Usual Claim Research Articles

Entrepreneurship in times of economic stress: unraveling the U-shaped relationship between the internality of causal attributions and growth

PurposeThis paper examines the relationship between entrepreneurs' internality of causal attributions and firm growth during an economic crisis. We propose a U-shaped relationship between the two variables, arguing that the highest-growth entrepreneurs are those with either the highest or lowest levels of internal attribution (IA) during such periods.Design/methodology/approachTo test our hypothesis, we analyze a database of 804 interviews with entrepreneurs in Brazil during a period of economic stress. Due to the existence of endogeneity, we estimate a model of simultaneous equations in two stages.FindingsWe find evidence of a U-shaped relationship. This means that during economic stress, the fastest-growing entrepreneurs are those who rely more on their own effort (high IA) and those who attribute their success to the economic crisis (low IA).Practical implicationsTailoring interventions based on attribution patterns and recognizing the U-shaped relationship ensures effective support during economic stress. Entrepreneurial support programs should align with internality levels, emphasizing external awareness or skill development accordingly. Policymakers should take attributions into account when promoting financial resilience. Entrepreneurs would benefit from awareness programs on attributions for reflective decision-making. Ecosystems should foster collaboration by recognizing diverse attributions, enhancing a collective understanding of entrepreneurial responses in crises.Originality/valueOur results have important implications for understanding the role of entrepreneurs in economic crises. Our results are relevant because they challenge the usual claim that entrepreneurs with high IA are the ones who perform better in situations where external economic conditions are adverse.

Patent races and pennant races: A new rationale for revenue sharing in sports leagues

This paper draws an analogy between patent races and pennant races. Both involve externalities: investments by individual firms (teams) produce spillover benefits, but they also precipitate a race to be first. In both contexts, the granting of partial rights to the winner balances these effects. In the case of inventions this takes the form of time-limited patents; in sports competition it takes the form of revenue sharing. This conclusion provides a justification for revenue sharing that differs from the usual claim that it promotes competitive balance.

Coaction effect of radiative and non-radiative damping on the lifetime of localized surface plasmon modes in individual gold nanorods.

Revealing the coaction effect of radiative and non-radiative damping on the lifetime of the localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) mode is a prerequisite for the applications of LSPR. Here, we systematically investigated the coaction effect of radiative and non-radiative damping on the lifetime of the super-radiant and sub-radiant LSPR modes of gold nanorods using time-resolved photoemission electron microscopy (TR-PEEM). The results show that the lifetime of the LSPR mode depends on the length of the gold nanorod, and the different variation behavior of an LSPR mode lifetime exists between the super-radiative mode and the sub-radiative one with the increase of nanorod length (volume). Surprisingly, it is found that the lifetime of the super-radiant LSPR mode can be comparable to or even longer than that of the sub-radiant LSPR mode, instead of the usual claim that a sub-radiant LSPR mode has a longer life than the super-radiant mode. Those TR-PEEM experimental results are supported by finite-difference time-domain simulations and are well explained by the coaction effect with the calculation of the radiative and non-radiative damping rate with the increase of the nanorod volume. We believe that this study is beneficial to build a low-threshold nano-laser and ultrasensitive molecular spectroscopy system.

The Heliosheath Plasma Flow Downstream of the Solar Wind Termination Shock in a Consistent Two-Fluid View

In this article, we shall take it serious what has come out from recent theoretical studies on the plasma conditions in the heliosheath, namely downstream of the solar wind termination shock the total plasma pressure is dominated by the pressure of the electrons. We shall respect these results and try to develop the corresponding theoretical basis for an authentic multi-fluid description of the plasma flow downstream of the shock, starting with the dominant pressure action of the local electrons on the mass- and momentum flow of the multi-fluid plasma. It turns out that the usual claim made by Voyager-1 and-2 experimentalists that the bulk velocity of the upwind plasma flow is decreasing with distance from shock, would require that, in reaction to that bulkplasma momentum loss, the electron pressure even increases downstream of the shock. The alternative possibility would be that Voyager-1/-2 data up to now are misinterpreted, and that in fact solar wind bulk velocities in the upwind heliosheath downstream of the shock are increasing opposite to present understandings.

