cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Positive Political Theory of Legislative History: New Perspectives on the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Its Interpretation

A central issue in the contemporary debate about how statutes ought to be interpreted is the proper role of legislative history. The use of legislative history in statutory interpretation is often seen as problematic, in part because the legislative process, involving many different legislators with different points of view, provides contradictory information about a statute's meaning. Scholars of very different normative stripes - including textualists, purposivists, and those who eschew reliance on legislators' will altogether - raise questions about the historical reconstruction of legislative intent. Indeed, a common conclusion in the literature on statutory interpretation is that legislative history can be used to rationalize any point of view, leading some to conclude that it is useless to the enterprise of statutory interpretation.In this Article, we revisit this enduring conversation about the proper place, if any, of legislative history in statutory interpretation. Our perspective is distinct from traditional arguments in that it relies on a different underlying theoretical foundation and, significantly, a positive political theory of statute creation. This theory, in turn, provides both a theory of legislative rhetoric and of statutory interpretation.We apply our approach to reading legislative history to the passage and interpretation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Part I of this Article presents our positive political theory of legislative decision making, on which our characterization of coalitional strategies and statute making is based. In Part II, we analyze a set of critical events in the legislative history of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We next consider, in Part III, how courts, in pursuing expansionary constructions in the early years following the Act's passage, relied on the legislative history produced by ardent supporters of the Act. Lastly, in Part IV, we suggest how our approach to interpreting legislative history helps shed light on the politics of civil rights, on theories of legislation and statutory interpretation, and on the patterns of modern American politics and social policy. Our objective, in the end, is to draw from our approach, and from a revisionist view of the Civil Rights Act, lessons of general applicability for the interpretation of the legislative history of statutes. This project, then, presages further analytical work on the puzzles of legislation and its interpretation.
Dworkin v. The Philosophers: A Review Essay on Justice in Robes

In this review essay, I argue that Dworkin's reputation among his fellow philosophers has needlessly suffered because of his refusal to back down from his "semantic sting" argument against H. L. A. Hart. Philosophers of law have uniformly rejected the semantic sting argument as a fallacy. Nevertheless Dworkin reaffirms the argument in "Justice in Robes," his most recent collection of essays, and devotes much of the book to stubbornly, and unsuccessfully, defending it. This is a pity, because the failure of the semantic sting argument in no way undermines Dworkin's other arguments against Hart.
Biased forecasts or biased earnings? The role of reported earnings in explaining apparent bias and over/underreaction in analysts’ earnings forecasts

The extensive literature that investigates whether analysts’ earnings forecasts are biased and/or inefficient has produced conflicting evidence and no definitive answers to either question. This paper shows how two relatively small but statistically influential asymmetries in the tail and the middle of distributions of analysts’ forecast errors can exaggerate or obscure evidence consistent with analyst bias and inefficiency, leading to inconsistent inferences. We identify an empirical link between firms’ recognition of unexpected accruals and the presence of the two asymmetries in distributions of forecast errors that suggests that firm reporting choices play an important role in determining analysts’ forecast errors. r 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Drug Repurposing Screen for Compounds Inhibiting the Cytopathic Effect of SARS-CoV-2

Drug repurposing is a rapid approach to identify therapeutics for the treatment of emerging infectious diseases such as COVID-19. To address the urgent need for treatment options, we carried out a quantitative high-throughput screen using a SARS-CoV-2 cytopathic assay with a compound collection of 8,810 approved and investigational drugs, mechanism-based bioactive compounds, and natural products. Three hundred and nineteen compounds with anti-SARS-CoV-2 activities were identified and confirmed, including 91 approved drugs and 49 investigational drugs. The anti-SARS-CoV-2 activities of 230 of these confirmed compounds, of which 38 are approved drugs, have not been previously reported. Chlorprothixene, methotrimeprazine, and piperacetazine were the three most potent FDA-approved drugs with anti-SARS-CoV-2 activities. These three compounds have not been previously reported to have anti-SARS-CoV-2 activities, although their antiviral activities against SARS-CoV and Ebola virus have been reported. These results demonstrate that this comprehensive data set is a useful resource for drug repurposing efforts, including design of new drug combinations for clinical trials for SARS-CoV-2.
Assessing Partisan Bias in Federal Public Corruption Prosecutions

