cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
On-shell constructibility of tree amplitudes in general field theories

We study “on-shell constructibility” of tree amplitudes from recursion relations in general 4-dimensional local field theories with any type of particles, both massless and massive. Our analysis applies to renormalizable as well as non-renormalizable interactions, with or without supersymmetry. We focus on recursion relations that arise from complex deformations of all external momenta. Under certain conditions, these “all-line shift recursion relations” imply the MHV vertex expansion. We derive a simple sufficient criterion for the validity of the all-line shift recursion relations. It depends only on the mass dimensions of the coupling constants and on the sum of helicities of the external particles. Our proof is strikingly simple since it just relies on dimensional analysis and little-group transformation properties. In particular, the results demonstrate that all tree amplitudes with n > 4 external states are constructible in any power-counting renormalizable theory. Aspects of all-line shift constructibility are illustrated in numerous examples, ranging from pure scalar theory and the massless Wess-Zumino model to theories with higher-derivative interactions, gluon-Higgs fusion, and Z-boson scattering. We propose a sharp physical interpretation of our constructibility criterion: the all-line shift fails precisely for those classes of n-point amplitudes that can receive local contributions from independent gauge-invariant n-field operators.
ZITTERBEWEGUNG IS NOT AN OBSERVABLE

It has recently been claimed that Zitterbewegung has been observed. However, we argue that it is not an observable and that the authors' observations must be reinterpreted.
Mean force kinetic theory: A convergent kinetic theory for weakly and strongly coupled plasmas

A new closure of the BBGKY hierarchy is developed, which results in a convergent kinetic equation that provides a rigorous extension of plasma kinetic theory into the regime of strong Coulomb coupling. The approach is based on a single expansion parameter which enforces that the exact equilibrium limit is maintained at all orders. Because the expansion parameter does not explicitly depend on the range or the strength of the interaction potential, the resulting kinetic theory does not suffer from the typical divergences at short and long length scales encountered when applying the standard kinetic equations to Coulomb interactions. The approach demonstrates that particles effectively interact via the potential of mean force and that the range of this force determines the size of the collision volume. When applied to a plasma, the collision operator is shown to be related to the effective potential theory [S. D. Baalrud and J. Daligault, Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 235001 (2013)]. In addition to the collision operator, this systematic derivation reveals a second term that is related to the excess (nonideal) components of the pressure and internal energy in the hydrodynamic limit. The relationship between this and previous kinetic theories is discussed.
Broadcasting on Random Directed Acyclic Graphs

We study the following generalization of the well-known model of broadcasting on trees. Consider an infinite directed acyclic graph (DAG) with a unique source vertex $X$ . Let the collection of vertices at distance $k$ from $X$ be called the $k$ th layer, and suppose every non-source vertex has indegree $d \geq 2$ . At layer 0, the source vertex is given a random bit. At layer $k\geq 1$ , each vertex receives $d$ bits from its parents in the $(k-1)$ th layer, which are transmitted along edges that are independent binary symmetric channels (BSCs) with crossover probability $\delta \in \left({0,\frac {1}{2}}\right)$ . Each vertex combines its $d$ noisy inputs using a deterministic $d$ -ary Boolean processing function that generates the value at the vertex. The goal is to be able to reconstruct the original bit $X$ with probability of error bounded away from $\frac {1}{2}$ using the values of all vertices at an arbitrarily deep layer $k$ . This question is closely related to models of reliable computation and storage, and information flow in biological networks. In this paper, we treat the case of randomly constructed DAGs, for which we show that broadcasting is only possible if the BSC noise level $\delta $ is below a certain (degree and function dependent) critical threshold. For $d \geq 3$ , and random DAGs with layers of size $\Omega (\log (k))$ and majority processing functions, we identify the critical threshold. For $d = 2$ , we establish a similar result for the NAND processing function. We also prove a partial converse result for odd $d \geq 3$ illustrating that the identified thresholds are impossible to improve by selecting different processing functions if the decoder is restricted to using a single vertex’s value. Finally, for any BSC noise level $\delta $ , we construct explicit DAGs (using regular bipartite lossless expander graphs) with bounded degree and layers of size $\Theta (\log (k))$ admitting reconstruction. In particular, we show that the first $r$ layers of such DAGs can be generated in either deterministic quasi-polynomial time or randomized polylogarithmic time in $r$ . These results portray a doubly-exponential advantage for storing a bit in bounded degree DAGs compared to trees, where $d = 1$ but layer sizes need to grow exponentially with depth in order for broadcasting to be possible.
The Particle spectrum of heterotic compactifications