A Note on nonconvex adjustment costs in lumpy investment models: Mean versus variance

AbstractThis paper revisits the canonical assumption of nonconvex capital adjustment costs in lumpy investment models as in Khan and Thomas [(2008) Econometrica 76(2), 395–436], which are assumed to follow a uniform distribution from zero to an upper bound, without distinguishing between the mean and the variance of the distribution. Unlike the usual claim that the upper bound stands for the size (represented by the mean) of a nonconvex cost, I show that in order to generate an empirically consistent interest elasticity of aggregate investment, both a sizable mean and a sizable variance are necessary. The mean governs the importance of the extensive margin in aggregate investment dynamics, while the variance governs how sensitive the extensive margin is to changes in the real interest rate. As a result, both the mean and the variance are quantitatively important for aggregate investment dynamics.

Nonconvex Adjustment Cost in Lumpy Investment Models: Mean versus Variance

This paper revisits the canonical assumption of nonconvex capital adjustment costs in lumpy investment models as in Khan and Thomas (2008), which are assumed to follow a uniform distribution from zero to an upper bound, without distinguishing between the mean and the variance of the distribution. Unlike the usual claim that the upper bound stands for the size (represented by the mean) of a nonconvex cost, I show that in order to generate an empirically consistent interest elasticity of aggregate investment, both a sizable mean and a sizable variance are necessary. The mean governs the importance of the extensive margin in aggregate investment dynamics, while the variance governs how sensitive the extensive margin is to changes in the real interest rate. As a result, both the mean and the variance are quantitatively important for aggregate investment dynamics.

Contest for Dominance: US–China Rivalry in Asia

There is an ongoing debate whether China is a satisfied power or a dissatisfied revisionist power. On the basis of the concept of regime insecurity and power transition theory, this article argues that the resolution of this debate mainly depends on some essentially interrelated complex factors—China’s assertive behaviour, China’s core interests, China’s internal security, and China’s involvement in territorial disputes. Moreover, this article examines the validity of the usual claim of power transition theory that the dominant power is always satisfied with the status quo, and contrary to this idea of power transition theory, this article suggests that the dominant power can be dissatisfied and revisionist too if its hegemony is under threat.

Civil Society and the Rise of the Radical Right in Poland

The influence of the radical right in the whole of Central Europe not only continues to grow, but has reached its apex by gaining power in Poland and Hungary. Its success is often attributed to two factors: a) the weakness of civil society, and b) economic and social crisis. We shall try to dispute these theses by using the example of Poland. We will defend a thesis that contradicts the usual claim that developed civil society also fosters democracy, and will show that the radical right owes its success precisely to its strength in civil society. This text will also show that there is no direct connection between the radical right and economic crisis, and that the real reason for its success is the dominance over the public discourse. The text is divided into three parts: the first will define the concept of the radical right and give an overview of the theories about its rise; the second part will focus on different explanations of the relationship between civil society and liberal democracy; and the third part will discuss the characteristics and activities of the most important organisations of the Polish radical right and their place in civil society and politics.

Curvature invariants and lower dimensional black hole horizons

It is known that the event horizon of a black hole can often be identified from the zeroes of some curvature invariants. The situation in lower dimensions has not been thoroughly clarified. In this work we investigate both (2+1)- and (1+1)-dimensional black hole horizons of static, stationary and dynamical black holes, identified with the zeroes of scalar polynomial and Cartan curvature invariants, with the purpose of discriminating the different roles played by the Weyl and Riemann curvature tensors. The situations and applicability of the methods are found to be quite different from that in 4-dimensional spacetime. The suitable Cartan invariants employed for detecting the horizon can be interpreted as a local extremum of the tidal force suggesting that the horizon of a black hole is a genuine special hypersurface within the full manifold, contrary to the usual claim that there is nothing special at the horizon, which is said to be a consequence of the equivalence principle.

Ideas in Music

It is often taken for granted that music, whatever else it is able to do, cannot articulate ideas. This paper aims to refute that formalist claim and present an anti-formalist one showing why thinking formalism true is based on a fallacy and involves a misunderstanding of ordinary language. By ‘idea’ is meant a view, and reflection on that view, which in the limiting case may be a worldview, a Weltanschauung. That in this sense ideas are articulated in music is to say that they are, among other things, presented, conveyed and considered. This goes well beyond the usual anti-formalist claim that music may express emotions. The paper goes on to show how ideas may be articulated in music. This follows from properly understanding how it is that any idea may be articulated. Without music being able to include articulating ideas, the high artistic and cultural value we place upon music, as well as the way people actually talk about music, while being compatible with music having other features that we value, is inexplicable. In this sense the question is raised as to how it is possible to articulate ideas in music.

