cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Energy Security, Green Job Creation, and Youth Innovation

Global energy demand is likely to increase by 45 percent by 2030. Climate change will threaten existing employment and necessitate new green jobs. Funding has gone towards such renewable energy technologies as wind and solar; such fuel economy options as second-generation hybrids, plug-in electrics, and fuel cell vehicles; increased appliance efficiency; and such water-efficient farming methods as drip irrigation. Youth innovation can play a powerful role in achieving sustainable development. Nobel Peace Prize winner Professor Muhammad Yunus has demonstrated how micro finance in the form of small loans can help poor people start or expand entrepreneurial endeavors. Government funded research has led to innovative ways to address climate change mitigation and adaptation. Companies are beginning to ramp up technologies to full-scale production and provide infrastructure that enables consumers to use new energy options. Governments are passing legislation that will facilitate carbon trading and offer tax benefits to purchasers of renewable energy and efficiency measures. Engaging youth in environmentally sound emerging sectors can promote international peace and security.
Semi-transparency, dealership market, and foreign exchange market quality

Abstract This paper examines the effects of a semi-transparency event, the introduction of the electronic trading system (EBS), on the market quality of a typical dealership market – the FX market. We find that increasing transparency leads to smaller quote disagreement among dealers and higher trading volume, but the beneficial effects are bigger for uninformed dealers than informed dealers. We also find that information efficiency improves overall in the semi-transparent system; however, informed dealers are found to quote less aggressively in the more transparent market. We conclude that semi-transparency raises market quality in general, but that it is the uninformed dealers who benefit more from this increased quality.
‘Nothing But Wind’? The Past and Future of Comparative Corporate Governance

Corporate law scholarship has come a long way since Bayless Manning some four decades ago famously pronounced it dead. Not only has doctrinal scholarship continued its project of critique and rationalization, but empirical and economic approaches have injected new life into the field. Recent years have seen the rise of comparative corporate govern ance (CCG) as an increasingly mainstream approach within the world of corporate governance studies. This is a function partly of an in creasing international orientation on the part of legal scholars and partly of an increasingly empirical turn in corporate law scholarship generally. Different practices in other jurisdictions present at least the possibility of natural experiments that attempt to find causal relation ships between particular features of a corporate governance regime and real-world outcomes. This body of research has become particu larly relevant as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century. The financial crisis has called into question many of our traditional ways of thinking about corporate governance and the relationship be tween business enterprises and the state. Are there other countries that do it better? This Article discusses what is unique about CCG as an approach to corporate governance studies. It begins by examining the concepts of corporate governance and comparative corporate governance, making the point that comparative corporate governance has in general been focused on agency problems between shareholders and managers but need not be so. It then looks at methodological issues in comparative corporate governance, critiquing in particular economic Darwinist theories and the failure of theories of international competition in cor porate governance to incorporate the notion of comparative advantage. Finally, it reviews major lessons learned from this body of work and
The topology of fear

Abstract For many years experimental observations have raised questions about the rationality of economic agents—for example, the Allais Paradox or the Equity Premium Puzzle. The problem is a narrow notion of rationality that disregards fear. This article extends the notion of rationality with new axioms of choice under uncertainty and the decision criteria they imply (Chichilnisky, G., 1996a. An axiomatic approach to sustainable development. Social Choice andWelfare 13, 257–321; Chichilnisky, G., 2000. An axiomatic approach to choice under uncertainty with Catastrophic risks. Resource and Energy Economics; Chichilnisky, G., 2002. Catastrophical Risk. Encyclopedia of Environmetrics, vol. 1. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Chicester). In the absence of catastrophes, the old and the new approach coincide, and both lead to standard expected utility. A sharp difference emerges when facing rare events with important consequences, or catastrophes. Theorem 1 establishes that a classic axiom of choice under uncertainty – Arrow’s Monotone Continuity axiom, or its relatives introduced by DeGroot, Villegas, Hernstein and Milnor – postulate rational behavior that is ‘insensitive’ to rare events as defined in (Chichilnisky, G., 1996a. An axiomatic approach to sustainable development. Social Choice andWelfare 13, 257–321; Chichilnisky, G., 2000. An axiomatic approach to choice under uncertainty with Catastrophic risks. Resource and Energy Economics; Chichilnisky, G., 2002. Catastrophical Risk. Encyclopedia of Environmetrics, vol. 1. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Chicester). Theorem 2 replaces this axiom with another that allows extreme responses to extreme events, and characterizes the implied decision criteria as a combination of expected utility with extremal responses. Theorems 1 and 2 offer a new understanding of rationality consistent with previously unexplained observations about decisions involving rare and catastrophic events, decisions involving fear, the Equity Premium Puzzle, ‘jump diffusion’ processes and ‘heavy tails’, and it agrees with (Debreu, G., 1953. Valuation equilibrium and Pareto optimum. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 40, 588–592) formulation of market behavior and his proof of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand theorem.
The Professionalization of Law Firm In-House Counsel

