cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Immigration Research in the United States: Social Origins and Future Orientations

This paper presents and analyzes findings from the first National Survey of Immigration Scholars (NASIS), designed specifically to inquire into the social origins and research orientations of scholars who specialize in immigration studies and who are most responsible for producing our scholarly knowledge base. The NASIS sample consists of immigration scholars in a wide range of disciplines and at all stages in their careers. Unlike the nascent scholarship on immigration at the turn of the 19th century, the present era has seen many immigrants themselves become leading scholars of immigration in certain disciplines, and children, and especially grandchildren of immigrants are prominent immigration scholars in others. The finding that almost half of today's immigration scholars are themselves of immigrant stock, including the majority of the sociologists and more than a third of the anthropologists and historians, underscores the profound impact of immigration on the field itself. Simply put, immigration is producing many of the scholars who study it and who will tell its story.
Read All About It! Understanding the Role of Media in Economic Development

Summary This paper explores the role of media in economic development. In particular, we seek to outline the conditions under which the media contributes to the successful adoption of policies aimed at economic progress. Our core thesis is that successful economic development requires the coordination of efforts by politicians with the interests of the populace on policies that bring about economic growth. However, the nature of the relationship between political actors in charge of reform is characterized by a conflict of interests. The role of media as a key mechanism for transforming these situations of conflict into situations of coordination between politicians and the populace is analyzed. Specifically, we consider four factors — media autonomy, legal structure, quality of the media and consumer demand — and how they impact media as a coordination-enhancing mechanism. Historical examples of the media in developing countries provide further insight into the circumstances necessary for media to be an effective coordination-enhancing mechanism. We consider the impact of a free media in cases where successful economic development has occurred — Hungary and Poland. We also consider the Ukraine as a case where media has failed to overcome the conflict characterizing the reform process, and Bulgaria as a situation where politicians and the populace have failed to coordinate around ‘good’ reforms despite having a free media. Our paper concludes with some policy recommendations regarding the achievement of a free and effective media.
A note on minimum riskiness hedge ratio

Abstract This note incorporates the riskiness indexes of Aumann and Serrano (2008) and Foster and Hart (2009) into the futures hedging framework. It is shown that the minimum FH riskiness hedge strategy does not exist whereas the minimum AS riskiness hedge ratio tends to be smaller than the conventional minimum variance hedge ratio. Empirical results using daily spot and futures prices of S&P500 and FTSE100 indices over the 2009 to 2013 period support the theoretical prediction.
Are people more risk-taking in the presence of the opposite sex?

This paper investigates whether exposure to the opposite sex induces greater risk-taking in both males and females. Experimental subjects evaluated a series of hypothetical monetary gambles before and after viewing pictures of opposite sex faces; control subjects viewed pictures of cars. Both males and females viewing opposite sex photos displayed a significant increase in risk tolerance, whereas the control subjects exhibited no significant change. Surprisingly, the attractiveness of the photo had no effect; subjects viewing photographs of attractive opposite sex persons displayed similar results as those viewing photographs of unattractive people.
Ethical Concerns in International Business: Are Some Issues More Important than Others?

F irms expanding into international business have had to contend with ethical and social dilemmas brought on by differences in economic conditions, cultural values, and competitive variables. In recent years, as economic activities have become more globally integrated, concern has been expressed over ethical practices in various countries and the role of multinational firms in making profits through conduct considered inappropriate. Thanks to the activism of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and advancements in communication such as television, telephone, and the World Wide Web, the general public, especially in advanced industrial countries such as the United States, are now aware and conscious of economic, social, and political conditions elsewhere in the world. In this article we ascertain and rank the U.S. public’s concern over a set of ethical issues in international business.
Private Firm Investment and Public Peer Misvaluation

ABSTRACT We study how public firm misvaluation affects private peer firm investments. An economic competition hypothesis predicts a negative relation because misvaluation-induced new investment by ...
On the existence of competitive equilibrium in frictionless and incomplete stochastic asset markets

Using a standard frictionless, continuous time, and continuous trading stochastic economy with heterogeneous beliefs, the purpose of this paper is to provide sufficient conditions for the existence of competitive equilibrium in an incomplete asset market. A new approach to proving existence is provided, which is readily generalized to markets with frictions, including trading constraints and transaction costs. As a second contribution, this paper also proves the existence of bubble equilibrium in a market without trading constraints. We show that bubbles can exist solely due to heterogeneous beliefs about the evolution of an asset’s market price process.
The Monetary Transmission Mechanism

The monetary transmission mechanism describes how policy‐induced changes in the nominal money stock or the short‐term nominal interest rate impact real variables such as aggregate output and employment. Specific channels of monetary transmission operate through the effects that monetary policy has on interest rates, exchange rates, equity and real estate prices, bank lending, and firm balance sheets. Recent research on the transmission mechanism seeks to understand how these channels work in the context of dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium models.
High crimes, not misdemeanors: deterring the production of unsafe food.

