cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Commercial Law in the Cracks of Judicial Federalism

Almost seventy years after the Supreme Court sought to rationalize the American system of judicial federalism in Erie, sales law remains trapped in a pattern more reminiscent of the Swift v. Tyson era. The extraordinarily wide separation of powers in the NCCUSL-ALI uniform law-making process has entrenched Article 2 of the UCC in the status quo. Concurrently, an imbalance between the federal and state courts in the American system of judicial federalism has conferred an unusually wide range of discretion over state commercial law on the federal courts. Ironically, therefore, state sales statutes are being reinterpreted and revised by the federal courts rather than the state legislatures or state courts. The federal courts are thus the most important source of innovation and experimentation in modern American sales law, but the role they play is not entirely consistent with modern notions of democracy and judicial restraint. Moreover, it is debatable whether they have, in exercising their discretion, brought much rationality and coherence to the law or simply injected uncertainty and disharmony instead. At this point it appears that the pattern will persist. Thus, it seems inevitable that American sales law will continue to diverge, not only across jurisdictions but further and further away from the rickety framework of Article 2. American sales law therefore will not only continue to devolve into something more akin to the common law, it will remain an area of disjunction in which the federal courts play the dominant role in developing the law, even though the law is still formally within the authority of the states.
Geohyperbolic Routing and Addressing Schemes

The key requirement to routing in any telecommunication network, and especially in Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, is scalability. Routing must route packets between any source and destination in the network without incurring unmanageable routing overhead that grows quickly with increasing network size and dynamics. Here we present an addressing scheme and a coupled network topology design scheme that guarantee essentially optimal routing scalability. The FIB sizes are as small as they can be, equal to the number of adjacencies a node has, while the routing control overhead is minimized as nearly zero routing control messages are exchanged even upon catastrophic failures in the network. The key new ingredient is the addressing scheme, which is purely local, based only on geographic coordinates of nodes and a centrality measure, and does not require any sophisticated non-local computations or global network topology knowledge for network embedding. The price paid for these benefits is that network topology cannot be arbitrary but should follow a specific design, resulting in Internet-like topologies. The proposed schemes can be most easily deployed in overlay networks, and also in other network deployments, where geolocation information is available, and where network topology can grow following the design specifications.
The control over personal data: True remedy or fairy tale ?

This research report undertakes an interdisciplinary review of the concept of “control” (i.e. the idea that people should have greater “control” over their data), proposing an analysis of this con-cept in the field of law and computer science. Despite the omnipresence of the notion of control in the EU policy documents, scholarly literature and in the press, the very meaning of this concept remains surprisingly vague and under-studied in the face of contemporary socio-technical environments and practices. Beyond the current fashionable rhetoric of empowerment of the data subject, this report attempts to reorient the scholarly debates towards a more comprehensive and refined understanding of the concept of control by questioning its legal and technical implications on data subject’s agency.
Welfare and Generational Equity in Sustainable Unfunded Pension Systems.

Abstract Using stochastic simulations we analyze how public pension structures spread the risks arising from demographic and economic shocks across generations. We consider several actual and hypothetical sustainable PAYGO pension structures, including: (1) versions of the US Social Security system with annual adjustments of taxes or benefits to maintain fiscal balance; (2) Sweden's Notional Defined Contribution system and several variants developed to improve fiscal stability; and (3) the German system, which also includes annual adjustments to maintain fiscal balance. For each system, we present descriptive measures of uncertainty in representative outcomes for a typical generation and across generations. We then estimate expected utility for generations based on simplifying assumptions and incorporate these expected utility calculations in an overall social welfare measure. Using a horizontal equity index, we also compare the different systems' performance in terms of how neighboring generations are treated. While the actual Swedish system smoothes stochastic fluctuations more than any other and produces the highest degree of horizontal equity, it does so by accumulating a buffer stock of assets that alleviates the need for frequent adjustments. In terms of social welfare, this accumulation of assets leads to a lower average rate of return that more than offsets the benefits of risk reduction, leaving systems with more frequent adjustments that spread risks broadly among generations as those most preferred.
Preferred risk habitat of individual investors

Abstract The preferred risk habitat hypothesis, introduced here, is that individual investors select stocks whose volatilities are commensurate with their risk aversion. The data, 1995–2000 holdings of over 20,000 clients at a large German broker, are consistent with the predictions of the hypothesis: the returns of stocks within each portfolio have remarkably similar volatilities, when stocks are sold they are replaced by stocks of similar volatilities, and the more risk-averse customers indeed hold less volatile stocks. Greater volatility specialization is associated with lower Sharpe ratios, primarily because more specialized investors hold fewer stocks and thereby expose themselves to more unsystematic risk.
Are Filipina/os Asians or Latina/os?: Reclaiming the Anti-Subordination Objective of Equal Protection After Grutter and Gratz