The 2007 U.S. Attorney firing scandal raised the specter of political bias in the prosecution of officials under federal corruption laws. Has prosecutorial discretion been employed to persecute enemies or shield allies? To answer this question, I develop a model of the interaction between officials contemplating corruption and a prosecutor deciding whether to pursue cases against them. Biased prosecutors will be willing to file weaker cases against political opponents than against allies. Consequently, the model anticipates that in the presence of partisan bias, sentences of prosecuted opponents will tend to be lower than those of co-partisans. Employing newly collected data on public corruption prosecutions, I find evidence of partisan bias under both Bush (II) and Clinton Justice Departments. However, additional evidence suggests that these results may understate the extent of bias under Bush, while overstating it under Clinton.
The Determinants of Employment of Affiliates of US Multinational Enterprises in Africa

Employment of foreign affiliates of multinational enterprises has been shown to promote growth by boosting wages, increasing the transfer of technology and enhancing productivity in host countries. Yet, the factors affecting such multinational employment in Africa have not been studied. Using panel data, this article indicates that – in contrast to natural resource availability – good infrastructure, higher income, openness to trade and an educated labour force have a significant positive impact on employment. In order to realise the employment benefits of FDI, therefore, sub-Saharan Africa needs to attract investments in non-natural resource industries, and host countries need to improve their infrastructure and educate their population.
Building an integrative model of extra role work behaviors: A comparison of counterproductive work behavior with organizational citizenship behavior.

Researchers have recently drawn attention to performance elements that extend beyond task performance (often labeled as organizational citizenship behavior, or OCB). A second stream of research concerns detrimental, potentially destructive acts that hurt colleagues or organizations (labeled counterproductive work behavior, or CWB). Spector and Fox (in press) have proposed a model based upon conceptual parallels that may help connect these two disparate fields of research, using positive and negative emotions as intermediary variables between environmental conditions and extra-role work behaviors. The current study tested portions of the overall model, and found reasonable support for the components. Suggestions for further research designed to test the overall model are presented.
Statistical Arbitrage and Securities Prices

This article introduces the concept of a statistical arbitrage opportunity (SAO). In a finite-horizon economy, a SAO is a zero-cost trading strategy for which (i) the expected payoff is positive, and (ii) the conditional expected payoff in each final state of the economy is nonnegative. Unlike a pure arbitrage opportunity, a SAO can have negative payoffs provided that the average payoff in each final state is nonnegative. If the pricing kernel in the economy is path independent, then no SAOs can exist. Furthermore, ruling out SAOs imposes a novel martingale-type restriction on the dynamics of securities prices. The important properties of the restriction are that it (1) is model-free, in the sense that it requires no parametric assumptions about the true equilibrium model, (2) can be tested in samples affected by selection biases, such as the peso problem, and (3) continues to hold when investors’ beliefs are mistaken. The article argues that one can use the new restriction to empirically resolve the joint hypothesis problem present in the traditional tests of the efficient market hypothesis. In a fairly general environment, this article proposes a novel martingaletype restriction on the dynamics of securities prices. This restriction has a number of important properties. Most notably, the restriction may be viewed as model-free because it requires no parametric assumptions about the true equilibrium model. To derive the restriction, we rely on the concept of statistical arbitrage, a generalization of pure arbitrage. A pure arbitrage opportunity (PAO) is a zero-cost trading strategy that offers the possibility of a gain with no possibility of a loss. As is well known, the existence of PAOs is incompatible with a competitive equilibrium in asset markets. The fundamental theorem of the financial theory establishes a link between the absence of PAOs and the existence of a positive pricing kernel which supports securities prices. While the absence of PAOs is a necessary condition for any equilibrium model, this condition alone often yields pricing implications that are too weak to be practically useful. For example, when valuing options in incomplete markets, the no-arbitrage bounds on option prices are typically very wide. To strengthen pricing implications, several recent articles
Does Diversification Cause the "Diversification Discount"?

I examine whether the discount of diversified firms can actually be attributed to diversification itself, using recent econometric developments about causal inference. The value effect of diversification is unbiasedly estimated by matching diversified and specialized firms on the propensity score––the predicted values from a probit model of the propensity to diversify. I apply this method on a sample of diversified firms that trade at a significant mean and median discount relative to specialized firms of similar size and industry. I find that, when a more comparable benchmark based on propensity scores is used, the diversification discount as such disappears or even turns into a premium.
Not competent enough to know the difference? Gender stereotypes about women’s ease of being misled predict negotiator deception

We examined whether gender differences in the perceived ease of being misled predict the likelihood of being deceived in distributive negotiations. Study 1 (N = 131) confirmed that female negotiators are perceived as more easily misled than male negotiators. This perception corresponded with perceptions of women’s relatively low competence. Study 2 (N = 328) manipulated negotiator gender, competence and warmth and found that being perceived as easily misled via low competence affected expectations about the negotiating process, including less deception scrutiny among easily misled negotiators and lower ethical standards among their negotiating counterparts. This pattern held true regardless of buyer and seller gender. Study 3 (N = 298) examined whether patterns of deception in face-to-face negotiations were consistent with this gender stereotype. As expected, negotiators deceived women more so than men, thus leading women into more deals under false pretenses than men.
Labor market policy: A comparative view on the costs and benefits of labor market flexibility

