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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.

How do elected autocrats come to power? Prominent explanations point to distributive conflict. We propose instead that some candidates advertise democratic deconsolidation as “deepening democracy,” which can have cross-cutting appeal. We evaluate this proposal through the election of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, an emblematic elected autocrat. Using original data, we find that historical voting patterns and political rhetoric are consistent with our proposal: Chávez came to power with the cross-class support of voters from across the traditional political spectrum, and his campaign emphasized rather than obscured his plan to remake political institutions.

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)

This article will explore some of the Qing Empire's primary adaptations, mainly pastoral and agricultural, to the arid environments of southern, eastern and northern Xinjiang - that is, the Tarim, Hami-Turfan and Zünghar basins respectively. It first examines the region's arid climate and its constraining implications for, first, agriculture as the empire's standard form of territorial incorporation in the south and east; and, second, pastoralism and agro-pastoralism in the north. These relations were not purely social, but were conditioned within both human and natural parameters. Xinjiang's general aridity informed Qing interactions with the territory's diverse peoples, which presented both cultural and ecological - that is, environmental - obstacles and opportunities.

This article examines the history of leguminous grasses in the Brazilian Cerrado between the early 1950s and early 1970s. The westward expansion of the Brazilian agrarian frontier was a massive ecological transformation, propelled by a transnational process that relied on a series of actors beyond the national borders, most notably the Rockefeller-sponsored IRI research institute. However, as the article demonstrates, this epistemic transformation was also crucially complemented by the ecological potential of a set of leguminous grasses that gave an essential contribution to the ecological reconversion of the Brazilian Cerrado. These sturdy nitrogen-fixing species grew extensively - and mostly autonomously - on these arid territories, propelling agrarian development in the region. However, while the successful interaction between anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic actors led to successful techno-scientific and economic results, it also led to severe socio-environmental consequences.

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.

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.

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.

According to the orthodox interpretation of bounce cosmologies, the universe was born from an entropy reducing phase in a previous universe. To defend the thesis that the whole of physical reality was caused to exist a finite time ago, William Lane Craig and co-author James Sinclair have argued the low entropy interface between universes should instead be understood as the beginning of two universes. Here, I present Craig and Sinclair with a dilemma. On the one hand, if the direction of time is reducible, as friends of the Mentaculus -- e.g., David Albert, Barry Loewer, and David Papineau -- maintain, then there is reason to think that the direction of time and the entropic arrow of time align. But on that account, efficient causation is likely reducible to non-causal phenomena. In consequence, contrary to Craig and Sinclair's theological aims, things can begin to exist without causes. On the other hand, if the direction of time is not reducible, Craig and Sinclair's interpretation of bounce cosmologies is unjustified. Lastly, a reply to a potential objection motivates a discussion of how to interpret bounce cosmologies on the tensed theory of absolute time favored by Craig and Sinclair. I offer two interpretations of bounce cosmologies that, given a tensed theory of absolute time, are preferable to those Craig and Sinclair offer, yet inconsistent with their project in natural theology; on one interpretation, the universe does not require a supernatural cause and, on the other, bounce cosmologies represent the universe as never having begun to exist., 36 pages, Forthcoming in The British Journal for Philosophy of Science

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has a major precedent almost exactly a century ago: the world-famous H1N1 influenza virus pandemic, sometimes known to the general public as the Spanish flu. From a history of medicine perspective, it is possible to underline many potential common traits between the two. In this article, hygiene and prophylaxis strategies are analyzed in a review of the most popular Italian general medical journals at the time of Spanish flu, Il Policlinico being the most representative of them. The analysis included 40 original journal articles as well as important references to the most influential coeval national manuals and international journals. The main issues in the context of public hygiene are prophylaxis with quinine and quinine derivatives, vaccinations, face masks, disinfection, and social distancing. We draw a comparison between these and the most recent international World Health Organization and Italian national guidelines on the topic. Sadly, little has changed since those times in terms of most of the prevention techniques, even with technical improvements, showing how shortsighted doctors and physicians can be when dealing with medical history. (Am J Public Health. 2021;111(10):1815–1823. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306412 )

We revisit the pros and cons of cartel criminalization with focus on its possible introduction in the EU. We document a recent phenomenon that we name EU ``leniency inflation", whereby leniency has been increasingly awarded to many, and sometimes all members of a cartel. We argue that, coupled with the non-disclosure of leniency statements and the insufficient protection of leniency applicants from damage claims introduced by the 2014 Damages Directive, it may have led to a decrease in cartel convictions. Together with evidence on the current level of fines, this points at the need to introduce criminalization. We then explore data on US criminal enforcement (1990-2015) to highlight potential areas of concern for policymakers, if criminal sanctions will be implemented in the EU. Among other things, we find that individuals in cartels where multiple offending firms are involved, are less likely to obtain a prison sentence.

