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Daily Archives: August 9, 2013

The Macroeconomic Dependence of Industry Equilibrium

This paper reconciles industry conditions with the state of the economy in driving asset liquidation values and, therefore, recovery rates on defaulted debt securities. Macro-economic effects matter but they operate differentially at the industry level. I find that industries whose sales growth is more correlated with GDP growth recover less during recessions. And industries that are more dependent on external finance recover more when the stock market rises. Direct measures of industry distress and industry fundamental value, in addition to measures of bond market illiquidity, enter with reduced economic and statistical significance once the constraint that the macro-economy should have a uniform effect is relaxed. The results of this paper are not incompatible with the industry-equilibrium view put forward by Shleifer and Vishny (1992) and others, but it unmasks a channel of transmission from the macro-economy.”

DOJ/Obama Administration White Paper on Bulk Collection of Metadata Telephony

WSJ – Obama Proposes Surveillance-Policy Overhaul – President Plans Changes to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Transcript of President Obama’s press conference on surveillance, August 9, 2013 Background on the President’s Statement on Reforms to NSA Programs, August 9 2013 Huffington Post – Obama Proposes FISA Reforms Amid Growing Concerns Over NSA Surveillance DOJ/Obama Administration White Paper on… Continue Reading

Environmental Tobacco Smoke Exposure in Children Aged 3‒19 Years

Environmental Tobacco Smoke Exposure in Children Aged 3‒19 Years With and Without Asthma in the United States, 1999‒2010 – Number 126, August 2013 Key findings – Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 1999‒2010 “From 1999 to 2010, the percentage of children without asthma exposed to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) decreased from 57.3%… Continue Reading

Guardian – NSA loophole allows warrantless search for US citizens’ emails and phone calls

Spy agency has secret backdoor permission to search databases for individual Americans’ communications – “The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens’email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden. The previously… Continue Reading

TRAC – New Information on FISA Judges

“Central to the growing dispute about the legality and value of the very extensive electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) is the secret federal court that approves the search warrants authorizing the NSA’s world-wide efforts. While the operations of both the NSA and the decisions of what is now incorrectly called the Federal… Continue Reading

NY Fed Commentary – Historical Use of Graphics

Historical Echoes: Off the Charts! by Kathleen McKiernan “The visual representation of information, knowledge, or data has been around since the time of the caveman. But it wasn’t until 1786, when William Playfair, a Scottish engineer, published The Commercial and Political Atlas, illustrating for the first time how economic data could be represented by charts.… Continue Reading

The Librarian/Internet-Search Relationship

Defining What We Do — All Over Again”: Occupational Identity, Technological Change, and the Librarian/Internet-Search Relationship. A. Nelson, J. Irwin. Academy of Management Journal, 2013; DOI: 10.5465/amj.2012.0201 “Although a growing literature explores occupational identity, or the overlap between “who we are” and “what we do,” this literature has not fully considered how occupational identity may… Continue Reading