I review theories and evidence on wage-setting institutions and labor market policies in an international comparative context. These include collective bargaining, minimum wages, employment protection laws, unemployment insurance (UI), mandated parental leave, and active labor market policies (ALMPs). Since it is unlikely that an unregulated private sector would provide the income insurance these institutions do, these policies may enhance economic efficiency. However, to the extent that unemployment or resource misallocation results from such measures, these efficiency gains may be offset. Overall, Scandinavia and Central Europe follow distinctively more interventionist policies than the English-speaking countries in the Northern Hemisphere. Possible explanations for such differences include vulnerability to external market forces and ethnic homogeneity. I then review evidence on the impacts of these policies and institutions. While the interventionist model appears to cause lower levels of wage inequality and high levels of job security to incumbent workers, it also in some cases leads to the relegation of new entrants (disproportionately women, youth, and immigrants) as well as the less skilled to temporary jobs or unemployment. Making labor markets more flexible could bring these groups into the regular labor market to a greater extent, at the expense of higher levels of economic insecurity for incumbents and higher levels of wage inequality. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.
A case study in sports law analytics: The debate on widespread point shaving

This study outlines the evolution of academic literature generated in response to Wolfers's (2006) widespread- point-shaving hypothesis, which put forward that roughly 1% of college basketball games involve gambling-related corruption. Researchers attempted to replicate Wolfers' findings in a variety of settings, examined the logistics involved in the act of point shaving, developed a theoretical model of team strategy, and used a variety of other novel approaches to better understand the root cause of the suspicious statistical anomalies identified. It offers evidence that sports analytics research is highly robust in academic settings because the methods employed and inferences drawn are subjected to the scrutiny of competing researchers having dissenting opinions and a strong incentive to publish.
Physiological Steps Doctrine

In vivo conversion is a process, often metabolic in nature, wherein one substance, usually a chemical compound, is altered significantly by physiological pathways in the body into one or more different substances. For example, when a patient ingests a therapeutic drug, that drug is often converted by the natural physiology of the digestive system into one or more chemically different metabolites. The end products of in vivo conversion sometimes possess therapeutic efficacy. Many patent applications have claimed such therapeutic metabolites, either as compositions per se or as parts of methods of treatment. Although the USPTO has granted patent claims to such products generated by in vivo conversion of ingested drugs, and courts have noted the eligibility of such products as patentable subject matter, never has a United States court of final appeal upheld such a patent claim as valid, enforceable, and infringed. The unanimity of results in cases involving patent infringement triggered by in vivo conversion is striking. In fact, its very improbability suggests a common underlying explanation for why in vivo conversion does not ever seem to trigger patent infringement. Explanations based on inherency or a lack of evidence provide a satisfactory explanation for only a minority of in vivo cases. The Physiological Steps Doctrine, which suggests that products and processes of in vivo conversion are unpatentable subject matter under U.S. patent law, offers an explanation that spans all in vivo conversion cases. Though the rationales offered to explain the results in a number of in vivo conversion cases are suggestive, there are several advantages for a more explicit recognition of the Physiological Steps Doctrine. Consistent with much international, European, and U.S. patent law, the Physiological Steps Doctrine provides a theoretical underpinning to explain the results in cases involving products and processes of in vivo conversion. This theoretical underpinning not only has explanatory power for interpreting previous case law but is also useful in predicting the outcome of future in vivo conversion cases. In addition, the Physiological Steps Doctrine increases the understanding of where inventions involving human beings, and the biological products and processes thereof, fit within the spectrum of patentable subject matter.
FROM THE UNION HALL: A LABOR CRITIQUE OF THE NEW MANUFACTURING AND ACCOUNTING REGIMES

Abstract This study presents the critique of new manufacturing regimes that is emerging out of debates within the U.S. labor movement over the merits of union/management cooperation as a strategy for revitalizing American manufacture. The research focuses on the labor histories of three union locals in Decatur, Illinois and their critique of new forms of factory governance such as teams, quality circles and employee participation programs. The paper examines the implications of the labor critique for management accounting's attempt to establish its relevance within contemporary manufacturing environments.Introduction A new conventional wisdom has found its way into management accounting theory and practice. Accounting academics, industry consultants, the media, trade journals and accounting textbooks now almost uniformly accept that traditional cost accounting, with its emphasis on controlling production workers, is no longer relevant to contemporary management and manufacturing strategies (Johnson @2e Kaplan, 1987). Consequently, traditional cost accounting is being re-thought, revised and revolutionized (Johnson, 1992; Shank @2e Govindarajan, 1993).
Individual laboratory-measured discount rates predict field behavior

