management are needed. The four areas cover integrated risk management, fiscal and financial risk management, social insurance and work status, and multinational approaches to address global risks. Why these four? They are by no means exhaustive, but they do represent a framework through which many specific recommendations provided in the Report could be implemented. They discuss innovative sol...

Contrary to traditional biological arguments, the differential susceptibility model suggests genotype may moderate rather than mediate parent-child economic similarity. Using family fixed effects models of Add Health sibling data, I investigate the relationship between an index of sensitive genotypes and intergenerational mobility. Full, same sex sibling comparisons hold constant parental chara...

Analysis of causal effects between continuous-valued variables typically uses either autoregressive models or structural equation models with instantaneous effects. Estimation of Gaussian, linear structural equation models poses serious identifiability problems, which is why it was recently proposed to use non-Gaussian models. Here, we show how to combine the non-Gaussian instantaneous model wi...

Hagadorn and co-authors (HKMM) invite the interpretation that most of the large increase in unemployment since 2007 can be blamed on the rising generosity of unemployment insurance benefits, leaving little to blame on the financial crisis. But the paper does not make that claim. And the claim is incorrect. The right way to explain the claims of the the paper is that a policy of extending UI ben...

We have the technology. What is needed is government financial commitment, so argues Kristen Jakobsen in the following discussion of "telemedicine." The term refers to the delivery of health care services by means of modern telecommunications technology. According to Ms. Jakobsen, the telephone, the fax machine, the Internet, and interactive audio-visual transmissions hold the key to making med...

Abstract A long-standing macroeconomic issue is how monetary policy affects the real economy. The lending view is that tight money affects aggregate demand by shifting the supply schedule left in the bank loan market. Previous studies have found that loans contract following tight money. It is not clear whether the financial contraction reflects a shift of the supply schedule or the demand sche...

Surface acoustic waves (SAW) are used to coherently excite nanofabricated free standing beam resonators. Typical resonator sizes are L = 3.5 μm, w = 300nm, and h = 200nm, resulting in mechanical eigenfrequencies of the order of 100 MHz. Depending on the ratio between the resonator eigenfrequency and the frequency of the driving SAW, and depending on the SAW amplitude, we observe a complex inter...

In 1994 the World Bank and the IMF marked the fiftieth anniversary of their founding meeting at Bretton Woods. The occasion was hardly one of celebration for the two Washington institutions with which official post-war international financial arrangements are most closely identified. For, paradoxically, in the lengthy wake of the Uruguay Round of the GATT, the World Trade Organisation was loomi...

A long-standing controversy is whether LBOs relieve managers from shortterm pressures from public shareholders, or whether LBO funds themselves sacrifice long-term growth to boost short-term performance. We examine one form of long-term activities, namely investments in innovation as measured by patenting activity. Analyzing 472 LBO transactions, we find no evidence of any decrease in these act...