The article analyzes the dictionary «Hutsul dialect vocabulary and phrasemics in the Ukrainian literary language» as a source of modeling the Hutsul linguistic picture of the world in Ukrainian fiction. The main provisions of the article are based on the fact that the basic components of the linguistic picture of the world are words as nominative units. In each national language, the designation (name) of the elements of the conceptual picture of the world is carried out primarily with the help of nominative units. In addition to the concept of a national linguistic picture of the world, there are regional linguistic pictures of the world, the linguistic basis of which are local dialects. The specificity of the regional-linguistic picture of the world is determined by dialectal language forms, as they name the realities of extralinguistic reality, for which no names were needed in the national language outside the dialectal area. The framework of the Hutsul linguistic picture of the world in its artistic version consists of key dialectisms within certain thematic layers of vocabulary, lexicographically elaborated in the mentioned dictionary. Lexical elements of the linguistic picture of the world in the Ukrainian artistic language cover the most various spheres of life and activity of Hutsuls: life, production sphere, material and spiritual, culture, beliefs, demonology, nature, etc. The dictionary also deals with stable phrases - phrasemics, paremias, curses, etc., which significantly complement and enrich the artistic version of the Hutsul language picture of the world. The dictionary as a whole provides extensive information in the semantic characteristics of dialectal nominative units and in the context of their use in literary texts and in figurative and stylistic remarks, which allows to model the Hutsul linguistic picture of the world through the prism of Ukrainian artistic language.

The article is devoted to the language creation of Father Kyrylo Seletskyi - a cler gyman of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, founder of two monastic congrega tions, an advocate of the spiritual and national Order in Galicia, a sower of “healthy grain for our people”, a stalwart supporter of the Ukrainian word. K. Seletskyi’s literary works serve as an excellent illustration for understanding a complex and often contradictory process of the Ukrainian literary language for mation in Galicia, an insight into a folk polyphony of dialectal words of that epoch, dialectical interaction of the living language and Church Slavonic at all levels. Not only does the dialectal variability of many lexemes give a colorful expression to the characters’ speech, but also illustrates the evolutionary stages of development of the Transnistrian branch of the Ukrainian language. The author emphasizes that in K. Seletskyi’s artistic discourses, the Church Sla v onic language as a historically and culturally important segment of the Ukrainian language becomes a special text- and style-building category, organically intertwines with its living canvas. Numerous Church Slavonicisms explicate the semantic speci fi city of the text and its general sacral-didactic intention through grammatical, lexical and phonetical adaptation to dialectal speech. Literary theological-educational, informative-moralizing texts are full of reli gious vocabulary, which gives the impression of a spiritual cliche, yet they (the texts) remain inherently Ukrainian and do not create any barriers in the process of percep tion, as they retain a clearly articulated Ukrainian-language basis. The author concludes that the Church Slavonic language-style played a special role in the process of the modern Ukrainian literary language formation - the role of its spiritual variant.

The emigrant writer V. Barka proves to us that during those years he worked and lived there were no opportunities to write works on Christian problems in Ukraine, only abroad due to various cultural-religious, socio-political reasons. V. Barkа’s novel «Paradise» is fi lled with religious nominations, which we differentiate into different subgroups. The lexico-semantic subgroups of religious termino-vocabulary was analyzed in the article. It is found out, that the author of the analyzed work repeatedly illustrates demonological vocabulary, uses it to denote of evil power and enriches the work with religious synonymous and antonymous words. However, an analysis of recent research witness that the question of the research of names for the designation of religious vocabulary in the novel “Paradise” has not yet been learned. Therefore, we set ourselves an aim to analyze the layers of religious vocabulary in worked out work. The purpose of the article is to differentiate the names of religious lexemes in the novel “Paradise” by certain thematic subgroups, to confi rm with illustrative theses, to display peculiarities of the formation of demonological vocabulary. Nominations to designation of demonological vocabulary were fi led as such, that devoid of moral-ethics norms, positive traits, and they doing only bad, sinful acts in the work under review. B. Barka the main focus concentrates on the following biblical antinomies: paradise / hell, man / beast, good / evil, life / death, faith / disbelief, righteous / sinner, sinful / righteous. Perspective henceforth we perceive the analysis of verbs on the notation of religious concepts, as well as the research of religious vocabulary in the works of V. Barka.

