Do the burdens to being public affect the investment and innovation of newly public firms?

We examine how the regulatory burdens to being public affect the investment and innovation of newly public firms. To do so, we exploit the Jumpstart our Business Start-up (JOBS) Act, which eliminates certain disclosure, auditing, and governance requirements for a subset of newly public firms. Firms treated with these reduced burdens invest more and more efficiently after going public relative to untreated firms. These findings are concentrated in innovative investments, are accompanied by treated firms being less prone to cater to short-term earnings benchmarks, and are non-existent in dual class firms. We conclude that one reason the burdens to being public affect investment and innovation is because they divert resources away from long-run value increasing investments

Catholic Social Thought in Catholic Business Schools in the U.S. Today: A Survey and Conclusions

When it comes to religion and business ethics, Catholic Schools have a uniquely important position in that they are institutions generally founded in support of religious values which in turn supposedly impact the content and method of teaching of business (and business ethics). Catholic business schools claim to have a distinctiveness which gives them an advantage over non-Catholic business schools (Spitzer, 2010; Lowney, 2012). It is clear that Catholic schools are better than their peers at providing business ethics education in their curriculum. But it also appears that many Catholic business schools and departments consider their business ethics education one of the most important Catholic distinctives. However, merely having a business ethics class is not enough to distinguish one from a secular business school. This paper is primarily a presentation of the findings of our research survey on Catholic Social Teaching in Catholic business schools completed in the Fall of 2014. We proposed to collect data from 50 Catholic colleges and Universities using a series of 30 questions. Our study shows that there are some distinctive programs and methods by which Catholic Business Schools are integrating faith with business, but for many of these schools, the following traits seemed to be characteristic: Business Ethics classes were considered to be the key location of any Catholic Social Teaching in the business school Many Catholic business schools assume that the Catholic identity is taught through core non-business classes. At most of the schools, a very small minority of faculty were considered capable of speaking about Catholic Social Thought. In terms of self-perception of how their institution was improving their distinctive Catholic identity, nearly 2/3 of the schools thought they were improving, and about 2/3 thought they were doing better than other Catholic Business Schools. Generally, uniquely Catholic mission goals for education like “Change Unity of Heart, Mind and Soul” or “Care for the individual person” scored more poorly than “Producing employable graduates” or “Cultivating innovative problem-solvers” While Catholic Business Schools do much better than their peers at requiring business ethics classes, by and large it seems that the Catholic identity of many of these business schools is in many cases maintained and promoted primarily by requiring business ethics classes

Buying Analyst and Investor Attention through IPO Proceeds

We examine the effect of IPO proceeds on the post-IPO information environment. We exploit variation in the amount of capital raised across IPOs that is unrelated to firm size and manager decisions using an instrumental variable approach, and find that marginal increases in IPO proceeds lead to large increases in analyst coverage and institutional ownership in the first two years a firm is public. Increases in IPO proceeds also lead to more frequent follow-on offerings and longer survival as a public firm. We find evidence that immediate shocks to ownership diversification represent one plausible channel through which changes in IPO proceeds affect long-run visibility and investor demand. Overall, our findings highlight important rewards to selling additional shares at the IPO

Robust incremental SLAM with consistency-checking

Incorrect landmark and loop closure measurements can cause standard SLAM algorithms to fail catastrophically. Recently, several SLAM algorithms have been proposed that are robust to loop closure errors, but it is shown in this paper that they cannot provide robust solutions when landmark measurement errors occur. The root cause of this problem is that the robust SLAM algorithms only focus on generating solutions that are locally consistent (i.e. each measurement agrees with its corresponding estimates) rather than globally consistent (i.e. all of the measurements in the solution agree with each other). Moreover, these algorithms do not attempt to maximize the number of correct measurements included in the solution, meaning that often correct measurements are ignored and the solution quality suffers as a result. This paper proposes a new formulation of the robust SLAM problem that seeks a globally consistent map that also maximizes the number of measurements included in the solution. In addition, a novel incremental SLAM algorithm, called incremental SLAM with consistency-checking, is developed to solve the new robust SLAM problem. Finally, simulated and experimental results show that the new algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art robust SLAM methods for datasets with incorrect landmark measurements and can match their performance for datasets with incorrect loop closures.Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. Internal Research and Development Progra

Kikuchi-Fujimoto Disease in a 30-Year-Old Caucasian Female

Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease is a rare, self-limited, histiocytic, necrotizing lymphadenitis first described in Japan in 1972. Necrosis of lymph node tissue is caused by apoptosis and may be virally induced. It commonly presents with cervical lymphadenitis and fever. Despite its low incidence, Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease should be considered in patients with persistent lymphadenopathy. Originally thought to occur only in young Asian women, it is now recognized in other geographic regions. We report a 30-year-old white woman with Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease. We discuss the clinical features, differential diagnosis, radiography, pathology, and outcome