Techniques are presented for computing the cohomology of stable, holomorphic vector bundles over elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau threefolds. These cohomology groups explicitly determine the spectrum of the low energy, four-dimensional theory. Generic points in vector bundle moduli space manifest an identical spectrum. However, it is shown that on subsets of moduli space of co-dimension one or higher, the spectrum can abruptly jump to many different values. Both analytic and numerical data illustrating this phenomenon are presented. This result opens the possibility of tunneling or phase transitions between different particle spectra in the same heterotic compactification. In the course of this discussion, a classification of SU(5) GUT theories within a specific context is presented.
TURNING BACK THE CLOCK: INFERRING THE HISTORY OF THE EIGHT O'CLOCK ARC*

We present the results from an optical and near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopic study of the ultraviolet-luminous z = 2.73 galaxy, the 8 o'clock arc. Due to gravitational lensing, this galaxy is magnified by a factor of ? > 10, allowing in-depth measurements which are usually unfeasible at such redshifts. In the optical spectra, we measured the systemic redshift of the galaxy, z = 2.7322? 0.0012, using stellar photospheric lines. This differs from the redshift of absorption lines in the interstellar medium, z = 2.7302 ? 0.0006, implying gas outflows on the order of 160 km s?1. With H- and K-band NIR spectra, we have measured nebular emission lines of H?, H?, H?, [N II], and [O III], which have a redshift z = 2.7333 ? 0.0001, consistent with the derived systemic redshift. From the Balmer decrement, we measured the dust extinction in this galaxy to be A 5500 = 1.17 ? 36 mag. Correcting the H? line flux for dust extinction as well as the assumed lensing factor, we measure a star formation rate (SFR) of ~270 M ? yr?1, which is higher than ~85% of star-forming galaxies at z ~ 2-3. Using combinations of all detected emission lines, we find that the 8 o'clock arc has a gas-phase metallicity of ~0.8 Z ?, showing that enrichment at high redshift is not rare, even in blue, star-forming galaxies. Studying spectra from two of the arc components separately, we find that one component dominates both the dust extinction and SFR, although the metallicities between the two components are similar. We derive the mass via stellar population modeling, and find that the arc has a total stellar mass of ~4.2 ? 1011 M ?, which falls on the mass-metallicity relation at z ~ 2. Finally, we estimate the total gas mass, and find it to be only ~12% of the stellar mass, implying that the 8 o'clock arc is likely nearing the end of a starburst.
Joint equidistribution of CM points

We prove the mixing conjecture of Michel and Venkatesh for toral packets with negative fundamental discriminants and split at two fixed primes; assuming all splitting fields have no exceptional Landau-Siegel zero. As a consequence we establish for arbitrary products of indefinite Shimura curves the equidistribution of Galois orbits of generic sequences of CM points all whose components have the same fundamental discriminant; assuming the CM fields are split at two fixed primes and have no exceptional zero. The joinings theorem of Einsiedler and Lindenstrauss applies to the toral orbits arising in these results. Yet it falls short of demonstrating equidistribution due to the possibility of intermediate algebraic measures supported on Hecke correspondences and their translates. The main novel contribution is a method to exclude intermediate measures for toral periods. The crux is a geometric expansion of the cross-correlation between the periodic measure on a torus orbit and a Hecke correspondence, expressing it as a short shifted convolution sum. The latter is bounded from above generalizing the method of Shiu and Nair to polynomials in two variables on smooth domains.
The same-sign dilepton signature of RPV/MFV SUSY

The lack of observation of superpartners at the Large Hadron Collider so far has led to a renewed interest in supersymmetric models with R-parity violation (RPV). In particular, imposing the Minimal Flavor Violation (MFV) hypothesis on a general RPV model leads to a realistic and predictive framework. Naturalness suggests that stops and gluinos should appear at or below the TeV mass scale. We consider a simplied model with these two particles and MFV couplings. The model predicts a signicant rate of events with same-sign dileptons andb-jets. We re-analyze a recent CMS search in this channel and show that the current lower bound on the gluino mass is about 800 GeV at 95% condence level, with only a weak dependence on the stop mass as long as the gluino can decay to an on-shell top-stop pair. We also discuss how this search can be further optimized for the RPV/MFV scenario, using the fact that MFV stop decays often result in jets with large invariant mass. With the proposed improvements, we estimate that gluino masses of up to about 1:4 TeV can be probed at the 14 TeV LHC with a 100 fb 1 data set.
Differentiable Programming for Hyperspectral Unmixing Using a Physics-Based Dispersion Model

