cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
An economic response to unsolicited communication

If communication involves some transactions cost to both sender and recipient, what policy ensures that correct messages -- those with positive social surplus - get sent? Filters block messages that harm recipients but benefit senders by more than transactions costs. Taxes can block positive value messages, and allow harmful messages through. In contrast, we propose an ``Attention Bond,'' allowing recipients to define a price that senders must risk to deliver the initial message.The underlying problem is first-contact information asymmetry with negative externalities. Uninformed senders waste recipient attention through message pollution. Requiring attention bonds creates an attention market, effectively applying the Coase Theorem to price this scarce resource. In this market, screening mechanisms shift the burden of message classification from recipients to senders, who know message content. Price signals can also facilitate decentralized two-sided matching. In certain limited cases, this leads to greater welfare than use of even ``perfect'' filters.
THUCYDIDES AND LAW: A RESPONSE TO LEITER

Thucydides is the author of the most harrowing account of societal breakdown in antiquity. Brian Leiter has recently made the provocative claim that Thucydides’ analysis of such breakdowns indicates that morality is of little import in guiding behavior, including legal behavior. Yet Thucydides also narrates events, particularly in Athens, that indicate that something resembling morality can continue to guide action, including legal action, even at the worst of times. Thucydides provides tantalizing clues as to why he narrates events that only sometimes follow the path predicted by Leiter. In particular, Thucydides (accurately) portrays the law that suffuses Athenian life and saves Athens itself as, for the most part, informal and infused with moral concerns. Leiter's reading of Thucydides therefore not only is limited but misses implicit arguments that challenge Leiter's broader argument for a particular form of legal realism.
The Four Freedoms: Good Neighbors Make Good Law and Good Policy in a Time of Insecurity

When Franklin D. Roosevelt articulated the Four Freedoms in January 1941, he was promulgating a vision for a postwar world system of states that promoted respect for human dignity as a means to ensure security. President Roosevelt called for policies that would make the world more secure by promoting freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. This essay examines FDR’s intentions and the subsequent history of the Four Freedoms in order to reveal how the Four Freedoms offer a principled and flexible paradigm for addressing the challenges and opportunities in an era characterized by a rapidly changing and significant range of security challenges. They are more accurate, descriptive, and evocative of the current situation than is an ill-defined and alienating “Global War on Terror.” In place of an unending and unbounded war, they offer a paradigm of enduring values that would inform more humane policies and permit more rational decision making. The Four Freedoms point the way to a grand strategy or national policy promoting security, prosperity, and justice. This essay employs an interdisciplinary methodology, relying on the tools of history and security studies, as well as a form of constitutional interpretation that owes much to Justice Stephen Breyer’s concept of
Gender Differences in Predispositions towards Economics

Research has found that women tend to have more negative predispositions towards studying economics than men, which contributes to their underrepresentation in the field. This paper uses survey data on principles students at a large state university to investigate causes of this difference. We find that students widely view economics as a business-oriented field that prioritizes math skills and making money — a combination that is a turnoff for women, but not so much men. Thus, emphasizing uses of economics for social welfare analysis, while de-emphasizing its business applications, may help to rebalance predispositions at the outset of the principles class.
The Gate is Open but the Door is Locked - Habeas Corpus and Harmless Error

State prisoners challenging their confinement through the writ of habeas corpus must first pass through the gate of the federal court system. The Supreme Court's "new habeas" jurisprudence has imposed a variety of procedural obstacles to block that gate. Defaulted claims, successive claims, new claims and Fourth Amendment claims are generally barred. Even a claim of actual innocence ordinarily does not gain entry although it may serve as a precondition to onsideration of otherwise barred claims.
Accidental Atheists? Agent-Based Explanations for the Persistence of Religious Regionalism

This article outlines a new approach to the study of religious commitment. Starting with a variant on Schelling's classic model of mobility and segregation, we develop a multi-agent religion simulation (MARS) that incorporates insights from theories of religious choice, social influence, and preference formation. Compared to standard statistical methods, MARS does a better job of linking individual choices and collective outcomes. In particular, it demonstrates that stable regional patterns require a balanced combination of attachment to personal identity and adaptation to the social environment.
Market power, private information, and the optimal scale of pollution permit markets with application to North Carolina's Neuse River

