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Using a continuous-time model of litigation, we show that the increasingly popular practice of third-party litigation financing has ambiguous welfare implications. A defendant and a plaintiff bargain over a settlement payment. The defendant takes costly actions to avoid deadweight losses associated with large transfers to the plaintiff. Litigation financing bolsters the plaintiff, leading to larger deadweight losses. However, by endogenously deterring the defendant from taking costly actions, litigation financing can nonetheless improve the joint surplus of the plaintiff and the defendant. In contrast to popular opinion, litigation financing does not necessarily encourage high-risk frivolous lawsuits.

We examine how the trade shock from China influences the behavior and investment performance of overconfident CEOs in U.S. firms. We show that the rise of Chinese import competition curbs investments and improves investment value and acquisition performance for firms with overconfident CEOs. Intensified Chinese product competition also reduces the incentives for these firms to expand assets, invest out of cash flows, pursue aggressive financial policies, and increase risk exposure, and enhances their incentives to buy back shares. Overall, the evidence suggests that product market competition is an effective external governance mechanism for curbing the adverse effects of managerial overconfidence.

We analyse the competitive effects of the centralised sale of football media rights in Europe, focusing on the “Big Five” countries (England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain). Contrary to the recent findings of European competition authorities, we consider that there are arguments in favour of the relevant market for domestic media rights being club- or even match-specific. This raises the question of what competition is restricted by the centralised sale if the rights on offer do not compete. If the media rights of different clubs are indeed complementary and because of the potential efficiency gains from bundling, we conclude that the centralised sale of media rights is unlikely to be anticompetitive and may have procompetitive effects. We further show that under a club or match-specific market definition, a no-single-buyer rule likely reduces the benefits from the centralised sale and may be to the detriment of consumers.

Forward markets are believed to aggregate information about future spot prices and reduce the cost of producing the commodity. We develop a measure of the extent to which forward and spot prices agree in markets with transaction costs. Using this measure, we show that day-ahead prices better reflect real-time prices at all locations in California’s electricity market after the introduction of financial trading. We then present evidence suggesting that operating costs and input fuel use fell after the introduction of financial trading on days when the nonconvexities inherent to the production and transmission of electricity are especially relevant. (JEL D23, D24, G13, L94, L98, Q48)

We study the 2011 Austrian pay transparency law, which requires firms above a size threshold to publish internal reports on the gender pay gap. Using an event-study design, we show that the policy had no discernible effects on male and female wages, thus leaving the gender wage gap unchanged. The effects are precisely estimated, and we rule out that the policy narrowed the gender wage gap by more than 0.4 p.p.. Moreover, we do not find evidence for wage compression within establishments. We discuss several possible reasons why the reform did not reduce the gender wage gap. (JEL J16, J31, J71, K31)

In this study, I present a theoretical social learning model to investigate how confirmation bias affects opinions when agents exchange information over a social network. Hence, besides exchanging opinions with friends, agents observe a public sequence of potentially ambiguous signals and interpret it according to a rule that includes confirmation bias. First, this study shows that regardless of level of ambiguity both for people or networked society, only two types of opinions can be formed, and both are biased. However, one opinion type is less biased than the other depending on the state of the world. The size of both biases depends on the ambiguity level and relative magnitude of the state and confirmation biases. Hence, long-run learning is not attained even when people impartially interpret ambiguity. Finally, analytically confirming the probability of emergence of the less-biased consensus when people are connected and have different priors is difficult. Hence, I used simulations to analyze its determinants and found three main results: i) some network topologies are more conducive to consensus efficiency, ii) some degree of partisanship enhances consensus efficiency even under confirmation bias and iii) open-mindedness (i.e. when partisans agree to exchange opinions with opposing partisans) might inhibit efficiency in some cases., Status: Accepted (Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier)

As the number of deliveries continues to increase, last-mile transport causes rising congestion rates and pollution in urban environments. Integrating last-mile deliveries with existing public transport infrastructure, e.g., metros or trams, can make them more sustainable. This integration can implement in a shared infrastructure mode, where passenger and cargo vehicles share the same rail network, or a shared vehicle mode, where vehicles simultaneously transport cargo and passengers. Evaluating the resulting systems entails modelling several interlinking planning problems. This work presents a component-based simulation to evaluate design decisions for shared passenger and freight transport on fixed infrastructure. We introduce a linear mixed-integer program for optimising the train schedule and the allocation of cargo with a lexicographical objective function that prioritises passenger transport while minimising cargo delivery delay. We analyse the interplay of operational modes, scheduling solutions, and settings in a computational simulation study. The results show that a well-planned train schedule can significantly contribute to service quality. Furthermore, a system with shared vehicles is more robust towards changes in demand whereas a system with only shared an infrastructure is a valid option if we consider a high or unlimited dwell time for cargo vehicles.

