly protect HCP advocacy on behalf of patients. The article next considers whether advocacy protection laws have achieved their purposes, given the substantial theoretical and practical barriers to their implementation, and discusses both ERISA and Medicare preemption as potential hurdles to successful litigation. I conclude that advocacy protection laws have had only a limited in terrorem effect, making it somewhat harder for MCOs to terminate HCPs who advocate for their patients. I argue that current laws are inadequate to ensure that health care professionals will vigorously advocate for their patients, and suggest alternative means to encourage and support patient advocacy, in order to enhance the quality of health care. Because this work is not yet published, the author welcomes all feedback and other suggestions for improvement.
Private placements and managerial entrenchment

We re-examine old evidence and provide new evidence on private placements of large-percentage blocks of stock. Our goal is to judge whether the prevailing hypotheses of monitoring and certification explain most private placements. Examining new evidence on events following the private placements and using a much larger sample than previous studies, our findings suggests that private placements are often made to passive investors, thereby helping management solidify their control of the firm. Although monitoring and certification may motivate some private placements, the evidence with respect to placement discounts, stock-price reactions, the post-placement activities of the purchasers, and a comparison with arm's-length trades of large blocks of stock favors managerial entrenchment as the explanation for many private placements.
High Frequency Identification of Monetary Non-Neutrality: The Information Effect

We present estimates of monetary non-neutrality based on evidence from high-frequency responses of real interest rates, expected inflation, and expected output growth. Our identifying assumption is that unexpected changes in interest rates in a 30-minute window surrounding scheduled Federal Reserve announcements arise from news about monetary policy. In response to an interest rate hike, nominal and real interest rates increase roughly one-for-one, several years out into the term structure, while the response of expected inflation is small. At the same time, forecasts about output growth also increase—the opposite of what standard models imply about a monetary tightening. To explain these facts, we build a model in which Fed announcements affect beliefs not only about monetary policy but also about other economic fundamentals. Our model implies that these information effects play an important role in the overall causal effect of monetary policy shocks on output.
Archiving Justice: Conceptualizing the Archives of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) will complete its proceedings over the coming years, leaving behind an enormous collection of records. The ICTY archive provides a record of conviction and acquittal, prosecution case, and defense response—a vast series of contested facts and arguments. The ICTY winds down with a decidedly mixed reputation, especially among the communities of the Balkans, doing damage to the already-discredited idea of a Tribunal capable of aiding the processes of reconciliation. And yet the UN still speaks of the reconciliatory purposes the ICTY archives may serve. Pursuing reconciliation, however, sets up the archives for failure. It would be better for those establishing the archives to focus on other, attainable goals, taking into account Minow’s caution against judicial records that merely ‘speak for themselves.’ This essay provides historical context for the development of the ICTY archives, outlining its two decades of work, and emphasizes the political context from and into which the archives will emerge.
The effects of import competition on health in the local economy.

We provide evidence that average mental, physical, and general health worsens for employed workers in local U.S. labor markets exposed to greater import competition from China. The effects are greatest for mental health. Moving a region from the 25th to 75th percentiles of import exposure corresponds to a 7.8% increase in the morbidity of poor mental health, adding about 3 days of poor mental health per year for the average adult. Concurrently, the ability to afford health care decreases. Our results complement documented consequences of import competition on labor markets and temporary business cycle shocks on health outcomes.
A Multiple Lender Approach to Understanding Supply and Search in the Equity Lending Market

Although a large body of research has been devoted to the effects of short sales constraints, very little is understood about how those constraints arise in the one trillion dollar equity lending market. Using a database of share loans from twelve lenders, we find that the share loan supply schedule is generally flat at low quantity levels. However, for a significant number of stocks, it has a positive slope at higher quantity levels. For this class of stocks, a one standard deviation increase in quantity demanded increases loan fees by approximately 15 basis points when demand is low but increases loan fees by approximately 192 basis points when demand is high. This finding helps reconcile seemingly conflicting findings in the literature, where shifts in demand have been shown to have both small and large effects on price. In addition, we find that the predictions of costly customer search models hold in the equity loan market. This implies that search frictions between share borrowers and lenders contribute to the cost of shorting, as Duffie, Garleanu, and Pederson (2002) suggest. Specifically, we find that crosslender fee dispersion increases from a standard deviation of 19% when demand is low to a standard deviation of 86.8% when demand is high. We also find that fee dispersion increases in various proxies for search costs, including a stock’s illiquidity and the proportion of small lenders making loans in the stock. Our results imply that short sale constraints could be slackened by reintroducing a central clearinghouse of share loans, such as the now-defunct NYSE lending post, which would reduce search costs. We are grateful for financial support from the Q Group. Our data provider made this work possible and provided invaluable advice through numerous discussions.
The legal definition of parenthood: Uncertainty at the core of family identity