This Article examines the structural evolution of the firm counsel position from a volunteer, part-time position filled by an existing partner to a specialized, often full-time position increasingly filled by career in-house counsel. Based on focus groups and interviews with firm counsel, as well as participant observation at meetings and conferences aimed at firm counsel, I examine how the professionalization of the firm counsel position affects: (1) the definition of the firm as the client; (2) the authority of firm counsel with partners; and (3) firm counsels' professional commitments and attitudes about ethical rules. I find that, from a regulatory standpoint, the professionalization of firm counsel is a positive development. The increasing formalization and specialization of the firm counsel position has helped to clarify the identity of the firm as a client without compromising the authority or commitment of lawyers who serve in that role. Although "professional" firm counsel - that is, full-time firm counsel and those appointed from outside the firm - tend to draw on different sources of authority than part-time firm counsel who grew up in the firm, most respondents report that their role is expanding and that they have sufficient authority to be effective. I argue that professional networks among firm counsel are likely to play a critical role in defining the future standards for law firm regulation and urge legal ethics scholars to collaborate with firm counsel in promoting the vibrancy of such networks.
Fee Payments to Criminal Defense Lawyers from Third Parties: Revisiting United States v. Hodge and Zweig

Many lawyers have studied the case of United States v. Hodge and Zweig1 in their professional responsibility classes.' The case is well known for its analysis of the attorney-client privilege when lawyers are asked to disclose the names of their clients or the fee arrangements they have with their clients.3 In this article, I will discuss an important implication of the case that has apparently been overlooked by other commentators: in many cases involving the payment of attorneys' fees by third parties, criminal defense lawyers must decline the representation. This implication arises from the context of Hodge and Zweig. In the case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit addressed the confidential status of client identity and fee arrangements when a
Group Identity and Symbolic Political Behavior

Political expression often revolves around ethnic, religious, or cultural group identities. I develop a game-theoretic model explaining how group identities interact with citizens' social environments to induce political behavior designed to express group identity. Citizens make political choices before engaging in social interactions which may involve members of the individual's ingroup or outgroup. The strength of an individual's group identity is private information and affects payoffs from political behavior and from cooperative behavior in social interactions. Therefore, symbolic political behavior informs social interactions by revealing information about the group identity of the participant. Furthermore, cross-cutting pressures from ingroup and outgroup interactions govern the intensity with which individuals pursue symbolic political behavior. Symbolic political behavior is more common in segregated communities and among members of large majority groups. I illustrate the broad importance of the theory through applications to anti-immigrant activism.
A simple strategy to reduce the salivary gland and kidney uptake of PSMA-targeting small molecule radiopharmaceuticals.

Peptide-based prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) targeted radionuclide therapy (TRT) agent [177Lu]-PSMA-617 has emerged as leading TRT candidate for treatment of castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC). [177Lu]-PSMA-617 and other small molecule–based PSMA ligands have shown efficacy in reducing the tumor burden in mCRPC patients but irradiation to the salivary gland and kidneys is a concern and dose-limiting factor. Therefore, methods to reduce non-target organ toxicity are needed to safely treat patients and preserve their quality of life. Herein, we report that addition of cold PSMA ligand PSMA-11 can aid in reducing the uptake of [177Lu]-PSMA-617 in the salivary glands and kidneys. Groups of athymic nude mice (n = 4) bearing PC3-PIP (PSMA+) tumor xenografts were administered with [177Lu]-PSMA-617 along with 0, 5, 100, 500, 1000, and 2000 pmoles of PSMA-11 and biodistribution studies were performed at 1 h. Biodistribution studies at 1 h post-administration revealed that [177Lu]-PSMA-617 uptake in PC3-PIP tumors was 21.71 ± 6.13, 18.7 ± 2.03, 26.44 ± 2.94, 16.21 ± 3.5, 13.52 ± 3.68, and 12.03 ± 1.96 %ID/g when 0, 5, 100, 500, 1000, and 2000 pmoles of PSMA-11 were added, respectively. Corresponding uptake values in kidney were 123.14 ± 52.52, 132.31 ± 47.4, 84.29 ± 78.25, 2.12 ± 1.88, 1.16 ± 0.36, and 0.64 ± 0.23 %ID/g, respectively. Corresponding salivary gland uptake values were 0.48 ± 0.11, 0.45 ± 0.15, 0.38 ± 0.3, 0.08 ± 0.03, 0.09 ± 0.07, and 0.05 ± 0.02 % ID/g, respectively. The uptake of [177Lu]-PSMA-617 in the salivary gland and kidney can be substantially reduced without significantly impacting tumor uptake by adding cold PSMA-11.
Administering the Ministerial Exception Post-Hosanna-Tabor: Why Contract Claims Should Not Be Barred

In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, the Supreme Court held that the "ministerial exception," rooted in both the Free Exercise and Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, barred an employment discrimination claim by a minister against her religious employer. The Court explained that requiring a church to retain an unwanted minister, or punishing a church for failing to do so, impermissibly interfered with the church's right to control who will personify its beliefs. The Court explicitly left open the question whether the ministerial exception also barred other types of suits, such as a minister's contract claims against his or her religious employer. Multiple courts since Hosanna-Tabor have interpreted the decision broadly and found ministers' wrongful termination claims against their employers barred by the ministerial exception regardless of the contractual language at issue. This Note argues that the ministerial exception is inapplicable to contract claims broadly, and wrongful termination claims more specifically, because of several significant distinctions from employment discrimination claims. First, historically, ministers were able to sue their religious employers on valid contracts without implicating the First Amendment. Second, the voluntary nature of contractual obligations assuages free exercise concerns present where federal employment discrimination standards are imposed upon a church. In wrongful termination suits, a religious organization is merely held to obligations it previously imposed upon itself. Third, finding contract claims barred by the ministerial exception could inject precariousness into the church-minister relationship and have harmful consequences for religious organizations. This Note argues that instead, ministers' wrongful termination claims should be analyzed under the broader ecclesiastical abstention doctrine, whereby courts can generally adjudicate disputes involving neutral principles of law, but not those disputes where resolution would require excessive entanglement with religious doctrine. Though this approach may lack the clarity of the ministerial exception, it more appropriately strikes the balance between the First Amendment concerns present in Hosanna-Tabor and the values underlying contract law.
Teaching Temperance to the “Cookie Monster”: Ethical Challenges to Data Mining and Direct Marketing

R ecently, DoubleClick made the decision to merge the Internet tracking information contained in its ‘‘cookies’’ with the customer databases of Abacus Direct. It then announced its plan to sell its data, which raised significant concerns about the trade-offs between loss of individual privacy and economic benefits of data mining and direct marketing. In the short term, external pressure from privacy watch-dog organizations like EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) based on its concerns about corporate violations of the individual’s privacy, forced DoubleClick to reconsider the decision to sell to direct marketing firms the substantial data it has collected. To this point, there has been significant writing in the fields of communication, law, and technology about the means and the extent of government and corporate rights to collect and use the personal data of individual Internet users. Furthermore, the work of groups like EPIC has been successful in initiating legislative action dictating what can and cannot be done by corporations with regard to the marketing and collection of data about individuals. The concern of this essay, therefore, is not to argue for the justification of existing or further external sanctions (i.e., government legislation, consumer boycotts, etc.) against businesses involved in this aspect of e-commerce.
Migration and Financial Constraints: Evidence from Mexico

Abstract This paper shows that poor households’ entitlement to an exogenous, temporary, but guaranteed income stream increases Mexican migration to the United States, although this income is mainly consumed. Some households use the entitlement to this income stream as collateral to finance the migration. The new migrations come from previously constrained individuals and households and worsen migrant skills. In sum, financial constraints to international migration are binding for poor Mexicans, some of whom would like to migrate but cannot afford to. As growth and antipoverty and microfinance programs relax financial constraints for the poor, low-skilled Mexican migration to the United States will likely increase.
Order Flows and The Exchange Rate Disconnect Puzzle

Abstract The aim of this paper is to establish the link between the high frequency dynamics of spot exchange rates and developments in the macroeconomy. To do so, I first present a theoretical model of exchange-rate determination that bridges the gap between existing microstructure and traditional models. The model examines how dispersed microeconomic information known to individual agents outside the foreign exchange market is aggregated and transmitted to dealers via transaction flows (i.e., order flow); and how the information is then embedded in the spot exchange rate. I then report empirical evidence that strongly supports the presence of the link between the macroeconomy, order flow, and high frequency exchange rate returns implied by the model. In fact, my empirical results indicate that between 20 and 30% of the variance in excess currency returns over one- and two-month horizons can be linked back to developments in the macroeconomy. This level of explanatory power is an order of magnitude higher than that found in traditional models — even the newly developed monetary models incorporating central banks reaction functions. Moreover, it provides a straightforward solution to the exchange-rate disconnect puzzle. Namely, the high frequency behavior of spot exchange rates reflects the flow of new information reaching dealers concerning the slowly evolving state of the macroeconomy, rather than the effects of shocks that drive rapidly changing macroeconomic conditions.
The Economic Psychology of Entrepreneurship and Family Business

