cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Importance of Check-Cashing Businesses to the Unbanked: Racial/Ethnic Differences

The roughly 9.1% of all U.S. families that are without some type of transaction account (unbanked) are disproportionately represented among minorities. The unbanked often must rely on alternative ways to carry out basic financial transactions such as cashing payroll checks and paying bills. This study analyzes unique survey data and finds that a consumer's decision to patronize check-cashing businesses is jointly made with the decision to be unbanked. For the unbanked, these businesses are an important source of financial services. Attributes that contribute to these decisions, however, vary with the racial/ethnic group. Latent preference effects are also observed to influence this joint decision for blacks and Hispanics. These findings may explain in part why the provisions of the Debt Collection Improvement Act (DCIA) of 1996 have not been more successful in bringing unbanked federal benefits recipients into the financial mainstream. Consumer participation in mainstream financial markets can improve the...
Anisotropic Autocorrelation in House Prices

This article examines anisotropic spatial autocorrelation in single-family house prices and in hedonic house-price equation residuals using a spherical semivariogram and transactions data for one county in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, MSA. Isotropic semivariograms model spatial relationships as a function of the distance separating properties in space. Anisotropic semivariograms model spatial relationships as a function of both the distance and the direction separating observations in space. The goals of this article are (1) to determine whether there is spatial autocorrelation in hedonic house-price equation residuals and (2) to empirically examine the validity of the isotropy assumption. We estimate the parameters of spherical semivariograms for house prices and for hedonic house-price equation residuals for 21 housing submarkets within Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. These housing submarkets are constructed by dividing the county into 21 groupings of economically similar adjacent census tracts. Census tracts are grouped according to 1990 census tract median house prices and according to characteristics of the housing stock. We fit the residuals of each submarket hedonic house price equation to both isotropic and anisotropic spherical semivariograms. We find evidence of spatial autocorrelation in the hedonic residuals in spite of a very elaborate hedonic specification. Additionally, we have determined that, in some submarkets, the spatial autocorrelation in the hedonic residuals is anisotropic rather than isotropic. The empirical results suggest that the spatial autocorrelation in Montgomery County single-family house-price equation residuals is anisotropic in submarkets where residents typically commute to a regional or local central business district.
THE EXPORTER WAGE PREMIUM RECONSIDERED | DESTINATIONS, DISTANCES AND LINKED EMPLOYER-EMPLOYEE DATA

This study uses detailed, reliable and up-to-date linked employer-employee data that take account of both the demand and the supply side of the labor market to chal- lenge the conventional wisdom of a universal exporter wage premium. It investigates whether for German establishments an exporter wage premium can be found irrespec- tive of export destination and the distance between export origin and destination. As expected, it nds that exporters generally pay higher wages than non-exporters. But it also shows that only exporting to certain countries is associated with a wage premium. Moreover, such a premium exists only for establishments that ship goods over a relatively long distance.
Is Military Justice Sentencing on the March? Should it be? And if so, Where should it Head? Court-Martial Sentencing Process, Practice, and Issues

This article starts with a sketch of the military justice system to orient readers. Understanding that structure, the article then describes the sentencing process for special and general courts-martial. The article follows by identifying two core military sentencing questions: First, should commanders have authority to grant clemency? Second, should the military justice system adopt sentencing guidelines? With respect to each topic presented, the article does not attempt to answer the questions nor offer prescriptions. Rather, it seeks to identify the principal fault lines around which debate should, or will likely, fall. The article next presents ‘‘nutshell’’ introductions to additional sentencing matters that may warrant review as applied in the military context, including the handling of collateral matters, and the relationship between age and culpability. However, for the reasons stated, these issues are not presented in detail here.
The effect of information on the bidding and survival of entrants in procurement auctions

In government procurement auctions of construction contracts, entrants are typically less informed and bid more aggressively than incumbent …rms. This bidding behavior makes them more sus- ceptible to losses aecting their prospect of survival. In April of 2000, the Oklahoma Department of Transportation started releasing the internal cost estimates to complete highway construction projects. Using newly developed quantile regression approaches, this paper examines the impact of the policy change on aggressive entrants. First, we …nd that the information release eliminates the bidding dierential between entrants and incumbents attributed to informational asymmetries. Second, we argue that the policy change aects the prospects of survival of entrants in the market. We …nd that those who used to exit the market relatively soon are now staying 37 percent longer, while at the median level bidding duration increased by roughly 68 percent. The policy has the potential to encourage entry in government procurement auctions and thus increase competition.
Screening for Solidarity