In this piece, I explore two avenues of political action - self-identification for affirmative action purposes and longer-term solutions to educational inequity - in an attempt to develop a coherent and effective post-Grutter and Gratz strategy for promoting equal educational opportunities consistent with the demands of equal protection. I use the experiences of Filipina/o-Americans as a vehicle for exploring these issues. I hope to show that diversity as the underlying goal of affirmative action fails to capture the core of modern equal protection jurisprudence implicit in Brown v. Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia: that treating all races equally requires that policymakers take steps to undermine white supremacy - that the cornerstone of equality is the elimination of subordination. After Grutter and Gratz, we would do well to recover and lift up that anti-subordination ideal, and I contend that Filipina/o-Americans are particularly well-positioned to lead a coalitional effort toward that end.
How many games are we playing? An experimental analysis of choice bracketing in games

Abstract Individuals who bracket decisions narrowly ignore the consequences of one decision when making another decision. Such behavior is well documented in experiments where subjects make decisions in the absence of strategic considerations. This paper uses an economic experiment to investigate whether people also bracket their decisions in games. Subjects played two Volunteer’s Dilemmas at the same time, with the payoffs from both games added to their earnings. Aggregate play in the game is not consistent with predictions made by assuming all subjects bracket either narrowly or broadly. On the individual level, structural modeling suggests that most subjects bracket narrowly in the game.
Real Estate Transactions: Policy Considerations for Law, Technology and Globalization

This essay explores a number of issues related to intellectual property and technology in real estate transactions. It examines these issues with reference to differences in property law concepts in a global context, looking at both civil law and common law ideas, for instance. The essay also discusses the integration of technology into real-estate development projects and the infrastructure requirements for promoting real estate markets in countries with emerging and transitional economies. A key observation of the essay involves the need to think about property law questions in an integrated manner. It is no longer possible to think in a compartmentalized way regarding real property and intellectual property – in modern real estate transactions these areas are fully integrated.
The Effects of Fiscal Policies on the Economic Development of Women in the Middle East and North Africa

Statistics indicate that the economic and social development of women in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) compares unfavorably with most regions in the world. This paper assesses the influence of governmental expenditure and taxation policies on the economic and social welfare of women in the region. On the expenditure side we test the explanatory power of public social spending in the determination of key female social indicators. We find that the relatively weak social outcomes for MENA women are not explained by the amount of government social spending suggesting the answer lies in the efficiency and reach of present spending. With respect to taxation the main issues in the literature on gender bias in taxation are highlighted and applied in a general manner to the MENA context. Some simple policy recommendations are suggested. (authors)
Optimal Unemployment Insurance and Cyclical Fluctuations

The authors study the design of optimal unemployment insurance in an environment with moral hazard and cyclical fluctuations. The optimal unemployment insurance contract balances the insurance motive to provide consumption for the unemployed with the provision of incentives to search for a job. This balance is affected by aggregate conditions, as recessions are characterized by reductions in job finding rates. We show how benefits should vary with aggregate conditions in an optimal contract. In a special case of the model, the optimal contract can be solved in closed form. We show how this contract can be implemented in a rather simple way by allowing unemployed workers to borrow and save in a bond (whose return depends on the state of the economy), providing flow payments that are constant over an unemployment spell but vary with the aggregate state, and giving additional lump-sum payments (or charges) upon finding a job or when the aggregate state switches. We then consider a calibrated version of the model and study the quantitative impact of changing from the current unemployment system to the optimal one. In a recession, the optimal system reduces unemployment rates by roughly 2.5 percentage points and shortens the duration of unemployment by about 50 percent.
Emerging Issues for Undocumented Workers

Immigrant families and their communities have experienced extraordinary pressures since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. A number of law enforcement initiatives have targeted Arab and Muslim immigrants in particular,' but many others, such as the efforts by the current Administration to enlist state and local police in the routine enforcement of immigration laws, have swept more broadly. A weak economy has left many employees, especially vulnerable low-wage immigrant workers, unable to resist employer demands for lower pay, longer hours, and other reductions in the terms and conditions of employment. The erosion of the social safety net for non-citizens, occasioned by 1996 reforms to the federal welfare statutes and the subsequent state and local implementation of these changes, have greatly restricted access to public benefits for even legal immigrants, leaving little to fall back on should an immigrant wage-earner lose her job.3 The prospect of a broad amnesty for undocumented immigrants in the United
Effects of Index-Fund Investing on Commodity Futures Prices

