cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Managing the risk of misleading financial metrics in annual reports: A first step towards providing assurance over management's discussion

Recent public policy initiatives seek greater transparency in financial reporting through an honest, balanced and thorough management discussion of company performance in the annual report. Management's discussion invariably includes key performance indicators, such as financial ratios, relevant to external stakeholders. We model the impact of accounting estimates, assumptions, choices and errors on the risk of misleading financial ratios. This framework is illustrated through good and bad examples of financial reporting practices and by simulation of financial data of public companies. We provide a structured approach to inform policymakers, auditors and other stakeholders of the incremental financial reporting risk that accompanies current regulatory efforts.
What’s really in a deal? Evidence from textual analysis of M&A conference calls

Using a sample of 814 transcripts from 2011 to 2018, we examine information within merger and acquisition conference calls. Textual analysis reveals significant differences between the content of M&A call transcripts and both contemporaneous corporate press releases and prior earnings conference calls. We find participation of target executive types in M&A calls occurs more frequently in diversifying acquisitions and is related to payment choice consistent with promoting managerial sector specific skills and incentive alignment, respectively. Retention of participating target executives is associated with a negative market reaction. We also identify a negative relation between textual sentiment and market reaction consistent with a response to higher levels of information asymmetry. Greater quantitative information, however, is positively related to the market reaction of M&A calls. We develop targeted M&A motive dictionaries to identify financial and strategic content within call transcripts. Consistent with prior literature on merger motivation, deals with more finance (strategy) oriented words have a higher (lower) market reaction. Overall, our results show that deal-related textual analysis explains a highly significant and economically important component of gains/losses to acquirers.
Entitlements: Not Just a Health Care Problem

A new consensus on entitlement reform has developed in Washington: rising per-capita health care spending is the only real crisis besetting the government‘s entitlement programs, while America‘s aging population and Social Security play minor roles at best. Some cite this view to shift the policy emphasis from entitlement cost control to the restructuring of the U.S. health sector, including private health care.
The Constitutionality of the Alien Tort Statute: Some Observations on Text and Context

Both the text of the Alien Tort Statute and its historical context demonstrate that the First Congress did not mean to limit jurisdiction to suits against U.S. citizens or even to violations of the law of nations that were recognized at that time. Rather, they intended that the district courts “have cognizance . . . of all causes where an alien sues for a tort only in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” The text of the Constitution also shows that “Laws of the United States” in Article III is broader than “Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance [of the Constitution]” under Article VI, and history shows that Article III's phrase was read at the time, and may be fairly read today, as including the law of nations. To say this is, of course, not to resolve every aspect of the debate over the role of customary international law in the U.S. legal system, but it is to say that Filartiga was constitutional when it was decided.
Discussion¿The Reliability of Fair Value versus Historical Cost Information: Evidence from Closed-End Mutual Funds

Carroll, Linsmeier, and Petroni examine whether fair value financial statements reported by closed-end mutual funds are reliable and relevant. They also examine whether their inferences are sensitive to fund type, where they classify funds into six categories by their majority investment type. They find a significant association between stock market metrics (price and return) and reported fair values and their changes in all cases, controlling for the relation between stock metrics and historical cost values. They conclude that the fair value financial statements issued by closed-end mutual funds are incrementally value-relevant.I argue that the closed-end fund setting is well suited to investigating the valuation role of accounting, because the contracting role of accounting is relatively small and also highly aligned with the valuation role. The closed-end fund setting thus serves as a best-case benchmark for fair value accounting, and I assess the results from this vantage point. I extend the authors’ cross-sectional analysis to examine whether value-relevance has changed over time for closed-end funds, and find that it has remained quite stable. I evaluate whether the authors’ inferences hold under more powerful tests of relevance and reliability, and find that they do. While the cross-fund tests are consistent with fair value estimates from liquid markets being more reliable, I suggest alternative explanations. Finally, I discuss what we can learn about the desirability of fair value accounting from this paper, and urge caution in generalizing the results to more complex firms.
Do security analysts exhibit persistent differences in stock picking ability

Abstract We investigate whether security analysts exhibit persistence in their stock picking ability. We find that analysts whose recommendation revisions earned the most (least) excess returns in the past continue to outperform (underperform) in the future. Further, the market recognizes these performance differences in the five-day period surrounding the recommendation revision. This market reaction, however, is incomplete. Excess returns in the one and three trading months following the revision are significant and positively associated with analysts’ prior performance. However, a trading strategy taking long (short) positions in recommendation upgrades (downgrades) conditional on analysts’ prior performance is unprofitable.
Which Corporate Sustainability Activities are Associated with Greater Financial Payoffs

