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Purpose: This paper aims to evaluate policymakers' concerns about the lack of competition in highly concentrated markets for public company audits by examining the association between audit fees and the inequality of Big 4 market shares at both the USA national-industry and city-industry levels. Design/methodology/approach: Using publicly available data, this paper uses regression analysis to examine publicly available data to test research hypotheses related to the association between audit market inequalities and audit fees at both the USA national-industry and city-industry levels. Findings: The findings support a U-shaped association between national-industry inequality and audit fees. As inequality initially increases, fees decrease; however, as inequality becomes increasingly large fees increase. The city-industry level analysis shows the opposite pattern. The results are consistent with capacity constraints at the national-industry level that are less binding at the city-industry level. Research limitations/implications: This study provides evidence that market inequality has a non-linear association with audit price and contributes to the limited findings in industrial organization research on the importance of market share inequality in highly concentrated markets. Originality/value: This study provides new insights into the growing body of research on audit market structure by documenting that national-industry and city-industry analysis provides different insights into the market structure. In addition, the sample period for this study (2004-2017) addresses the General Accounting Office (GAO) concern about the lack of a stable audit market in the period it examined (GAO, 2008, p. 94) and finds evidence of market structure effects not present in the earlier GAO studies (GAO, 2003, 2008). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the request of French Regulatory Authorities, a new formulation of Levothyrox® was licensed in France in 2017, with the objective of avoiding the stability deficiencies of an existing licensed formulation. Before launching the new formulation, an average bioequivalence (ABE) trial was conducted, having enrolled 204 subjects and selected for interpretation a narrow a priori bioequivalence range of 0.90-1.11. Bioequivalence was concluded. In a previous publication, we questioned the ability of an ABE trial to guarantee the switchability within patients of the new and old levothyroxine formulations. It was suggested that the two formulations should be compared using the conceptual framework of individual bioequivalence. The present paper is a response to those claiming that, despite the fact that ABE analysis does not formally address the switchability of the two formulations, future patients will nevertheless be fully protected. The basis for this claim is that the ABE study was established in a large trial and analyzed using a stringent a priori acceptance interval of equivalence. These claims are questionable, because the use of a very large number of subjects nullifies the implicit precautionary intention of the European guideline when, for a Narrow Therapeutic Index drug, it recommends shortening the a priori acceptance interval from 0.80-1.25 to 0.90-1.11. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newly precise evidence of the trajectory of top incomes in the United States and around the world relies on shares and ratios, prompting new inquiry into their properties as inequality measures. Current evidence suggests a mathematical link between top shares and the Gini coefficient and empirical links extending as well to the Atkinson measure. The work reported in this article strengthens that evidence, making several contributions: First, it formalizes the shares and ratios, showing that as monotonic transformations of each other, they are different manifestations of a single inequality measure, here called TopBot. Second, it presents two standard forms of TopBot, which satisfy the principle of normalization. Third, it presents a new link between top shares and the Gini coefficient, showing that properties and results associated with the Lorenz curve pertain as well to top shares. Fourth, it investigates TopBot in mathematically specified probability distributions, showing that TopBot is monotonically related to classical measures such as the Gini, Atkinson, and Theil measures and the coefficient of variation. Thus, TopBot appears to be a genuine inequality measure. Moreover, TopBot is further distinguished by its ease of calculation and ease of interpretation, making it an appealing People's measure of inequality. This work also provides new insights, for example, that, given nonlinearities in the (monotonic) relations among inequality measures, Spearman correlations are more appropriate than Pearson correlations and that weakening of correlations signals differences and shifts in distributional form, themselves signals of income dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This study aims to examine potential disparities in scholarly performance based on sex, academic rank, leadership positions, and regional distribution of faculty in accredited Head and Neck Surgery fellowships in the United States. Methods: Online faculty listings for 37 accredited fellowships were organized according to academic rank, leadership position, sex, and institutional location. Academic productivity was measured with three bibliometric indices: h‐index, m‐index, and the weighted relative citation ratio. Results: A total of 732 faculty members were included, of which 153 (21%) were female. Fifty‐eight males (89.2%) held leadership positions, compared to seven females (10.8%). There was no significant difference in overall productivity between male and female senior faculty. There were regional differences in productivity by sex. Conclusions: Females are underrepresented in senior faculty and within three common leadership positions, although scholarly productivity for male and female senior faculty and for those in leadership positions is similar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In neighborhood research, the concept of collective efficacy has been particularly successful in capturing social cohesion and behavioral expectations among residents. Research has spread beyond the U.S. where it originated, and many studies from different countries have shown that collective efficacy is related to structural disadvantage in similar ways and affects outcomes as crime, education or health. However, methodological issues about measurement and modeling persist, and no study has yet investigated the cross-cultural measurement equivalence of this scale. We close this gap using two recent neighborhood surveys from Australia and Germany with large samples of respondents (N = ca. 12.800) and neighborhoods (N = ca. 440) in four cities. We employ multilevel structural equation modeling to test for measurement equivalence of collective efficacy across countries and to model its association with concentrated poverty, ethnic diversity, and residential stability. We find that the measurement of collective efficacy is metrically equivalent in both countries, modeling two latent factors on the respondent level—the two components informal social control and social cohesion/trust—but only one latent factor on the neighborhood level. Considering the relationship between the key correlates of collective efficacy, we find broad similarities but also substantial differences across contexts and compared to U.S. research, particularly concerning the role of ethnic diversity which has a stronger diminishing effect in Germany than in Australia. Possible explanations for these differences are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kochen-Specker theorem is investigated for n spin-1/2 systems by using an inequality proposed in Nagata (J. Math. Phys. 46, 102101, 2005) on the basis on binary logic. A measurement theory based on the truth values (binary logic), i.e., the truth T (1) for true and the falsity F (0) for false is used. The values of measurement outcome are either + 1 or 0 (in ℏ / 2 unit). The quantum predictions by n-multipartite states violate the inequality by an amount that grows exponentially with n. The measurement theory based on the binary logic provides an exponentially stronger refutation of the existence of hidden-variable when the number of parties of the state increases more. It turns out that the Kochen-Specker theorem becomes a quite strong theorem when the dimension of the multipartite state highly increases, regardless of entanglement properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of ideas in the scientific community is often viewed as a competition, in which good ideas spread further because of greater intrinsic fitness, and publication venue and citation counts correlate with importance and impact. However, relatively little is known about how structural factors influence the spread of ideas, and specifically how where an idea originates might influence how it spreads. Here, we investigate the role of faculty hiring networks, which embody the set of researcher transitions from doctoral to faculty institutions, in shaping the spread of ideas in computer science, and the importance of where in the network an idea originates. We consider comprehensive data on the hiring events of 5032 faculty at all 205 Ph.D.-granting departments of computer science in the U.S. and Canada, and on the timing and titles of 200,476 associated publications. Analyzing five popular research topics, we show empirically that faculty hiring can and does facilitate the spread of ideas in science. Having established such a mechanism, we then analyze its potential consequences using epidemic models to simulate the generic spread of research ideas and quantify the impact of where an idea originates on its longterm diffusion across the network. We find that research from prestigious institutions spreads more quickly and completely than work of similar quality originating from less prestigious institutions. Our analyses establish the theoretical trade-offs between university prestige and the quality of ideas necessary for efficient circulation. Our results establish faculty hiring as an underlying mechanism that drives the persistent epistemic advantage observed for elite institutions, and provide a theoretical lower bound for the impact of structural inequality in shaping the spread of ideas in science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]