Spectrum Management: Property Rights, Markets, and The Commons

Gerald Faulhaber and David Farberconsider alternatives to the current licensing regime for spectrum, which appears to lead to substantial inefficiencies in spectrum allocation.Specifically, they examine two property rights regimes and a commons regime.Theynote that economists have favored a market-based regime while engineers have favored a commons-based regime to promote new technologies. Mr. Faulhaber and Mr. Farbershow that thereis aproperty rights market-based regime that unleashes the power of the market andthe power of the new technologies to efficiently allocate spectrum, and that is likely to meet our needs for the near-term future. This regime resolves the presumed dichotomy between the market-based and the commons-based views, so that both objectives can be realized.The authorsalso outline a transition processfor achieving the desired regime outcome that is a "win-win" for all stakeholders, and that could be politically feasible. The change to a property rights regime is likely to lower the cost of spectrum substantially, in many cases to zero.Mr. Faulhaber and Mr. Farberassert that a commons model and a market model can co-exist, at least until spectrum becomes truly scarce.

The Composition of Strike Activity in the Construction Industry

This study shows that strikes in construction have, by most measures, increased during the years since 1949, a period during which strike activity tended to decline in American industry as a whole. The authors demonstrate that this increase has resulted not from an increase in the number of wage disputes but from a growing number of jurisdictional strikes and the increasing severity of economic and union-organizing strikes. They also show that the number of strikes in construction does not vary significantly with the unemployment rate in that industry nor with the presence of wage controls, but both of those factors have a significant impact on the composition of strike activity in construction

Innovation in the Wireless Ecosystem: A Customer-Centric Framework

The Federal Communications Commission’s Notice of Inquiry in GN 09-157 Fostering Innovation and Investment in the Wireless Communications Market is a significant event at an opportune moment. Wireless communications has already radically changed the way not only Americans but people the world over communicate with each other and access and share information, and there appears no end in sight to this fundamental shift in communication markets. Although the wireless communications phenomenon is global, the US has played and will continue to play a major role in the shaping of this market. At the start of a new US Administration and important changes in the FCC, it is most appropriate that this proceeding be launched.

A distributed computer system

The goal of this project Is to plan and develop a computing system that will provide interactive computing services with a high degree of reliability, a variety of language systems, incremental expansion capability, competitive costs, a respect for human factors considerations; and the project will require only a modest amount of system programming resources

Audit Committee Accounting Expertise, Analyst Following, and Market Liquidity

We study the relation between audit committee accounting expertise, analyst following, and market liquidity. Our main results indicate that analyst following increases subsequent to the appointment of an accounting expert to the audit committee. We also provide evidence that accrual quality, as opposed to audit quality or management earnings forecasts, is the channel through which accounting expertise increases analyst following and improves analyst forecast properties. We also show that audit committee accounting expertise is related to higher trading volume and lower liquidity risk, supporting incentives for greater analyst following. Our study extends prior literature by providing evidence that audit committee accounting expertise enhances firms’ information environment beyond the effects it has on financial reporting quality or analysts’ forecast properties. Our study also complements the literature on determinants of analyst following and market liquidity, both of which are related to cost of capital. Results from our study should be useful to firms seeking to enhance analyst following and market liquidity

Managerial Ability and the Quality of Firms’ Information Environment

In this study, we examine the relation between managerial ability and the quality of a firm’s information environment. An emerging stream of research has identified managerial ability as an important determinant of accruals quality and management forecast quality. However, our understanding of the impact of managerial ability on a firm’s broader information environment is incomplete because it captures more than these specific financial reporting disclosures. Using a composite index based on various proxies for a firm’s information environment, we find a positive relation between managerial ability and a firm’s information environment. Consistent with our argument that managers’ equity incentives improve disclosure quality, we find that the quality of a firm’s information environment improves when managers have higher levels of equity incentives. We contribute to the literature by providing more complete and conclusive evidence about the impact of managerial ability on a firm’s broader information environment

Bone marrow transplantation alters the tremor phenotype in the murine model of globoid-cell leukodystrophy

Tremor is a prominent phenotype of the twitcher mouse, an authentic genetic model of Globoid-Cell Leukodystrophy (GLD, Krabbe’s disease). In the current study, the tremor was quantified using a force-plate actometer designed to accommodate low-weight mice. The actometer records the force oscillations caused by a mouse’s movements, and the rhythmic structure of the force variations can be revealed. Results showed that twitcher mice had significantly increased power across a broad band of higher frequencies compared to wildtype mice. Bone marrow transplantation (BMT), the only available therapy for GLD, worsened the tremor in the twitcher mice and induced a measureable alteration of movement phenotype in the wildtype mice. These data highlight the damaging effects of conditioning radiation and BMT in the neonatal period. The behavioral methodology used herein provides a quantitative approach for assessing the efficacy of potential therapeutic interventions for Krabbe’s disease

The Predictive Value of the Proliferation Marker Ki-67 in Patients with Fulminant Hepatic Failure

INTRODUCTION In the United States, acute liver failure (ALF) affects an estimated 2,000 people per year and accounts for 6% of all liver transplants. Without transplantation, however, less than 50% of patients survive with medical management alone. Early identification of patients with survivable AFL is important to guiding their management and early referral to transplantation. Studies have shown that the current prognostic scoring systems used for FHF, including the King’s College Criteria (KCC) and the Model for End- Stage Liver Disease (MELD), have poor sensitivity and negative predictive value for predicting outcome, highlighting a need for more accurate predictive models. Ki-67 is a well-established marker of cellular proliferation but its expression in FHF as a surrogate marker of liver regeneration has not been studied as a tool to predict outcome in these patients. In this pilot study, we sought to determine the predictive value of Ki-67 expression in patients with FHF and its potential for improving the accuracy of current predictive models

Experimental Evidence for a High-Pressure Isostructural Phase Transition in Osmium

International audienceWe have measured the isothermal equation of state (EOS) of osmium to 75 GPa under hydrostatic conditions at room temperature using angle-dispersive x-ray diffraction. A least-squares fit of this data using a third-order Birch-Murnaghan EOS yields an isothermal bulk modulus K 0 411 6 GPa, showing osmium is more compressible than diamond. Most importantly, we have documented an anomaly in the compressibility around 25 GPa associated with a discontinuity in the first pressure derivative of the c=a ratio. This discontinuity plausibly arises from the collapse of the small hole-ellipsoid in the Fermi surface near the L point