While many company managers and academic researchers have argued that businesses that develop a sustainability focus also may improve their financial performance, little information is known about whether firms' different types of sustainability activities are related to varying degrees of financial gain. This paper assesses the economic relationship between two types of sustainability activities – lower- and higher-order – derived from the sustainability value framework of Hart and Milstein (2003). Our analysis reveals that both types of sustainability activities are similarly associated with firms' financial performance in terms of direction and trend. However, the average level of financial benefits related to firms' higher-order sustainability activities (which develop new products and processes) is greater than the average level of financial benefits related to firms' lower-order sustainability activities (which modify existing products and processes). These findings offer initial evidence that companies that reach further by developing higher-order sustainability activities may reap greater financial benefits, while improving the natural environment to a greater degree. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.
Applying human rights to maternal health: UN Technical Guidance on rights-based approaches

In the last few years there have been several critical milestones in acknowledging the centrality of human rights to sustainably addressing the scourge of maternal death and morbidity around the world, including from the United Nations Human Rights Council. In 2012, the Council adopted a resolution welcoming a Technical Guidance on rights-based approaches to maternal mortality and morbidity, and calling for a report on its implementation in 2 years. The present paper provides an overview of the contents and significance of the Guidance. It reviews how the Guidance can assist policymakers in improving women's health and their enjoyment of rights by setting out the implications of adopting a human rights-based approach at each step of the policy cycle, from planning and budgeting, to ensuring implementation, to monitoring and evaluation, to fostering accountability mechanisms. The Guidance should also prove useful to clinicians in understanding rights frameworks as applied to maternal health.
Observed characteristics and teacher quality: Impacts of sample selection on a value added model

Abstract We measure the impact of observed teacher characteristics on student math and reading proficiency using a rich dataset from Florida. We expand upon prior work by accounting directly for nonrandom attrition of teachers from the classroom in a sample selection framework. We find evidence that sample selection is present in the estimation of the influence of teacher characteristics, but that failure to account for it does not appear to substantially bias estimation. Further, our procedure produces some evidence that more effective teachers are more likely to exit the classroom.
The Role of Dual-pane Windows and Improvement Age in Explaining Residential Property Values

There is a modest amount of research on the valuation impact of individual green features such as dual-pane windows. We develop and test a valuation theory for dual-pane windows. The results from a hedonic pricing model indicate a positive and statistically significant direct effect for residential transactions with improvements possessing the dual-pane window feature. However, when a dual-pane window age variable is introduced, the direct effect disappears and is replaced by an interaction effect. The supply of properties with dual-pane windows decreases with property age, which suggests that the valuation impact of the dual-pane window feature increases with property age.
Organizational Responses to Environmental Demands: Opening the Black Box

This article combines new and old institutionalism to explain differences in organizational strategies. We propose that differences in the influence of corporate departments lead their facilities to prioritize different external pressures and thus adopt different management practices. Specifically, we argue that external constituents—including customers, regulators, legislators, local communities, and environmental activist organizations—who interact with influential corporate departments are more likely to affect facility managers' decisions. As a result, managers of facilities that are subjected to comparable institutional pressures adopt distinct sets of management practices that appease different external constituents. We test our framework in the context of the adoption of environmental management practices using an original survey and archival data obtained for nearly 500 facilities. We find support for these hypotheses. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Political Risk, Reputation, and the Resource Curse:

There is a growing literature on how natural resources affect both economic performance and political regimes. In this article the authors add to this literature by focusing on how natural resource wealth affects the incentives of governments to uphold contracts with foreign investors across all sectors. They argue that although all states suffer reputation costs from reneging on contracts, governments in natural-resource-dependent economies are less sensitive to these costs, leading to a greater probability of expropriation and contract disputes. Specifically, leaders weigh the benefits of reneging on contracts with investors against the reputation costs of openly violating agreements with firms. The authors’ theoretical model predicts a positive association between resource wealth and expropriation. Using a data set from the political risk insurance industry, the authors show that resource dependent economies have much higher levels of political risk.
The Role of Search Engine Optimization in Search Marketing