t Assistant Professor of Law, University of California Irvine School of Law. For helpful comments, I am grateful to Jennifer Gordon, Catherine Fisk, David Moore, and Laura Weinrib. This essay benefitted from presentations at UC Irvine School of Law, BYU J. Reuben Clark Law School, and at The University of Chicago's Immigration Law and Institutional Design Symposium, held at The University of Chicago Law School on June 15 and 16, 2012. The UC Irvine Law School research librarians provided excellent support. I am also grateful to Morgan White-Smith, Taylor Meehan, and the other University of Chicago Law Review editors for their superb editorial work. Please direct comments and questions to slee@law.uci.edu. 1 The immigration code prevents employers from hiring any "unauthorized alien [s]," which means that at the time of hiring, the noncitizen is not "either (A) an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence, or (B) authorized to be so employed by this Act or by the Attorney General." Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) § 101(a)(1), Pub L No 99-603, 100 Stat 3359, 3360, 3368, amending INA § 274A(a)(l), (h)(3), codified at 8 USC § 1324a(a)(l), (h)(3). 2 Jeffrey S. Passei and D "Vera Cohn, Unauthorized Immigrant Population: National and State Trends , 2010 1 (Pew Hispanic Center Feb 1, 2011), online at http://www .pewhispanic.org/files/reports/133.pdf (visited Mar 4, 2013) (noting that in 2010, eight million of the approximately eleven million unauthorized migrants were in the workforce). Unauthorized workers comprise approximately 5.2 percent of the total workforce. Id at 17 table 6 (showing unauthorized immigrants' share of the US labor force for every year since 2000). Unauthorized migrants comprise a higher percentage of total workers in certain industries. See Andorra Bruno, Immigration-Related Worksite Enforcement: Performance Measures 2 table 1 (Congressional Research Service May 10, 2012), online at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R40002.pdf (visited Mar 4, 2013) (noting that in 2008 unauthorized workers comprised about 14 percent, 13 percent, and 10 percent of the "Construction," "Agriculture," and "Leisure & Hospitality" industries respectively). Unauthorized migrants will likely continue to comprise a significant percentage of the total unauthorized population. The unauthorized population has remained steady for several years at around eleven million just under 30 percent of the total foreign-born population despite the fact that immigration law has become harsher and less forgiving. See Passei and Cohn, National and State Trends , 2010 at 1 (cited in note 2) (graphing the unauthorized immigrant population from 2000 to 2010); id at 9 ("Unauthorized immigrants represented 28% of the nation's foreign-born population of 40.2 million in March 2010, according to the Pew Hispanic Center estimates. The share is the same as it was in 2009 but a decline from 2007's 31%.").
Invigorating Vertical Merger Enforcement

This Feature summarizes why and how vertical merger enforcement should be invigorated. In our modern market system, vigorous vertical merger enforcement is a necessity. Strong enforcement is particularly important in markets where economies of scale and network effects lead to barriers to entry and durable market power. Even when there are parallel vertical mergers, the result may well be an anticompetitive reciprocal dealing, coordinated equilibrium rather than intense competition among efficient integrated firms. Stronger enforcement would involve several steps, including recognition that claims of elimination of double marginalization do not deserve to be silver bullets and that behavioral remedies are generally unable to prevent anticompetitive effects.
When Is Reputation Bad

Abstract In traditional reputation models, the ability to build a reputation is good for the long-run player. In [Ely, J., Valimaki, J., 2003. Bad reputation. NAJ Econ. 4, 2; http://www.najecon.org/v4.htm . Quart. J. Econ. 118 (2003) 785–814], Ely and Valimaki give an example in which reputation is unambiguously bad. This paper characterizes a class of games in which that insight holds. The key to bad reputation is that participation is optional for the short-run players, and that every action of the long-run player that makes the short-run players want to participate has a chance of being interpreted as a signal that the long-run player is “bad.” We allow a broad set of commitment types, allowing many types, including the “Stackelberg type” used to prove positive results on reputation. Although reputation need not be bad if the probability of the Stackelberg type is too high, the relative probability of the Stackelberg type can be high when all commitment types are unlikely.
A Profile of Discontinuity between Citizen Demand and Willingness to Pay Taxes: Comprehensive Planning for Park and Recreation Investment

Growing alienation between citizens and government represents an important challenge to democracy. Resistance to taxation is one of the manifestations of this alienation. The issue is further complicated by citizen demands that exceed their willingness to pay taxes, referred to here as tax-demand discontinuity. This article uses a survey of over 700 citizens designed to provide an information foundation for comprehensive park and recreation planning to test for and profile tax-demand discontinuity. Using combined scores on summated measures of willingness to pay taxes and demand for public investment, citizens are typologically classified into nine groups that are then consolidated under three classifications of tax-demand discontinuity. Citizen-assignments include traditionalists, or those with continuity or balance between willingness to pay taxes and demand; philanthropists, those who are willing to pay taxes in excess of demand; and free-riders, citizens with demands that exceed willingness to pay taxes. Differences in assessments of local government performance are examined in relationship to tax-demand discontinuity classifications indicating that productivity alone will not resolve issues of tax-demand discontinuity. The results indicate differences in citizen subpopulations in tax-demand discontinuity.
Putting Patients First: How the FDA Could Use Its Existing Powers to Reduce Post-Market Adverse Events

