Economic integration and corruption: The corrupt soul of the European Union

We study the link between corruption and economic integration. We show that if an economic union establishes a common regulation for public procurement, the country more prone to corruption benefits more from integration. However, if the propensities to corruption are too distinct, the less corrupt country will not be willing to join the union. This difference in corruption propensities can be offset by a difference in efficiency. We also show that corruption is lower if integration occurs. A panel data analysis for the European Union confirms that more corrupt countries are more favorable towards integration but less acceptable as potential new members.Corruption, procurement, economic integration

Allocating ideas: Horizontal competition in tournaments

We develop a stylized model of horizontal and vertical competition in tournaments with two competing firms. The sponsor cares about the quality of the design but also about the design location. A priori not even the sponsor knows his preferred design location, which is only discovered once he has seen the actual proposals. We show that the more efficient firm is more likely to be conservative when choosing the design location. Also, to get some differentiation in design locations, the cost difference between contestants can neither be too small nor too big. Therefore, if the sponsor mainly cares about the design location, participation in the tournaments by the two lowest cost contestants cannot be optimal for the sponsor.Horizontal and vertical competition, tournaments

Schooling, Nation Building, and Industrialization: a Gellnerian Approach (new version)

We model a two-region country where value is created through bilateral production between masses and elites (bourgeois and landowners). Industrialization requires the elites to finance schools and the masses to attend them. Schooling raises productivity, particularly for matches between masses and bourgeois. At the same time, only country-wide education ("unified schooling") renders the masses mobile across regions. Alternatively, schools can be implemented in one region alone ("regional education") or the regionally dominant group can choose to implement schooling in its own region but refuse to share the costs/proceeds within the wider country-level group ("secession"). We show that schools are more likely to be set-up when the bourgeoisie dominates, but that this is not necessarily socially efficient. Unified schooling is always chosen if the identity of the dominant elite at the regional and country level is the same and/or the industrialization shock is sufficiently high. If instead the bourgeoisie is dominant in one region and landowners are dominant country-wise, the bourgeoisie of that region may promote the secession of the region, and this can be socially efficient. The model is shown to be consistent with evidence for 19th century France and Spain

The City: Art and the Urban Environment

The City: Art and the Urban Environment is the fifth annual exhibition curated by students enrolled in the Art History Methods class. This exhibition draws on the students’ newly developed expertise in art-historical methodologies and provides an opportunity for sustained research and an engaged curatorial experience. Working with a selection of paintings, prints, and photographs, students Angelique Acevedo ’19, Sidney Caccioppoli ’21, Abigail Coakley ’20, Chris Condon ’18, Alyssa DiMaria ’19, Carolyn Hauk ’21, Lucas Kiesel ’20, Noa Leibson ’20, Erin O’Brien ’19, Elise Quick ’21, Sara Rinehart ’19, and Emily Roush ’21 carefully consider depictions of the urban environment in relation to significant social, economic, artistic, and aesthetic developments. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1029/thumbnail.jp

Concurrent brain responses to separate auditory and visual targets.

In the attentional blink, a target event (T1) strongly interferes with perception of a second target (T2) presented within a few hundred milliseconds. Concurrently, the brain's electromagnetic response to the second target is suppressed, especially a late negative-positive EEG complex including the traditional P3 wave. An influential theory proposes that conscious perception requires access to a distributed, frontoparietal global workspace, explaining the attentional blink by strong mutual inhibition between concurrent workspace representations. Often, however, the attentional blink is reduced or eliminated for targets in different sensory modalities, suggesting a limit to such global inhibition. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we confirm that visual and auditory targets produce similar, distributed patterns of frontoparietal activity. In an attentional blink EEG/MEG design, however, an auditory T1 and visual T2 are identified without mutual interference, with largely preserved electromagnetic responses to T2. The results suggest parallel brain responses to target events in different sensory modalities

Major epidemiological changes in sudden infant death syndrome : a 20-year population-based study in the UK

Background Results of case-control studies in the past 5 years suggest that the epidemiology of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) has changed since the 1991 UK Back to Sleep campaign. The campaign's advice that parents put babies on their back to sleep led to a fall in death rates. We used a longitudinal dataset to assess these potential changes. Methods Population-based data from home visits have been collected for 369 consecutive unexpected infant deaths (300 SIDS and 69 explained deaths) in Avon over 20 years (1984—2003). Data obtained between 1993 and 1996 from 1300 controls with a chosen “reference” sleep before interview have been used for comparison. Findings Over the past 20 years, the proportion of children who died from SIDS while co-sleeping with their parents, has risen from 12% to 50% (p<0·0001), but the actual number of SIDS deaths in the parental bed has halved (p=0·01). The proportion seems to have increased partly because the Back to Sleep campaign led to fewer deaths in infants sleeping alone—rather than because of a rise in deaths of infants who bed-shared, and partly because of an increase in the number of deaths in infants sleeping with their parents on a sofa. The proportion of deaths in families from deprived socioeconomic backgrounds has risen from 47% to 74% (p=0·003), the prevalence of maternal smoking during pregnancy from 57% to 86% (p=0·0004), and the proportion of pre-term infants from 12% to 34% (p=0·0001). Although many SIDS infants come from large families, first-born infants are now the largest group. The age of infants who bed-share is significantly smaller than that before the campaign, and fewer are breastfed. Interpretation Factors that contribute to SIDS have changed in their importance over the past 20 years. Although the reasons for the rise in deaths when a parent sleeps with their infant on a sofa are still unclear, we strongly recommend that parents avoid this sleeping environment. Most SIDS deaths now occur in deprived families. To better understand contributory factors and plan preventive measures we need control data from similarly deprived families, and particularly, infant sleep environments

Recurrence is required to capture the representational dynamics of the human visual system.

The human visual system is an intricate network of brain regions that enables us to recognize the world around us. Despite its abundant lateral and feedback connections, object processing is commonly viewed and studied as a feedforward process. Here, we measure and model the rapid representational dynamics across multiple stages of the human ventral stream using time-resolved brain imaging and deep learning. We observe substantial representational transformations during the first 300 ms of processing within and across ventral-stream regions. Categorical divisions emerge in sequence, cascading forward and in reverse across regions, and Granger causality analysis suggests bidirectional information flow between regions. Finally, recurrent deep neural network models clearly outperform parameter-matched feedforward models in terms of their ability to capture the multiregion cortical dynamics. Targeted virtual cooling experiments on the recurrent deep network models further substantiate the importance of their lateral and top-down connections. These results establish that recurrent models are required to understand information processing in the human ventral stream

The Neural Time Course of Semantic Ambiguity Resolution in Speech Comprehension.

Semantically ambiguous words challenge speech comprehension, particularly when listeners must select a less frequent (subordinate) meaning at disambiguation. Using combined magnetoencephalography (MEG) and EEG, we measured neural responses associated with distinct cognitive operations during semantic ambiguity resolution in spoken sentences: (i) initial activation and selection of meanings in response to an ambiguous word and (ii) sentence reinterpretation in response to subsequent disambiguation to a subordinate meaning. Ambiguous words elicited an increased neural response approximately 400-800 msec after their acoustic offset compared with unambiguous control words in left frontotemporal MEG sensors, corresponding to sources in bilateral frontotemporal brain regions. This response may reflect increased demands on processes by which multiple alternative meanings are activated and maintained until later selection. Disambiguating words heard after an ambiguous word were associated with marginally increased neural activity over bilateral temporal MEG sensors and a central cluster of EEG electrodes, which localized to similar bilateral frontal and left temporal regions. This later neural response may reflect effortful semantic integration or elicitation of prediction errors that guide reinterpretation of previously selected word meanings. Across participants, the amplitude of the ambiguity response showed a marginal positive correlation with comprehension scores, suggesting that sentence comprehension benefits from additional processing around the time of an ambiguous word. Better comprehenders may have increased availability of subordinate meanings, perhaps due to higher quality lexical representations and reflected in a positive correlation between vocabulary size and comprehension success