We develop a simple model of futures arbitrage that implies that if purchases by commodity index funds influence futures prices, then the notional positions of the index investors should help predict excess returns in these contracts. We find no evidence that the positions of index traders in agricultural contracts as identified by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission can help predict returns on the near futures contracts. Although there is some support that these positions might help predict changes in oil futures prices over 2006�2009, the relation breaks down out of sample.
The quantity and quality of teachers: Dynamics of the trade-off

Abstract The paper addresses the two-fold rise in teacher–student ratio in the American K-12 school system in the post-World War II period accompanied by the evidence of a decline in the relative quality of teachers. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium framework for analyzing the teacher quantity–quality trade-off and offer an explanation to the observed trends. Our OLG model features two stages of education: basic and advanced (college), the latter required of teachers. The cost of hiring teachers is influenced by the outside opportunities for college graduates in the production sector. We show that the latter factor strengthens in the process of endogenous growth and that it affects the optimal trade-off between quantity and quality of teachers such that the number of teachers hired will grow over time while their relative, but not the absolute, human capital attainment will fall. This is accompanied by increasing inequality, among the group of college educated workers in particular. We show that this effect, which we call the rising talent premium, applies whether teacher salaries are determined based on merit pay or, alternatively, by collective bargaining. Moreover, the salary compression characterizing the latter regime exacerbates the loss of the more talented workers by the teaching profession. Further, we analyze a comparative dynamics effect of exogenous skill-biased technological change which raises the college premium. We show that the effect is detrimental to the aggregate quality of teachers and to the quality of basic education. An important insight from this analysis is that in the process of human capital driven economic growth the rise in premium for high ability outpaces that for the average, whereby this effect is accelerated by technological change. This puts a downward pressure on the “real” quality of education inputs and therefore can create a negative feedback effect on human capital development as a factor of economic growth.
Conceptual Difficulties in the Empirical Study of Bilateral Investment Treaties

Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have emerged as one of the most visible aspects of the legalization of host state-foreign investor relations. They have unsurprisingly attracted the attention of empirical researchers, who attempt to explain the treaties’ causes and consequences. I argue that extant studies typically ignore two important conceptual difficulties that render the studies’ conclusions suspect. First, analysts routinely fail to appropriately define the relevant universe of treaties, automatically relying on a theoretically flawed United Nations compilation that ignores important differences in the procedural content of the treaties. I present an empirical examination of the investor-state dispute settlement provisions of nearly 1000 BITs that demonstrates significant variation in the extent to which the treaties might meaningfully serve to credibly commit host states to treat investors favorably. Second, analysts fail to consider whether alternative policy instruments might serve as reasonably effective substitutes for BITs. I argue that BITs are hardly the inevitable solution to the supposedly insoluble problem of the “obsolescing bargain” that they are frequently held out to be. † J.D. (Duke University School of Law), Ph.D. (Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill); Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin Law School. The research underlying this Article was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Science program. I may be contacted at jason.yackee@alumni.duke.edu. © JWY 2007.
The Wreckage of Recklessness

"Recklessness" is one of the oldest concepts in Anglo-American tort law, but also one of the most poorly understood. Often identified as a tort falling somewhere between negligence and intentional misconduct, recklessness has evaded precise judicial interpretation for two hundred years. The Restatement of Torts defines recklessness as conscious disregard of a substantial risk of serious harm, but courts have been unable to interpret consistently the key elements of this definition. This Article suggests that judicial confusion is not simply the product of linguistic imprecision on the part of the ALI. Rather, the Restatement version of recklessness is inconsistent with the actual behavioral and cognitive processes humans employ in the face of risk and uncertainty. Recent work in behavioral economics and neuroeconomics indicates that individuals fail to process risk in the way the black-letter-law definition of recklessness presumes, and calls into question the degree to which decisions can easily be classified as conscious or unconscious. Rather than continue to struggle to add clarity to an already convoluted articulation of doctrine, law reformers should reconceptualize the tort concept of recklessness not in terms of what it is, but in terms of what it does: allow a particular plaintiff to recover for a defendant's carelessness where ordinary negligence doctrine would bar relief.
End-of-life decision making, therapeutic jurisprudence, and preventive law: hierarchical v. consensus-based decision-making model.

In addressing how end-of-life decisions should be made, courts have mandated the use of a hierarchical model in which one person is provided sole decision-making authority. However, this exclusionary approach fails to consider the well-being of a range of individuals deeply affected by these decisions. In contrast, a consensus-based model has been widely endorsed and applied by health care providers. The integrated principles of Therapeutic Jurisprudence and Preventive Law and data from an empirical study of laypersons provide further support for a consensus-based model.
A Dynamic Model of Sponsored Search Advertising

Sponsored search advertising is ascendant---Forrester Research reports expenditures rose 28% in 2007 to $8.1 billion and will continue to rise at a 26% compound annual growth rate [VanBoskirk, S. 2007. U.S. interactive marketing forecast, 2007 to 2012. Forrester Research (October 10)], approaching half the level of television advertising and making sponsored search one of the major advertising trends to affect the marketing landscape. Yet little empirical research exists to explore how the interaction of various agents (searchers, advertisers, and the search engine) in keyword markets affects consumer welfare and firm profits. The dynamic structural model we propose serves as a foundation to explore these outcomes. We fit this model to a proprietary data set provided by an anonymous search engine. These data include consumer search and clicking behavior, advertiser bidding behavior, and search engine information such as keyword pricing and website design. With respect to advertisers, we find evidence of dynamic bidding behavior. Advertiser value for clicks on their links averages about 26 cents. Given the typical $22 retail price of the software products advertised on the considered search engine, this implies a conversion rate (sales per click) of about 1.2%, well within common estimates of 1%--2% [Narcisse, E. 2007. Magid: Casual free to pay conversion rate too low. GameDaily.com (September 20)]. With respect to consumers, we find that frequent clickers place a greater emphasis on the position of the sponsored advertising link. We further find that about 10% of consumers do 90% of the clicks. We then conduct several policy simulations to illustrate the effects of changes in search engine policy. First, we find the search engine obtains revenue gains of 1% by sharing individual-level information with advertisers and enabling them to vary their bids by consumer segment. This also improves advertiser revenue by 6% and consumer welfare by 1.6%. Second, we find that a switch from a first-to second-price auction results in truth telling (advertiser bids rise to advertiser valuations). However, the second-price auction has little impact on search engine profits. Third, consumer search tools lead to a platform revenue increase of 2.9% and an increase of consumer welfare by 3.8%. However, these tools, by reducing advertising exposures, lower advertiser profits by 2.1%.
Claiming the Copyright

For nearly two centuries, U.S. copyright law relied on statutory formalities to balance the public interest with the interests of copyright holders. These formalities historically included affixing a copyright notice to the work and registering the work with the government. An author was required to publicly claim her work or else the work was freely available for others to use. Yet over the past thirty years, Congress has progressively rolled back copyright formalities. Today, neither registration nor notice is required for copyright to protect a work for seventy years after the author’s death. And by affording expansive protection to unclaimed works, we have created a number of related problems. First, we have a growing orphan works problem where the copyright holder is unknown. Second, we have more works in the private domain, which has depleted the public domain from which other creators can draw. And third, the transaction costs to identify ownership and copyright status have thwarted socially beneficial uses of these works. But there is no doctrinal reason to exempt an author from publicly claiming a statutory right. Copyright holders, not the public, should bear the cost of notice failure. As a solution, I propose that a copyright holder should claim an interest in her original work of authorship. If a copyright holder fails to claim an interest in her work, a user would be allowed to raise an innocent infringer defense. With this innocent infringer defense, the chilling effect and risks associated with using unclaimed works would be ameliorated. This proposal arguably complies with our international obligations under the Berne Convention. And there are a host of advantages that flow from requiring a copyright holder to claim her work. These advantages include a workable solution to the orphan works problem, functional replenishment of the public domain, and decreased transaction costs to license works.
Information acquisition, information release and trading dynamics

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to examine how uncertainty about the timing of the public release of information affects strategic traders' incentives to acquire and trade on long- and short-lived private information. We show that this uncertainty generally induces strategic traders to trade on private information more aggressively and to acquire long-lived private information first. We also show that (1) an increase in the correlation between short- and long-lived information reduces the incentives to acquire either, and (2) when a public information release is anticipated, trading is more aggressive, prices are more informative and bid/ask spreads are smaller. Further, our analysis suggests that the design of a firm's public information systems affects the acquisition of private information and the efficiency of prices by determining what is short- and long-lived information and how they are correlated.
Where Did All the Growth Go? External Shocks, Social Conflict, and Growth Collapses