Abstract We extend the analysis of optimal scale in pollution permit markets by allowing for both market power and private information. We characterize the total costs (abatement costs and damages) under market power and private information and compare them to total costs under competition. It is possible for both market power and private information to lead to lower total costs than competition, but generally the differences between the three market structures will be small. We also conduct an optimal scale analysis of nitrogen pollution from waste water treatment plants (WWTP) into North Carolina's Neuse River System. An economic model of damages and abatement costs is integrated with a hydro-ecological model of nitrogen flow through the Neuse. We determine the optimal number of trading zones and allocate the WWTP into these zones. Under the most likely regulatory scenario, we find cost savings of 1.55 million dollars per year under the optimal market design relative to the typical 303(d) regulation in which the WWTP are not allowed to trade.
Individual welfare and the group size paradox

How does an increase in group size affect individual welfare in the presence of Olson’s group size paradox? Under the standard approaches to modeling the group size paradox, individual welfare declines as the size of the group expands. However, this may not be true if we apply the group size paradox to politics. In particular, if a smaller group attempts to extract a fixed income transfer from a larger group, the welfare of individuals in the larger group is increasing monotonically in the size of their group under a standard contest success function. Even though the probability of the transfer taking place is rising monotonically in the size of the group, the expected transfer per member shrinks because more members share the burden of financing the transfer. A similar result is obtained if the transfer is modeled as a fixed entitlement to be received by each member of the smaller group. By contrast, if the transfer imposes a fixed cost per member of the larger group, the result that individual welfare in the larger group is falling monotonically in its own group size is restored.
Macroeconomic Cycles and the Stock Market's Reaction to Monetary Policy

Abstract This paper examines cyclical variation in the effect of Fed policy on the stock market. We find a much stronger response of stock returns to unexpected changes in the federal funds target rate in recession and in tight credit market conditions. Using firm-level data, we also show that firms that face financial constraints are more affected by monetary shocks in tight credit conditions than the relatively unconstrained firms. Overall, the results are consistent with the credit channel of monetary policy transmission.
Evaluating risk‐based capital regulation

Abstract This paper evaluates the effectiveness of risk-based capital (RBC) regulation and challenges some evidence from the well-known study by Haldane and Madouros (2012). We reconsider the evidence on the relationship between RBC ratios and failures of US banks from Haldane and Madouros (2012) and find their results are not robust to changes in the sample period or regression model. Using data on US commercial banks from 2000 through 2015 and an improved regression model, we compare banks' RBC ratios and simple capital ratios as predictors of bank risk. We find simple capital ratios to be significantly better than complex RBC ratios as predictors of bank risk.
Accepting Justice Kennedy's Dare: The Future of Integration in a Post-PICS World

In the wake of the most important public schools case in decades, Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS), the future of diversity in public schools is in doubt. This period of uncertainty comes at a moment when parents, educators, and employers are demanding high quality schools that prepare students for an increasingly globalized world. Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his PICS concurrence, recognized this and challenged districts to continue the important work of bringing different students together without resorting to unconstitutional means. Filling the void between what is essential to public education and what is constitutionally permissible after PICS, the public schools of Jefferson County (Louisville), Kentucky, one of the districts rebuked in PICS, have accepted Justice Kennedy’s dare by crafting a nuanced and race-conscious student assignment plan aimed at promoting broadly-defined diversity and increasing the quality of education across the district. The article argues two distinct points. First, it argues that the new plan is a constitutionally permissible response to PICS. Second, it argues that the new plan’s broadening of both the definition of diversity and the mission of a school district represents the beginning of a new post-Brown era that is responsive to the realities of public education in the 21st century. By tethering its analysis of PICS - and specifically of Justice Kennedy’s concurrence - to a specific response to that decision, the article provides a detailed analysis of the new constitutional framework in this area. Ultimately, the article argues that because it is both constitutional and educationally-relevant, the new plan represents the future of integration for any district willing to make the commitment to providing the educational benefits of diverse public schools to its students.
Lemons or Cherries? Growth Opportunities and Market Temptations in Going Public and Private

Is the decision to go public or private a stock-market-driven “sideshow” or does it have significant effects on investment and profitability? We address this issue using a comprehensive data set of private and public companies in the U.K. during 1996–2006. Firms with high investment-financing needs, lower information-production costs, and high industry market-to-book ratios are more likely to go public. In contrast to the literature, we find that capital investment and profitability increase substantially after the initial public offering (IPO). Consistent with the agency-cost-based theories of going private, firms decrease investment but increase profits after going private, especially firms bought out by private equity investors. Our analysis also highlights the effects of market conditions on the ownership structure decision.
The Praetorians: An Analysis of U.S. Border Patrol Checkpoints Following Martinez-Fuerte