Hyperspectral unmixing is an important remote sensing task with applications including material identification and analysis. Characteristic spectral features make many pure materials identifiable from their visible-to-infrared spectra, but quantifying their presence within a mixture is a challenging task due to nonlinearities and factors of variation. In this paper, spectral variation is considered from a physics-based approach and incorporated into an end-to-end spectral unmixing algorithm via differentiable programming. The dispersion model is introduced to simulate realistic spectral variation, and an efficient method to fit the parameters is presented. Then, this dispersion model is utilized as a generative model within an analysis-by-synthesis spectral unmixing algorithm. Further, a technique for inverse rendering using a convolutional neural network to predict parameters of the generative model is introduced to enhance performance and speed when training data is available. Results achieve state-of-the-art on both infrared and visible-to-near-infrared (VNIR) datasets, and show promise for the synergy between physics-based models and deep learning in hyperspectral unmixing in the future.
Output feedback control of two-lane traffic congestion

Abstract This paper develops output feedback boundary control to mitigate traffic congestion of an unidirectional two-lane freeway segment. The macroscopic traffic dynamics are described by the Aw–Rascle–Zhang (ARZ) model respectively for both the fast and slow lanes. The traffic density and velocity of each of the two lanes are governed by coupled 2 × 2 nonlinear hyperbolic partial differential equations (PDEs). Lane-changing interactions between the two lanes lead to exchanging source terms between the two pairs second-order PDEs. Therefore, we are dealing with 4 × 4 nonlinear coupled hyperbolic PDEs. Based on driver’s preference for the slow and fast lanes, a reference system of lane-specific uniform steady states in congested traffic is chosen. To stabilize traffic densities and velocities of both lanes to the steady states, two distinct variable speed limits (VSLs) are applied at outlet boundary, controlling the traffic velocity of each lane. Using backstepping transformation, we map the coupled heterodirectional hyperbolic PDE system into a cascade target system, in which the traffic oscillations are damped out through actuation of the velocities at the downstream boundary. Two full-state feedback boundary control laws are developed. We also design a collocated boundary observer for state estimation with sensing of the densities at the outlet. Output feedback boundary controllers are obtained by combining the collocated observer and full-state feedback controllers. The finite time convergence to equilibrium is achieved and a performance improvement in fuel consumption, drivers’ comfort and total travel time is demonstrated with the proposed output feedback controllers for some parameter choice, compared with the open-loop system. The proposed output feedback design is also validated for different congested traffic scenarios and compared with one-lane backstepping and PI control designs.
Excision in equivariant fibred $G$-theory

This paper provides a generalization of excision theorems in controlled algebra in the context of equivariant G-theory with fibred control and families of bounded actions. It also states and proves several characteristic features of this theory such as existence of the fibred assembly and the fibrewise trivialization.
Transmission Switching Under Wind Uncertainty Using Linear Decision Rules

Increasing penetration of wind and renewable generation poses significant challenges to the power system operations and reliability. This paper considers the real-time optimal transmission switching (OTS) problem for determining the generation dispatch and network topology that can account for uncertain energy resources. To efficiently solve the resultant two-stage stochastic program, we propose a tractable linear decision rule (LDR) based approximation solution that can eliminate the uncertain variables and lead to fixed number of constraints. The proposed LDR approach can guarantee feasibility, and significantly reduces the computational complexity of existing approaches that grows with the number of randomly generated samples of uncertainty. Numerical studies on IEEE test cases demonstrate the high approximation accuracy of the proposed LDR solution and its computational efficiency for real-time OTS implementations.
Economic Efficiency of Alternative Border Carbon Adjustment Schemes: A Case Study of California Carbon Pricing and the Western North American Power Market

Abstract To be effective, policies addressing power sector carbon emissions in jurisdictions that are embedded in larger carbon markets must account for carbon embodied in imports and the potential for leakage. Yet analyses of alternative border carbon adjustment (BCA) policies that carefully model the impact of generation mix, net load distributions, and transmission limits are rare in the literature. With a generation-transmission expansion planning model of Western North America, we compare the impacts of alternative BCA schemes that California's carbon pricing system could implement. These include no BCA, facility (import source)-based deemed emission rate, a facility-neutral and constant (over-time) rate, and a facility-neutral and dynamic rate. Our results suggest that, when compared to no BCA or BCA using facility-based deemed rates, a facility-neutral BCA can improve efficiency by simultaneously lowering market-wide emissions and costs without raising California consumer expenditures. Emissions leakage also declines significantly. The precise value of the deemed rate affects these gains; setting it equal to marginal emission rates external to California is most efficient. We also show that California's carbon pricing encourages more interstate transmission expansion because power imports become more profitable. However, BCAs that cost-effectively lower total regional emissions will dampen those incentives.
Seymour's second-neighborhood conjecture from a different perspective

Seymour's Second-Neighborhood Conjecture states that every directed graph whose underlying graph is simple has at least one vertex $v$ such that the number of vertices of out-distance $2$ from $v$ is at least as large as the number of vertices of out-distance $1$ from it. We present alternative statements of the conjecture in the language of linear algebra.
How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos in Peru

