Concentration Levels in the U.S. Advertising and Marketing Services Industry: Myth vs. Reality

This paper analyzes changes in concentration levels in the U.S. Advertising and Marketing Services (A&MS) industry using publicly released data that have been largely ignored in past discussions of the industrial organization of this industry, namely those available from the U.S. Census Bureau's quinquennial Economic Census and the Service Annual Survey. We define the A&MS industry in terms of nine sectors, each of which is represented by a separate 5 digit NAICS category. In so doing, we have sought to redress some of the measurement problems surrounding estimates found in the existing literature. Our main findings are threefold. First, in the case of the core and largest sector, Advertising Agencies, firm level concentration as measured by Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) increased slightly but remained relatively low from 1977 to 2002. All of the HHI estimates readily satisfied the standard widely used to characterize an industry as "unconcentrated." We find mixed support for the hypotheses that the ranks of mid-sized agencies were depleted by ongoing waves of mergers and acquisitions and resulted in a polarized size structure. The size distributions of agency revenue have become more polarized in the sense that over time they appear more skewed, more dispersed, and exhibit greater inequality. The share of total receipts realized by small agencies fell while that of large agencies rose. However, the position of mid-sized agencies appears to have changed little over the period 1977- 2002, as measured by the shares of agencies and receipts they represent. Second, concentration levels in 1997 and 2002 varied across the nine sectors comprising the A&MS industry, but all were within the range generally considered as indicative of a competitive industry. Third, we developed concentration ratios at the level of holding companies (HC's) and find that the four largest HC's captured between a fifth and a quarter of total revenue from the A&MS industry, a share that remained quite stable over the period, 2002-2006. These estimates are lower by an order of magnitude than estimates often cited in the trade press. Reasons for the discrepancy are discussed.

Single-inductor, multiple-output buck converter with parallel source transient recovery

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-66).To address the need for multiple regulated voltage supplies in electronic devices, this thesis presents a modeling and design study of a single-inductor, multiple-output (SIMO) DC-DC buck converter with parallel source transient recovery. This converter would provide substantial cost and space savings over traditional options for producing multiple supply voltages. Operating in pseudo-continuous conduction mode (PCCM), it can supply heavy loads while not suffering from cross-regulation problems. The parallel current source circuitry at each output will greatly dampen any voltage spikes that may occur due to sudden load changes, thus improving transient performance. While the entire converter could not be nicely simulated as envisioned, the initial steps and accomplishments outlined in this thesis show definite promise. The proposed converter certainly merits further research, as the problems encountered here most likely stem from implementation and control issues rather than fundamental flaws in the idea.by Charles Jackson King III.M.Eng

How Good a Deal Was the Tobacco Settlement?: Assessing Payments to Massachusetts

We estimate the increment in Massachusetts Medicaid program costs attributable to smoking from December 20, 1991, to 1998. We describe how our methods improve upon earlier estimates of analogous costs at the national level. Current costs to the Massachusetts Medicaid program approximate the payments to Massachusetts under the tobacco settlement of November 1998. Whether these payments are viewed as appropriate compensation for Medicaid costs over time depends upon the rate of increase in future health care costs, the rate of decline in smoking, the proportion of smoking that should be attributed to the actions of the tobacco companies and the liklihood that state would have prevailed at trial. The costs to the Medicaid program are dwarfed by the internal costs to smokers themselves.

The Future of American Sentencing: A National Roundtable on Blakely

In the wake of the dramatic Supreme Court decision in Blakely v. Washington, Stanford Law School convened an assembly of the most eminent academic and professional sentencing experts in the country to jointly assess the meaning of the decision and its implications for federal and state sentencing reform. The event took place on October 8 and 9, just a few months after Blakely came down and the very week that the Supreme Court heard the arguments in United States v. Booker and United States v. Fanfan, the cases that will test Blakely\u27s application to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Thus the Roundtable offered these experts an intellectual breathing space at a crucial point in American criminal law. The event was built around six sessions, with shifting panels of participants doing brief presentations on the subject of the session, and with others then joining in the discussion. We are pleased that FSR is able to publish this version of the proceedings of the event-a condensed and edited transcript of the sessions

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead