Ideology and the Red Button:How Ideology Shapes Nuclear Weapons’ Use Preferences in Europe

Does partisan ideology influence whether Europeans are willing to use nuclear weapons, and if so, how? The US nuclear weapons stationed in Europe have been at the core of European security since the Cold War, but we have still yet to learn what would make Europeans be willing to support their use. In this paper, we present the results of a survey, in which we asked citizens in Germany and the Netherlands about their views on the use of the US nuclear weapons stationed on their territory in four distinct scenarios. Our results indicate that voters of right-wing parties are more likely to approve of the use of nuclear weapons in both countries. There are, however, important differences between the two countries in terms of the degree to which the participants oppose the use of nuclear weapons. These results have implications for NATO’s nuclear deterrence posture.</p

Collaborative Composition Project, March 24, 2011

This is the concert program of the Collaborative Composition Project performance on Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 8:00 p.m., at the Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were Quartet for Flute, Oboe, Bassoon and Piano by Ian Gottlieb, Lunar Sketches by Graham Dixon, Trá- by Luciano Leite Barbosa, Three Bagatelles by Aaron Kirschner, Quartet by Michal Novotny, From Above by Tommy Barth, Loess by Lesley Hinger, and from Masnavi (after Rumi) by Igor Iwanek. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Which Foreigners Are Worth Wooing? A Meta-Analysis of Vertical Spillovers from FDI

The principal argument for subsidizing foreign investment is the assumed spillover of technology to local firms. Yet researchers report mixed results on spillovers. To examine the phenomenon in a systematic way, we collected 3,626 estimates from 57 empirical studies on between-sector spillovers and reviewed the literature quantitatively. Our results indicate that model misspecifications reduce the reported estimates, but that journals select relatively large estimates for publication. The underlying spillover to suppliers is positive and economically significant, whereas the spillover to buyers is insignificant. Greater spillovers are received by countries that have underdeveloped financial systems and that are open to international trade. Greater spillovers are generated by investors that come from distant countries and that have only slight technological advantages over local firms.Foreign direct investment, meta-analysis, productivity, publication selection bias, spillovers.

Trivial Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation

Transfer learning has been proven as an effective technique for neural machine translation under low-resource conditions. Existing methods require a common target language, language relatedness, or specific training tricks and regimes. We present a simple transfer learning method, where we first train a "parent" model for a high-resource language pair and then continue the training on a lowresource pair only by replacing the training corpus. This "child" model performs significantly better than the baseline trained for lowresource pair only. We are the first to show this for targeting different languages, and we observe the improvements even for unrelated languages with different alphabets.Comment: Accepted to WMT18 reseach paper, Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Machine Translation 201

Enhancing Transparency and Control when Drawing Data-Driven Inferences about Individuals

Recent studies have shown that information disclosed on social network sites (such as Facebook) can be used to predict personal characteristics with surprisingly high accuracy. In this paper we examine a method to give online users transparency into why certain inferences are made about them by statistical models, and control to inhibit those inferences by hiding ("cloaking") certain personal information from inference. We use this method to examine whether such transparency and control would be a reasonable goal by assessing how difficult it would be for users to actually inhibit inferences. Applying the method to data from a large collection of real users on Facebook, we show that a user must cloak only a small portion of her Facebook Likes in order to inhibit inferences about their personal characteristics. However, we also show that in response a firm could change its modeling of users to make cloaking more difficult.Comment: presented at 2016 ICML Workshop on Human Interpretability in Machine Learning (WHI 2016), New York, N

The Influence of Michal Kalecki on Joan Robinson’s Approach to Economics

Joan Robinson and Michal Kalecki were two of the intellectual giants of twentieth century economics, whose contributions over a significant range of issues have had major impacts on economics. This paper examines the significant communications between them, concentrating on the major cross influences which were apparent from the first time that they met. It focuses on Kalecki’s influence on Joan Robinson in a number of areas. In particular, there was much communication between them about developments in Keynesian theory, where Joan Robinson was influenced by Kalecki’s Marxian approach. Further areas of influence included the role and determination of investment and innovation, the nature of price setting in capitalist economies, and methodological issues associated with the nature of economic theory, particularly with respect to economic cycles and trends.History of Economic Thought since 1925; Current Heterodox Approaches; Economic Methodology

Exact solution to the steady-state dynamics of a periodically-modulated resonator

We provide an analytic solution to the coupled-mode equations describing the steady-state of a single periodically-modulated optical resonator driven by a monochromatic input. The phenomenology of this system was qualitatively understood only in the adiabatic limit, i.e. for low modulation speed. However, both in and out of this regime, we find highly non-trivial effects for specific parameters of the modulation. For example, we show complete suppression of the transmission even with zero detuning between the input and the static resonator frequency. We also demonstrate the possibility for complete, lossless frequency conversion of the input into the side-band frequencies, as well as for optimizing the transmitted signal towards a given target temporal waveform. The analytic results are validated by first-principle simulations

Determinants of Horizontal Spillovers from FDI: Evidence from a Large Meta-Analysis

The voluminous empirical research on horizontal productivity spillovers from foreign investors to domestic firms has yielded mixed results. In this paper, we collect 1,205 estimates of horizontal spillovers from the literature and examine which factors influence spillover magnitude. To identify the most important determinants of spillovers among 43 collected variables, we employ Bayesian model averaging. Our results suggest that horizontal spillovers are on average zero, but that their sign and magnitude depend systematically on the characteristics of the domestic economy and foreign investors. The most important determinants are the technology gap between domestic and foreign firms and the ownership structure in investment projects. Foreign investors who form joint ventures with domestic firms and who come from countries with a modest technology edge create the largest benefits for the domestic economy.Bayesian model averaging, determinants, foreign direct investment, meta-analysis, productivity spillovers.

How to Solve the Price Puzzle? A Meta-Analysis

The short-run increase in prices following an unexpected tightening of monetary policy represents a frequently reported puzzle. Yet the puzzle is surprisingly easy to explain away when all published models are quantitatively reviewed. We collect about 1,000 point estimates of impulse responses from 70 articles using vector autoregressive models and present a simple method of research synthesis for graphical results. We find some evidence of publication selection against the price puzzle. Our results suggest that the reported impulse responses depend systematically on the study design: when misspecifications are filtered out, the average impulse response shows that prices decrease soon after a tightening. The long-run response of prices to monetary policy shocks depends on the characteristics of the economy.Meta-analysis, monetary policy transmission, price puzzle, publication selection bias.