cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
ETHNIC SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITIES AND INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY DIFFUSION

This study explores the role of U.S. ethnic scientific and entrepreneurial communities for international technology transfer to their home countries. U.S. ethnic researchers are quantified through an ethnic- name database and individual patent records. International patent citations confirm knowledge diffuses through ethnic networks, and manufacturing output in foreign countries increases with an elasticity of 0.1-0.3 to stronger scientific integration with the U.S. frontier. Specifications ex- ploiting exogenous changes in U.S. immigration quotas address reverse- causality concerns. Exercises further differentiate responses by develop- ment stages in home countries. Ethnic technology transfers are particularly strong in high-tech industries and among Chinese economies. I. Introduction T HE adoption of new technologies and innovations is a primary engine for economic growth, improving worker productivity and spurring higher standards of living. Invention, however, is concentrated in advanced economies. OECD countries account for 83% of the world's R&D expenditure and 98% of its patenting (OECD, 2004). Even within the OECD, a disproportionate share of R&D is undertaken in the United States. Diffusion of new innova- tions from technologically leading nations to following economies is thus necessary for the economic development of poorer regions and the achievement of global prosperity. Economic models often describe a worldwide technology frontier, where new ideas and innovations travel quickly to all countries. 1 Rapid diffusion may be a good approximation for industrialized economies, but many advances are either not available or not adopted in poorer countries. Case studies in the business sociology and economic history literatures suggest this poor adoption may result from inad- equate access to the informal or practical knowledge that complements the codified details of new innovations. Be it between two people or two countries, knowledge transfer is much more complicated than sharing blueprints, process designs, or journal articles. Intellectual spillovers are often thought to be important for the formation of cities and high-tech clusters, and perhaps heterogeneous access to the codified and tacit knowledge associated with new innova- tions shapes the effective technology sets of following countries. 2
Untangling the Knot: Finding a Forum for Same-Sex Divorces in the State of Celebration

Same-sex couples with marriages or civil unions living in states hostile to their relationships may lack access to any court procedures to declare them divorced, leaving them in indefinite legal limbo. This comment proposes and defends a new solution: divorces in the state of celebration of the marriage or civil union.The difficulties that same-sex couples face in accessing divorce results from two factors. First, “hostile” states, such as Texas, refuse to recognize same-sex marriages, even for the limited purpose of dissolving them. Second, Supreme Court precedents suggest that domicile is a constitutional prerequisite for personal jurisdiction over a divorce action (the so-called "domicile rule"), thus largely preventing same-sex couples from traveling outside of their home states to obtain divorce decrees.The existing literature on this topic has focused entirely on encouraging hostile states to recognize same-sex relationships, at least for the limited purpose of dissolving them. This comment contends that such a strategy is unlikely to provide a remedy in the foreseeable future. Instead, this comment suggests that each friendly state can allow same-sex couples who can obtain marriages there (the “state of celebration”) to return to obtain a divorce, even if neither spouse still resides there. This solution has already been legislatively adopted in civil union/domestic partnership statutes in California, Delaware, Illinois, and Oregon.However, the domicile rule may cast serious doubt on the validity of any dissolutions granted in the state of celebration, because jurisdiction over these dissolutions would not be founded on domicile, but rather consent or contacts arising from the celebration. This comment suggests that a limited exception to the domicile rule for divorces performed in the state of celebration is consistent with constitutional constraints on personal jurisdiction -- at least when the couple’s domicile refuses to recognize their marriage. While states may once have had an interest in regulating the divorces of their citizens (interests which originally undergirded the domicile rule), such interests are not offended by the divorces at issue here. In particular, states flatly refusing to recognize same-sex marriages cannot simultaneously assert an interest in preventing same-sex couples from being divorced elsewhere, or in applying their own substantive law to govern out-of-state divorce actions.
Destabilizing the Normalization of Rural Black Land Loss: A Critical Role for Legal Empiricism

Mitchell's study exemplifies the New Legal Realist goal of combining qualitative and quantitative empirical research to shed light on important legal and policy issues. He also demonstrates the utility of a ground-level contextual analysis that examines legal problems from the bottom up. The study tracks processes by which black rural landowners have gradually been dispossessed of more than 90% of the land held by their predecessors in 1910. Mitchell points out that despite the continuing practices that contribute to this problem, there has been very little research on the issue, and what little attention legal scholars have paid to it has proceeded in an empirical vacuum. The article proceeds to examine existing data, and to describe the ongoing empirical research being conducted on black rural land loss in the U.S. south by Mitchell and his team. Mitchell concludes that a thoroughly contextual analysis (combining qualitative with quantitative methods) is necessary if we are to achieve an accurate understanding of the process by which law contributes to black rural land loss in this country. This kind of understanding will permit more effective policy decisions, both within and outside of the law.
Habeas as Forum Allocation: A New Synthesis

