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Circle of Greed is the epic story of the rise and fall of Bill Lerach, once the leading class action lawyer in America and now a convicted felon. For more than two decades, Lerach threatened, shook down and sued top Fortune 500 companies, including Disney, Apple, Time Warner, and—most famously—Enron. Now, the man who brought corporate moguls to their knees has fallen prey to the same corrupt impulses of his enemies, and is paying the price by serving time in federal prison. If there was ever a modern Greek tragedy about a man and his times, about corporate arrogance and illusions and the scorched-earth tactics to not only counteract corporate America but to beat it at its own game, Bill Lerach's story is it.

Present-day Americans feel secure in their citizenship: they are free to speak up for any cause, oppose their government, marry a person of any background, and live where they choose—at home or abroad. Denaturalization and denationalization are more often associated with twentieth-century authoritarian regimes. But there was a time when American-born and naturalized foreign-born individuals in the United States could be deprived of their citizenship and its associated rights. Patrick Weil examines the twentieth-century legal procedures, causes, and enforcement of denaturalization to illuminate an important but neglected dimension of Americans' understanding of sovereignty and federal authority: a citizen is defined, in part, by the parameters that could be used to revoke that same citizenship. The Sovereign Citizen begins with the Naturalization Act of 1906, which was intended to prevent realization of citizenship through fraudulent or illegal means. Denaturalization—a process provided for by one clause of the act—became the main instrument for the transfer of naturalization authority from states and local courts to the federal government. Alongside the federalization of naturalization, a conditionality of citizenship emerged: for the first half of the twentieth century, naturalized individuals could be stripped of their citizenship not only for fraud but also for affiliations with activities or organizations that were perceived as un-American. (Emma Goldman's case was the first and perhaps best-known denaturalization on political grounds, in 1909.) By midcentury the Supreme Court was fiercely debating cases and challenged the constitutionality of denaturalization and denationalization. This internal battle lasted almost thirty years. The Warren Court's eventual decision to uphold the sovereignty of the citizen—not the state—secures our national order to this day. Weil's account of this transformation, and the political battles fought by its advocates and critics, reshapes our understanding of American citizenship.

This textbook shows how to bring theoretical concepts from finance and econometrics to the data. Focusing on coding and data analysis with R, we show how to conduct research in empirical finance from scratch. We start by introducing the concepts of tidy data and coding principles using the tidyverse family of R packages. We then provide the code to prepare common open source and proprietary financial data sources (CRSP, Compustat, Mergent FISD, TRACE) and organize them in a database. We reuse these data in all the subsequent chapters, which we keep as self-contained as possible. The empirical applications range from key concepts of empirical asset pricing (beta estimation, portfolio sorts, performance analysis, Fama-French factors) to modeling and machine learning applications (fixed effects estimation, clustering standard errors, difference-in-difference estimators, ridge regression, Lasso, Elastic net, random forests, neural networks) and portfolio optimization techniques. Highlights 1. Self-contained chapters on the most important applications and methodologies in finance, which can easily be used for the reader’s research or as a reference for courses on empirical finance. 2. Each chapter is reproducible in the sense that the reader can replicate every single figure, table, or number by simply copy-pasting the code we provide. 3. A full-fledged introduction to machine learning with tidymodels based on tidy principles to show how factor selection and option pricing can benefit from Machine Learning methods. 4. Chapter 2 on accessing and managing financial data shows how to retrieve and prepare the most important datasets in the field of financial economics: CRSP and Compustat. The chapter also contains detailed explanations of the most relevant data characteristics. 5. Each chapter provides exercises that are based on established lectures and exercise classes and which are designed to help students to dig deeper. The exercises can be used for self-studying or as a source of inspiration for teaching exercises.