In the fall of 2008, Minnesota public health officials became alarmed by an unusually high number of illnesses and deaths caused by salmonella poisoning. Federal and state regulators and the news media eventually traced the outbreak back to products supplied by the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA). Employees shipped batches that tested positive for salmonella from a plant with a leaking roof, mold growing on ceilings and walls, rodent infestation, filthy processing receptacles, and feathers and feces in the air filtration system. Under an agreement with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Georgia state inspectors visited the PCA plant nine times in 2006-2008 but took no effective action to terminate any of these conditions. When called to testify before Congress, Stewart Parnell, PCA’s chief executive officer, invoked his Fifth Amendment rights, and the company itself is under criminal investigation. Food-borne illness causes 5,000 deaths, hospitalizes 325,000, and sickens 76 million annually. Incidents like those at PCA have spurred Congress to draft comprehensive legislation to strengthen FDA’s food safety programs, which cover 80 percent of the American diet. (The Department of Agriculture has jurisdiction over meat and poultry.) Yet under the leading piece of Senate legislation, such egregious conduct would remain punishable as a misdemeanor, triggering at most 0-6 months in jail if the Department of Justice even considered prosecuting those crimes. Industry groups like the Grocery Manufacturers of America oppose enhanced criminal and civil penalties, urging the FDA to focus on cooperative efforts to achieve compliance. The paper argues that the nation cannot afford to forego the substantial deterrent effects provided by severe criminal penalties, especially under the “responsible corporate officer” doctrine that applies to violations of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act. That doctrine holds responsible any corporate officer who should know illegal practices are occurring and is in a position to stop them. In an era when regulatory agencies responsible for protecting health and safety cannot afford to inspect their way out of trouble, high profile enforcement is critical to efforts to improve the safety of the food supply.
License to Deal: Mandatory Approval of Complex Financial Products

In the wake of the recent crisis, policy-makers and academics continue to debate how to control and reduce systemic risk associated with financial innovation, complexity, and growing interconnectedness of global financial markets. This Article argues that an effective method of achieving that goal is to establish ex ante regulatory controls that target risk before it is introduced into the financial system. The Article offers the first comprehensive analysis of one particular method of such ex ante regulation – mandatory pre-market product approval – and its potential applicability to complex financial instruments, including derivatives, asset-backed securities, and other structured products. The Article examines key features of three historical experiments with product approval regulation: licensing of pharmaceutical drugs by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the European Union’s newly adopted Regulation on Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), and a system of mandatory pre-approval of commodity futures contracts administered by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1974 to 2000. Building on these examples, the Article discusses whether, and how, a similar regime can operate as a gatekeeping device that aims explicitly at reduction of systemic risk and strategic complexity in financial markets. The core of the proposal advanced in this Article is the process for product approval, which would require financial institutions to make an affirmative showing that each complex financial product they intend to market meets three statutory tests: (1) an “economic purpose” test, which would place the burden of proving commercial utility of each proposed financial instrument on the financial institutions seeking approval; (2) an “institutional capacity” test, which would require a review of the applicant firm’s ability to manage the risks and monitor the market dynamics of the proposed product effectively; and (3) a broad “systemic effects” test, which would require a finding that approval of the proposed product does not pose an unacceptable risk of increasing systemic vulnerability and otherwise does not raise significant public policy concerns. The proposed approach does not seek to prohibit any financial activities. It merely imposes the duty to provide information necessary for evaluating potential risks and benefits of a specific financial product on the party that has the best access to such information and the greatest incentives not to disclose it voluntarily. Acknowledging significant implementation challenges, the Article argues that mandatory product approval should be taken very seriously as a potentially effective method of advancing the public interest in the more robust systemic risk prevention, as well as enhancing the efficient operation of financial markets.
Data-driven biological network alignment that uses topological, sequence, and functional information.

Network alignment (NA) can transfer functional knowledge between species’ conserved biological network regions. Traditional NA assumes that it is topological similarity (isomorphic-like matching) between network regions that corresponds to the regions’ functional relatedness. However, we recently found that functionally unrelated proteins are as topologically similar as functionally related proteins. So, we redefined NA as a data-driven method called TARA, which learns from network and protein functional data what kind of topological relatedness (rather than similarity) between proteins corresponds to their functional relatedness. TARA used topological information (within each network) but not sequence information (between proteins across networks). Yet, TARA yielded higher protein functional prediction accuracy than existing NA methods, even those that used both topological and sequence information. Here, we propose TARA++ that is also data-driven, like TARA and unlike other existing methods, but that uses across-network sequence information on top of within-network topological information, unlike TARA. To deal with the within-and-across-network analysis, we adapt social network embedding to the problem of biological NA. TARA++ outperforms protein functional prediction accuracy of existing methods. As such, combining research knowledge from different domains is promising. Overall, improvements in protein functional prediction have biomedical implications, for example allowing researchers to better understand how cancer progresses or how humans age.
Managerial Opportunism? Evidence from Directors' and Officers' Insurance Purchases