The scope of habeas relief for state prisoners, especially during the decades before the Supreme Court’s 1953 decision in Brown v. Allen, is a famously disputed question – one of recognized significance for contemporary debates about the proper scope of habeas review. This Essay provides a new answer. It argues that, until the enactment of AEDPA in 1996, state prisoners were always entitled to de novo review of the legal and mixed law/fact questions decided against them by the state courts. Until 1916, such review was provided by the Supreme Court; after 1953, such review was provided by the lower federal courts via habeas. The situation between 1916 and 1953 was murkier. This Essay shows that this was a transitional period marked by disagreement among the Justices as to the appropriate federal forum to review state court decisions resulting in custody. At the beginning of this period, a majority of Justices continued to insist that the responsibility rested with Supreme Court. Towards the end of this period, the Court shifted this responsibility to the habeas courts as a majority of Justices came to recognize that the Court could no longer hope to monitor state court criminal convictions. The Justices during this period agreed that federal review of state court convictions was necessary but disagreed about which federal court should provide such review. The scope of habeas jurisdiction during this period, as before and after, reflected the Justices’ views about the proper allocation of jurisdiction among federal courts to review the state courts’ decision of constitutional questions arising in criminal cases resulting in custody.
The Two Faces of Globalization: Against Globalization as We Know It

Abstract The paper shows that the current view of globalization as an automatic and benign force is flawed: it focuses on only one, positive, face of globalization while entirely neglecting the malignant one. The two key historical episodes that are adduced by the supporters of the “globalization as it is” (the Halcyon days of the 1870–1913, and the record of the last two decades of development) are shown to be misinterpreted. The “Halcyon days” were never Halcyon for those who were “globalized” through colonization since colonial constraints prevented them from industrializing. The record of the last two decades (1978–98) is shown to be almost uniformly worse than that of the previous two (1960–78).
Zero-Forcing Max-Power Beamforming for Hybrid mmWave Full-Duplex MIMO Systems

Full-duplex (FD) systems gained enormous attention because of the potential to double the spectral efficiency. In the context of 5G technology, FD systems operating at millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies become one of the most promising solutions to further increase the spectral efficiency and reduce the latency. However, such systems are vulnerable to the self-interference (SI) that significantly degrades the performance. To overcome this shortcoming, analog-only beamforming techniques have been developed to mitigate the SI. Because of the huge power consumption, systems operating at mm Wave frequencies beamform the power by only tuning the phase shifters while maintaining constant amplitudes. Such a hardware constraint, known as the constant amplitude (CA) constraint, severely limits the system performance. In this work, we propose a digital and analog hybrid beamforming design that completely eliminates the SI while substantially minimizing the losses imposed by the CA constraint. Further, we develop a fully-digital beamforming design and derive the upper bound for the spectral efficiency as benchmarking tools to quantify the losses of our proposed hybrid design.
Innumeracy and unpacking: Bridging the nomothetic/idiographic divide in violence risk assessment.

Structured methods to assess violence risk have proliferated in recent years, but such methods are not uncontroversial. A "core controversy" concerns the extent to which an actuarial risk estimate derived at the group level should-morally, logically, or mathematically-apply to any particular individual within the group. This study examines the related psychological question: When do people apply group-level risk estimates to the individual case? We manipulated whether an actuarial risk estimate is "unpacked;" that is, whether the risk factors on which the estimate is based are articulated. Our findings indicate that the degree of unpacking (e.g., listing six vs. three risk factors) increased the likelihood that jury-eligible citizens will apply an actuarial risk estimate in their decision to civilly commit a particular respondent. Unpacking also increased the perceived relevance of the group-level risk estimate to the individual case. We then split the sample based on self-reported numeracy, defined as "ability with or knowledge of numbers." Numeracy moderates the unpacking effect in that unpacking only made a difference for the innumerate participants. The psychological approach we take to the question of group-to-individual inference is not limited to violence-risk assessment, and may apply to many other areas of law in which group-to-individual inferences are frequently, if controversially, made. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved). Language: en
Dynamic Competition with Customer Recognition