In the article analyzes current Ukrainian asionymes as explicators of the cultural memorial code. It is revealed that after the passage of the Law «On Condemning Communist and National Socialist (Nazi) Totalitarian Regimes in Ukraine and Prohibiting the Propaganda of Their Symbolism», there are few such asionyms left. The purpose of the exploration is to trace the national conditionality of the Astionims, who are the explicators of the memorial code of culture. Formation of a linguocultural portrait of an urban settlement as an explicator of a cultural memorial code was carried out according to the following scheme: nuclear zone (current city name, its location); near periphery (scientifi c genesis of the astionym with the explication of etymon; historical conditions of the name’s name: date of the fi rst known name of the settlement in the sources; name change, etc.) distal periphery (characteristic of etymon); optional interpretive zone (extra-lingual information, descriptors, connotony etc.). There are three groups of memorial astiononyms: names in which memory of famous persons is stored (Alchevsk, Vatutine, Verkhivtseve, Gorlivka, Hrebinka, Dokuchaevsk, Yenakiyeve, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kropyvnytskyi, Lutugine, Sinelnikovo, Khmelnitsky, Shcholkine; Boryspil); settlements named after the biblical Christian events (Blagovishchenske, Voznesenivka, Voznesensk, Pokrovsk, Pokrov); ideologically labeled astionimes, motivated by chrononyms (Pervomaisk, Pershotravensk) and individual memorial names of settlements, the etymons for which became onimes or appellations indicating a memorable event (Artsyz, Beryslav). It is proved that the national spirit of the Ukrainian astionym is often a prerequisite for the national existence of the city itself. However, the memorial titles, in which such conditionality could be used as fully as possible, do not always encode the national-patriotic and spiritual values of Ukrainians.

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.

Lo studio dei manoscritti coranici piu antichi e fondamentale per conoscere la prima diffusione del testo sacro e soprattutto la sua consistenza. In attesa, ormai fin troppo prolungata, di studi sui materiali ritrovati a Sanaa, lo studioso a cui si devono i maggiori contributi sull'argomento e senz'altro Fran50is Deroche. Suo e anche il piu recente saggio esaustivo e completo, nel quale analizza un esempla re manoscritto coranico, conservato tra varie biblioteche, probabilmente risalente alla fine del VII secolo.1 Si tratta della versione, benche incompleta, piu impor tante e antica e per tale ragione Deroche dedica a tale esemplare un'analisi mi nuziosa con un'acribia difficilmente superabile. La questione della storia del ma noscritto di probabile origine egiziana, le differenti (5) mani dei copisti, e le pe culiarita ortografiche di ognuno e nel complesso, rispetto alla versione contem poranea della vulgata di cUtman e ad altri esemplari antichi, sono tutte affronta te con una capacita e un equilibrio convincenti. L'ampia parte in arabo riprodu ce il testo segnalando ovviamente le peculiarita del ductus consonantico e anche cancellature, interventi di vario tipo e peculiarita di ogni genere. Inserito tra le due parti, un consistente apparato di immagini offre riproduzioni del manoscrit to e di altri materiali citati e utilizzati nel saggio. Il prodotto finale di un percor so cosi argomentato e condivisibile e la datazione del manoscritto e alcune fon damentali considerazioni sullo stato del testo coranico attorno all'ultimo quarto del VII secolo. Senza alcuna valutazione polemica e con un argomentare che procede spedito col fermo vincolo documentale e logico, Deroche seppellisce, se ancora ve ne fosse bisogno, le affascinanti interpretazioni di Wansbrough e quel le, piu recenti, che ipotizzano la circolazione di versioni coraniche alquanto di verse da quella Cutmanica. Allo stesso tempo, dimostra come la grafia coranica fu una costruzione progressiva, che nel caso specifico era gia frutto di una trasmis sione scritta del testo, quantunque continuamente rielaborata e perfezionata per almeno due secoli, giungendo a una fissazione non scevra da problemi e inconsi stenze che anche l'edizione cairina, considerata oggi standard, denota. La ricerca sul testo coranico, con lo spettro di ipotesi piu diverse, da quelle che accettano la visione islamica, a quelle piu scettiche, ha conosciuto negli ul timi anni un nuovo vigore. Il volume curato da Manfred S. Kropp e il piu recen

Purpose of the article is to show that colour names form concept periphery of the landscape, enrich, expose in general, making it more important in small prose ofI. Bunin.Art concept that is born in the writing and continues its life beyond the one isalways obeyed to the necessity of detail the phenomena of nature, landscapes andtheir elements refl ection. It is revealed in a small prose of the writer as an integral systemic formation represented by colour lexemes not only with conventional but alsowith associative semantics.Conceptual comprehension of the landscape in I. Bunin’s small prose is connectedwith the understanding that nature can exist only in the context of the human worldview.The variety of details and their colourist features makes it possible for the writer to show the unique beauty of the surrounding world, inner richness, the intensity of the spiritual life and the depth of the characters’ emotions. The colour marking palette in I. Bunin’s prose is extremely rich, vividly individual. The artist is looking for new means of emotional infl uence. In perspective it is advised to analyse the concept “landscape” in I. Bunin’s poetry. The presented methodology can become the basis for studying the category of coloration in different author styles.