We analyze a sample of 72 IPO firms that went public between 1992 and 1996 for which we have detailed proprietary information about the amount and cost of D&O liability insurance. If managers of IPO firms are exploiting superior inside information, we hypothesize that the amount of insurance coverage chosen will be related to the post-offering performance of the issuing firm’s shares. Consistent with the hypothesis, we find a significant negative relation between the three-year postIPO stock price performance and the insurance coverage purchased in conjunction with the IPO. One plausible interpretation is that, like insider securities transactions, D&O insurance decisions reveal opportunistic behavior by managers. This provides some motivation to argue that disclosure of the details of D&O insurance decisions, as is required in some other countries, is valuable. CORPORATE INSIDERS ARE WIDELY ACKNOWLEDGED to possess superior information about future prospects for the firms they manage, and to some degree to utilize that information to their private benefit. One well-known example that helps to establish this inference is that insider trades have been shown to contain information that helps to predict security returns. We refer to insiders’ use of corporate information for private benefit as managerial opportunism. The managerial opportunism hypothesis says that rational managers, armed with superior information, choose to sell shares when the public valuation of the company’s shares exceeds management’s valuation estimate. In the context of insider trades, evidence by Seyhun ~1986!, Lee ~1997!, and Kahle ~2000! provides support for the managerial opportunism hypothesis. We test the managerial opportunism hypothesis in another context. We examine the decision that informed insiders make concerning the purchase of directors’ and officers’ ~D&O! liability insurance around the time when a company is preparing to sell its initial public offering ~IPO! of stock. If managers are behaving opportunistically and taking the company public when the IPO shares are overvalued, then we posit that rational managers will adjust other decisions they make to balance the costs and benefits of ex
Currency Risk Hedging With Time-Varying Correlations

This paper studies currency risk hedge when volatilities and correlations of forward currency contracts and underlying assets returns are all time-varying. A multivariate GARCH model with time-varying correlations is adopted to fit the dynamic structure of the conditional volatilities and correlations. The conditional risk-minimizing hedge strategies are estimated for an international portfolio of the US, UK and Switzerland stocks, for the period of February of 1973 to March of 2002. The empirical results show that the optimal dynamic hedging strategies can capture partially the currency fluctuations, and greatly reduce the currency risk and enhance the risk-adjusted returns of the portfolio with significant foreign currency exposures.
Hybrid histories and indigenous knowledge among Asian rubber smallholders

Michael R. Dove is Margaret K. Musserprofessor of social ecology and chair ofthe Council on South-East Asian Studiesat Yale University, F&ES, 205 ProspectStreet, New Haven, Connecticut 06511–2189, US. An anthropologist who hascarried out ﬁeldwork in both Indonesiaand Pakistan, his current research inter-ests include contemporary and historicalenvironmental relations in South andSouth-East Asia, the sociology ofresource-related sciences, and the studyof developmental and environmentalinstitutions and discourses.Email: michael.dove@yale.edu
Dissolving multi-partnerships efficiently☆

Abstract I study a market where agents with unit demand jointly own heterogeneous goods. In this market, the existence of an efficient, incentive compatible, individually rational, and budget balanced mechanism depends on the shares of the agents. I characterize the set of shares for which having such a mechanism is possible. This set includes the symmetric allocation and excludes the allocation in which every agent owns a separate good.
Secondary Human Rights Law

This Essay, written to honor Professor Michael Reisman, argues that international actors fundamentally disagree on the secondary rules that govern human rights law - that is, on how human rights law is properly made, applied, and enforced. The Essay identifies and appraises that problem. The lack of consensus on the applicable secondary rules limits the capacity of human rights law to establish substantive codes of conduct. More troubling, that lack of consensus breeds dissidence within and ultimately destabilizes the human rights regime.
How Do Incumbents Respond to the Threat of Entry? Evidence from the Major Airlines

