Did U.S. Bank Supervisors Get Tougher During the Credit Crunch? Did They Get Easier During the Banking Boom? Did It Matter to Bank Lending?

We test three hypotheses regarding changes in supervisory toughness' and their effects on bank lending. The data provide modest support for all three hypotheses that there was an increase in toughness during the credit crunch period (1989-1992), that there was a decline in toughness during the boom period (1993-1998), and that changes in toughness, if they occurred, affected bank lending. However, all of the measured effects are small, with 1% or less of loans receiving harsher or easier classification, about 3% of banks receiving better or worse CAMEL ratings, and bank lending being changed by 1% or less of assets.

Public & Private Spillovers, Location and the Productivity of Pharmaceutical Research

While there is widespread agreement among economists and management scholars that knowledge spillovers exist and have important economic consequences, researchers know substantially less about the "micro mechanisms" of spillovers -- about the degree to which they are geographically localized, for example, or about the degree to which spillovers from public institutions are qualitatively different from those from privately owned firms (Jaffe, 1986; Krugman, 1991; Jaffe et al., 1993; Porter, 1990). In this paper we make use of the geographic distribution of the research activities of major global pharmaceutical firms to explore the extent to which knowledge spills over from proximate private and public institutions. Our data and empirical approach allow us to make advances on two dimensions. First, by focusing on spillovers in research productivity (as opposed to manufacturing productivity), we build closely on the theoretical literature on spillovers that suggests that knowledge externalities are likely to have the most immediate impact on the production of ideas (Romer, 1986; Aghion & Howitt, 1997). Second, our data allow us to distinguish spillovers from public research from spillovers from private, or competitively funded research, and to more deeply explore the role that institutions and geographic proximity play in driving knowledge spillovers.

Optimal control of predictive mean-field equations and applications to finance

We study a coupled system of controlled stochastic differential equations (SDEs) driven by a Brownian motion and a compensated Poisson random measure, consisting of a forward SDE in the unknown process $X(t)$ and a \emph{predictive mean-field} backward SDE (BSDE) in the unknowns $Y(t), Z(t), K(t,\cdot)$. The driver of the BSDE at time $t$ may depend not just upon the unknown processes $Y(t), Z(t), K(t,\cdot)$, but also on the predicted future value $Y(t+\delta)$, defined by the conditional expectation $A(t):= E[Y(t+\delta) | \mathcal{F}_t]$. \\ We give a sufficient and a necessary maximum principle for the optimal control of such systems, and then we apply these results to the following two problems:\\ (i) Optimal portfolio in a financial market with an \emph{insider influenced asset price process.} \\ (ii) Optimal consumption rate from a cash flow modeled as a geometric It\^ o-L\' evy SDE, with respect to \emph{predictive recursive utility}

A randomized trial of a lab-embedded discourse intervention to improve research ethics.

We report a randomized trial of a research ethics training intervention designed to enhance ethics communication in university science and engineering laboratories, focusing specifically on authorship and data management. The intervention is a project-based research ethics curriculum that was designed to enhance the ability of science and engineering research laboratory members to engage in reason giving and interpersonal communication necessary for ethical practice. The randomized trial was fielded in active faculty-led laboratories at two US research-intensive institutions. Here, we show that laboratory members perceived improvements in the quality of discourse on research ethics within their laboratories and enhanced awareness of the relevance and reasons for that discourse for their work as measured by a survey administered over 4 mo after the intervention. This training represents a paradigm shift compared with more typical module-based or classroom ethics instruction that is divorced from the everyday workflow and practices within laboratories and is designed to cultivate a campus culture of ethical science and engineering research in the very work settings where laboratory members interact

Mapping solar array location, size, and capacity using deep learning and overhead imagery

The effective integration of distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays into existing power grids will require access to high quality data; the location, power capacity, and energy generation of individual solar PV installations. Unfortunately, existing methods for obtaining this data are limited in their spatial resolution and completeness. We propose a general framework for accurately and cheaply mapping individual PV arrays, and their capacities, over large geographic areas. At the core of this approach is a deep learning algorithm called SolarMapper - which we make publicly available - that can automatically map PV arrays in high resolution overhead imagery. We estimate the performance of SolarMapper on a large dataset of overhead imagery across three US cities in California. We also describe a procedure for deploying SolarMapper to new geographic regions, so that it can be utilized by others. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed deployment procedure by using it to map solar arrays across the entire US state of Connecticut (CT). Using these results, we demonstrate that we achieve highly accurate estimates of total installed PV capacity within each of CT's 168 municipal regions

To What Extent is Collocation Knowledge Associated with Oral Proficiency? A Corpus-Based Approach to Word Association

This study examined the relationship between second language (L2) learners’ collocation knowledge and oral proficiency. A new approach to measuring collocation was adopted by eliciting responses through a word association task and using corpus-based measures (absolute frequency count, t-score, MI score) to analyze the degree to which stimulus words and responses were collocated. Oral proficiency was measured using human judgements and objective measures of fluency (articulation rate, silent pause ratio, filled pause ratio) and lexical richness (diversity, frequency, range). Forty Japanese university students completed a word association task and a spontaneous speaking task (picture narrative). Results indicated that speakers who used more low-frequency collocations in the word association task (i.e., lower collocation frequency scores) spoke faster with fewer silent pauses and were perceived to be more fluent. Speakers who provided more strongly associated collocations (as measured by MI) used more sophisticated lexical items and were perceived to be lexically proficient. Collocation knowledge remained as a unique predictor after the influence of learners’ vocabulary size (i.e., knowledge of single-word items) was considered. These findings support the key role that collocation plays in oral proficiency and provide important insights into understanding L2 speech development from the perspective of phraseological competence

CC‐BY: Is There Such a Thing as Too Open in Open Access?

Support and demand for researchers to publish in open access (OA) journals has been growing steadily among funding agencies, research organizations, and institutions of higher education. The Wellcome Trust and the Research Councils UK OA policies have begun imposing more finite restrictions, like publishing only under CC‐BY licenses, on researchers. CC‐BY, or Creative Commons Attribution, is one of several, and the most open, of all creative commons licensing. It most closely embodies the definition of OA, as established by the Berlin Declaration and Bethesda Statement on Open Access, by allowing for the most reuse, including the unrestricted creation of derivatives. Scholars have voiced concern that CC‐BY may not be the best license for all disciplines. Libraries, as OA publishers, custodians of institutional repositories, facilitators of scholarly research, and organizers of information, are well‐positioned to enhance a discussion on balancing the needs of scholars for minimum control over their work with the goal of OA publishing to most widely disseminate information and scholarship to the public without barriers of country, class, access, or financing