We estimate discount rates of 555 subjects using a laboratory task and find that these individual discount rates predict inter-individual variation in field behaviors (e.g., exercise, BMI, smoking). The correlation between the discount rate and each field behavior is small: none exceeds 0.28 and many are near 0. However, the discount rate has at least as much predictive power as any variable in our dataset (e.g., sex, age, education). The correlation between the discount rate and field behavior rises when field behaviors are aggregated: these correlations range from 0.09-0.38. We present a model that explains why specific intertemporal choice behaviors are only weakly correlated with discount rates, even though discount rates robustly predict aggregates of intertemporal decisions.
Hyperlegality and Heightened Surveillance: The Case of Threatened Species Lists

My contribution focuses on the project of governing nonhuman species through care, briefly pointing to how law and surveillance are interwoven in this context and to how conservation’s biopolitical regimes are increasingly becoming more abstract, standardized, calculable, and algorithmic in scope. I will argue that conservation’s focus on governing through care lends itself to heightened modes of surveillance and to hyperlegality—namely, to the intensified inspection and regulation of both governed and governing actors. I’ll start with some preliminary explanations about my atypical use of the terms surveillance, law, and biopolitics.
The Outcome of Influence: Hitler’s American Model and Transnational Legal History

James Q. Whitman’s powerful book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Race Law, offers a chilling example of the way the United States can negatively influence the world. This review essay sets the book within the context of foreign relations history and transnational legal history. I first trace Whitman’s careful examination of Nazi uses of American law. His evidence of direct and substantial Nazi discussion of U.S. law when writing the Nuremburg Laws makes his core claim indisputable that American law was a model for the Nazis. Whitman shows that Nazi law sometimes did not go as far as American law due to foreign relations concerns. I argue that attention to Nazi foreign policy history would deepen this history, helping to explain how and when foreign criticism led Germany to modify its approach to race law. Hitler’s ultimate goal was the expansion of German power, not the maintenance of a positive German image, so any moderation in the Nuremberg Laws due to foreign criticism was likely tied to specific goals, like the importance of particular trade relations to Hitler’s goal to expand Germany. Finally, the essay sets Hitler’s American Model within the broader history of the international impact of domestic law. The foreign relations impact of U.S. race discrimination provides an illuminating comparison because foreign criticism played a different role than the German experience. Negative international reaction to American racism during the early Cold War years led American leaders to believe that civil rights reform was essential to protecting the U.S. global image, which mattered to maintaining American Cold War leadership. In comparison, Nazi concerns may have been tied to efforts to build up their arms industry as a means of enabling German power. Comparing the two examples can illuminate the varied relationships between domestic law and international affairs. The international role of domestic law is not limited to the borrowing of legal texts, and the transnational promotion of legal norms. Domestic law can also be an aspect of a nation’s diplomacy. The essay suggests questions for future scholars to pursue, and includes in the footnotes concrete ideas and resources for researching the transnational history of domestic law.
Food insecurity and public assistance

This paper examines if welfare programs reduce the probability that vulnerable households experience food deprivation because of financial constraints. Although the 1996 welfare reform legislation specifically limited the eligibility of immigrant households to receive assistance, many states chose to protect their immigrant populations by offering state-funded aid to these groups. I exploit these changes in eligibility rules to examine the link between food insecurity and public assistance. The evidence indicates that a 10 percentage point cut in the fraction of the population that receives public assistance increases the fraction of food-insecure households by about 5 percentage points.
The economy of Israel

The paper opens with a description of the salient features of the Israeli economy. These consist of a large government sector(the government budget has absorbed more than 80% of GNP in some recent years); high levels of defense spending; a large government budget deficit; a large current account deficit (about 20%of GNP); triple digit inflation; and extensive indexation of both wages and long term financial commitments. A descriptive model of the economy is then presented, which includes the particular asset menu of the Israeli economy, and its properties examined. Finally,the rrodel is used in analyzing aspects of the Israeli inflationary experience.The currency liberalization of 1977, which increased the access of Israelis to foreign assets, shares respensibility for the high rate of inflation. The possibilities of ending the inflation are discussed.
Contracting for On-Time Delivery in the U.S. Influenza Vaccine Supply Chain