This paper examines how incumbents respond to the threat of entry of competitors, as distinguished from their response to competitors’ actual entry. It uses a case study from the passenger airline industry—specifically, the evolution of Southwest Airlines’ route network—to identify particular routes where the probability of future entry rises abruptly. When Southwest begins operating in airports on both sides of a route but not the route itself, this dramatically raises the chance they will start flying that route in the near future. We examine the pricing of the incumbents on threatened routes in the period surrounding such events. We find that incumbents cut fares significantly when threatened by Southwest’s entry into their routes. This is true even after controlling in several ways for airport-specific operating costs. The response of incumbents seems to be limited only to the threatened route itself, and not to routes out of nearby competitor airports where Southwest does not operate (e.g., fares drop on routes from Chicago Midway but not Chicago O’Hare). The largest responses appear to be restricted to routes that were concentrated beforehand. Incumbents do experience short-run increases in their passenger loads concurrent with these fare cuts. This is consistent with theories implying incumbents will try to generate some longer-term loyalty among current customers before the entry of a new competitor. We examine evidence relating this demand-building motive to frequent flyer programs and find suggestive evidence in favor of this notion. There is only weak evidence that incumbents increase capacity on the routes.
The role of information and financial reporting in corporate governance and debt contracting

Abstract We review recent literature on the role of financial reporting transparency in reducing governance-related agency conflicts among managers, directors, and shareholders, as well as in reducing agency conflicts between shareholders and creditors, and offer researchers some suggested avenues for future research. Key themes include the endogenous nature of debt contracts and governance mechanisms with respect to information asymmetry between contracting parties, the heterogeneous nature of the informational demands of contracting parties, and the heterogeneous nature of the resulting governance and debt contracts. We also emphasize the role of a commitment to financial reporting transparency in facilitating informal multiperiod contracts among managers, directors, shareholders, and creditors.
AN OBSCURED EXPANSION OF THE COMMERCE POWER

* JD candidate, 2008, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (Yeshiva University). Thanks to Professors Michelle Adams, Margaret Lemos, and Julie Suk, as well as Austen Rachlis, for their guidance and comments. 1. The phrase "federalism revolution" refers to the perceived program of the Su­ preme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist to place limitations on the exercise of federal power, particularly federal legislative power. See, e.g., Jack M. Balkin & Sanford Levinson, Understanding the Constitutional Revolution, 87 VA. L. REV. 1045, 1051 (2001) ("[Bush v. Gore] occurred against the background of a veritable revolution in constitutional doctrine that has been going on for some fifteen years. "); Erwin Chemerinsky, The Rehnquist Revolution, 2 PIERCE L. REV. 1 (2004); Larry D. Kramer, Foreword: We the Court, 115 HARV. L. REV. 4, 138 (2001) ("The real revolution began in 1995, when for the first time in six decades the Court struck down a federal statute as exceeding the limits of the Commerce Clause."). But see Keith E. Whittington, Taking What They Give Us: Explaining the Court's Federalism Offensive, 51 DUKE L.J. 477,477 (2001) (describing the "recent federalism cases" as "not quite amounting to a revolution "). 2. 42 U.S.c. § 2000e (2000). 3. See Paul Boudreaux, Federalism and the Contrivances of Public Law, 77 ST. JOHN'S L. REV. 523, 566-70 (2003) (discussing the Rehnquist Court's likely approach to the question of Title VII's constitutionality and concluding that overturning the statute "would be a logical result of the ... Court's new federalism"); Sylvia A. Law, In the Name of Federalism: The Supreme Court's Assault on Democracy and Civil Rights, 70 U. CiN. L. REV. 367, 385 (2002) ("[T]he Court's decision in Garrett strongly suggests that federal legislative protection of civil rights and liberties will no longer be tolerated by the Supreme Court majority."); James Leonard, The Shadows of Unconstitutionality: How the New Federalism May Affect the Anti-Discrimination Mandate of the Americans with Disabilities Act, 52 ALA. L. REV. 91 (2000); James M. Oleske, Jr., Federalism, Free Exercise, and Title VII: Reconsidering Reasonable Accommodation, 6 U. PA. J. CONST. L. 525, 526 (2004) ("Could Title VII be the next victim of the states' rights revolu­ tion?"); Jed Rubenfeld, The Anti-Antidiscrimination Agenda, 111 YALE LJ. 1141,1143­ 44 (2002) (arguing that federalism concerns were merely a "stalking-horse" for the Court's actions against the national antidiscrimination program); Louis J. Virelli III &
Economic Emergency and the Rule of Law

Academic work extolling the merits of the "rule of law" both domestically and internationally abounds today, yet the meanings of the phrase itself seem to proliferate. Two of the most prominent contexts in which rule of law rhetoric appears are those of economic development and states of emergency. In the area of private law, dissemination of the rule of law across the globe and, in particular, among emerging market countries is often deemed a prerequisite for enhancing economic development, partly because it ensures that foreign investments will not be summarily expropriated and that contractual rights will not be frustrated by governmental interference. Much of public law scholarship has, in turn, examined whether and in what form the rule of law, which is often seen as a basic requirement for a liberal political order, can be retained during times of emergency. While the economic development and state of emergency contexts for rule of law discussions appear quite distinct, they do converge in at least one situation, that of economic emergency. Paradigmatic cases of economic emergency include the Great Depression, the Argentine fiscal crisis of 2001, and the East Asian currency crisis of the late 1990s. Arguably more marginal instances might comprehend the economic consequences of Hurricane Katrina, the economic dimensions of a potential bird flu pandemic, or the threatened financial chaos of the Y2K computer crisis. Either the economic development or emergency-oriented approach to the rule of law could lead to the conclusion that none of these situations justify abrogation of core rule of law values - but this, of course, puts aside the question of which values do lie at the center of the rule of law. This Article contends that, in the United States context, the rule of law should be conceived flexibly enough to permit governmental intervention that may temporarily disrupt the economic but not personal liberty or political participation rights of individuals during these situations of economic emergency. Without addressing whether and to what extent the government should interfere in the economic sphere, this Article argues that several justifications based in the democratic vision underlying our constitutional system warrant treating the suspension of economic rights differently from the suspension of rights such as those of habeas corpus or the vote.
Tariffs and sectoral adjustments in an open economy

Abstract This paper analyzes the impact of a tariff on sectoral adjustments in an economy which produces two traded consumption goods, one of which is exported, and one nontraded investment good. The importance of sectoral capital intensities is emphasized. In particular, the qualitative dynamic adjustment depends upon the relative capital intensities of the import-competing consumption-good sector and the nontraded investment-good sector. Sectoral labor allocation effects are analyzed and the long-run effect on aggregate capital accumulation is shown to depend upon the relative capital intensities of the import and export sectors. Temporary as well as permanent tariffs are discussed.
Mobility and infectiousness in the spatial spread of an emerging fungal pathogen.

Emerging infectious diseases can have devastating effects on host communities, causing population collapse and species extinctions. The timing of novel pathogen arrival into naive species communities can have consequential effects that shape the trajectory of epidemics through populations. Pathogen introductions are often presumed to occur when hosts are highly mobile. However, spread patterns can be influenced by a multitude of other factors including host body condition and infectiousness. White-nose syndrome (WNS) is a seasonal emerging infectious disease of bats, which is caused by the fungal pathogen Pseudogymnoascus destructans. Within-site transmission of P. destructans primarily occurs over winter; however, the influence of bat mobility and infectiousness on the seasonal timing of pathogen spread to new populations is unknown. We combined data on host population dynamics and pathogen transmission from 22 bat communities to investigate the timing of pathogen arrival and the consequences of varying pathogen arrival times on disease impacts. We found that midwinter arrival of the fungus predominated spread patterns, suggesting that bats were most likely to spread P. destructans when they are highly infectious, but have reduced mobility. In communities where P. destructans was detected in early winter, one species suffered higher fungal burdens and experienced more severe declines than at sites where the pathogen was detected later in the winter, suggesting that the timing of pathogen introduction had consequential effects for some bat communities. We also found evidence of source-sink population dynamics over winter, suggesting some movement among sites occurs during hibernation, even though bats at northern latitudes were thought to be fairly immobile during this period. Winter emergence behaviour symptomatic of white-nose syndrome may further exacerbate these winter bat movements to uninfected areas. Our results suggest that low infectiousness during host migration may have reduced the rate of expansion of this deadly pathogen, and that elevated infectiousness during winter plays a key role in seasonal transmission. Furthermore, our results highlight the importance of both accurate estimation of the timing of pathogen spread and the consequences of varying arrival times to prevent and mitigate the effects of infectious diseases.
Advanced unembedding techniques for quantum annealers

The D-Wave quantum annealers make it possible to obtain high quality solutions of NP-hard problems by mapping a problem in a QUBO (quadratic unconstrained binary optimization) or Ising form to the physical qubit connectivity structure on the D-Wave chip. However, the latter is restricted in that only a fraction of all pairwise couplers between physical qubits exists. Modeling the connectivity structure of a given problem instance thus necessitates the computation of a minor embedding of the variables in the problem specification onto the logical qubits, which consist of several physical qubits "chained" together to act as a logical one. After annealing, it is however not guaranteed that all chained qubits get the same value (-1 or +1 for an Ising model, and 0 or 1 for a QUBO), and several approaches exist to assign a final value to each logical qubit (a process called "unembedding"). In this work, we present tailored unembedding techniques for four important NP-hard problems: the Maximum Clique, Maximum Cut, Minimum Vertex Cover, and Graph Partitioning problems. Our techniques are simple and yet make use of structural properties of the problem being solved. Using Erdos-Renyi random graphs as inputs, we compare our unembedding techniques to three popular ones (majority vote, random weighting, and minimize energy). We demonstrate that our proposed algorithms outperform the currently available ones in that they yield solutions of better quality, while being computationally equally efficient.
A Dichotomy for Real Boolean Holant Problems