This Note analyzes interior immigration checkpoints following the US Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, which upheld the use of checkpoints for the narrow purpose of conducting brief, routine questioning of persons traveling within the United States in order to verify a person’s citizenship and immigration status. The Court’s holding, however, has been broadened by Border Patrol officials to cover other law enforcement functions such as apprehending narcotics and weapons. This broader use of the checkpoints “subverts the rationale of Martinez-Fuerte and turns a legitimate administrative search into a massive violation of the [Constitution].” This Note makes several proposals that could curtail the abusive practices that have taken place at the checkpoints since the Court’s decision in Martinez-Fuerte. First, it recommends that Congress install an ombudsman with the purpose of overseeing border patrol operations at the checkpoints. The ombudsman would be primarily concerned with remedying the current lack of data surrounding activity at the checkpoint and documenting such activity in order for the information to be used to assess the checkpoints from a cost-benefit standpoint. Second, and somewhat an additional function of the ombudsman, this Note recommends that Congress and/or the Department of Homeland Security implement a readily-accessible complaint forum for individuals who suffer constitutional grievances at the checkpoints. Third, this Note recommends that border patrol adopt a monitoring system for regular travelers; namely, a mirror-like SENTRI system that requires extensive background checks and readily apparent ways for border patrol to identify trustworthy individuals at the checkpoints. Finally, this Note recommends that even if Congress or the agencies mentioned in the discussion fail to implement reformative measures to curtail abuse at the checkpoints, the United States Supreme Court should intervene in a future case involving the application of fundamental constitutional rights at the checkpoints in order to clarify whether it intended the checkpoints to effectively operate as crime checkpoints rather than immigration checkpoints. The former has resulted in millions of individuals forgoing the exercise of their constitutional rights within the United States at the mercy of the powerful arm of the government.
Market Participation and Dividend Clienteles

Asset allocation and market participation are intimately related investment decisions. Studies of dividend clienteles often attribute the positive relation between age and dividends to lack of self-control, but consumers with self-control problems are precisely those less likely to hold securities. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX), I model market participation and dividend preferences jointly and find evidence of self-selection bias in traditional regressions linking dividend preferences to investors' demographics. The positive relation between dividends and age is likely due to life-cycle considerations rather than to lack of self-control.
Lexical Influences on Categorical Speech Perception Are Driven by a Temporoparietal Circuit.

Categorical judgments of otherwise identical phonemes are biased toward hearing words (i.e., "Ganong effect") suggesting lexical context influences perception of even basic speech primitives. Lexical biasing could manifest via late stage postperceptual mechanisms related to decision or, alternatively, top-down linguistic inference that acts on early perceptual coding. Here, we exploited the temporal sensitivity of EEG to resolve the spatiotemporal dynamics of these context-related influences on speech categorization. Listeners rapidly classified sounds from a /gɪ/-/kɪ/ gradient presented in opposing word-nonword contexts (GIFT-kift vs. giss-KISS), designed to bias perception toward lexical items. Phonetic perception shifted toward the direction of words, establishing a robust Ganong effect behaviorally. ERPs revealed a neural analog of lexical biasing emerging within ~200 msec. Source analyses uncovered a distributed neural network supporting the Ganong including middle temporal gyrus, inferior parietal lobe, and middle frontal cortex. Yet, among Ganong-sensitive regions, only left middle temporal gyrus and inferior parietal lobe predicted behavioral susceptibility to lexical influence. Our findings confirm lexical status rapidly constrains sublexical categorical representations for speech within several hundred milliseconds but likely does so outside the purview of canonical auditory-sensory brain areas.
Opportunities for Building Social-Ecological Resilience in New Mexico Forest Communities

Abstract The forest lands of northern New Mexico are a contested landscape fraught with conflicts over ownership, resource exploitation and land fraud. Partly in recognition of this, the US Forest Service established the Vallecitos Federal Sustained Yield in 1948 under the relatively obscure Sustained Yield Forest Management Act of 1944 to promote the “stability” of rural Hispano communities and the sustained yield of forest products. The Unit, however, has failed to live up to its promise. This paper explores the concept of resilience as a new way of looking at this ongoing conflict and examines its potential to support future policies for management of the Unit and other public lands.
Price Informativeness and Investment Sensitivity to Stock Price