This paper provides causal evidence that greater minority representation on school boards translates into greater investment in minority students. Focusing on California school boards, I obtain causal effects by instrumenting for minority (specifically, Hispanic) school board representation using the random order in which candidates appear on election ballots. Given the dearth of school-level expenditure data, I introduce detailed records from California’s School Facility Program (SFP), a capital investment program for which I observe how school boards allocate the marginal dollar within district. Instrumental variables estimates show that an additional Hispanic school board member increases SFP-funded investments at high-Hispanic schools within the district by 69 percent, with significantly lower effects at low-Hispanic schools. High-Hispanic schools also exhibit gains in student achievement of 0.08 standard deviations. I attribute this improved performance broadly to increased investment in these schools: new instructor hiring at high-Hispanic schools decreases by 23 percent. These results provide the first causal evidence that school board politics—and, specifically, school board ethnic composition—shapes education finance policy at the local level. I conclude that enhancing minority representation on school boards could help combat disparities in education finance and achievement.

We study long-run shareholder outcomes for over 64,000 global common stocks during the January 1990 to December 2020 period. We document that the majority, 55.2% of U.S. stocks and 57.4% of non-U.S. stocks, underperform one-month U.S. Treasury bills in terms of compound returns over the full sample. Focusing on aggregate shareholder outcomes, we find that the top-performing 2.4% of firms account for all of the $US 75.7 trillion in net global stock market wealth creation from 1990 to December 2020. Outside the US, 1.41% of firms account for the $US 30.7 trillion in net wealth creation.

Prevalence of testosterone deficiency is increasing in the adolescent and young adult male population. As the average paternal age rises, there is a significant population of men with hypogonadism seeking testosterone therapy wishing to achieve or maintain fertility potential. Identification of potential lifestyle modifications that may improve the testosterone deficiency is one of the initial interventions of the holistic strategy in treatment. This is followed by drug therapy; however, traditional testosterone therapy acts as a contraceptive by suppressing the hypothalamus-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis and therefore cannot be used as a treatment strategy. A solution has been the off-label use of selective estrogen receptor modulators, human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), and anastrozole inhibitors to treat hypogonadal symptoms while increasing intratesticular testosterone, a necessity for spermatogenesis. Recently, a novel therapy, Natesto intranasal testosterone gel, has been shown to increase serum testosterone levels while maintaining semen parameters. This is hypothesized to be because of its short-acting properties having lesser effect on the HPG axis, in contrast to the long-acting properties of traditional testosterone therapy. It is important to differentiate hypogonadal men between those seeking to achieve or maintain fertility status because the drug therapy of choice differs. This can be accomplished by determining the levels of 17-hydroxyprogesterone (17-OHP), because it is a biomarker for intratesticular testosterone. Those with low 17-OHP may wish to initiate treatment with alternative therapies, whereas those with high 17-OHP may trial short-acting testosterone therapies. As the urologist's armamentarium continues to increase, better strategies to increase testosterone levels in men seeking fertility can be achieved.

Non-obstructive azoospermia is reported to affect 1 in 100 men, and despite advances in surgical practice, the succesful sperm retrieval rate for microdissection testicular sperm extraction surgery (mTESE) is only 46%. This article reviews the potential causes for mTESE failure and provides a management strategy to guide the clinicians on how to treat this challenging cohort of patients.

El objetivo de esta investigación fue realizar una caracterización de los residuos sólidos reciclables producidos en la Universidad de la Amazonia y desarrollar un contenedor y clasificador automático de este tipo de residuos, para contribuir por medio de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (TIC) al proceso de sostenibilidad ambiental ligado al concepto de economía circular en el ámbito educativo. La metodología definida se dividió en cinco fases que corresponden al conocimiento del manejo de residuos sólidos de los usuarios de las cafeterías, caracterización de los residuos sólidos, diseño y construcción del contenedor, entrenamiento del sistema de inteligencia artificial (IA) y prueba interna beta test, tras lo cual se obtuvo como resultado una generación total de residuos plásticos a la semana de 66 kg, lo que representa un ingreso económico aproximado de $138.000. Además, se desarrolló un contenedor y clasificador automático capaz de reconocer y almacenar botellas plásticas empleando una red neuronal artificial. Como conclusión, el reciclaje de residuos plásticos en una institución de educación superior (IES) aporta a la sostenibilidad ambiental. Además, el desarrollo de tecnologías como el contenedor y clasificador automático permite optimizar la selección y clasificación de elementos reciclables de forma rápida y segura.

This study provides the first empirical evidence that the Federal Reserve (the Fed) systematically retrieves micro-level accounting reports to aid its understanding of the state of the macroeconomy. Using unique data identifying its direct access of corporate SEC filings, we show that the Fed tracks firms that are bellwethers and industry leaders, or that can engender systemic risk. The qualitative information in the Fed-accessed periodic reports explains the Fed’s GDP growth forecasts for up to four quarters, after controlling for contemporaneous aggregate earnings and other economic information. However, professional forecasts fail to incorporate such qualitative accounting information. In addition, this qualitative information is reflected in the tone of the ensuing FOMC meeting discussions as well as in Fed forecasts of key macro demand and supply factors. Overall, our evidence suggests important externalities of micro-level accounting reports, especially qualitative disclosures, on the central bank’s macroeconomic forecasts and, by extension, monetary policy. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources. JEL Classifications: E58; G20; M41; M45.