In many markets firms have some information about their customers resulting from the consumers' past choice behavior. Given this information, firms can better target their market practice with respect to their customers. This article considers such a situation in a duopoly with infinitely lived firms and overlapping generations of customers. A new customer may either have bought the competing product in the previous period or be new to the market. I identify three effects: (i) Firms lower prices to attract the competitor¹s previous customers. (ii) Greater consumer patience intensifies competition. (iii) Greater firm patience softens the competitive interaction. With patient firms and consumers, prices are lower than when there is no customer recognition.
Location-based services, conspicuous mobility, and the location-aware future

Abstract The production and consumption of geographic information is becoming a more mobile practice, with more corporate actors challenging the traditional stronghold of Esri- and government-based geospatial developments. What can be considered a geographic information system has expanded to include web-based technologies like Google Earth/Maps, as well as more recent developments of Microsoft’s Bing Maps and the mobile version of ArcGIS available for the iPhone. In addition to these developments, a discursive shift toward ‘location’ is occurring across the Internet industry. Location has become the new buzzword for social-spatial strategies to target consumers. As reported in 2010, venture capitalists have, since 2009, invested $115 million into ‘location start-ups’ – software companies that provide location-based services to mobile computing consumers ( Miller and Wortham, 2010 ). Applications like Foursquare, Loopt, Gowalla, and most recently, Facebook Places allow users to ‘check-in’ at restaurants, bars, gyms, retail outlets, and offices, thereby sharing their location within their social network. These developments enable consumers to (re)discover their proximities to products, while feeding a desire for making known one’s everyday movements. Here, I discuss the development of location-based services as the proliferation of a peculiar form of geographic information: conspicuous mobility. Through discussion of a recent gathering of location-aware software professionals and through analysis of discourses that emerge over a battle between ‘check in’ companies, I sketch an area of study that explores the implications of these emerging geographic information ‘systems’, and new everyday cartographers.
Alternate decision rules, the flexibility premium, and land development over time and under uncertainty

The Arrow–Fisher–Henry (AFH) analysis of land development under uncertainty has been conducted in a two period model. Recently, Capozza and Helsley (1990), Batabyal (1996, 1997, 2000), and others have analyzed the question of land development under uncertainty in a multi-period setting. We extend this literature by examining the role that time independent and time dependent decision rules play in the decision to develop land over time and under uncertainty. We first construct a dynamic and stochastic model of decision making in the context of land development. Next, we use this model to analyze the expected profit of a landowner when this landowner uses, respectively, time independent and time dependent decision rules. Finally, we compare and contrast the properties of time independent and time dependent decision rules and we discuss the magnitude of the premium stemming from the maintenance of temporal flexibility in decision making.
Public spending on health care and the poor.

This paper uses new cross-country data to assess the relationship between public spending on health care and the health status of the poor. Data are drawn from two sources: (i) existing data on health status by income quintile tabulated from demographic health surveys in 44 countries; and (ii) our estimates of the health status of the poor in over 70 countries drawn from a new technique in decomposing social indicators. Our estimates confirm that the poor have significantly worse health status than the nonpoor and the regression results provide new evidence that public spending on health care matters more to them. However, the results suggest that increased public spending alone will not be sufficient to significantly improve health status.
A Precautionary Tale: Assessing Ecological Damages After the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

Three years after the Exxon Valdez ran aground Bligh Reef in 1989, the Pacific Herring fishery collapsed and has yet to recover. Scientists are still searching for direct evidence linking the oil spill and the collapse and the fishing industry remains uncompensated for losses associated with the long-term collapse. Drawing on the scientific literature, this article tells the story of the Pacific herring collapse in Prince William Sound. In doing so, this article examines the nature of ecological injuries and the shortcomings of our existing damages paradigm for assessing those unique damages. In particular, this article demonstrates a disconnect between the dynamic, complex, and uncertain nature of ecological injuries on the one hand, and our existing damages paradigm — which requires relatively quick and static opportunities for identification and valuation — on the other hand. To offer a solution, the article explores the origins of the precautionary principle and suggests invoking the burden-shifting attributes of the precautionary principle to transfer the risk of long-term, unknown ecological harm to those who have caused the injury. Through such a risk transfer, true costs of ecological injury would more properly be borne by actors capable of altering their behavior to avoid such injury in the first place. In addition, the article proposes offering defendants two options for incurring damages for ecological injuries — either accepting a multiplier of the compensatory damage award or paying for later-discovered damages on an ongoing basis through a case-specific superfund. These options are aimed at embodying the total cost of ecological injuries.This paper was part of a symposium marking the twentieth anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
CUBA'S ROAD TO SERFDOM