This textbook shows how to bring theoretical concepts from finance and econometrics to the data. Focusing on coding and data analysis with Python, we show how to conduct research in empirical finance from scratch. We start by introducing the concepts of tidy data and coding principles using pandas, numpy, and plotnine. Code is provided to prepare common open-source and proprietary financial data sources (CRSP, Compustat, Mergent FISD, TRACE) and organize them in a database. We reuse these data in all the subsequent chapters, which we keep as self-contained as possible. The empirical applications range from key concepts of empirical asset pricing (beta estimation, portfolio sorts, performance analysis, Fama-French factors) to modeling and machine learning applications (fixed effects estimation, clustering standard errors, difference-in-difference estimators, ridge regression, Lasso, Elastic net, random forests, neural networks) and portfolio optimization techniques. Key Features: Self-contained chapters on the most important applications and methodologies in finance, which can easily be used for the reader’s research or as a reference for courses on empirical finance. Each chapter is reproducible in the sense that the reader can replicate every single figure, table, or number by simply copying and pasting the code we provide. A full-fledged introduction to machine learning with scikit-learn based on tidy principles to show how factor selection and option pricing can benefit from Machine Learning methods. We show how to retrieve and prepare the most important datasets financial economics: CRSP and Compustat, including detailed explanations of the most relevant data characteristics. Each chapter provides exercises based on established lectures and classes which are designed to help students to dig deeper. The exercises can be used for self-studying or as a source of inspiration for teaching exercises.

This paper shows that firms with longer debt maturities earn risk premia not explained by unconditional standard factor models. We develop a dynamic capital structure model and find that firms with long-term debt exhibit more countercyclical leverage, making them more highly levered in downturns, when the market price of risk is high. The induced covariance between risk exposure and the market price of risk generates a maturity premium which we estimate at 0.21% per month. Empirical results from a conditional CAPM as well as observed beta dynamics are consistent with the model. We also exploit exogenous variation of debt maturities at the onset of the financial crisis and find that firms with shorter debt maturities experienced a smaller increase in leverage during the crisis. Also, after an initial spike, the betas of short-maturity firms reverted to levels below those of long-maturity firms by the end of 2008.

Featuring interviews with the creators of 36 popular video games--including Deus Ex, Night Trap, Mortal Kombat, Wasteland and NBA Jam--this book gives a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of some of the most influential and iconic (and sometimes forgotten) games of all time. Recounting endless hours of painstaking development, the challenges of working with mega publishers and the uncertainties of public reception, the interviewees reveal the creative processes that produced some of gaming's classic titles.

Man, with his superior intelligence, believes that he controls nature, but sometimes, when man least expects it... the beast bites back.In these horrific stories, you will find out how far a man will go to protect his home from man-eating hogs, and what happens when killer wasps and the military mix. You will learn the true nature of fear when you read what starving wolves will do to satisfy their desperate hunger, and what happens when a giant anaconda gets loose on the Beijing Subway. You will go back in time to witness the bloody battle to the death between a Neanderthal and a cave bear. And then, when you think it's all over and it's safe to breathe again, the jungle comes alive, it surrounds you, crushes you, drags you in and holds on to you, and then you hear a sound... breathing... getting closer...Prepare to be terrified. Prepare for Man v Beast.Man v Beast is published by Hippo Books, a publisher dedicated to producing interesting, readable and fun books. This book is suitable for English students with upper-intermediate English or higher. Be sure to check out our other Hippo Graded Readers.About the Authors:Patrick Kennedy is the chief editor at Hippo Books. He is also one of Hippo's principal writers. He is a DELTA qualified English teacher with over ten years' experience teaching in Europe and Asia. Patrick has also written three English language textbook series. He is the author of the Mahoney Green mysteries and has contributed to many of Hippo's short story collections. Cooper Baltis is one of the writers and founders of Hippo Books. He is a former Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at the National University of Mongolia and is TESOL certified. He has taught English in Asia for five years and has published stories in several literary magazines in America. His Hippo books include Hassan and Lulu and My Brother the Giant, as well as many short story collections. Danny Weiss received a degree in Civil Engineering and Architecture from Princeton University in 2012, and is TESOL certified. He has worked in a variety of different fields and on a number of different projects in Asia, Africa, and South America - most recently as an English teacher and contributing author for Hippo Books, and as a coordinator of international partnerships for a large American NGO.