The danger to the health of patients taking drugs) recently on the market after being approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is well documented. While there may be problems inherent to the drug itself, what is emerging as a more serious issue is possible “drug-drug interactions (DDIs)” between a newly approved drug and the drugs already being taken by the patient. Researchers at Stanford University recently noted that “DDIs cause nearly 74,000 emergency room visits and 195,000 hospitalizations in the USA.” This situation is not due to laxity by the FDA so much as it reflects the current state of health care. As Professor Barbara Evans explains, the FDA plays the role as “gatekeeper” in assessing the safety and efficacy of drugs, and other products, before they go on the market but as a matter of “realism” because “[t]he gate is intrinsically porous, and safety cannot be achieved by fighting that fact but rather by responding to it.” Indeed, concerns about the problem resulted in Congress extending the FDA’s ability to require manufacturers to conduct their own research studies to assess the safety and efficacy of the drugs they sell not just before seeking FDA approval but afterwards as well. Yet despite the awarding of these new powers, there is still no comprehensive mechanism in place to gather the information needed to protect or warn patients who receive these prescriptions. So although the FDAA gives the FDA the authority to require sponsors to conduct post-market clinical trials if it is aware of “a known serious risk related to the use of the drug involved” it also authorizes the FDA to “[a]ssess signals of serious risk related to the use of the drug.” This article proposes ways in which the FDA can use this power to promote and protect the public’s health. There have been numerous reports by or commissioned by the FDA or other government and private entities. The goal of this article is to gather this information, re-affirm why change is necessary, suggest two additional measures that so far have not been proposed, the addition of whistleblower protection and greater use of electronic medical and pharmaceutical records, and explain why the FDA could make these changes itself rather than await action from Congress. It is the claim of this article that although the phenomena of the emergence of post- approval hazards is inevitable, the FDA can do far more to protect patients by using its legal authority to require post- market surveillance for all, not some, newly approved products. Moreover, it can increase the likelihood of relevant information coming to its attention sooner by targeting the specific groups who are likely to have early knowledge of harms caused by new drugs: the sponsors, health care providers, patients, and the FDA itself.
Benefit Corporations -- A Sustainable Form of Organization?

Founders of social enterprises believe profits and social good can be produced in tandem and wish to form organizations that will pursue these dual missions.1 They will, however, encounter obstacles to articulating and enforcing such dual missions if they adopt either a traditional nonprofit or for-profit form of organization. Nonprofit forms bar profit distribution2 and for-profit forms will create practical, if not legal, pressure to favor profit maximization over social good when the two come into conflict.3 And these two imperatives will certainly, at times, conflict. If more profit could always be obtained by pursuing social good, traditional for-profits would produce the optimal level of social goods, charities would be swimming in resources, or both. Social entrepreneurs believe social good can be produced along with profits and desire hybrid forms of organization to smooth a single enterprise’s path to realizing both goals.4 A mounting number of jurisdictions have attempted to meet this demand by enabling new hybrid organizational forms. These include the low-profit limited liability company (“L3C”) available in nine U.S. states5 and the community interest company (“CIC”)
Ethics of the social determinants of health

8–11 Such efforts have fuelled the debate over the relative contributions of health determinants and how to weight and direct public policies that affect health. 12–17 The debate centres on the tension between the need to account for the impact of health determinants outside the health-care system (social determinants of health) and the need to balance health as an objective with other valuable social ends (in other policy domains). Alongside this practical debate exists a parallel debate at the philosophical level; 18–23 one that will in many ways inform the policy choices that societies make to improve the health of their populations. The implications of theories of justice (eg, fair and equitable treatment of people) for social determinants of health has thus become an important topic of philosophical inquiry, although little work has been done in this area. 19–21
Subsidies to employee health insurance premiums and the health insurance market

One approach to covering the uninsured that is frequently advocated by policy-makers is subsidizing the employee portion of employer-provided health insurance premiums. But, since the vast majority of those offered employer-provided health insurance already take it up, such an approach is only appealing if there is a very high takeup elasticity among those who are offered and uninsured. Moreover, if plan choice decisions are price elastic, then such subsidies can at the same time increase health care costs by inducing selection of more expensive plans. We study an excellent example of such subsidies: the introduction of pre-tax premiums for postal employees in 1994, and then for the remaining federal employees in 2000. We do so using a census of personnel records for all federal employees from 1991 through 2002. We find that there is a very small elasticity of insurance takeup with respect to its after-tax price, and a modest elasticity of plan choice. Our results suggest that the federal government did little to improve insurance coverage, but much to increase health care expenditures, through this policy change.
Prospective Advice and Consent