The purpose of the article is to fi nd out the main principles that unite stratigraphy and ethnology. Oykonymy is universal ethno-historical fact. It is interpreted as a peculiar phenomenon of culture. Oykonymy is an important link of traditional culture in the modern multicultural Ukrainian space. That is why it can be considered in both anthropological and ethno-historical aspect. The article analyzes main aspects of using of stratigraphy of archaic oykonyms for ethnological studies. It is found out main principles that unite stratigraphy and ethnology. Oykonymic stratigraphy is tight connected with oykonymic landscape – a complex linguistic-historical multicomponent system that is the part of anthropogenic space combining stratigraphy of oykonymy and the history of development of ethnic group. Archaic oykonymy of Ukraine has pronounced spatial-temporal dimension and shows us information about the Slavic, in particular Ukrainian, model of the world. Extralinguistic and intralinguistic factors affect the qualitative and quantitative parameters of both oykonymyc and ethnic landscapes. Stratigraphy of archaic place names is represented on a chart which focuses on the consideration of the material in three aspects: areal, chronological and statistical. Thus the article analyzes specifi c examples of confi guration of areas of geographic names ending in *-any/*-jany and *-itji (Charts 1, 2), which are connected with patrimonial and collective structure of society. It is found out that location of objects of geographic names ending in *-any/*-jany and *-itji (Charts 1, 2) in the earliest period (before XIV century) mainly coincides with the area of Upper and Middle Podnisterya, Volyn and Kyiv-Chernihiv centers. These territories were convenient for living (developed water supply system, fertile soils, natural protection from enemies, etc.) and, as archeological evidence shows, fi rst of all populated by Slavs. The article demonstrates that areal onomastic has great possibilities for using its data for development of ethnology. Diachronic and synchronic areas of onyms of all types in one way or another can confi rm or deny ethnographic principles, conclusions etc.

The article is aimed at analyzing the Hutsul language picture of the world, which is modeled by the Ukrainian language of fi ction, by focusing on the nominative unit polonyna. The substratum of the regional and dialectal picture of the world constitutes subdialect as linguistic and territorial phenomenon, characterized by the predominant part, which corresponds to a literary language, and number of language units of different levels, characteristic only of this subdialect or of other closely related subdialects along with it. The specifi c nature of the regional and dialectal picture of the world is determined by dialectal language units naming extralinguistic realia, corresponding names for which were not needed in the national language beyond dialect area. The lexical Hutsul dialecticism polonyna is an example of de-dialectization of a dialectal lexeme and its inclusion in the vocabulary of a literary language, although it remains an important component of the Hutsul language picture of the world, represented by the Ukrainian language of fi ction. In fi ction, the lexical meaning of polonyna – “a high-mountain meadow used as a pasture in summer” – with different added semantic connotations form the basis of the semantic body of this dialecticism. These added semantic connotations include location, which extends beyond the one expressed by the lexical meaning, a landform, established ownership, an element of the culture of distant shepherding, identifi cation with and attribution to the Hutsul region, the Carpathians, etc. In this fragment, the H utsul language picture of the world is analyzed from the perspective of the Ukrainian language of fi ction, which introduced its components to it, associated, fi rst and foremost, with metaphorization, the fi gurative use of the dialecticism polonyna that expands and enriches its semantic body.

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.

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.

This paper investigates how the pricing policy of a revenue-maximizing monopolist is influenced by the social learning dynamics of customers who use online reviews to estimate the quality of the product. A salient feature of our problem is that the customers’ willingness to pay, and hence the demand function, evolves over time in conjunction with the online reviews. The monopolist strives to maximize its total expected revenue over a finite horizon by adjusting prices in response to these dynamics. The revenue maximization problem is studied using two different review models: a quality-based review model, where customers report their experienced quality, and a value-based review model, where reviews internalize experienced quality as well as the purchase price. To formulate the problem in tractable form, we derive a fluid model that provides a good approximation of the system dynamics when the volume of sales is large. This formulation lends itself to key structural insights into the interactions between optimal pricing policies and review dynamics. In particular, we identify critical time scales and social learning regimes that sharply separate the efficacy of dynamic pricing vis-à-vis fixed-price strategies. Furthermore, we demonstrate the impact of the quality-based and value-based review models on key structural properties of the optimal pricing policies. These structural insights are also elucidated in an illustrative simulation study based on data from an online marketplace. This paper was accepted by Gabriel Weintraub, revenue management and market analytics. Supplemental Material: Data and the e-companion are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4387 .

This paper analyses the rise of a new kind of urban citizenship in the context of the urban crisis of the 1980s: the vigilant citizen, characterized by a view of citizens as possible victims, who assume and are called upon to take responsibility for social safety. Top-down policy explanations insufficiently clarify why the polarized debate over urban petty crime developed into a consensus by the mid-1980s. Tying in with recent trends in urban police history, this paper shows the diversity of bottom-up actors in Amsterdam that helped to, sometimes unintentionally, further a communitarian “social safety” agenda: vigilantes and victim-support groups, the former based in more conservative circles, the latter partly inspired by women advocacy groups. These actors entered into a sometimes-tense dynamic with the police and municipality, which took up the challenge of providing victim support and of educating the public for neighborhood prevention. This slowly yielded results.

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.

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.

