CNN: “Tucked inside the defense authorization bill that the Senate passed Friday was an unrelated public lands package that’s set to bring the biggest expansion to the National Park Service in decades. Despite some conservative opposition—a chorus that skewered the legislation as a pork-barrel land grab—the measure also establishes thousands of acres of new wilderness areas.… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: December 2014
Asset Allocation and Asset Pricing with Opaque and Illiquid Assets
“Buss, Adrian and Uppal , Raman and Vilkov, Grigory, Where Experience Matters: Asset Allocation and Asset Pricing with Opaque and Illiquid Assets (December 15, 2014). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2538381 “Alternative assets, such as private equity, hedge funds, and real assets, are illiquid and opaque, thus posing a challenge to traditional models of asset allocation.… Continue Reading
Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density
“Therapeutic interventions that incorporate training in mindfulness meditation have become increasingly popular, but to date, little is known about neural mechanisms associated with these interventions. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), one of the most widely used mindfulness training programs, has been reported to produce positive effects on psychological well-being and to ameliorate symptoms of a number… Continue Reading
Gasoline prices tend to have little effect on demand for car travel
EIA: “The U.S. average retail price per gallon of regular motor gasoline has fallen 28% from its 2014 peak of $3.70 per gallon on June 23, to $2.68 per gallon on December 8. However, this price decline may not have much effect on automobile travel, and in turn, gasoline consumption. Gasoline is a relatively inelastic… Continue Reading
An Analysis of the Navy’s Fiscal Year 2015 Shipbuilding Plan
“The Department of Defense (DoD) submitted the Navy’s 2015 shipbuilding plan, which covers fiscal years 2015 to 2044, to the Congress in July 2014. The total costs of carrying out the 2015 plan—an average of about $21 billion in 2014 dollars per year over the next 30 years—would be one-third higher than the funding amounts… Continue Reading
The role of enterprising libraries in promoting economic wellbeing
The Carnegie UK Trust – Beyond Books. The role of enterprising libraries in promoting economic wellbeing. Jennifer Peachey. “Public spending cuts are changing the physical landscape, governance models and staffing of the public library service. Changing demographics, varying consumer needs and new technologies as media for learning and accessing information have also provided challenges to the public library service. Some public libraries have taken these challenges as… Continue Reading
An Equilibrium Model of Institutional Demand and Asset Prices
Koijen, Ralph S. J. and Yogo, Motohiro, An Equilibrium Model of Institutional Demand and Asset Prices (December 12, 2014). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2537559 “We develop an asset pricing model with rich heterogeneity in asset demand across investors, designed to match institutional holdings data. The equilibrium price vector is uniquely determined by market clearing,… Continue Reading
114th Congress New Member Pictorial Directory
Via GPO – New Member Pictorial Directory Prepared by the Committee on House Administration. Candice S. Miller, Chairman | Robert A. Brady, Ranking Minority Member. Continue Reading
Captured Documents Illuminate Structure of Islamic State Financing
Boston Globe: The terrorist bureaucracy: Inside the files of the Islamic State in Iraq. An exclusive look at captured documents reveals the tight organizational structure — and vulnerabilities — of a violent movement “The group takes a bureaucratic, systematized approach to maintaining power that makes it look in some ways more like a settled government than… Continue Reading
Patterns of Text Reuse in a Scientific Corpus
Patterns of Text Reuse in a Scientific Corpus. Daniel T. Citron, Paul Ginsparg (Submitted on 8 Dec 2014) “We consider the incidence of text “reuse” by researchers, via a systematic pairwise comparison of the text content of all articles deposited to arXiv.org from 1991–2012. We measure the global frequencies of three classes of text reuse, and measure… Continue Reading
Unauthorized Immigrant Population Trends for States, Birth Countries and Regions
Pew – “Explore U.S. unauthorized immigrant population trends for states of residence, as well as for international regions and largest countries of birth, based on Pew Research Center estimates. In 2012, an estimated 11.2 million unauthorized immigrants lived in the U.S., down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007 and unchanged since 2009. For… Continue Reading
Wealth inequality has widened along racial, ethnic lines since end of Great Recession
Pew – Racial, Ethnic Wealth Gaps Have Grown Since the Great Recession “The Great Recession, fueled by the crises in the housing and financial markets, was universally hard on the net worth of American families. But even as the economic recovery has begun to mend asset prices, not all households have benefited alike, and wealth… Continue Reading