This paper examines the impact of search engine optimization SEO on the competition between advertisers for organic and sponsored search results. The results show that a positive level of search engine optimization may improve the search engine's ranking quality and thus the satisfaction of its visitors. In the absence of sponsored links, the organic ranking is improved by SEO if and only if the quality provided by a website is sufficiently positively correlated with its valuation for consumers. In the presence of sponsored links, the results are accentuated and hold regardless of the correlation. When sponsored links serve as a second chance to acquire clicks from the search engine, low-quality websites have a reduced incentive to invest in SEO, giving an advantage to their high-quality counterparts. As a result of the high expected quality on the organic side, consumers begin their search with an organic click. Although SEO can improve consumer welfare and the payoff of high-quality sites, we find that the search engine's revenues are typically lower when advertisers spend more on SEO and thus less on sponsored links. Modeling the impact of the minimum bid set by the search engine reveals an inverse U-shaped relationship between the minimum bid and search engine profits, suggesting an optimal minimum bid that is decreasing in the level of SEO activity.
The put problem with buying toxic assets

This article uses the option pricing arguments of Merton (1974) to demonstrate that even solvent banks will be reluctant to sell volatile, toxic assets at market prices. Banks’ shareholders have insolvency puts that give them limited liability in the event of default. The insolvency puts are more valuable when the banks’ assets are more volatile. Shareholders in banks will require any buyer to pay for the lost volatility as well as the market price of the toxic assets. Thus, taxpayers must be ready to richly overpay if they want banks to voluntarily part with their toxic assets.
Limiting Abuse and Opportunism by Mortgage Servicers

This article discusses the opportunistic and abusive behavior of some servicers of residential mortgages toward the borrowers whose loans they service. Such abuse includes claiming that borrowers are in default and attempting to foreclose even when payments are current, charging borrowers unwarranted late fees and other kinds of fees, force-placing insurance even when borrowers already have a policy, and mishandling escrow funds. The causes of such practices and the market forces that can rein them in are discussed. A case study of one mortgage servicer describes its unfair treatment of borrowers and the reforms imposed by federal regulators and other market participants. Both regulatory agencies and ratings agencies appear to have increased their scrutiny of servicers’ behavior, and states have passed new legislation to limit abuse. The article concludes with a discussion of proposals for further reform should these steps prove inadequate.
Skating Too Close to the Edge: A Cautionary Tale for Tax Practitioners about the Hazards of Waiver

The Federal Rules of Evidence defer to common law in establishing the rules of attorney-client privilege. As a general matter, such an approach creates a fairly uncertain legal landscape as each court articulates the baseline rules somewhat differently. The varied judicial applications of those differing rules can then exacerbate the uncertainty even more.Unfortunately, in the area of tax law, the rules and their application are particularly uncertain because attorneys and accountants have overlapping responsibilities to clients and the courts have historically refused to recognize an accountant-client privilege. During my approximately eight years practicing corporate tax law, I was acutely aware of the tremendous confusion and uncertainty about the application of attorney-client privilege in my discipline. Both the Tax Bar and the courts were confused about the application of the rules and the extent to which privilege applied. When I became an academic, I resolved to focus my scholarship in this area to bring clarity and guidance to the muddled state of the common law.This article is the third in a trilogy of articles that sheds light on the application of privilege in the area of tax. The first article in 2008 synthesized a huge body of common law to explain when the attorney-client privilege initially attaches to client-tax lawyer communications. The second article in 2010 addressed the case law applying the statutorily enacted Federally Authorized Tax Practitioner Privilege. The statutory privilege extended the common law attorney-client privilege to certain non-lawyers in the tax setting; it has huge potential interpretative significance for tax attorney-client privilege cases. This third and final article explains how the protections of privilege can be lost due to waiver.Because tax practitioners have been uncertain as to when privilege initially attaches, waiver has long been a huge trap for the unwary. Due to the specter of subject matter waiver, this trap has potentially broad and devastating effects on a client’s case. This article reviews the rules determining when privilege initially attaches to then explain the mechanics of waiving that privilege whether purposefully or inadvertently. The article warns tax practitioners about several common situations when subject matter waiver is often inadvertently triggered. The article also provides courts with guidance about a few high-profile cases that have frequently been misunderstood to define the scope of waiver too broadly.
Fire Sales in a Model of Complexity

We present a model of financial crises that stem from endogenous complexity. We conceptualize complexity as banks' uncertainty about the financial network of cross exposures. As conditions deteriorate, cross exposures generate the possibility of a domino effect of bankruptcies. As this happens, banks face an increasingly complex environment since they need to understand a greater fraction of the financial network to assess their own financial health. Complexity dramatically amplifies banks' perceived counterparty risk, and makes relatively healthy banks reluctant to buy risky assets. The model also features a novel complexity externality.
The Solution to the Problem of Outcome Luck: Why Harm is Just as Punishable as the Wrongful Action that Causes it