The article shows that two measures of the amount of private information in stock price—price nonsynchronicity and probability of informed trading (PIN)—have a strong positive effect on the sensitivity of corporate investment to stock price. Moreover, the effect is robust to the inclusion of controls for managerial information and for other information-related variables. The results suggest that firm managers learn from the private information in stock price about their own firms’ fundamentals and incorporate this information in the corporate investment decisions. We relate our findings to an alternative explanation for the investment-to-price sensitivity, namely that it is generated by capital constraints, and show that both the learning channel and the alternative channel contribute to this sensitivity. (JEL G14, G31) Oneofthemainrolesoffinancialmarketsistheproductionandaggregation of information. This occurs via the trading process that transmits informationproducedbytradersfortheirownspeculativetradingintomarketprices [e.g.,Grossman and Stiglitz (1980), Glosten and Milgrom (1985), and Kyle (1985)]. The markets’ remarkable ability to produce information that generates precise predictions about real variables has been demonstrated empirically in several contexts. Roll (1984) showed that private information of citrus futures traders regarding weather conditions gets impounded into citrus futures’ prices, so that prices improve even public predictions of the weather. Relatedly, the literature on prediction markets has shown that
Ricci v. DeStefano: Diluting Disparate Impact and Redefining Disparate Treatment

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids employment discrimination based on an individual’s sex, race, color, national origin, and/or religion. The statute permits plaintiffs to bring discrimination cases under two different theories: disparate treatment, which requires a showing of the employer’s discriminatory intent, and disparate impact, which holds the employer liable absent intent to discriminate if it uses neutral employment policies or practices that have a disparate impact on a protected group. Ricci v. DeStefano significantly affects the interpretation of both of these theories of discrimination. The case arose out of written and oral examinations that the City of New Haven gave in 2003 to its firefighters who applied for promotions to lieutenant and captain positions. Despite the City’s hiring of an independent consultant, I/O Solutions (IOS), to create a fair, job related evaluative instrument, the results of the exam were disconcerting. In a City where more than one third of
Giving to Secular Causes by the Religious and Nonreligious: An Experimental Test of the Responsiveness of Giving to Subsidies

Although evidence indicates that religious persons are more generous on average than nonreligious persons, little work has been done to determine if this greater generosity is a general pattern or is, rather, specific to church-based institutions. Limited research addresses if, or how, religious and nonreligious givers respond to subsidies. This article uses experimental data to examine differences in the amount and pattern of giving to secular charities in response to subsidies by self-identified religious and nonreligious participants. The results indicate no significant difference in either the amount or pattern of giving or in the response to subsidies by religious and nonreligious participants; however, giving by religious participants is significantly more responsive to income changes than giving by nonreligious participants.
Accruals, Accounting-Based Valuation Models, and the Prediction of Equity Values:

This study uses out-of-sample equity value estimates to determine whether earnings disaggregation, imposing linear information valuation model (LIM) structure and separate industry estimation of va...
The Association of Hedge Fund Performance with Manager Location, Domicile and Service Provider Choice

This paper evaluates the association of a manager’s choice of location, domicile, prime broker, auditor and administrator with fund performance and survival between 2007 and 2011. The study finds that there is a negative association between most location, domicile and service provider choices and performance during the five-year period from 2007 to 2011 that is reversed in 2008 during the market crisis. During the crisis, managers based in New York City or funds using JPMorgan, Goldman or Morgan Stanley as Prime Brokers showed a positive association with performance, indicating there may be a “put like” option imbedded in the decision to use a top tier Prime Broker or costly location like New York that is valuable during periods of market crisis.
Trade and Domestic Policy Linkage in International Agreements

A central question in discussions of integrating negotiations over domestic policy (e.g., environmental policy or labor standards) into traditional trade agreements is the degree to which the trade policy and domestic policy provisions of an agreement should be explicitly linked. For example, should the World Trade Organization enforce domestic policy obligations with the threat of the suspension of trade concessions? This article considers the conditions under which linking trade and domestic policy agreements within a self-enforcing agreement is beneficial, and argues that the benefits of such policy linkage may be lower than is commonly thought.
Dissenting In and Dissenting Out

This paper was solicited and prepared for a symposium held by the Chicago-Kent Law Review on "Intragroup Dissent." The intense legal and social preoccupation with the appearance of diversity and nondiscrimination both reflects and reinforces a process I call “identity capitalism.” Through that process, ingroup individuals and ingroup-dominated institutions derive value from outgroup identity. This process results in the commodification of outgroup identity, with negative consequences for both outgroup members and society. Outgroup members actively participate in the process of identity capitalism in various ways. In particular, they leverage their outgroup membership to derive social and economic value for themselves. I call such outgroup participants “identity entrepreneurs.” Identity entrepreneurship is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Rather, I view identity entrepreneurship as a complicated phenomenon with both positive and negative consequences. In this essay, I apply the framework of identity entrepreneurship to the notion of dissent within outgroups. Such dissent can take many forms. Here I examine two. First, I consider how outgroup members can leverage outgroup identity by minimizing outgroup associations — what I call “dissenting in” — by engaging in identity performances and adopting attitudes that distance themselves from the outgroup and associate them more closely with the ingroup. Second, I consider how outgroup members can leverage outgroup identity — what I call “dissenting out” — by engaging in identity performances and adopting attitudes that distance themselves from both the ingroup and the outgroup simultaneously. This theoretical grounding lays the foundation for a future examination of the ways that legal doctrines should treat dissenting in and dissenting out.
Does Head Start Improve Children's Life Chances? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design