The last decade of the 20th century was marked by a profound change in the structure of the international political system and with it the foreign policy priorities of the United States. Yet, one policy that has remained unchanged for close to 40 years has been the use of a unilateral embargo on Cuba with the presumed objective of provoking a change in the behavior of a dictatorial and repressive government. That policy has continued in light of the evidence that the efficacy of unilateral economic sanctions in effectuating political change is at best inconclusive. In fact, Kaempfer and Lowenberg (1988) illustrate how domestic politics influences the design and severity of the sanctions to account for the varying interests of different constituencies (see Seiglie 1997 for an application to the case of Cuba).
Earnings Management: Reconciling the Views of Accounting Academics, Practitioners, and Regulators

We address the fact that accounting academics often have very different perceptions of earnings management than do practitioners and regulators. Practitioners and regulators often see earnings management as pervasive and problematic—and in need of immediate remedial action. Academics are more sanguine, unwilling to believe that earnings management is actively practiced by most firms or that the earnings management that does exist should necessarily concern investors. We explore the reasons for these different perceptions, and argue that each of these groups may benefit from some rethinking of their views about earnings management.
“Private” Means to “Public” Ends: Governments as Market Actors

Many people recognize that governments can play salutary roles in relation to markets by (a) “overseeing” market behavior from “above,” or (b) supplying foundational “rules of the game” from “below.” It is probably no accident that these widely recognized roles also sit comfortably with traditional conceptions of government and market, pursuant to which people tend categorically to distinguish between “public” and “private” spheres of activity. There is a third form of government action that receives less attention than forms (a) and (b), however, possibly owing in part to its straddling the traditional public/private divide. We call it the “government as market actor” form, whereby government instrumentalities pursue traditionally “public” ends through traditionally “private” means. Inattention to this pervasive form of government action might signal a theoretical blind spot attending the public/private distinction itself. At least as importantly, however, this inattention also denies us a practical opportunity: it prevents our more fully exploiting the government role in question. This Article, part of a larger project, aims to encourage fuller theoretical appreciation and wider practical use of the role we identify. It first offers a provisional taxonomy of recurrent forms that the government market actor role appears to take, affording a wealth of illustrative case studies in so doing. It then envisions additional good that governments might do, simply by extending their market acting roles to spheres in which they have yet to be fully utilized. The Article concludes by suggesting next steps in both theorizing and employing the government market actor role.
Standing on Ceremony: Can Lead Plaintiffs Claim Injury from Securities That They Did Not Purchase?

Between 2007 and 2008, the American economy experienced its worst contraction since the Great Depression.1 News soon spread that a financial instrument called a "mortgage-backed security" was a prime cause of this disaster, compounding a host of extant problems in the housing market, including low interest rates, relaxed lending standards, and misplaced assumptions that prices would continue to rise indefinitely.2 Yet the damage done by mortgage-backed securities spilled beyond housing— institutional investors3 bet big on these products, only to realize too late that many of these securities were backed by loans is sued haphazardly at best, fraudulently at worst. Shockwaves from the meltdown spread throughout not just the nation, but the global economy, casting corporate titans and individuals
Organic Haze as a Biosignature in Anoxic Earth-like Atmospheres.

Abstract Early Earth may have hosted a biologically mediated global organic haze during the Archean eon (3.8–2.5 billion years ago). This haze would have significantly impacted multiple aspects of our planet, including its potential for habitability and its spectral appearance. Here, we model worlds with Archean-like levels of carbon dioxide orbiting the ancient Sun and an M4V dwarf (GJ 876) and show that organic haze formation requires methane fluxes consistent with estimated Earth-like biological production rates. On planets with high fluxes of biogenic organic sulfur gases (CS2, OCS, CH3SH, and CH3SCH3), photochemistry involving these gases can drive haze formation at lower CH4/CO2 ratios than methane photochemistry alone. For a planet orbiting the Sun, at 30× the modern organic sulfur gas flux, haze forms at a CH4/CO2 ratio 20% lower than at 1× the modern organic sulfur flux. For a planet orbiting the M4V star, the impact of organic sulfur gases is more pronounced: at 1× the modern Earth organic sulfu...
A Social Justice Theory of Self-Defense at the World Court

This article offers a theory of social justice based on the work of John Rawls that helps to explain use of force or jus ad bellum jurisprudence at the World Court. More precisely, the theory provides a prism for understanding the interpretation of Article 2(4) and Article 51 of the U.N. Charter in cases before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The judgments and opinions of the ICJ offer an empirical basis for proposing that social justice rationale is a key driver of the Court’s major decisions on analyzing questions of jus ad bellum in the law of armed conflict. Social justice is derived from critical theory and pragmatism, and the term is used here to mean the use of plenary or administrative power (or in the context of international relations, transnational, or global authority) to achieve equal or at least equitable distribution of scarce resources among many peoples or nations.
The WTO Trade Policy Review of the United States, 1996