Treaty-making in the United States follows a well-worn track: the President negotiates and signs; the Senate gives advice and consent; and the President ratifies. This Article argues that the order of the first two steps is not constitutionally determined and should be reversed under certain circumstances. As text, historical context, and evolving practice demonstrate, the Treaty Clause gives the President and the Senate the flexibility to determine the timing and specificity of the Senate’s advice and consent. The present system of advice and consent after negotiation and signature limits the number of treaties that can be made under the Treaty Clause, slows the entry into force of even minor treaties, and leads to intentionally endless delays (amounting to outright deaths) for major multilateral ones. By having broad-brush advice and consent precede treaty negotiation and signature, the United States could greatly improve the efficiency of its treaty-making process and increase its negotiating power at the international level.
Parameter misspecification and robust monetary policy rules

In this paper, I evaluate the performance deterioration that occurs when the central bank employs an optimal targeting rule that is based on incorrect parameter values. I focus on two parameters - the degree of inflation inertia and the degree of price stickiness. I explicitly account for the effects of the structural parameters on the objective function used to evaluate outcomes, as well as on the model's behavioral equations. The costs of using simple rules relative to the costs of parameter misspecification are also assessed. JEL Classification: E52, E58
Federal Administration and Administrative Law in the Gilded Age

The dominant story of America’s so-called “Gilded Age” describes an era of private excess and public corruption. In a rapidly industrializing society, private capital, in league with venal politicians, ran roughshod over a national state apparatus incapable of responding to the emerging social and economic needs of the day. Only toward the end of this era, with the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, did the national government begin to break free from a laissez-faire ideology that was antithetical to state building in virtually all of its forms. Indeed, on this conventional account, the American administrative state, and with it administrative law, only began to emerge in the early twentieth century. And both remained underdeveloped until the New Deal constitutional revolution. There is much truth to this familiar narrative, but it is far from the whole truth. State capacities built steadily throughout the post-Reconstruction era. Congress created multiple new departments, bureaus, and programs, and federal civilian employment grew much more rapidly than population. Just as today, conflicts between political parties, the drama of electoral politics, and the vagaries of congressional lawmaking dominated the headlines. But the day-to-day activities of government were in the charge of administrative departments and bureaus. Operating under broad delegations of authority, administrators developed a rich internal law of administration that guided massive administrative adjudicatory activity and substantial regulatory action as well. Moreover, policy innovation at the legislative level depended heavily on the research and recommendations of existing administrative agencies. In short, if we look at legislative and administrative practice rather than at constitutional ideology or political rhetoric, we can see the emergence of a national administrative state and national administrative law before either had a name. author. Sterling Professor of Law and Management, Yale University. My thanks to Daniel Habib, Scott Hartman, and Ana Munoz for excellent research assistance and to Patricia Page for her usual swift and accurate manuscript preparation. Thanks also to Bruce Ackerman, Akhil Amar, Anne MacClintock, Nicholas Parrillo, and Peter Strauss for comments on earlier drafts. As always, I owe an enormous debt to the support of the Yale Law School in all its parts. No scholar was ever blessed with a more supportive institution. MASHAW_PRESS_V1WEB.DOC 5/10/2010 2:40:30 PM federal administration and administrative law in the gilded age 1363 article contents
Broken Systems, Broken Duties: A New Theory for School Finance Litigation