This paper exploits a new source of variation in Head Start funding to identify the program’s effects on health and schooling. In 1965 the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) provided technical assistance to the 300 poorest counties to develop Head Start proposals. The result was a large and lasting discontinuity in Head Start funding rates at the OEO cutoff for grant-writing assistance. We find evidence of a large drop at the OEO cutoff in mortality rates for children from causes that could be affected by Head Start, as well as suggestive evidence for a positive effect on educational attainment. I. INTRODUCTION Head Start was established in 1965 as part of the War on Poverty to provide preschool, health, and other social services to poor children age three to five and their families, and currently serves over 900,000 children each year at a cost of around $7 billion [HHS 2006]. This paper provides new evidence on the effects of the Head Start program on schooling and health by drawing on a new source of variation in program funding. Spe
Assessing the Effects of Mergers and Acquisitions on Firm Performance, Plant Productivity, and Workers: New Evidence from Matched Employer-Employee Data

Empirical studies of mergers and acquisitions typically focus on firm-level financial performance. In contrast, we use human capital theory to model these events as transactions that simultaneously have cross-level, real effects on workers, plants, and firms. Our empirical analysis is based on longitudinal, linked employer-employee data for virtually all Swedish manufacturing firms and employees. We find that mergers and acquisitions enhance plant productivity, although they also result in the downsizing of establishments and firms. Firm performance does not decline in the aftermath of these ownership changes. We conclude that such transactions constitute a mechanism for improving the sorting and matching of plants and workers to more efficient uses. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Hyperbolic Discounting of Public Goods

This article examines revealed rates of time preference for public goods, using environmental quality as the case study. A nationally representative panel-based sample of 2,914 respondents considered a series of 5 conjoint policy choices, yielding 14,570 decisions. Both the conditional fixed effect logit estimates of the random utility model and mixed logit estimates implied that the rate of time preference is very high for immediate improvements and drops off substantially thereafter, which is inconsistent with exponential discounting but consistent with hyperbolic discounting. The implied marginal rate of time preference declines and then rises. Estimates of the quasi-hyperbolic discounting parameter range from 0.48 to 0.61. People who are older are especially likely to have a high disutility from delays in improving water quality.
Exchange rate pass-through in the Caucasus and Central Asia

This article estimates the extent and speed of exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) in seven Caucasus and Central Asia (CCA) countries using monthly data over the January 1995–May 2020 period. The est...
Endogenous firm heterogeneity and the dynamics of trade liberalization

In this paper, we build a dynamic model with endogenous firm-level productivity that involves ex ante identical firms behaving differently in equilibrium. Heterogeneity arises in equilibrium as firms choose different dates to adopt a new technology. We investigate the effects of international trade on technological diffusion and show that trade has a generally positive impact on the equilibrium rate of adoption (and hence on firm-level productivity). In addition, the model can replicate the stylized fact that exporters are larger and more productive than non-exporters. Finally, we show how our model can be used to interpret the emerging empirical evidence on the firm-level productivity effects of CUSFTA. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Global Well-Posedness of the Energy-Critical Defocusing NLS on \({\mathbb{R} \times \mathbb{T}^3}\)

We prove global well-posedness in H1 for the energy-critical defocusing initial-value problem \({(i\partial_t+\Delta_x)u=u|u|^2,\quad u(0)=\phi,}\) in the semiperiodic setting \({x\in\mathbb{R} \times \mathbb{T}^3}\) .
The Expressive Dimension of EU Criminal Law