Background: Multiple clinical trials of modern antipsychotics have failed in pediatric samples. One possibility for these failures is the use of a primary outcome measure that was developed for adults. Surprisingly, the psychometric properties of primary outcome measures have never been reported for a pediatric sample using modern methods. The present study’s aim is to use a pediatric sample to evaluate the psychometrics of the most used primary outcome measure in pediatric schizophrenia trials, the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). Methods: To evaluate the factor structure, item characteristics, and treatment sensitivity of the PANSS in a pediatric sample, secondary analyses of PANSS data at baseline and weekly throughout an 8-week randomized double-blind study of three antipsychotic agents (registered and previously published) were conducted. Subjects were 118 youths receiving outpatient psychiatric treatment for schizophrenia spectrum disorders (Mage=14.26(2.41) years). Outcomes: A 10-item short form, keeping two strongest items for each factor, had r=.89 with the full-length scale. Each of the 5 2-item subscales has alphas ranging from .66 to .84. Item Response Theory (IRT) found that the 10-item scale and 2-item subscores had high reliability across the severity range typical of clinical trials. Criterion validity was high, with equal sensitivity to treatment effects. Interpretation: The short version eliminates weaker items in the pediatric population without loss of sensitivity to treatment effects and thus may be more appropriate for subsequent pediatric trials. Funding: NIMH funded the original protocol; NDA archived the data; Signant paid for secondary statistical analyses. Declaration of Interest: Dr. Findling receives or has received research support, acted as a consultant and/or has received honoraria from Acadia, Adamas, Aevi, Afecta, Akili, Alkermes, Allergan, American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, American Psychiatric Press, Arbor, Axsome, Daiichi-Sankyo, Emelex, Gedeon Richter, Genentech, Idorsia, Intra-Cellular Therapies, Kempharm, Luminopia, Lundbeck, MedAvante-ProPhase, Merck, MJH Life Sciences,NIH, Neurim, Otsuka, PaxMedica, PCORI, Pfizer, Physicians Postgraduate Press, Q BioMed, Receptor Life Sciences, Roche, Sage, Signant Health, Sunovion, Supernus Pharmaceuticals, Syneos, Syneurx, Takeda, Teva, Tris, and Validus. Dr. Youngstrom has received royalties from the American Psychological Association and Guilford Press, consulted with Signant Health about psychological assessment, and received funding from NIMH. He is the founder and Executive Director of Helping Give Away Psychological Science (HGAPS.org). Dr. Sikich receives or has received research support from NIMH, NICHD, and Roche. She has received partial salary support from Tris. She has a patent submission through Duke University for a new formulation of intranasal oxytocin. Dr. Frazier receives or has received funding from NIMH, NICHD, Autism Speaks, Roche pharmaceuticals, and Fulcrum. Dr. McClellan receives or has received funding from NIMH. Dr. Daniel is an employee and equity holder in Signant Health. Dr. Busner is an employee and equity holder in Signant Health. Ethical Approval: The secondary analyses were reviewed and approved by the UNC Chapel Hill IRB.

We examine the effectiveness of a quality assurance mechanism that relies on a third-party’s reputation. We focus on the market for fine and rare wines where auction houses intermediating between sellers and buyers have also claimed expertise to assess product authenticity. An auction house’s reputation can sustain product quality in this market only if consumers absorb relevant information and punish houses who fail at screening out counterfeits. We test the existence of such reputational effects by studying the market responses to two disclosures of houses having auctioned fake wine. We find that one house experienced negligible losses after a 2008 event involving a limited number of counterfeit bottles. However, three houses associated with a 2012 incident involving thousands of bottles are found to have suffered reputational losses. These losses are demonstrated over the following year by an average 4.5% decrease in equilibrium sales prices of all wines, and a slight decrease in sales quantities of older wines, relative to other houses.

This paper studies the causal impact of political connections on innovation. Using a unique hand-collected data set of sudden deaths of politically connected independent directors (i.e., retired government officials) in Chinese firms, we find that an unexpected loss of political connections increases a firm’s patent applications by 34% (14 patents). The innovation response is more pronounced in firms with stronger connections: when the connected directors held higher-level bureaucratic positions or when firms operate within their geographical jurisdictions. Upon losing political connections firms face higher competitive pressure and divert resources from rent-seeking into innovation investment. Our findings highlight the role of competition in the substitution between political connections and innovation, particularly in settings where formal institutions are weak.

To maximize productivity, manufacturers must organize and equip their workforces to efficiently handle variable workloads. Their success depends on their ability to assign experienced and skilled workers to specialized tasks and coordinate work on production lines. Worker turnover may disrupt such efforts. We use staffing, productivity, and pay data from within a major consumer electronics manufacturer’s supply chain to study how firms should manage worker turnover and its effects using production decisions, wages, and inventory. We find that worker turnover impedes coordination between assembly line coworkers by weakening knowledge sharing and relationships. Publicly available unit-cost estimates imply that worker turnover accounts for $206–274 million in added direct expenses alone from defectively assembled units failing the firm’s stringent quality control. To evaluate managerial alternatives, we structurally estimate a dynamic equilibrium model (an Experience-Based Equilibrium) encompassing (1) workers’ endogenous turnover decisions and (2) the firm’s weekly planning of its production scheduling and staffing in response. In counterfactual analyses, a less turnover-prone, hence more productive, workforce significantly benefits the firm, reducing its variable production costs by 4.5%, or an estimated $928 million for the studied product. Such benefits justify paying higher efficiency wages even to less skilled workforces; furthermore, interestingly, rational inventory management policies incentivize self-interested firms to reduce rather than tolerate turnover. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management. Funding: The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the data sponsor, and K. Moon gratefully acknowledges support from the Wharton Dean’s Research Fund and the Claude Marion Endowed Faculty Scholar Award of the Wharton School. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4476 .

