cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Wealthiest Is Not Always Healthiest: What Explains Differences in Child Mortality in West Africa?

Ghana has the lowest under-five mortality rate in West Africa. Understanding why Ghana’s child mortality rate is lower than in neighboring countries may offer useful insights for other developing countries that are trying to improve child health. This paper explores whether Ghana’s lower mortality rate is mostly a result of greater household wealth, better implementation of national health policies, or more favorable geography. The paper uses micro level data for children under five to examine relative child mortality risk between Ghana and each of its three immediate neighbors -- Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, and Togo. A Cox proportional hazards model is used to test which of the three ‘contenders’ – health policy, wealth, or geography – best explains Ghana’s mortality advantage. The results of the analysis indicate that wealth variables are not able to explain any of the child mortality variation between Ghana and its neighbors. Geography and health policy variables each explain about 40% of the mortality gap between Ghana and Burkina Faso. Health policy differences alone are able to explain about 70% of the child mortality gap between Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. These results suggest that even poor countries that have been ‘cursed’ by bad geography can potentially improve development outcomes and save children’s lives.
Dynamic valuation: Preference changes in the context of face-to-face negotiation

Abstract This experiment examines the dynamics of preference change in the context of face-to-face negotiation. Participants playing the role of “student” or “financial aid officer” exchanged proposals regarding the terms of a student loan. Consistent with dissonance theory, participants increased their liking for proposals they offered and/or ultimately accepted. The reactance theory prediction that participants would devalue proposals received from their opponents was confirmed for loan officers, but not for students. A pair of experimental manipulations involving the pre-rating of proposals and/or the opportunity for participants to engage in a brief discussion period prior to the initial exchange of offers mediated these effects, and influenced subsequent rates of agreement. Underlying attributional mechanisms and the implications of these findings for facilitating agreements are discussed.
Ranking sealed high-bid and open asymmetric auctions

Abstract For an important family of asymmetric auctions, we show that the seller’s expected revenue is higher in the sealed high-bid auction than in the open auction. This is true for arbitrary numbers of weak and strong buyers. We establish many interesting properties of the linear asymmetric auction model. We show how the linear model can also be useful for non-linear models. Revenue comparisons for the two auction formats are performed using data observed in U.S. forest timber auctions. We show that the revenue difference is minimal with a fixed number of participants, but can be as high as 14% when the difference in participation is taken into account. The revenue difference predicted by the linear model is quite similar to the empirical results of Athey et al. (2004) .
Do features that associate managers with a message magnify investors’ reactions to narrative disclosures?

Abstract We test whether investors react more strongly to narrative disclosures when the CEO's presence or association with the message is more salient in the disclosure, holding all other information constant. In our first experiment, we manipulate whether a CEO uses more personal pronouns (e.g., “I” and “our” rather than “the company” and “its”) in an assertion about whether the firm is “likely” or “unlikely” to win a lawsuit. We find investors' beliefs about the outcome of the lawsuit align more closely with the CEO's assertion when the disclosure contains more personal pronouns. Experiments 2 and 3 manipulate the extent of the CEO's association with the message and whether the disclosure contains good or bad news. In the second experiment, we manipulate whether a disclosure uses more personal pronouns. In the third experiment, we manipulate whether a disclosure does or does not contain a photo of the CEO. Both manipulations of association with the message lead to stronger reactions from investors in between-subjects tests. That is, when news is good (bad), including either more personal pronouns or the CEO's photo leads to more positive (negative) assessments of firm value. We also find that, within-subjects, both manipulations are perceived as indicating greater association with the message, but participants do not expect an effect on investment evaluations. In a fourth experiment, we provide additional evidence that personal pronoun usage affects investor reactions by increasing the perceived credibility of the disclosure.
Regulating Spyware: The Limitations of State Laboratories and the Case for Federal Preemption of State Unfair Competition Laws

Property rights and contract law are two of our most basic legal categories. Many legal scholars describe what makes them different; this Article describes how they work together to promote economic exchange. Incorporating the insights of both "transaction cost" and "new property rights" economics, it identifies two crucial contributions that property rights make to real-world contracting: (1) precontractual liability, or protection for disclosure of sensitive information in the period leading up to contract formation; and (2) enforcement flexibility after a contract is executed, in the form of many subtle but important advantages that accrue to a contracting party who also holds a property right. This Article argues that property's "transactional" role is growing in importance, as the "new economy" ushers in a more transaction-intensive industrial structure featuring greater numbers of smaller, more specialized firms. I think you can often learn more about how the economic system works by reading law books and cases in law books than you can by reading economics books because you do get descriptions of actual business practices which are difficult to explain.
The Governance Problem in Aggregate Litigation