Over the last decade, the European Union has begun actively legislating in the area of criminal justice. The 2009 Treaty of Lisbon expressly acknowledged the EU’s authority to pass criminal laws with respect to certain serious offenses with a cross-border dimension. This explicit grant of powers is the culmination of a remarkable evolution in the European Union’s identity — from an organization devoted primarily to economic integration to a political union that increasingly resembles a federal state. This Article argues that the EU has used its powers to criminalize not only to address practical needs, but also to reaffirm its core values and strengthen its political identity. An example of this phenomenon is the decision to harmonize definitions of racist and xenophobic crime across the Union. A review of the text and the drafting history of EU measures against racist and xenophobic crime suggests that they are best understood as a tool to express the Union’s commitment to human rights and equal treatment, rather than as a response to pressing practical needs. The Union’s use of the criminal law for such purposes, while symbolically powerful, raises some questions about the limits to EU intervention in criminal justice. The Article discusses the difficulties with establishing a legal basis for EU intervention in criminal justice when no demonstrable transnational dimension is present. Policy considerations — respect for state sovereignty, deference to democratic decision-making, and a concern for the effective implementation of EU laws — also recommend a cautious approach to legislating in this field. Above all, the EU should actively engage national parliaments in decisions to expand its reach over criminal law. While this approach might reduce the frequency with of EU legislation, it could strengthen the legitimacy and effectiveness of EU criminal law and better serve the political goals to which Europe and its peoples aspire.
Disengagement From Gangs as Role Transitions

Most research has focused on the onset and consequences of gang membership, neglecting the importance of leaving the gang. Disengagement from gangs often occurs during the transition to adulthood, a critical period of the life course. While leaving gangs has received growing attention over the past decade, absent from this research has been a suitable theoretical perspective with which to frame disengagement. This study drew on Ebaugh's theory of role exit to examine disengagement among 260 former gang members. We find disengagement to be a drawn-out process, replete with many failures and obstacles. We conclude with a discussion of these implications for practitioners, policymakers, and future research.
HARM AND THE VOLENTI PRINCIPLE

This is an essay on the limits of the Criminal Law. In particular, it is about what principles, if any, determine whether it is legitimate for the state to criminalize certain conduct. Joel Feinberg in his great work on the moral limits of the criminal law argues that we need only two principles. One is a principle regulating harm to other people and the other is an offense principle regulating certain kinds of offensive conduct. I explore various aspects of his argument. In particular I concentrate on his use of the Volenti Principle: He who consents cannot be wrongfully harmed by conduct to which he has fully consented. Feinberg uses the principle to argue that certain kinds of consensual conduct cannot be forbidden unless we adopt some kind of legal moralism, i.e., conduct can be forbidden on the grounds that it is immoral even though the conduct harms no other person. I explore the possibility of avoiding legal moralism by limiting the use of the Volenti Principle.
Enriching U.S. labor results in a multi-regional CGE model

Abstract This paper proposes a new approach for enriching results for U.S. labor markets from the leading multi-regional CGE model, the GTAP model. Departing from the usual approach of expanding labor data in all economies in a model's database, our method expands only the U.S. labor data. Additionally, we introduce a novel modification to primary factor demands, generating more realistic labor markets in which lower-skilled jobs substitute more easily with other primary factors than higher-skilled jobs. The advantages of our approach are that we can rely on the most recent and the most disaggregate U.S. labor data available; we build upon the most recently available GTAP database; and, when applied to other economies, our approach is the initial contribution to a database of detailed labor statistics for several economies.
Which Firms Follow the Market? An Analysis of Corporate Investment Decisions

We test whether stock market mispricing or private investor information in stock prices affects corporate investment. We develop an econometric methodology that disentangles stock-price movements that are relevant for investment from those that are not. We combine this decomposition with proxies for private information and mispricing to devise unbiased tests for the effects of mispricing and information on investment. We depart from much of the literature by finding that stock market mispricing does not affect investment, especially that of large firms and firms subject to mispricing. In contrast, we confirm previous evidence that managers incorporate private investor information when making investment decisions. The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org., Oxford University Press.
The Assignment of Property Rights on the Western Frontier: Lessons for Contemporary Environmental and Resource Policy

I examine the assignment of private property rights during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to five natural resources on federal lands in the Far West. Assigning property rights required adaptation from established, eastern practices. The resulting property rights and their long-term welfare effects inform over-fishing, excessive air pollution, and other natural resource and environmental problems. Allocations based on local conditions, prior use, and unconstrained by outside government mandates were most effective in both addressing the immediate threat of open-access and providing a longer-term basis for production, investment, and trade. Initial faulty property allocations and path dependencies are discussed.This is what stretched westward from the 100th meridian, this complex, misunderstood two fifths of the continental United States where men had come before law arrived and where before there were adequate maps there were warring interests, white against Indian, cattleman against sheepman and both against nester, open range notions against the use of the newly invented barbed wire, Gentile against Mormon, land rights against water rights, appropriation rights to water against riparian rights to water, legitimate small settler against speculator and land-grabber. The public domain as Powell knew it was all of these, its only unity the unity of little rain.Wallace StegnerStegner, Beyond the 100th Meridian, p. 218.
Pet Policy and Housing Prices: Evidence from the Condominium Market

This paper examines the economic impact of restrictions against keeping domestic pets in residential dwellings. Using a large data sample of condominium sales, we empirically estimate price effects associated with pet restrictions. Our results suggest that an unrestricted pet policy creates a significant premium in condominium price, along with discounts for condominiums that do not allow pets or have pet restrictions. This finding is useful for policy makers, developers of new condominium projects, and condominium owner associations in their decisions to establish or alter laws and regulations regarding restrictions on pet owner residents.
From coercion to deception: the changing nature of police interrogation in America

Our police, with no legal sanction whatever, employ duress, threat, bullying, a vast amount of moderate physical abuse and a certain degree of outright torture; and their inquisitions customarily begin with the demand: “If you know what's good for you, you'll confess. (Ernest Jerome Hopkins, 1931)1
Underestimating the Duration of Future Events: Memory Incorrectly Used or Memory Bias?

People frequently underestimate how long it will take them to complete a task. The prevailing view is that during the prediction process, people incorrectly use their memories of how long similar tasks have taken in the past because they take an overly optimistic outlook. A variety of evidence is reviewed in this article that points to a different, although not mutually exclusive, explanation: People base predictions of future duration on their memories of how long past events have taken, but these memories are systematic underestimates of past duration. People appear to underestimate future event duration because they underestimate past event duration.
Lending with costly enforcement of repayment and potential fraud

Abstract If penalizing a borrower in default is costly to lenders, Pareto-improving loans may be dynamically inconsistent not because there is no sufficiently harsh penalty for default, but because the lender has no incentive to implement the penalty if default occurs. Infinitely-lived institutions repeatedly intermediating between lenders and borrowers, called banks, can enforce contracts that individual lenders cannot, but to do so they must earn strictly positive profits. Maintaining the value of bank equity can also provide an incentive for bank owners not to use deposits fraudulently.
A unified framework to generate optimized compact finite difference schemes

Abstract A unified framework to derive optimized compact schemes for a uniform grid is presented. The optimized scheme coefficients are determined analytically by solving an optimization problem to minimize the spectral error subject to equality constraints that ensure specified order of accuracy. A rigorous stability analysis for the optimized schemes is also presented. We also show that other types of schemes e.g., spatially explicit and biased finite differences, can be generated as special cases of the framework. Optimized schemes generated using this framework are tested on canonical partial differential equations, and numerical results are compared with the standard schemes.
SIFTING THROUGH THE WRECKAGE: LESSONS FROM RECENT HEDGE-FUND LIQUIDATIONS ∗

We document the empirical properties of a sample of 1,765 funds in the TASS Hedge Fund database from 1977 to 2004 that are no longer active. The TASS sample shows that attrition rates differ significantly across investment styles, from a low of 5.2% per year on average for convertible arbitrage funds to a high of 14.4% per year on average for managed futures funds. We relate a number of factors to these attrition rates, including past performance, volatility, and investment style, and also document differences in illiquidity risk between active and liquidated funds. We conclude with a proposal for the US Securities and Exchange Commission to play a new role in promoting greater transparency and stability in the hedge-fund industry.
Welfare Implications of Costly Litigation under Strict Liability

This article examines a model of strict liability with costly litigation and presents conditions under which (1) potential injurers take optimal precautions, (2) increasing the cost of litigation enhances precaution and social welfare, (3) the optimal level of liability exceeds the compensatory level, and (4) increasing the rate of settlement enhances social welfare. The results have implications for controversies surrounding fee shifting, optimal damage awards (e.g., punitive damages), and the social desirability of settlement. The most striking implication is that fee shifting in favor of prevailing plaintiffs is socially desirable in low-transaction-cost settings. Copyright 2002, Oxford University Press.
Properties of implied cost of capital using analysts’ forecasts:

We evaluate the influence of measurement error in analysts’ forecasts on the accuracy of implied cost of capital estimates from various implementations of the ‘implied cost of capital’ approach, an...
Resolving the open source paradox in biotechnology: A proposal for a revised open source policy for publicly funded genomic databases

Abstract This article contends that the open source data access policy adopted by the International HapMap Project, a large-scale, publicly funded genomic database, fails to protect against the dangers of parasitic patenting, the filing of patent applications that block other users' access to the data. The Article analyzes the shortcomings of the HapMap Project's open source policy and proposes an alternative that preserves some features of the open source approach while providing additional protection against parasitic patenting. Part 2 provides a brief background on the aims and data access policy of the HapMap Project. Part 3 describes the shortcomings of the HapMap data access policy. Part 4 then proposes an alternative data access policy that preserves some features of the open source approach while also providing enhanced protection against parasitic patenting.
Federal Budgeting After September 11th: A Whole New Ballgame, or Is It Déjà Vu All Over Again?

