Phantom limb pain

Traditional methods of postoperative analgesia do not provide adequate control of pain, in part because they focus on treating the patient only after the pain is well entrenched. Despite recent advances in the management of postoperative pain, up to 60% of patients continue to report moderate to severe pain shortly after surgery. 1 Patients are ordinarily transported to the recovery room, in considerable pain, where they receive high doses of morphine in an attempt to bring the pain under control. ..

Dynamic topography of the sea surface in the equatorial Atlantic

From historic meridional sections of the central equatorial Atlantic it is shown that the dynamic sea surface topography varies extensively during the year…

Activism's Impact on Diversified Investors and the Market

We model activism as it affects the future distribution of prices in a portfolio context with risk-averse expected utility of end-of-period wealth maximizing investors. We characterize activism as affecting the mean, the variance, and/or the covariance of the target firm’s price with the prices of the other firms. This characterization allows us to investigate conditions under which the activist would choose to become an activist and, subsequently, to derive the sequence of equilibria that begins with the surreptitious acquisition of shares by the activist and ends at the moment of the activist’s divestiture of these shares. We investigate the impact of activism not only on the target firm’s price over time and the activist’s profit, but also on the redistribution of portfolio holdings of all market participants that this activism induces. We propose a method to evaluate activism and show that, while activism may augment the share price of the target firm, there exist conditions under which activism would not necessarily increase the value of the market. Furthermore, we show that the pro.t of the activist is at the expense of the group of other investors. We compare our results to recent empirical findings.Statistics Working Papers Serie

An Evaluation of Shareholder Activism

We develop a method to evaluate shareholder activism when an activist targets firms whose shareholders are diversified portfolio holders of possibly correlated firms. Our method of evaluation takes the portfolios of all of the shareholders, including the activist, as its basis of analysis. We model the activist from the time of the acquisition of a foothold in the target firm through the moment when the activist divests the newly acquired shares. We assume that during this period, all exchanges of securities, and their corresponding prices, are achieved in Walrasian markets in which all participants, including the activist, are risk-averse price-takers. Using the derived series of price changes of all the firms in the market, as well as the derived series of changes in all the portfolio holdings over this period, we evaluate the impact of activism on the activist, on the group of other shareholders, and on the combined group. We show that when activism is beneficial to the activist, the group of other investors may not benefit; furthermore, even when the activist benefits from activism, the value of the market may decrease. When the activist benefits from activism, an increase in the value of the market is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the group of other investors to benefit also from activism. In addition, we show that the combined group, the activist plus the group of other investors, benefits if and only if the value of the market increases and, under this condition, either the activist or the group of other investors, but not necessarily both, benefits

Crime and Uncertain Punishment

We consider agents in a country in an early stage of transition from a planned to a market economy. As the transition is in progress, the nature of the government’s policies are unknown to the agents. Property rights once held by the state have already been transferred to the agents, with each agent owning one firm. However, the agents are uncertain of the level of law enforcement the government will provide. Specifically, they are unsure of the tax and confiscation consequences of both legal and illegal acts. Each agent, having a different cost of stealing, must decide how much of the firm to divert to himself. The agents believe the government may become either a traditional democratic government that supplies law enforcement as well as infrastructure leading to positive firm growth, or a corrupt government that may or may not provide law enforcement, does not provide a climate for firm growth, and may be confiscatory. All agents presume the government will choose its behavior as a function of the tax revenue it will collect under each scenario; however, the tax revenue results from the collective decisions of the agents. This interaction between tax revenue and agents’ decisions, together with the uncertainty of law enforcement and tax policy, forms the framework within which the agent chooses his level of honesty. By calculating the percentage of agents who steal some amount from the firm, we investigate the relationship between the level of criminality and the various uncertainties facing the agents. We show how expectations of the agents about the future behavior of their government induce the degree of criminality in society

Political Uncertainty and Crime in Transition Economies

Political Uncertainty and Crime in Transition Economies Two stylized facts are often used to characterize the economies in transition: an increase in the crime level and frequent government changes, where the party in power is replaced by another party with a different, and often opposite, ideological orientation. We investigate the impact on agents’ honesty when agents perceive the future form of government as uncertain, and also know that their own collective decisions will effect the government’s choice of type. Furthermore, we assume that the form that the government will take depends, in part, on the collective behavior of the agents. By endogenizing the joint decisions made by the agents, as well as the government, we derive the social consequences of these choices, the induced level of crime. Using the level of crime permits us to investigate comparative statics for possible policy implications. We show that the complex interactions between the government and the agents leads to some non-intuitive results

Exploring Tax Evasion in the Context of Political Uncertainty

We present a model of agents facing the uncertainty of two future forms of government who are able to insure against this uncertainty by hiding funds from taxation. In order to choose whether or not to hide funds from taxation, agents need to know policy choices that each government would make should it come to power. But each government, before it could make its decision, would need to know the choices of the agents who would, for example, produce tax revenues. This informational tension is resolved endogenously. We derive the resulting level of tax evasion in society and the optimal choices made by the potential governments. We examine how changes in governmental structure would affect the level of tax evasion, and how that, in turn, would affect a particular form of capital flight