Innovation, Growth, and Asset Prices KUNG, HOWARD; SCHMID, LUKAS
The Journal of finance (New York),
June 2015, Letnik:
70, Številka:
3
Journal Article
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We examine the asset pricing implications of a production economy whose long-term growth prospects are endogenously determined by innovation and R&D. In equilibrium, R&D endogenously drives a small, ...persistent component in productivity that generates long-run uncertainty about economic growth. With recursive preferences, households fear that persistent downturns in economic growth are accompanied by low asset valuations and command high-risk premia in asset markets. Empirically, we find substantial evidence for innovation-driven low-frequency movements in aggregate growth rates and asset market valuations. In short, equilibrium growth is risky.
Residence of unauthorized immigrants is a stable feature of the Global North’s liberal democracies. This article asks how liberal-democratic policymakers should respond to this phenomenon, assuming ...both that states have incontrovertible rights and interests to assert control over immigration and that unauthorized residence is nevertheless an entrenched fact. It argues that a set of liberal-democratic commitments gives policymakers strong reason to implement both so-called ‘firewall’ and ‘regularization’ policies, thereby protecting unauthorized immigrants’ basic needs and interests and officially incorporating many of them in society. It then explains that the background imperative of immigration control creates a dilemmatic tension between these policies, as regularization is envisaged alongside the removal of the ineligible, which is in turn hindered by the implementation of firewalls. This creates a dilemma between the pursuit of two policy goals that are both underwritten by the same value commitments. Though it cannot be entirely dissolved, I argue that the best way to mitigate this dilemma is to design regularization policy in a way that leaves only a small number of unauthorized immigrants subject to removal.
Levered Returns GOMES, JOAO F.; SCHMID, LUKAS
The Journal of finance (New York),
April 2010, Letnik:
65, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper revisits the theoretical relation between financial leverage and stock returns in a dynamic world where both corporate investment and financing decisions are endogenous. We find that the ...link between leverage and stock returns is more complex than static textbook examples suggest, and depends on the investment opportunities available to the firm. In the presence of financial market imperfections, leverage and investment are generally correlated so that highly levered firms are also mature firms with relatively more (safe) book assets and fewer (risky) growth opportunities. A quantitative version of our model matches several stylized facts about leverage and returns.
Citizens unequally participate in referendums, and this may systematically bias policy in favor of those who vote. Some view compulsory voting as an important tool to alleviate this problem, whereas ...others worry about its detrimental effects on the legitimacy and quality of democratic decision making. So far, however, we lack systematic knowledge about the causal effect of compulsory voting on public policy. We argue that sanctioned compulsory voting mobilizes citizens at the bottom of the income distribution and that this translates into an increase in support for leftist policies. We empirically explore the effects of a sanctioned compulsory voting law on direct-democratic decision making in Switzerland. We find that compulsory voting significantly increases electoral support for leftist policy positions in referendums by up to 20 percentage points. We discuss the implications of these results for our understanding of the policy consequences of electoral institutions.
Traditional theory implies that fiscal federalism hinders redistribution and increases inequality. Decentralization might however improve predistribution. To obtain more precise empirical evidence on ...this relationship we introduce an interaction between tax decentralization and jurisdictional fragmentation and analyze its impact on pre- vs. after-tax inequality. The empirical strategy relies on the unique institutional setting and data consistency in Switzerland which allows to exploit cantonal variance since 1945. According to our findings, tax decentralization reduces income inequality as long as jurisdictional fragmentation remains limited. Significant effects in pre-tax income suggest an impact via the predistribution instead of the redistribution channel.
States cannot legitimately enforce their borders against migrants if dominant conceptions of sovereignty inform enforcement because these conceptions undermine sufficient respect for migrants’ basic ...human rights. Instead, such conceptions lead states to assert total control over outsiders’ potential cross-border movements to support their in-group’s self-rule. Thus, although legitimacy requires states to prioritize universal respect for basic human rights, sovereign states today generally fail to do so when it comes to border enforcement. I contend that this enforcement could only be rendered legitimate if it was predicated on more desirable conceptions of sovereignty that supported the universal prioritization of basic human rights. Specifically, desirable conceptions would not establish and require absolute state sovereignty over borders as a necessary precondition for true popular self-governance.
Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is an aggressive malignancy. Tumor-derived exosomes (TEX) have immunoregulatory properties. Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and its immunosuppressive ...precursor adenosine (ADO) have been found in cancerous tissue. We investigated the effect of TEX on B cells in the presence of ATP. TEX were isolated from human HNSCC cell line (PCI-13) cultures and co-cultured with peripheral blood B cells of healthy donors, with or without TEX in different concentrations and with or without a low (20 µM) or high (2000 µM) ATP dose. We were able to demonstrate that TEX inhibit B-cell proliferation. The addition of TEX to either ATP concentration showed a decreasing trend in CD39 expression on B cells in a dose-dependent manner. High ATP levels (2000 µM) increased apoptosis and necrosis, and analysis of apoptosis-associated proteins revealed dose-dependent effects of ATP, which were modified by TEX. Altogether, TEX exhibited dual immunomodulatory effects on B cells. TEX were immunosuppressive by inhibiting B-cell proliferation; they were immunostimulatory by downregulating CD39 expression. Furthermore, TEX were able to modulate the expression of pro- and anti-apoptotic proteins. In conclusion, our data indicate that TEX play an important, but complex, role in the tumor microenvironment.
Neutrality during World War I was not assured but depended on the ability of a neutral state to adjust to the major belligerent powers’ interests. How did Switzerland manage to adhere to its ...neutrality policy under those circumstances? This paper analyzes contemporary perceptions of neutrality by means of a structural break analysis. According to historiography Switzerland was endangered from within rather than by foreign actions. The analysis based on a newly assembled database supports this assessment in parts. In the bondholders’ view, Switzerland’s neutrality was most threatened by the events leading up to the general strike in November 1918.
Recent advances in high throughput phenotyping have made it possible to collect large datasets following plant growth and development over time, and those in machine learning have made inferring ...phenotypic plant traits from such datasets possible. However, there remains a dirth of datasets following plant growth under stress conditions along with methods for inferring them using only remotely sensed data, especially under a combination of multiple stress factors such as drought, weeds and nutrient deficiency. Such stress factors and their combinations are commonly encountered during crop production and being able to accurately detect and treat such stress conditions in an automated and timely manner can provide a major boost to farm yields with minimal resource input.
We present a generic framework for remote plant stress phenotyping that consists of a dataset with spatio-temporal-spectral data following sugarbeet crop growth under optimal, drought, low and surplus nitrogen fertilization, and weed stress conditions, along with a machine learning based methodology for systematically inferring these stress conditions from the remotely measured data. The dataset contains biweekly color images, infra-red stereo image pairs and hyperspectral camera images along with applied treatment parameters and environmental factors like temperature and humidity, collected over two months. We present a plant agnostic methodology for deriving plant trait indicators such as canopy cover, height, hyperspectral reflectance and vegetation indices along with a spectral 3D reconstruction of the plants from the raw data to serve as a benchmark. Additionally, we provide fresh and dry weight measurements for both the above (canopy) and below (beet) ground biomass at the end of the growing period to serve as indicators of expected yield. We further describe a data driven, machine learning based method to infer water, Nitrogen and weed stress using the derived plant trait indicators. We use the plant trait indicators to evaluate 8 different classification approaches from which the best classifier achieved a mean cross validation accuracy of
93, 76 and 83% for drought, nitrogen and weed stress severity classification respectively. We also show that our multi-modal approach significantly improves classifier performance over using any single modality.
The presented framework and dataset can serve as a valuable reference for creating and comparing processing pipelines which extract plant trait indicators and infer prevalent stress factors from remote sensing data under a variety of environments and cropping conditions. These techniques can then be deployed on farm machinery or robots enabling automated, precise and timely corrective interventions for maximising yield.
Purity as Difference Identity and Alterity in Max Frisch`s early fiction This study investigates the early fiction of Max Frisch, previously only margin-ally discussed, in particular his first novel, ...«Jürg Reinhart. Eine sommerliche Schicksalsfahrt» (1934), the novella «Antwort aus der Stille» (1937), as well as the sequel to the Reinhart story, «J’adore ce qui me brûle oder Die Schwierigen». It uses previously unknown sources to reconstruct the creative origins of these works. Deploying a discourse analysis, this book employs analytical techniques from gender and postcolonial studies to deconstruct is-sues of ethnicity, nationalism, gender, and class. The three texts, and their constructions of identity and alterity are contextualized within the contested zone of ‹purity› and ‹difference› and relevant fields of discourse. «Antwort aus der Stille» is investigated within the Alpine discourse, including its nationalistic, gender-political and sexist extensions, «Jürg Reinhart» in the anti-Semitic, Orientalist, Balkan and Slavic discourses, and «J’adore ce qui me brûle» in the contemporary discourse of emancipation and gender issues, and especially in the discourse of eugenics and its Social Darwinist implications.
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