This article argues that domestic social conflicts are a key to understanding why growth rates lack persistence and why so many countries have experienced a growth collapse since the mid-1970s. It emphasizes, in particular, the manner in which social conflicts interact with external shock on the one hand, and the domestic institutions of conflict-management on the other. Econometric evidence provides support for this hypothesis. Countries that experienced the sharpest drops in growth after 1975 were those with divided societies (as measured by indicators of inequality, ethnic fragmentation, and the like) and with weak institutions of conflict management (proxied by indicators of the quality of governmental institutions, rule of law, democratic rights, and social safety nets).
Specialization and Regulation: The Rise of Professionals and the Emergence of Occupational Licensing Regulation

During the Progressive Era, advances in knowledge and specialization led to the emergence of modern-day professions. This growth in professions was accompanied by the adoption of occupational licensing regulation. In this article we explore the origins and effects of occupational licensing regulation during this period. Although most studies argue that occupational licensing regulation is adopted to restrict entry and reduce competition, the evidence from the Progressive Era suggests that regulation arose to improve markets as specialization and advances in knowledge made it increasingly difficult for consumers to judge the quality of professional services. Not long ago, the Governor of a midwestern state was approached by representatives of a particular trade anxious to enlist the Governor's support in securing passage of legislation to license their trade.“Governor,” the men said, “passage of this licensing act will ensure that only qualified people will practice this occupation; it will eliminate charlatans, incompetents or frauds; and it will thereby protect the safety and welfare of the people of this state.”The governor, from long experience, was somewhat skeptical. “Gentlemen,” he asked, “are you concerned with advancing the health, safety and welfare of the people under the police powers of the state, or are you primarily interested in creating a monopoly situation to eliminate competition and raise prices?”The spokesman for the occupational group smiled and said, “Governor, we're interested in a little of each.”Council of State Governments Council of State Governments, Occupational Licensin g, p. 1.
The quality of street cash flow from operations

We provide empirical evidence on the quality of street cash flow from operations (CFO) as an alternative financial performance summary measure. We focus our investigation on the quality of the items analysts exclude in their determination of street CFO. Based on a sample of 8,518 firm-year observations over the 1993–2008 period, we find that the street CFO number is generally higher than the GAAP CFO number, indicating that analysts typically make CFO-increasing exclusions. Our inspection of hand-collected analyst reports reveals that, while some analysts make sophisticated exclusions of transitory cash items, many others ignore working capital and other accruals when adjusting forecasted earnings to arrive at their street CFO forecasts. We find that street CFO exclusions are negatively associated with future operating earnings, suggesting that these exclusions are not fully transitory or unimportant in forecasting future performance. Our results also indicate that street CFO exclusions are less transitory than the implicit accrual component of analysts’ street earnings exclusions. These results suggest that the average quality of analysts’ street CFO exclusions is quite low and that it is even lower than the quality of their implied accrual exclusions. Moreover, we find that investors perceive analysts’ CFO exclusions to be of such low quality to render street CFO measures less informative than GAAP CFO figures. Finally, we find that analyst conflicts of interest and (to some extent) the greater inherent volatility of firms’ CFO series contribute to the low-quality nature of analysts’ street CFO exclusions.
The Invasion of Panama Was A Lawful Response to Tyranny

The Grenada and Panama interventions contributed to the momentum of popular sovereignty. Not only did the United States remove tyrannical leaders from those two countries, but more importantly it set an example that has undoubtedly shaken other ruling elites that enjoy tyrannical control in their own countries. For even if some of those entrenched elites regard themselves as secure against popular uprising in their own countries (usually by the application of torture and brutality against political dissidents), they cannot now feel totally insulated against foreign humanitarian intervention. Thus, Grenada and Panama may very well act as catalysts in the current global revolution of popular sovereignty. In this respect, as well as on their own merits, the two interventions underscore the unraveling of statist conceptions of international law. The arguments of Professors Farer and Nanda, struggling to conform to the tautological jargon of statism, already seem anachronistic. Tags: Transboundary Use of Force, Article 18 of the OAS Charter, Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, U.S. Intervention in Panama 1989-1990
How to conduct a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) study in social science research

This research essay outlines a set of guidelines for conducting functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies in social science research in general and also, accordingly, in Information Systems research. Given the increased interest in using neuroimaging tools across the social sciences, this study aims at specifying the key steps needed to conduct an fMRI study while ensuring that enough detail is provided to evaluate the methods and results. The outline of an fMRI study consists of four key steps: (1) formulating the research question, (2) designing the fMRI protocol, (3) analyzing fMRI data, and (4) interpreting and reporting fMRI results. These steps are described with an illustrative example of a published fMRI study on trust and distrust in this journal (Dimoka 2010). The paper contributes to the methodological literature by (1) providing a set of guidelines for designing and conducting fMRI studies, (2) specifying methodological details that should be included in fMRI studies in academic venues, and (3) illustrating these practices with an exemplar fMRI study. Future directions for conducting high-quality fMRI studies in the social sciences are discussed.
Quasi-maximum likelihood estimation of volatility with high frequency data