This paper assesses the major developments in U.S. trade policies since the creation of the WTO in 1995. It is based in large measure on the fourth biannual (1996) WTO Trade Policy Review of the United States and updated through 1997. The discussion and assessments include in particular: the major U.S. multilateral trade-policy issues and activities centered in the WTO: issues and activities relating to NAFTA; U.S. bilateral trade relations with its major trading partners; administration of U.S. trade laws and regulations; and U.S. agricultural trade policies. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
Why Doesn’t She Leave? The Collision of First Amendment Rights and Effective Court Remedies for Victims of Domestic Violence

This Article examines the potential constitutional barriers to the issuance of protection orders that restrict the speech of batterers in domestic violence cases. Focusing on threats by batterers to divulge information related to the victim’s HIV or immigration status and sexual orientation, this Article considers the court’s authority to protect victims as they try to escape abuse despite their fear of the dissemination of this confidential, truthful information . After examining the possible barriers to such restrictions under relevant First Amendment doctrine, the Article concludes that the orders are not only normatively important, but are likely to be constitutionally sound relief.
Capital Allocation for Portfolio Credit Risk

Capital allocation rules are derived that maximize leverage while maintaining a target solvency rate for credit portfolios where risk is driven by a single common factor and idiosyncratic risk is fully diversified. Equilibrium conditions ensure that capital allocations depend on interest earnings as well as credits’ probability of default, endogenous loss given default, and asset correlation. Capitalization rates exceed those estimated using Gaussian credit loss models. Results demonstrate that credit risk is undercapitalized by the Basel II AIRB approach in part because of ambiguities regarding the definition of loss given default. An alternative proposed capital rule removes this bias.
Performance Incentives within Firms: The Effect of Managerial Responsibility

We show that top management incentives vary by responsibility. For oversight executives, pay-performance incentives are $1.22 per thousand dollar increase in shareholder wealth higher than for divisional executives. For CEOs, incentives are $5.65 higher than for divisional executives. Incentives for the median top management team are substantial at $32.32. CEOs account for 42 to 58 percent of aggregate team incentives. For divisional executives, the pay–divisional performance sensitivity is positive and increasing in the precision of divisional performance and the pay–firm performance sensitivity is decreasing in the precision of divisional performance. These results support principal–agent models with multiple signals of managerial effort.
Thickening the Safety Net: Key Elements to Successful Independent Living Programs for Young Adults Aging out of Foster Care

Every year, almost 25,000 children in foster care across the nation turn 18 and "age out" of state custody. They have been raised by the state because their own families were unable or unwilling to care for them, and they have never been adopted nor have they found a permanent home to spend their childhood. The challenges facing these youth at age 18 are enormous; many studies document the poor outcomes they experience. This Articles analyzes the reasons that the child welfare system is failing so many adolescents, identifies some basic principles for reform, and describes some innovative social service programs that, adhering to these principles, are worthy of replication.
Sovereign Immunity and the Constitutional Text

This Term, in Franchise Tax Board v. Hyatt, the Supreme Court will decide whether to overrule Nevada v. Hall, which holds that state sovereign immunity need not be respected in another state’s courts. Overruling Hall seems like one more logical extension of the Court’s modern sovereign immunity cases, such as Seminole Tribe and Alden v. Maine, although those cases have been accused of being inconsistent with the constitutional text. There is in fact a theory that explains how Seminole Tribe and Alden are consistent with the text. But under that theory, Nevada v. Hall may well be rightly decided. This Term may therefore present a test of whether the Court’s sovereign immunity cases will finally break away from the text of the Constitution. * Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School. Thanks to Nathan Chapman, Chad Flanders, Daniel Hemel, Richard Re, Stephen Sachs, and Steve Vladeck for insightful comments, to the SNR Denton and Alumni Faculty Funds for research support, and to Kelly Holt for helpful research assistance.
Emerging Market Business Cycles: The Cycle is the Trend

Emerging market business cycles exhibit strongly countercyclical current accounts, consumption volatility that exceeds income volatility, and “sudden stops” in capital inflows. These features contrast with developed small open economies. Nevertheless, we show that a standard model characterizes both types of markets. Motivated by the frequent policy regime switches observed in emerging markets, our premise is that these economies are subject to substantial volatility in trend growth. Our methodology exploits the information in consumption and net exports to identify the persistence of productivity. We find that shocks to trend growth—rather than transitory fluctuations around a stable trend—are the primary source of fluctuations in emerging markets. The key features of emerging market business cycles are then shown to be consistent with this underlying income process in an otherwise standard equilibrium model.
International and domestic collateral constraints in a model of emerging market crises

