Why are we losing manufacturing jobs?

In the last 50 years, the share of employment in manufacturing has declined in the United States. The main reason for this phenomenon is labor-saving technological progress. Variation among state tax polices and international economic conditions have played only minor roles. The source of future prosperity will be technological advances in a service-oriented economy.Manufactures ; Labor market

Purchasing Power Parity and Interest Parity in the Laboratory,

This paper analyzes purchasing power parity and uncovered interest parity in the laboratory. It finds strong evidence that purchasing power parity, covered interest parity, and uncovered interest parity hold. Subjects are endowed with an intrinsically useless (green) currency that can be used to purchase another useless (red) currency. Green goods can be bought only with green currency, and red goods can be bought only with red currency. The foreign exchange markets are organized as call markets. In the treatment analyzing purchasing power parity, the price of the red good varies. In a second treatment, the interest rate on red currency varies. In a third treatment, the interest rate on red currency varies, and the price of the red good is random.

Is Accurate Understanding of Global Warming Necessary to Promote Willingness to Sacrifice?

Although not definitive, the authors\u27 study suggests potential benefits from having a general public better informed about global climate change. They find, e.g., that accurate information appears to increase willingness to accept personal sacrifice

Depinning with dynamic stress overshoots: A hybrid of critical and pseudohysteretic behavior

A model of an elastic manifold driven through a random medium by an applied force F is studied focussing on the effects of inertia and elastic waves, in particular {\it stress overshoots} in which motion of one segment of the manifold causes a temporary stress on its neighboring segments in addition to the static stress. Such stress overshoots decrease the critical force for depinning and make the depinning transition hysteretic. We find that the steady state velocity of the moving phase is nevertheless history independent and the critical behavior as the force is decreased is in the same universality class as in the absence of stress overshoots: the dissipative limit which has been studied analytically. To reach this conclusion, finite-size scaling analyses of a variety of quantities have been supplemented by heuristic arguments. If the force is increased slowly from zero, the spectrum of avalanche sizes that occurs appears to be quite different from the dissipative limit. After stopping from the moving phase, the restarting involves both fractal and bubble-like nucleation. Hysteresis loops can be understood in terms of a depletion layer caused by the stress overshoots, but surprisingly, in the limit of very large samples the hysteresis loops vanish. We argue that, although there can be striking differences over a wide range of length scales, the universality class governing this pseudohysteresis is again that of the dissipative limit. Consequences of this picture for the statistics and dynamics of earthquakes on geological faults are briefly discussed.Comment: 43 pages, 57 figures (yes, that's a five followed by a seven), revte

Key Disclosure Issues for Life Sciences Companies: FDA Product Approval, Clinical Test Results, and Government Inspections

The government, particularly the Food and Drug Administration ( FDA ), heavily regulates the life sciences industry. FDA actions can have an extraordinary influence on the fortunes of biotechnology companies. Timely FDA approval of a drug or medical device can permit a company to exploit an inviting market window. FDA product approval is, in turn, tied to clinical test results which demonstrate efficacy and safety. Delayed approval, unfavorable test results, or the denial of an FDA application may ruin a company. Beyond the FDA product approval process and related testing lie FDA inspections and the possibility that the government will investigate charges such as the submission of false data. Problems found by inspection or revealed by investigation can, in turn, influence FDA action on further product approvals. All of this makes regulatory events and clinical testing matters of great concern to both the managers of life sciences companies and investors in those companies. What biotechnology companies disclose--and decide against disclosing--about such events can influence the price of those companies\u27 stocks. These disclosure decisions, therefore, can have important securities law implications. Inaccurate statements--and, under some circumstances, decisions to keep information about regulatory and testing developments within the company rather than including it in a public statement--may lead to private lawsuits, Securities and Exchange Commission ( SEC ) enforcement actions, and even criminal prosecutions. This article addresses issues arising from disclosures about: a) FDA product approval, particularly predictions about such approval; b) Clinical tests; c) Communications with the FDA before product approval; and d) FDA inspections, government investigations, and the possible consequences of such actions. The recent adoption of Regulation FD emphasizes that life sciences companies must communicate information on these four key subjects directly, often making announcements in these critical areas to a market that has not been alerted by analysts who have anticipated the news. All of this increases the pressure on biotech executives who address the investment community. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (the Reform Act ) does not remove the possibility that shareholders will sue on allegations of inaccurate or incomplete disclosures. Some Reform Act protections require disclosing companies to take affirmative steps. Life sciences executives can find it difficult, in the particular circumstances they face, to take full advantage of the Reform Act\u27s necessarily general provisions. Moreover, the Reform Act applies only to private suits by shareholders, not to enforcement actions by the SEC, which has been active in the biotech arena

Where Were the Counselors - Reflections on Advice Not Given and the Role of Attorneys in the Accounting Crisis

Today\u27s reports of corporate villainy invite these questions: Restricting ourselves to what the profession knew in the last days of the late 1990s soaring stock market, what advice might attorneys have given-about the temptations of deceptive accounting and the defenses to erect against it-to young executives who were taking their companies public then? And, if attorneys did not always give that counsel in fulsome form, why was that so? What forces worked on lawyers to deter that advice? What does all this suggest for counseling today? To help us answer these questions, we begin with two scenes. We return to them later for contrasts

Predicting a Heart Attack: The Fundamental Opacity of Extreme Liquidity Risk

After 150 years of business, Lehman Brothers ran out of cash and credit and filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. As a publicly traded company, Lehman had filed all the reports required by U.S. securities law. But the hundreds of pages of words and numbers provided no timely warning of lurking liquidity death. The risks of triparty repurchase financing and the endgame Lehman would have to play if a selfmagnifying credit drain hit were, as it turned out, inherently opaque. Disclosure, the traditional securities law “fix,” was destined to fail in this case, raising the question of whether it might fail in others as well

To Thine Own CEO Be True: Tailoring CEO Compensation to Individual Personality and Circumstances

Eight-figure compensation. Cash. Restricted stock. Options. Performance shares. And more. Companies shower their CEOs with pay in large amounts, delivered in multiple ways, and dependent on complex and intricate formulae. It is all intended to motivate the top officers to make decisions that will best benefit their companies. Common sense tells us that the value of a complicated, multifaceted pay package—and hence its ability to motivate—will depend on the psychological characteristics and financial circumstances of the particular executive being paid. Economic theory and empirical studies confirm this intuition. Yet, companies generally ignore these vital factors. Substantive and disclosure law should push them to take these key variables into account

When the Government Attempts to Change the Board, Investors Should Know

In 2008 and 2009, the federal government effectively hired and fired directors at American International Group and Bank of America, without any securities filing of the sort that would have been required had a private market actor attempted to change the boards at those companies. The fact that current law allows the government to secretly reconstitute the governing bodies of multibillion-dollar, publicly traded companies is cause for concern, for who controls the board controls the company. This Article argues that, just as securities filings alert investors when private parties attempt board change, a new required filing should inform investors when the government seeks to push sitting directors out or bring new ones in