This paper investigates the properties of the well-known maximum likelihood estimator in the presence of stochastic volatility and market microstructure noise, by extending the classic asymptotic results of quasi-maximum likelihood estimation. When trying to estimate the integrated volatility and the variance of noise, this parametric approach remains consistent, efficient and robust as a quasi-estimator under misspecified assumptions. Moreover, it shares the model-free feature with nonparametric alternatives, for instance realized kernels, while being advantageous over them in terms of finite sample performance. In light of quadratic representation, this estimator behaves like an iterative exponential realized kernel asymptotically. Comparisons with a variety of implementations of the Tukey‐Hanning2 kernel are provided using Monte Carlo simulations, and an empirical study with the Euro/US Dollar future illustrates its application in practice.
How Hungry is the Selfish Gene

We examine resource allocation in step-households in the United States and South Africa to test whether child investments vary according to economic and genetic bonds between parent and child. In the United States, households spend less on food when a child is raised by a nonbiological mother. The reduction is identical for step, adoptive, and foster households, consistent with the hypothesis that genetic ties are the ones that binds. In South Africa, where food spending can be disaggregated, households spend less on milk, fruit and vegetables, and more on tobacco and alcohol, in the absence of a child's birth mother. Family living arrangements have changed dramatically in the United States in a generation. Children in the middle of the century were, on the whole, born to married parents, with whom they lived until adulthood. In the United States today, over half of all children will live apart from at least one parent before reaching age 18 (Bumpass and Sweet, 1989), and a majority of these children will live with a step parent or foster parent. Until recently, most academics were not very concerned about changes in children's family structures. During the 1970s, single parenthood was viewed as a time of transition (Ross and Sawhill, 1975) between divorce and remarriage, and step families were considered to be good substitutes for original twoparent families. Since the 1980s, however, several developments have challenged this optimistic view. First, declines in remarriage have lead to extended periods of high poverty for single mothers and their children, undermining the notion that single parenthood is a time of transition. Second, a growing body of research has shown that children raised by only one of their parents are less successful than children raised by both their parents, when measured across a broad array of outcomes. Although some of these disadvantages are due to characteristics of the parents that predate divorce, there is mounting evidence that parent-absence itself plays at least some causal role in reducing children's life chances. (McLanahan and Sandefur, 1994; Haveman and Wolfe, 1994). A primary mechanism behind the
Hiding in Plain Sight: Conspicuous Type Standards in Mandated Communication Statutes

This article analyzes the content and effectiveness of “mandated communication statutes,” i.e., statutes that require one person or entity to communicate a message to another, using specific language in a particular format. Most of these statutes require that information appear in “conspicuous type,” and they have the apparent goal of promoting the effective communication of a message to the reader. Despite this goal, they often use outdated sentence structures and document design techniques that put the burden of comprehension on the reader instead of the writer. This article considers reasons behind the ineffectiveness of the statutes and makes suggestions for their improvement, based on current knowledge of reader behavior and writing doctrine.
Allocation of decision rights and the investment strategy of mutual funds

The literature suggests that while decentralized decision making can allow for greater specialization in an organization, it heightens the cost of coordinating decisions. The mutual fund industry—in particular, sole- and team-managed balanced funds—provides an ideal setting to test the specialization versus coordination trade-off, as information on decision structures and fund actions is easily obtained. We show that sole-managed balanced funds, with centralized decision rights, exhibit significant market timing that requires reallocation across asset classes. However, consistent with coordination difficulties between managers specializing in particular asset classes, no market timing is evident in team-managed balanced funds. Team-managed funds exhibit greater returns from specialization, in the form of better security selection performance than sole-managed funds. These results hold cross-sectionally and for funds that switch management structures. The overall returns across different management structures are similar, indicating a market equilibrium. Investor flows reward market-timing performance for sole- but not team-managed funds.
Inexperienced Investors and Bubbles

Abstract We use mutual fund manager data from the technology bubble to examine the hypothesis that inexperienced investors play a role in the formation of asset price bubbles. Using age as a proxy for managers’ investment experience, we find that around the peak of the technology bubble, mutual funds run by younger managers are more heavily invested in technology stocks, relative to their style benchmarks, than their older colleagues. Furthermore, young managers, but not old managers, exhibit trend-chasing behavior in their technology stock investments. As a result, young managers increase their technology holdings during the run-up, and decrease them during the downturn. Both results are in line with the behavior of inexperienced investors in experimental asset markets. The economic significance of young managers’ actions is amplified by large inflows into their funds prior to the peak in technology stock prices.
Consumption Commitments and Asset Prices