Abstract We build a model of emerging markets crises which features two types of collateral constraints. Firms in a domestic economy have limited borrowing capacity from international investors. They also have limited borrowing capacity with respect to each other. We study how the presence and changes in these collateral constraints affect financial and real variables. A binding international constraint in the aggregate leads to a sharp rise in interest rates and fire sales of domestic assets, while limited domestic collateral can lead to wasted international collateral. These two collateral constraints can interact in important ways. The first is disintermediation: a fire sale of domestic assets causes banks to fail in their function of reallocating resources across the economy leading to wasted international collateral. The second is a dynamic effect. We show that firms in an economy with limited domestic collateral and a binding international collateral constraint will not adequately precaution against adverse shocks, increasing the severity of these shocks.
Estimating the Value of Information

We derive a general expression for the value of information to a price-taking investor in a dynamic environment and provide a framework for its estimation. We study the value of both private and public information and break it into its instrumental and psychic parts. To illustrate, we estimate and rank the values of leading macroeconomic indicators (GDP, employment, etc.). Using variations in option prices, we find that consumer-investors with conventional preference parameters would pay 3 to 5 bps of their wealth for a one-time private peek into these indicators. Such signals provide substantial instrumental value but a minor psychic value.Received August 29, 2016; editorial decision June 6, 2018 by Editor Itay Goldstein. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.
The Death of the Practitioner

This article examines how the term "The Practitioner" organizes knowledge and power in public administration, and how it constrains thought about the field's possibilities. The Practitioner has neither the specific qualities it posits as a representative of executive authority, nor the generic, universal quality as a neutral figure of science, stripped of all particular characteristics. The Practitioner is shown to reinforce a preoccupation with a narrow range of social concerns and questions and, ultimately, determines what constitutes legitimate public administration speech and inquiry and who may speak on behalf of administrative realities. On a more fundamental level, however, The Practitioner names a specific kind of formal relationship in which the actual content of the term is less critical than the basic relationship it establishes and seeks to reproduce. Through its pedagogy, public administration fabricates heterogeneous practitioners into The Practitioner. The possibilities for a different kind...
The Information in the Term Structure: Some Further Results

SUMMARY This paper provides some refinements and updating of Fama's (1984) evidence on the information in the term structure about future spot interest rate movements. First, it uses econometric techniques that properly correct standard errors for overlapping data and for conditional heteroscedasticity. Second, it makes use of a new data set that has some potential advantages over Fama's, and which has more recent data. Overall, the results are in broad agreement with those of Fama. The term structure does help predict spot interest rate movements several months into the future. Indeed, updating Fama's results indicates that the forecast power of forward rates is generally higher during the October 1982 to June 1986 period than it was during the sample periods Fama examined. In a recent important paper, Fama (1984) resurrects the view that the term structure of interest rates contains information about the future movements of spot interest rates. Using ordinary least-squares estimation, Fama finds evidence that the forward rate-spot rate differential helps predict changes in the spot rate, while the difference between adjacent maturity forward rates helps predict the future 1-month changes in the spot rate. This paper provides some refinements of Fama's regression evidence. First, it uses econometric techniques that properly correct standard errors for overlapping data and for conditional heteroscedasticity. Second, it makes use of a new data set that has some potential advantages over Fama's and which has more recent data.*
Is Activity‐Based Costing Up to the Challenge When It Comes to Privatization of Local Government Services?

After its initial success in the private sector, activity-based costing (ABC) has been embraced by the public sector as an analytical tool that can be used to improve the efficiency of government operations, especially in the area of the privatization of operations. Despite claims that ABC can greatly enhance the evaluation of how to most efficiently deliver services, there are significant obstacles that must be overcome before ABC can be effectively implemented. In order to underscore the challenges facing successful ABC execution in the public sector, the use of activity-based cost accounting by the City of Indianapolis for its privatization initiatives is discussed. Generally ABC is not up to challenge of providing local governments with the tool necessary to comprehensively evaluate direct services and determine which are candidates for contracting out or privatization.
Measuring Market Power in the Ready-to-Eat Cereal Industry

The ready-to-eat cereal industry is characterized by high concentration, high price-cost margins, large advertising-to-sales ratios, and numerous introductions of new products. Previous researchers have concluded that the ready-to-eat cereal industry is a classic example of an industry with nearly collusive pricing behavior and intense nonprice competition. This paper empirically examines this conclusion. In particular, I estimate price-cost margins, but more importantly I am able empirically to separate these margins into three sources: (i) that which is due to product differentiation; (ii) that which is due to multi-product firm pricing; and (iii) that due to potential price collusion. The results suggest that given the demand for different brands of cereal, the first two effects explain most of the observed price-cost margins. I conclude that prices in the industry are consistent with noncollusive pricing behavior, despite the high price-cost margins. Leading firms are able to maintain a portfolio of differentiated products and influence the perceived product quality. It is these two factors that lead to high price-cost margins.
The Microsoft Case: What Can a Dominant Firm Do to Defend Its Market Position?