Although influenza vaccine shortage is often attributed to low supply, it has been observed that even with abundant supply, a major shortage can still occur because of late delivery. In this paper, motivated by the influenza vaccine industry, we study a supply chain contracting problem in the presence of uncertainties surrounding design, delivery, and demand of the influenza vaccine. In this supply chain, a manufacturer has insufficient incentive to initiate at-risk early production prior to the design freeze because it is a retailer who reaps the most benefits from selling more vaccines delivered on time. Anticipating that late delivery will lead to potential loss in demand, the retailer tends to reduce the order size, which further discourages the manufacturer from making an effort to improve its delivery performance. To break this negative feedback loop, a supply contract needs to achieve two objectives: incentivize at-risk early production and eliminate double marginalization. We find that two commonly observed supply contracts in practice, the delivery-time-dependent quantity flexibility (D-QF) contract and the late-rebate (LR) contract, may fail to coordinate the supply chain because of the tension between these two objectives. To resolve such a tension, we construct a buyback-and-late-rebate (BLR) contract and show that a properly designed BLR contract can not only coordinate the supply chain but also can provide full flexibility of profit division between members of the supply chain. Numerical experiments further demonstrate that the BLR contract significantly improves supply chain efficiency compared to the contracts used in the industry.
Champions of Change: Reinventing Democracy Through Land Law Reform

This Article explores the prospects of achieving policy coherence in the field of land use regulation. It explains how, as municipal governments react to pressures and crises at the local level, they discover and adopt new strategies in a constant process of experimentation. Through a properly constructed legal framework, critical information can be relayed from local to higher levels of government, state and federal legislators and judges can respond, and a “system” of law can evolve. Using theories developed in the fields of systems analysis and diffusion of innovations, the Article describes the process by which local communities perceive land use challenges at the grassroots level and react through the adoption of responsive laws. It argues that state and federal governments, by being attentive to local innovations, can hasten needed change and create a coordinated and efficient system of land use law. The Article presents and analyzes case studies at the federal, state, and local level that illustrate how law reform occurs and that demonstrate the interdependence of all the components within the system. It explains the interplay of bottom-up and top-down forces and the importance of developing a legal framework for ordering the roles, resources, and competencies of each level of government involved.
Different Approaches Towards Electricity Transmission Expansion

There is an intense debate regarding the best way to attract investment for the long-term expansion of an electricity transmission network. We study three hypotheses: the long-term financialtransmission- right hypothesis; the incentive-regulation hypothesis; and the market-power hypothesis. The first approach derives optimal transmission expansion through auctions of longterm financial transmission rights by an independent system operator. The second provides a Transco with incentives to expand the network by making it face the entire social cost of congestion. The third approach defines optimal transmission expansion according to the strategic behavior of generators. This paper discusses the analytical and practical strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
Regional Growth Spillovers in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper documents the steady increase in intraregional trade in sub-Saharan Africa since 1980, links this rise to important growth spillovers in the region, and identifies the main source countries and those most vulnerable to the economic conditions of others. Estimates show that in the short run, positive idiosyncratic shocks to regional trading partners' growth significantly increase growth in the average sub-Saharan African country, while in the long-run the annual impact of growth in regional trading partner's is smaller in magnitude. Policy implications including the need to support further continent-wide integration and the associated growth spillovers are discussed. Actions policymakers in sub-Saharan Africa can take to capture the benefits of these spillovers, while limiting exposure to the associated risks, are also proposed.
Crime and Local Inequality in South Africa

The authors examine the effects of local inequality on property and violent crime in South Africa. Their findings are consistent with economic theories relating inequality to property crime, and also with sociological theories that imply that inequality leads to crime in general. Burglary rates are 20-30 percent higher in police station jurisdictions that are the wealthiest among their neighbors, suggesting that criminals travel to neighborhoods where the expected returns from burglary are highest. The authors do not find evidence that inequality between racial groups fosters interpersonal conflict at the local level.
Stopping Philadelphia Abortion Provider Kermit Gosnell and Preventing Others Like Him: An Outcome that Both Pro-Choicers and Pro-Lifers Should Support

This article focuses on three of the atrocities committed by Philadelphia abortion provider Kermit Gosnell: his shameful, destructive treatment of women; his brutal killing of born-alive infants; and his performance of illegal post-viability abortions. Pro-choicers and pro-lifers alike should unite in condemning, stopping, and preventing these abuses. Women seeking abortions need the protection of medically appropriate health and safety regulations; a civilized society should not tolerate the killing of babies, viable or not, once they are born; and viable fetuses deserve meaningful legal protection. The wider abortion controversy is sure to continue, but the combatants should join forces to achieve these three significant objectives.
Exact Sampling of Jump Diffusions