We prove a complexity dichotomy for Holant problems on the boolean domain with arbitrary sets of real-valued constraint functions. These constraint functions need not be symmetric nor do we assume any auxiliary functions. It is proved that for every set $\mathcal{F}$ of real-valued constraint functions, $\text{Holant}(\mathcal{F})$ is either P-time computable or #P-hard. The classification has an explicit criterion. This is a culmination of much research on this problem, and it uses many previous results and techniques. Dealing with some concrete functions plays an important role in this proof. In particular, two functions, called $f_{6}$ and $f_{8}$ , and their associated families exhibit intriguing and extraordinary closure properties related to Bell states in quantum information theory.
The vacuum boundary problem for the spherically symmetric compressible Euler equations with positive density and unbounded entropy

Global stability of the spherically symmetric nonisentropic compressible Euler equations with positive density around global-in-time background affine solutions is shown in the presence of free vacuum boundaries. Vacuum is achieved despite a non-vanishing density by considering a negatively unbounded entropy, and we use a novel weighted energy method, whereby the exponential of the entropy will act as a changing weight to handle the degeneracy of the vacuum boundary. Spherical symmetry introduces a coordinate singularity near the origin for which we adopt a method developed for the Euler–Poisson system [Y. Guo et al., Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 239, 431–552 (2021)] to our problem.
Minnesota-type adaptive hierarchical priors for large Bayesian VARs

Abstract Large Bayesian VARs with stochastic volatility are increasingly used in empirical macroeconomics. The key to making these highly parameterized VARs useful is the use of shrinkage priors. We develop a family of priors that captures the best features of two prominent classes of shrinkage priors: adaptive hierarchical priors and Minnesota priors. Like adaptive hierarchical priors, these new priors ensure that only ‘small’ coefficients are strongly shrunk to zero, while ‘large’ coefficients remain intact. At the same time, these new priors can also incorporate many useful features of the Minnesota priors such as cross-variable shrinkage and shrinking coefficients on higher lags more aggressively. We introduce a fast posterior sampler to estimate BVARs with this family of priors—for a BVAR with 25 variables and 4 lags, obtaining 10,000 posterior draws takes about 3 min on a standard desktop computer. In a forecasting exercise, we show that these new priors outperform both adaptive hierarchical priors and Minnesota priors.
Performance Analysis and Improvement on DSRC Application for V2V Communication

In this paper, we focus on the performance of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication adopting the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) application in periodic broadcast mode. An analytical model is studied and a fixed point method is used to analyze the packet delivery ratio (PDR) and mean delay based on the IEEE 802.11p standard in a fully connected network under the assumption of perfect PHY performance. With the characteristics of V2V communication, we develop the Semi-persistent Contention Density Control (SpCDC) scheme to improve the DSRC performance. We use Monte Carlo simulation to verify the results obtained by the analytical model. The simulation results show that the packet delivery ratio in SpCDC scheme increases more than 10% compared with IEEE 802.11p in heavy vehicle load scenarios. Meanwhile, the mean reception delay decreases more than 50%, which provides more reliable road safety.
adPerf: Characterizing the Performance of Third-party Ads

Monetizing websites and web apps through online advertising is widespread in the web ecosystem, creating a billion-dollar market. This has led to the emergence of a vast network of tertiary ad providers and ad syndication to facilitate this growing market. Nowadays, the online advertising ecosystem forces publishers to integrate ads from these third-party domains. On the one hand, this raises several privacy and security concerns that are actively being studied in recent years. On the other hand, the ability of today's browsers to load dynamic web pages with complex animations and Javascript has also transformed online advertising. This can have a significant impact on webpage performance. The latter is a critical metric for optimization since it ultimately impacts user satisfaction. Unfortunately, there are limited literature studies on understanding the performance impacts of online advertising which we argue is as important as privacy and security. In this paper, we apply an in-depth and first-of-a-kind performance evaluation of web ads. Unlike prior efforts that rely primarily on adblockers, we perform a fine-grained analysis on the web browser's page loading process to demystify the performance cost of web ads. We aim to characterize the cost by every component of an ad, so the publisher, ad syndicate, and advertiser can improve the ad's performance with detailed guidance. For this purpose, we develop a tool, adPerf, for the Chrome browser that classifies page loading workloads into ad-related and main-content at the granularity of browser activities. Our evaluations show that online advertising entails more than 15% of browser page loading workload and approximately 88% of that is spent on JavaScript. On smartphones, this additional cost of ads is 7% lower since mobile pages include fewer and well-optimized ads. We also track the sources and delivery chain of web ads and analyze performance considering the origin of the ad contents. We observe that 2 of the well-known third-party ad domains contribute to 35% of the ads performance cost and surprisingly, top news websites implicitly include unknown third-party ads which in some cases build up to more than 37% of the ads performance cost.
Expression of a membrane-targeted fluorescent reporter disrupts auditory hair cell mechanoelectrical transduction and causes profound deafness