This paper introduces a stylized model to capture distinctive features of waiting list allocation mechanisms. First, agents choose among items with associated expected wait times. Waiting times serve a similar role to that of monetary prices in directing agents' choices and rationing items. Second, the expected wait for an item is endogenously determined and randomly fluctuates over time. We evaluate welfare under these endogenously determined waiting times and find that waiting time fluctuations lead to misallocation and welfare loss. A simple randomized assignment policy can reduce misallocation and increase welfare. (JEL C78, D61, D82, D83)

This paper explores the role of cash usage in feeding the underground economy by using a unique dataset that combines, at province level, official estimates of Italian firms’ underreporting with data on cash transactions drawn from the aggregate anti-money laundering reports filed to the Italian Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) by banks. In order to derive causal evidence, we apply two different econometric strategies: an instrumental variable approach and a difference-in-difference approach, which exploits the change in the maximum threshold for cash transactions introduced in 2016, thereby providing a measure of the effect of such policy on tax evasion. We find that an increase in cash usage translates, other things being equal, into a higher level of underreporting by firms, and that raising the cash threshold in 2016 – a measure motivated by the objective of boosting spending – had the side effect of leading to a larger underground economy.

As cities debate how to regulate Airbnb and other home-sharing services, we study the impacts of home sharing on local residential real estate markets. By accommodating transient travelers with short-term rental properties, home-sharing platforms have evolved as a major alternative channel that attracts the growing supply of residential properties. However, on the demand side of local residential markets, home-sharing platforms are not a viable option for residents. To demonstrate this dynamic between home sharing and local residential markets, we leverage a unique quasi-experiment on Airbnb—a platform policy that caps the number of properties a host can manage in a city—and find that the policy reduced rents (in the long-term rental markets) and home values (in the for-sale housing markets) by about 3% and did not affect the price-to-rent ratio. Consistent with the conjecture, we find that the policy impacts can be attributed to increased supply in local residential markets because of the policy. Quantitatively, our estimates suggest that, if the density of affected Airbnb properties is 1% higher in a market, the policy may further decrease rents and home values by about 0.03%–0.06%, which is similar across each policy-affected city. Our empirical findings add to the debate about the impacts of home sharing on local residential markets with a novel data set and a unique identification strategy. Practically speaking, our research is a timely response to the debate on regulating home sharing and has implications for various stakeholders of the residential real estate markets. This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems. Funding: K. Xie thanks the University of Denver Faculty Research Fund 2017 for financial support. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4299 .

Callender claims that `time is the great informer' (Callender 2017, chapter 7), meaning that the direction(s) in which our `best' physical theories inform are temporal. This is intended to be a metaphysical claim, and as such expresses a relationship between the physical world and information-gathering systems such as ourselves. This paper gives two counterexamples to this claim, illustrating the fact that time and informative strength doubly dissociate, so the claim cannot be about physical theories in general. The first is a case where physical theories inform in directions that we have no reason to regard as temporal. The second is a case where our best physical theories fail to inform in directions that we have independent (pre-theoretic) reasons to regard as temporal. Taking these two cases into account suggests that the connection Callender makes between time and informativeness is perspectival. The second case demonstrates that, although scientists often seek information in temporal directions, the behaviour of the physical world can present serious difficulties for finding it. In response, this paper proposes a perspectival reading of Callender's claim, according to which the connection between time and informative strength has more to do with the aims and objectives of science than the workings of the physical world.

It is a common view among philosophers of science that theoretical virtues (also known as epistemic or cognitive values), such as simplicity and consistency, play an important role in scientific practice. In this paper, I set out to study the role that theoretical virtues play in scientific practice empirically. I apply the methods of data science, such as text mining and corpus analysis, to study large corpora of scientific texts in order to uncover patterns of usage. These patterns of usage, in turn, might shed some light on the role that theoretical virtues play in scientific practice. Overall, the results of this empirical study suggest that scientists invoke theoretical virtues explicitly, albeit rather infrequently, when they talk about models (less than 30%), theories (less than 20%), and hypotheses (less than 15%) in their published works. To the extent that they are mentioned in scientific publications, the results of this study suggest that accuracy, consistency, and simplicity are the theoretical virtues that scientists invoke more frequently than the other theoretical virtues tested in this study. Interestingly, however, depending on whether they talk about hypotheses, theories, or models, scientists may invoke one of those theoretical virtues more than the others.

In this study, we examine the role of monitoring institutional investors in firm innovation. Following Fich, Harford and Tran (2015), we define monitoring institutions as those whose holding value in a firm is among the top 10% of holdings in the institution’s portfolio. We document a positive effect of monitoring institutional ownership on firm innovation after controlling for traditional measures of institutional ownership. The positive effect is more pronounced when monitoring institutions are more diversified. We further find that monitoring institutions enhance firm innovation by: (1) increasing failure tolerance and CEO risk-taking incentives, and (2) reducing intense board monitoring, managerial career concerns, and diversion of corporate resources. Overall, the evidence shows that monitoring institutions are instrumental in promoting firm innovation.

