Suchergebnisse

Unlike most other countries where the government owns the rights to all minerals, the United States has fragmented mineral ownership, where the rights to extract oil and gas can be owned by the federal government, state governments, and private owners. Different owners put different requirements and regulations on oil and gas firms, and these in turn affect the profitability and therefore the likelihood of drilling. Evaluating the effects of federal versus state and private policies is challenging because the land that remains in federal ownership tends to be more remote, rugged, and arid—making drilling more costly. In Wyoming, however, the Land Ordinance of 1785 mandated that certain regularly spaced plots of land be transferred to state ownership upon statehood. The transfers resulted in a regular pattern of side-by-side state-owned and federal-owned land that persists today and provided the setting for a natural experiment that helps us understand the effects of land regulations. This report explores the Wyoming setting to show how regulations on state-owned land affect the likelihood of drilling on nearby federal-owned land.

AbstractWe exploit a government oil lease lottery that randomly assigned leases to individuals and firms. We examine how initial misallocation affected trade, drilling, and production outcomes. When parcels are far from existing production, leases won by individuals have similar drilling and production outcomes as those won by firms. However, for parcels close to existing production, we find that leases are about 50% less likely to be drilled when they are won by firms. We find evidence that information asymmetries drive these results.

We review and discuss the literature related to adaptive musical instruments since 2000, focusing on the use of such instruments with children with disabilities. The aim of this review is to provide a synthesis of perspectives and answer the following questions: How have music technologies, including both software and hardware, been used for children with disabilities and how have they been tested and evaluated? What have been the research questions asked and outcomes evaluated concerning these instruments? The studies reviewed include intervention, narrative and descriptive studies. One observation is that adaptive instrument design and research cuts across many different disciplines including music therapy, education and engineering. We considered articles taking functional and rehabilitation informed perspectives as well as critical disability studies, for which music making is often discussed as a human right independently of potential benefits. We discuss methodological approaches used in these studies, and reports of user's opinions concerning the use of AMIs. It is worth noting that most uses of AMIs by the population under consideration are highly improvisatory, and so a methodological challenge frequently reported is how can the effectiveness of AMIs be assessed without focusing only on easily measurable outputs? We reveal divisions existing between research focusing on the use of AMIs with precise therapeutic and pedagogic goals in mind, and that interested in more general positive effects of improvised collective creative activity and its role in community building. With this two-fold perspective, we analyse the limitations of current research and derive questions for future directions.

The granting of options on common stock to corporate executives has recently attracted a great deal of attention. Some scholars suggest that the granting of options will help motivate key employees to act in the best interests of the share-holders of a corporation. There are also strong criticisms of the conflicts of interests that the most commonly granted options may have the propensity to create. The reloading of options to lower settlement prices in response to declining market values has been criticized as a management perquisite that has little potential for adding value to a firm. This article proposes a strategy for systematically repricing options in both directions according to expected returns on corporate common stock, with a new, market-based method for determining the reload price. This technique promises to retain the motivational benefits of stock option grants while curbing some of the abuses for which these instruments have been criticized.