Implementing flexible demand: Real-time price vs. market integration

This paper proposes an agent-based model that combines both spot and balancing electricity markets. From this model, we develop a multi-agent simulation to study the integration of the consumers' flexibility into the system. Our study identifies the conditions that real-time prices may lead to higher electricity costs, which in turn contradicts the usual claim that such a pricing scheme reduces cost.We show that such undesirable behavior is in fact systemic. Due to the existing structure of the wholesale market, the predicted demand that is used in the formation of the price is never realized since the flexible users will change their demand according to such established price.As the demand is never correctly predicted, the volume traded through the balancing markets increases, leading to higher overall costs. In this case, the system can sustain, and even benefit from, a small number of flexible users, but this solution can never upscale without increasing the total costs.To avoid this problem, we implement the so-called “exclusive groups”. Our results illustrate the importance of rethinking the current practices so that flexibility can be successfully integrated considering scenarios with and without intermittent renewable sources.

Relationship between the Elemental Abundances and the Kinematics of Galactic-Field RR Lyrae Stars

Data of our compiled catalog containing the positions, velocities, and metallicities of 415 RR~Lyrae variable stars and the relative abundances [el/Fe] of 12~elements for 101 RR~Lyrae stars, including four $\alpha$~elements (Mg, Ca, Si, and Ti), are used to study the relationships between the chemical and spatial--kinematic properties of these stars. In general, the dependences of the relative abundances of $\alpha$~elements on metallicity and velocity for the RR~Lyrae stars are approximately the same as those for field dwarfs. Despite the usual claim that these stars are old, among them are representatives of the thin disk, which is the youngest subsystem of the Galaxy. Attention is called to the problem of low-metallicity RR~Lyrae stars. Most RR~Lyrae stars that have the kinematic properties of thick disk stars have metallicities ${\rm [Fe/H]} < -1.0$ and high ratios [$\alpha$/Fe]$ \approx 0.4$, whereas only about 10\,\% of field dwarfs belonging to the so-called "low-metallicity tail" have this chemical composition. At the same time, there is a sharp change in [$\alpha$/Fe] in RR~Lyrae stars belonging just to the thick disk, providing evidence for a long period of formation of this subsystem. The chemical compositions of SDSS J1707+58, V455 Oph, MACHO 176.18833.411, V456 Ser, and BPS CS 30339--046 do not correspond to their kinematics. While the first three of these stars belong to the halo, according to their kinematics, the last two belong to the thick disk. It is proposed that they are all most likely extragalactic, but the possible appearance of some of them in the solar neighborhood as a result of the gravitational action of the bar on field stars cannot be ruled out.

Millimeter Wave Receiver Efficiency: A Comprehensive Comparison of Beamforming Schemes With Low Resolution ADCs

In this paper, we study the achievable rate and the energy efficiency of analog, hybrid, and digital combining (AC, HC, and DC) for millimeter wave (mmW) receivers. We take into account the power consumption of all receiver components, not just analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), determine some practical limitations of beamforming in each architecture, and develop performance analysis charts that enable comparison of different receivers simultaneously in terms of two metrics, namely, spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE). We present a multi-objective utility optimization interpretation to find the best SE-EE weighted tradeoff among AC, DC, and HC schemes. We consider an additive quantization noise model to evaluate the achievable rates with low resolution ADCs. Our analysis shows that AC is only advantageous if the channel rank is strictly one, the link has very low SNR, or there is a very stringent low power constraint at the receiver. Otherwise, we show that the usual claim that DC requires the highest power is not universally valid. Rather, either DC or HC alternatively results in the better SE versus EE tradeoff depending strongly on the considered power consumption characteristic values for each component of the mmW receiver.

The Avoidable Evils of "All Sums" Liability for Long-Tail Insurance Coverage Claims

Most events covered by insurance happen at a fixed point in time. Accordingly, in the typical context, timing issues relating to coverage under commercial general liability (CGL) insurance policies relate to whether the bodily injury or property damage happened during a particular policy period. This question is usually described as whether the policy is “triggered.” In the context of the usual claim, a court simply determines when the injury or damage took place, and whether the relevant policy was in effect at that time. Environmental, toxic tort, and some products liability claims, however, present more complex timing issues. These types of claims often involve progressive injuries or damage happening over substantial timeframes. In the insurance industry, such losses are often called “longtail” claims. Many long-tail claims involve injury or damage spanning multiple policy years. A court considering timing issues relating to coverage for such claims is faced not only with the challenge of determining which policies are triggered, but also with a far more complicated question: whether and how to allocate the damages between the relevant insurers and between the insurers and the policyholder. The most common approach used to determine how to allocate longtail losses among multiple triggered policy years is often called “pro rata

Janus-faced NGO Participation in Global Governance: Structural Constraints for NGO Influence

Increasingly, nongovernmental organizations participate in negotiations within international organizations as well as in global working groups and discussion forums. This trend is commonly said to enable the influence of the participating NGOs. Yet this article highlights the negative effects of the high level of NGO participation on the NGOs' influence. It shows, in the case of the UN World Summit on the Information Society, how the NGOs' influence is reduced to less relevant issues and how this influence turns out to be highly selective: while the views and demands of a few NGO actors are successful, more diverse views from the broader NGO community become neglected. This suggests greater caution regarding the usual claim that more is necessarily better with regard to NGO participation in global governance.

