Does Political Giving Impact Shareholder Wealth? Evidence from State Campaign Finance Reforms

Does corporate political giving actually affect shareholder wealth? While firms value political participation, some lawmakers oppose corporate involvement in politics. Yet, the existing literature has established a correlation between campaign finance and corporate outcomes without fully documenting a causal relation. I use an innovative database of political giving to exploit changes in state campaign finance laws as an exogenous shock to political giving. Specifically, I use the staggered adoption of externally imposed legal limits to political giving across U.S. states to expose how shareholder wealth responds. I find shareholder wealth declines following legally imposed reductions in political giving. The causal effect of political giving on shareholder wealth that I find speaks to the larger role of politics in firms and the economy. The results suggest corporate political giving leads to greater shareholder wealth, and reforms reduce corporate political participation, informing the debate around campaign finance reform

Combining Causality Tests and Path Analysis to Model Agricultural Markets

Causality tests and path analysis are combined to create a new procedure for use in evaluating agricultural markets. The two complementary techniques combine to form a strong process for measuring the direction and strength of causal relationships within a structural equation model. An empirical example which evaluates midwestern corn market price relationships is presented

The Problem of Aggregation in Spatial Equilibrium Analysis

Aggregation across time has long been recognized as a potential source of specification error within time series modeling. This source of specification error has major implications for the use of causality tests in spatial equilibrium analyses. This study reviews the theoretical econometric literature to generate hypotheses which are empirically tested to illustrate the impacts of aggregation on causality tests. Granger causality tests for three major corn markets reveal one-way causality to be fragile with respect to changes in the level of time aggregation in data. Dynamic multipliers are discussed as being one method of checking the specification of the model

Approximating invariant densities of metastable systems

We consider a piecewise smooth expanding map of the interval possessing two invariant subsets of positive Lebesgue measure and exactly two ergodic absolutely continuous invariant probability measures (ACIMs). When this system is perturbed slightly to make the invariant sets merge, we describe how the unique ACIM of the perturbed map can be approximated by a convex combination of the two initial ergodic ACIMs.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figure

Mean Value Theorems for Riemannian Manifolds Via the Obstacle Problem

We develop some of the basic theory for the obstacle problem on Riemannian manifolds, and we use it to establish a mean value theorem. Our mean value theorem works for a very wide class of Riemannian manifolds and has no weights at all within the integral

Ceramic matrix composites at GE Aviation

General Electric Aviation (GEA) is the world’s leader in aircraft engine production. For more than a half century, GE has been at the forefront of developing advanced materials for turbine applications, including the recent certification of Ceramic Matrix Composites (CMC’s) on the LEAP engine. The introduction of SiC/SiC CMC materials into hot section components provides a significant increase in fuel efficiency. These propulsion system benefits are being realized as a result of significant technology development progress over the past 20 years. During this time, GE has taken CMCs from the lab to robust, cost-effective manufacturing. GE Aviation already has CMC manufacturing facilities in Newark, Delaware and an advanced composite component factory near Asheville, North Carolina. In addition, GE is currently building-out a ceramics raw material production facility in Huntsville, AL. These manufacturing capabilities will enable high production volumes of CMC materials and components required to support industry needs. Key aspects of CMC technology maturation and industrialization at GE Aviation will be discussed in this Paper, including component testing, data analytics, process modeling, manufacturing scale-up, and production readiness

The Influence of Technological Change on Grain Elevator Pricing Efficiency

The introduction of unit train technology is found to increase the pricing efficiency of a case study elevator. Daily prices are found to be more correlated with destination market prices and nearby futures contract prices after the subterminal was introduced. The increased ability to physically arbitrage between markets integrated the elevator into the regional and national grain market. The subterminal technology altered the price behavior of the elevator beyond simply changing the level of prices received by producers

Graphics + Robotics + AI = Fast, 3D Scene Construction

Sceneconstruction is the process of building realis- tic, three-dimensionalrepresentations, or models,of real world environments, such as rooms, landsacpes or buildings. Because of the realistic quality of images being produced, current scene construction algorithms require manualprocessing by humanexperts. However, the benefits of having such 3Dmodelsare great. Con- sider a situation where a three-dimensional modelof an evironment must be created in real-time. Existing scene construction algorithms will not su~ce. There- fore we have outlined a newarea of quick and dirty scene construction whereusable, lowresolution, three- dimensional models of real world environments can be created in real time. This paper describes the need for such a system, and provides a generalized approachfor accomplishingthe task

Graphics + Robotics + AI = Fast, 3D Scene Construction

Sceneconstruction is the process of building realis- tic, three-dimensionalrepresentations, or models,of real world environments, such as rooms, landsacpes or buildings. Because of the realistic quality of images being produced, current scene construction algorithms require manualprocessing by humanexperts. However, the benefits of having such 3Dmodelsare great. Con- sider a situation where a three-dimensional modelof an evironment must be created in real-time. Existing scene construction algorithms will not su~ce. There- fore we have outlined a newarea of quick and dirty scene construction whereusable, lowresolution, three- dimensional models of real world environments can be created in real time. This paper describes the need for such a system, and provides a generalized approachfor accomplishingthe task