This paper studies the attitudes of entrepreneurs, both how they differ as a group from others in the economy, as well as how they differ from one another according to the mode of entry into entrepreneurship and whether or not the firm is a family business. We use data from the Survey of Consumer Finance to measure and isolate the enjoyment of private benefits, attitudes toward risk, and optimism for these groups. Entrepreneurs are more optimistic and enjoy the nonpecuniary benefits of work more than wage earners. They embrace risk, but perhaps less so than commonly believed, as their risk-bearing is tempered by longer planning horizons. Family business owners share optimism and nonpecuniary benefits with other entrepreneurs; their tolerance for risk is not different than wage earners. In contrast, those who inherit businesses are significantly less risk tolerant than nonentrepreneurs, are no more optimistic than nonentrepreneurs, but seem to derive more nonpecuniary benefits from work than others. Simply possessing these entrepreneurial traits translate into actions, increasing the amount of time spent at work, even among those who are not entrepreneurs.
Wages and Other Determinants of Corruption

Raising wages has commonly been viewed as an anticorruption policy by policymakers from both governments and multilateral development organizations. Conventional wisdom and recent theoretical work suggest that low wages encourage corruption. Nevertheless, the empirical studies done on the wage– corruption tradeoff are econometric estimates that find no conclusive support for the effectiveness of increasing wages as an anticorruption measure. The unique contributions of this paper are the application of an expected utility model to explain the emergence of corruption, and the use of comparative static results that are consistent with the empirical evidence and useful for the design of anticorruption policies. The most important result from the expected utility model is that anticorruption policies designed to increase the net income of potentially corrupt agents not only may be ineffective but may actually encourage corruption.
Rampart: A Crying Need to Restore Police Accountability

While the misconduct that occurred in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division is a scandal, it is not surprising in light of the lack of accountability for police officers who engage in questionable conduct as part of a criminal investigation. Officers who violate the law during criminal investigations are not held directly accountable for their actions. Rather, the penalty for such misconduct is suppression of evidence. Moreover, police officer perjury in support of criminal cases has become so widespread that it is widely referred to as “testilying.” Judges are reluctant to recognize and reject perjured or exaggerated police officer testimony because of the unpopularity of suppression rulings and the pressure that has been exerted on judges who make such decisions. In order to avoid future Rampart-style scandals, we much change our rules to permit direct punishment of police officers for violations of the law. We also need to encourage prosecutors and judges to be more critical in their evaluation of police officer accounts of their criminal investigations.
Giving the People What They Want? The Distribution of Earmarks in the U.S. House of Representatives

The common wisdom in journalistic accounts of earmarking is that Congress distributes earmarks on a purely political basis, without any consideration for the demand for federal spending. Academic accounts similarly argue that factors internal to Congress are preeminent in determining where earmarks go, even more than for other types of pork-barrel spending. Using earmarks appearing in the fiscal year 2008 Appropriations bills, I search for both chamber-based and demand-side determinants of the distribution of earmarks. I find that both types of factors are significantly related to the number of earmarks that a House member receives. This result indicates that even while earmarking, members of Congress are at least minimally responsive to voter preferences and calls into question whether earmarks should be treated as an outlier within the universe of spending allocation mechanisms.
Vanishing Power Lines and Emerging Distributed Generation

Experts predict that distributed energy will contribute as much as twenty percent of the U.S. power supply by 2020. While no one will wake up tomorrow morning to an entirely new energy distribution system — complete with solar panels on the roof and a wind turbine in the back yard — distributed generation is receiving significant attention as the disruptive technology that will ultimately revolutionize the way energy is delivered in the United States. The reason for this shift is, in part, due to new technology that allows for more flexible localized generation of energy, and in part due to a changing climate resulting in frequent and violent storms that destroy large-scale energy infrastructure. A variety of distributed energy technologies are available today, including solar photovoltaic panels, battery storage, and micro turbines. These innovative technologies are not only appealing to today’s tech-savvy customers they are also becoming more economically accessible to the average customer. This shift in customer behavior will directly threaten the current energy delivery model. The more customers utilize distributed generation the less customers rely upon the transmission grid. Remaining customers will bear a higher burden of the transmission costs. The higher the cost of electricity to the remaining customers, the more likely those customers will seek out on-site generation as well. It could result in a vicious cycle for an unprepared utility company. Another significant threat to the current energy delivery system is climate change. Increased ambient air temperatures, increased (and more severe) storms, flooding, and sea level rise have all exposed the vulnerabilities in the traditional central energy delivery system. For example, transmission infrastructure and generation facilities are vulnerable to physical damage during storms, fires, and floods, and they operate less efficiently in hotter temperatures. Distributed generation is emerging as a viable alternative that is less susceptible to these changing weather patterns, in part because it utilizes little to no transmission infrastructure and the generation facilities are located on-site, or near the end user. Utilities and regulatory agencies will need to develop a more sustainable energy delivery system in the face of these climate and technological changes. Given that distributed generation appears to be a “culprit” in disrupting the traditional energy delivery model as well as a potential “solution” to a new, more sustainable, model, the focus should, at least in part, be on the flexible inclusion of distributed generation. Unfortunately, in recent years, energy laws and policies — such as Renewable Portfolio Standards and Multi Value Project policies — have instead promoted and facilitated large-scale energy development, resulting in billions of dollars being spent on unsustainable energy delivery systems. Policymakers will need to work to undo these damaging policies.
Housing Price Booms and Crowding-Out Effects in Bank Lending

Analyzing the period 1988–2006, we document that banks that are active in strong housing markets increase mortgage lending and decrease commercial lending. Firms that borrow from these banks have significantly lower investment. This is especially pronounced for firms that are more capital constrained or borrow from more-constrained banks. Various extensions and robustness analyses are consistent with the interpretation that commercial loans were crowded out by banks responding to profitable opportunities in mortgage lending, rather than with a demand-based interpretation. The results suggest that housing prices appreciations have negative spillovers to the real economy, which were overlooked thus far. Received November 29, 2016; editorial decision January 12, 2018 by Editor David Hirshleifer. 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.
Discerning the Meaning of Gonzales v. Carhart: The End of the Physician Veto and the Resulting Change in Abortion Jurisprudence

Gonzales v. Carhart1 represents a seismic shift in our nation’s abortion jurisprudence. Upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003,2 despite the lack of a health exception, it signals the end of what can be termed the “physician veto.” This veto can be globally defined as the placing of dispositive weight in our nation’s abortion jurisprudence on the autonomy and judgment of physicians who favor abortion rights, at the expense of undergoing the more difficult and deeper process of engaging issues of women’s liberty and equality visa-vis the nature of the unborn fetus and of abortion itself. While physician autonomy and judgment are deeply intertwined concepts, the emphasis has shifted over the years from physician autonomy in Roe v. Wade3 to physician judgment in Stenberg v. Carhart.4 From Roe until the more recent Carhart decision, this dispositive weight—the veto— has shielded the right to abortion in a manner that approaches the absolute through the erection of an impenetrable wall of deference to physician autonomy and judgment in this area of their practice.5
Deconstructing the terrorism–news media relationship

The news media are an extremely powerful actor in the dynamics of oppositional political terrorism.1 Just how important newspapers, radio, and television are during ongoing campaigns and in the context of terrorist incidents is a subject of constant debate (Atwater, 1987; Jenkins, 2003). Any understanding of the connections between this type of violence and the media must be embedded in broader discussions of: the power of the media (e.g. Shaw and McCombs, 1972), especially in conflict situations (e.g. Arno, 1984); the relationship among journalists, editors, authorities, and terrorists; empirical analyses of the media; and the connection between terrorism and public opinion. Nevertheless, since the early 1970s, researchers have examined the role of the news media in connection with terrorism. In many respects, this body of work is a sub-specialty in the field of terrorism studies. It is typically anchored in a limited number of academic disciplines including communications studies, law, political science, and sociology. In short, this Research Note looks at the venues in which research on this connection is typically found, the topics that academics generally research and the methods they use, their findings, and where these scholars might devote their future energy.
Why do managers explain their earnings forecasts

Managers often explain their earnings forecasts by linking forecasted performance to their internal actions and the actions of parties external to the firm. These attributions potentially aid investors in the interpretation of management forecasts by confirming known relationships between attributions and profitability or by identifying additional causes that investors should consider when forecasting earnings. We investigate why managers choose to provide attributions with their forecasts and whether the attributions are related to security price reactions to management earnings forecasts. Using a sample of 951 management earnings forecasts issued from 1993 to 1996, we find that attributions are more likely for larger firms, less likely for firms in regulated industries, less likely for forecasts issued over longer horizons, more likely for bad news forecasts, and more likely for forecasts that are maximum type. Furthermore, attributions are associated with greater absolute price reactions to management forecasts, more negative price reactions to management forecasts (forecast news held constant), and a greater price reaction per dollar of unexpected earnings. Our findings hold after control for the aforementioned determinants of attributions and after control for other firm- and forecast-specific variables that are often associated with security prices.
Optimal Institutional Arrangements for Transboundary Pollutants in a Second-Best World: Evidence from a Differential Game with Asymmetric Players