In May 2010, a coalition of California students, parents, and school districts filed a ground-breaking lawsuit alleging that the state’s public school finance system violates the California constitution. The lawsuit, Robles-Wong v. California, is not ground-breaking because of its basic aim; at last count, school finance lawsuits with similar goals have occurred in forty-four states. Instead, the lawsuit is path-breaking because of the novel approach plaintiffs used to frame their constitutional challenge. Historically, plaintiffs have sued state governments using two legal theories: the equity theory and the adequacy theory. Under the equity theory, plaintiffs argue that the states distribute school resources in a disparate manner that violates equal protection of the laws. Under the adequacy theory, plaintiffs assert that the states deny children their right to an adequate level of education as guaranteed under the education clauses in state constitutions. While litigants suing under the equity theory have lost more cases than they have won, adequacy challenges have met some success: plaintiffs in adequacy claims have prevailed in two-thirds of the thirty-three cases in state courts. In recent years, however, plaintiffs have grown less likely to prevail in their school finance challenges, losing six of eleven cases decided since 2009. Moreover, as I show in an empirical analysis of school spending levels in twenty-two states, even those states that have experienced successful adequacy and equity lawsuits continue to spend less than the amount necessary to provide their children with a quality education. Responding to these trends, the Robles-Wong plaintiffs allege a new and different form of constitutional violation: that the state’s school finance program violates the state’s constitutional duty to provide a “system” of common schools because it is not “intentionally, rationally, and demonstrably aligned” with the educational goals described in statewide academic content standards. As this Article explains, this constitutional violation alleged in Robles-Wong, which I call the “broken system” cause of action, represents a significant evolution in the historic journey of school finance litigation. In addition to describing the textual and legal basis for this new theory, I argue that it builds on the experiences of its two predecessor theories, responds to important trends in education policy reform, and offers courts a manageable framework for ensuring that state school systems are in compliance with the substantive educational guarantees of state constitutions.
Economics and Reality

This paper is a non-technical and somewhat philosophical essay, that seeks to investigate the relationship between economics and reality. More precisely, it asks how reality in the form of empirical evidence does or does not influence economic thinking and theory. In particular, which role do calibration, statistical inference, and structural change play? What is the current state of affairs, what are the successes and failures, what are the challenges? I shall tackle these questions moving from general to specific. For the general perspective, I examine the following four points of view. First, economics is a science. Second, economics is an art. Third, economics is a competition. Forth, economics is politics. I then examine four specific cases for illustration and debate. First, is there a Phillips curve? Second, are prices sticky? Third, does contractionary monetary policy lead to a contraction in output? Forth, what causes business cycles? The general points as well as the specific cases each have their own implication for the central question at hand. Armed with this list of implications, I shall then attempt to draw a summary conclusion and provide an overall answer.
Trade deflection and trade depression

This is the first paper to empirically examine whether a country’s use of an import restricting trade policy distorts a foreign country’s exports to third markets. We first develop a theoretical model of worldwide trade in which the imposition of antidumping and safeguard taris, or “trade remedies,” by one country causes significant distortions in world trade flows. We then empirically test this model by investigating the eect of the United States’ use of such import restrictions on Japanese exports of roughly 4800 products into 37 countries between 1992 and 2001. Our estimation yields evidence that US restrictions both deflect and depress Japanese export flows to third countries. Imposition of a US antidumping measure against Japan deflects trade, as the average antidumping duty on Japanese exports leads to a 5-7% increase in Japanese exports of the same product to the average third country market. The imposition of a US antidumping measure against a third country depresses trade, as the average US duty imposed on a third country leads to a 5-19% decrease in Japanese exports of that same product to the average third country’s market. We also document the substantial variation in trade deflection and trade depression across dierent importing countries and exported products.
Using a Simple Contest to Illustrate Mechanism Design

This article describes a simple classroom activity that illustrates how economic theory can be used for mechanism design. The rules for a set of contests are presented; the results typically obtained from these contests illustrate how the prize structure can be manipulated in order to produce a particular outcome. Specifically, this activity is designed to show how changing the prize structure can impact both the contestants’ average efforts and the effort level of the hardest-working contestant. The activity can be run in a 50-minute class, has instructions that fit on a single piece of paper, and, although it can be run in large classes, requires only six students.
EVALUATING HEDGING ERRORS: AN ASYMPTOTIC APPROACH

We propose a methodology for evaluating the hedging errors of derivative securities due to the discreteness of trading times or the observation times of market prices, or both. Utilizing a weak convergence approach, we derive the asymptotic distributions of the hedging errors as the discreteness disappears in several situations. First, we examine the hedging error due to discrete-time trading when the true strategy is known, which generalizes the result of Bertsimas, Kogan, and Lo (2000) to continuous It ˆ op rocesses. Then we consider a data-driven strategy, when the true strategy is unknown. This strategy is free of parametric model assumptions, therefore it is expected to serve as a benchmark for the evaluation of parametric strategies. Finally, we consider a case study of the Black-Scholes delta-hedging strategy when the volatility is unknown in the proposed framework. The results obtained give us a prospect for further developments of the framework under which various parametric strategies could be compared in a unified manner.
Faith in the Rule of Law