This paper argues that the determination of legal parenthood should fundamentally be about identity; that is, it should be seen as providing an answer to the question: to which family does this child belong? The paper approaches the issue by, first, noting that the determination of legal parenthood has become one of the most contentious issues in family, and that this has ironically happened because of the combination of greater certainty in the determination of biological paternity, and greater instability in family relationships. The historic strategy of using the stigma against illegitimacy and the marital presumption to lock children into fixed family relationships is no longer tenable. The paper examines then the tension between ex ante and ex post definitions of parenthood. Ex ante doctrines, such as those requiring biological parenthood, marriage or adoption, recognize parenthood on the basis the conditions that exist at the time of the assumption of parental responsibilities. These doctrines provide certainty at the expense of the failure to recognize adults who may have played a primary parental role in the child's life. Ex post doctrines, such as de facto or psychological parent, affirm parental standing on the basis of functional relationships in existence at the time of the dispute. They have been criticized for opening the door to recognition of a potentially large and changing group of adults, without clear identification of those most likely to further the child's well-being. Finally, the paper critiques the growing body of law applying the marital presumption, de facto parenthood, parenthood by estoppel, unmarried parents, and stepparents. The paper argues, first, that biology matters even if it is not the only thing that matters; identification of biological parents contributes to a firmer foundation for the recognition of others. Second, the paper maintains the relationships between the adults are important; recognition of functional parents, if parenthood entails a permanent commitment to the child, requires something more than a casual relationship with a legal parent. Third, the paper considers the possibility of "unbundling parenthood," that is, of considering support, custody and identity as separate issues that may produce different results. The paper concludes that recreation of legal parenthood as a constituent of the child's lasting identity requires adult acceptance of permanent responsibilities. This, in turn, means that the law should be designed to prompt a closer correlation between the ex ante institutions and the actual assumption of parental responsibilities.
Empty Promises and Arbitrage

Analysis of absence of arbitrage normally ignores payoffs in states to which the agent assigns zero probability. We extend the fundamental theorem of asset pricing to the case of “no empty promises” in which the agent cannot promise arbitrarily large payments in some states. There is a superpositive pricing rule that can assign positive price to claims in zero probability states important to the market as well as assigning positive prices to claims in the states of positive probability. With continuous information arrival, no empty promises can be enforced by shutting down the agent’s subsequent investments once wealth hits zero. Dogmatic disagreements create arbitrage opportunities in competitive markets that are sufficiently complete. There may be someone in the economy who is certain (correctly or not on objective grounds) that gold prices will go up and someone else who believes there is a positive probability that gold prices will go down. The first person will have an arbitrage opportunity if at-the-money put options on gold have a positive price, while the second person will have an arbitrage opportunity if at-the-money put options on gold have a zero or negative price. Similarly, if some people are sure their favorite sport teams or horses will win but others are not so sure, any odds posted by a competitive bookmaker will imply arbitrage for one group or the other. 1 In practice, however, dogmatic differences in beliefs do not imply actual arbitrage that can be used to generate arbitrarily large profits because people have limited resources and cannot make “empty promises” of payments that exceed their own ability to pay in states the market cares about, even if those are states they personally believe to be impossible. The purpose of this article is to extend the study of the absence of arbitrage to situations in which no empty promises are permitted.
Say on Pay Votes and CEO Compensation: Evidence from the UK

