Effect of the Corporate Structure on Liability: IBF Corporation v. Alpern and National Paralegal Institute, Inc. v. Bernstein

This article is part of the District of Columbia Surve

Effect of the Corporate Structure on Liability: IBF Corporation v. Alpern and National Paralegal Institute, Inc. v. Bernstein

This article is part of the District of Columbia Surve

Assessing impacts of declines in the world price of tobacco on China, Malawi, Turkey, and Zimbabwe

This study quantitatively analyzes the general equilibrium effects of declines in world demand for tobacco products. The study finds that tobacco exports and production in the three developing countries, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Turkey, would be badly hit if world tobacco prices fall due to the decline in tobacco demand. Moreover, for a given decrease in the world tobacco price, the more important the tobacco sector is in an economy, the worse the tobacco sector is hit. Tobacco is quite important to the Malawian and Zimbabwean economies as tobacco production and trade accounted for, respectively, 17% and 43% of agricultural GDP and tobacco exports accounted for 50% and 35% of national exports in these two countries. The negative effects of a decline in world tobacco prices on the Malawian and Zimbabwean economies are much larger than that on the Turkish economy. In the case of China, tobacco production, marketing, cigarette processing, distribution, and foreign trade are strictly controlled by the government and tobacco trade accounted for a small share of production and consumption. Thus, the decline in the world tobacco prices would hardly affect China's tobacco sector. The study shows that it is highly risky for a developing country to highly depend on exports of a single agricultural commodity. To reduce such risk, a country has to create a more diversified and flexible export structure.Equilibrium (Economics) ,Tobacco Prices. ,Exports Developing countries. ,Agricultural diversification Economic aspects. ,China Economic conditions. ,Malawi. ,Zimbabwe. ,Turkey. ,

A Prescriptive Approach To Introducing An Experiential Entrepreneurship Course In Undergraduate Education

Universities are continually adding entrepreneurship courses to their curriculum. Duhaime and Hitt (2000) found 82% of schools offered entrepreneurship courses at the undergraduate level and 69% of masters programs had offerings in entrepreneurship. A much smaller number of programs offer courses that require that the students actually start the business. The requirement of new venture creation adds an enormous amount of complexity to the teaching experience. Although each pedagogical endeavor will vary, this manuscript details one such experience, including the challenges and various successes of the course and offers recommendations for those professors and/or deans interested in adding a real-life experiential entrepreneurship course to their curriculum

Domestic violence and the Air Force family: Research into situational dynamics and evaluation of the Air Force Family Advocacy Program

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the Air Force Family Advocacy Program and examine the effects that situational dynamics have on recidivism. Although, the high volume of program participants and low recidivism rate demonstrated that the Family Advocacy Program is a valuable resource for treating families referred for spousal domestic violence

On the attribution of weather events to climate change using a fit to extreme value distributions

Increases in extreme weather events are a potentially important consequence of anthropogenic climate change (ACC), yet, are difficult to attribute to ACC because the record length is often similar to, or shorter than, extreme-event return periods. This study is motivated by the ``World Weather Attribution Project'' (WWAP) and their approach of fitting extreme value distribution functions to local observations. The approach calculates the dependence of distribution parameters on the global mean surface temperature (GMST) and uses this dependence to attribute extreme events to ACC. Applying the WWAP method to a large ensemble of climate simulations run without anthropogenic forcing, we still find a strong dependence of distribution parameters on GMST. This dependence results from internal climate variability, such as ENSO, affecting both extreme events and GMST. Therefore, dependence on GMST does not necessarily imply an effect of ACC on extremes. We next re-examine three WWAP attribution cases. We consider whether an extreme value, normal, or log-normal distribution better represents the data; if a GMST-dependence of distribution parameters is justified using a likelihood ratio test; and if a meaningful attribution can be made given errors in GMST dependence. The effects of natural variability on both GMST and extremes make it impossible to attribute the 2020 Siberian Heatwave and Australia's 2020--2021 bushfires to ACC. The small number of data points for the 2019--2021 drought in Madagascar precludes a meaningful attribution analysis. Overall, natural variability and the uncertain relationship between GMST and extremes make attribution using the WWAP approach challenging

Policy bias and agriculture: partial and general equilibrium measures

The paper examines the impact of industrial protection, agricultural export taxes, and overvaluation of the exchange rate on the balance between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. A variety of agricultural terms-of-trade indices are constructed to measure the policy bias against agriculture in a general equilibrium framework that incorporates traded and non-traded goods. These general equilibrium measures are compared to earlier work in a partial equilibrium framework assuming perfect substitutability between domestic and traded goods. Starting from a stylized computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of Tanzania, we simulate a 25 percent tariff on non-agriculture and a 25 percent export tax on agriculture. We also consider the impact of changes in the equilibrium exchange rate. The results indicate that the partial equilibrium measures miss much of the action operating through indirect product and factor market linkages, while overstating the strength of the linkages between changes in the exchange rate and prices of traded goods on the agricultural terms of trade.Terms of trade., Equilibrium (Economics) Mathematical models., Tanzania., Computable general equilibrium (CGE)., Agricultural trade.,

Improved periodic spectral analysis with application to diesel vibration data

The purpose of this work is to begin the development of a comprehensive time/frequency spectral analysis approach that can be applied to complex signals associated with real world systems, such as rotating machinery. Rotating machinery operating at nominally constant speed comprise a large class of important real world systems that have received relatively little attention in terms of stochastic characterizations of any greater sophistication than those associated with wide sense stationary processes. In this work, a periodic-time/frequency characterization procedure is introduced in the context of vibration analysis associated with a diesel engine operating at nominally constant speed. This application highlights a number of difficulties, such as the need for accurate period estimation, accommodation of noninteger periods in relation to digital processing, and identification and separation of tonal components from the signature in order to arrive at a more parsimonious characterization. A theorem relating to the limiting influence of these difficulties is presented. These difficulties are addressed using advanced signal processing tools, such as a recently developed tone identification procedure and extended Kalman filtering, which to the authors\u27 knowledge have not been considered to date in such a setting. Results include a simple correction algorithm for noninteger periods, excellent separation of tonal components whose frequencies are slowly varying, and subsequently a modest improvement in the spectral characterization of the remainder of the process. These results have some significance in relation to diesel engine vibration, since they unambiguously identify tonal vibration components, in addition to a random structure which appears to include random excitation of resonances