This paper develops a method for the exact simulation of a skeleton, a hitting time, and other functionals of a one-dimensional jump diffusion with state-dependent drift, volatility, jump intensity, and jump size. The method requires the drift function to be C1, the volatility function to be C2, and the jump intensity function to be locally bounded. No further structure is imposed on these functions. The method leads to unbiased simulation estimators of security prices, transition densities, hitting probabilities, and other quantities. Numerical results illustrate its features.
Hydropower: It's a Small World after All

Global warming is here. As exhibited by the recent droughts, heat waves, severe storms and floods, climate change is no longer a question for the future, but a problem for the present. Of the many ways to help combat climate change, this article discusses the use of the most abundant renewable energy source on the plant – water. While large-scale hydropower (think Hoover Dam) is unlikely to see increased development due to its negative impact on the environment, fish, and wildlife, small-scale hydropower (think a highly technologically-advanced water mill) is environmentally-friendly and would produce clean, renewable energy to benefit local communities as well as the global climate. Unfortunately, small hydropower development has been stymied by antiquated federal hydropower licensing regulations – originally intended for regulation of large hydropower dams. Without significant regulatory changes, development is, and will continue to be, cost-prohibitive for many projects. This article concludes that more small hydropower resources would be developed if the federal government delegated to the states the authority to license these projects, either through legislation or, more likely, through delegation agreements between the federal government and the states. Granting licensing authority to the states would result in more efficient and less expensive licensing, but would still allow for thorough site-specific evaluations and solutions. Studies by the Department of Energy have identified literally hundreds of thousands of available sites for small-scale hydropower development. If fully developed, these projects could increase the U.S. annual hydropower generation by up to 200%. Without a regulatory change, the United States’ stated policy goal of promotion of renewable energy development, including small hydropower, will remain just that, a goal, and will struggle to become reality. This article provides crucial information and direction for options to facilitate the needed regulatory change and analyzes the benefits – both local and global – of such a change.
Securities Fraud and Corporate Finance: Recent Developments

In this paper, I survey the recent research in corporate finance on financial securities frauds. I structure my review around the three subjects in this literature: studies of internal and external factors that elicit managerial incentives for fraudulent activities, studies on regulatory and market-based mechanisms that help to deter or detect fraud and on what affects the efficiency of such mechanisms, and studies on the economic and social consequences of financial fraud. I outline the empirical challenges related to this line of research and discuss opportunities for future studies. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Risk, Economic Growth and the Value of U.S. Corporations

This paper documents a strong association between total factor productivity (TFP) growth and the value of U.S. corporations (measured as the value of equities and net debt for the U.S. corporate sector) throughout the postwar period. Persistent uctuations in the rst two moments of TFP growth predict two-thirds of the medium-term variation in the value of U.S. corporations relative to gross domestic product (henceforth value-output ratio). An increase in the conditional mean of TFP growth by 1% is associated to a 21% increase in the value-output ratio, while this indicator declines by 12% following a 1% increase in the standard deviation of TFP growth. A possible explanation for these ndings is that movements in the rst two moments of aggregate productivity aect the expectations that investors have regarding future corporate payouts as well as their perceived risk. We develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with the aim of verifying how sensible this interpretation is. The model features recursive preferences for the households, Markov-Switching regimes in the rst two moments of TFP growth, incomplete information and monop
Will Ticket Scalpers Meet the Same Fate As Spinal Tap Drummers? The Sale and Resale of Concert and Sports Tickets

When a concert or sporting event sells out, the performer appears popular and the venue enjoys the opportunity to maximize profits from the sale of parking, merchandise, food, and beverages. For these and other reasons, event sponsors often underprice tickets. This underpricing creates commercial opportunities for ticket resellers, who purchase in bulk at the lower price and resell the tickets at a profit, and also for intermediaries such as StubHub. Legal and technological efforts to squelch ticket resales have largely failed, leaving the secondary ticket market stronger than ever. This secondary ticket market is economically efficient, but it also creates winners and losers. Ticket resales irritate artists, who believe that greedy scalpers are profiting from the artists’ talent, and also trouble some fans, who resent the increasingly astronomical prices of resold tickets. Secondary purchasers, by contrast, benefit by obtaining tickets to events they might otherwise have missed. Legislatures have begun to join the discussion, though some recent bills have failed in the face of intense industry lobbying. These legislative proposals assume that consumers need protection without always recognizing that rules that protect some consumers may harm others. This Article examines the transferability of event tickets. It attempts to answer several questions: What are the economics of the market in ticket * Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Woolf, McClane, Bright, Allen & Carpenter Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Tennessee College of Law; gstein@utk.edu. I would like to thank Ben Barton, Peter Engel, Jeanette Kelleher, Bob Lloyd, and Aaron Perzanowski for their helpful comments and suggestions and the University of Tennessee College of Law for its generous support of my research. [Vol. 42: 1, 2014] Will Ticket Scalpers Meet the Same Fate As Spinal Tap Drummers? PEPPERDINE LAW REVIEW 2 sales and resales? What, exactly, is a “ticket”? What property and contract rights does the initial ticket holder acquire? Does the initial ticket holder have the legal power to transfer these rights to someone else? To what extent can the initial ticket seller limit that transferability? Does it matter whether the initial purchaser planned to sell at a profit all along? If there is a profit to be made, who is entitled to keep the resale premium? I. INTRODUCTION 2 II. THE ECONOMICS OF TICKET RESELLING 4 III. WHAT RIGHTS DOES A TICKET CREATE UNDER PROPERTY AND CONTRACT LAW, AND ARE THOSE RIGHTS TRANSFERRABLE? 23 A. The Law of Property 24 B. The Law of Contracts 30 C. Harmonizing Property and Contract Law 33 IV. THE ROLE OF THE PRIVATE MARKET AND THE ROLE OF THE GOVERNMENT 34 V. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? 45 VI. CONCLUSION 53
The evolving concept of “retirement”: Looking forward to the year 2050