We examine the effect of say on pay regulation in the UK. Consistent with the view that shareholders regard say on pay as a value-creating mechanism, the regulations announcement trig- gered a positive stock price reaction at firms with weak penalties for poor performance. UK firms responded to negative say on pay voting outcomes by removing controversial CEO pay practices criticized as rewards for failure (e.g., generous severance contracts) and increasing the sensitivity of pay to poor realizations of performance.
Rank Determination in Tensor Factor Model

Factor model is an appealing and effective analytic tool for high-dimensional time series, with a wide range of applications in economics, finance and statistics. One of the fundamental issues in using factor model for time series in practice is the determination of the number of factors to use. This paper develops two criteria for such a task for tensor factor models where the signal part of an observed time series in tensor form assumes a Tucker decomposition with the core tensor as the factor tensor. The task is to determine the dimensions of the core tensor. One of the proposed criteria is similar to information based criteria of model selection, and the other is an extension of the approaches based on the ratios of consecutive eigenvalues often used in factor analysis for panel time series. The new criteria are designed to locate the gap between the true smallest non-zero eigenvalue and the zero eigenvalues of a functional of the population version of the auto-ross-covariances of the tensor time series using their sample versions. As sample size and tensor dimension increase, such a gap increases under regularity conditions, resulting in consistency of the rank estimator. The criteria are built upon the existing non-iterative and iterative estimation procedures of tensor factor model, yielding different performances. We provide sufficient conditions and convergence rate for the consistency of the criteria as the sample size $T$ and the dimensions of the observed tensor time series go to infinity. The results include the vector factor models as special cases, with an additional convergence rates. The results also include the cases when there exist factors with different signal strength. In addition, the convergence rates of the eigenvalue estimators are established. Simulation studies provide promising finite sample performance for the two criteria.
Understanding Reflection Needs for Personal Health Data in Diabetes

To empower users of wearable medical devices, it is important to enable methods that facilitate reflection on previous care to improve future outcomes. In this work, we conducted a two-phase user-study involving patients, caregivers, and clinicians to understand gaps in current approaches that support reflection and user needs for new solutions. Our results show that users desire to have specific summarization metrics, solutions that minimize cognitive effort, and solutions that enable data integration to support meaningful reflection on diabetes management. In addition, we developed and evaluated a visualization called PixelGrid that presents key metrics in a matrix-based plot. Majority of users (84%) found the matrix-based approach to be useful for identifying salient patterns related to certain times and days in blood glucose data. Through our evaluation we identified that users desire data visualization solutions with complementary textual descriptors, concise and flexible presentation, contextually-fitting content, and informative and actionable insights. Directions for future research on tools that automate pattern discovery, detect abnormalities, and provide recommendations to improve care were also identified.
IDENT: Identifying Differential Equations with Numerical Time Evolution

Identifying unknown differential equations from a given set of discrete time dependent data is a challenging problem. A small amount of noise can make the recovery unstable. Nonlinearity and varying coefficients add complexity to the problem. We assume that the governing partial differential equation (PDE) is a linear combination of few differential terms in a prescribed dictionary, and the objective of this paper is to find the correct coefficients. We propose a new direction based on the fundamental convergence principle of numerical PDE schemes. We utilize Lasso for efficiency, and a performance guarantee is established based on an incoherence property. The main contribution is to validate and correct the results by time evolution error (TEE). A new algorithm, called identifying differential equations with numerical time evolution (IDENT), is explored for data with non-periodic boundary conditions, noisy data and PDEs with varying coefficients. Based on the recovery theory of Lasso, we propose a new definition of Noise-to-Signal ratio, which better represents the level of noise in the case of PDE identification. The effects of data generations and downsampling are systematically analyzed and tested. For noisy data, we propose an order preserving denoising method called least-squares moving average (LSMA), to preprocess the given data. For the identification of PDEs with varying coefficients, we propose to add Base Element Expansion (BEE) to aid the computation. Various numerical experiments from basic tests to noisy data, downsampling effects and varying coefficients are presented.
Vibrational heat-bath configuration interaction.