A surprisingly large number of scholars believe that (a) we are blameworthy, and therefore punishable, only for what we have control over; (b) we have control only over our actions and intentions, not the consequences of our actions; and therefore (c) if two agents perform the very same action (e.g., attempting to kill) with the very same intentions, then they are equally blameworthy and deserving of equal punishment – even if only one of them succeeds in killing. This paper argues against these “equivalence theorists” that harmful consequences do make a moral difference, that the harm produced by the killer’s attempt retroactively makes her action more blameworthy, and therefore deserving of more punishment, than the failed attempter’s attempt. The primary argument for this “non-equivalence theory” is an analogy with gambling. Just as a gambler makes a deal with the casino to allow metaphysical luck to retroactively determine the “profit status” of her bet, so too the attempted killer makes a deal with “the casino of morality” to allow metaphysical luck to retroactively determine the moral status of her attempt. She makes the “moral deal” that if her attempt succeeds, her attempt was more blameworthy than if her attempt does not succeed. And it is the greater blameworthiness of the killer’s attempt that justifies our intuition that the killer should be punished more harshly than the failed attempter.
Words vs. Deeds; What Really Matters?

This paper revisits the link between the nominal exchange rate regime and inflation, based on a sample of 145 emerging market and developing countries (EMDCs) over the period 1980-2010. We contend that, just as a de jure peg that is not backed by a de facto peg will have little value, de facto pegs that lack the corresponding de jure will likewise reap few of the low inflation benefits associated with pegging the exchange rate. To test our hypothesis, we exploit a novel dataset of both de jure and de facto exchange rate regime classifications. We find that pegged exchange rates are associated with significantly lower inflation in EMDCs than flexible exchange rates, and that this effect is much stronger for de facto pegs that are matched by de jure pegs than for those that are not. When it comes to anchoring expectations and delivering low inflation, therefore, both deeds and words matter.
Neural Thompson Sampling

Thompson Sampling (TS) is one of the most effective algorithms for solving contextual multi-armed bandit problems. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called Neural Thompson Sampling, which adapts deep neural networks for both exploration and exploitation. At the core of our algorithm is a novel posterior distribution of the reward, where its mean is the neural network approximator, and its variance is built upon the neural tangent features of the corresponding neural network. We prove that, provided the underlying reward function is bounded, the proposed algorithm is guaranteed to achieve a cumulative regret of O(T1/2), which matches the regret of other contextual bandit algorithms in terms of total round number T. Experimental comparisons with other benchmark bandit algorithms on various data sets corroborate our theory.
HOLDUP AND THE EVOLUTION OF BARGAINING CONVENTIONS

As Posner (1997) has observed, when individuals in a re- lationship can commit to imposing costs upon each other then ecient behavior in the absence of law is possible. The question is whether ecient norms of behavior evolve endogenously in a population. We show that in a standard hold up model in which both parties make relationship specic investments the long run outcome of a stochastic adaptation process similar to Young (1993)'s 'adaptive play' does not in general correspond to the ecient equilibria. As Grossman and Hart (1986) observe, institutions, such as rms, may be needed to improve the allocation of resources. Classication Codes. C78, L41.
Reducing Choice Overload without Reducing Choices

Abstract Previous studies have demonstrated that a multitude of options can lead to choice overload, reducing decision quality. Through controlled experiments, we examine sequential choice architectures that enable the choice set to remain large while potentially reducing the effect of choice overload. A specific tournament-style architecture achieves this goal. An alternate architecture in which subjects compare each subset of options to the most preferred option encountered thus far fails to improve performance due to the status quo bias. Subject preferences over different choice architectures are negatively correlated with performance, suggesting that providing choice over architectures might reduce the quality of decisions.
Unraveling the Tangle of Pathology: The Effect of Spatially Concentrated Joblessness on the Well-Being of African Americans

