Media, Education, and anti-Americanism in the Muslim World

Recent surveys in the United States and the Muslim world show widespread misinformation about the events of September 11, 2001. Using data from 9 predominantly Muslim countries, we study how such beliefs depend on exposure to news media and levels of education. Standard economic theory would predict that increased access to information should cause beliefs to converge. More recent models of biased belief formation suggest that this result might hinge critically on who is providing the information. Consistent with the latter, we find that overall intensity of media use and level of education have at best a weak correlation with beliefs, while particular information sources have strong and divergent effects. Compared to those with little media exposure or schooling, individuals watching Arab news channels or educated in schools with little Western influence are less likely to agree that the September 11 attacks were carried out by Arab terrorists. Those exposed to media or education from Western sources are more likely to agree. Belief that the attacks were morally justified and general attitudes toward the US are also strongly correlated with source of information. These findings survive controls for demographic characteristics and are robust to identifying media effects using cross-country variation in language.persuasion, media, bias, terrorism

Displaced Capital

This paper studies the efficiency with which physical capital can be reallocated across sectors. It presents a model of a firm selling specialized capital in a thin resale market. The model predicts that the selling price depends not only on the sectoral specificity of capital, but also on the thinness of the market and the discount factor of the firm. It then provides empirical evidence on the sectoral mobility of capital based on equipment-level data from aerospace industry auctions. These data track the flow of used capital across industries, as well as the discounts at which the capital sells. The results suggest substantial sectoral specificity of capital. Capital that flowed out of the sector sold for only one-third of its estimated replacement cost.

Labor Goals and Antidiscrimination Norms: Employer Discretion, Reasonable Accommodation, and the Costs of Individualized Treatment

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)\u27 envisions a workplace markedly different from the one that organized labor has long endeavored to construct. While the statute mandates individualized treatment for disabled employees, organized labor has traditionally sought to limit the decisionmaking discretion of employers-and thus their ability to provide such treatment

Procedural Wrongdoing

Both the practice and the study of civil justice are rife with accusations of litigation “abuse.” Although it’s tempting to dismiss all this abuse talk as merely rhetorical, the concept of abuse in fact has deep roots in the normative structure of civil procedure’s doctrinal apparatus for regulating parties’ wrongful litigation conduct — their procedural wrongdoing. Prior accounts of procedural wrongdoing have maintained that parties abuse the civil justice system whenever they violate a procedural rule that’s calibrated to maximize the net benefits of litigation. Such accounts, however, ignore the many rules that define procedural wrongdoing not in terms of the effects of litigation conduct, but rather in terms of parties’ motivations, forbidding parties to act with certain motives or for certain purposes. According to these rules, which this Article labels motivation-sensitive restrictions, the very same litigation conduct can either constitute procedural wrongdoing or not, depending on a party’s motivations for engaging in it. This Article provides a comprehensive analytical account of civil procedure’s motivation-sensitive restrictions. In doing so, it contends that the restrictions have ambiguous normative consequences for civil justice. On the one hand, the restrictions can foster a thin but nevertheless valuable form of procedural civic virtue, prodding parties to attend to important public values even as they pursue their own private ends through the civil justice system. On the other hand, precisely because they focus on parties’ subjective purposes, the motivation-sensitive restrictions risk inflaming public discourse about civil justice by inviting participants in policy debates to transmute their disagreements into moralized accusations of abuse or bad faith. We can try to mitigate these latter, discursive effects by emphasizing the relatively modest demands imposed by the motivation-sensitive restrictions — the fact that such rules require parties only to abjure certain illicit purposes rather than to become primarily public-regarding in their litigation behavior. This Article’s account of civil procedure’s motivation-sensitive restrictions also sheds new light on leading theories of civil justice, which have largely glossed over the doctrinal infrastructure for addressing procedural wrongdoing. In contrast to the “private enforcement” model espoused by most civil procedure scholars, the motivation-sensitive restrictions (modestly) limit the purposes parties may pursue through civil litigation but make no systematic attempt to ensure that parties promote rather than subvert governmental regulatory policy, belying common portrayals of plaintiffs as stand-ins for the state — “private attorneys general.” But the restrictions also expose an underappreciated public dimension of prominent theories of private law, insofar as they curb party autonomy by requiring parties to attend directly to public values when taking certain actions during civil litigation. Considered in light of civil procedure’s motivation-sensitive restrictions, the civil justice system proves to be both more private and more public than how it’s generally understood

Why Do Computers Depreciate?

