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142. CATO Institute: Peer-to-Peer Networking and Digital Rights Management: How Market Tools Can Solve Copyright Problems
- Author:
- Michael A. Einhorn and Bill Rosenblatt
- Publication Date:
- 02-2005
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- The Cato Institute
- Abstract:
- The term “peer to peer” (P2P) refers generally to software that enables a computer to locate a content file on another networked device and copy the encoded data to its own hard drive. P2P technology often attracts people who use it to reproduce or distribute copyrighted music and movies without authorization of rights owners. For that reason, the short history of P2P technology has been one of constant controversy and calls by many in the content industry to regulate or even ban P2P-based networks or software.
- Topic:
- Development, Government, and Science and Technology
- Political Geography:
- United States
143. CATO Institute: Who Killed Telecom? Why the Official Story Is Wrong
- Author:
- Lawrence Gasman
- Publication Date:
- 02-2005
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- The Cato Institute
- Abstract:
- In the mid-1990s as it seemed that lawmakers were about to abandon much of the regulatory apparatus that had hampered the telecommunications industry since the 1930s, the telecom equipment industry began to boom, helped in part by the rise of the Internet. The deregulatory trend led ultimately to the 1996 Telecom Act, and soon the architects and implementers of that act were congratulating themselves on a job well done. We were supposedly building a new telecom infrastructure fit for the information age.
- Topic:
- Development, Industrial Policy, and Science and Technology
- Political Geography:
- United States
144. Is Cybersecurity a Public Good? Evidence from the Financial Services Industry
- Author:
- Benjamin Powell
- Publication Date:
- 03-2005
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Independent Institute
- Abstract:
- The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States heightened concerns about vulnerabilities to future attacks. One new area of concern is cyberterrorism: the possibility of terrorists using computers to attack our critical infrastructure electronically. The government has made efforts to better secure its own computer networks to prevent terrorists from hacking into computer systems in the Pentagon, FBI, and other government agencies. Increasingly, however, the government has been concerned that the private sector is vulnerable to cyberterrorism. The private sector owns approximately 85 percent of the critical infrastructure in the U.S. (Deloitte 2004 p. 15). There are concerns that a cyber attack on dams, trains, electrical grids, pipeline pumps, communications networks, or the financial services industry could cause significant physical or economic damage to the U.S. The policy question being asked is whether private businesses, when left to their own devices, provide enough cybersecurity or if some form of government involvement is justified.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Development, Industrial Policy, and Science and Technology
- Political Geography:
- United States and United Nations
145. Nuclear Energy Today
- Publication Date:
- 02-2005
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
- Abstract:
- Nuclear energy has been used to produce electricity for more than half a century. It currently provides about 17% of the world's supply and 23% in OECD countries. The oil crisis of the early 1970s provoked a surge in nuclear power plant orders and construction, but as oil prices stabilised and even dropped, and enough electricity generating plants came into service to meet demand, orders tailed off. Accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States (1979) and at Chernobyl in Ukraine (1986) also raised serious questions in the public mind about nuclear safety.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Development, Nuclear Weapons, and Science and Technology
- Political Geography:
- United States and Ukraine
146. Order Flow and Exchange Rate Dynamics in Electronic Brokerage System Data
- Author:
- Jonathan H. Wright, David W. Berger, Alain P. Chaboud, Sergey V. Chernenko, Edward Howorka, Raj S. Iyer, and David Liu
- Publication Date:
- 04-2005
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
- Abstract:
- We study the association between order flow and exchange rate returns in five years of high-frequency intraday data from the leading interdealer electronic broking system, EBS. While the association between order flow and exchange rate returns has been studied in several previous papers, these have mostly used relatively short spans of daily data from older bilateral dealing systems and, usually, transaction counts instead of actual trading volume. Using a substantially longer span of recent high-frequency data and measuring order flow as actual signed trading volume, we find a strong positive association between order flow and exchange rate returns at frequencies ranging from one minute to one day, and a more modest but still sizeable association at the monthly frequency. We find, however, no evidence that order flow has predictive power for future exchange rate movements beyond, possibly, the next minute. Focusing on the behavior of order flow and exchange rates at the time of scheduled U.S. economic data releases, we find that the surprise components of these announcements are associated with order flow at high frequency immediately after the data releases. This finding seems inconsistent with a simple efficient markets view of how a public news announcement is incorporated into prices.
- Topic:
- Economics, International Trade and Finance, and Science and Technology
- Political Geography:
- United States
147. A Flexible Finite-Horizon Identification of Technology Shocks
- Author:
- Neville Francis, Michael T. Owyang, and Jennifer T. Roush
- Publication Date:
- 04-2005
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
- Abstract:
- Recent empirical studies using infinite horizon long-run restrictions question the validity of the technology-driven real business cycle hypothesis. These results have met with their own controversy, stemming from their sensitivity to changes in model specification and the general poor performance of long run restrictions in Monte Carlo experiments. We propose a alternative identification that maximizes the contribution of technology shocks to the forecast error variance of labor productivity at a long, but finite horizon. In small samples, our identification outperforms its infinite horizon counterpart by producing less biased impulse responses and technology shocks that are more highly correlated with the technology shocks from the underlying model. For U.S. data, we show that the negative hours response is not robust to allowing a greater role for non-technology shocks in the forecast error variance share at a ten year horizon.
- Topic:
- Development, Industrial Policy, International Trade and Finance, and Science and Technology
- Political Geography:
- United States
148. International Risk-Sharing and the Transmission of Productivity Shocks
- Author:
- Sylvain Leduc, Giancarlo Corsetti, and Luca Dedola
- Publication Date:
- 02-2005
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
- Abstract:
- A central puzzle in international finance is that real exchange rates are volatile and, in stark contradiction to efficient risk-sharing, negatively correlated with cross-country consumption ratios. This paper shows that a standard international business cycle model with incomplete asset markets augmented with distribution services can account quantitatively for these properties of real exchange rates. Distribution services, intensive in local inputs, drive a wedge between producer and consumer prices, thus lowering the impact of terms-of-trade changes on optimal agents' decisions. This reduces the price elasticity of tradables separately from assumptions on preferences.
- Topic:
- Development, Economics, International Trade and Finance, and Science and Technology
- Political Geography:
- United States
149. Climate Change Science: Time for "Team B"?
- Author:
- Steven F. Hayward
- Publication Date:
- 02-2005
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
- Abstract:
- The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is currently working on its fourth assessment report. Despite the IPCC's noble intent to generate a scientific consensus, a number of factors have compromised the research and drafting process, assuring that its next assessment report will be just as controversial as previous reports in 1995 and 2001. Efforts to reform this large bureaucratic effort are unlikely to succeed. Perhaps the time has come to consider competition as the means of checking the IPCC's monopoly and generating more reliable climate science.
- Topic:
- Environment, Government, and Science and Technology
- Political Geography:
- United States
150. Managing Energy Insecurity
- Author:
- John Browne
- Publication Date:
- 02-2005
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Peterson Institute for International Economics
- Abstract:
- It is great to be in Washington again and a privilege to be invited to speak here for the first time. You asked me to talk about energy security, and I think the basic question is whether, to use the words of one of your recent papers, there is "a gathering storm" around energy supply, and what, if anything, should and could be done to avert that storm.
- Topic:
- Economics, Energy Policy, and Science and Technology
- Political Geography:
- United States and Washington