On the Clawbacks in the Madoff Liquidation Proceeding

At a Meeting of Creditors held on February 20, 2009, counsel for the trustee overseeing the liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC, announced the advent of clawback suits seeking to recover sums paid out to defrauded investors.\u27 This Essay explains the legal framework for the clawback suits and anticipates that many investors in the Ponzi scheme 2 will not have submitted claims by the July 2, 2009 deadline, which may result in clawback litigation before multiple courts. The Essay then discusses ways to streamline clawbacks and other Madoff-related litigation so that investors who have already been defrauded are not further damaged by the measures taken to compensate them. It closes with an invitation for additional proposals

On the Clawbacks in the Madoff Liquidation Proceeding

At a Meeting of Creditors held on February 20, 2009, counsel for the trustee overseeing the liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC, announced the advent of clawback suits seeking to recover sums paid out to defrauded investors.\u27 This Essay explains the legal framework for the clawback suits and anticipates that many investors in the Ponzi scheme 2 will not have submitted claims by the July 2, 2009 deadline, which may result in clawback litigation before multiple courts. The Essay then discusses ways to streamline clawbacks and other Madoff-related litigation so that investors who have already been defrauded are not further damaged by the measures taken to compensate them. It closes with an invitation for additional proposals

A Profile of Frail Older Americans and Their Caregivers

Provides a profile of older Americans and their caregivers, focusing on people age 65 and older who are not in nursing homes, and those with severe disabilities. Includes policy implications and recommendations for community-based home care options

Assessing the effect of advertising expenditures upon sales: a Bayesian structural time series model

We propose a robust implementation of the Nerlove--Arrow model using a Bayesian structural time series model to explain the relationship between advertising expenditures of a country-wide fast-food franchise network with its weekly sales. Thanks to the flexibility and modularity of the model, it is well suited to generalization to other markets or situations. Its Bayesian nature facilitates incorporating \emph{a priori} information (the manager's views), which can be updated with relevant data. This aspect of the model will be used to present a strategy of budget scheduling across time and channels.Comment: Published at Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/asmb.246

Avoiding bias in reconstructing the largest observable scales from partial-sky data

Obscuration due to Galactic emission complicates the extraction of information from cosmological surveys, and requires some combination of the (typically imperfect) modeling and subtraction of foregrounds, or the removal of part of the sky. This particularly affects the extraction of information from the largest observable scales. Maximum-likelihood estimators for reconstructing the full-sky spherical harmonic coefficients from partial-sky maps have recently been shown to be susceptible to contamination from within the sky cut, arising due to the necessity to band-limit the data by smoothing prior to reconstruction. Using the WMAP 7-year data, we investigate modified implementations of such estimators which are robust to the leakage of contaminants from within masked regions. We provide a measure, based on the expected amplitude of residual foregrounds, for selecting the most appropriate estimator for the task at hand. We explain why the related quadratic maximum-likelihood estimator of the angular power spectrum does not suffer from smoothing-induced bias.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. v2: replaced with version accepted by PRD (minor amendments to text only

Medicaid and Work Incentives for People with Disabilities: Background and Issues

The potential loss of health benefits under Medicare and Medicaid is a deterrent to people with disabilities entering or re-entering the labor force. Although people with disabilities are generally not "sick," they often have conditions that require greater than average use of medical and long-term care services. To address this problem, Medicaid includes several mandatory and optional provisions, including ones from the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 and the Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act, that allow people with disabilities to work and retain coverage.This paper describes the Medicaid work incentives and how they are being implemented at the state level. It explores the major issues involving Medicaid and work incentives, including the state fiscal crises, horizontal equity across states and groups, coverage of needed services, defining disability, and the interaction between Medicaid and Social Security Disability Insurance and Medicare. In addition, the article also analyzes more technical design issues related to the Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act work incentives, including definition of employment, age restrictions, and use of premiums

Labor Market Segmentation and Immigrant Competition: A Quantal Response Statistical Equilibrium Analysis

Competition between and within groups of workers takes place in labor markets that are segmented along various, often unobservable dimensions. This paper proposes a measure of the intensity of competition in labor markets on the basis of limited data. The maximum entropy principle is used to make inferences about the unobserved mobility decisions of workers in US household data. The quantal response statistical equilibrium class of models can be seen to give robust microfoundations to the persistent patterns of wage inequality. An application to labor market competition between native and foreign-born workers in the United States shows that this class of models captures a substantial proportion of the informational content of observed wage distribution