The value of installed computers falls rapidly and therefore computers have a very high user cost. The paper provides a complete account of the non-financial user cost of personal computers -- decomposing it into replacement cost change, obsolescence, instantaneous depreciation, and age-related depreciation. The paper uses data on the resale price of computers and a hedonic price index for new computers to achieve this decomposition. Once obsolescence is taken into account, age-related depreciation -- which is often identified as deterioration -- is estimated to be negligible. While the majority of the loss in value of used computers comes from declines in replacement cost, this paper shows the second most important source of decline in value is obsolescence. Obsolescence is accelerated by the decline in replacement cost of computers. Cheaper computing power drives developments in software and networks that make older computers less productive even though their original functionality remains intact.

Workers at Risk: Regulatory Dysfunction at OSHA

This white paper explores the causes of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)’s regulatory dysfunctions and describes their negative impacts on OSHA and America’s Workers. With the decreasing power of unions to organize and press employers to implement strong health and safety programs, employees in every occupation rely on OSHA to protect them from occupational hazards. Yet, in the last decade, OSHA has dropped more standards from its regulatory agenda than it has finalized, largely due to insufficient budge authority. And the agency’s enforcement program has assessed such paltry fines for even fatality-related violations of the law that many employers see no incentive in addressing hazards, much less developing precautionary health and safety programs. After describing OSHA’s problems in detail, this paper outlines a number of reforms that could enhance the agency’s performance. Although certain aspects of the Occupational Safety and Health Act could use improvement, the recommendations in this paper focus on regulatory reform—administrative actions that OSHA could implement in the short term.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines

Critical phenomena at the threshold of black hole formation for collisionless matter in spherical symmetry

We perform a numerical study of the critical regime at the threshold of black hole formation in the spherically symmetric, general relativistic collapse of collisionless matter. The coupled Einstein-Vlasov equations are solved using a particle-mesh method in which the evolution of the phase-space distribution function is approximated by a set of particles (or, more precisely, infinitesimally thin shells) moving along geodesics of the spacetime. Individual particles may have non-zero angular momenta, but spherical symmetry dictates that the total angular momentum of the matter distribution vanish. In accord with previous work by Rein et al, our results indicate that the critical behavior in this model is Type I; that is, the smallest black hole in each parametrized family has a finite mass. We present evidence that the critical solutions are characterized by unstable, static spacetimes, with non-trivial distributions of radial momenta for the particles. As expected for Type I solutions, we also find power-law scaling relations for the lifetimes of near-critical configurations as a function of parameter-space distance from criticality.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figure

A complete record from colonization to extinction reveals density dependence and the importance of winter conditions for a population of the silvery blue, Glaucopsyche lygdamus.

Butterflies in the family Lycaenidac are often the focus of conservation efforts. However, our understanding of lycaenid population dynamics has been limited to relatively few examples of long-term monitoring data that have been reported. Here, factors associated with population regulation are investigated using a complete record of a single population of the silvery blue, Glaucopsyche lygdamus Doubleday (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae). Adults of G. lygdamus were first observed in an annual grassland near Davis, California, in 1982 and were last seen in 2003. Relationships between inter-annual variation in abundance and climatic variables were examined, accounting for density dependent effects. Significant effects of both negative density dependence and climatic variation were detected, particularly precipitation and temperature during winter months. Variation in precipitation, the strongest predictor of abundance, was associated directly and positively with butterfly abundance in the same year. Winter temperatures had a negative effect in the same year, but had a lagged, positive effect on abundance in the subsequent year. Mechanistic hypotheses are posed that include climatic effects mediated through both larval and adult plant resources

Tweeting Vertically? Elected Officials’ Interactions with Citizens on Twitter

Enthusiasts propose that social media promotes vertical political communication, giving citizens the opportunity to interact directly with their representatives. However, skeptics claim that politicians avoid direct engagement with constituents, using technology to present a façade of interactivity instead. This study explores if and how elected officials in three regions of the world are using Twitter to interact with the public. We examine the Twitter activity of 15 officials over a period of six months. We show that in addition to the structural features of Twitter that are designed to promote interaction, officials rely on language to foster or to avoid engagement. It also provides yet more evidence that the existence of interactive features does not guarantee interactivity