The reporter mT/mG mice expressing a membrane-targeted fluorescent protein are becoming widely used to study the auditory and vestibular system due to its versatility. Here we show that high expression levels of the fluorescent mtdTomato reporter affect the function of the sensory hair cells and the auditory performance of mT/mG transgenic mice. Auditory brainstem responses and distortion product otoacoustic emissions revealed that adult mT/mG homozygous mice are profoundly deaf, whereas heterozygous mice present high frequency loss. We explore whether this line would be useful for studying and visualizing the membrane of auditory hair cells by airyscan super-resolution confocal microscopy. Membrane localization of the reporter was observed in hair cells of the cochlea, facilitating imaging of both cell bodies and stereocilia bundles without altering cellular architecture or the expression of the integral membrane motor protein prestin. Remarkably, hair cells from mT/mG homozygous mice failed to uptake the FM1-43 dye and to locate TMC1 at the stereocilia, indicating defective mechanotransduction machinery. Our work emphasizes that precautions must be considered when working with reporter mice and highlights the potential role of the cellular membrane in maintaining functional hair cells and ensuring proper hearing.
Inference for High-Dimensional Linear Mixed-Effects Models: A Quasi-Likelihood Approach

Linear mixed-effects models are widely used in analyzing clustered or repeated measures data. We propose a quasi-likelihood approach for estimation and inference of the unknown parameters in linear...
Effect size, sample size and power of forced swim test assays in mice: Guidelines for investigators to optimize reproducibility.

A recent flood of publications has documented serious problems in scientific reproducibility, power, and reporting of biomedical articles, yet scientists persist in their usual practices. Why? We examined a popular and important preclinical assay, the Forced Swim Test (FST) in mice used to test putative antidepressants. Whether the mice were assayed in a naive state vs. in a model of depression or stress, and whether the mice were given test agents vs. known antidepressants regarded as positive controls, the mean effect sizes seen in the experiments were indeed extremely large (1.5-2.5 in Cohen's d units); most of the experiments utilized 7-10 animals per group which did have adequate power to reliably detect effects of this magnitude. We propose that this may at least partially explain why investigators using the FST do not perceive intuitively that their experimental designs fall short-even though proper prospective design would require ~21-26 animals per group to detect, at a minimum, large effects (0.8 in Cohen's d units) when the true effect of a test agent is unknown. Our data provide explicit parameters and guidance for investigators seeking to carry out prospective power estimation for the FST. More generally, altering the real-life behavior of scientists in planning their experiments may require developing educational tools that allow them to actively visualize the inter-relationships among effect size, sample size, statistical power, and replicability in a direct and intuitive manner.
The RSC complex remodels nucleosomes in transcribed coding sequences and promotes transcription in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

RSC (Remodels the Structure of Chromatin) is a conserved ATP-dependent chromatin remodeling complex that regulates many biological processes, including transcription by RNA polymerase II (Pol II). We report that RSC contributes in generating accessible nucleosomes in transcribed coding sequences (CDSs). RSC MNase ChIP-seq data revealed that RSC-bound nucleosome fragments were very heterogenous (∼80 bp to 180 bp) compared to a sharper profile displayed by the MNase inputs (140 bp to 160 bp), supporting the idea that RSC promotes accessibility of nucleosomal DNA. Notably, RSC binding to +1 nucleosomes and CDSs, but not with -1 nucleosomes, strongly correlated with Pol II occupancies, suggesting that RSC enrichment in CDSs is linked to transcription. We also observed that Pol II associates with nucleosomes throughout transcribed CDSs, and similar to RSC, Pol II-protected fragments were highly heterogenous, consistent with the idea that Pol II interacts with remodeled nucleosomes in CDSs. This idea is supported by the observation that the genes harboring high-levels of Pol II in their CDSs were the most strongly affected by ablating RSC function. Additionally, rapid nuclear depletion of Sth1 decreases nucleosome accessibility and results in accumulation of Pol II in highly transcribed CDSs. This is consistent with a slower clearance of elongating Pol II in cells with reduced RSC function, and is distinct from the effect of RSC depletion on PIC assembly. Altogether, our data provide evidence in support of the role of RSC in promoting Pol II elongation, in addition to its role in regulating transcription initiation.
A note on twisted group rings and semilinearization

In this short note, we construct a right adjoint to the functor which associates to a ring R equipped with a group action its twisted group ring. This right adjoint admits an interpretation as semi...
Nonconvex generalization of Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for nonlinear equality constrained problems