The Second Ecumenical Council (also known as the First Council of Constantinople), held in Constantinople in 381 AD, is in many ways unique in the history of ecumenical councils. Its uniqueness lies, among other things, in the scarcity of written sources describing this event. No documents from the Council are extant. All that has remained is passing references by fifth century historians and chance remarks on the Council in letters. An important, although rather singular, source on the Second Ecumenical Council is St Gregory of Nazianzus’s autobiographical poem. We can also rely on the documents which were the fruit of the Council: the canons, the Symbol and a letter written to the Emperor Theodosius I at the conclusion of the Council. The information included in these documents is not entirely coherent. This paper aims to reconstruct the proceedings of the Council on the basis of the available evidence.

La denominada «poesía intercultural» que implica el diálogo entre las culturas occidentales y las amerindias se manifiesta en la obra de César Vallejo. La ponencia fundamenta cómo la interculturalidad se manifiesta en cuatro niveles en Trilce y Poemas humanos: la lengua, la estructuración literaria, las estructuras figurativo-simbólicas y la cosmovisión. Asimismo, aborda el análisis del sujeto migrante (categoría formulada por Antonio Cornejo Polar) en los dos poemarios antes mencionados. La migración de Trujillo a Lima o del Perú a París constituyen ejes fundamentales y evidencia cómo la memoria del sujeto migrante está fragmentada en dos espacios: el andino y el occidental. En tal sentido, se tomarán los aportes no solo de Cornejo Polar, sino también de Ángel Rama para el análisis minucioso de los poemas de Vallejo. ABSTRACTThe so-called «intercultural poetry», that involves dialogue between Western and Amerindian cultures is displayed itself in Cesar Vallejo’s works. This paper shows how the interculturalism is manifested in Trilce and Poemas humanos (‘Human Poems’) through four levels: language, literary structure, the figurative and symbolic structures and the worldview. It also focuses on the analysis of the migrant subject (category made by Antonio Cornejo Polar) in the two aforementioned poems. The migration from Trujillo to Lima or from Peru to Paris are keystones and they demonstrate how the migrant subject memory is fragmented into two spaces: the Andean and Western. For that reason, the contributions not only of Cornejo Polar but also Angel Rama are considered for the analysis of Vallejo’s poems. Keywords: Vallejo, intercultural poetry, migrant subject, Trilce and Poemas humanos (‘Human Poems’).

Para nadie es un secreto que el itinerario geográfico de César Vallejo fue no solo variado, sino accidentado. De su natal Santiago de Chuco había que viajar cuatro horas a lomo de caballo hasta la ciudad costeña de Trujillo (donde concluyó su bachillerato en Letras) y luego a Lima (generalmente en barco). Una vez en la capital peruana, hacia 1915, Vallejo intentó ser aceptado en los círculos literarios con relativo éxito, sobre todo después de la publicación de Los heraldos negros en 1918- 1919. Sin embargo, una vez aparecido Trilce en 1922, muchas puertas se le cerraron, y hasta se vio implicado antes de ello en un conflicto policial que le valió casi cuatro meses de cárcel. Como consecuencia, el poeta partió para París en 1923, golpeado y amargado del Perú, para nunca más volver. Esta ponencia examina cómo la continua condición migrante del poeta resume y explica parcialmente el conflicto de millones de latinoamericanos durante su tiempo y a lo largo del siglo XX. Más específicamente, me interesa notar la internalización de esa experiencia y las formas en que se manifiesta en su poesía inicial, la de la llamada etapa peruana, así como algunas de las huellas que ha dejado en la producción poética más reciente. ABSTRACTIt is no secret that the geographical route of Cesar Vallejo was not only diverse but bumpy. From his native Santiago de Chuco, he traveled four hours on horseback to the coastal city of Trujillo (where he completed his Bachelor of Arts degree) and then continued to Lima by ship. Once arriving to the Peruvian capital around 1915, Vallejo tried to be accepted in literary circles with relative success, especially after the publication of Los heraldos negros (‘The Black Heralds’) in 1918- 1919. However, after Trilce was published in 1922, many doors were closed to him, and even he was involved in a police conflict which gave him almost four months in prison. As a result, he traveled to Paris in 1923. He felt he was fed up and beaten by Peru and that he was never coming back. This paper examines how the continuous migrant condition of the poet summarizes and explains partly the conflict of millions of Latin Americans during his time and throughout the 20th century. More specifically, it is important to note the internal process of these experiences and the ways how it is manifested in his initial poetry: the so-called Peruvian stage, as well as some of the marks left in the more recent poetic production. Keywords: Vallejo, migrant subject, Los heraldos negros (‘The Black Heralds’), Trilce, Latin American poetic diaspora.