In this paper the authors use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to construct a series of event history files that follow young Black men and women as they age year-by-year from 15 to 30. Given a persons individual family and neighborhood characteristics in year t they predict the odds of various outcomes in the year t+1: getting a job and going to jail for males and getting married and having a teenage birth for females. The key predictor from a theoretical viewpoint is the percentage of jobless males in the respondents census tract. Controlling for various socioeconomic characteristics of the individual and family they find that this factor has a strong effect in predicting the odds of various problematic socioeconomic outcomes. Young African American men who live in neighborhoods of concentrated male joblessness are significantly more likely to be jobless themselves. Likewise Black women who live in areas where jobless men predominate are considerably less likely to get married but this factor does not affect the odds of teenage childbearing. (authors)
GENDER DIFFERENCES IN THE PERCEIVED RISK OF BUYING ONLINE AND THE EFFECTS OF RECEIVING A SITE RECOMMENDATION

This article examines how men and women differ in both their perceptions of the risks associated with shopping online and the effect of receiving a site recommendation from a friend. The first study examines how gender affects the perceptions of the probability of negative outcomes and the severity of such negative outcomes should they occur for five risks associated with buying online (i.e., credit card misuse, fraudulent sites, loss of privacy, shipping problems, and product failure). The second study examines gender differences in the effect of receiving a recommendation from a friend on perceptions of online purchase risk. The third study experimentally tests whether, compared to men, women will be more likely to increase their willingness to purchase online if they receive a site recommendation from a friend. The results suggest that, even when controlling for differences in Internet usage, women perceive a higher level of risk in online purchasing than do men. In addition, having a site recommended by a friend leads to both a greater reduction in perceived risk and a stronger increase in willingness to buy online among women than among men.
“Native Christians Massacred”: The Ottoman Genocide of the Assyrians during World War I

The Ottoman Empire's widespread persecution of Assyrian civilians during World War I constituted a form of genocide, the present-day term for an attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, or religious group, in whole or in part. Ottoman soldiers and their Kurdish and Persian militia partners subjected hundreds of thousands of Assyrians to a deliberate and systematic campaign of massacre, torture, abduction, deportation, impoverishment, and cultural and ethnic destruction. Established principles of international law outlawed this war of extermination against Ottoman Christian civilians before it was embarked upon, and ample evidence of genocidal intent has surfaced in the form of admissions by Ottoman officials. Nevertheless, the international community has been hesitant to recognize the Assyrian experience as a form of genocide. The Assyrian genocide is indistinguishable in principle from its Armenian counterpart, however, and its recognition by scholars and the international community may assist in the resettlement and relief of the Assyrian remnant, currently fleeing by the thousands from its homelands in Iraq.
Executive Stock Options and Earnings Management: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis

We study the effect of the grants of executive stock options (ESOs) and restricted stock on earnings management and insider trading during the vesting years of these grants. In our theoretical model, an informed manager compensated by stock options is mandated to issue an earnings report. Uninformed investors price the stock based on this report. The manager can manipulate the report to affect the stock price, but earnings management is costly to the manager. The optimal report balances the benefits from exercising stock options and the costs of earnings management. Earnings management and insider trading occur at the vesting date only if the options are in the money post manipulation, and are intensified by larger grants. The model identifies three major determinants of the extent of both earnings management and insider trading: The moneyness of the options at the vesting date, the size of the grants, and cumulative stock returns between the grant date and the vesting date. Our empirical results confirm that the moneyness of newly granted stock options and cumulative stock returns are strongly correlated with both earnings management and insider trading in vesting years. In contrast, the size of the grants is only weakly related to earnings management and insider trading in vesting years.
The Attorney-Client Relationship: A Jewish Law Perspective

Professors Thomas L. Shaffer and Robert F. Cochran, Jr., state that an attorney, vis-ý-vis her client, acts as either (1) a godfather; (2) a hired gun; (3) a guru; or (4) a friend. These paradigms principally differ as to the extent to which the attorney, rather than the client, controls the relationship and the degree to which the interests of persons other than the client are deemed important. Shaffer and Cochran contend that the friend model is to be preferred. As the client's friend, the attorney not only considers which possible decision would be ethically correct but she engages her client in moral discourse so that the client may make the ethically correct decision. However, the attorney does not attempt to manipulate the client into making this decision.This article explains that Jewish law assumes the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent Creator and the existence of a network of relationships between and among the Creator and all human beings. The purpose of the article is to examine how, in light of these assumptions and other applicable Jewish law doctrines, none of the Shaffer-Cochran models captures Jewish law's view of the attorney-client relationship. Moreover, the article argues that the Jewish law model is ethically superior to the friend paradigm favored by Shaffer and Cochran.
Information Embedded in Directors and Officers Insurance Purchases