Recent developments in class action law and scholarship have forced new attention on the question of how class representation should be assessed. This Article begins with an examination of the governance problem in class action analyzed from the perspective of the customary political theories that would justify legitimate government in public and private domains. Customary accounts of democratic legitimacy or contractual voluntarism poorly capture the distinct world of the one-time aggregation of a class under court-assigned leadership. What emerges is an assessment of how various class action doctrines serve to fill the void in customary indications of legitimacy in governance. The Article concludes with a review of alternative efforts to structure class governance to avoid the agency problems inherent in the power to manage the affairs of others.
Indigenous peoples' claims to cultural property: A legal perspective

This essay examines the legal dimensions of indigenous peoples' claims to cultural property. Law and anthropology often address issues of cultural property in different ways. Anthropologists seek to understand cultural property within the context of the indigenous cultures themselves, while lawyers attempt to translate concepts of indigenous property into the language of Euroamerican law. Indigenous peoples' claims to cultural property provide a compelling example of the need for new legal relationships to be articulated between Indian nations and Euroamerican society.
Publicly Provided Goods and Intrafamily Resource Allocation: Female Child Survival in India

The paper examines the problem of excess mortality of females in India. The determinants of gender-specific child survival are investigated through the traditional household production model pioneered by Becker which is extended to include publicly provided goods as fixed inputs in production decisions. The introduction of government-provided goods provides an avenue for investigating the influence of the state on household decisions. Gender-specific child survival equations are estimated using a robust "seemingly unrelated regression" method. Results using 1981 Indian Census data indicate that increases in female literacy and female labor force participation increase female child survival in rural India. Furthermore higher ratios of female to male medical technicians are associated with higher female child survival relative to males. This paper demonstrates that a large and effective role exists for government to address excess female morality. (authors)
Toward Optimal Feature Selection in Naive Bayes for Text Categorization

Automated feature selection is important for text categorization to reduce feature size and to speed up learning process of classifiers. In this paper, we present a novel and efficient feature selection framework based on the Information Theory, which aims to rank the features with their discriminative capacity for classification. We first revisit two information measures: Kullback-Leibler divergence and Jeffreys divergence for binary hypothesis testing, and analyze their asymptotic properties relating to type I and type II errors of a Bayesian classifier. We then introduce a new divergence measure, called Jeffreys-Multi-Hypothesis (JMH) divergence, to measure multi-distribution divergence for multi-class classification. Based on the JMH-divergence, we develop two efficient feature selection methods, termed maximum discrimination ( $MD$ ) and methods, for text categorization. The promising results of extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
Edgeworth cycles revisited

Some gasoline markets exhibit remarkable price cycles, where price spikes are followed by a series of small price declines: a pattern consistent with a model of Edgeworth cycles described by Maskin and Tirole. We extend the model and empirically test its predictions with a new dataset of daily station-level prices in 115 US cities. Consistent with the theory, and often in contrast with previous empirical work, we find the least and most concentrated markets are much less likely to exhibit cycling behavior both within and across cities; areas with more independent convenience-store gas stations are also more likely to cycle.
Law, finance, and economic growth in China

China is an important counterexample to the findings in the law, institutions, finance, and growth literature: Neither its legal nor financial system is well developed, yet it has one of the fastest growing economies. While the law–finance–growth nexus applies to the State Sector and the Listed Sector, with arguably poorer applicable legal and financial mechanisms, the Private Sector grows much faster than the others and provides most of the economy’s growth. The imbalance among the three sectors suggests that alternative financing channels and ARTICLE IN PRESS
Issues, Limitations, and Opportunities in Cross-Cultural Research on Collaborative Software in Information Systems

Globalization has led to the increasing use of organizational teams comprising individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds. Existing research suggests that collaborative software may benefit multicultural teams. However, most prior studies are limited by their focus on U.S. and Western cultures. We explore this issue by comprehensively examining the literature on cultural effects on collaborative software use. This article makes several contributions by providing common nomenclatures and theoretical perspectives that are essential to promoting scientific progress in this area. It focuses mainly on empirical collaborative software studies in which culture is a key conceptual construct. We discuss underlying cultural theories, research methodologies, and findings of major collaborative software studies on the impact of culture. This article provides insights into various issues surrounding this line of research and highlights future research opportunities.
The Speech-Enhancing Effect of Internet Regulation