Abstract The classic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is a popular framework to solve linear-equality constrained problems. In this paper, we extend the ADMM naturally to nonlinear equality-constrained problems, called neADMM. The difficulty of neADMM is to solve nonconvex subproblems. We provide globally optimal solutions to them in two important applications. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate excellent performance and scalability of our proposed neADMM over existing state-of-the-start methods.
Slot-specific priorities with capacity transfers

Abstract In many real-world matching applications, there are restrictions for institutions either on priorities of their slots or on the transferability of unfilled slots over others (or both). Motivated by the need in such real-life matching problems, this paper formulates a family of practical choice rules, slot-specific priorities with capacity transfers (SSPwCT). These rules invoke both slot-specific priorities structure and transferability of vacant slots. We show that the cumulative offer mechanism (COM) is stable, strategy-proof and respects improvements with regards to SSPwCT choice rules. Transferring the capacity of one more unfilled slot, while all else is constant, leads to strategy-proof Pareto improvement of the COM. Following Kominers ' ( 2020 ) formulation, we also provide comparative static results for expansion of branch capacity and addition of new contracts in the SSPwCT framework. Our results have implications for resource allocation problems with diversity considerations.
Denoising large-scale biological data using network filters

Large-scale biological data sets are often contaminated by noise, which can impede accurate inferences about underlying processes. Such measurement noise can arise from endogenous biological factors like cell cycle and life history variation, and from exogenous technical factors like sample preparation and instrument variation. We describe a general method for automatically reducing noise in large-scale biological data sets. This method uses an interaction network to identify groups of correlated or anti-correlated measurements that can be combined or “filtered” to better recover an underlying biological signal. Similar to the process of denoising an image, a single network filter may be applied to an entire system, or the system may be first decomposed into distinct modules and a different filter applied to each. Applied to synthetic data with known network structure and signal, network filters accurately reduce noise across a wide range of noise levels and structures. Applied to a machine learning task of predicting changes in human protein expression in healthy and cancerous tissues, network filtering prior to training increases accuracy up to 43% compared to using unfiltered data. Network filters are a general way to denoise biological data and can account for both correlation and anti-correlation between different measurements. Furthermore, we find that partitioning a network prior to filtering can significantly reduce errors in networks with heterogenous data and correlation patterns, and this approach outperforms existing diffusion based methods. Our results on proteomics data indicate the broad potential utility of network filters to applications in systems biology.
OverSketched Newton: Fast Convex Optimization for Serverless Systems

Motivated by recent developments in serverless systems for large-scale computation as well as improvements in scalable randomized matrix algorithms, we develop OverSketched Newton, a randomized Hessian-based optimization algorithm to solve large-scale convex optimization problems in serverless systems. OverSketched Newton leverages matrix sketching ideas from Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra to compute the Hessian approximately. These sketching methods lead to inbuilt resiliency against stragglers that are a characteristic of serverless architectures. Depending on whether or not the problem is strongly convex, we propose different iteration updates using the approximate Hessian. For both cases, we establish convergence guarantees for OverSketched Newton, and we empirically validate our results by solving large-scale supervised learning problems on real-world datasets. Experiments demonstrate a reduction of ∼50% in total running time on AWS Lambda, compared to state-of-the-art distributed optimization schemes.
Production of anti-SARS-CoV-2 hyperimmune globulin from convalescent plasma.

BACKGROUND: In late 2019, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus emerged in China and quickly spread into a worldwide pandemic. Prior to the development of specific drug therapies or a vaccine, more immediately available treatments were sought including convalescent plasma. A potential improvement from convalescent plasma could be the preparation of anti-SARS-CoV-2 hyperimmune globulin (hIVIG). STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS: Convalescent plasma was collected from an existing network of plasma donation centers. A caprylate/chromatography purification process was used to manufacture hIVIG. Initial batches of hIVIG were manufactured in a versatile, small-scale facility designed and built to rapidly address emerging infectious diseases. RESULTS: Processing convalescent plasma into hIVIG resulted in a highly purified immunoglobulin G (IgG) product with more concentrated neutralizing antibody activity. hIVIG will allow for the administration of greater antibody activity per unit of volume with decreased potential for several adverse events associated with plasma administration. IgG concentration and IgG specific to SARS-CoV-2 were increased over 10-fold from convalescent plasma to the final product. Normalized enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay activity (per mg/ml IgG) was maintained throughout the process. Protein content in these final product batches was 100% IgG, consisting of 98% monomer and dimer forms. Potentially hazardous proteins (IgM, IgA, and anti-A, anti-B, and anti-D) were reduced to minimal levels. CONCLUSIONS: Multiple batches of anti-SARS-CoV-2 hIVIG that met regulatory requirements were manufactured from human convalescent plasma. The first clinical study in which the hIVIG will be evaluated will be Inpatient Treatment with Anti-Coronavirus Immunoglobulin (ITAC) [NCT04546581].