Abstract This paper uses a dynamic model with asymmetric players to explore the question: In a second-best world, should environmental regulations for transboundary pollutants be carried out locally or centrally? We find that combined payoffs are larger with decentralized control if payoffs are sufficiently heterogeneous and initial pollution stocks are sufficiently small. This result is obtained because the central authority applies one shadow price to pollution (i.e., it uses uniform standards), whereas local authorities use different shadow prices, and therefore different standards.
Claims to Information Qua Information and a Structural Theory of Section 101

In this article, I start from the premises that claims to inventive information qua information are not and should not be patentable, and I pursue two lines of inquiry. First, I argue that a structural theory of Section lOl of the Patent Act provides a policy-driven, conceptually coherent and statutorily justified interpretation that explains why claims to inventive information qua information should be excluded from the realm of patentable subject matter. In brief, patentable subject matter must be restricted in this manner to preserve the duality of claiming and disclosing upon which the entire patent regime is constructed. Second, I raise the line-drawing problem that I believe to be the most significant obstacle to an administrable implementation of a structural theory of Section lol. The breadth or polyvalency of the concept of information suggests that many things that we currently treat as patentable, if not all of them, are also information. We must develop a more refined taxonomy of the different types of informationality that material things possess in order to sort the patentable claims to information from the unpatentable ones. Because the immateriality of the things described by a claim is not an acceptable proxy for their informationality, the Federal Circuit's recent opinion in In re Nuijten that addresses intangibility as a restriction on patentable subject matter is not a useful starting point for this project. * Associate Professor of Law, Indiana University School of Law, Bloomington. This article is a refinement of a presentation that I gave at The Future of Patent Reform conference at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. I thank Mark Lemley, Michael Risch and Polk Wagner for their insights. I/S: A JOURNAL OF LAW AND POLICY
Dynamic forecasting of monetary exchange rate models: Evidence from cointegration

The Frenkel-Bilson and Dornbusch-Frankel monetary exchange rate models are used to estimate the out-of-sample forecasting performance for the U.S. dollar/Canadian dollar exchange rate. By using Johansen's multivariate cointegration, up to three cointegrating vectors were found between the exchange rate and macroeconomic fundamentals. This means that there is a long-run relationship between the exchange rate and economic fundamentals. Based on error correction models, two monetary models outperform the random walk model at the three-, six-, and 12-month forecasting horizons. Therefore, monetary exchange rate models are still useful in forecasting exchange rates.
Stochastic Games with Hidden States

This paper studies infinite-horizon stochastic games in which players observe noisy public information about a hidden state each period. We find that if the game is connected, the limit feasible payoff set exists and is invariant to the initial prior about the state. Building on this invariance result, we provide a recursive characterization of the equilibrium payoff set and establish the folk theorem. We also show that connectedness can be replaced with an even weaker condition, called asymptotic connectedness. Asymptotic connectedness is satisfied for generic signal distributions, if the state evolution is irreducible.
War and the political zeitgeist: Evidence from the history of female suffrage

Abstract Despite the upheaval associated with warfare, empirical evidence linking conflict with institutional development is limited. This paper examines the hypothesis that international wars accelerated democratization by fostering political inclusion. Employing survival analysis, I find that during the 20th century, nations engaging in external conflict were more than twice as likely to extend the franchise to women in the post-conflict period, even after controlling for other commonly cited determinants of suffrage adoption. I explore several potential mechanisms for this association and find evidence consistent with stories which connect war with increased national unity, ideological fervor, and international posturing. Finally, examining conflict-induced changes in sex ratios and female labor force participation suggests that the underlying determinants of suffrage expansion at the national and sub-national level differ.
Assessing Financial Wellness Via Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviews

The current study reports on the first use of the Personal Financial Wellness ScaleTM in random-digit-dial computer-assisted telephone interviews. The scale was modified for telephone interviews, fielded in a survey of 515 married adults, then assessed using alternative methods that accounted for missing data common in telephone interviews. Confirmatory factor models verified that the scale was robust as both a single and twoconstruct measure of subjective and objective financial wellness. The modified scale produced low levels of missing data, was not affected by location in the instrument, and exhibited excellent internal reliability under varied assumptions. Recommendations for the use of the scale in telephone interviews, including scale modification, subscale possibilities, and the utility of multiple imputation of missing items, are offered.
Great expectations: Banks as equity underwriters

