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The objective of this work was to systematically evaluate the effects of formulation composition on subcutaneous injection site pain (ISP) using matrices comprising of common pharmaceutical excipients. Two randomized, blinded, crossover studies in healthy subjects were conducted at a single site, where subjects received 1 mL SC injections of the buffer matrices. ISP intensity was measured using a 100 mm visual analogue scale (VAS), which was then analyzed via heatmap, categorical grouping, subgroup analysis, and paired delta analysis. Buffer type, buffer concentration and tonicity agent showed a substantial impact on ISP. Citrate buffer demonstrated a higher ISP than acetate buffer or saline). The 20 mM citrate buffer was more painful than 10 or 5 mM citrate buffers. NaCl and propylene glycol were significantly more painful than sugar alcohols (mannitol, sucrose, trehalose or glycerol). Histidine buffers exhibited ISP in the descending order of 150 mM > 75 mM > 25 mM > 0 mM NaCl, while histidine buffers containing Arginine-HCl at 0, 50, or 150 mM all showed very low ISP. Histidine buffer at pH 6.5 showed a lower ISP than pH 5.7. This systematic study via orthogonal analyses demonstrated that subcutaneous ISP is significantly influenced by solution composition.

Analyzing account-level data from an account aggregator, we find that households increase consumption when they receive expected tax refunds, as if they face liquidity constraints. However, these same households smooth consumption when making payments in other years, primarily by transferring funds among liquid accounts. Even households carrying credit card debt smooth consumption when making payments, and even highly liquid households spend out of refunds. This behavior is inconsistent with pure liquidity constraints or hand-to-mouth behavior and is most consistent with a mental accounting life-cycle model. (JEL D12, E21, G51, H24, H31)

This paper evaluates the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS ) by comparing the vehicle purchases and disposals of households with eligible “clunkers” to those of households with similar but ineligible vehicles. CARS caused roughly 500,000 purchases during the program period. The provision of liquidity, through a rebate usable as a down payment, was critical in generating this large response. Participation was rare among households that owned clunkers with outstanding loans, which required loan repayment. This decline in participation is attributed to households’ preference for lower down payments and distinguished from the effects of income, other indebtedness, and the program subsidy. (JEL E23, E62, G51, H24, H31)

© 2019 The Ohio State University Using variation in minimum wages across cities and controlling for differences in business-cycle factors and long-run local economic trends, we find that following minimum wage increases, both, prices and nominal spending rise modestly. These gains are larger for certain subcategories of goods such as food away from home and in locations where low-wage workers account for a larger share of employment. Further, minimum wage increases are associated with reduced total debt among households with low credit scores, higher auto debt, and increased access to credit.

This essay argues for a re-reading of the lament in Psalm 22:1–5, 9–11 as Christian Scripture. This reading of the Old Testament as Christian Scripture redresses an imbalance in Christian theology, which tends to highlight difficulties in Jesus’ cry of dereliction but obscures its lament. This lament is central to the cross as solidarity with the experience of human suffering as betrayal by God and as an invitation for humanity to cry out for God’s response, found ultimately in the cross. In particular, the essay offers a new, feminist, birth-sensitive interpretation of Psalm 22:9–11 and a new, feminist translation of Psalm 22:10b, accenting God’s motherhood in the passage.

We evaluate the consistency of two methods for estimating the effect of an economic policy: (i) asking people how the policy caused them to change their behavior (reported effects) and (ii) inferring this change using data on behavior and differences in treatment across people (revealed-preference estimates). Both methods are widely used to measure spending caused by increases in liquidity. Using federal stimulus payments disbursed quasi-randomly in 2008, we find larger revealed-preference estimates of spending propensities for households who report greater spending responses, and the methods produce similar average propensities. But evidence is mixed on the relationship between spending propensities and liquidity. (JEL C83, D14, D91, E62, H24, H31)

