In a less widely known contribution, Béla Martos (1966, Hungarian Academy of Sciences) introduced a generalized notion of concavity that is closely related to what is nowadays known as r-concavity in the operations research literature, and that is identical to what is nowadays known as...

Large deviations for fat tailed distributions, i.e. those that decay slower than exponential, are not only relatively likely, but they also occur in a rather peculiar way where a finite fraction of the whole sample deviation is concentrated on a single variable. The regime of large deviations is...

In this study we use the 2010-2013 Survey of Consumer Finances to analyze the allocation and location of financial assets in categorizing the tax-efficiency of investment portfolios by race/ethnicity. We find that Blacks and Hispanics tend to be more tax-efficient since they invest largely...

For many years corporate lenders have been a crucial force in the boardroom, providing a check on management and contributing to firm governance. However, lenders’ influence has receded in recent years for a large and important class of corporate borrowers. The culprit is a familiar one in a...

Whatever F.A. Hayek meant by "knowledge" could not have been the justified true belief conception common in the Western intellectual tradition from at least the time of Plato onward. In this brief note, I aim to uncover and succinctly state Hayek's unique definition of knowledge.

Some of the literature on entrepreneurship suggests that the term entrepreneur was first introduced by either Cantillon or Say during the industrial revolution in the 18th and early 19th centuries. This article, by contrast, shows the term and the concept to be far older. Moreover, before the...

The current peer review system suffers from two key problems: promotion of an in-crowd whose methods, opinions and innovations it protects; and failure to represent the opinions and interests of non-peer clients. As a result, whole disciplines orient themselves toward navel-gazing research...

Causal inference in the empirical sciences is based on counterfactuals. This paper presents the counterfactual account of causation in terms of Lewis's possible-world semantics, and reformulates the statistical potential outcome framework and its underlying assumptions using counterfactual...

A classic paper of Borwein/Lewis (1991) studies optimisation problems over L^p_+ with finitely many linear equality constraints, given by scalar products with functions from L^q. One key result shows that if some x in L^p_+ satisfies the constraints and if the constraint functions are...

Many political scientists and economists have addressed the implications of the public sector's sheltered status on their unions' wage strategies vis-à-vis the government. Since the public sector is a monopoly provider of necessary and price inelastic services, conventional wisdom suggests that...