Federal budgeting has undergone some profound changes since the tragic events of September 11th, 2001. Large surpluses that existed prior to September 11th and were forecast to continue have been replaced by equally large and intractable deficits. The consensus around a macro-level norm for federal budgeting has completely broken down. In other ways, the federal budget process has not changed at all. Despite the emphasis on defense and homeland security, domestic discretionary spending is still continuing unabated, as it has since the late 1980s. Further, the federal government continues to have chronic difficulty adopting its budget in a timely fashion.
SOFTWARE DEFAULTS AS DE FACTO REGULATION The case of the wireless internet

Today's internet presumes that individuals are capable of configuring software to address issues such as spam, security, indecent content, and privacy. This assumption is worrying – common sense and empirical evidence state that not everyone is so interested or so skilled. When regulatory decisions are left to individuals, for the unskilled the default settings are the law. This article relies on evidence from the deployment of wireless routers and finds that defaults act as de facto regulation for the poor and poorly educated. This paper presents a large sample behavioral study of how people modify their 802.11 (‘Wi-Fi’) wireless access points from two distinct sources. The first is a secondary analysis of WifiMaps.com, one of the largest online databases of wireless router information. The second is an original wireless survey of portions of three census tracts in Chicago, selected as a diversity sample for contrast in education and income. By constructing lists of known default settings for specific br...
Four Models of Jury Democracy

This article proposes a theory of “representative deliberation” to describe the democratic ideal that jurors seek to practice. Given its long history, the jury does not fit neatly into any one of the most familiar types of democracy, such as direct democracy, representative democracy, or deliberative democracy. However, the jury does hold together elements of all of these theories. In line with direct democracy, we select jurors from the people-at-large. In line with representative democracy, we seek to draw jurors from a representative cross-section of the community. In line with deliberative democracy, jurors talk as well as vote and seek to change one another’s minds. The resulting hybrid is what this article calls “representative deliberation.” The core idea is that deliberation works best on diverse panels where jurors from different backgrounds bring different views and life experiences to bear on the impartial consideration of the evidence. The article reviews empirical studies supporting the theory of representative deliberation and proposes changes in jury selection to remove obstacles to empaneling representative juries.
Leadtime-Variety Tradeoff in Product Differentiation

The literature on mass customization generally focuses on the tradeoff between higher revenues from better matching customer preferences with product specifications, and higher costs of offering a broader---possibly fully customized---product line. Less well understood is the tradeoff between the increased ability to precisely meet customer preferences and the increased leadtime from order placement to delivery often associated with customized products. In this paper, we use a locational customer choice model to formulate a firm's integrated product line design problem that involves variety, leadtime (or inventory), and pricing decisions. We propose a dynamic programming based solution procedure that amounts to solving a shortest path problem on an acyclic network, and derive some structural results on the optimal product line design. We find that unimodal preferences generally result in hybrid product lines, with standard products clustering around the mode and custom products covering the tails, in contrast with the all-custom or all-standard product lines that are optimal under uniform preferences. We also numerically examine how the firm should adjust its leadtime and variety in response to changes in parameters such as customer dispersion and operational scale. We find that the tradeoff between leadtime and variety is sometimes nonintuitive and complex.
Fathers and child maltreatment: A research agenda based on evolutionary theory and behavioral biology research

Abstract Children face a risk of maltreatment at the hands of fathers or father figures. But different types of fathers and different fathering situations present different levels of risk of child maltreatment. The question is whether this variance in risk is predictable in a way that could be useful in constructing and guiding aspects of child welfare policy and practice. This article answers this question in the affirmative by drawing on evolutionary concepts and behavioral biology research that address expected levels of male parental investment. In answering this question, this article delineates a research agenda for the examination of child maltreatment by fathers. The research agenda has significant implications for child welfare policy and practice related to risk assessment and child placement. Research that identifies father-types and father-situations that exhibit or evoke relatively low levels of male parental investment will provide new knowledge that will enhance the validity and reliability of actuarial risk assessment instruments. In addition, research that delineates father-situations that evoke a relatively high level of male parental investment will provide information that guides caseworkers in constructing placements that are characterized by a high level of foster parent investment and a low risk of child maltreatment.