This paper examines the competitive actions taken by Microsoft in its "browser war" with Netscape, most importantly Microsoft's decisions to give away Explorer free of charge, integrate Explorer into its dominant Windows operating system and pay online service providers for exclusive distribution. Consumers benefited significantly from these actions, but the fundamental economic question is whether Microsoft abused its existing market power when competing in this way. A detailed analysis of Microsoft's conduct and the economics of competition for distribution suggests that severe limits placed on Microsoft's behavior would not be welfare.
Value Relevance of Nonfinancial Information: The Case of Patent Data

When used in conjunction with traditional R&D expenditure information, scientific information on patent quality appear to give investors a more useful basis upon which to judge the economic merit of the firm's R&D effort. This complementary relation suggests that consistent disclosure of patent quality information would be helpful to investors in their ongoing assessment of firms in the high tech sector.
Models and Methods of University Technology Transfer

This paper argues that a linear model of technology transfer is no longer sufficient, or perhaps even no longer relevant, to account for the nuances and complexities of the technology transfer process that characterizes the ongoing commercialization activities of universities. Shortcomings of the traditional linear model of technology transfer include inaccuracies — such as its strict linearity and oversimplification of the process, composition, a one-size-fits-all approach, and an overemphasis on patents — and inadequacies — such as failing to account for informal mechanisms of technology transfer, failing to acknowledge the impact of organizational culture, and failing to represent university reward systems within the model. As such, alternative views of technology transfer that better capture the progression of the university towards an entrepreneurial and dynamic institution are presented here, and that advance the body of knowledge about this important academic endeavor.
Winner Take All: Competition, Strategy, and the Structure of Returns in the Internet Economy

In this paper, we develop an economic rationale for the following stylized fact: Web‐based firms spend profligately on advertising and marketing and usually lose money. Our rationale is based on the winner‐take‐all structure of high fixed cost, low marginal cost, markets for information goods. This market structure ensures that market participation and investment policy are highly stochastic. Moreover, if a firm chooses to participate in a Web market, it is optimal to act very aggressively through saturation advertising. Although increases in advertising costs reduce the probability of entry, once the decision to enter is made, firm strategies are insensitive to advertising price. Consistent with empirical studies of the profitability of internet firms (Hand, 2001), our model predicts returns that are highly positively skewed, that is, even the firms that survive the competition for market position have a small chance of huge gains combined with a large probability of very modest returns. In dynamic competition, firms weakened by early rounds are less likely to challenge in subsequent rounds. However, when a challenge is attempted, it is always aggressive. In addition, because large expenditures in the first period produce valuable strategic real options in later periods, which are treated as expenses using traditional accounting methodology, the financial valuation of Internet firms may actually be negatively related to performance when using standard accounting measures of profitability that fail to capitalize these strategic real options.
Investigating Violations of International Law in Armed Conflict

This chapter examines the legal norms governing investigations of possible international law violations during an armed conflict. It begins by setting forth those rules derived from the 1949 Geneva Conventions, 1977 Additional Protocols and customary law. Since human rights norms also apply in armed conflicts, the chapter surveys human rights investigatory standards, and how they interact with corresponding international humanitarian law rules. Since international humanitarian and human rights law on the subject lacks granularity, State practice is surveyed in order to tease out prevailing practices that may either reflect on how treaty law is applied or reveal the broad outlines of customary law. The chapter offers conclusions as to the applicable legal standards for such investigations.
Central American immigrant workers and legal violence in Phoenix, Arizona

This article examines how a multi-pronged legal regime, composed of laws at the federal, state and local levels (including those that apply specifically to Central Americans), shapes the everyday lives of Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans in Phoenix, Arizona, with special attention to the ambit of work. The article is based on longitudinal qualitative fieldwork and 78 in-depth interviews conducted over a decade in the Phoenix metro area. It argues that the experiences of Central Americans during the years of direct political violence in their home countries help to shed light on their experiences as workers in the United States. Using the lens of legal violence to help retrieve the “excesses” of the law and its implementation today, the article highlights Central American immigrant workers' experiences of abuses in the workplace and an overall context of fear that encroach on their rights.
Treatment of the X chromosome in mapping multiple quantitative trait loci

