From 1995 to 1998, more than 90 percent of mid-range IPOs were charged underwriter fees, or spreads, of exactly seven percent, even though evidence suggests that economies of scale in the size of the offering should allow for lower fees. Chen and Ritter (2000) offer collusion as a possible explanation based on empirical analysis and observation. Alternatively, we investigate whether the spreads...

Fruits of Trichilia cuneata (Meliaceae), a common tree in dtiet fotests of Central America, are eaten by a numbet of birds. The fruits are 10 to 12 mm in diameter, covered by a yellowish-brown, capsular exocarp, and contain three to six seeds distributed among three locules. Each seed is covered by an orangish-red aril that averages 59.7 percent lipid and 15.1 petcent protein, which makes this ...

I magine a society with perfect economic equality. Perhaps out of sheer coincidence, the supply and demand for different types of labor happen to produce an equilibrium in which everyone earns exactly the same income. As a result, no one worries about the gap between the rich and poor, and no one debates to what extent public policy should make income redistribution a priority. Because people e...

That tired Ten-Percent claim pops up all the time. Last year, national magazine ads for U.S. Satellite Broadcasting showed a drawing of a brain. Under it was the caption, "You only use 11 percent of its potential." Well, they're a little closer than the ten-percent figure, but still off by about 89 percent. In July 1998, ABC television ran promotional spots for "The Secret Lives of Men," one of...

An information retrieval performance measure that is interpreted as the percent of perfect performance (PPP) can be used to study the effects of the inclusion of specific document features or feature classes or techniques in an information retrieval system. Using this, one can measure the relative quality of a new ranking algorithm, the result of incorporating specific types of metadata or folk...