SPDAs and GICs: like money in the bank?

We argue that changes in the life insurance industry have created a nontrivial moral hazard. We document the industry's shift from sales of life insurance to sales of mainly rate-of-return oriented investments like single premium deferred annuities (SPDAs) and guaranteed investment contracts (GICs). We describe the system of explicit and implicit guarantees that state governments and the industry provide to SPDA and GIC investors. We argue that these guarantees create moral hazards that have contributed to insurance company failures and misallocation of resources. We summarize reformers' proposals to enhance both the explicit guarantees and the regulation of insurance companies and argue that maintaining the degree of regulatory tightness required for such proposals to succeed will be difficult. We suggest an alternative: eliminate guarantees of SPDAs, GICs, and similar products (and possibly promote full disclosure practices and earmarked investments like variable annuities).Insurance industry

The Migration of African Americans to the Canadian Football League during the mid-20th Century: An Escape from Discrimination?

The institutional racial discrimination that existed in American professional team sports prior to World War II resulted in African American players effectively being barred from playing in the major professional leagues. Although the NFL color barrier did officially fall in 1946, to be quickly followed by the fall of the MLB color barrier one year later when Jackie Robinson made his debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers, these events were just the beginning of the struggles for African American athletes. Integration proceeded very slowly during the next two decades, and economists have shown that African Americans continued to suffer from a variety of forms of discriminatory treatment. However, it is the argument of this paper that the literature that examines discrimination during this era is incomplete, in that it ignores the experiences of a small, but relatively significant, group of African American football players who actually chose to leave their own country – and correspondingly leave the racially-charged environment of mid-20th century America – to head north to play professional football in the Canadian Football League (CFL). Beginning in 1946, a steady flow of African Americans began to migrate to the CFL which, at the time, was a legitimate competitor league to the NFL. This paper attempts to test a perception seemingly held by some that, by moving to Canada, African American football players were able to escape the racial injustices they often suffered in the US. This view appears to have its roots in the notion that Canada is a “gentler”, more tolerant society, without the divisive socio-political history that characterizes much of the race relations in the US. This paper tests these notions using a variety of empirical approaches. The results indicate that, while African Americans were better represented in the CFL relative to the NFL, African Americans still faced some level of entry discrimination in the CFL. In particular, African American players in the CFL outperformed their white counterparts on numerous performance dimensions, indicating the overall talent level in the CFL could have been further improved by employing an even greater number of African Americans. Additionally, the paper finds that those CFL teams that employed the highest percentage of African Americans were those teams that had the most on-field success. Finally, the paper analyzes prices of player trading cards from that era, and finds that cards of African Americans were undervalued, relative to white CFL players of equal talent.sports

Free energy and equilibrium states for families of interval maps

Funding: MT was partially supported by FCT grant SFRH/BPD/26521/2006 and NSF grants DMS0606343 and DMS 0908093. ND was supported by ERC Bridges project, the Academy of Finland CoE in Analysis and Dynamics Research and an IBM Goldstine fellowship.We study continuity, and lack thereof, of thermodynamical properties for one-dimensional dynamical systems. Under quite general hypotheses, the free energy is shown to be almost upper-semicontinuous: some normalised component of a limit measure will have free energy at least that of the limit of the free energies. From this, we deduce results concerning existence and continuity of equilibrium states (statistical stability). Counterexamples to statistical stability in the absence of strong hypotheses are provided.PostprintPeer reviewe

Reply to "Embodied Rhythm" by Bruno Repp and "Do Preferred Beat Rate and Entrainment to the Beat Have a Common Origin in Movement?" by Laurel Trainor

Two leading issues raised in commentaries on the authors’ earlier article (2007) involved the possible roles of gender differences and the vestibular system on test results. Those issues are discussed in this reply

The Contribution of Anthropometric Factors to Individual Differences in the Perception of Rhythm

In a sample of 44 human subjects, aged between 18 and 38 years, two distinct measurement procedures were carried out: (1) a psychophysical procedure to determine ‘preferred beat rate’ and (2) standard anthropometry to determine mass and 6 skeletal dimensions. Additionally the factors of sex, age and musicianship were also assessed. ANOVAs were carried out with preferred beat rate as the dependent variable and each of the anthropometric variables as between-subjects factors, partitioned into two levels, defined by the 50th percentile. Significant effects were obtained for age, anthropometric factors and the interaction between age and sex, totalling about 40% of the explainable variance. No significant main effects of sex or musicianship were obtained

The role of damage-contingent contracts in allocating the risks of natural catastrophes

The distinguishing feature of natural-catastrophe risk is claimed to be aggregate risk. Because such risk is encompassed in the general competitive model, it seems to pose no new theoretical challenge. However, that model has markets contingent on exogenous events, while the actual economy seems to be developing mainly markets contingent on the level of total damage. In the context of a model with aggregate risk and endogenous total damage, a notion of competitive markets contingent on total damage is formulated. That notion implies that such markets achieve the same (efficient) risk sharing as markets contingent on exogenous events.Risk

Source analysis of short and long latency vestibular-evoked potentials (VsEPs) produced by left versus right ear air-conducted 500 Hz pips

Todd et al. (2014) have recently demonstrated the presence of vestibular dependent changes both in the morphology and in the intensity dependence of auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) when passing through the vestibular threshold as determined by vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (VEMPs). In this paper we extend this work by comparing left vs. right ear stimulation and by conducting a source analysis of the resulting evoked potentials of short and long latency. Ten healthy, right-handed subjects were recruited and evoked potentials were recorded to both left- and right-ear sound stimulation, above and below vestibular threshold. Below VEMP threshold, typical AEPs were recorded, consisting of mid-latency (MLR) waves Na and Pa followed by long latency AEPs (LAEPs) N1 and P2. In the supra-threshold condition, the expected changes in morphology were observed, consisting of: (1) short-latency vestibular evoked potentials (VsEPs) which have no auditory correlate, i.e. the ocular VEMP (OVEMP) and inion response related potentials; (2) a later deflection, labelled N42/P52, followed by the LAEPs N1 and P2. Statistical analysis of the vestibular dependent responses indicated a contralateral effect for inion related short-latency responses and a left-ear/right-hemisphere advantage for the long-latency responses. Source analysis indicated that the short-latency effects may be mediated by a contralateral projection to left cerebellum, while the long-latency effects were mediated by a contralateral projection to right cingulate cortex. In addition we found evidence of a possible vestibular contribution to the auditory T-complex in radial temporal lobe sources. These last results raise the possibility that acoustic activation of the otolith organs could potentially contribute to auditory processing

Vestibular evoked potentials (VsEPs) of cortical origin produced by impulsive acceleration applied at the nasion

Abstract: We report the results of a study to record vestibular evoked potentials (VsEPs) of cortical origin produced by impulsive acceleration (IA). In a sample of 12 healthy participants, evoked potentials recorded by 70 channel electroencephalography were obtained by IA stimulation at the nasion and compared with evoked potentials from the same stimulus applied to the forefingers. The nasion stimulation gave rise to a series of positive and negative deflections in the latency range of 26–72 ms, which were dependent on the polarity of the applied IA. In contrast, evoked potentials from the fingers were characterised by a single N50/P50 deflection at about 50 ms and were polarity invariant. Source analysis confirmed that the finger evoked potentials were somatosensory in origin, i.e. were somatosensory evoked potentials, and suggested that the nasion evoked potentials plausibly included vestibular midline and frontal sources, as well as contributions from the eyes, and thus were likely VsEPs. These results show considerable promise as a new method for assessment of the central vestibular system by means of VsEPs produced by IA applied to the head