This article, written in response to an article by Amitai Etzioni, suggests that certain speech-reducing regulations will, in fact, be speech-enhancing for children. This is because children are vulnerable to far greater censorship at the hands of their parents. Regulations that inspire parents to relax their grip on their children's access to information are likely to produce significant net speech gains for children. Viewed this way, regulations designed to protect children can be conceived as pitting the speech interests of adults against the speech interests of children. The article suggests a number of reasons we might value the children's speech gain over the adult's speech loss, particularly in the context of internet speech.
Falling from the Legislative Grace: The Acorn Defunding and the Proposed Restraint of Congress' Appropriations Power Through the Bill of Attainder Clause

This Comment discusses the interplay between the Bill of Attainder Clause and the Appropriations Clause. It uses the ACORN case to highlight the issues that result from applying the prohibition against attainder to non-traditional "punishment," e.g., an appropriations ban.
The Disadvantages of Aggregate Deductibles

This paper analyzes the choice of deductible in insurance contracts that insure against a risk that, as is common, might materialize more than once during the life of the policy. As was established by Arrow (1963), from the perspective of risk-bearing costs, the optimal contract is one that uses an aggregate deductible that applies to the aggregate losses incurred over the life of the policy. Aggregate deductibles, however, are uncommon in practice. This paper identifies two disadvantages that aggregate deductibles have. Aggregate deductibles are shown to produce higher expected verification costs and moral hazard costs than contracts that apply a per-loss deductible to each loss that occurs. I further show that each of these disadvantages can make an aggregate deductible contact inferior to a contract with per loss deductibles. The results of the analysis can help explain the rare use of aggregate deductibles and, in addition, might explain why umbrella policies that cover all types of losses are rarely used.
Whose Ox Is Being Gored? When Attitudinalism Meets Federalism

Empirical research indicates that factors such as an individual Justice's general political ideology play a substantial role in the decision of Supreme Court cases. Although this pattern holds in federalism cases, views about the proper allocation of authority between the state and federal governments-independent of whether the particular outcome in any given case is "liberal" or "conservative"can sometimes be decisive, as demonstrated by the 2005 decision in Gonzales v. Raich, in which "conservative" Justices voted to invalidate a strict federal drug provision in light of California's legalization of medical marijuana and "liberal" Justices voted to uphold the federal law. Proponents of a strongly legal realist view of the Court might argue that views about federalism are themselves ideological, or that Justices who commit themselves to defending or opposing states' rights do so because of a calculation about the likely long-term consequences of such a position. But they do so only by draining the realist enterprise of its descriptive and normative power, because, as this Essay argues, genuine principles about federalism are distinctly legal, even if formed on the basis of long-term calculations about the likely effects of various views about federalism. Taking federalism as a point of departure, this Essay describes and * *Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law, Columbia University School of Law. For very helpful comments and suggestions on an early draft of this essay, the author thanks Sherry Colb, Barry Friedman, Victor Goldberg, Jeffrey Gordon, Thomas Lee, Gerald Neuman, Catherine Sharkey, and Peter Strauss, as well as the participants in a faculty workshop at Columbia Law School. Thanks to David Crowley for superb research assistance and to John Barrett and the St. John's Journal of Legal Commentary for organizing a terrific symposium. ST JOHN'S JOURNAL OF LEGAL COAMENTARY justifies a method by which Justices choose the legal principles
Arbitral Jurisdiction and the Dimensions of ‘Consent’

A RECURRING problem in any legal system is to mark off the respective roles of courts and arbitrators in deciding whether to refer a dispute to arbitration.1 The treatment of this problem in the courts of the United States has certainly not been without its twists and turns, but it exemplifies, I think, the common law at its best – able over time to get the job done well enough, if roughly, and to forge sensible, commonly-held understandings. This is an attempt at a synthesis – an attempt to describe where I think we are at the moment. I begin with a point so banal, so commonplace, so formulaic, that readers justifiably wince when they see it repeated. ‘Arbitration is a matter of contract and a party cannot be required to submit to arbitration any dispute which he has not agreed so to submit.’2 (The antiquity of this formulation is well demonstrated by its blithe use of the (now proscribed) male pronoun.)3 A second rule, ‘follow[ing] inexorably from the first’, is that this ‘question of arbitrability’ (whether there is ‘a duty for the parties to arbitrate’ the dispute; whether the parties have consented to a final arbitral judgment on the issues; whether, in short, the arbitrators have ‘jurisdiction’ to decide) is ‘undeniably an issue for judicial determination’.4 But all of that merely provides the point of departure: for surely it is possible to characterise every objection to arbitration as implicating the jurisdiction of the arbitrators, in the sense that it potentially calls into question the presence of consent to submit to the process?
From Statute to Contract: The Law of the Employment Relationship Reconsidered