Which of the democratic checks and balances--opposition parties, the judiciary, a free press--is the most forceful? Peru has the full set of democratic institutions. In the 1990s, the secret-police chief Montesinos systematically undermined them all with bribes. We quantify the checks using the bribe prices. Montesinos paid a televisionchannel owner about 100 times what he paid a judge or a politician. One single television channel's bribe was five times larger than the total of the opposition politicians' bribes. By revealed preference, the strongest check on the government's power was the news media.
Accusation in a Mirror

One of the most astonishing discoveries in the history of genocide studies was the Note Relative a la Propagande d’Expansion et de Recrutement (the “Note”), a mimeographed document found in Butare prefecture in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. The Note, which draws from Goebbels, Lenin, and others, is a manual of the rhetorical methods that could be used to inflame ordinary people to attack their countrymen.1 For jurists attempting to interpret or apply the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the “Genocide Convention”)2 and related statutes,3 this
An extrapolative model of house price dynamics

A model in which homebuyers make a modest approximation leads house prices to display three features present in the data but usually missing from perfectly rational models: momentum at one-year horizons, mean reversion at ve-year horizons, and excess longer-term volatility relative to fundamentals. Valuing a house involves forecasting the current and future demand to live in the surrounding area. Buyers forecast using past transaction prices. Approximating buyers assume that past prices reect only contemporaneous demand, just like professional economists who use trends in housing prices to infer trends in housing demand. Consistent with survey evidence, this approximation leads buyers to expect increases in the market value of their homes after recent house price increases, to fail to anticipate the price busts that follow booms, and to be overcondent about the accuracy of their assessments of
Inflation Expectations in the U.S.: Linking Markets, Households, and Businesses

Inflation has been below the Federal Reserve's target for much of the past 20 years, creating worries that inflation may be deanchoring from the FOMC's target. This paper uses a factor model that incorporates information from professional forecasters, household and business surveys, and the market for Treasury inflation protected securities (TIPS) to estimate long-run inflation expectations. These have fallen notably in the past few years (to roughly 1.9 percent for CPI inflation, well below the FOMC's target). It appears that, even before the covid recession, the private sector viewed the economy as likely to suffer from persistent headwinds to inflation.
The Medicaid Mandates of the 1980s: An Intergovernmental Perspective

Medicaid, the health care program for the poor, has undergone significant changes in the last fifteen years. Many of those changes relate to the intergovernmental nature of the program. Medicaid is jointly operated, with the federal and state governments sharing program costs. Despite a set of program guidelines dictated by the federal government, states have traditionally had substantial latitude in Medicaid decisions. However, a series of developments in the 1980s led to increasing constraints on state Medicaid discretion, including federal mandates to expand Medicaid coverage. This article examines the inception and effectiveness of the Medicaid mandates from the perspective of interstate equity of health care services for poor families.
Modularity and Innovation in Complex Systems

The problem of designing, coordinating, and managing complex systems has been central to the management and organization literature. Recent writings have tended to offer modularity as at least a partial solution to this design problem. However, little attention has been paid to the problem of identifying what constitutes an appropriate modularization of a complex system. We develop a formal simulation model that allows us to carefully examine the dynamics of innovation and performance in complex systems. The model points to the trade-off between the destabilizing effects of overly refined modularization and the modest levels of search and a premature fixation on inferior designs that can result from excessive levels of integration. The analysis highlights an asymmetry in this trade-off, with excessively refined modules leading to cycling behavior and a lack of performance improvement. We discuss the implications of these arguments for product and organization design.
A Theory of Shareholder Approval and Proposal Rights

This paper develops a theory of how shareholder decision rights over policies and directors affect firm value. The model highlights the distinction between the right to approve and the right to propose. The right to approve is weak; the right to propose is impactful but can help as well as hurt shareholders. Managers have an incentive to deter proposals from activist shareholders by adjusting corporate policy; one might conjecture that external pressure leads them to choose policies more appealing to other shareholders in order to reduce the electoral prospects of activist proposals. However, we show that when deterrence occurs, it is always by moving policy toward the position favored by the activist, even if this reduces shareholder wealth. Our analysis stresses the central role of voting uncertainty in determining the value consequences of shareholder rights and proxy access. (JEL D72, G34, G38, K22)
Strange Bedfellows: The Policy Consequences of Legislative—Judicial Relations in the American States