Precision estimation in temperature and refractivity profiles retrieved by GPS radio occultations

AbstractThe Constellation Observing System for Meteorology Ionosphere and Climate (COSMIC) is a six‐satellite Global Positioning System (GPS) radio occultation (RO) mission that started in April 2006. The close proximity of these satellites during some months after launch provided a unique opportunity to evaluate the precision of GPS RO temperature and refractivity profile retrievals in the neutral atmosphere from nearly collocated and simultaneous observations. In order to work with nearly homogeneous sets, data are divided into five groups according to latitude bands during 20 days of July. For all latitude bands and variables, the best precision values (about 0.1%) are found somewhere between 8 and 25 km height. In general, we find that precision degrades significantly with height above 30 km and its performance becomes there worse than 1%. Temperature precision assessment has been generally excluded in previous studies. Refractivity has here, in general, a precision similar to dry temperature but worse than wet temperature in the lower atmosphere and above 30 km. However, it has been shown that the better performance of wet temperature is an artificial effect produced by the use of the same background information in nearly collocated wet retrievals. Performance in refractivity around 1% is found in the Northern Hemisphere at the lowest heights and significantly worse in the southern polar zone above 30 km. There is no strong dependence of the estimated precision in terms of height on day and night, on latitude, on season, or on the homogeneity degree of each group of profiles. This reinforces the usual claim that GPS RO precision is independent of the atmospheric conditions. The roughly 0.1% precision in the 8–25 km height interval should suffice to distinguish between day and night average values, but no significant differences are found through a Student t test for both populations at all heights in each latitude band. It was then shown that the present spatial density of GPS RO does not allow to analyze smaller latitudinal bands, which could lead to smaller dispersions associated with the day and night means, where it would then be potentially possible to detect significant statistical differences among both categories. We studied the uncertainties associated with the background conditions used in the retrievals and found that their contribution is negligible at all latitudes and heights. However, they force an artificial improvement of wet temperature precision as compared to the dry counterpart at the lowest and highest altitudes studied. In addition, we showed that there is no detectable dubious behavior of COSMIC data prior to day 194 of year 2006 as warned by the data providers, but our result applies only to the precision issue and cannot be extended to other features of data quality. Regarding accuracy, we estimated an average bias of 0.1 K for GPS RO temperature between about 10 and 30 km height and somewhat larger at lower altitudes. We expect a roughly −0.5 K bias above 35 km altitude. Regarding refractivity, a −0.2% bias of the measurements was estimated below about 8 km height.

Harriet Martineau: Authorship, Society and Empire ed. by Ella Dzelzainis, Cora Kaplan (review)

