ENVH 7231 - Air Quality

Introduces students to chemical, physical, and biological principles of air quality, as well as potential sources of contamination and the resulting effects. The course will also introduce environmental policies pertinent to air issues along with current remediation strategies to ameliorate pollution

Trade, law and order, and political liberties: theory and application to English medieval boroughs

Earleir version issued as discussion paperWe develop a framework that puts the administration at the core of the relationship between trade and political liberties. A ruler chooses the size of an administration that (i) collects taxes and (ii) provides law and order for a representative merchant to use. To be exploited, large gains from trade require a relatively large administration. However, keeping a large administration in check is difficult. When the resulting inefficiencies are significant, the ruler grants control of the administration to the better-informed merchant, even though this facilitates tax evasion. We analyze the case of post-Norman Conquest England (1066-1307) by using evidence on taxation, commerce, and political liberties across boroughs. We use boroughs’ ownership as a proxy for the cost of controlling the administration, and find that rulers with a high cost are more willing to grant boroughs the control of their administration. Also, provided it belongs to a high-cost ruler, a borough’s propensity to receive a grant increases with its commercial importance. Finally, we find that boroughs are willing to pay higher taxes in exchange for liberties

Trade, Self-Governance,and the Provision of Law and Order, with an Application To Medieval English Chartered Towns

We build a model to investigate the interaction between trade, the supply of law and order, and the nature of governing political institutions. To supply law and order necessary for a representative merchant to create wealth, a ruler (i) appoints officials capable of coercion and (ii) introduces a system of taxation. When potential gains from trade are important, the demand for law and order is high but appointing numerous officials capable of coercion may pave the way to arbitrary and distortive expropriation. Delegating the task of appointing offi- cials to the better-informed merchant lowers the cost of sustaining good market institutions, but exacerbates the latter's temptation to escape taxation. When gains from trade are instead low delegation never occurs. Our theory provides a rationale for the case of post-Norman Conquest England (1066-1307) where, in parallel with the rise of trade, kings increasingly give in to the citizens' desire of self-governance by granting Charters of Liberties

Rethinking Chutes: Incentives, Investments, and Innovation

Eighty-two percent of public firms have golden parachutes (or “chutes”) under which CEOs and senior officers may be paid tens of millions of dollars upon their employer’s change in control. What justifies such extraordinary payouts? Much of the conventional analysis views chutes as excessive compensation granted by captured boards, focusing on the payouts that occur following a takeover. Those explanations, if they ever were complete, miss the mark today. This Article demonstrates, theoretically and empirically, that chutes are less relevant to a firm during a takeover than they are before a takeover, particularly in relation to firms that invest in innovation. Chutes assure\ud managers of realizing the long-term value of their work, even if the firm is later acquired. As a result, managers are more likely to make specific investments in innovation whose value may not be realized for some time—but which are essential to sustaining long-term performance. Moreover, when granted, a chute’s expected cost is a small fraction of what may be paid, reflecting the real likelihood a payment will never be made. That cost is more than offset by the value of the specific investments in innovation that managers are now more likely to make. Consequently, granting chutes tends to increase the value of innovative firms—promoting, rather than jeopardizing, shareholder interests\ud in such firms.\ud Nevertheless, an analysis of chutes as a valuable tool in promoting innovation is largely missing from the corporate law scholarship, with important consequences. Two, in particular, are the negative view of proxy advisors on chutes, and recent federal Say-on-Golden-Parachute legislation that mandates certain types of disclosure regarding chutes. We recommend changes that properly reflect the low expected cost of chutes and their positive effect on innovation

Sportswomen as Brand Ambassadors: Prospects, Challenges and Possibilities

Research has shown that sportswomen are not being given the same opportunities as sportsmen to earn sponsorships from brands to become brand ambassadors. Sportsmen appear to be more favoured by brands as they have higher profiles, can attract a larger audience and increase profit margins. The challenges, opportunities and prospects for sportswomen to have equal opportunities to improve their commercial viability and boost their revenue with brand sponsorships are investigated in this study. Semi-structured interviews are conducted with 5 brand managers, 15 sportswomen and 10 consumers to explore attitudes and opinions. Results revealed there are opportunities for women to become brand ambassadors, however, there are several key challenges facing the sportswomen including the physical restrictions of being a woman, the cycle of popularity, media coverage, being aware, having the look, a strong media team and a strong moral compass. Opportunities for various stakeholders (including the sportswomen themselves, brand, the media, the government and the public) are discussed to give sportswomen sufficient opportunities to become brand ambassadors

Analyzing and reconstructing reticulation networks under timing constraints

Reticulation networks are now frequently used to model the history of life for various groups of species whose evolutionary past is likely to include reticulation events such as horizontal gene transfer or hybridization. However, the reconstructed networks are rarely guaranteed to be temporal. If a reticulation network is temporal, then it satisfies the two biologically motivated timing constraints of instantaneously occurring reticulation events and successively occurring speciation events. On the other hand, if a reticulation network is not temporal, it is always possible to make it temporal by adding a number of additional unsampled or extinct taxa. In the first half of the paper, we show that deciding whether a given number of additional taxa is sufficient to transform a non-temporal reticulation network into a temporal one is an NP-complete problem. As one is often given a set of gene trees instead of a network in the context of hybridization, this motivates the second half of the paper which provides an algorithm, called TemporalHybrid, for reconstructing a temporal hybridization network that simultaneously explains the ancestral history of two trees or indicates that no such network exists. We further derive two methods to decide whether or not a temporal hybridization network exists for two given trees and illustrate one of the methods on a grass data se

Rethinking Chutes: Incentives, Investment, and Innovation

Eighty-two percent of public firms have golden parachutes (or “chutes”) under which CEOs and senior officers may be paid tens of millions of dollars upon their employer’s change in control. What justifies such extraordinary payouts? Much of the conventional analysis views chutes as excessive compensation granted by captured boards, focusing on the payouts that occur following a takeover. Those explanations, if they ever were complete, miss the mark today. This Article demonstrates, theoretically and empirically, that chutes are less relevant to a firm during a takeover than they are before a takeover, particularly in relation to firms that invest in innovation. Chutes assure managers of realizing the long-term value of their work, even if the firm is later acquired. As a result, managers are more likely to make specific investments in innovation whose value may not be realized for some time — but that which are essential to sustaining long-term performance. Moreover, when granted, a chute’s expected cost is a small fraction of what may be paid, reflecting the real likelihood a payment will never be made. That cost is more than offset by the value of the specific investments in innovation that managers are now more likely to make. Consequently, granting chutes tends to increase the value of innovative firms — promoting, rather than jeopardizing, shareholder interests in such firms. Nevertheless, an analysis of chutes as a valuable tool in promoting innovation is largely missing from the corporate law scholarship, with important consequences. Two, in particular, are the negative view of proxy advisors on chutes, and recent federal Say-on-Golden-Parachute legislation that mandates certain types of disclosure regarding chutes. We recommend changes that properly reflect the low expected cost of chutes and their positive effect on innovation