This research examines the relationship between courts and legislatures in a comparative perspective. Specifically, I examine how (a) the ideological composition of the bench, (b) the propensity of court involvement in a given policy area, and (c) the disposition of court decisions in a given policy area influence the ideology of bill introductions and policy enactments by state legislatures. By examining HMO regulation and education policy in the American states during the 1990s, I find evidence that judicial influence does affect legislative policymaking, in both the introduction and enactment stages, across both policy areas. Although traditional scholarship has depicted the judicial branch as having minimal effect on policy formation, and subsequently social change, the findings of this study suggest that we have overlooked an important policymaking role of the judicial branch. Furthermore, state policy research has not given adequate attention to judicial influence as an explanation for policy format...
Judith Shklar on the Philosophy of International Criminal Law

This article revives Judith N. Shklar’s Legalism (Harvard University Press, 1964) with an eye to its relevance to international criminal law today. It examines her general jurisprudential outlook, and critique of various prominent mid-century positions, before turning to her account of the Nuremberg Trials. Showing that her defense of those trials may fail, the article concludes by suggesting that the book’s failure may make it more relevant to the contemporary enterprise of international criminal law rather than less.
Punishing Crimes of Terror in Article III Courts

As the government’s strategy for advancing the “War on Terror” has evolved, preventative prosecutions of terrorism suspects in the Article III courts have played an increasingly important role. In this way, the civilian courts have been enlisted as participants in the government’s war strategy in the conflict with al Qaeda. Problematically, though, there has been little attention to how this interbranch war strategy could be more effective and better coordinated. In particular, there has been relatively little conversation about the civilian courts’ approach to sentencing and punishing defendants convicted of terrorism crimes perpetrated in connection with the War on Terror. For whatever reason, movement toward reform has been stagnant — the United States Sentencing Guidelines have been largely accepted as providing adequate guidance to the courts in their sentencing practices. This article demonstrates why the Guidelines fall short and suggests how they can improve. The article takes as its frame of reference the Executive’s war strategy and war aims in this conflict, which include preventative prosecution. In view of that strategy and its related objectives, it considers how the current Guidelines framework for international terrorism is insufficient. In so doing, the article identifies the appropriate legal principles, sentencing purposes, and historical experiences that are relevant to the United States’ conflict with al Qaeda but not adequately accounted for in the current Guidelines regime. The article proposes a way to revise the Guidelines to incorporate these principles, purposes, and lessons from history in a way that will better serve the United States’ overarching war effort. Importantly, the article proposes a sentencing and punishment framework that draws from both domestic and international law and context — consistent with the global nature of this conflict — thereby enhancing the transparency of the civilian courts’ sentencing and punishment practices and improving the coherency of this component of United States counterterrorism policy.
Chevron Inside the Regulatory State: An Empirical Assessment

For three decades, scholars (as well as courts and litigants) have written thousands of articles (and opinions and briefs) concerning the impact of Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resource Defense Council, Inc.1 on judicial review of agency statutory interpretation. This should come as no surprise as Chevron is the most cited administrative law decision of all time.2 Little attention, however, has been paid to how Chevron and its progeny have actually shaped statutory interpretation inside the regulatory state.3 Indeed, as Jerry Mashaw observed nearly a decade ago, ―virtually no one has even asked, much less answered, some simple questions about agency statutory interpretation.‖4 Professor Mashaw concluded with a call for more
Reexamination of Economic Growth, Tax Policy, and Distributive Politics

The paper examines the relationship between economic growth, tax policy, and distribution of capital and labor ownership in a one-sector political-economy model of endogenous growth with productive government spending financed by a proportional tax on capital income. The analysis shows that inequality in wealth and income can be positively or negatively related to the optimal tax rate. In either environment, higher inequality leads to a lower after-tax return to capital, thereby reducing the economy's growth rate.
The FCPA and the OECD Convention: Some Lessons from the U.S. Experience

Although corruption is ubiquitous, attitudes toward it differ among countries. Until the 1997 OECD Convention, the U.S. had been one of the only two countries with an explicit extraterritorial anti-bribery law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977. The FCPA employs a two-pronged approach to control the supply side of corruption: (1) anti-bribery provisions; and (2) accounting (books and record and internal controls) provisions. I offer evidence, albeit indirect, to show that the FCPA had limited success. The OECD Convention adopts the same two-pronged approach, but, since it is a multilateral treaty, is likely to be more successful provided that enforcement is vigorous enough. The signatory nations effectively form a cartel to reduce the cost of doing business. As with any cartel, however, each multinational corporation has an incentive to deviate. Thus, the mutual enforcement of the agreement is crucial for its success. However, the two-pronged approach is not sufficient, since internal control does not adequately monitor decisions made at the top level. I argue that the two lessons drawn from the U.S. experience are: (1) law enforcement must be credible; and (2) internal controls alone are not sufficient. Stronger and more effective corporate governance within an appropriate regulatory framework is needed to ensure that multinational corporations conduct their business in an ethical manner.
Discipline: An Academic Dean's Perspective on Dealing with Plagiarism