The objective of this work was to systematically evaluate the effects of formulation composition on subcutaneous injection site pain (ISP) using matrices comprising of common pharmaceutical excipients.Two randomized, blinded, crossover studies in healthy subjects were conducted at a single site, where subjects received 1 mL SC injections of the buffer matrices. ISP intensity was measured using a 100 mm visual analogue scale (VAS), which was then analyzed via heatmap, categorical grouping, subgroup analysis, and paired delta analysis.Buffer type, buffer concentration and tonicity agent showed a substantial impact on ISP. Citrate buffer demonstrated a higher ISP than acetate buffer or saline). The 20 mM citrate buffer was more painful than 10 or 5 mM citrate buffers. NaCl and propylene glycol were significantly more painful than sugar alcohols (mannitol, sucrose, trehalose or glycerol). Histidine buffers exhibited ISP in the descending order of 150 mM 75 mM 25 mM 0 mM NaCl, while histidine buffers containing Arginine-HCl at 0, 50, or 150 mM all showed very low ISP. Histidine buffer at pH 6.5 showed a lower ISP than pH 5.7.This systematic study via orthogonal analyses demonstrated that subcutaneous ISP is significantly influenced by solution composition.

Using detailed transaction-level data from financial accounts, this paper shows that the revenues of small businesses and the consumption spending of their owners both decline by roughly 40% following the declaration of the national emergency in March 2020. However, through May 2020, the vast majority of this average decline in revenues is due to national factors rather than to variation in local infection rates or policies. Further, there is only a modest propensity for business owners to cut consumption in response to their individual business losses: Comparing owners in the same county but whose businesses operate in industries differentially impacted by local infections and state-level policies, we show that each dollar of revenue loss leads to a 1.6 cent decline in the consumption of the owner at this early stage of the pandemic. This limited passthrough appears to be explained by three factors: (1) the liquidity of households and businesses entering the crisis – consumption is twice as responsive for small business owners who operate with low liquidity; (2) emergency Federal programs – median account balances in both business and checking accounts decline in March but rebound in April and May when the transfer programs begin; (3) pandemic induced declines in the ability to spend on consumption – spending on travel, restaurants or personal services dropped dramatically.

The rise of Target Date Funds (TDFs) has moved a significant share of retail investors into contrarian trading strategies that rebalance between stocks and bonds so as to maintain age-appropriate portfolio shares. We show that i) TDFs actively rebalance within a few months following differential asset-class returns to maintain stable portfolio shares, ii), this rebalancing drives contrarian rebalancing flows across funds held by TDFs, iii) investors do not move funds into or out of TDFs to offset these flows, and iv) these flows impact the prices of stocks. Across otherwise similar stocks, those with higher (indirect) TDF ownership experience lower returns after higher market-wide performance, a results that holds when looking only at variation in TDF ownership driven by S&P index inclusion. Consistent with this price impact, the stock market exhibits more reversion at the monthly frequency during the recent TDF era. Together, our results suggest that continued growth in TDFs may affect return dynamics and the relation between stock and bond returns.

We develop a tractable dynamic model of credit markets in which lending standards and the quality of potential borrowers are endogenous. Competitive banks privately choose their lending standards: whether to pay a cost to screen out some unprofitable borrowers. Lending standards have negative externalities and are dynamic strategic complements: tighter screening worsens the future pool of borrowers for all banks and increases their incentives to screen in the future. Lending standards can amplify and prolong temporary downturns, affecting lending volume, credit spreads, and default rates. We characterize constrained-optimal policy which can generally be implemented as a government loan insurance program. When markets recover, they may do so only slowly, a phenomenon we call “slow thawing.” Finally, we show that limits on lending such as from capital constraints naturally incentivize tight lending standards, further amplifying shocks to credit markets. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Many firms want to target their customers with a sequence of marketing actions, rather than just a single action. We interpret sequential targeting problems as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), which can be solved using a range of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. MDPs require the construction of Markov state spaces. These state spaces summarize the current information about each customer in each time period, so that movements over time between Markov states describe customers’ dynamic paths. The Markov property requires that the states are “memoryless,” so that future outcomes depend only upon the current state, not upon earlier states. We propose a method for constructing Markov states from historical transaction data by adapting a method that has been proposed in the computer science literature. Rather than designing states in transaction space, we construct predictions over how customers will respond to a firm’s marketing actions. We then design states using these predictions, grouping customers together if their predicted behavior is similar. To make this approach computationally tractable, we adapt the method to exploit a common feature of transaction data (sparsity). As a result, a problem that faces computational challenges in many settings, becomes more feasible in a marketing setting. The method is straightforward to implement, and the resulting states can be used in standard RL algorithms. We evaluate the method using a novel validation approach. The findings confirm that the constructed states satisfy the Markov property, and are robust to the introduction of non-Markov distortions in the data.

This paper evaluates theoretical explanations for the propensity of households to increase spending in response to the arrival of predictable, lump-sum payments, using households in the Nielsen Consumer Panel who received $25 million in randomly distributed stimulus payments. The pattern of spending is inconsistent with models in which identical households cycle rapidly through high and low- response states as they manage liquidity, but is instead highly predictable by income years before the payment. Spending responses are unrelated to expectation errors, almost unrelated to crude measures of procrastination and self-control, significantly related to sophistication and planning, and highly related to impatience. (JEL D12, D14, D91, E21, H23)

Many transit agencies have developed measurements of pedestrian crowding in rail stations but lack clear standards for when crowding becomes a safety risk that justifies an operating or capital intervention. How frequent, consistent, or severe must congestion be before a capital improvement is warranted to mitigate a safety risk? How should agencies weigh severe but infrequent congestion against moderate but daily congestion? Adoption of such standards is a critical step for a transit agency in identifying and prioritizing safety risks and capital needs. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA, or Metro) uses a variety of methods to measure pedestrian crowding at Metrorail stations on platforms, escalators, and stairs and through fare gates. WMATA has incorporated big data into its measuring of crowding in rail stations and has recognized that using demand on a typical weekday can mask important variations and issues in normal operations. The agency has relied on the Transit Capacity Quality of Service Manual (TCQSM) to establish the capacity of station circulation elements, but the manual’s existing measures do not address questions of the frequency and severity of overcrowding or of what levels of crowding warrant action or capital projects. Although peer agencies commonly use station capacity values consistent with the TCQSM, other agencies have developed specific guidelines for acceptable peak crowding duration and special event conditions. This paper summarizes WMATA’s analytic approaches, including the use of pedestrian microsimulations to derive volume-to-capacity ratios and level of service. The paper concludes by calling for clear standards that consider frequency, severity, and acceptable safety thresholds.

Using a proprietary dataset of the portfolio holdings of millions of US households, we document how agents who believe in different models of the world update their beliefs heterogeneously in response to a public signal. We identify households ex ante that hold different models of the world using political party affiliation (probabilistically inferred from zip code), and our public signal is the unexpected outcome of the US national election of 2016. Relative to Democrats, Republican investors actively increase the equity share and market beta of their portfolios following the election. The rebalancing is due to a small share of investors making large adjustments. We conclude that this behavior is driven by belief heterogeneity because of extensive controls for differential hedging needs or preferences, including detailed controls for age, wealth, income, state, and even county-employer fixed effects.

We evaluate the consistency of two methods for estimating the effect of an economic policy: i) asking people how the policy caused them to change their behavior (reported effects); ii) inferring this change using data on behavior and differences in treatment across people (revealed-preference estimates). Both methods are widely used to measure spending caused by increases in liquidity. Using Federal stimulus payments disbursed quasi-randomly in 2008, we find larger revealed-preference estimates of spending propensities for households who report greater spending responses, and the methods produce similar average propensities. But evidence is mixed on the relationship between spending propensities and liquidity.

The remaining potential in many mature fields in the Gulf of Mexico consists of smaller long-reach targets that require ever-more-accurate vertical and horizontal location for drilling precision. This is particularly true at the Lobster field in Ewing Bank, where, during the previous platform drilling campaigns, some midreach prospects were interpreted to have been missed due to mispositioning. Potential future drilling at the Lobster field would target primarily long-reach prospects in areas of significant geologic dip — increasing the risk of missing the prospects. This mispositioning risk could sometimes exceed the geologic risk, and it could have significant impact on the risked reserves and on the economics. Achieving the desired positioning accuracy requires the use of 3D seismic and anisotropic prestack depth migration with accurate velocity and anisotropy models. We have developed a case study of using a long offset walkaway checkshot and a geologic frame of reference to build a tilted transverse isotropy velocity model sufficiently accurate to support potential future drilling campaigns at the Lobster field.

