THE EFFECT OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS ON CEO COMPENSATION IN BAD VERSUS GOOD PERFORMANCE FIRMS

This paper investigates the relation between firm performance preceding the Financial Crisis and their CEO compensation after the Crisis. We find a significant decrease in CEO compensation for firms that had bad performance prior to the Crisis, compared to those who performed well before the Crisis. This result remains after controlling for firm size, accounting performance, and year and industry fixed effects. The decrease in compensation seems to be derived from the drop in equity-based compensation. We conclude that boards are effective and considered the performance of the firm prior to the Crisis when they considered setting the compensation following the shock of the Crisis

Particle focusing and separation in xanthan gum solutions

There has been increasing interest in the use of magnetic fluids to manipulate diamagnetic particles in microfluidic devices. Focusing particles (both biological and synthetic) into a single tight stream is usually a necessary upstream operation in numerous microfluidic applications. Current methods for diamagnetic-particle focusing in magnetic fluids require either a pair of repulsive magnets or a diamagnetic sheath flow, which can work efficiently for very small particles by simply increasing the flow-rate ratio between the sheath fluid and particle suspension. This approach, however, becomes difficult to implement if particles need to be focused in both the horizontal and vertical directions for so-called three dimensional focusing. Therefore, a variety of sheathless particle-focusing approaches have been developed in microfluidic devices, which are classified as either passive or active depending on the source of the involving force. We demonstrate herein a passive, tunable, sheathless focusing of diamagnetic particles in a microchannel ferrofluid flow with a single set of overhead permanent magnets. Particles are focused into a single stream near the bottom wall of a straight rectangular microchannel, where a magnetic-field minimum is formed because of the magnetization of the ferrofluid. This focusing can be readily switched off and on by removing and replacing the permanent magnets. More importantly, the particle-focusing position can be tuned by shifting the magnets with respect to the microchannel. We perform a systematic experimental study of the parametric effects of the fluid-particle-channel system on diamagnetic particle focusing in terms of a defined particle-focusing effectiveness

Ca(r)veat Emptor: Crowdsourcing Data to Challenge the Testimony of In-Car Technology

This Article addresses the situation in which a car acts as a witness against its human driver in a court of law. This possibility has become a reality due to technology embedded in modern-day vehicles that captures data prior to a crash event. The authors contend that it is becoming increasingly difficult for drivers to defend themselves in a meaningful way against the testimony of cars and suggest that crowdsourcing data could be a viable option for assessing the trustworthiness of such evidence. The Article further explores whether crowdsourced data could be used as an additional source of information in the fact-finding process and if such data could provide a counterbalance to the prevailing tendency to fault human drivers rather than their vehicles or the manufactures of their vehicles. The practical importance of this issue in the age of driving automation is highlighted, and lawyers, judges, and lawmakers are urged to remain open-minded regarding the use of this new strategy