We examine corporate purchases of Directors and Officers (D&O) liability insurance and find that in addition to governance quality it contains managers’ private information. In particular, we find that insider control in excess of insider share holdings is jointly associated with lower D&O coverage limits and higher firm performance. The result holds when deductibles, corporate governance characteristics and litigation risk factors are controlled for. Our finding is consistent with an asymmetric information hypothesis in financial markets which posits that managers possess private information about firm risk. Our findings differ from existing literature that shows that D&O insurance purchases primarily reflect firm's governance quality and litigation risk. The evidence supports the policy prescription advanced in earlier studies which call for mandatory public disclosure of D&O insurance purchases since it contains additional information for the market.
Entropy Conservative Schemes and the Receding Flow Problem

This work reviews the entropy conservative (EC) schemes introduced by Tadmor and examines their use in the receding flow problem extensively studied by Liou. This is motivated by Liou’s recent findings that an abnormal spike in temperature observed with finite-volume schemes is linked to a spurious entropy rise that can be prevented in principle by conserving entropy. While a semi-discrete analysis suggests EC schemes are a good fit, a fully discrete analysis based on Tadmor’s framework shows the non-negligible impact of time-integration on the solution behavior. In addition, an EC time-integration scheme is developed to show that enforcing conservation of entropy at the fully discrete level does not necessarily prevent the temperature spike.
Genealogies of Risk: Searching for Safety, 1930s-1970s

Health, safety, and environmental regulation in the United States are saturated with risk thinking. It was not always so, and it may not be so in the future. But today, the formal, quantitative approach to risk provides much of the basis for regulation in these fields, a development that seems quite natural, even necessary. This particular approach, while it drew on conceptual and technical developments that had been underway for decades, achieved prominence during a relatively short timeframe; roughly, between the mid1970s and the early 1980s—a time of hard looks and regulatory reform. Prior to this time, formal conceptions of risk were rarely invoked in the effort to regulate the increasingly complex set of hazards associated with industrial society and quantitative risk assessment was considered too uncertain to serve as a basis for regulatory decision making. With few exceptions, safety, hazard, and endangerment provided the dominant framings, drawing on different conceptual and normative tendencies and leading to different regulatory outcomes. This Article investigates the emergence and development of formal approaches to risk in health, safety, and environmental law during the twentieth century. It focuses specifically on the concepts, tools, and practices that have underwritten risk thinking in these fields, developing a perspective on health, safety, and environmental regulation that seeks to historicize risk and situate the contemporary debate regarding the merits of risk versus precaution in its proper historical context. In doing so, the Article demonstrates how both approaches struggled to address the much more vast and complicated world of potential environmental harm brought into view as a result of substantial advances in analytical techniques during the 1960s and early 1970s, thereby revealing the contours of a more fundamental clash over environmental law’s
Understanding Data Virtualization for Learning Models

Data is most crucial and essential building block for any data mining and AI application exist out there. More significantly, deep learning approaches require massive datasets. We know that the theory and algorithms have been around for quite a while however the ability to process the huge amounts of data brought us to the recent breakthroughs in the field. A challenge comes up in the case of a small dataset, compared to the required training data required. However, commonly, getting this data is neither an easy nor a cheap task, Many annotating services take advantage of the problem and charge for tagging data-sets campaigns, those could cost hundreds of dollars easily and still with an uncertain quality. Many wonder how to exploit the minimal data we have and still be able to learn well (generalize). In this paper, we overview methods for solving the tackle the problem and suggest solutions in order to overcome the challenge.
Rent-a-regulator: Design and innovation in privatized governmental decisionmaking

Privatization of traditionally governmental functions, from police work to education, has been a contentious topic in recent years. Popular debates treating the decision as a/I-or-nothing overlook the plethora of extant models of privatization that depart from the familiar paradigms of contracting out or selling assets entirely. This Comment examines one such under-the-radar model in the context of environmental regulation, both to highlight an approach that deserves attention and to show the connection between an initiative - design and its results. The model, which this Comment nickknames "rent-a-regulator," transfers regulatory decisionmaking to licensed professionals who directly serve regulated "clients." Rather than contracting out regulatory functions or privatizing them entirely, the government licenses professionals, just as it would doctors or plumbers, to make compliance decisions. A case study of Massachusetts' program reveals systematic regulatory violations in this system. At the same time, ii suggests that the program's failings are likely due to specific structural shortcomings, such that the program might be redesigned rather than abandoned. Careful attention to design and structure thus helps establish middle ground between privatization supporters and opponents. Refining existing privatization strategies may provide the most promising way forward.
The Changing Beta of Value and Momentum Stocks

Alpha and risk factor volatility have recently reached extremes. This aticle discusses the risk and return relationships of value and momentum, which the authors believe have shifted. They find that market risk, or beta, correlations for both factors have reversed and resulted in changes and magnifications of return relationships. Decomposing these interactions allows us to better understand the underlying risks of portfolios constructed using value or momentum signals in their alpha or risk models.
Social media and E‐Government: A case study assessing Twitter use in the implementation of the open government directive

The first official order of business carried out by President Obama in 2008 was the presentation of a memorandum entitled Transparency and Open Government. Three pillars for Open Government are outlined in the document and consist of transparency, participation and collaboration which form the foundation for the initiative. Here we report on a case study, where the use of social media by the United States Department of Agriculture was assessed in relation to the agencies implementation of goals set by the Open Government Initiative. In the Open Government Initiative, the use of social media features strongly as a means to connect with the public and to promote the three pillars. We question whether use of social actually results in realization of the three pillars, but with a particular focus on dialogue between the USDA and the public. We apply a mixed-methods approach based in grounded theory, social network analysis, content analysis and discourse analysis. Early findings suggest that although the USDA is mentioned there is no clear evidence of discourse, in the sense of exchange of tweets between the USDA and other posters. This is assuming that anyone who may post from the USDA would do so under the auspices of the organization and not as an individual with a unique user name. Our research indicates that traditional definitions of these terms (transparency, collaboration and participation) may need to be expanded to account for the types of interactions occurring via social media. In this paper, we report on our research plan and initial observations.
Industrialization, Female Labor Force Participation, and the Modern Division of Labor by Sex

We examine the effect of industrialization on female labor force participation for 62 countries. Two hypotheses are tested: the emancipation hypothesis and the U-shaped hypothesis. Our results support the U-shaped hypothesis insofar as shifts in the distribution of occupations in early industrialization decrease female labor force participation by removing women from agriculture while excluding them from occupations in manufacturing and management. We further suggest that different paths to industrialization may have different effects on female labor force participation.
Privileges and Immunities of Global Public-Private Partnerships: A Case study of the Global Fund to Fight AIDs, Tuberculosis and Malaria

The question of whether it is at all appropriate to extend privileges and immunities regimes beyond international organizations to the increasingly ubiquitous global public-private partnership structure has received little attention to date in the scholarly literature. This article examines this question through a study of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a permanent global public-private partnership that formally incorporates non-state actors as equal players in its core governance structures. The article concludes that considerations of genesis and administrative law-type analyses of institutional design may, to some extent, substitute for the constituent treaty of classical international law in order to identify which global public-private partnerships should benefit from privileges and immunities, as well as the specific privileges and immunities to be granted in each case to facilitate the effective fulfilment of these partnerships' mandates.
Fast and accurate learned multiresolution dynamical downscaling for precipitation

Abstract. This study develops a neural-network-based approach for emulating high-resolution modeled precipitation data with comparable statistical properties but at greatly reduced computational cost. The key idea is to use combination of low- and high-resolution simulations (that differ not only in spatial resolution but also in geospatial patterns) to train a neural network to map from the former to the latter. Specifically, we define two types of CNNs, one that stacks variables directly and one that encodes each variable before stacking, and we train each CNN type both with a conventional loss function, such as mean square error (MSE), and with a conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN), for a total of four CNN variants. We compare the four new CNN-derived high-resolution precipitation results with precipitation generated from original high-resolution simulations, a bilinear interpolater and the state-of-the-art CNN-based super-resolution (SR) technique. Results show that the SR technique produces results similar to those of the bilinear interpolator with smoother spatial and temporal distributions and smaller data variabilities and extremes than the original high-resolution simulations. While the new CNNs trained by MSE generate better results over some regions than the interpolator and SR technique do, their predictions are still biased from the original high-resolution simulations. The CNNs trained by CGAN generate more realistic and physically reasonable results, better capturing not only data variability in time and space but also extremes such as intense and long-lasting storms. The new proposed CNN-based downscaling approach can downscale precipitation from 50 to 12 km in 14 min for 30 years once the network is trained (training takes 4 h using 1 GPU), while the conventional dynamical downscaling would take 1 month using 600 CPU cores to generate simulations at the resolution of 12 km over the contiguous United States.
Insightful Details on How Everything Developed From Nothing