Three months after I was convinced by our very persuasive Dean that, contrary to my first thought, being an Associate Academic Dean was not such a dumb idea, I was confronted with a situation that reinforced my initial impression. On my desk sat a paper submitted by a student in a law school course. More than one-half of the paper was copied word for word without any attribution being given. Dozens of other lines contained material that should have been included in quotation marks, but was not. Some of the material quoted without attribution came from sources cited in other portions of the paper, some from sources that were never cited at all. Further investigation revealed a similar pattern in another paper written by the same student. Unfortunately, over the years, I have come to conclude that such problems are not a once-in-a-tenure experience for academic deans and others who deal with plagiarism problems in law school. While this case is the most extreme case of plagiarism I have encountered in my nearly five years as Academic Dean, it is not the only one. Although each case is unique, all involve difficult questions because plagiarism is, as one scholar has observed, "an academic capital offense, punishable by academic death." With so much on the line, how should Academic Deans proceed once it is clear that plagiarism has occurred?
Standing, Spending, and Separation: How the No-Establishment Rule Does (and Does Not) Protect Conscience

The First Amendment’s “Establishment Clause” is widely thought to protect “conscience.” Does it? If so, how? It is proposed in this paper that the no-establishment rule does indeed promote and protect religious liberty, and does safeguard conscience, but not (or, at least, not only) in the way most people think it does, namely, by sparing those who object from the asserted injury to their conscience caused by public funding of religious activity. The Supreme Court’s decision in Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation - a case in which the Justices limited taxpayer standing to bring Establishment Clause claims - reminds us of the importance in our constitutional law and tradition of structural devices that preserve individual liberty and, in so doing, helps to illuminate the real relationship between nonestablishment and the liberty of conscience: Nonestablishment and church-state separation protect conscience by committing us to the idea that there are, and ought to be, multiple, rival authorities. Protecting and respecting the freedom of conscience requires protecting and respecting the competing associations, institutions, and authorities that both clear out the space in which consciences are formed and engage in the formation of consciences. A community that cherishes the freedom of conscience will allow non-state formers-of-conscience to flourish, will acknowledge their appropriate independence, and will not aspire to remake them in its own image.
Mediating Ribosomal Competition by Splitting Pools

Synthetic biology constructs often rely upon the introduction of “circuit” genes into host cells, in order to express novel proteins and thus endow the host with a desired behavior. The expression of these new genes “consumes” existing resources in the cell, such as ATP, RNA polymerase, amino acids, and ribosomes. Ribosomal competition among strands of mRNA may be described by a system of nonlinear ODEs called the Ribosomal Flow Model (RFM). The competition for resources between host and circuit genes can be ameliorated by splitting the ribosome pool by use of orthogonal ribosomes, where the circuit genes are exclusively translated by mutated ribosomes. In this letter, the RFM system is extended to include orthogonal ribosome competition. This Orthogonal Ribosomal Flow Model (ORFM) is proven to be stable through the use of Robust Lyapunov Functions. The optimization problem of maximizing the weighted protein translation rate by adjusting allocation of ribosomal species is formulated.
Wholesale bank funding, capital requirements and credit rationing

Abstract This paper analyzes how different types of bank funding affect the extent to which banks ration credit to borrowers, and the impact that capital requirements have on that rationing. Using an extension of the standard Stiglitz–Weiss model of credit rationing, unsecured wholesale finance is shown to amplify the credit market impact of capital requirements as compared to funding by retail depositors. Unsecured finance surged in the pre-crisis years, but is increasingly replaced by secured funding. The collateralization of wholesale funding is found to expand the extent of credit rationing.
Do Credit Market Shocks affect the Real Economy? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the Great Recession and ‘Normal’ Economic Times

Using comprehensive data on bank lending and establishment-level outcomes from 1997–2010, this paper finds that small business lending is an unimportant determinant of small business and overall economic activity. A shift-share style research design is implemented to predict county-level lending shocks using variation in preexisting bank market shares and bank supply shifts. Counties with negative predicted lending shocks experienced declines in small business loan originations, indicating that it is costly to switch lenders. However, small business loan originations have an economically insignificant and generally statistically insignificant impact on both small firm and overall employment during the Great Recession and normal times.
Experimental Gasoline Markets

Abstract Zone pricing in wholesale gasoline markets is a contentious topic in the public policy debate. With a controlled laboratory experiment, we investigate the competitive effects of zone pricing on consumers, retail stations, and refiners vis-a-vis the proposed policy prescription of uniform wholesale pricing to retailers. We also examine the issue of divorcement and the “rockets and feathers” phenomenon. The former is the legal restriction that refiners and retailers cannot be vertically integrated, and the latter is the perception that retail gasoline prices rise faster than they fall in response to random walk movements in the world price for oil.
Analyst Coverage and Intangible Assets