Most observers would say that the employment relationship is regulated largely by statutes. This Article argues that the statutory regulation of the employment relationship, and its correction of market failures, is disappearing under the cloak of judicial decisions upholding contracts which, in one form or another, find individuals to have waived their and the public's statutory rights. In a variation on the nineteenth century's transformation of the employment relationship from status to contract, we have the contemporary move from statute to contract. Part I of this Article examines how contractual waivers operate within the framework of the statutory regulation of the employment relationship: Employers remove future disputes from statutory regulation by requiring applicants for employment and incumbent employees to agree, as the price of securing or retaining a job, to have all employment-related disagreements, including alleged violations of statutory rights, decided by arbitration rather than litigation. Employers insulate current and prior employment decisions from legal challenge by requiring employees to release all claims, including those based on statute, as the price of receiving enhanced benefits. In both of these circumstances, an individual who has not challenged an employment practice or personnel decision agrees to forego statutory rights whose significance may not yet be appreciated, in order to secure something of immediate value, like a job or a benefit. I call these agreements waivers-for-private-gain. Part II addresses the operation and impact of waivers-for-private-gain, as well as the criteria for allowing these private agreements as long as they meet some type of "knowing and voluntary" waiver of statutory rights. Although the courts in applying the various statutes use somewhat different terms and standards in describing a "knowing and voluntary" waiver, the core, shared concept is procedural regularity. I argue that attention to procedural regulatory addresses whether a waiver is "knowing" but denies the concept of voluntariness any independent meaning. In Part III, I demonstrate that legal analysis ignores, to its detriment, the rich philosophical literature on voluntariness and its counterpoint coercion. focusing on the work of Joel Feinberg and G.A. Cohen. Part III concludes that only a fully realized conception of voluntariness provides a legitimate baseline for examining the authenticity of contractual waivers of statutory rights in the employment relationship.
Compelling Product Sellers to Transmit Government Public Health Messages

If you go to a gas station in California you should see a sign posted on or next to the pumps that says “Warning. This product contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.” Similarly worded signs, required by voter-passed Proposition 65, are posted at a wide range of other California business establishments. But suppose, in addition, you were to find this sign at the gas station: “For a Healthier Environment, the State of California Wants you to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint. We are all better off if we take public transport more and drive less.”
Corporate Venture Capital Contracts

This paper introduces a dataset of securities used by US and Canadian venture capitalists (VCs) in seed, early and expansion stage Canadian entrepreneurial firms spanning the period 1991-2004. The data indicate Canadian limited partnership VCs are more likely to use common equity and convertible securities than Canadian corporate VCs, while Canadian corporate VCs are more likely to use non-convertible debt than Canadian limited partnership VCs. Similar patterns in security design are observed in the data in this paper for cross-border US limited partnership and corporate VC investments in Canadian entrepreneurial firms. Related evidence also indicates very similar contracting practices for European corporate VC investments. The securities used offer one explanation as to why corporate VC performance is typically less successful than limited partnership VC performance. The data also challenge the conventional wisdom that VCs always use convertible preferred equity.
Intertemporal Price Discrimination with Complementary Products: E-Books and E-Readers

This paper studies intertemporal price discrimination (IPD) with complementary products in the context of e-readers and e-books. Using individual-level data (2008–2012), I estimate a dynamic demand...
Negligence, Ignorance and the Demand for Liability Insurance

This paper considers whether lack of information regarding risk exposures can lead to a demand for negligence liability insurance. We find that, under the uniform negligence rule, such as the “reasonable person” standard used to determine negligence in the U.S. and other countries, the value of information is positive and any demand for liability insurance must come from informed individuals. The necessary and sufficient condition is that good risks find it less costly to be negligent and purchase insurance.
ESTIMATION OF EXCESS RETURNS FROM DERIVATIVE PRICES AND TESTING FOR RISK NEUTRAL PRICING

This paper develops an econometric framework for ~i! estimating excess returns of the security process from high frequency derivative prices, ~ii! testing for risk neutral pricing, and ~iii! measuring premiums outside the no-arbitrage pricing model+ The estimator is constructed by applying quasi-likelihood and Feynman– Kac theory to the risk neutral contingent claims pricing model to generate the optimal orthogonality restriction+ The strong consistency and asymptotic normality of the estimator are established in the context of a nonstationary underlying state process+ These results further imply that the estimator is robust to distributional assumptions on the underlying asset process+ The proposed approach is applicable to any arbitrary derivative security, does not require estimation of the risk neutral probability measure, and has application to spot rate bond pricing models+ A controlled diagnostic study based on generating the S&P500 index and calls verifies the ability of the estimators to correctly estimate security excess returns and test for risk neutral pricing+ The estimator is invariant to call strikes, and larger samples constructed by cycling over shorter maturity options can be used to reduce its variance+
Binomial bias in pricing and early exercising American put options