This paper proposes new holding horizon (HH) measures of active management, and examines the relation between horizon and manager skill. Our HH measures identify, in the cross-section, funds with better long-term alphas, while reported turnover identifies, in the time-series, when a particular fund is likely to exhibit a higher alpha in the short run. This superior long-term performance of long HH funds is due to their superior skills in picking stocks with higher future cash-flow growth. Moreover, stocks largely held by long-horizon funds outperform stocks largely held by short-horizon funds by 2.4%-3.8% per year, adjusted for risk, over the following five-year period.

Operating under both supply-side and demand-side uncertainties, a mobile-promotion platform conducts advertising campaigns for individual advertisers. Campaigns arrive dynamically over time, which is divided into seasons; each campaign requires the platform to deliver a target number of mobile impressions from a desired set of locations over a desired time interval. The platform fulfills these campaigns by procuring impressions from publishers, who supply advertising space on apps via real-time bidding on ad exchanges. Each location is characterized by its win curve, that is, the relationship between the bid price and the probability of winning an impression at that bid. The win curves at the various locations of interest are initially unknown to the platform, and it learns them on the fly based on the bids it places to win impressions and the realized outcomes. Each acquired impression is allocated to one of the ongoing campaigns. The platform’s objective is to minimize its total cost (the amount spent in procuring impressions and the penalty incurred due to unmet targets of the campaigns) over the time horizon of interest. Our main result is a bidding and allocation policy for this problem. We show that our policy is the best possible (asymptotically tight) for the problem using the notion of regret under a policy, namely the difference between the expected total cost under that policy and the optimal cost for the clairvoyant problem (i.e., one in which the platform has full information about the win curves at all the locations in advance): The lower bound on the regret under any policy is of the order of the square root of the number of seasons, and the regret under our policy matches this lower bound. We demonstrate the performance of our policy through numerical experiments on a test bed of instances whose input parameters are based on our observations at a real-world mobile-promotion platform. This paper was accepted by Baris Ata, stochastic models and simulation. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4441 .

We study the influence of bank competition on U.S. public borrowers’ accounting conservatism by exploiting the staggered adoption of the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act (IBBEA) of 1994, which increased the threats of new bank entrants and actual bank entry. We find that borrowers’ conditional conservatism fell after IBBEA. Conservatism fell more for firms located in states with weak incumbent banks and states with more out-of-state entrants, especially entrants with better monitoring technologies. The decrease in conservatism partially stems from borrowers’ increased investment and risk-taking incentives. Conservatism fell more for firms relying more on bank loans, especially those that borrowed loans for the first time after IBBEA and for firms having lower dedicated institutional ownership and board independence. We also find that loans included fewer covenants and that bank loan borrowers became less likely to choose Big N auditors and industry specialist auditors after IBBEA. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: G21; G28; K23; M41.

We develop a theory wherein a priori identical banks may trade loans in a search market with reusable information. The equilibrium is unique, but its nature depends on the probability of a future market state. When the probability of a boom is high, all banks hold no equity and do no screening. When this probability is low, all banks choose a high level of equity and screen loans. For intermediate probability values, the equilibrium is heterogeneous, with some banks posting equity and screening and others avoiding equity and screening. This endogenously arising heterogeneity generates interbank trading. The credit market is partially frozen in a recession: only high-capital banks have continued funding access. Low-capital banks obtain funding by selling legacy loans to banks with “financial muscle,” so market funding is reallocated from low-capital to high-capital banks. This paper was accepted by Bruno Biais, finance.

Consumers gain information about the evolving value of a product both prior to purchase and when owning a product. We consider a model where both these types of gaining information are possible. The information gained when owning the product may affect future product purchases. We characterize when the consumer chooses to purchase the product if the consumer does not own it, the expected interval of time between purchases, and the expected number of product purchases over time. We find that, keeping product duration fixed, the optimal fixed price is independent of the initial product valuation if that valuation is sufficiently low such that a consumer not owning the product does not purchase it immediately, and characterize how the price charged affects the consumer information gathering strategy. When the firm can also choose product duration and there are no costs of production, we find that the firm chooses an expected production duration that is infinitely small, and charges a flow price for the consumer to use the product. We also characterize how the extent of learning when owning and when not owning the product, the duration of the product, and the discount rate affect the optimal consumer and firm strategies.

The limitation of executive compensation has been a matter of public and policy debate for at least 20 years. We examine a regulatory action in Austria in 2014 where the tax deductibility of the total value of executive compensation is unavoidably limited. We find no average effects on the growth or composition of executives’ pay. However, the deductibility limit affects the managers of firms with low bargaining power and of firms with strong corporate governance, indicating that they are affected by the deductibility limit. Additionally, the contract durations for executives decrease after renegotiation. We further find that affected firms experience cuts in investment and research and development, suggesting that shareholders bear part of the economic burden. Our results indicate that the effectiveness of other reforms, such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, in restricting executive pay is rather limited. JEL Classifications: H21; H22; M41.

