Fresh start or head start? The effect of filing for personal bankruptcy on the labor supply.

The key feature of the modern U.S. personal bankruptcy law is to provide debtors a financial fresh start through debt discharge. The primary justification for the discharge policy is to preserve human capital by maintaining incentives for work. In this paper, we test this fresh start argument by providing the first estimate of the effect of personal bankruptcy filing on the labor supply using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Our econometric approach controls for the endogenous self-selection of bankruptcy filing and allows for dependence over time for the same household. We find that filing for bankruptcy does not have a positive impact on annual hours worked by bankrupt households, a result mainly due to the wealth effects of debt discharge. The finding is robust to a number of alternative model specifications and sample selections. Therefore, our analysis does not find supporting evidence for the human capital argument for bankruptcy discharge.Bankruptcy

Spillover Effect of Consumer Awareness on Third-Party Sellers’ Selling Strategies on Retail Platform

Global e-commerce sales have reached over $1 trillion and e-commerce has experienced unprecedented prosper for the past years. Along with this remarkable growth is the emergence of giant online retailers such as Amazon.com in the U.S. and JD.com in China. Traditionally these retailers adopt merchant revenue model under which they buy products from suppliers and resell to consumers. Over years, the leading online retailers have developed a considerable consumer base. With the options of reaping their dominance via their merchant revenue model, interestingly, these retailers open their platforms and allow third-party sellers to sell on their platforms, thus inviting competition. Small merchants might use the platforms to reach customers who otherwise would not know the existence of the merchants, and are attracted to the retailers\u27 platforms by the promise of tapping into their huge user base. Third-party sellers report an average of 50% increase in sales when they join Amazon\u27s platform. In turn, Amazon takes a commission for every sale (e.g., 6% for personal computers and 15% for mobile phones). Intuitively, both the retailer and the third-party sellers benefit from the partnership if the third-party sellers sell products different from those offered by the retailer. However, one puzzling phenomenon is that these retailers allow third-party sellers to sell identical products as those offered by the retailers, and we often observe both a retailer and a third-party seller offering the same product on the retailer\u27s platform. More interestingly, many third-party sellers have their own websites and carry more products than retailers in some specific category, and when they join a retailer\u27s platform they sell some of their products on the retailer\u27s platform. Sometimes these third-party sellers may even choose to sell the same product as the retailer, instead of different products, on the retailer\u27s platform. For example, www.HANDU.com sells clothing for women, men, and kids on its own website, but only sells women dress on JD.com. Conceivably, the sellers do so because the presence of sellers on a retailer\u27s platform can increase the traffic to the sellers\u27 websites: When a product by a third-party seller is listed on a retailer\u27s platform and is exposed to its consumers, some of the consumers may also become aware of the other products offered by the seller, with the help of different online tools such as search engines. We call this cross-product awareness increase spillover effect of consumer awareness. This paper aims to answer the following questions. With an open platform and a given commission rate, how does the spillover effect affect a third-party seller’s incentive to join a retailer’s platform and how does the spillover effect affect its product offering on the platform? We develop a game-theoretic model in which the platform is open and the commission rate is given, and the third-party seller carries identical products as the retailer as well as exclusive products that the retailer does not carry. The third party chooses whether to join the platform; If so, the third party chooses which product(s), the identical product, the exclusive product, or both products, is/are sold on the retailer’s platform. We find that the third party\u27s optimal selling strategies vary with its initial awareness, the extent of spillover effect, and the commission rate. Specifically, for a low commission rate, when its initial awareness and spillover effect are mild, the third party sells both identical and exclusive products on the retailer\u27s platform; when its initial awareness is high or spillover effect is salient, the third party sells exclusive products only. For a high commission rate, the third party only sells identical products if the spillover effect relative to initial awareness is significant; otherwise, the third party does not offer any product. In particular, even when the commission rate is very high, the third party may still have incentive to sell the identical product on the retailer\u27s platform. For instance, when the spillover effect relative to the initial awareness level is significant, even the retailer asks for the whole revenue of third party\u27s sales on the retailer\u27s platform, the third party still optimally chooses to sell the identical product on the retailer\u27s platform. This surprising result is because in this case the spillover effect is more important than the initial awareness, the benefit of increased demand for exclusive product resulting from spillover effect outweighs the cost of contributing the revenue from the identical product to the retailer

Conversion of furan derivatives for preparation of biofuels over Ni-Cu/C catalyst

Conversions of furfural and 5-hydroxymethylfurfural as model components in bio-oil were investigated over Ni-Cu/C catalyst with formic acid as hydrogen donor in isopropanol solvent to produce biofuels. The effects of reaction temperature, feed ratio, and reaction time were studied. A high yield of 2-methylfuran up to 91 mol% was obtained from furfural in 8 h at 200 degrees C, and under same conditions 80 mol% yield of 2,5-dimethylfuran could also be obtained from 5-hydroxymethylfurfural in 6 h. The results verified the catalyst performance and the availability of the reaction conditions for producing biofuels from furan derivatives.</p

Fusion characterization of biomass ash

The ash fusion characteristics are important parameters for thermochemical utilization of biomass. In this research, a method for measuring the fusion characteristics of biomass ash by Thermo-mechanical Analyzer, TMA, is described. The typical TMA shrinking ratio curve can be divided into two stages, which are closely related to ash melting behaviors. Several characteristics temperatures based on the TMA curves are used to assess the ash fusion characteristics. A new characteristics temperature, T-m, is proposed to represent the severe melting temperature of biomass ash. The fusion characteristics of six types of biomass ash have been measured by TMA. Compared with standard ash fusibility temperatures (AFT) test, TMA is more suitable for measuring the fusion characteristics of biomass ash. The glassy molten areas of the ash samples are sticky and mainly consist of K-Ca-silicates. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.</p