Statistical methods to map quantitative trait loci (QTL) often neglect the X chromosome and may focus exclusively on autosomal loci. But the X chromosome often requires special treatment: sex and cross-direction covariates may need to be included to avoid spurious evidence of linkage, and the X chromosome may require a separate significance threshold. In multiple-QTL analyses, including the consideration of epistatic interactions, the X chromosome also requires special care and consideration. We extend a penalized likelihood method for multiple-QTL model selection, to appropriately handle the X chromosome. We examine its performance in simulation and by application to a large eQTL data set. The method has been implemented in the package R/qtl.
Lunch, recess and nutrition: responding to time incentives in the cafeteria.

Abstract Objectives In this study, we evaluate if moving recess before lunch has an effect on the amount of fruits and vegetables elementary school students eat as part of their school-provided lunch. Methods Participants were 1st–6th grade students from three schools that switched recess from after to before lunch and four similar schools that continued to hold recess after lunch. We collected data for an average of 14 days at each school (4 days during spring 2011, May 3 through June 1, 2011 and 9 days during fall 2011, September 19 through November 11, 2011). All of the schools were in Orem, UT. Data was collected for all students receiving a school lunch and was based on observational plate waste data. Results We find that moving recess before lunch increased consumption of fruits and vegetables by 0.16 servings per child (a 54% increase) and increased the fraction of children eating at least one serving of fruits or vegetables by 10 percentage points (a 45% increase). In contrast, the schools in our control group actually experienced a small reduction in fruit and vegetable consumption during the same time period. Conclusions Our results show the benefits of holding recess before lunch and suggest that if more schools implement this policy, there would be significant increases in fruit and vegetable consumption among students who eat school lunch as part of the National School Lunch Program.
Corporate Governance and Institutional Ownership

In this study we examine the relation between corporate governance and institutional ownership. Our empirical results show that the fraction of a company’s shares that are held by institutional investors increases with the quality of its governance structure. In a similar vein, we show that the proportion of institutions that hold a firm’s shares increases with its governance quality. Our results are robust to different estimation methods and alternative model specifications. These results are consistent with the conjecture that institutional investors gravitate to stocks of companies with good governance structure to meet fiduciary responsibility as well as to minimize monitoring and exit costs.
Law, Social Welfare, and Net Neutrality

Net neutrality generates wealth transfers from one type of internet content provider to another. In theory, these transfers might be socially desirable, and could be justified on the basis of informational externalities similar to those cited to justify fair use in copyright law. In practice, however, the conditions that justify fair use do not hold where net neutrality operates. Moreover, the internal subsidization required by net neutrality generates a regressive transfer. The welfare gains that might come from controlling anticompetitive abuse or government coercion through implementation of net neutrality can be achieved by alternative policies with less harmful consequences.
FrAngel: component-based synthesis with control structures

In component-based program synthesis, the synthesizer generates a program given a library of components (functions). Existing component-based synthesizers have difficulty synthesizing loops and other control structures, and they often require formal specifications of the components, which can be expensive to generate. We present FrAngel, a new approach to component-based synthesis that can synthesize short Java functions with control structures when given a desired signature, a set of input-output examples, and a collection of libraries (without formal specifications). FrAngel aims to discover programs with many distinct behaviors by combining two main ideas. First, it mines code fragments from partially-successful programs that only pass some of the examples. These extracted fragments are often useful for synthesis due to a property that we call special-case similarity. Second, FrAngel uses angelic conditions as placeholders for control structure conditions and optimistically evaluates the resulting program sketches. Angelic conditions decompose the synthesis process: FrAngel first finds promising partial programs and later fills in their missing conditions. We demonstrate that FrAngel can synthesize a variety of interesting programs with combinations of control structures within seconds, significantly outperforming prior state-of-the-art.
The Russian Crisis: Perils and Prospects for Post-Soviet Transition

Since 1992, the rhetoric of Russian economic reformers has been one of full-speed ahead to a free-market economy. The reality, however, has diverged significantly from this rhetoric at both a broad rules of the game level and specific policy within rules level. The resulting ambiguity of the economic environment and the lingering effects of the previous system which is supposed to be reformed has led to a continued deterioration of the Russian economy. A modified defense of shock therapy as a path to a cure for Russia's economic malaise, as opposed to the cure itself, is offered.