Economic growth, more than demography, will determine the nature of future retirement. With growth has come a steady increase in retirement years. Now, however, there is increasing interest in “rolling back” these gains. Alternatively, some scholars propose a different framework for evaluating “work” late in life — one that includes altruism, citizenship, stewardship, creativity, and the search for faith. Attitudes toward retirement in the future are likely to move sharply away from the simplistic view of all work before retirement and no work after. Some of the resulting changes we can expect to see are more part-time work, expanded “citizen participation,” and an older workforce with more training and retraining.
Credit Market Imperfections and Persistent Unemployment

Abstract This paper develops the thesis that credit market frictions may be an important contributor to high unemployment in Europe. When a change in the technological regime necessitates the creation of new firms, this can happen relatively rapidly in the U.S. where credit markets function efficiently. In contrast, in Europe, job creation is constrained by credit market imperfections, so unemployment rises and remains high for an extended period. The data show that there has not been slower growth in the most credit dependent industries in Europe relative to the U.S., but the share of employment in these industries is lower than in the U.S. This suggests that although credit market imperfections are unlikely to have been the major cause of the increase in European unemployment, they may have played some role in limiting European employment growth.
Backstop Ambiguity: A Proposal for Balancing Specificity and Ambiguity in Financial Regulation

Many in the financial sector argue that the Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) rules are too vague, and have called for greater specificity and predictability. Specific rules serve important functions of notice and efficiency, but this Note argues that the rules in any given area of financial regulation should be paired with purposely vague “backstop ambiguity” provisions. Such a model would allow regulators to target unforeseen harmful behavior, as well as efforts to evade the law by exploiting loopholes. The Note uses the examples of insider trading and tender offers to assess the efficacy and shortcomings of real-world backstop ambiguity, eliciting lessons to construct a normative model for balancing specificity and ambiguity in regulatory design. At a time when the financial industry seems unconcerned with cultivating a reputation for ethical conduct, backstop ambiguity may have a role to play in promoting a culture of compliance.
New Products, Quality Changes, and Welfare Measures Computed from Estimated Demand Systems

This paper examines the construction of a price index based on an estimated-demand system. In principle the method examined can produce a price index that takes account of the introduction of new p...
Contraceptive coverage laws: eliminating gender discrimination or infringing on religious liberties?

To ensure that women receive access to contraceptives state legislatures have recently enacted measures requiring insurers to cover contraceptives under their insurance plans. Congress is considering a similar law that would require insurance plans to provide the same level of coverage for all FDA-approved prescription contraceptives and related outpatient services as they provide for other prescription drugs and preventive care. Currently most insurance plans cover preventive prescription drugs yet do not cover contraceptive drugs and devices. Legislatures passed these contraceptive coverage laws therefore to eliminate this gender discrimination. Some religious employers and insurers however believe that the use of contraception is a sin and that assisting another person to commit a sin is a sin itself. They claim that contraceptive coverage laws inhibit their free exercise of religion in violation of the First amendment. Out of respect for these employers and insurers some legislatures included exemptions (also called "conscience provisions") for those entities that object to contraception on religious grounds. (excerpt)
Taxation and Redistribution of Residual Income Inequality