The binomial algorithm (Cox and Rubinstein, 1985) is an accepted theoretically justifiable standard for measuring the accuracy of American put option pricing algorithms. An important question is whether it also generates accurate estimates of the early exercise boundary (Lamberton, 1993). I show that, in addition to the non-linearity and distribution errors recognised in the literature, the algorithm systematically misprices the early exercise boundary. While convergence to the true boundary ultimately occurs, the convergence rate is slow. An analytic integral equation (Carr et al., 1992) is solved sequentially for the true boundary and is a better benchmark for American put option pricing algorithms.
CAPITAL GAINS TAXATION AND CORPORATE INVESTMENT

This study examines the interaction of dividend taxes and capital gains taxes from the sale of stock. Capital gains taxes produce lock-in, increasing the required rate of return for a sale and rein...
Learning Asymmetries in Real Business Cycles

When a boom ends, the downturn is generally sharp and short. When growth resumes, the boom is more gradual. Our explanation rests on learning about productivity. When agents believe productivity is high, they work, invest, and produce more. More production generates higher precision information. When the boom ends, precise estimates of the slowdown prompt decisive reactions: Investment and labor fall sharply. When growth resumes, low production yields noisy estimates of recovery. Noise impedes learning, slows recovery, and makes booms more gradual than downturns. A calibrated model generates growth rate asymmetry similar to macroeconomic aggregates. Fluctuations in agents’ forecast precision match observed countercyclical errors of forecasters.
Constitutional Culpability: Questioning the New Exclusionary Rules

This article addresses the questions left unanswered by the Supreme Court’s recent exclusionary rule cases. The Hudson-Herring-Davis trilogy presents a new and largely unexamined doctrinal landscape for Fourth Amendment suppression hearings. Courts, litigators, and scholars are only now assessing what has changed on the ground in trial practice.Once an automatic remedy for any constitutional violation, the exclusionary rule, now necessitates a separate and more searching analysis. Rights and remedies have been decoupled, such that a clear Fourth Amendment constitutional violation may not lead to the exclusion of evidence. Instead, it now leads to an examination of the conduct of the law enforcement officer – conduct that if not sufficiently “culpable” does not require exclusion. This is new territory for lawyers and courts used to an automatic linkage between constitutional wrongs and constitutional remedies. It is an unexplored reality that requires new tactical choices and an understanding of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s new standard for exclusion. This article approaches the Roberts Court’s exclusionary rule reasoning on its own terms. It questions the doctrinal moves of the Supreme Court focused on “culpability” and raises questions about its implication for trial practice. It then offers several suggested responses for defense counsel and prosecutors approaching this new reality.
Trademark Dilution: Empirical Measures for an Elusive Concept

Abstract Consumer researchers have conceptualized brand name dilution in terms of the potentially damaging effects that a company’s own brand extensions can have on beliefs and attitudes toward parent brands. A different form of dilution, trademark dilution, can also occur through the unauthorized use of a mark (e.g., brand, logo) by an entity other than its owner. With passage of the Federal Trademark Dilution Act of 1995, an increasing number of trademark dilution cases are being litigated. A recurring issue in these cases has been how to measure trademark dilution. The authors review the concept of trademark dilution and explore how recognition and recall-based methods can be used for empirically assessing trademark dilution. The authors also investigate the impact of brand familiarity and product category similarity on the extent of trademark dilution and discuss implications, limitations, and areas for further research.
The Rights of the New Untouchables: A Constitutional Analysis of HIV Jurisprudence in India

It is believed that India will soon have the highest number of HIV/AIDS cases of any country. Some reports project that 37 million people will be infected within the next two decades. Sadly few studies have examined the legal claims of those who suffer with this disease in this the world’s largest democracy. In this article I systematically examine how the courts in India have responded to rights-based claims brought by people who have HIV. The conventional wisdom is that the Indian judiciary frequently protects the rights of the poor the under-represented and the ill. But my findings reveal that at least for people with HIV the courts have not extended to this group full constitutional protection. The implications of this conclusion force us to revisit whether the courts in India best safeguard the rights of others who are disadvantaged. (authors)
The in-hospital mortality rates of slaves and freemen: Evidence from Touro Infirmary, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1855–1860

Abstract Using a rich sample of admission records from New Orleans Touro Infirmary, we examine the in-hospital mortality risk of free and enslaved patients. Despite a higher mortality rate in the general population, slaves were significantly less likely to die in the hospital than the whites. We analyze the determinants of in-hospital mortality at Touro using Oaxaca-type decomposition to aggregate our regression results. After controlling for differences in characteristics and maladies, we find that much of the mortality gap remains unexplained. In conclusion, we propose an alternative explanation for the mortality gap based on the selective hospital admission of slaves.
Inside-Out as Law School Pedagogy