We study a market for funding real investment where valuation—meaning investors devoting resources to acquiring information about future payoffs—creates an adverse selection problem. Unlike previous models, more valuation is associated with lower market prices and so greater returns to valuation. This strategic complementarity in the capacity to do valuation generates multiple equilibria. With multiple equilibria, the equilibrium without valuation is most efficient despite funding some unprofitable investments. Switches to valuation equilibria, valuation runs, look like credit crunches. A large investor can ensure the efficient equilibrium only if it can precommit to a price and potentially, only if subsidized.

Households in the Nielsen Consumer Panel were surveyed about their 2008 Economic Stimulus Payment. In estimates identified by the randomized timing of disbursement, the average household׳s spending rose by 10 percent the week it received a Payment and remained high cumulating to 1.5–3.8 percent of spending over three months. These estimates imply partial-equilibrium increases in aggregate demand of 1.3 percent of consumption in the second quarter of 2008 and 0.6 percent in the third. Spending is concentrated among households with low wealth or low past income; a household׳s spending did not increase significantly when it learned about its Payment., Sloan School of Management, Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.). Kellogg School of Management, University of Chicago. Initiative for Global Markets, Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.). Kellogg School of Management. Zell Center for Risk Research, Harvard University. Laboratory for Applied Economics and Policy

We develop a structural theory of beliefs and behavior that relaxes the assumption of time consistency in beliefs. Our theory is based on the trade-off between optimism, which raises anticipatory utility, and objectivity, which promotes efficient actions. We present it in the context of allocating work on a project over time, develop testable implications to contrast it with models assuming time-inconsistent preferences, and compare its predictions to existing evidence on behavior and beliefs. Our predictions are that (i) optimal beliefs are optimistic and time inconsistent; (ii) people optimally exhibit the planning fallacy; (iii) incentives for rapid task completion make beliefs more optimistic and worsen work smoothing, whereas incentives for accurate duration prediction make beliefs less optimistic and improve work smoothing; (iv) without a commitment device, beliefs become less optimistic over time; and (v) in the presence of a commitment device, beliefs may become more optimistic over time, and people optimally exhibit preference for commitment. This paper was accepted by Neng Wang, finance.

We evaluate the consistency of two methods for estimating the effect of an economic policy: i) surveying people to report the change in their behavior caused by the policy, ii) inferring this change using (reported) actual behavior and differences in treatment across people. Both methods have been widely used to measure propensities to spend. Using Federal stimulus payments disbursed quasi-randomly over time in 2008, we find greater revealed-preference estimates of spending by households reporting greater spending and the two methods produce similar estimates of average spending. But, counterfactually, reported preferences estimates are not higher for households with lower liquidity.

We measure the response of household spending to the economic stimulus payments (ESPs) disbursed in mid-2008, using special questions added to the Consumer Expenditure Survey and variation arising from the randomized timing of when the payments were disbursed. We find that, on average, households spent about 12-30% (depending on the specification) of their stimulus payments on nondurable expenditures during the three-month period in which the payments were received. Further, there was also a substantial and significant increase in spending on durable goods, in particular vehicles, bringing the average total spending response to about 50-90% of the payments. Relative to research on the 2001 tax rebates, these spending responses are estimated with greater precision using the randomized timing variation. The estimated responses are substantial and significant for older, lower-income, and home-owning households. We find little evidence that the propensity to spend varies with the method of disbursement (paper check versus electronic transfer).

Results for the solubilization of metals from biosolid- (BSL-) treated soils by simulated organic acid-based synthetic root exudates (OA mixtures) of differing composition and concentrations are presented. This study used two BSL-treated Romona soils and a BSL-free Romona soil control that were collected from experimental plots of a long-term BSL land application experiment. Results indicate that the solubility of metals in a BSL-treated soil with 0.01 and 0.1 M OA mixtures was significantly higher than that of 0.001 M concentrations. Differences in composition of OAs caused by BSL treatment and the length of growing periods did not affect the solubility of metals. There were no significant differences in organic composition and metals extracted for plants grown at 2, 4, 8, 12, and 16 weeks. The amount of metals extracted tended to decrease with the increase of the pH. Results of metal dissolution kinetics indicate two-stage metal dissolution. A rapid dissolution of metals occurred in the first 15 minutes. For Cd, Cu, Ni, and Zn, approximately 60–70% of the metals were released in the first 15 minutes while the initial releases for Cr and Pb were approximately 30% of the total. It was then followed by a slow but steady release of additional metals over 48 hours.