In the context of subscription-based services, many technologies improve over time and service providers can provide increasingly powerful service upgrades to their customers, but at a launching cost, and the expense of the sales of existing products. We propose a model of technology upgrades and characterize the optimal pricing and timing of technology introductions for a service provider who price-discriminates among customers based on their upgrade experience, in the face of customers who are averse to switching to improved offerings. We first characterize optimal discriminatory pricing for the infinite horizon pricing problem with fixed introduction times. We reduce the optimal pricing problem to a tractable optimization problem and propose an efficient algorithm for solving it. Our algorithm computes optimal discriminatory prices within a fraction of a second, even for large problem instances. We then show that periodic introduction times, combined with optimal pricing, enjoy optimality guarantees. In particular, we first show that as long as the introduction intervals are constrained to be non-increasing, it is optimal to have periodic introductions after an initial warm-up phase. When allowing general introduction intervals, we show that periodic introduction intervals after some time are optimal in a more restricted sense. Numerical experiments suggest that it is generally optimal to have periodic introductions after an initial warm-up phase. Finally, we focus on a setting in which the firm does not price-discriminate based on customers' experience. We show both analytically and numerically that in the non-discriminatory setting, a simple policy of Myerson (i.e., myopic) pricing and periodic introductions enjoys good performance guarantees.

Understanding the drivers of market concentration in the generic pharmaceutical industry is essential to guaranteeing the availability of low-cost generics. In this paper, we develop a structural model to capture the multiple determinants governing manufacturers’ entry decisions; in particular, we focus on how manufacturing complexity and the regulatory environment for generics approval affect concentration in drug markets. We estimate the model using data collated from six disparate sources. We find that manufacturing complexity, as reflected in the number of active ingredients, for example, significantly reduces the likelihood of generics entry. Moreover, the delay in the review process for the generics applications significantly affects the number of firms entering a market. Our policy simulations suggest that a shortened drug approval review time significantly increases the average number of entrants per market and reduces the fraction of markets with no generics entry; however, a notable portion of markets would still lack any generic competition. This paper was accepted by Jayashankar Swaminathan, operations management. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4423 .

We study systemic risk in a supply chain network where firms are connected through purchase orders. Firms can be hit by cost or demand shocks, possibly leading to defaults. These shocks propagate through the supply chain network via input-output linkages between buyers and suppliers. Firms endogenously take contingency plans to mitigate the impact generated from disruptions. They reroute undelivered orders to alternative buyers and switch excess demand to different suppliers. We show that, as long as firms have large initial equity buffers, network fragility is low if both buyer and supplier diversification is low. We argue that horizontal mergers may lead to a more fragile network if firms have small initial equity buffers. We find that a single sourcing strategy is beneficial for a firm only if the default probability of the firm's supplier is low. Otherwise, a multiple sourcing strategy is ex-post more cost effective for a firm.

Generation X directors are slowly replacing Baby Boomers on U.S. corporate boards and will eventually dominate corporate boardrooms in the U.S. and around the world. We provide the first robust evidence of a significantly positive effect of Generation X directors on corporate performance. The positive effect is not driven by other director attributes such as age, sex, ethnicity, or professional expertise, and is robust to endogeneity checks using instrumental variables. Part of the improvement in firm performance can be attributed to the commitment of Generation X directors to corporate social responsibility and to the inclusion of women on corporate boards.

There is a lively debate on whether football fans should pay an additional security fee, added to the price of tickets, to finance police activities on match days. This paper investigates the price effect on the demand for tickets in a dynamic setting, by considering two subgroups of spectators, namely fans and hooligans. In contrast to the previous literature, we analyze a situation in which the demand from each subgroup causes a negative social externality for members of the other group but, simultaneously, a positive one for members of the same group. We show that charging a security fee may start a dynamic process, leading to fewer fans and more hooligans attending matches and thus, counterintuitively to even more violence. Therefore, the present study provides an argument to refrain from charging a security fee. As an alternative economic solution, we discuss the strategy of outpricing hooligans.

We investigate the effects of the use of different sources of investment leverage, i.e. securities with embedded leverage and traditional margin accounts, on the portfolio performance of retail investors, recognizing that these effects may be conditional on investor attention. We find that investors who trade on margin underperform those who do not have margin accounts, but we also find that investors who trade securities with embedded leverage show an even poorer performance than investors who trade on margin. The negative effect of leverage usage decreases with greater investor attention, measured by portfolio monitoring frequency. These results suggest that more attentive investors gain more from the use of investment leverage.

We investigate the effects of financial reporting on current employee job search; i.e., whether firms' public financial reports cause their employees to reevaluate their jobs and consider leaving. We develop a simple model in which current employees use earnings announcements to inform job search decisions, and empirically measure job search based on employees' activity on a popular job market website. We find that job search by current employees increases significantly during earnings announcement weeks, especially when employees are more mobile and when within-firm information frictions are greater. We also find that employees use earnings announcements to update their expectations about their employers' economic prospects, consistent with learning. Our paper contributes to the burgeoning labor and accounting literature by providing among the first evidence closely linking financial reports to employee learning and job search.

