Evaluation of the Financial Impact of Flood Management on Residential Losses

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts that the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has had on the costs of flooding and on their distribution among payers. This study thus probes the NFIP's financial impact, the centerpiece question about program effectiveness. For the analysis, this paper models the institutional and economic framework of flood relief compensation into the HAZUS-flood model, and calculates the NFIP impact on the distribution of payers for flood losses in special flood hazard areas.Risk and Uncertainty,

Oral History Interview: Ted Miller

This interview is one of a series conducted concerning West Virginia coal mining. At the time of the interview, Mr. Miller was a retired coal miner living in Oak Hill, West Virginia. He talks about Jenny Lynn Houses, entertainment as a boy, pick and shovel mining, and his mining experiences.https://mds.marshall.edu/oral_history/1084/thumbnail.jp

Effects of Frustration on Performance in Adult Human Subjects

Submitted in partial fulillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology in the Graduate School of Morehead State University by Ted L. Miller in December of 1972

Irrigation practices and costs in southeastern Missouri, 1960

Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station and Farm Economics Division, Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, cooperating.Digitized 2007 AES.Includes bibliographical references

Nature and extent of irrigation in Missouri

Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station, and Farm Economics Research Division, Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, cooperating--P. [2].Digitized 2007 AES

Irrigation practices and costs in southeastern Missouri, 1959

Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station and Farm Economics Division, Economic Research Services, U.S. Department of Agriculture, cooperating.Digitized 2007 AES.Includes bibliographical references

How analysts process information: technical and financial disclosures in the microprocessor industry

Following Bradshaw (‘Analyst information processing, financial regulation, and academic research’ [2009], and Analysts' forecasts: What do we know after decades of work? [2011]), this paper examines how analysts process information, particularly in an information environment characterised by multiple and potentially complementary information sources. The setting is the microprocessor industry, one in which technical information is particularly significant and complex to digest. Based on 3837 analyst earnings-forecast revisions, issued by 134 analysts, we examine quantitatively the speed, magnitude, and information content of the reactions of individual analysts and subgroups of analysts to both periodic and timely technical disclosures, and as a complement to periodic financial disclosure. We find that analysts are much slower to react to timely technical disclosures than they are to periodic financial disclosures. We find also that technical and financial disclosures complement each other. Furthermore, we find that there is a ‘hierarchy’ of analysts in this particular industry, as evidenced through the strength of reaction to timely technical disclosures. Finally, we find that lower speed in reacting to timely technical disclosures and a higher intensity in the use of timely technical disclosure (in conjunction with periodic financial disclosure) result in greater accuracy, and that more experienced analysts tend to be less accurate. We suggest that the findings may have implications for other industries such as Bio-Tech Pharma

Do Economic Downturns Dampen Patent Litigation?

Recent studies estimate that the economic impact of U.S. patent litigation may be as large as $80 billion per year and that the overall rate of U.S. patent litigation has been growing rapidly over the past twenty years. And yet, the relationship of the macroeconomy to patent litigation rates has never been studied in any rigorous fashion. This lacuna is notable given that there are two opposing theories among lawyers regarding the effect of economic downturns on patent litigation. One camp argues for a substitution theory, holding that patent litigation should increase in a downturn because potential plaintiffs have a greater incentive to exploit patent assets relative to other investments. The other camp posits a capital constraint theory that holds that the decrease in cash flow and available capital disincentivizes litigation. Analyzing quarterly patent infringement suit filing data from 1971-2009 using a time-series vector autoregression (VAR) model, we show that economic downturns have significantly affected patent litigation rates. (To aid other researchers in testing and extending our analyses, we have made our entire dataset available online.) Importantly, we find that these effects have changed over time. In particular, patent litigation has become more dependent on credit availability in a downturn. We hypothesize that such changes resulted from an increase in use of contingent-fee attorneys by patent plaintiffs and the rise of non-practicing entities (NPEs), which unlike most operating companies, generally fund their lawsuits directly from outside capital sources. Over roughly the last twenty years, we find that macroeconomic conditions have affected patent litigation in contrasting ways. Decreases in GDP (particularly economy-wide investment) are correlated with significant increases in patent litigation and countercyclical economic trends. On the other hand, increases in T-bill and real interest rates as well as increases in economy-wide financial risk are generally correlated with significant decreases in patent suits, leading to procyclical trends. Thus, the specific nature of a downturn predicts whether patent litigation rates will tend to rise or fall

A Unified Theory of Dual-Process Control

Dual-process theories play a central role in both psychology and neuroscience, figuring prominently in fields ranging from executive control to reward-based learning to judgment and decision making. In each of these domains, two mechanisms appear to operate concurrently, one relatively high in computational complexity, the other relatively simple. Why is neural information processing organized in this way? We propose an answer to this question based on the notion of compression. The key insight is that dual-process structure can enhance adaptive behavior by allowing an agent to minimize the description length of its own behavior. We apply a single model based on this observation to findings from research on executive control, reward-based learning, and judgment and decision making, showing that seemingly diverse dual-process phenomena can be understood as domain-specific consequences of a single underlying set of computational principles