In the fall of 2010, and again in spring 2012, I taught a course titled Gender & Criminal Law inside the Western Massachusetts Correctional Alcohol Center in Springfield. Participants in the course included roughly equal numbers of law students from my home academic institution, Western New England University School of Law (WNE), and residents of the facility. For 14 weeks, we met on Friday mornings at the institution to discuss issues including domestic violence law reform, the role of family ties in sentencing, and gender issues in prisoner reentry.
Implementing Results-Oriented Trade Policies: The Case of the US-Japanese Auto Parts Dispute

Abstract Why would the US threaten punitive tariffs on luxury autos to implement a market share target in auto parts? We show that by making threats to a linked market, a market share target may be implemented with fairly weak informational and administrative requirements. Moreover, such policies can be both pro-competitive and advantageous to US firms.
The Value of Research and Its Evaluation in Business Schools Killing the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg

Critics have characterized academic research as being of little practical or commercial value. Such criticism of scholarly research, as opposed to applied research, resonates with detractors who do...
Speckle nulling with space-based coronagraphs

Following the tracks of Malbet, Yu, & Shao (1995) on dark hole algorithms, we present analytical methods to measure and correct the speckle noise behind an ideal coronagraph. We show that, in a low aberration regime, wavefront sensing can be accomplished with only three images, the next image being fully corrected (no iterative process needed). The only hardware required is the coronagraph deformable mirror and an imaging detector in the focal plane, thus there are no non-common path errors to correct. Our first method, speckle field nulling , is a fast FFT-based algorithm requiring the deformable mirror influence functions to have identical shapes. Our second method, speckle energy minimization is more general and based on matrix inversion. Numerical simulations show that these methods can improve the contrast by several orders of magnitude.
Discontinuous Interest Rate Processes: An Equilibrium Model for Bond Option Prices

This paper obtains equilibrium interest rate option prices for discontinuous short-term in? terest rate processes. The prices are first obtained for a general distribution of jump sizes using a process with a number of fixed size jumps. The pricing formulas are then used to obtain option prices when the jump distribution is known to be one of the continuous dis? tributions. The commonly used jump-diffusion, stochastic volatility jump-diffusion, and Gamma process option prices can be obtained as limiting cases. The methodology is also applied to obtain the prices of options on stocks. Finally, the paper shows how portfolios to hedge derivative securities can be built.
Home is Where the Crime Is

There is a new vision of home that is beginning to gain ascendance, at least from the point of view of legal actors and doctrine in the criminal justice system. Under this vision, home is not always, or even usually, “sweet.” Under this new vision, the home is not a safe haven, inviolate and inviolable except for, perhaps, a burglar. Under this new vision, the home is a place of violence. And not violence perpetrated by intruders, but by co-habitants. The home, notionally a site of security, a place “safe” from outside intervention, now functions as a place that enables abuse, assault, and rape. It is the exemplary place of coercion. The home, in this re-vision, has metastasized into the scene of the crime. In short, home has become “where the crime is.” What are we to make of this shift in how the law perceives the home, and how we perceive the home? What are the collateral consequences of this shift? These are the questions Jeannie Suk takes up in her provocative At Home in the Law. This Review assesses Suk’s claims critically, turns to some of the collateral effects of this shift that Suk elides, and switches lenses to reveal a larger, more troubling picture.
Electronic Privacy and Employee Speech

The boundary between work and private life is blurring as a result of changes in the organization of work and advances in technology. Current privacy law is ill-equipped to address these changes and as a result, employees’ privacy in their electronic communications is only weakly protected from employer scrutiny. At the same time, the law increasingly protects certain socially valued forms of employee speech. In particular, collective speech, speech that enforces workplace regulations and speech that deters or reports employer wrong-doing are explicitly protected by law from employer reprisals. These two developments — weak protection of employee privacy and increased protection for some socially valued forms of employee speech — are at odds because privacy and speech are closely connected. As privacy scholars have emphasized, protecting privacy promotes speech values by granting individuals space to explore and test new ideas, and to associate with like-minded others — activities that are often important precursors to public speech. Similarly, in the workplace context, some measure of privacy to explore ideas and communicate with others may be necessary to ensure that employees actually speak out in socially valued ways. Ironically, then, the law is simultaneously expecting more from employee speech and protecting employee privacy less, even though the latter may be necessary to produce the former.
Industry relationships of DoD-funded academics and institutional changes in the US university system

This paper describes an empirical study of the differences in industry interaction of US tenure and tenure-track academics that are funded by civilian and military funding agencies. Significant differences in industry interaction as manifested in a range of different interaction types can be observed between academics funded by Department of Defense (DoD) resources and those enjoying other non-military means of support. The policy implications of these divergent patterns of behavior in university–industry interactions will be analyzed and discussed. Furthermore, a qualitative assessment of changes in university–industry relationships in response to more stringent DoD contracting practices reveals that several types of industry interaction will be adversely affected.
Forming priors for DSGE models (and how it affects the assessment of nominal rigidities)

Abstract We discuss prior elicitation for the parameters of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, and provide a method for constructing prior distributions for a subset of these parameters from beliefs about steady-state relationships and second moments of the endogenous variables. The empirical application documents how the specification of the prior distribution affects our assessment of the relative importance of price and wage rigidities in a New Keynesian DSGE model.
Individual Rights, Good Consequences, and the Theory of Social Choice

In a series of recent papers a number of economists and philosophers have been wrestling with the age-old problem of reconciling the value we place on the exercise of individual liberty with the value we also seem to accord to economic efficiency. Amartya Sen put the problem in its starkest form when he showed that for some configurations of individual preferences the two following principles are not consistent with one another: (i) The Pareto Principle: If every individual in society prefers some state of affairs x to another one y, then y should not prevail if x is attainable; and (ii) The Principle of Individual Liberty: For each individual in society there are some "personal" matters such that if the privileged individual prefers, say, w to z, then z should not prevail if w is attainable (eg. to sleep on one's back (w) or one's stomach ( z ) , all other things in society being equal). The purpose of this paper is to view Sen's problem on "the impossibility of the Paretian liberal" from the larger perspective of a general divide which exists in ethics between consequentialist and deontological theories and so demonstrate the source of this inconsistency. In the process I hope to show why economists, and in particular those economists who are the practitioners of the theory of social choice, are committed to a theoretical structure which renders individual rights inconsequential. Section 2 of this paper summarizes Sen's original theorem. Section 3 discusses the above-mentioned divide in ethics between consequentialism and deontology. Section 4 gives an example, interpreted in Sen's terms, of a situation in which this distinction in ethics may be important. The section also shows that the distinction has important implications for Sen's invocation of the usual collective rationality conditions of social choice theory. Section 5 anticipates a possible objection to my arguments and attempts an explanation of the nature of a moral dilemma. I finish with some concluding remarks in Section 6.
"Democracy Stops at My Front Door": Obstacles to Gender Equality in South Africa

In South Africa, post-apartheid legislation promulgated in pursuit of the constitutional commitment to equality demonstrates that the government, at least at the formal level, is committed to a comprehensive democratic framework that promotes such equality. Statutes such as the Promotion of Equality and the Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act, the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act, and the Black Empowerment Act amongst others, attest to the commitment of such a vision. In addition, statutes such as the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act, that purport to protect women in polygamous African customary unions, suggest that the South African Parliament is deeply committed to recognizing the rights of those in indigenous communities who prefer to regulate their private lives according to indigenous principles. This is so even though those principles might at first glance contradict majoritarian notions of equality, as polygamy arguably does. The South African situation therefore raises the central question: How can a country with such a wonderful and expansive constitution, in which gender equality is embraced comprehensively, evince such widespread and systemic violence against women? In addition, what accounts for a democratic government, seemingly committed to the principle of equality in the public sphere, demonstrating such reluctance to decisively confront the egregious consequences of public and private violence against women? It is my thesis that despite the formal embrace of gender equality in the Constitution, and despite attempts by all branches of government to address the legacy of racism, sexism, and patriarchy, the interlocking cultural underpinnings of sexism and patriarchy were never dislodged. Moreover, a formal vision of equality was unequivocally endorsed across all sectors of South African society with respect to the eradication of racism, but this universal endorsement was absent with respect to gender equality. Indeed, patterns of violence that incubated during the years of apartheid were unleashed as the society became more open and democratic. Ironically, the transparency of the new democratic order revealed the underbelly of apartheid violence, a very public violence as described in the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But this transparency has also highlighted the chronic reality of private violence, particularly against women. It was this violence that apartheid never fully revealed, and that has come to be a major impediment to women enjoying the human rights encapsulated in the South African Bill of Rights.
Hot Jupiters: Origins, Structure, Atmospheres