El poeta peruano César Vallejo y el pintor belga René Magritte comparten querencias estéticas y vitales fundamentales, llevar al lector o el espectador por una serie de signos que chocan con el vacío aparente, el misterio, el surco prolífico. Una aracterística compartida es la frecuencia del motivo de la ropa masculina burguesa, signo de identidad del que el poeta se va despojando y en el cual el pintor insiste para dar con pasmoso aplomo en el misterio. ABSTRACTThe Peruvian poet, César Vallejo, and the Belgian painter, René Magritte share fundamental esthetic and vital lost homes, a yearning that takes the reader or viewer along a sequence of signs that crashes into an apparent emptiness, into mystery, the fertile furrow. One shared feature of their art is the frequent presence of male bourgeois clothing, identifying markers that the poet shucks off along the way, and the painter retains in order to approach, with amazing aplomb, mystery.Keywords: Vallejo, Magritte, poetics, breach, clothing.

El papel que juegan las vanguardias en César Vallejo supone un paso más en la gestación y reafirmación de una obra que asume, con todas sus contradicciones, la contextualización de un tiempo que, poco a poco, dará paso a una brutal dialéctica. Vallejo lo vivirá de primera mano junto a los intelectuales europeos y del llamado grupo del 27, los cuales condensaban una sensación de vacío y de pérdida de identidad que en Vallejo poco o nada tendrá que ver con ese universo tan personal que hace visible lo real para ofrecernos una nueva forma de entender la poesía del siglo XX. ¿O estamos hablando del XXI? ABSTRACTThe role played by the avant-garde in Cesar Vallejo is one more step up to the gestation and reaffirmation of a work that assumes, with all its contradictions, the contextualization of a time which, little by little, resulting in brutal dialectics. Later, Vallejo lived it first-hand with European intellectuals and the so-called Group 27, which condensed a sense of void and identity loss having little or nothing to do with this so personal universe that makes the real thing visible. In that way, it offers a new understanding of the poetry of the 20th century. Are we talking about the 21st century? Keywords: Avant-garde, dialectic, individualism, aesthetics, reality.

The term “civilization,” articulated in eighteenth century Europe, has been widely used in many languages from the nineteenth century to the present. It refers both to widespread societies governed by powerful states in modern times and to prestigious urban and monumental civilizations of ancient times. This essay explores the history of the concept of civilization through science, ideology, and schooling. Scientific exploration of civilization was an implementation of emerging studies in social science. Ideological statement of social priorities appropriated civilization, especially in the era of expanding capitalism, empire, and white supremacy. In the school systems set up around the world, the term “civilization” was included in the curriculum both to explain ancient heritage and the comparison of modern great powers, religious faiths, and cultural practices. Weaknesses in the concept of civilization are becoming apparent as knowledge expands. New factors to consider include the significance of the end of empire; increased attention to network dynamics as well as hierarchies; comparisons of biological equality and social inequality; the roles of commoners and local scales; the rise of global social and institutional structures; shifting balances of societies and regions; and more attention to the historical role of schooling and science.

Using unique, hand-collected data, we study the interaction between the legal system and the takeover auction process from 1981 to 2015. We show a structural break in the takeover process in 1989. The strengthening of the property rights of target boards after Time Inc. decision has moved the auction process from public to a behind the scenes process where target boards control both the number of bidders and the flow of information. Target boards are more likely to initiate the auction themselves and the length of the private negotiation process has significantly lengthened. This fundamental change has benefited target shareholders.

In this paper, we document the importance of memory in machine learning (ML)-based models relying on firm characteristics for asset pricing. We come to three empirical conclusions. First, the pure out-of-sample fit of the models is often poor: we find that most R^2 measures are negative, especially when training samples are short. Second, we show that poor fit does not necessarily matter from an investment standpoint: what actually counts are measures of cross-sectional accuracy, which are seldom reported in the literature. Third, memory is key. The accuracy of models is maximal when both labels and features are highly autocorrelated. Relatedly, we show that investments are the most profitable when they are based on models driven by strong persistence. Average realized returns are the highest when the size of training samples is large and when the horizon of the predicted variable is also long.

We still know very little about the incentives of police, often due to data constraints and the underlying policy environment. Using geocoded crime data and a novel source of within-city spatial and temporal variation in punishment severity, I am able to shed light on enforcement behavior. I find that in parts of a city where drug penalties were weakened, there is a 13% decrease in drug arrests within a year; there is no displacement of non-drug offenses and majority black neighborhoods have a larger decline in drug arrests. If offenders were significantly deterred by harsher penalties, as the law intended and Becker’s (1968) model predicts, there should have been an increase in drug arrests. My results are therefore consistent with police treating enforcement effort and punishment severity as complementary. I also find that citywide crime and drug use do not increase following the weakening of drug penalties; this calls into question the "War on Drugs" view of punishment and suggests that certain types enforcement can be reduced without incurring large public safety costs.

Bond returns are time-varying and predictable. What economic forces drive this variation? To answer this long-standing question, we propose a consumption-based model with recursive preferences, long-run risks, and inflation non-neutrality. Our model offers two important insights. First, our model matches well the post-1990 nominal upward-sloping U.S. Treasury yield curve. Second, consistent with our model's implication, variance risk premium based on the U.S. interest rate derivatives data emerges as a strong predictor for short-horizon Treasury excess returns, above and beyond the predictive power of other popular factors. In the model equilibrium, the variance risk premium is related to the short-run risks in the economy, while standard forward-rate-based factors are associated with long-run risks in the economy.