We introduce vibrational heat-bath configuration interaction (VHCI) as an accurate and efficient method for calculating vibrational eigenstates of anharmonic systems. Inspired by its origin in electronic structure theory, VHCI is a selected CI approach that uses a simple criterion to identify important basis states with a pre-sorted list of anharmonic force constants. Screened second-order perturbation theory and simple extrapolation techniques provide significant improvements to variational energy estimates. We benchmark VHCI on four molecules with 12–48 degrees of freedom and use anharmonic potential energy surfaces truncated at fourth and sixth orders. When compared to other methods using the same truncated potentials, VHCI produces vibrational spectra of tens or hundreds of states with sub-wavenumber accuracy at low computational cost.
Artemisia annua L. extracts inhibit the in vitro replication of SARS-CoV-2 and two of its variants.

Abstract Ethnopharmacological relevance Artemisia annua L. has been used for millennia in Southeast Asia to treat “fever”. Many infectious microbial and viral diseases have been shown to respond to A. annua and communities around the world use the plant as a medicinal tea, especially for treating malaria. Aim of the study SARS-CoV-2 (the cause of Covid-19) globally has infected and killed millions of people. Because of the broad-spectrum antiviral activity of artemisinin that includes blockade of SARS-CoV-1, we queried whether A. annua suppressed SARS-CoV-2. Materials and methods Using Vero E6 and Calu-3 cells, we measured anti SARS-CoV-2 activity against fully infectious virus of dried leaf extracts of seven cultivars of A. annua sourced from four continents. IC50s were calculated and defined as the concentrations that inhibited viral replication by 50%; CC50s were also calculated and defined as the concentrations that kill 50% of cells. Results Hot-water leaf extracts based on artemisinin, total flavonoids, or dry leaf mass showed antiviral activity with IC50 values of 0.1–8.7 μM, 0.01–0.14 μg, and 23.4–57.4 μg, respectively. Antiviral efficacy did not correlate with artemisinin or total flavonoid contents of the extracts. One dried leaf sample was >12 years old, yet its hot-water extract was still found to be active. The UK and South African variants, B1.1.7 and B1.351, were similarly inhibited. While all hot water extracts were effective, concentrations of artemisinin and total flavonoids varied by nearly 100-fold in the extracts. Artemisinin alone showed an estimated IC50 of about 70 μM, and the clinically used artemisinin derivatives artesunate, artemether, and dihydroartemisinin were ineffective or cytotoxic at elevated micromolar concentrations. In contrast, the antimalarial drug amodiaquine had an IC50 = 5.8 μM. Extracts had minimal effects on infection of Vero E6 or Calu-3 cells by a reporter virus pseudotyped by the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. There was no cytotoxicity within an order of magnitude above the antiviral IC90 values. Conclusions A. annua extracts inhibit SARS-CoV-2 infection, and the active component(s) in the extracts is likely something besides artemisinin or a combination of components that block virus infection at a step downstream of virus entry. Further studies will determine in vivo efficacy to assess whether A. annua might provide a cost-effective therapeutic to treat SARS-CoV-2 infections.
Enumeration Algorithms for Conjunctive Queries with Projection

We investigate the enumeration of query results for an important subset of CQs with projections, namely star and path queries. The task is to design data structures and algorithms that allow for efficient enumeration with delay guarantees after a preprocessing phase. Our main contribution is a series of results based on the idea of interleaving precomputed output with further join processing to maintain delay guarantees, which maybe of independent interest. In particular, we design combinatorial algorithms that provide instance-specific delay guarantees in linear preprocessing time. These algorithms improve upon the currently best known results. Further, we show how existing results can be improved upon by using fast matrix multiplication. We also present {new} results involving tradeoff between preprocessing time and delay guarantees for enumeration of path queries that contain projections. CQs with projection where the join attribute is projected away is equivalent to boolean matrix multiplication. Our results can therefore be also interpreted as sparse, output-sensitive matrix multiplication with delay guarantees.
A data structure for arc insertion and regular path finding