This is an essay on Professor Brian Tamanaha's book, "Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law" (Cambridge Univ. Press 2006), and what Tamanaha describes as the danger that legal instrumentalism poses for the rule of law. It claims that though Tamanaha successfully traces the rise of legal instrumentalism over the last two centuries, the reader comes away wondering why Tamanaha seems so fretful about the strength of belief in the rule of law or what accounts for the desire to affirm a non-instrumentalist view of law in the face of the contrary march of history. The essay offers an answer to these questions. It claims that one source of resistance to the seemingly inexorable progress of legal instrumentalism lies in the non-rational, temporally unbounded human yearning that the rules that guide our lives should deserve our allegiance because they represent a transcendent structure of meaning. Our opposition to legal instrumentalism reflects "faith in the rule of law," a belief that the law is something other than merely a means to resolve our ordinary conflicts, and that it bestows worth and possibility to its adherents beyond their historical context. Drawing from Tamanaha's excellent history of the rise of legal instrumentalism, the essay reinterprets what Tamanaha repeatedly emphasizes as the crucial contemporary instrumentalist danger - our growing inability or unwillingness to believe that the law is anything but a tool to advance interest - as loss of faith in the rule of law. The essay thus offers a counterpoint to Professor Adrian Vermeule's reading of the book, arguing that Vermeule may be mistaken in analogizing Tamanaha's thesis to a kind of secularized Pascal's wager. The essay concludes by considering whether there is any value in faith in the rule of law and what that value might be.
Fintushel--Stern knot surgery in torus bundles

Suppose that X is a torus bundle over a closed surface with homologically essential fibers. Let X_K be the manifold obtained by Fintushel–Stern knot surgery on a fiber using a knot K⊂S^3. We prove that X_K has a symplectic structure if and only if K is a fibered knot. The proof uses Seiberg–Witten theory and a result of Friedl–Vidussi on twisted Alexander polynomials.
Even Republics Must Sometimes Strike Back

The general was frustrated. In the summer of 2011, General James Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put his concerns this way in a congressional hearing: “If it’s O.K. to attack me, and I’m not going to do anything other than improve my defenses every time you attack me, it’s very difficult to come up with a deterrent strategy.” He happened to be speaking about dealing with cyber attacks, but he could have made a similar point about a wide range of security threats. Our reticence about retaliating in kind for cyber attacks seems to reflect wider uneasiness about using force in a retaliatory – or punitive – spirit. Yet some forms of military retaliation may be quite necessary to our national security. Whatever else one might say in assessing America’s military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past decade, the experience demonstrates the limits of American commitment to nation-building and on-the-ground policing. But the United States still faces threats from many sources. It cannot hope to reconstruct every country that has hostile intentions. Instead, it must find ways to punish countries that sponsor attacks on America or allow their own territory to be used for planning and launching attacks. As the first section of this article explains, there are plausible legal grounds for inhibitions, given widely accepted understandings of
Regression Discontinuity Inference with Specification Error

Abstract A regression discontinuity (RD) research design is appropriate for program evaluation problems in which treatment status (or the probability of treatment) depends on whether an observed covariate exceeds a fixed threshold. In many applications the treatment-determining covariate is discrete. This makes it impossible to compare outcomes for observations “just above” and “just below” the treatment threshold, and requires the researcher to choose a functional form for the relationship between the treatment variable and the outcomes of interest. We propose a simple econometric procedure to account for uncertainty in the choice of functional form for RD designs with discrete support. In particular, we model deviations of the true regression function from a given approximating function—the specification errors—as random. Conventional standard errors ignore the group structure induced by specification errors and tend to overstate the precision of the estimated program impacts. The proposed inference procedure that allows for specification error also has a natural interpretation within a Bayesian framework.
The Impact of Consumer Inattention on Insurer Pricing in the Medicare Part D Program

The Medicare Part D program relies on consumer choice to provide insurers with incentives to offer low-priced, high-quality pharmaceutical insurance plans. We demonstrate that consumers switch plans infrequently and search imperfectly. We estimate a model of consumer plan choice with inattentive consumers and show that high observed premiums are consistent with insurers profiting from consumer inertia. We estimate the reduction in steady state plan premiums if all consumers were attentive. An average consumer could save $1050 over three years; government savings in the same period could amount to $1.3 billion or 1% of the cost of subsidizing the relevant enrollees.
Learning from Counting: Leveraging Temporal Classification for Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Detection.

This paper reports a new solution of leveraging temporal classification to support weakly supervised object detection (WSOD). Specifically, we introduce raster scan-order techniques to serialize 2D images into 1D sequence data, and then leverage a combined LSTM (Long, Short-Term Memory) and CTC (Connectionist Temporal Classification) network to achieve object localization based on a total count (of interested objects). We term our proposed network LSTM-CCTC (Count-based CTC). This "learning from counting" strategy differs from existing WSOD methods in that our approach automatically identifies critical points on or near a target object. This strategy significantly reduces the need of generating a large number of candidate proposals for object localization. Experiments show that our method yields state-of-the-art performance based on an evaluation on PASCAL VOC datasets.
Parity-time symmetric systems with memory

The authors show that memory in PT-symmetric systems leads to non-Markovian nonlinearity and self-induced Floquet dynamics.
Adversarial robustness study of convolutional neural network for lumbar disk shape reconstruction from MR images

Machine learning technologies using deep neural networks (DNNs), especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have made automated, accurate, and fast medical image analysis a reality for many applications, and some DNN-based medical image analysis systems have even been FDA-cleared. Despite the progress, challenges remain to build DNNs as reliable as human expert doctors. It is known that DNN classifiers may not be robust to noises: by adding a small amount of noise to an input image, a DNN classifier may make a wrong classification of the noisy image (i.e., in-distribution adversarial sample), whereas it makes the right classification of the clean image. Another issue is caused by out-of-distribution samples that are not similar to any sample in the training set. Given such a sample as input, the output of a DNN will become meaningless. In this study, we investigated the in-distribution (IND) and out-of-distribution (OOD) adversarial robustness of a representative CNN for lumbar disk shape reconstruction from spine MR images. To study the relationship between dataset size and robustness to IND adversarial attacks, we used a data augmentation method to create training sets with different levels of shape variations. We utilized the PGD-based algorithm for IND adversarial attacks and extended it for OOD adversarial attacks to generate OOD adversarial samples for model testing. The results show that IND adversarial training can improve the CNN robustness to IND adversarial attacks, and larger training datasets may lead to higher IND robustness. However, it is still a challenge to defend against OOD adversarial attacks.
Unrecognized Expected Credit Losses and Bank Share Prices

Accounting for credit losses under U.S. GAAP is transitioning from an incurred to an expected loss model. The model change was motivated by concerns that reporting only incurred losses does not provide investors with sufficient and timely information about banks’ credit risk. In this paper, I develop a measure of lifetime expected credit losses using vintage analysis to examine whether stock prices reflect information about unrecognized expected credit losses in an incurred loss regime. Consistent with investors being able to obtain information about expected losses that are not recognized in the financial statements, I find that unrecognized expected credit losses are negatively associated with bank stock prices. The pricing of these losses is stronger for larger banks, consistent with lower costs of obtaining this information for banks with better information environments. I also find that recorded allowances were less than estimated expected losses, on average, consistent with concerns that implementing the expected loss model will adversely impact regulatory capital adequacy.
State-Level Partisanship Strongly Correlates With Health Outcomes for Us Children

Introduction/Background: Poor childhood health can lead to chronic illness, producing significant burdens on both patients and the healthcare system. Given that public policy can affect public health, it is conceivable that childhood health can be influenced by one’s state of residence. The Cook Partisan Voting Index (PVI) is calculated based on how strongly a state leans toward the Democratic or Republican Party in presidential elections compared to the national average. We set out to determine the ecological correlation between childhood health outcomes and state-level partisanship, as denoted by PVI. Methods: The outcome of interests were 16 measures of childhood health obtained from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. …
Supply network resilience learning: An exploratory data analytics study

When a supplier experiences a disruption, it learns how to better prevent and recover from future disruptions. As suppliers learn to become more resilient, the overall supply network also learns to become more resilient. This research draws on the organizational learning literature to introduce the concept of supply network resilience learning, which we define as the improvement of supply network resilience when suppliers learn from their own disruptions. The analysis integrates agent-based modeling, experimental design, data analytics, and analytical modeling to investigate how supplier learning improves supply network learning. We examine how two types of supplier learning, namely learning-to-prevent and learning-to-recover, affect supply network learning. The results show that suppliers' learning-to-prevent results in a disruption-free supply network when time approaches infinity. However, the results differ across a more realistic finite time horizon. In this setting, learning-to-recover improves network learning when suppliers face a lower chance of disruption. The analysis also shows that centrally located suppliers enhance network learning, except when the risk of a disruption is high and the chance of diffusing a disruption to another supplier is high. In this setting, non-central suppliers become more critical to supply network learning. This research provides a framework that will help practitioners understand the contingencies that influence the effect of supplier learning on the overall supply network resilience learning.
High-purity pulsed squeezing generation with integrated photonics

Squeezed light has evolved into a powerful tool for quantum technology, ranging from quantum enhanced sensing and quantum state engineering based on partial post-selection techniques. The pulsed generation of squeezed light is of particular interest, as it can provide accurate time stamp and physically defined temporal mode, which are highly preferred in complex communication networks and large-scale information processing. However, the multimode feature of pulsed squeezing in conventional single-pass configuration limits the purity of the output state, negatively impacting its application in quantum technology. In this Letter, we propose a new approach to generate pulsed squeezing with high temporal purity. Pulsed squeezing based on parametric down-conversion in photonic cavities is analyzed. We show that the effective mode number of the output squeezed light approaches unity. Such a high-purity squeezed light can be realized with broad parameters and low pump power, providing a robust approach to generate large-scale quantum resource.
Tax Liability for Wage Theft