This study examines the relation between analysts' incentives to cover firms and the extent of their intangible assets. Because intangible assets typically are unrecognized and estimates of their fair values are not disclosed, absent analyst coverage firms with more intangible assets likely have less informative prices. Accordingly, we expect analysts have greater incentives to cover firms with more intangible assets and, thus, predict they have higher analyst coverage. As predicted, we find that analyst coverage is significantly greater for firms with larger research and development and advertising expenses relative to their industry, and for firms in industries with larger research and development expense. We also predict and find that analyst coverage is increasing in firm size, growth, trading volume, equity issuance, and perceived mispricing, and is decreasing in the size of the firm's analysts' brokerage houses and the effort analysts expend to follow the firm. These findings indicate that analyst coverage depends on private benefits and costs of covering a firm. We also test hypotheses related to analyst effort. We predict and find that analysts expend greater effort to follow firms with more intangible assets, after controlling for other factors associated with analyst effort. Our evidence indicates that intangible assets, most of which are not recognized in firms' financial statements, are associated with greater incentives for analysts to cover such firms, and greater costs of coverage. An open question is whether financial statement recognition of intangible assets could more efficiently provide information about such assets to investors.
Adjudicating Classified Information

As the legal community increasingly deals with classified materials, it is vital to consider not just when such evidence is admissible – or by what processes that determination should be made – but how to interpret and evaluate the secret information itself.Nearly all of the academic literature addressing secret information in the judicial system has focused on issues such as what should be classified, the admissibility of those materials, who can and should view such information, and differences between relevant civil and criminal processes. While it is important to debate and resolve these matters, little attention has been paid to how classified information itself should be understood and adjudicated.This Article is the first to propose approaches and reforms to assist courts in navigating the complex domain of secrecy and judicature. Knowing how to understand and evaluate intelligence products, which embrace idiosyncratic linguistic, cultural, and political influences, is neither intuitive nor widely understood in the legal community. For the judicial system to effectively engage with protected materials, its members – including judges, academics, and practitioners alike – should understand the background of how such information is created, not just whether it is admissible. Moreover, courts should be, and in some instances are, as described in case studies herein, diverging from the historical judicial deference and credulity toward classified materials. The language, structure, and drafting processes of classified documents are highly relevant to their usefulness and credibility, but there is little study – much less full comprehension – of these critical elements. The U.S. government’s anti-terrorism efforts have added urgency and relevance to this topic, both by causing a dramatic increase in the volume of protected materials created and utilized in recent years and, more specifically, by bringing a wide range and large number of national security issues into the judicial system. Accordingly, there is a pressing need for a blueprint for understanding and engaging with the information itself. There are good and bad ways to understand and engage with protected materials; this Article is the first attempt in legal scholarship to evaluate the differences.
Resource accumulation through economic ties: Evidence from venture capital

Abstract Ties between similar partners in economic and financial networks are often attributed to concerns about agency costs. In this paper, we distinguish the underlying motives for tie formation between sets of potential partners in the network, thus informing the relative importance of agency cost and resource accumulation in tie formation across firms. We develop a robust and generalizable methodology that allows for the inference of similarity and/or cumulative advantage motives in the potential presence of resource trading. We estimate the model using venture capital (VC) co-investment networks, employing factor analysis to characterize orthogonal, interpretable resources for VC firms. In the VC setting, value-added resources other than capital appear to be exchanged for capital, but not for one another. We find little evidence for similarity motives as the primary driver of matching, suggesting that concerns over agency conflicts in partnering are dominated by the desire to accumulate higher levels of certain resources.
Managing Engineering Design for Competitive Sourcing in Closed‐Loop Supply Chains

We examine the strategic interplay between a buyer's design decision and the ensuing competition between suppliers in a three-tier closed-loop supply chain setting with significant recycling considerations. The nature of the engineering design decision in our research entails choice of integral versus modular design that has direct implications for the input raw material waste and ensuing competition between suppliers (i.e., incumbent and new). Whereas the integral design requires a large blank and generates excessive material scrap, the modular design reduces the generated scrap, and enhances cut-to-fit modularity, but incurs joining cost and yield loss. The incumbent supplier who supports the status quo choice of integral design can effectively recycle excessive material waste, as it is strategically located close to the source of material. The engineering design team at our study firm is currently exploring the option to source from alternative suppliers that can support either integral or modular designs, but have significantly lower effectiveness in recycling scrap material. We characterize the buyer's price sensitivity levels, component characteristics, supply chain configurations, and virgin and scrap specialty material prices that yield various design and sourcing policy alternatives. The buyer's optimal policy choice, the ensuing price–demand dynamics, and the resulting recycling implications demonstrate that the buyer can benefit from strategically tailoring his design decisions to affect the suppliers' material requirements and costs. We show that utilizing an alternative supply option is particularly valuable for components made from a material with a low price differential in virgin and scrap forms in supply chains wherein the new supplier base can recycle effectively. In such cases, the buyer induces severe price competition by dual sourcing the integral design, and competition may negate the seemingly obvious benefits of operational improvements (e.g., higher scrap material return rate).
Optimal Tax Salience