Let ℒ be the language defined by some deterministick-state automaton with accepting statesF, and letG be a directed graph withn nodes andm labeled arcs. Thedynamic ℒ-path problem is to process efficiently and on-line two kinds of operations: (1) inserting arcs intoG, and (2) given two nodesu andv inG, finding a path fromu tov that is labeled by some word of ℒ, or reporting that none exists. We present a data structure that supports insertion and regular path existence queries inO(nk 2) amortized time andO(|F|) worst-case time, respectively. Deletions only (no insertions) can also be accommodated in directed acyclic graphs. Finding an ℒ-path between two nodes can be done inO(l+|F|) worst-case time, wherel is the length of the path returned. This is an improvement over theO(m) time required to answer queries in the static version of this problem, for each fixed infinite ℒ. We show how this data structure and the techniques used for building it are applicable to the area of knowledge base querying. In an amortized setting, we provide relative improvements ofO(m/n) to the time bounds for answering many one-sided recursive queries and even some two-sided recursive queries, such as the same generation query on acyclic graphs.
A1-homotopy invariants of dg orbit categories

Let A A be a dg category, F:A→A F : A → A be a dg functor inducing an equivalence of categories in degree-zero cohomology, and A/F A / F be the associated dg orbit category. For every A 1 A 1 -homotopy invariant E ( e.g. homotopy K -theory, K -theory with coefficients, etale K -theory, and periodic cyclic homology), we construct a distinguished triangle expressing E(A/F) E ( A / F ) as the cone of the endomorphism E(F)−Id E ( F ) − Id of E(A) E ( A ) . In the particular case where F is the identity dg functor, this triangle splits and gives rise to the fundamental theorem. As a first application, we compute the A 1 A 1 -homotopy invariants of cluster (dg) categories, and consequently of Kleinian singularities, using solely the Coxeter matrix. As a second application, we compute the A 1 A 1 -homotopy invariants of the dg orbit categories associated with Fourier–Mukai autoequivalences.
Network economic effects and the limits of GTE Sylvania's efficiency analysis

The significant contribution of the "Chicago school" of antitrust has been to demonstrate persuasively, through the use of economic theory, how some business activities historically viewed with suspicion actually benefited consumers and promoted economic efficiency. The landmark Supreme Court decision in Continental T.V., Inc. v. GTE Sylvania Inc.1 can be fairly read as accepting the argument that courts should not use the antitrust laws to interfere with demonstrably efficient conduct in order to promote broader political goals. After Sylvania, it is clear that where a challenged agreement is demonstrably efficient, or occurs in an industry where market retribution to inefficient conduct will be swift, the defendant wins.2 Where a dominant firm or concerted group of firms is unable to offer a persuasive justification for conduct that demonstrably raises price, reduces output, or renders output unresponsive to consumer demand, the plaintiff wins.3
The lemniscate tree of a random polynomial

To each generic complex polynomial $p(z)$ there is associated a labeled binary tree (here referred to as a "lemniscate tree") that encodes the topological type of the graph of $|p(z)|$. The branching structure of the lemniscate tree is determined by the configuration (i.e., arrangement in the plane) of the singular components of those level sets $|p(z)|=t$ passing through a critical point. In this paper, we address the question "How many branches appear in a typical lemniscate tree?" We answer this question first for a lemniscate tree sampled uniformly from the combinatorial class and second for the lemniscate tree arising from a random polynomial generated by i.i.d. zeros. From a more general perspective, these results take a first step toward a probabilistic treatment (within a specialized setting) of Arnold's program of enumerating algebraic Morse functions.
TaFn and TaCln Atomization Energies for n = 1−5

TaFn and TaCln atomization energies are computed for n = 1−5. The geometries, frequencies, and atomization energies are determined using density functional theory. Both the BP86 and B3LYP functiona...
PALMAR: Towards Adaptive Multi-inhabitant Activity Recognition in Point-Cloud Technology