Problem definition: We study how algorithmic (versus human-based) task assignment processes change task recipients’ fairness perceptions and productivity. Academic/practical relevance: Since algorithms are widely adopted by businesses and often require human involvement, understanding how humans perceive algorithms is instrumental to the success of algorithm design in operations. Particularly, the growing concern that algorithms may reproduce inequality historically exhibited by humans calls for research about how people perceive the fairness of algorithmic decision making (relative to traditional human-based decision making) and, consequently, adjust their work behaviors. Methodology: In a 15-day-long field experiment with Alibaba Group in a warehouse where workers pick products following orders (or “pick lists”), we randomly assigned half of the workers to receive pick lists from a machine that ostensibly relied on an algorithm to distribute pick lists, and the other half to receive pick lists from a human distributor. Results: Despite that we used the same underlying rule to assign pick lists in both groups, workers perceive the algorithmic (versus human-based) assignment process as fairer by 0.94–1.02 standard deviations. This yields productivity benefits: receiving tasks from an algorithm (versus a human) increases workers’ picking efficiency by 15.56%–17.86%. These findings persist beyond the first day when workers were involved in the experiment, suggesting that our results are not limited to the initial phrase when workers might find algorithmic assignment novel. We replicate the main results in another field experiment involving a nonoverlapping sample of warehouse workers. We also show via online experiments that people in the United States also view algorithmic task assignment as fairer than human-based task assignment. Managerial implications: We demonstrate that algorithms can have broader impacts beyond offering greater efficiency and accuracy than humans: introducing algorithmic assignment processes may enhance fairness perceptions and productivity. This insight can be utilized by managers and algorithm designers to better design and implement algorithm-based decision making in operations. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2022.1120 .

This paper examines the trajectory, ambitions, and practices involved in the official national and provincial planning for Jeju Island from 1963 to 1985 as it became reimagined as the so-called ‘Hawai'i of East Asia’. Jeju Island has been constantly built, left unfinished, demolished, and rebuilt at each wave and ebb in regional tourism trends. Jeju has thus become a complicated geography of heavy contradictions as South Korea’s prime tourism experiment. Before the 2002 ‘Free International City’ project, the larger region of Jeju Island was identified as a ‘specified region’ from 1963 for experimentation in tourism. By virtue of its historic marginality, Jeju has been portrayed as a pristine internal frontier ripe for tourism and utopian transformation ‘like Hawai’i’. Surprisingly, however, ‘Hawai’i’ does not actually appear in official planning documentation, even while it is a frequent talking point in public discourse. In this paper, I discuss the specter of ‘Hawai’i’ in Jeju tourism development and address the discrepancy between official development planning strategies and colloquial references to Hawai’i, observing that reference to ‘Hawai’i’ was not from initial design but followed the late 1950s to 1960s zeitgeist in which tourism itself became a mark of distinction for modernity.

We develop a general theory of state-dependent fiscal multipliers in a framework featuring interaction between two empirically relevant goods market frictions: idle productive capacity and unsatisfied demand. Our key novel finding is that the source of economic fluctuations determines the cyclicality of fiscal multipliers. Policies that stimulate aggregate demand, such as government spending and consumption tax cuts, have multipliers that are large in demand-driven recessions, but small and possibly negative in supply-driven downturns. On the other hand, policies that boost aggregate supply, such as cuts in taxes on labor income and firms’ payroll and sales, are ineffective in demand-driven recessions, but powerful if the downturn is driven by supply factors. Spending austerity, implemented by a reduction in government consumption, can be the policy with the largest multiplier in severe supply-side recessions and demand-driven booms, provided elasticities of labor demand and supply are sufliciently low. We obtain model-free empirical support for our theoretical predictions by using a novel econometric specification that allows us to estimate spending and tax cut multipliers in recessionary and expansionary episodes, conditional on those being either demand- or supply-driven.

Variable annuities, the largest liability of U.S. life insurers, are investment products containing long-dated minimum return guarantees. I show that guarantees with similar economic risks are treated differently by regulation and these differences impact insurers’ hedging behavior. When the regulatory regime recognizes certain risks, insurers start to hedge these risks in a substantial way. For some guarantees, this involves hedging both interest rate and equity market risks. However, for others, it involves hedging only equity market risk. As the regulatory regime still does not recognize the interest rate risk of all guarantees, insurers remain exposed to substantial interest rate risk. 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.

This article examines the effect of board governance on investment efficiency. I use the staggered enactment of board reforms in 41 countries as a shock to board structure that exogenously improves the quality of board oversight of managers. I find that investment-Q sensitivity improves by roughly half post-reform. This effect is more pronounced for firms that are more exposed to the reforms or when external governance mechanisms are less likely to discipline managers. These findings suggest that increased board oversight strengthens managers’ incentives to make investment decisions that are more in line with their firms’ growth opportunities.