Abstract We examine the in-roads commercial banks have made into equity underwriting over 1990–2002. While banks end the period handling upwards of 25% of equity underwriting, this increase results almost exclusively from acquisitions of investment banks with an already established market share of equity underwriting. We find a significant decline in the market share of equity underwriting that banks acquired in the post-merger period, a decline that is larger than that experienced by independent investment banks of comparable reputation. Banks lose market share because they originate fewer IPOs and their IPOs have a lower incidence of follow-on SEOs compared to independent investment banks. Following the merger, banks experience a large fall off in their ability to retain follow-on SEOs and are less successful in winning SEO mandates when an issuer switches from its IPO underwriter. Overall, the findings suggest it has been difficult for banks to achieve scope economies in equity underwriting.
Autoencoder Watchdog Outlier Detection for Classifiers.

Neural networks have often been described as black boxes. A generic neural network trained to differentiate between kittens and puppies will classify a picture of a kumquat as a kitten or a puppy. An autoencoder watch dog screens trained classifier/regression machine input candidates before processing, e.g. to first test whether the neural network input is a puppy or a kitten. Preliminary results are presented using convolutional neural networks and convolutional autoencoder watchdogs using MNIST images.
FairFil: Contrastive Neural Debiasing Method for Pretrained Text Encoders

Pretrained text encoders, such as BERT, have been applied increasingly in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, showing significant performance gains. However, recent studies have demonstrated the existence of social bias in these pretrained NLP models. Although prior works have made progress on word-level debiasing, improved sentence-level fairness of pretrained encoders still lacks exploration. In this paper, we proposed the first neural debiasing method for a pretrained sentence encoder, which transforms the pretrained encoder outputs into debiased representations via a fair filter (FairFil) network. To learn the FairFil, we introduced a contrastive learning framework that not only minimizes the correlation between filtered embeddings and bias words but also preserves rich semantic information of the original sentences. On real-world datasets, our FairFil effectively reduces the bias degree of pretrained text encoders, while continuously showing desirable performance on downstream tasks. Moreover, our post-hoc method does not require any retraining of the text encoders, which further enlarges FairFil's application scenarios.
Optimal control of large fluctuations

We consider the problem of optimal control of large fluctuations. Our approach is based on the concept of the optimal fluctuational path along which the system is most likely to move when it fluctuates to a given state. Optimal control requires double optimization: over realizations of the control field and fluctuational paths. We formulate the appropriate variational problem. Using a white-noise-driven dynamical system as an example, we show that even comparatively weak control fields, if applied in an optimal way, can exponentially strongly reduce the probability of an undesirable fluctuation or increase the probability of a desirable one. Explicit expressions are obtained for the cases of control by a spatially uniform time-dependent field and by a stationary nonuniform field. We show that, in the problem of control, there generically occur singularities related to topological singularities found in the problem of large fluctuations. @S1063-651X~97!09203-9#
Machine Learning on Camera Images for Fast mmWave Beamforming

Perfect alignment in chosen beam sectors at both transmit- and receive-nodes is required for beamforming in mmWave bands. Current 802.11ad WiFi and emerging 5G cellular standards spend up to several milliseconds exploring different sector combinations to identify the beam pair with the highest SNR. In this paper, we propose a machine learning (ML) approach with two sequential convolutional neural networks (CNN) that uses out-of-band information, in the form of camera images, to (i) rapidly identify the locations of the transmitter and receiver nodes, and then (ii) return the optimal beam pair. We experimentally validate this intriguing concept for indoor settings using the NI 60GHz mmwave transceiver. Our results reveal that our ML approach reduces beamforming related exploration time by 93% under different ambient lighting conditions, with an error of less than 1% compared to the time-intensive deterministic method defined by the current standards.
Time-varying associations between COVID-19 case incidence and community-level sociodemographic, occupational, environmental, and mobility risk factors in Massachusetts