This paper studies portfolio choice and asset prices in a model with two consumption goods, one of which involves a commitment in that its consumption can only be adjusted at a cost. Commitments effectively make investors more risk averse: they invest less in risky assets and smooth total consumption more. Aggregating over a population of such consumers implies dynamics that match those of a representative consumer economy with habit formation. Calibrations show that the model can resolve the equity premium puzzle. We test the key prediction that an exogenous increase in economic commitments (e.g., housing) causes a more conservative portfolio allocation using a novel instrumental variables strategy related to age at marriage. We find that a $1 increase in housing causes a 50-70 cent reallocation from stocks to bonds for the average investor. Exploiting differences in the variance of home prices across cities, we show that this effect is due to commitments and not greater exposure to housing price risk.
Review of the Merits in Class Action Certification

This article explores the extent (if any) to which a court should inquire into the merits of a case when deciding on motions to certify a class. The Article examines three stylized rules: strong-form rules which preclude inquiry into the merits and require the court to take the well-pleaded allegations of the complaint as true for purposes of the class certification motion; weak-form rules which permit the court to inquire into merits issues that are convenient or useful in connection with the analysis of Rule 23’s certification requirements; and super-weak rules which permit or require the court to inquire into the class’s ultimate chances of success on the merits. The Article evaluates these rules along the following dimensions of public policy: fidelity to law; accuracy in adjudication; fairness with respect to the preclusive effect of judgments; fairness with respect to settlements; and judicial efficiency. The Article concludes that weak-form rules dominate over the others along most policy dimensions. In Eisen v. Carlisle & Jacquelin, the Supreme Court declared that federal courts may not “conduct a preliminary inquiry into the merits of a suit in order to determine whether it may be maintained as a class action.” This proscription – sometimes known 1 Stuyvesant P. and William T. III Comfort Professor of Law, New York University. BA 1973 Princeton University; JD 1978 Columbia University. I thank Will Taft for excellent research assistance. 2 417 U.S. 156 (1974). 3 Id. at 177.
WHAT LIARS CAN TELL US ABOUT THE KNOWLEDGE NORM OF PRACTICAL REASONING

If knowledge is the norm of practical reasoning, then we should be able to alter people's behavior by affecting their knowledge as well as by affecting their beliefs. Thus, as Roy Sorensen (2010) suggests, we should expect to find people telling lies that target knowledge rather than just lies that target beliefs. In this paper, however, I argue that Sorensen's discovery of “knowledge-lies” does not support the claim that knowledge is the norm of practical reasoning. First, I use a Bayesian framework to show that in each of Sorensen's examples, knowledge-lies alter people's behavior by affecting their beliefs. Second, I show that while we can imagine lies that target knowledge without targeting beliefs, they cannot alter people's behavior. In other words, knowledge-lies actually work (i.e., manipulate behavior) by targeting beliefs or they do not work at all.
Resource Oblivious Sorting on Multicores

We present a deterministic sorting algorithm, Sample, Partition, and Merge Sort (SPMS), that interleaves the partitioning of a sample sort with merging. Sequentially, it sorts n elements in O(nlog n) time cache-obliviously with an optimal number of cache misses. The parallel complexity (or critical path length) of the algorithm is O(log nlog log n), which improves on previous bounds for deterministic sample sort. The algorithm also has low false sharing costs. When scheduled by a work-stealing scheduler in a multicore computing environment with a global shared memory and p cores, each having a cache of size M organized in blocks of size B, the costs of the additional cache misses and false sharing misses due to this parallel execution are bounded by the cost of O(S · M/B) and O(S · B) cache misses, respectively, where S is the number of steals performed during the execution. Finally, SPMS is resource oblivious in that the dependence on machine parameters appear only in the analysis of its performance and not within the algorithm itself.
Limited lifespan of fragile regions in mammalian evolution

An important question in genome evolution is whether there exist fragile regions (rearrangement hotspots) where chromosomal rearrangements are happening over and over again. Although nearly all recent studies supported the existence of fragile regions in mammalian genomes, the most comprehensive phylogenomic study of mammals (Ma et al. (2006) Genome Research 16, 1557-1565) raised some doubts about their existence. We demonstrate that fragile regions are subject to a "birth and death" process, implying that fragility has limited evolutionary lifespan. This finding implies that fragile regions migrate to different locations in different mammals, explaining why there exist only a few chromosomal breakpoints shared between different lineages. The birth and death of fragile regions phenomenon reinforces the hypothesis that rearrangements are promoted by matching segmental duplications and suggests putative locations of the currently active fragile regions in the human genome.
Dangerous people, unsafe conditions. The constitutional basis for public health surveillance.