Abstract Recent empirical work finds that consumers under-account for commodity taxes when the after-tax price is not prominent. I investigate how policymakers may utilize such “low-salience” taxes to promote welfare. The optimal combination of high- and low-salience taxes balances two competing effects: low-salience taxes dampen distortionary substitution but cause consumers to misallocate their budgets. Using a stylized model, I show the availability of taxes with differing salience provides an extra degree of freedom that can be used to implement the first-best welfare outcome. I characterize the optimal policy and derive a formula for incremental adjustments when the first-best is unattainable.
Income, schooling, and ability: Evidence from a new sample of identical twins

We develop a model of optimal schooling investments and estimate it using new data on approximately 700 identical twins. We estimate an average return to schooling of 9 percent for identical twins, but estimated returns appear to be slightly higher for less able individuals. Simple cross-section estimates are marginally upward biased. These empirical results imply that abler individuals attain more schooling because they face lower marginal costs of schooling, not because of higher marginal benefits.
Trips-Plus Trade and Investment Agreements: Why More May Be Less for Economic Development

Conventional wisdom -- but not empirical research -- maintains that strong intellectual property (“IP”) rights trigger not only foreign direct investment, but also local innovation. Thus investors seek, and developing countries compete to offer, the highest levels of IP protections. But evaluating the level of IP protection in any given country has become increasingly complex. A proliferation of bilateral agreements, such as free trade agreements (“FTAs”) and bilateral investment treaties (“BITs”), intended to enhance the minimum standards set forth in The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (“TRIPS”), have created uncertainty about precisely what IP protections are available. Chile, for instance, is party to over one hundred IP agreements. By successively increasing the quantity and complexity of IP standards make a host state’s legal framework unknowable and thus highly unpredictable. Moreover, BITs permit investors to claim the “indirect expropriation” of their IP due to unsatisfactory IP protection. Investment arbitrators must then evaluate domestic laws for how they define the availability, validity, and scope of IP rights -- difficult substantive questions of IP law likely beyond the competence of investment tribunals. Such uncertainty over legal rights is never conducive to investment.
Panacea, Pandora's box, or placebo: Feedback in bank mortgage-backed security holdings and fair value accounting☆

We examine the relation between bank holdings of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and MBS prices. Theory suggests feedback between MBS holdings and underlying asset markets can be aggravated by mark-to-market accounting. We measure feedback by the relation between asset returns and the changes in bank MBS holdings. Consistent with the existence of feedback effects related to mark-to-market, we find that for banks with high MBS, more nonperforming loans, and lower total capital ratio, changes in bank MBS positions are positively associated with changes in MBS prices and that this relation is reduced after the April 2009 mark-to-market rule clarification. To assess the effect of feedback on shareholder value, we test whether the stock-price response of banks to the announcement of the mark-to-market accounting rule clarification is associated with the intensity of feedback behavior. We find that the stock market reaction to the rule change is more positive for banks with more MBS, higher nonperforming loans and higher pre-rule-change feedback. We also find positive bond-price reactions to the rule change. Overall, our results suggest feedback related to mark-to-market accounting had a measurable effect on shareholder value. & 2011 Published by Elsevier B.V.
Obligation Ignored: Why International Law Requires the United States to Provide Adequate Civil Legal Aid, What the United States is Doing Instead, and How Legal Empowerment Can Help

This Comment argues that to comply with international law, the United States should abandon Lassiter v. Department of Social Services’ reasoning and reform and fully fund the Legal Services Corporation (LSC). Part II explores international sources of a right to civil legal aid and the failures of the United States to realize that right. Part III argues that the United States is failing to meet its international legal duty to provide adequate civil legal aid, as evidenced by the shortcomings of the LSC and the Supreme Court’s Lassiter decision. Part IV recommends that, to meet its international obligations while avoiding the problems of the current indigent criminal defense scheme, the United States should implement a system that utilizes legal services professionals instead of exclusively relying upon lawyers, drawing on practices from the international development model of legal empowerment of the poor (LEP).