In order to provide true knowledge, explanatory concepts in the social realm must be consistent with scientific observations on the micro-level substances that underlie the reality of the beings whose interactions social theories seek to explain. As a result, there is a need in social research for a unified theory of the basic physics of social beings that involves the nature of being itself. As pointed out by Omnes , a unified, consistent theory of being that reflects the reality of quantum physics is very important in ontology and philosophy in general. However, deep philosophical issues relating to whether social beings represent mere illusions and whether perceptions of such beings are detailed symbolic categorizations of the nature of existence or rough generalizations of the true state of everything are important in all A major contribution to ensuring such consistency has been provided by Leuten , who, using a very diverse cross-section of scientific evidence stemming from over a thousand interdisciplinary sources, explained how everything is composed of various combinations of divided nothingness that evolved from nothing. (Other authors such as Krauss, who explained how quantum gravity and cosmic inflation enable a universe with no net energy to last longer than virtual particles springing out of a vacuum, have suggested that the universe evolved from nothing, but they leave far larger gaps in developing theories or hypotheses on the details of how such a universe could have arisen endogenously from nothing. The origin of the observed laws of quantum mechanics and all the exotic particles in existence isn’t clarified in any way that is much different than assuming a deity appeared out of nothing and created quantum physics as well as everything else.
The desirability of commodity taxation under non-linear income taxation and heterogeneous tastes

Abstract This paper revisits the Atkinson–Stiglitz result on uselessness of commodity taxation in the presence of optimal non-linear income taxation in a more general setup, namely when tastes are heterogeneous. This general analysis displays the key economic assumptions under which the Atkinson–Stiglitz result is robust. A small tax on a given commodity is desirable if high income earners have a relatively higher taste for this commodity or if consumption of this commodity increases with leisure. An application to the case of savings suggests that, even in the presence of optimal non-linear earnings taxation, there is a role for a supplemental capital income tax in the standard overlapping generation model.
Imperfect annuity markets, unintended bequests, and the optimal age structure of social security benefits

The social security program now provides a constant real benefit throughout each retirees lifetime. This paper examines whether total welfare would rise if benefits were lower in early retirement years (when most individuals have some saving with which to finance consumption) and higher in later years (when the uncertainty of survival and the absence of actuarially fair private annuities makes the availability of social security benefits more important.) The analysis shows that there is a potentially important difference between the structure of benefits that would be preferred by the current population of workers and retirees and the structure of benefits that would maximize the steady state level of social welfare. This difference reflects the role of unintended bequests. The provision of higher benefits to older retirees reduces individually optimal savings and therefore the level of unintended bequests. While those bequests may have no value to the retirees, they are clearly of value to the young workers who will receive those bequests. More generally, the system of level benefits raises the steady state level of the capital stock and of total real income. The present paper provides an explicit analysis of a case in which the current workers want benefits to increase with age while the social security system that maximizes steady state welfare would provide higher benefits to young retirees than to the very old.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
The Continuing Duty Then and Now

The recognition in the American Bar Association (“ABA”) Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Defense Counsel in Death Penalty Cases (“ABA Guidelines” or “Guidelines”) 1 of a continuing duty on the part of defense counsel to safeguard the interests of former clients by facilitating the work of successor counsel was, and is, essential to implementing post-conviction review of the effectiveness of their representation. 2 It is very difficult to meaningfully assess a defense lawyer’s representation if one cannot access her files (or if they are incomplete) and her strategic thinking and research ideas, let alone her testimony. The continuing duty’s inclusion in 2003 was “new” insofar as prior practice guidelines and public recognition were concerned (with the exception of one state ethics opinion 3 and one undistinguished scholarly article); 4 but over a century before, there had been isolated instances of lawyers discharging a continuing duty to former clients by facilitating their post-conviction efforts. The continuing duty’s inclusion in the ABA Guidelines was remarkable, not as a break from existing doctrine, but because it had almost never been articulated as extending, in scope and duration, to affirmative practices during the post-conviction phase.
Shareholder-Creditor Conflict and Payout Policy: Evidence from Mergers between Lenders and Shareholders

This paper studies how the conflict of interest between shareholders and creditors affects corporate payout policy. Using mergers between lenders and equity holders of the same firm as shocks to the shareholder-creditor conflict, I find that firms pay out less when there is less conflict between shareholders and creditors, suggesting that the shareholder-creditor conflict induces firms to pay out more at the expense of creditors. The effect is stronger for firms in financial distress. Received March 22, 2017; editorial decision October 17, 2017 by Editor Wei Jiang. 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.