Collateral Damage: When Should the Determinations of Administrative Adjudications Have Collateral Estoppel Effect in Subsequent Adjudications?

Collateral estoppel is an equitable doctrine under which a court gives issue-preclusive effect to findings of fact or law made in previous proceedings. The U.S. Supreme Court has recently held that under certain circumstances, the determinations of administrative adjudications have collateral estoppel effect in federal court. The Court, however, did not address under which circumstances the determinations of administrative adjudications should have collateral estoppel effect in subsequent administrative adjudications. There has been little clear and consistent reasoning in lower federal courts about when collateral estoppel should apply in administrative adjudications, and administrative agencies vary widely in their application of collateral estoppel when conducting adjudications. This Note argues that neither the balancing test used to apply collateral estoppel in federal court nor the more formalistic per se rules proposed by some commentators are appropriate when applying collateral estoppel between administrative adjudications. Instead, courts should defer to agencies, granting them wide discretion to recognize or not recognize the collateral estoppel effect of prior administrative adjudications

Comments on Piazzesi and Schneider's "Bond positions, expectations, and the yield curve"

This working paper comments on Monika Piazzesi and Martin Schneider's "Bond Positions, Expectations, and the Yield Curve," delivered at the Fiscal Policy and Monetary/Fiscal Policy Interactions conference held at the Atlanta Fed on April 19–20, 2007.Bonds - Prices ; Consumer behavior

Paintings and their implicit presuppositions : a preliminary report

In a series of earlier papers (Social Science Working Papers 350, 355. 357) we have studied the ways in which differences in "implicit presupposi tions" (i. e •• differences in world views) cause scientists and historians to reach differing conclusions from a consideration of the same evidence. In this paper we show that paintings are characterized by implicit presuppositions similar to those that characterize the written materials -- essays, letters, scientific papers -- we have already studied

Paintings and their implicit presuppositions: High Renaissance and Mannerism

All art historians who are interested in questions of "styles" or "schools" agree in identifying a High Renaissance school of Italian painting. There is, however, a disagreement, which has seemed nonterminating, regarding Mannerism: Is it another distinct school or is it merely a late development of the Renaissance school? We believe that this disagreement can be terminated by distinguishing questions of fact about paintings from questions about the definitions of schools. To this end we have had two representative subsets of paintings--one earlier, one later--rated on four of the dimensions of implicit presuppositions that we have introduced in other Working Papers. When the paintings are scaled in this way a very distinct profile emerges for the earlier, or Renaissance, paintings. In contrast, the later, or Mannerist, paintings are so heterogeneous that we conclude that they are best described as deviations from the Renaissance profile, rather than a separate school. These results are not unimportant--at least for art historians. But they are more important methodologically inasmuch as the procedures applied here can be used in classifying and distinguishing from one another all kind of cultural products

An Assessment of University Infrastructure Impact on the Safety of Individuals with Physical Disabilities at the University of Texas at Austin - Poster

Personal safety at the University of Texas is an increasingly popular topic of conversation between students, staff, faculty, and University administration. Concerns stemming from the recently passed “Campus Carry” legislation and the on-campus murder of an undergraduate student that occurred in the spring of 2016 spark debate over the utility of various safety resources currently available on-campus. However, the accessibility of said resources is hardly addressed. Per the 2010 U.S. Census, over 15% of U.S. adults identify as having any physical functioning difficulty. As the University of Texas campus hosts tens of thousands of adults each day, this thesis was conducted to address the flowing overarching question: How does the physical infrastructure of current safety resources on the University of Texas at Austin campus impact the safety of students, faculty, and staff with physical disabilities? To address this question, a survey was developed based on 2 semi-structured interviews gauging safety concerns with individuals from the disabled community, news articles documenting the use of campus safety resources, and University published documents. The survey underwent content review by 4 subject matter experts in areas such as civil engineering, campus diversity and community engagement, and the Americans with Disabilities act of 1990. Social media platforms such as Facebook and email list serves for various groups at the University of Texas were used to distribute the survey. It is expected that the results of the survey will indicate the perceptions of current and former students, faculty, and staff will underestimate the prevalence and use and overestimate the accessibility of certain safety resources mentioned in the survey. This poster is a summarized presentation of the findings from the survey.Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineerin

Comparing Greenbook and Reduced Form Forecasts using a Large Realtime Dataset

Many recent papers have found that atheoretical forecasting methods using many predictors give better predictions for key macroeconomic variables than various small-model methods. The practical relevance of these results is open to question, however, because these papers generally use ex post revised data not available to forecasters and because no comparison is made to best actual practice. We provide some evidence on both of these points using a new large dataset of vintage data synchronized with the Fed's Greenbook forecast. This dataset consists of a large number of variables, as observed at the time of each Greenbook forecast since 1979. Thus, we can compare real-time large dataset predictions to both simple univariate methods and to the Greenbook forecast. For inflation we find that univariate methods are dominated by the best atheoretical large dataset methods and that these, in turn, are dominated by Greenbook. For GDP growth, in contrast, we find that once one takes account of Greenbook's advantage in evaluating the current state of the economy, neither large dataset methods nor the Greenbook process offers much advantage over a univariate autoregressive forecast.

An investigation of co-movements among the growth rates of the G-7 countries

Early in 2000, after a decade of economic expansion, growth began to slow simultaneously in the large, advanced economies known as the Group of Seven (G-7)--Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The general slide in GDP growth fueled speculation that a period was emerging in which broad movements in the economies of the industrialized countries would be more closely linked. Proponents of this view argued that greater trade in goods and financial markets was leading to a greater synchronization of national economies. A rise in the co-movement of GDP among countries would have important implications for the making of national economic policies. Governments, for example, would need to take closer account of forecasts for conditions abroad in formulating forecasts for their domestic economies. The authors find, first, that the degree to which enhanced trade and financial linkages might be expected to increase the co-movement, or correlation, of economic growth among countries is far from clear. Then, examining the period from 1970 to the first quarter of 2002, the authors find that, indeed, the estimated correlation of growth across the G-7 has been higher in the current downturn than during the expansion of the 1990s. Rather than signaling a future of permanently higher synchronization, however, the rise is shown to be typical of business cycles over the past thirty years. Furthermore, estimates of correlation have not yet reached the peaks attained after earlier recessions. Overall, despite many changes in the international economy, the evidence does not reveal the arrival of a permanently higher correlation of growth rates among the G-7.Group of Seven countries ; Economic development