Boston College

About: Boston College is a education organization based out in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 9749 authors who have published 25406 publications receiving 1105145 citations. The organization is also known as: BC.

The concept of the just price : theory and economic policy

Abstract: In The concept view of many economists the just price is a nebulous concept invented by pious monks who knew nothing of business or economics and were blissfully unaware of market mechanisms. It is true that certain writers, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, have done their best to accredit this fairy tale and to propagate the notion that the just price, instead of being set by the allegedly blind and unconscionable forces of the market, was determined by criteria of fairness without regard to the elements of supply and demand or at least with the purpose of eliminating the evils of unrestrained competition.

Accelerating Inflation, Technological Innovation, and the Decreasing Effectiveness of Banking Regulation

Abstract: To explain the evolution of U.S. deposit institutions and markets in the 1960sand 1970s, we feed into the regulatory dialectic assumptions about the objectives of federal banking regulation and about outside forces that disturb the adjustment process. The disturbing exogenous forces are accelerating change in the technological and market environment of commercial banking and increasing uncertainty concerning the future speed of enviromental change. We hypothesize that, in the face of these environmental changes, the adaptive efficiency shown on average by deposit-institution managers is greater than that shown by managers of the several competing banking agencies. Incorporating this differential adaptive capacity into the regulatory dialectic helps us to understand how increases in the pace of environmental change and in the degree of environmental uncertainty led regulatee responses to come more quickly and regulatory responses to come more slowly. The bottom line is that, when the environment changes rapidly and becomes more uncertain, traditional forms of U.S. banking regulation can be overwhelmed by technological and regulation-induced innovation.

Universality and diversity in human song

Abstract: What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world's societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music (including songs with words) appears in every society observed; that music varies along three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity), more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with certain behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography-analyzed through machine summaries, amateur and expert listener ratings, and manual transcriptions-reveals that acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral context; that tonality is widespread, perhaps universal; that music varies in rhythmic and melodic complexity; and that elements of melodies and rhythms found worldwide follow power laws.

Selective Publicity and Stock Prices

Abstract: I examine how media coverage of a company’s good and bad news affects the stock price response, by looking at the effect of investor relations (IR) firms. I find that IR firms ‘spin’ their clients’ news by generating more media coverage of positive press releases than negative press releases. This spin increases announcement returns. Around earnings announcements however, IR firms cannot spin the news, and IR firm clients’ returns are significantly lower. This is consistent with positive media coverage increasing investor expectations, creating disappointment around hard earnings information. Using reporter connections and geographical links to newspapers, I argue that IR firms are causally affecting both media coverage and returns.

Soot Particle Studies—Instrument Inter-Comparison—Project Overview

Abstract: An inter-comparison study of instruments designed to measure the microphysical and optical properties of soot particles was completed. The following mass-based instruments were tested: Couette Centrifugal Particle Mass Analyzer (CPMA), Time-of-Flight Aerosol Mass Spectrometer—Scanning Mobility Particle Sizer (AMS-SMPS), Single Particle Soot Photometer (SP2), Soot Particle-Aerosol Mass Spectrometer (SP-AMS) and Photoelectric Aerosol Sensor (PAS2000CE). Optical instruments measured absorption (photoacoustic, interferometric, and filter-based), scattering (in situ), and extinction (light attenuation within an optical cavity). The study covered an experimental matrix consisting of 318 runs that systematically tested the performance of instruments across a range of parameters including: fuel equivalence ratio (1.8 ≤ φ ≤ 5), particle shape (mass-mobility exponent ( D fm ), 2.0 ≤ D fm ≤ 3.0), particle mobility size (30 ≤ d m ≤ 300 nm), black carbon mass (0.07 ≤ m BC ≤ 4.2 fg) and particle chemical composition. I...