Associations between community-level risk factors and COVID-19 incidence have been used to identify vulnerable subpopulations and target interventions, but the variability of these associations over time remains largely unknown. We evaluated variability in the associations between community-level predictors and COVID-19 case incidence in 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts from March to October 2020. Using publicly available sociodemographic, occupational, environmental, and mobility datasets, we developed mixed-effect, adjusted Poisson regression models to depict associations between these variables and town-level COVID-19 case incidence data across five distinct time periods from March to October 2020. We examined town-level demographic variables, including population proportions by race, ethnicity, and age, as well as factors related to occupation, housing density, economic vulnerability, air pollution (PM2.5), and institutional facilities. We calculated incidence rate ratios (IRR) associated with these predictors and compared these values across the multiple time periods to assess variability in the observed associations over time. Associations between key predictor variables and town-level incidence varied across the five time periods. We observed reductions over time in the association with percentage of Black residents (IRR = 1.12 [95%CI: 1.12–1.13]) in early spring, IRR = 1.01 [95%CI: 1.00–1.01] in early fall) and COVID-19 incidence. The association with number of long-term care facility beds per capita also decreased over time (IRR = 1.28 [95%CI: 1.26–1.31] in spring, IRR = 1.07 [95%CI: 1.05–1.09] in fall). Controlling for other factors, towns with higher percentages of essential workers experienced elevated incidences of COVID-19 throughout the pandemic (e.g., IRR = 1.30 [95%CI: 1.27–1.33] in spring, IRR = 1.20 [95%CI: 1.17–1.22] in fall). Towns with higher proportions of Latinx residents also had sustained elevated incidence over time (IRR = 1.19 [95%CI: 1.18–1.21] in spring, IRR = 1.14 [95%CI: 1.13–1.15] in fall). Town-level COVID-19 risk factors varied with time in this study. In Massachusetts, racial (but not ethnic) disparities in COVID-19 incidence may have decreased across the first 8 months of the pandemic, perhaps indicating greater success in risk mitigation in selected communities. Our approach can be used to evaluate effectiveness of public health interventions and target specific mitigation efforts on the community level.
Online reconfiguration of regularity-based resource partitions in cyber-physical systems

We consider the problem of resource provisioning for real-time cyber-physical applications in an open system environment where there does not exist a global resource scheduler that has complete knowledge of the real-time performance requirements of each individual application that shares the resources with the other applications. Regularity-based Resource Partition (RRP) model is an effective strategy to hierarchically partition and assign various resource slices among the applications. However, RRP model does not consider changes in resource requests from the applications at run time. To allow for the run time adaptation to resource requirement changes, we consider in this paper the issues in online resource partition reconfiguration, including semantics issues that arise in configuration transitions that may cause application failures. Based on the reconfiguration semantics, we study the online resource reconfigurability problem under the RRP model where the availability factors of resource partitions may be reconfigured at run time. We formalize and solve the Dynamic Partition Reconfiguration (DPR) problem for uniform environment where the minimal intervals assigned to each task for execution on each resource are the same. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches in different scenarios. We also present a case study using the autonomous F1/10 model car; the controller of the F1/10 car requires resource adaptation to satisfy the computing needs of its PID controller and vision system under different operating conditions. Our implementation demonstrates the effectiveness and benefit of online resource partition reconfiguration using the proposed approach in a real-world cyber-physical system.
kPAM 2.0: Feedback Control for Category-Level Robotic Manipulation

In this letter, we explore generalizable, perception-to-action robotic manipulation for precise, contact-rich tasks. In particular, we contribute a framework for closed-loop robotic manipulation that automatically handles a category of objects, despite potentially unseen object instances and significant intra-category variations in shape, size and appearance. Previous approaches typically build a feedback loop on top of a realtime 6-DOF pose estimator. However, representing an object with a parameterized transformation from a fixed geometric template does not capture large intra-category shape variation. Hence we adopt the keypoint-based object representation proposed in [13] for category-level pick-and-place, and extend it to closed-loop manipulation policies with contact-rich tasks. We first augment keypoints with local orientation information. Using the oriented keypoints, we propose a novel object-centric action representation in terms of regulating the linear/angular velocity or force/torque of these oriented keypoints. This formulation is surprisingly versatile – we demonstrate that it can accomplish contact-rich manipulation tasks that require precision and dexterity for a category of objects with different shapes, sizes and appearances, such as peg-hole insertion for pegs and holes with significant shape variation and tight clearance. With the proposed object and action representation, our framework is also agnostic to the robot grasp pose and initial object configuration, making it flexible for integration and deployment. Video demonstration, source code and supplemental materials are available on https://sites.google.com/view/kpam2/home .
On uniformly disconnected Julia sets

It is well-known that the Julia set of a hyperbolic rational map is quasisymmetrically equivalent to the standard Cantor set. Using the uniformization theorem of David and Semmes, this result comes down to the fact that such a Julia set is both uniformly perfect and uniformly disconnected. We study the analogous question for Julia sets of UQR maps in $$\mathbb {S}^n$$ , for $$n\ge 2$$ . Introducing hyperbolic UQR maps, we show that the Julia set of such a map is uniformly disconnected if it is totally disconnected. Moreover, we show that if E is a compact, uniformly perfect and uniformly disconnected set in $$\mathbb {S}^n$$ , then it is the Julia set of a hyperbolic UQR map $$f:\mathbb {S}^N \rightarrow \mathbb {S}^N$$ where $$N=n$$ if $$n=2$$ and $$N=n+1$$ otherwise.