An Interview with Franco Modigliani

These are the page proofs of the interview of Franco Modigliani by William A. Barnett and Robert Solow. The interview was published in the journal, Macroeconomic Dynamics, in 2000. Since William Barnett is one of the two interviewers, he now is permitted, by Cambridge University Press, to make the interview available as a 'working paper.' This interview contains some astonishing revelations about the life of Franco Modigliani, beginning with details of the circumstances regarding his move from Italy to France during the Second World War and his subsequent move to the United States.history of economic thought, Modigliani, Solow, macroeconomics, finance

Prosecuting Terrorists as Criminals and the Limits of Extraterritorial Jurisdiction

(Excerpt) The remainder of this Article is structured as follows. Part I discusses the United States government\u27s current use of the Article III courts to combat global terrorism. First, it reviews data to show that there has been a whopping number of extraterritorial prosecutions for terrorism crimes brought since 9/11. Second, it surveys the case law to demonstrate that U.S. courts have failed to develop a due process test for assessing extra-jurisdictionality in those terrorism cases, and that this has been problematic because several cases have raised due process questions. Part II puts the discussion in Part I in context by exploring the larger body of United States law on extraterritorial criminal jurisdiction. First, Part II.A shows that the lack of a due process doctrine for limiting terrorism prosecutions is actually par for the course; as a whole, federal court opinions allowing for the extraterritorial application of the criminal law have been largely silent on the Due Process Clause. Next, Part II.B claims that the reason for this state of the doctrine is historical. Extraterritorial crimes necessitating a due process analysis only date back to 1980. In Part III, this Article shifts to a normative argument. Drawing on domestic criminal law in Part III.A and on the law concerning the extraterritorial enforcement of federal civil statutes in Part III.B, this Article argues that the absence of a Due Process Clause test for prosecuting overseas crimes is inconsistent with core tenants in American law. Part III.C examines drug-trafficking cases in the Ninth Circuit since the 1990s, the one body of cases in which judges have begun to fill the holes. In the Conclusion, this Article seeks to apply the lessons from Part III to contemporary extraterritorial terrorism cases. It sketches the outlines of a Due Process Clause test that U.S. courts should apply in terrorism prosecutions going forward

Prosecuting Terrorists as Criminals and the Limits of Extraterritorial Jurisdiction

(Excerpt) The remainder of this Article is structured as follows. Part I discusses the United States government\u27s current use of the Article III courts to combat global terrorism. First, it reviews data to show that there has been a whopping number of extraterritorial prosecutions for terrorism crimes brought since 9/11. Second, it surveys the case law to demonstrate that U.S. courts have failed to develop a due process test for assessing extra-jurisdictionality in those terrorism cases, and that this has been problematic because several cases have raised due process questions. Part II puts the discussion in Part I in context by exploring the larger body of United States law on extraterritorial criminal jurisdiction. First, Part II.A shows that the lack of a due process doctrine for limiting terrorism prosecutions is actually par for the course; as a whole, federal court opinions allowing for the extraterritorial application of the criminal law have been largely silent on the Due Process Clause. Next, Part II.B claims that the reason for this state of the doctrine is historical. Extraterritorial crimes necessitating a due process analysis only date back to 1980. In Part III, this Article shifts to a normative argument. Drawing on domestic criminal law in Part III.A and on the law concerning the extraterritorial enforcement of federal civil statutes in Part III.B, this Article argues that the absence of a Due Process Clause test for prosecuting overseas crimes is inconsistent with core tenants in American law. Part III.C examines drug-trafficking cases in the Ninth Circuit since the 1990s, the one body of cases in which judges have begun to fill the holes. In the Conclusion, this Article seeks to apply the lessons from Part III to contemporary extraterritorial terrorism cases. It sketches the outlines of a Due Process Clause test that U.S. courts should apply in terrorism prosecutions going forward