This paper shows how, under existing tax law, illegal wage underpayment by an employer (sometimes called “wage theft”) may generate employer tax liability for unreported income or disallowed business expense deductions. Given that the tax authority needs information from the underpaid worker to prove such liability, the paper identifies two ways that a worker can transmit that information to a tax authority: becoming a tax informant, or bringing a qui tam action under a state false claims act. Finally, the paper discusses possible influences on the decision of the unpaid worker to inform on the employer to the tax authority, and considers the conditions under which a tax authority is likely to audit an employer based on such information. In so doing, the paper identifies a new approach to combating wage theft and an undiscovered implication of basic income tax law.
UAV Aided Search and Rescue Operation Using Reinforcement Learning

Owing to the enhanced flexibility in deployment and decreasing costs of manufacturing, the demand for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is expected to soar in the upcoming years. In this paper, we explore a UAV aided search and rescue (SAR) operation in indoor environments, where the GPS signals might not be reliable. We consider a SAR scenario where the UAV tries to locate a victim trapped in an indoor environment by sensing the RF signals emitted from a smart device owned by the victim. To locate the victim as fast as possible, we leverage tools from reinforcement learning (RL). Received signal strength (RSS) at the UAV depends on the distance from the source, indoor shadowing and fading parameters, and antenna radiation pattern of the receiver mounted on the UAV. To make our analysis more realistic, we model two indoor scenarios with different dimensions using a commercial ray tracing software. Then, the corresponding RSS values at each possible discrete UAV location are extracted and used in a Q-learning framework. Unlike the traditional location-based navigation approach that exploits GPS coordinates, our method uses the RSS to define the states and rewards of the RL algorithm. We compare the performance of the proposed method where directional and omnidirectional antennas are used. The results reveal that the use of directional antennas provides faster convergence rates than the omnidirectional antennas.
An Adaptive Receiver for Underwater Acoustic Full-Duplex Communication with Joint Tracking of the Remote and Self-Interference Channels

Full-duplex (FD) communication is a promising candidate to address the data rate limitations in underwater acoustic (UWA) channels. Because of transmission at the same time and on the same frequency band, the signal from the local transmitter creates self-interference (SI) that contaminates the the signal from the remote transmitter. At the local receiver, channel state information for both the SI and remote channels is required to remove the SI and equalize the SI-free signal, respectively. However, because of the rapid time-variations of the UWA environment, real-time tracking of the channels is necessary. In this paper, we propose a receiver for UWA-FD communication in which the variations of the SI and remote channels are jointly tracked by using a recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm fed by feedback from the previously detected data symbols. Because of the joint channel estimation, SI cancellation is more successful compared to UWA-FD receivers with separate channel estimators. In addition, due to providing a real-time channel tracking without the need for frequent training sequences, the bandwidth efficiency is preserved in the proposed receiver.
How Service Quality Variability Hurts Revenue When Customers Learn: Implications for Dynamic Personalized Pricing

Most service settings involve some degree of variability in the quality of customers’ experiences. An understudied mechanism is analyzed by which this variability can reduce firm revenues when cust...
Cohen–Lenstra distributions via random matrices over complete discrete valuation rings with finite residue fields

Let (R,m) be a complete discrete valuation ring with the finite residue field R∕m= Fq. Given a monic polynomial P(t)∈R[t] whose reduction modulo m gives an irreducible polynomial P‾(t)∈Fq[t], we initiate an investigation of the distribution of coker(P(A)), where A∈Matn(R) is randomly chosen with respect to the Haar probability measure on the additive group Matn(R) of n×n R-matrices. In particular, we provide a generalization of two results of Friedman and Washington about these random matrices. We use some concrete combinatorial connections between Matn(R) and Matn(Fq) to translate our problems about a Haar-random matrix in Matn(R) into problems about a random matrix in Matn(Fq) with respect to the uniform distribution. Our results over Fq are about the distribution of the P‾-part of a random matrix A‾∈Matn(Fq) with respect to the uniform distribution, and one of them generalizes a result of Fulman. We heuristically relate our results to a celebrated conjecture of Cohen and Lenstra, which predicts that given an odd prime p, any finite abelian p-group (i.e., Zp-module) H occurs as the p-part of the class group of a random imaginary quadratic field extension of Q with a probability inversely proportional to |AutZ(H)|. We review three different heuristics for the conjecture of Cohen and Lenstra, and they are all related to special cases of our main conjecture, which we prove as our main theorems.