This paper studies the optimal redistribution of income inequality caused by the presence of search and matching frictions in the labor market. We study this problem in the context of a directed search model of the labor market populated by homogeneous workers and heterogeneous firms. The optimal redistribution can be attained using a positive unemployment benefit and an increasing and regressive labor income tax. The positive unemployment benefit serves the purpose of lowering the search risk faced by workers. The increasing and regressive labor tax serves the purpose of aligning the cost to the firm of attracting an additional applicant with the value of an application to society.
Disability and Family Relationships: Marriage Penalties and Support Anomalies

This article explores how federal family law, specifically the Social Security Act, continues to impose severe marriage penalties on persons with disabilities. It also addresses anomalies in state support laws where a parent — or the dependent child — is receiving federal disability benefits.
When time is not on our side: The costs of regulatory forbearance in the closure of insolvent banks☆

Abstract In this paper, we empirically estimate the costs of delay in the FDIC's closures of 433 commercial banks between 2007 and 2014 based upon a counterfactual closure regime. We find that the costs of delay could have been as high as $18.5 billion, or 37% of the FDIC's estimated costs of closure of $49.8 billion. We think that these findings call for a more aggressive stance by bank regulators with respect to the provisions for loan losses and write-downs of banks’ non-performing assets. More aggressive (and earlier) provisions and write-downs, or adoption of a capital ratio that penalizes nonperforming loans, would allow the concept of “prompt corrective action” (PCA) to play the role that it was meant to play in reducing FDIC losses from insolvent banks.
Does Chatter Really Matter? Dynamics of User-Generated Content and Stock Performance

This study examines whether user-generated content (UGC) is related to stock market performance, which metric of UGC has the strongest relationship, and what the dynamics of the relationship are. We aggregate UGC from multiple websites over a four-year period across 6 markets and 15 firms. We derive multiple metrics of UGC and use multivariate time-series models to assess the relationship between UGC and stock market performance. Volume of chatter significantly leads abnormal returns by a few days (supported by Granger causality tests). Of all the metrics of UGC, volume of chatter has the strongest positive effect on abnormal returns and trading volume. The effect of negative and positive metrics of UGC on abnormal returns is asymmetric. Whereas negative UGC has a significant negative effect on abnormal returns with a short “wear-in” and long “wear-out,” positive UGC has no significant effect on these metrics. The volume of chatter and negative chatter have a significant positive effect on trading volume. Idiosyncratic risk increases significantly with negative information in UGC. Positive information does not have much influence on the risk of the firm. An increase in off-line advertising significantly increases the volume of chatter and decreases negative chatter. These results have important implications for managers and investors.
The U.S. Housing Finance Debacle, Measures to Assure its Non-recurrence, and Reform of the Housing GSEs

We provide another perspective regarding Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's impact on the recent financial crisis. We conclude that the crisis and the GSEs being placed into conservancy were primarily ...
More Than A Woman: Insights into Corporate Governance After the French Sex Quota

In 2011, France enacted a Corporate Board Quota to establish a forty percent floor for either sex on corporate boards. Existing literature presumes that women will change the way firms function and that their presence in upper management will improve both governance and financial returns. To assess the potential impact of the quota, we interviewed twenty-four current and former corporate board members. Our analysis of these interviews generates two findings. First our results indicate that, at least in the view of board members, the sex quota has had an impact on the process of board decision making, but adding women has not affected the substance of decision-making. Second, our findings suggest for the first time that adding women to a board may well have a substantive impact on decision making, not because of the sex of newly added member but because they more likely to be outsiders. French participants reported that newly added female members affected substantive decision making because they were more likely to be foreign, to be expert in a wider range of areas, and to be drawn from non-elite networks than their male counterparts. MORE THAN A WOMAN: INSIGHTS INTO CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AFTER THE FRENCH SEX QUOTA Darren Rosenblum  and Daria Roithmayr 
Heterogeneity and exchange: : Safe-conducts in Medieval Spain

During a time when religious animosities were reaching their peak in Medieval Europe leading up to the violent crusades, Christians, Jews, and Muslims residing in close proximity in Medieval Spain experienced a period of relative peace, prosperity, and cultural exchange. This historical episode, referred to as La Convivencia, or the coexistence, is a puzzle to many period historians. This paper argues that this anomalistic period arose due to the emergence of commerce, which generated cooperation and mitigated conflict among these heterogeneous groups, a la the Doux-Commerce Thesis of the Scottish Enlightenment. Commercial exchange between Christians, Jews, and Muslims was established through the use of safe-conducts, a promise of protection sold to foreign merchants. This paper details the operation of safe-conducts and the civilizing role that commerce played among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Medieval Spain.
Investment in a Smaller World: The Implications of Air Travel for Investors and Firms

A large literature reports that proximity influences investment. We extend the measurement of proximity beyond distance and report that air travel reduces local investment bias. This result is conf...