On the magnitude of spheres, surfaces and other homogeneous spaces

In this paper we define the magnitude of metric spaces using measures rather than finite subsets as had been done previously and show that this agrees with earlier work with Leinster in arXiv:0908.1582. An explicit formula for the magnitude of an n-sphere with its intrinsic metric is given. For an arbitrary homogeneous Riemannian manifold the leading terms of the asymptotic expansion of the magnitude are calculated and expressed in terms of the volume and total scalar curvature of the manifold. In the particular case of a homogeneous surface the form of the asymptotics can be given exactly up to vanishing terms and this involves just the area and Euler characteristic in the way conjectured for subsets of Euclidean space in previous work.Comment: 21 pages. Main change from v1: details added to proof of Theorem

An Interview with Franco Modigliani

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=51749&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S1365100500015042Franco Modigliani's contributions in economics and finance have transformed both fields. Although many other major contributions in those fields have come and gone, Modigliani's contributions seem to grow in importance with time. His famous 1944 article on liquidity preference has not only remained required reading for generations of Keynesian economists but has become part of the vocabulary of all economists. The implications of the life-cycle hypothesis of consumption and saving provided the primary motivation for the incorporation of finite lifetime models into macroeconomics and had a seminal role in the growth in macroeconomics of the overlapping generations approach to modeling of Allais, Samuelson, and Diamond. Modigliani and Miller's work on the cost of capital transformed corporate finance and deeply influenced subsequent research on investment, capital asset pricing, and recent research on derivatives. Modigliani received the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in 1985. In macroeconomic policy, Modigliani has remained influential on two continents. In the United States, he played a central role in the creation of a the Federal Reserve System's large-scale quarterly macroeconometric model, and he frequently participated in the semiannual meetings of academic consultants to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C. His visibility in European policy matters is most evident in Italy, where nearly everyone seems to know him as a celebrity, from his frequent appearances in the media. In the rest of Europe, his visibility has been enhanced by his publication, with a group of distinguished European and American economists, of “An Economists' Manifesto on Unemployment in the European Union,” which was signed by a number of famous economists and endorsed by several others. This interview was conducted in two parts on different dates in two different locations, and later unified. The initial interview was conducted by Robert Solow at Modigliani's vacation home in Martha's Vineyard. Following the transcription of the tape from that interview, the rest of the interview was conducted by William Barnett in Modigliani's apartment on the top floor of a high-rise building overlooking the Charles River near Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those concluding parts of the interview in Cambridge continued for the two days of November 5–6, 1999 with breaks for lunch and for the excellent espresso coffee prepared by Modigliani in an elaborate machine that would be owned only by someone who takes fine coffee seriously. Although the impact that Modigliani has had on the economics and finance professions is clear to all members of those professions, only his students can understand the inspiration that he has provided to them. However, that may have been adequately reflected by Robert Shiller at Yale University in correspondence regarding this interview, when he referred to Modigliani as: “my hero.

Hierarchical Re-estimation of Topic Models for Measuring Topical Diversity

A high degree of topical diversity is often considered to be an important characteristic of interesting text documents. A recent proposal for measuring topical diversity identifies three elements for assessing diversity: words, topics, and documents as collections of words. Topic models play a central role in this approach. Using standard topic models for measuring diversity of documents is suboptimal due to generality and impurity. General topics only include common information from a background corpus and are assigned to most of the documents in the collection. Impure topics contain words that are not related to the topic; impurity lowers the interpretability of topic models and impure topics are likely to get assigned to documents erroneously. We propose a hierarchical re-estimation approach for topic models to combat generality and impurity; the proposed approach operates at three levels: words, topics, and documents. Our re-estimation approach for measuring documents' topical diversity outperforms the state of the art on PubMed dataset which is commonly used for diversity experiments.Comment: Proceedings of the 39th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR2017

On the asymptotic magnitude of subsets of Euclidean space

Magnitude is a canonical invariant of finite metric spaces which has its origins in category theory; it is analogous to cardinality of finite sets. Here, by approximating certain compact subsets of Euclidean space with finite subsets, the magnitudes of line segments, circles and Cantor sets are defined and calculated. It is observed that asymptotically these satisfy the inclusion-exclusion principle, relating them to intrinsic volumes of polyconvex sets.Comment: 23 pages. Version 2: updated to reflect more recent work, in particular, the approximation method is now known to calculate (rather than merely define) the magnitude; also minor alterations such as references adde