This article reviews the legal framework for administrative surveillance for dangerous people and conditions. Although the theme of this symposium is dangerous people, dangerous people and dangerous conditions cannot be separated in public health jurisprudence. For purposes of this article, the detection of the dangerous mentally ill will be treated as a subset of public health law. Procedurally, the mental health jurisprudence is much richer than the public health jurisprudence, but it is mostly concerned with commitment orders and conditions of confinement and release. Constitutionally, the standards for public health and mental health surveillance are the same.Surveillance - the collection of data about the incidence and prevalence of conditions that pose a threat to public health and safety - is the starting point for public health. Surveillance provides the data that epidemiologists use to identify threats, test strategies for managing those threats, and, once mitigation strategies are developed, identify dangerous people and conditions that should be subject to public health interventions. There are two types of public health surveillance, searches by public health investigators and reports of specific conditions or individuals by third parties such as physicians, medical laboratories, schools, and counselors. Searches are discussed first, then reporting laws. The article analyzes the distinction between searches subject to full criminal due process standards (probable cause, warrant, and judicial oversight) and public health/administrative searches (warrantless or area warrant searches). The article concludes by identifying the key policy issues for maintaining an appropriate balance between individual privacy and public safety
Effects of electron temperature anisotropy on proton mirror instability evolution

Proton mirror modes are large amplitude nonpropagating structures frequently observed in the magnetosheath. It has been suggested that electron temperature anisotropy can enhance the proton mirror instability growth rate while leaving the proton cyclotron instability largely unaffected, therefore causing the proton mirror instability to dominate the proton cyclotron instability in Earth's magnetosheath. Here we use particle-in-cell simulations to investigate the electron temperature anisotropy effects on proton mirror instability evolution. Contrary to the hypothesis, electron temperature anisotropy leads to excitement of the electron whistler instability. Our results show that the electron whistler instability grows much faster than the proton mirror instability and quickly consumes the electron-free energy so that there is no electron temperature anisotropy left to significantly impact the evolution of the proton mirror instability.
Less is More: Making Institutional Investor Activism A Valuable Mechanism of Corporate Governance

Institutional investors have increasingly engaged in corporate governance activities, introducing proxy proposals and negotiating with management, with a goal of improving performance. As shareholder activism has become more pronounced, financial economists have attempted to measure its effect on performance. This Article reviews the finance literature on institutional investors' activities in corporate governance and uses the findings of the empirical literature to inform normative recommendations for the proxy process. In brief, there is an apparent paradox: notwithstanding the development of shareholder activism and commentators' generally positive assessments of it, the empirical research indicates that such activism has little or no effect on targeted firms' performance. This implies that activist institutions ought to reassess their agendas, in order to use their resources more effectively. The Article takes a two-pronged approach to furthering this aim. First, it suggests a mechanism of internal control, whereby funds would engage in periodic review of their shareholder-activism programs to identify the most fruitful governance objectives. Second, it seeks ways to provide incentives to undertake such internal revaluations, advocating elimination or significant reduction of the subsidy of proposal sponsorship under the SEC rules unless a proposal achieves substantial voting support, or permitting firms' shareholders to choose what level of subsidy they wish to provide proposal sponsors. The estimated savings from eliminating the subsidy for proposals that fail to receive at least 40% of the votes ranges from $293 million to $1.9 billion.
An examination into the factors that influence consumers’ perceptions of value

Abstract Recent trends in ticketing, such as dynamic ticket pricing, indicate a fundamental shift towards demand-based pricing strategies. As such, research is needed to understand the factors that may influence the price that consumers are willing to pay for tickets. Using the contingent valuation method (CVM), the current study examined the value that consumers placed on a ticket to a National Basketball Association game. Previous CVM research suggests that valuations differ based on whether the participant is on the buy side or the sell side of the transaction. Therefore, the current study examined the difference between buyer and seller valuations in addition to identifying factors that influenced these valuations. Results indicated a strong difference between buyer and seller valuations, which is consistent with previous CVM studies. Further, the factors that influenced these valuations, including the printed price on the ticket, also differed based on whether the participant was buying or selling the ticket.