We conduct a pre-registered field experiment with low-income grocery shoppers to study how behavioral interventions can improve the effectiveness of healthy food subsidies. Our unique design enables us to elicit choices and deliver subsidies both before and at the point of purchase. We examine the effects of two non-restrictive changes to the choice environment: giving shoppers a choice over the type of subsidy they receive and introducing a waiting period before the shopping trip to prompt deliberation about the food purchase decision. Combined, our interventions substantially improve the effectiveness of subsidies, increasing healthy purchases by 61% relative to a choice-less subsidy restricted to healthy food, and 199% relative to an un-subsidized control group. We discuss how these low-cost, scalable interventions can help mitigate nutritional inequality.

We undertake the first empirical analysis of profit shifting by U.S. firms during foreign tax holidays. We show that foreign tax holidays have become a prevalent and powerful tax planning strategy among U.S. firms. We find that U.S. firms significantly increase their outbound profit shifting while participating in foreign tax holidays. However, we also find that profit shifting associated with tax holidays comes at the cost of increased tax uncertainty. Our results have important implications for policy making and for understanding firm behavior.

For specialists and non-specialists alike, maps are one of the central ways that the environment becomes visible and comprehensible. Since the 1960s, both the practice and the values of environmental mapping have been transformed by new algorithmic methods for turning point-by-point measurements into a smooth cartographic image, especially when visualising the invisible geographies of pollution, climate change, and underground resources. The resulting maps are now ubiquitous. This article argues that algorithmic methods - especially those created by a small group of French mining engineers and installed widely in software by the 1990s - shifted the values and meaning of environmental mapping away from a traditional concern with qualitative realism to a new emphasis on quantitative accuracy. This was a shift not just in the goals of mapping but in the kind of environment that maps ultimately construct. The prioritisation of accuracy should therefore not be seen as a straightforward improvement, as its associated values raise difficult conceptual problems, both historical and historiographic, about scale, expertise and the role of human judgement in the creation of environmental fact. Historicising the techniques and meanings of mapping is especially important as environmental historians consider new geospatial methods - including algorithmic methods - in their own work.

Statement of problem A comprehensive bibliometric analysis to determine different aspects of the Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry is lacking. Purpose The purpose of this bibliometric study was to analyze the characteristics of the Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry between 1970 and 2019. Material and methods The Web of Science Core Collection was used to retrieve 9 categories of the Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry, including keywords and terms used, cited documents published, the countries and organizations of the authors, references, and sources cited during this period. Data were exported to a software program and analyzed for each 10-year period and for the entire 50 years. The highest 10 in each category were reported. Co-occurrence, couthorships, and linkage were also reported. Results A total of 11 989 records were reached by the search on the Web of Science Core Collection database; of which, 10 638 (92.9%) were included in the analysis. Articles made up 91.1%, of all records, with 217 review documents (1.8%). The most productive decade was 1980 to 1989 with 2936 documents. The total number of citations of all documents (available period 1980 to 2019) including self-citations was 155 112. During the period 1970 to 2019, 14 837 terms were used. The total number of keywords was 4933 (available period 1990 to 2019). There were 15 382 authors, 82 countries, and 2113 organizations identified in articles published in the Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry during this period, with most from the United States. There were 43 027 authors, 95 324 references, and 14 594 sources cited in the Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry during the period surveyed. Conclusions This bibliometric analysis provided a comprehensive overview of the impactful role of the Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry in contemporary dentistry, particularly in the field of prosthodontics.

SUMMARY Independent assurance of extended external reports (EER) is one of the most significant trends in today’s global assurance profession. When companies decide to purchase third-party assurance on EER, they need to decide whether to engage their financial statement auditor or a different assurance provider. We examine factors that impact this decision, and the consequences of this decision on financial statement audit quality and cost. We find that independence concerns are associated with companies choosing different EER assurance providers from their incumbent financial statement auditors, while providers’ expertise in EER assurance and the recent trend of integrating nonfinancial information into the annual report promote the use of the same provider. We further find some evidence that companies with the same provider attesting to both financial statements and EER benefit from having higher financial statement audit quality without paying significantly different audit fees.

This article details how the ovaHerero of Kaokoveld (north-west Namibia) experienced the precolonial and colonial eras as mediated through their cattle culture. While histories of Namibia rarely use non-Western lenses to interpret processes during the colonial era, this article examines ovaHerero colonial experiences as one episode within a broader history. It draws together archival and published sources to tell the little-known history of a people living in a remote and rugged rural area that nevertheless is of considerable contemporary interest because of wildlife conservation. Yet the ovaHerero of Kaokoveld remain little understood outside exoticised tourism material. Their history holds important lessons for the role of non-human actors in the precolonial and colonial eras, and for how environments, racialised social policies and power politics interacted to help construct contemporary north-west Namibia. Recentring ovaHerero experiences of these eras contributes to postcolonial studies of subaltern groups, the field of human-animal studies and the historiography of Namibia and Southern Africa.

Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) are designed to improve the efficiency and quality of healthcare through enhanced information sharing between disparate health entities. The objective of this study is to systematically examine the impact of HIE use in emergency departments (EDs) on quality and efficiency of medical care. We focus on two dimensions of healthcare quality, namely length of stay and 30-day readmission rate. From hospitals’ efficiency perspective, we examine if HIE access reduces the likelihood that more than one doctor would be consulted for a treatment. Drawing on complementarity theory, we adopt a contingency framework and examine the moderating role of patient-specific prior information (breadth of focal patient’s information and prior interaction between a focal patient and attending doctor) and doctor’s experience with the HIE on the effectiveness of HIE access on quality and efficiency of medical care. To accomplish our objectives, we leverage a unique panel data of actual HIE access by physicians who practice in a hospital system that participate in an HIE. The individual patient-level dataset comprises detailed medical provider information, patient-level medical information, and various other information related to procedures that were performed. Leveraging this unique and comprehensive data on physicians’ access of HIE system, we examine the effect of HIE use on the three outcome variables. After controlling for a battery of patient-specific, doctor-specific, and hospital-specific control variables, our results show that HIE access in EDs results in reduction in length of stay and 30-day readmission rate, and reduces the likelihood that more than one doctor would be consulted. We find that the benefits of HIE access are greater with greater breadth of patient information, greater experience of the attending physician with the HIE, and prior interaction between the focal patient and focal attending doctor. We account for endogeneity due to self-selection in HIE use and perform additional tests to ensure that our results are robust. Based on our results, we offer insights to practitioners and academicians alike on how adopting and sustaining HIE can yield better patient-level and provider-level outcomes.

We explore whether accounting fraud can be detected using the information of firms economically linked to a focal firm. Specifically, we examine whether customer information disclosed by a supplier firm, combined with customers’ accounting information, helps to detect the supplier’s revenue fraud. We first confirm the economic link between the supplier and customers by showing a strong positive correlation between the supplier’s sales growth and the growth rate of total customer purchases. We then introduce two variables based on customer accounting information—the discrepancy between supplier sales growth and customer purchase growth and customer excess purchases—and show that they are predictive of supplier revenue fraud. We conduct a battery of cross-sectional tests and generally find results to vary cross-sectionally in a predictable way. Finally, the out-of-sample tests indicate that adding the two variables to Dechow, Ge, Larson, and Sloan (2011) model increases fraud prediction accuracy. JEL Classifications: G14; M40; M41; M42.

Customer privacy is increasingly important to marketers. High-profile breaches of databases containing sensitive customer information, and the growing need to build the infrastructure required to support analysis of big data, present nontrivial obstacles to researchers seeking individual-level customer data from firms. In this paper, we show that recent developments in machine learning may enable firms to transfer a generative model, instead of data, thus potentially obviating the process of anonymizing and sampling customer data for release, for use in a variety of analytic use cases. We demonstrate the efficacy of a specific deep learning model, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), in preserving desired characteristics of original data. In real-world settings, we find that GANs can double the accuracy as compared to the best benchmark methods. We also demonstrate that GANs can be used to solve marketing problems of price markups for optimal profits and customer targeting, and that a single GAN can tackle multiple marketing problems. Furthermore, GANs have volume and velocity advantages, as the size of informational transfer grows according to model complexity, and it can readily handle real-time data streams.

The founder of a start‐up (principal) who has a project with uncertain returns must retain and incentivize an agent using promise of future payments and information gathering. The agent's effort incrementally advances production and such advance is a prerequisite for gathering new information. The principal decides how much information to gather based on these incremental advancements. The principal faces cash constraints. The agent's outside option is large relative to his effort cost. Equilibrium features one of two outcomes: immediate learning, whereby the agent's compensation is low, learning is immediate and retention is possible only conditional on the project being of high quality; or gradual learning, whereby the agent's compensation is high, learning is gradual, the agent never quits and effort is inefficiently high.

We address how value relevance of accounting information evolved as the new economy developed. Prior research concludes that accounting information—primarily earnings—has lost relevance. We consider more accounting items and find no decline in combined value relevance from 1962 to 2018. We assess evolution in each item’s value relevance and find increases, most notably for items related to intangible assets, growth opportunities, and alternative performance measures, which are important in the new economy. The number of relevant items also increases. We also consider separately new economy, old economy profit, and old economy loss firms. The trends are more pronounced for, but extend beyond, new economy firms. We base inferences on a nonparametric approach that does not require specifying the valuation relation. Taken together, our findings reveal an evolution to a more nuanced, but not declining, relation between accounting information and share price. JEL Classifications: C14; G10; G18; M40; M41.

Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities in the United States have experienced severe COVID-19 outbreaks and elevated mortality rates, often following upon the inadvertent introduction of SARS-CoV-2. Following FDA emergency use approval, widespread distribution of vaccines has resulted in rapid reduction in COVID-19 cases in vulnerable, older populations. Yet, vaccination coverage remains incomplete amongst residents and healthcare workers. As such, mitigation and prevention strategies are needed to reduce the ongoing risk of transmission and mortality amongst vulnerable, nursing home populations. One such strategy is that of ‘shield immunity’, in which recovered individuals increase their contact rates and therefore shield individuals who remain susceptible to infection. Here, we adapt recent population-scale shield immunity models to a network context. To do so, we evaluate network-based shield immunity by evaluating how restructured interactions in a bipartite network (e.g., between healthcare workers and long-term care residents) affects SARS-CoV-2 epidemic dynamics. First, we identify a series of rewiring principles that leverage viral testing, antibody testing, and vaccination information to reassign immunized healthcare workers to care for infected residents while retaining workload balance amidst an outbreak. We find a significant reduction in outbreak size when using infection and immune-based cohorting as a weekly intervention. Second, we also identify a preventative strategy using shield-immunity rewiring principles, by assigning susceptible healthcare workers to care for cohorts of immunized residents; this strategy reduces the risk that an inadvertent introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the facility via a healthcare worker spreads to susceptible residents. Network-based epidemic modeling reveals that preventative rewiring can control the size of outbreaks at levels similar to that of isolation of infectious healthcare workers. Overall, this assessment of shield immunity provides further support for leveraging infection and immune status in network-based interventions to control and prevent the spread of COVID-19.

We examine the impact of oil price uncertainty on IPO volume in the oil and gas sector. By using the implied volatility of oil options, a forward looking exogenously determined uncertainty measure, we can clearly identify the effect of uncertainty on the going public decision. Oil price uncertainty has a strong negative relation to IPO volume, a one standard deviation decrease in the implied volatility results in a 25%-29% increase in the number of quarterly IPOs. The effect is concentrated among the price sensitive upstream producers. We further report that uncertainty negatively impacts the IPO withdrawal decision and increases the value to postpone the offering.

Vitamin C ascorbic acid is a well-known antioxidant that is involved in anxiety, stress, depression, fatigue and mood state in humans. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of vitamin C on decreasing the level of public speaking stress in term of heart rate, blood pressure and stress assessment. A purposive sample of (45) were included in this randomized placebo-placebo trial study, that was conducted at Faculty of nursing / university of Kufa. Public speaking stress was determined by a questionnaire scale developed from (public speaking anxiety scale). Study group included volunteer students who took a dose of 500 mg a day of vitamin C for one week before a group presentation, while the placebo group is given a placebo before one week of before a group presentation. The result indicated that the blood pressure (systolic and diastolic) before presentation between the two groups ( student group and placebo) was not significantly different. In relation to heart rate, a significant decrease (p< 0.05) was recorded in student group as compared to placebo. The student group has recorded significant difference in many items of stress assessment when comparing to placebo (e.g. increase of heart rate, dry mouth, GIT cramps and anxiety due to fear from failure). The assessment of presentation stress between the two groups (student group and placebo) was determined by means of scores. The results revealed that there is a significant difference (P< 0.05) in presentation stress between student group and placebo group. It was concluded that student group which took 500 mg vitamin C for one week express less presentation stress. The most stress signs that has been improved by vitamin C intake are: increase of heart rate, dry mouth, GIT cramps and anxiety due to fear from failure.

Over eight million jobs were lost in the Great Recession, creating widespread economic hardship. This paper documents a novel and robust empirical regularity, that highly concentrated local labor markets experienced larger employment declines during the Great Recession. I argue that pre-crisis concentration level was instrumental in modulating the transmission of negative shocks using a model with heterogeneous firms where recessions arise as an aggregate consequence of idiosyncratic firm shocks. My model predicts a larger decline in expected employment when the market has a higher initial concentration level. Relatively small firms are unable to absorb the large number of workers that get displaced when relatively big firms are hit by idiosyncratic shocks, as the absorption is limited by decreasing returns to scale (at the firm) and an upward-sloping labor supply (in the local labor market). I undertake a series of empirical tests to rule out alternative explanations, and show that large employment losses in concentrated labor markets are not driven by highly concentrated industry-locations being hit harder during the Great Recession, having thinner labor markets, having more large firms, or having higher firm leverage ratios.

This study examines when firms offer higher product quality. We measure product quality by examining four different inflight amenities provided by airlines: Wi-Fi, seat size, entertainment, and seat power. Using daily flight level data for over 800 routes and spanning nine weeks in third quarter of 2015 we observe that carriers were actively retrofitting aircraft to expand their inflight amenity offerings. We find significantly lower product quality (Wi-Fi, entertainment, and power) on more concentrated routes. While considerable research has been done on airline pricing, less well known is how airlines pursue other revenue streams from ancillary services. Recent work by Brueckner et al. (2015) explores the role of baggage fees in airline pricing. We examine additional revenue streams provided by Wi-Fi and entertainment inflight amenities. We find that carriers are lowering the posted base ticket prices on routes with Wi-Fi and entertainment and then charging passengers for using these amenities. The IV price estimates reveal that magnitude of the posted fare reduction is larger than the additional revenue generated from the inflight amenity.

We show that distortion in the size distribution of banks around regulatory thresholds can be used to identify costs of bank regulation. We build a structural model in which banks can strategically bunch their assets below regulatory thresholds to avoid regulations. The resultant distortion in the size distribution of banks reveals the magnitude of regulatory costs. Using U.S. bank data, we estimate the regulatory costs imposed by the Dodd-Frank Act. Although the estimated regulatory costs are substantial, they are significantly lower than banks’ self-reported estimates. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.