We provide a brief review of many aspects of the planetary physics of hot Jupiters. Our aim is to cover most of the major areas of current study while providing the reader with additional references for more detailed follow-up. We first discuss giant planet formation and subsequent orbital evolution via disk-driven torques or dynamical interactions. More than one formation pathway is needed to understand the population. Next, we examine our current understanding of the evolutionary history and current interior structure of the planets, where we focus on bulk composition as well as viable models to explain the inflated radii of the population. Finally we discuss aspects of their atmospheres in the context of observations and 1D and 3D models, including atmospheric structure and escape, spectroscopic signatures, and complex atmospheric circulation. The major opacity sources in these atmospheres, including alkali metals, water vapor, and others, are discussed. We discuss physics that control the 3D atmospheric circulation and day-to-night temperature structures. We conclude by suggesting important future work for still-open questions.
Enhanced Diffusion by Reversible Binding to Active Polymers

Cells are known to use reversible binding to active biopolymer networks to allow diffusive transport of particles in an otherwise impenetrable mesh. We here determine the motion of a particle that ...
Real Effects of Financial Reporting on Innovation: Evidence from Tax Law and Accounting Standards

This study examines whether financial accounting standards moderate the effectiveness of tax policy. Specifically, we examine whether myopic managers’ focus on short-term financial reporting reduces the effectiveness of tax subsidies that incentivize innovation. We employ a novel setting, the issuance of Financial Interpretation No. 48 (FIN 48), which changed the financial reporting for some important, yet uncertain, tax incentives to innovate. For firms most affected by the standard change, we find evidence of reduced investment in innovation, reduced sensitivity of investment to tax incentives, and reduced future innovative output. Consistent with earnings myopia, we find the effect is more pronounced in firms with higher levels of transient institutional ownership and newly vesting equity compensation. These results indicate financial reporting myopia has real effects on innovation and can reduce tax policy effectiveness. The results further suggest that tax policymakers should consider both financial reporting and cash flow incentives in designing policy.
SwingBot: Learning Physical Features from In-hand Tactile Exploration for Dynamic Swing-up Manipulation

Several robot manipulation tasks are extremely sensitive to variations of the physical properties of the manipulated objects. One such task is manipulating objects by using gravity or arm accelerations, increasing the importance of mass, center of mass, and friction information. We present SwingBot, a robot that is able to learn the physical features of an held object through tactile exploration. Two exploration actions (tilting and shaking) provide the tactile information used to create a physical feature embedding space. With this embedding, SwingBot is able to predict the swing angle achieved by a robot performing dynamic swing-up manipulations on a previously unseen object. Using these predictions, it is able to search for the optimal control parameters for a desired swing-up angle. We show that with the learned physical features our end-to-end self-supervised learning pipeline is able to substantially improve the accuracy of swinging up unseen objects. We also show that objects with similar dynamics are closer to each other on the embedding space and that the embedding can be disentangled into values of specific physical properties.
Improving laser standards for three-photon microscopy

Significance: Three-photon excitation microscopy has double-to-triple the penetration depth in biological tissue over two-photon imaging and thus has the potential to revolutionize the visualization of biological processes in vivo. However, unlike the plug-and-play operation and performance of lasers used in two-photon imaging, three-photon microscopy presents new technological challenges that require a closer look at the fidelity of laser pulses. Aim: We implemented state-of-the-art pulse measurements and developed innovative techniques for examining the performance of lasers used in three-photon microscopy. We then demonstrated how these techniques can be used to provide precise measurements of pulse shape, pulse energy, and pulse-to-pulse intensity variability, all of which ultimately impact imaging. Approach: We built inexpensive tools, e.g., a second harmonic generation frequency-resolved optical gating (SHG-FROG) device and a deep-memory diode imaging (DMDI) apparatus to examine laser pulse fidelity. Results: First, SHG-FROG revealed very large third-order dispersion (TOD). This extent of phase distortion prevents the efficient temporal compression of laser pulses to their theoretical limit. Furthermore, TOD cannot be quantified when using a conventional method of obtaining the laser pulse duration, e.g., when using an autocorrelator. Finally, DMDI showed the effectiveness of detecting pulse-to-pulse intensity fluctuations on timescales relevant to three-photon imaging, which were otherwise not captured using conventional instruments and statistics. Conclusions: The distortion of individual laser pulses caused by TOD poses significant challenges to three-photon imaging by preventing effective compression of laser pulses and decreasing the efficiency of nonlinear excitation. Moreover, an acceptably low pulse-to-pulse amplitude variability should not be assumed. Particularly for low repetition rate laser sources used in three-photon microscopy, pulse-to-pulse variability also degrades image quality. If three-photon imaging is to become mainstream, our diagnostics may be used by laser manufacturers to improve system design and by end-users to validate the performance of their current and future imaging systems.