With the advancement of deep neural networks and computer vision-based Human Activity Recognition, employment of Point-Cloud Data technologies (LiDAR, mmWave) has seen a lot interests due to its privacy preserving nature. Given the high promise of accurate PCD technologies, we develop, PALMAR, a multiple-inhabitant activity recognition system by employing efficient signal processing and novel machine learning techniques to track individual person towards developing an adaptive multi-inhabitant tracking and HAR system. More specifically, we propose (i) a voxelized feature representation-based real-time PCD fine-tuning method, (ii) efficient clustering (DBSCAN and BIRCH), Adaptive Order Hidden Markov Model based multi-person tracking and crossover ambiguity reduction techniques and (iii) novel adaptive deep learning-based domain adaptation technique to improve the accuracy of HAR in presence of data scarcity and diversity (device, location and population diversity). We experimentally evaluate our framework and systems using (i) a real-time PCD collected by three devices (3D LiDAR and 79 GHz mmWave) from 6 participants, (ii) one publicly available 3D LiDAR activity data (28 participants) and (iii) an embedded hardware prototype system which provided promising HAR performances in multi-inhabitants (96%) scenario with a 63% improvement of multi-person tracking than state-of-art framework without losing significant system performances in the edge computing device.
A Model of Stock-Market-Based Rulemaking

We consider the extent to which a government regulator can harness information about a proposed rule from observing the stock price movements of the affected firms—information the regulator may in turn use to deliberate whether to adopt the rule. The rule comes with an uninformed ex ante (expected) value, which can be positive or negative. We find that if the rule’s ex ante value is positive and the regulator fully relies on the aggregate market reaction to guide its decision, then with many firms in the market, prices will exhibit maximal informativeness. When the ex ante value is negative, however, the regulator’s reliance on the market will dampen speculators’ incentives to gather information, and prices will become completely uninformative. This latter effect, however, can be mitigated if the regulator’s reliance is only partial. We also consider the presence of stakeholders who may be motivated to manipulate the market to steer the regulator toward privately beneficial outcomes. We find that with many firms in the market, such stakeholders’ incentives to manipulate will dissipate. The theoretical findings of this article suggest the potential benefits of a stock-market-based rulemaking mechanism in the absence of other forms of reliable empirical evidence.
Bayesian Algorithms for Decentralized Stochastic Bandits

We study a decentralized cooperative multi-agent multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem with $K$ arms and $N$ agents connected over a network. In this model, each arm’s reward distribution is the same for every agent, and rewards are drawn independently across agents and over time steps. At each iteration, agents independently choose an arm to play and exchange at most $\mathsf {poly}(K)$ real-valued messages with their neighbors. Existing lower bound on the average per-agent regret over the network shows that cooperation with other agents can achieve a reduction of $O\left({\frac {1}{N}}\right)$ over when playing in isolation. Motivated by this, we study a message-passing algorithm that can be combined with existing Bayesian MAB algorithms. Using this, we propose a decentralized Thompson Sampling (TS) algorithm and a decentralized Bayes-UCB algorithm. Under decentralized TS for bounded rewards, we establish a problem-dependent upper bound on the average per-agent regret in terms of the number of agents in the network and the network topology. For Bernoulli rewards, our upper bound asymptotically matches the lower bound. We empirically show that the proposed decentralized TS algorithm incurs significantly lesser per-agent regret than previously proposed algorithms. Furthermore, we show that the proposed decentralized TS can be extended to general bandit problems, where posterior distribution cannot be computed in closed form. We combine our decentralized TS algorithm with Variational Inference to apply our proposed algorithm to complex realistic reward distributions in a computationally efficient manner. We implement our proposed decentralized TS under gossip protocol and over time-varying networks, where each communication link has a fixed probability of failure and show that it incurs logarithmic regret.
On the Relation Between Information and Power in Stochastic Thermodynamic Engines

The common saying, that information is power, takes a rigorous form in stochastic thermodynamics, where a quantitative equivalence between the two helps explain the paradox of Maxwell’s demon in its ability to reduce entropy. In this letter, we build on earlier work on the interplay between the relative cost and benefits of information in producing work in cyclic operation of thermodynamic engines (by Sandberg et al. 2014). Specifically, we study the general case of overdamped particles in a time-varying potential (control action) in feedback that utilizes continuous measurements (nonlinear filtering) of a thermodynamic ensemble, to produce suitable adaptations of the second law of thermodynamics that involve information.
Site Mixing for Engineering Magnetic Topological Insulators

Randomly distributed atomic-level defects in the magnetic topological insulator MnSb${}_{2}$Te${}_{4}$ help stabilize ferromagnetic interactions but are detrimental to topological electronic properties.