Extreme statistics for time series: Distribution of the maximum relative to the initial value

The extreme statistics of time signals is studied when the maximum is measured from the initial value. In the case of independent, identically distributed (iid) variables, we classify the limiting distribution of the maximum according to the properties of the parent distribution from which the variables are drawn. Then we turn to correlated periodic Gaussian signals with a 1/f^alpha power spectrum and study the distribution of the maximum relative height with respect to the initial height (MRH_I). The exact MRH_I distribution is derived for alpha=0 (iid variables), alpha=2 (random walk), alpha=4 (random acceleration), and alpha=infinity (single sinusoidal mode). For other, intermediate values of alpha, the distribution is determined from simulations. We find that the MRH_I distribution is markedly different from the previously studied distribution of the maximum height relative to the average height for all alpha. The two main distinguishing features of the MRH_I distribution are the much larger weight for small relative heights and the divergence at zero height for alpha>3. We also demonstrate that the boundary conditions affect the shape of the distribution by presenting exact results for some non-periodic boundary conditions. Finally, we show that, for signals arising from time-translationally invariant distributions, the density of near extreme states is the same as the MRH_I distribution. This is used in developing a scaling theory for the threshold singularities of the two distributions.Comment: 29 pages, 4 figure

Design of the Data Description Language Processor

The Data Description Language (DDL) is a language for describing the structure of data, and expressing transformations that are to be performed on that data. The DDL Processor is a set of computer programs which interprets DDL statements and generates a computer program to perform the specified transformations. Together the DDL and its Processor provide a utility which can be used to perform jobs such as creating new data bases, reorganizing or extracting data from existing data bases, moving data to different storage devices, interfacing files between different programming languages, or between different operating systems. This report documents the design of the DDL Processor. Special features of the design include the use of special purpose internal languages, compiler-compiler techniques, bootstrapping methods, and a descriptor tree which aids in the parsing of input data

Identification of New Drug Candidates Against \u3cem\u3eBorrelia burgdorferi\u3c/em\u3e Using High-Throughput Screening

Lyme disease is the most common zoonotic bacterial disease in North America. It is estimated that .300,000 cases per annum are reported in USA alone. A total of 10%–20% of patients who have been treated with antibiotic therapy report the recrudescence of symptoms, such as muscle and joint pain, psychosocial and cognitive difficulties, and generalized fatigue. This condition is referred to as posttreatment Lyme disease syndrome. While there is no evidence for the presence of viable infectious organisms in individuals with posttreatment Lyme disease syndrome, some researchers found surviving Borrelia burgdorferi population in rodents and primates even after antibiotic treatment. Although such observations need more ratification, there is unmet need for developing the therapeutic agents that focus on removing the persisting bacterial form of B. burgdorferi in rodent and nonhuman primates. For this purpose, high-throughput screening was done using BacTiter-Glo assay for four compound libraries to identify candidates that stop the growth of B. burgdorferi in vitro. The four chemical libraries containing 4,366 compounds (80% Food and Drug Administration [FDA] approved) that were screened are Library of Pharmacologically Active Compounds (LOPAC1280), the National Institutes of Health Clinical Collection, the Microsource Spectrum, and the Biomol FDA. We subsequently identified 150 unique compounds, which inhibited .90% of B. burgdorferi growth at a concentration of ,25 µM. These 150 unique compounds comprise many safe antibiotics, chemical compounds, and also small molecules from plant sources. Of the 150 unique compounds, 101 compounds are FDA approved. We selected the top 20 FDA-approved molecules based on safety and potency and studied their minimum inhibitory concentration and minimum bactericidal concentration. The promising safe FDA-approved candidates that show low minimum inhibitory concentration and minimum bactericidal concentration values can be chosen as lead molecules for further advanced studies