DZELZAINIS, ELLA and CORA KAPLAN, eds. Martineau: Authorship, Society and Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. 263 pp. $84.95. Martineau: Authorship, Society and edited by Ella Dzelzainis and Cora Kaplan, is an eminently useful collection that manages both breadth and depth. Originating from a one-day conference on Martineau, the fifteen chapters are relatively short, but they make sophisticated arguments about Martineau's always complex, often contradictory positions on privacy, authorship, disability, labor unions, women, poverty, education, race, and empire, just to name a few. The broad range of topics and easily digestible length of the chapters make it an accessible introduction to this lesser-known Victorian thinker; it would be an invaluable companion to a course on Martineau, British economics, or the empire in the mid-nineteenth century. It also offers profitable reading to scholars investigating the nuances of Martineau's work. As a testament to the editors' good work, this book is readable cover-to-cover with a natural progression of interrelated topics that produces remarkable cohesion for an edited collection. The book is divided into three parts: Authorship and identity (six chapters), Political economy, technology and society (four chapters), and Empire, race, nation (five chapters). Though the scope widens from the self to the empire, certain aspects of Martineau's beliefs--freedom of expression, trade, and self-governance--reoccur and link to form a relatively complete, though certainly complex, understanding of Martineau's writings. The introduction sets the stage for this understanding, not by providing a simple biographical overview, but by contextualizing Martineau's place in the academy. Dzelzainis and Kaplan address the paucity of scholarly attention until relatively recently when interest in Martineau's work on sociology, feminism, liberalism, and imperialism has converged to bring her contributions to light. Dzelzainis and Kaplan make the rather usual claim that to study an individual figure is to illuminate the issues of the era, but the subsequent chapters more than justify their assertion that [b]y placing Martineau at the centre of nineteenth-century discourse and interrogating her social and political views, this volume intervenes in the wider analysis of the tensions in Victorian social and political reforming thought (4). Lucy Bending writes in her chapter, Self-presentation and instability in Martineau's Autobiography, that [w]hat emerges from Martineau's extensive body of is this strong sense of someone determined to project a firm and self-critical (64). This self-constructed image is the focus of the chapters in part 1. Linda H. Peterson in Harriet Martineau, woman of explores Martineau's role in the emergence of women as professionals of letters and her Autobiography as constructing a public identit[y] of the female author as heroic, in part based on Thomas Carlyle's image of the hero (30). A. Laura Stef-Praun further defines Martineau's self-image in Harriet Martineau's 'intellectual nobility': gender, genius and disability through an examination of Martineau's construction of a new version of genius that is moral, nourished by disability, and contrasted to the Romantic notions of genius. Felicity James, in 'Socinian and political-economy formulas': Martineau the Unitarian, looks to her Unitarian background for insight into the complexity of her character and some of the paradoxes of her early writing (74). According to James, Martineau's early Unitarianism accounts for her difference from Thomas Robert Malthus in her optimistic belief in human progress, a view that reappears in the chapters of part 3 (75). Martineau's image creation even extends to her work as a translator, as Lesa Scholl explores in Provocative agendas: Martineau's translation of Comte. …

International Politics and Import Diversification

This paper examines how international politics affects trade in the absence of empires or wars. We first show that deterioration of relations between the United States and another country, measured by divergence in their United Nations General Assembly voting patterns, reduced U.S. imports from that country during 1962–2000. Though statistically significant, the magnitude of the effect of political distance on trade is small. Indeed, we show that except for petroleum and some chemical products, U.S. imports are not affected by international politics. American firms, however, diversify their oil imports significantly away from political opponents of the United States. Oil trade is often associated with backward vertical foreign direct investment that is subject to the expropriation risk. In contrast to the usual claim that oil is a strategic commodity, we provide suggestive evidence that trade in products when rents are appropriable is more likely to be affected by international politics.

Wigner solution of the quark gap equation at nonzero current quark mass and partial restoration of chiral symmetry at finite chemical potential

According to the generally accepted phase diagram of QCD, at low temperature and high baryon number density the chiral phase transition of QCD is of first order and the co-existence of the Nambu-Goldstone phase and the Wigner phase should appear. This is in conflict with the usual claim that the quark gap equation has no Wigner solution in the case of nonzero current quark mass. In this paper we analyze the reason why the Wigner solution does not exist in the usual treatment and try to propose a new approach to discuss this question. As a first step, we adopt a modified Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model to study the Wigner solution at finite current quark mass. We then generalize this approach to the case of finite chemical potential and discuss partial restoration of chiral symmetry at finite chemical potential and compare our results with those in the normal NJL model.

Applying the extended molecule approach to correlated electron transport: Important insight from model calculations

Theoretical approaches of electric transport in correlated molecules usually consider an extended molecule, which includes, in addition to the molecule itself, parts of electrodes. In the case where electron correlations remain confined within the molecule, and the extended molecule is sufficiently large, the current can be expressed by means of Landauer-type formulas. Electron correlations are embodied into the retarded Green's function of a sufficiently large but isolated extended molecule, which represents the key quantity that can be accurately determined by means of ab initio quantum-chemical calculations. To exemplify these ideas, we present and analyze numerical results obtained within full configuration interaction calculations for an extended molecule described by the interacting resonant level model. Based on them, we argue that for narrower-band (organic) electrodes, the transport properties can be reliably computed because the extended molecule can be chosen sufficiently small to be tackled within accurate ab initio methods. For wider-band (metallic) electrodes, larger extended molecules have to be considered, in general, but a (semi)quantitative description of the transport should still be possible in the typical cases where electron transport proceeds by off-resonant tunneling. Our numerical results also demonstrate that, contrary to the usual claim, the ratio between the characteristic Coulomb strength and the level width due to molecule-electrode coupling is not the only quantity needed to assess whether electron correlation effects are strong or weak.