MECHANISTIC STUDY OF THE CONVERSION FROM DMDFC TO DOHE IN THE LEVULINIC ACID FORMATION PROCESS BY THEORETICAL APPROACHES

A reaction route accounting for the formation of levulinic acid from 5-hydroxymethylfuran-2-carbaldehyde was deduced on the basis of the mechanism previously offered by Horvat, to match the steps with more details. A newly deduced reaction route was proposed between two intermediate products within this mechanism, and the probabilities of the two mechanisms were compared by Gaussian 03 software. It was found that the conversion from the intermediate 2,3-dihydroxy-5-methyl-2,3-dihydro-furan-2-carbaldehyde (DMDFC) to 2,5-dioxo-hex-3-enal (DOHE) in the original mechanism has a lower net energy barrier than that in the newly deduced mechanism, and thus should be more preferred. The mechanism indicates that DMDFC is first protonized, followed by a proton shift process, and thereafter an OH- ion is added, completing the hydration process. Thereafter, an intramolecular H-shift reaction proceeds, leading to conversion to the intended intermediate product DOHE by the consecutive processes of isomerization and dehydration

Hydrodeoxygenation of phenol over Pd catalysts by in-situ generated hydrogen from aqueous reforming of formic acid

Hydrodeoxygenation of phenol, as model compound of bio-oil, was investigated over Pd catalysts, using formic acid as a hydrogen donor. The order of activity for deoxygenation of phenol with Pd catalysts was found to be: Pd/SiO2 &gt; Pd/MCM-41 &gt; Pd/CA &gt; Pd/Al2O3 &gt; Pd/HY approximate to Pd/ZrO2 approximate to Pd/CW &gt; Pd/HSAPO-34 &gt; Pd/HZSM-5. The good performance of Pd/SiO2 is owing to its proper pore structure and large specific surface area. The high level of Bronsted acid sites in SiO2 also favors the deoxygenation of phenol. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Entrained flow gasification of coal/bio-oil slurries

Coal/bio-oil slurry (CBS) is a new partial green fuel for bio-oil utilization. CBS reacts with gasification agents at high temperatures and converts into hydrogen and carbon monoxide. This paper provides a feasibility study for the gasification of CBS in an atmospheric entrained flow reactor for syngas production. Experiments have shown that CBS can be successfully processed and gasified in the entrained flow reactor to produce syngas with almost no tar content and low residual carbon formation. High reactor temperature and steam/carbon ratio is favourable for H-2 production. At 1400 degrees C with steam/carbon ratio of 5, the syngas components are similar with that in equilibrium. A synergistic effect exists between coal and bio-oil in coal/bio-oil slurry gasification which might be caused by the catalysis effect of alkali metals and alkaline earth metals in bio-oil. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.</p

LiSum: Open Source Software License Summarization with Multi-Task Learning

Open source software (OSS) licenses regulate the conditions under which users can reuse, modify, and distribute the software legally. However, there exist various OSS licenses in the community, written in a formal language, which are typically long and complicated to understand. In this paper, we conducted a 661-participants online survey to investigate the perspectives and practices of developers towards OSS licenses. The user study revealed an indeed need for an automated tool to facilitate license understanding. Motivated by the user study and the fast growth of licenses in the community, we propose the first study towards automated license summarization. Specifically, we released the first high quality text summarization dataset and designed two tasks, i.e., license text summarization (LTS), aiming at generating a relatively short summary for an arbitrary license, and license term classification (LTC), focusing on the attitude inference towards a predefined set of key license terms (e.g., Distribute). Aiming at the two tasks, we present LiSum, a multi-task learning method to help developers overcome the obstacles of understanding OSS licenses. Comprehensive experiments demonstrated that the proposed jointly training objective boosted the performance on both tasks, surpassing state-of-the-art baselines with gains of at least 5 points w.r.t. F1 scores of four summarization metrics and achieving 95.13% micro average F1 score for classification simultaneously. We released all the datasets, the replication package, and the questionnaires for the community

Coherent postionization dynamics of molecules based on adiabatic strong-field approximation

Open-system density matrix methods typically employ incoherent population injection to investigate the postionization dynamics in strong laser fields. The presence of coherence injection has long been a subject of debate. In this context, we introduce a coherence injection model based on the adiabatic strong-field approximation (ASFA). This model effectively predicts ionic coherence resulting from directional tunnel ionization. With increasing field strength, the degree of coherence predicted by the ASFA model gradually deviates from that of the SFA model but remains much milder compared to the results of the simple and partial-wave expansion models. The impact of coherence injection on the postionization molecular dynamics is explored in O$_2$ and N$_2$. We find that the ionization-induced vibrational coherence strongly enhances the population inversion of $X^2 \Sigma _g^+ -B^2 \Sigma _u^+$ in N$_2^+$ and the dissociation probability of O$_2^+$. Conversely, the ionization-induced vibronic coherences have inhibitory effects on the related transitions. These findings reveal the significance of including the vibronic-state-resolved coherence injection in simulating molecular dynamics following strong-field ionization.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure