cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Reputation Effects of Information Sharing

Abstract This paper analyzes a model of investment and return in an economy characterized by information asymmetry between an investor and a manager. The realized value of the uncertain state of nature is the manager’s private information. The paper first considers an economy where the manager cannot share her private information with the investor. Therefore, dividend payment is the only reputation building tool available to the manager. If the investor’s prior beliefs about the manager’s trustworthiness are sufficiently high, then the manager will return a dividend consistent with the lower possible state of nature having occurred and the investor will revise such beliefs downwards. However, if the beliefs are not so high, then the equilibrium will be mixed strategies. The paper then compares such a dividend-only economy with one where information sharing is an additional tool available for building reputation. Information sharing disciplines the potential opportunism accruing to a manager out of her informational advantage. It provides ex post verifiability of the state of nature and thereby, obviates downward revision of an investor’s prior beliefs about a manager’s trustworthiness. This results in a greater region of pure strategy play in the dividend-and-information-sharing economy. Since such pure strategy play implies investment with certainty, information sharing leads to higher investment. Further, pure strategy play implies returns consistent with the actual state of nature in the dividend-and-information-sharing economy while it implies dividend consistent with the lower state of nature in the dividend-only economy and these lead to higher return in information sharing.
Breaking Bad in the Classroom

Breaking Bad is often described as the transformation of Walter White—Mr. Chips becomes Scarface. Equally significant, though, are the journeys of Hank Schrader, his DEA pursuer, and Hank’s colleagues. The show is a study of law enforcement investigation in action. As a result, Breaking Bad can serve as a tool of pedagogy in criminal procedure. This Essay seeks to serve two ends. First, it provides a map for the use of the Breaking Bad series in the core constitutional criminal procedure course focusing on the limits on police investigation arising from the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Video is a powerful mechanism for presenting hypotheticals to students. Recent work on other shows such as The Wire has recognized the value of television as an alternative pedagogical technique in the law school curriculum. Breaking Bad deserves to take its place as a teaching aid in a criminal procedure classroom. The first part of this Essay identifies usable scenes for both faculty and students, and provides a preliminary analysis of the doctrine. The second goal of this Essay is to expand the focus of the traditional course beyond the United States Constitution. Breaking Bad is more than a show about cops and criminals. It is a show about New Mexico. As a result, for those of us training New Mexico’s future prosecutors and defense lawyers, it provides a mechanism to introduce students to state criminal procedure. As is true in many states, the New Mexico Constitution contains parallel protections to the Fourth and Fifth Amendments that have been interpreted more broadly than their restrictive federal counterparts. This Essay is a call to law school faculty to incorporate state constitutions into the criminal procedure class. Because criminal law is fundamentally state law, these are the provisions our students will implement in practice. As a result, they deserve significant time in the criminal procedure course. * Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Karelitz Professor of Law. E-mail: minzner@law.unm.edu. The author thanks Rick Bierschbach, Alex Reinert, Margaret Lemos, and Kevin Stack for comments on earlier drafts. 1. This description was central to Vince Gilligan’s original pitch for Breaking Bad. See Breaking Bad: Vince Gilligan On Meth and Morals, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO (Sept. 19, 2011, 11:28 AM), http://www.npr.org/2011/09/19/140111200/breakingbad-vince-gilligan-on-meth-and-morals.
The Credibility Imperative: The Political Dynamics of Retaliation in the World Trade Organization's Dispute Resolution Mechanism

Under the WTO’s dispute settlement procedures, a party that has been injured by a scofflaw state’s failure to comply with its trade obligations may retaliate against the scofflaw state by withdrawing equivalent trade concessions. Legal and economic commentators generally view retaliation as an economically perverse strategy for enforcing freetrade norms. This Article explores an alternative explanation, arguing that retaliation may provide the optimal enforcement mechanism for trade liberalization given the prevalence of low compliance incentives and high enforcement costs in international cooperation agreements. The Article argues that retaliation is superior to other remedial options because it enables an injured state to inflict maximum political costs on the scofflaw state by mobilizing powerful export groups in the scofflaw state against protectionist policies. Furthermore, this Article shows how the presence of significant protectionist groups in the injured state, which stand to benefit from retaliatory measures, also improves the injured state’s ability to commit to retaliation. Even if states have asymmetric preferences about protectionist policies, retaliation threats can still be credible since there is uncertainty about each state’s retaliation costs. Finally, the Article concludes that contrary to the conventional wisdom, the substantial role of uncertainty in this model indicates that specific performance, and not compensation, ought to be the goal of the WTO’s enforcement mechanism.
The role of top management team human capital in venture capital markets: Evidence from first-time funds

Abstract This paper examines whether the human capital of first-time venture capital fund management teams can predict fund performance and finds that it can. I find that fund management teams with more task-specific human capital, as measured by more managers having past experience as venture capitalists and by more managers having past experience as executives at start-up companies, manage funds with greater fractions of portfolio company exits. I also find that fund management teams with more industry-specific human capital in strategy and management consulting and, to a lesser extent, engineering and non-venture finance manage funds with greater fractions of portfolio company exits. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I find that fund management teams that have more general human capital in business administration, as measured by more managers having MBAs, manage funds with lower fractions of portfolio company exits. Overall, measures of task- and industry-specific human capital are stronger predictors of fund performance than are measures of general human capital.
Election Timing and the Electoral Influence of Interest Groups

It is an established fact that off-cycle elections attract lower voter turnout than on-cycle elections. I argue that the decrease in turnout that accompanies off-cycle election timing creates a str...
Does Heterogeneity Help in Overcoming the Public Goods Dilemma in a Sequential Contribution Environment

This paper compares behavior of heterogeneous groups with homogeneous groups in public goods production. In heterogeneous groups members differ in their opportunity costs of contribution, while in homogeneous groups, members have the same opportunity costs. Members of three-player groups sequentially make all-or-nothing contributions towards the production of a public good where contribution decisions, payoffs, and opportunity costs of preceding players in the group are known to each group member. We find that heterogeneous groups perform better than homogeneous groups controlling for average opportunity costs at the group level. Our results also indicate that subjects develop an endogenous contribution norm to sustain public goods production where subjects in the first positions, and subjects with relatively low opportunity costs contribute most often.
Data-Driven Linear Parameter-Varying Model Identification Using Transfer Learning

This letter proposes transfer learning methods to address a challenge in state-space linear parameter-varying (LPV-SS) model identification/learning using kernelized machine learning, when the distributions of the training and testing sets are different. Kernel mean matching is first employed to correct sample bias by resampling the data in the training set before the states in state-space model are estimated. Moreover, transfer component analysis is adopted to find a state-space basis transformation such that the transformed states follow similar distributions. The proposed methods are validated by testing on an ideal continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) model. Simulation results show that the proposed learning methods can enhance the accuracy of model identification and reduce the efforts involved in hyperparameters tuning.
Harnessing the Positive Power of Rankings: A Response to Posner and Sunstein

This is the Keynote Address from the Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington's Symposium on the Next Generation of Law School Rankings. The Author responds to papers submitted by Richard Posner and Cass Sunstein also submitted to the symposium. Given the amount of popular and academic interest in the topic of educational rankings generally and law school rankings specifically, the discussions and debates tend to be quite narrowly drawn. The common implicit assumption in such debates is that educational rankings ought to reflect educational quality, and disagreement usually centers around whether educational quality is possible to measure and, if so, how best to do so. Articles prepared for the forthcoming Indiana Law Journal symposium on The Next Generation of Law School Rankings by Judge Richard Posner and Professor Cass Sunstein offer useful insights within the parameters of the conventional rankings debate, but they fail to break free from its implicit boundaries. In this symposium contribution response to those articles, I first address these authors' contributions within the framework in which they are situated, but I then go on to argue for an expanded vision of the future of educational rankings - one that views rankings as instrumentally useful to the purpose of encouraging socially beneficial competition among educational institutions. When designing rankings, the primary goal should be to harness this positive power.
Fertility and the Plough

of populations today. We show that a history of plough agriculture, today, is associated with attitudes of gender inequality, and with less female participation in the labor force, entrepreneurial activities, and politics. 2 In the present paper, we continue this line of enquiry by analyzing the effect of historic plough use on beliefs about fertility. At first, one may expect that societies with historic plough use—and unequal gender roles—will have higher levels of fertility. If women are less likely to participate in market activities outside of the home, this lowers the cost of having children and increases fertility. The current study tests this hypothesis, and finds a surprising result: societies that historically engaged in plough agriculture today have lower fertility, not higher fertility. We show that this relationship is robust and is not caused by statistical outliers or omitted variables bias. We argue, and provide ethnographic evidence, that the finding is explained by the fact that with plough agriculture, children, like women, are relatively less useful in the field. The plough requires strength and eliminates the need for weeding, a task par ticularly suitable for women and children. This in turn generates a preference for fewer children, lowering fertility.
Gender, Risk Taking, and Negotiation Performance

Over the past three decades, the number of women entering the legal profession has increased substantially. Despite significant expansion in the number of female law students and legal practitioners, many individuals, including both legal employers and academics, stereotypically think that male and female attorneys behave differently in critical situations. These individuals suspect that female attorneys are less successful negotiators than their male counterparts. This article explores this assumption by empirically testing the relative abilities of men and women to perform successfully on negotiation exercises. It concludes that there is no significant difference in the relative abilities of men and women to achieve beneficial results for their clients and discusses how this research relates to women in the legal profession generally.
Credit spreads with dynamic debt.

Abstract This paper extends the baseline Merton (1974) structural default model, which is intended for static debt spreads, to a setting with dynamic debt, where leverage can be ratcheted up as well as written down through pre-specified exogenous policies. We provide a different and novel solution approach to dynamic debt than in the extant literature. For many dynamic debt covenants, ex-ante credit spread term structures can be derived in closed-form using modified barrier option mathematics, whereby debt spreads can be expressed using combinations of single barrier options (both knock-in and knock-out), double barrier options, double-touch barrier options, in-out barrier options, and one-touch double barrier binary options. We observe that debt principal swap down covenants decrease the magnitude of credit spreads but increase the slope of the credit curve, transforming downward sloping curves into upward sloping ones. On the other hand, ratchet covenants increase the magnitude of ex-ante spreads without dramatically altering the slope of the credit curve. These covenants may be optimized by appropriately setting restructuring boundaries, which entails a trade-off between the reduction in spreads against restructuring costs. Overall, explicitly modeling this latent option to alter debt leads to term structures of credit spreads that are more consistent with observed empirics.
The Impact of Health Information Exchanges on Emergency Department Length of Stay

Health information exchanges (HIEs) are expected to improve poor information coordination in emergency departments (EDs); however, whether and when HIEs are associated with better operational outcomes remains poorly understood. In this work, we study HIE and length of stay (LOS) relationship using a large dataset from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project consisting of about 7.4 million treat‐and‐release visits made to 63 EDs in Massachusetts. Overall, we find that HIE adoption is associated with a 10.2% reduction in LOS and the percentage reduction increases to 14.8% when the hospital is part of an integrated health system or to 21.0% when a patient has a previous visit to an HIE‐carrying hospital. We further find that (i) teaching hospitals benefit more from HIE adoption compared with non‐teaching hospitals, (ii) patients with severe or multiple comorbid conditions spend less time in the ED under HIE presence. Together, these results imply that (i) HIE adoption reduces overall ED LOS, (ii) wider HIE adoption would scale up the benefits for individual hospitals, (iii) magnitude of the association between HIE and LOS is higher when financial incentives for HIE adoption are stronger (e.g., integrated health systems), and (iv) the size of the reduction depends on certain contextual moderating factors. Given that HIEs are a key component of healthcare delivery and ongoing reforms, we believe that our findings have important implications and may inform policymakers regarding the nationwide HIE adoption.
Three Tools for Forecasting Federal Elections: Lessons from 2001

What is the best way to predict Australian federal election results? This article analyses three forecasting tools: opinion polls, economic models, and betting odds. Historically, we find that opinion polls taken close to the election are quite accurate, while economic models provide better medium-run forecasts. The November 2001 federal election largely follows this pattern, although the economic models provided more accurate projections than recorded through the 1990s. Against these, we compare betting odds, analysing a rich data source from one of Australia's largest bookmakers, Centrebet. The betting market not only correctly forecast the election outcome, but also provided very precise estimates of outcomes in a host of individual electorates. Betting fluctuations present an intriguing quantitative record of the shifting fortunes of the campaign. Particularly in marginal seats, the press may have better served its readers by reporting betting odds than by conducting polls. We conclude that the result...
Private Property Investment, Lucas and the Fairness Doctrine

Conferences and conversations on the Lucas case tend to be confrontational rather than collaborative. Worse, the property rights and environmental movements employ "spin masters" to turn the case to their advantage to the considerable confusion of property owners and regulators who are trying in earnest to understand the Supreme Court's view on the, matter. In the interests of looking at the issues from both sides at this colloquium, let me enter the discussion from the perspective of the property owner. These remarks are not intended to advocate the interests of the new property rights movement. In fact, those advocates will be disappointed by what I say. Rather, I aspire to view the issue of real property regulation as broadly as possible, reaching beyond the jurisprudence of regulatory takings cases into the realms of real estate transactions law and comprehensive land use planning.
Mass Tort Claims In International Investment Proceedings: What Are The Lessons From The Ecuador-Chevron Dispute?

In parallel to the Lago Agrio and Aguinda litigations in the U.S. and Ecuadorian proceedings that have been discussed already,1 the Chevron dispute includes an international dimension that presents equally complex and important challenges, but focuses on very different issues and involves different parties. My remarks introduce these international proceedings first to explain the different actions taken by the parties in different forums. I then assess the viability of international dispute resolution mechanisms for mass tort claims in general, before considering more specifically whether they can provide sufficient redress to mass tort claimants. Finally, I briefly introduce alternative dispute resolution forums to assess their applicability in mass tort claims.
OPTIMAL REGULATION OF COOPERATIVE R&D UNDER INCOMPLETE INFORMATION

A regulator offers a cooperation contract to two firms to develop a research project. The contract provides incentives to encourage skill-sharing and coordinate subsequent efforts. Innovators must get informational rents to disclose their privately known skills, which results in distorting R&D efforts with respect to the first-best level. When efforts are strategic complements, both efforts are distorted downwards. By contrast, when efforts are strategic substitutes, the effort of the firm with most valuable skills is distorted downwards (to decrease rents) and the effort of the other firm is distorted upwards (to compensate the previous efficiency loss).
Long Lines at the Courthouse: Pre-Election Litigation of Election Day Burdens

In 2008, for the first time, advocates sought to preemptively litigate the harm wrought by excessive lines at the polls, before they materialized. This Article examines the development of pre-election litigation to remedy an excessive wait, and finds much in the approach to inform the standards for guiding litigation to confront election day burdens more generally. It first explores the burdens that excessively long lines may impose, and then reviews past attempts to address those burdens, including those of the 2008 cycle. It then offers a doctrinal approach to this litigation to help shape the way that courts approach such cases, including thorny jurisprudential questions involving the appropriate timing for bringing election claims, the assessment of the severity of burden in the election context, and the means to assess the appropriate remedies for constitutional election violations. The Article concludes that the approach to the preemptive resolution of litigation over lengthy lines may prove productive for informing pre-Election Day litigation concerning many other forms of predictable Election Day burden.
Accrual Quality, Realized Returns, and Expected Returns: The Importance of Controlling for Cash Flow Shocks

ABSTRACT: This paper develops a simple methodology based on the earnings response coefficient framework that allows decomposing realized returns into cash flow shocks and returns excluding cash flow shocks. I find that stocks with poor (good) accrual quality were on average subject to relatively lower (higher) cash flow shocks over the past 37 years. These lower (higher) cash flow shocks offset the higher (lower) expected returns of poor (good) accrual quality firms. After excluding cash flow shocks, future realized returns are negatively associated with accrual quality. The premiums pertaining to accrual quality are both statistically and economically significant in standard asset-pricing tests when cash flow shocks are excluded by firm-specific return decomposition. Overall, this paper provides evidence on the existence of a priced accrual quality risk factor, and underscores the importance of controlling for cash flow shocks in asset-pricing tests that use realized returns.
Electronic medical records and physician productivity: : evidence from panel data analysis

This paper studies the impact of an electronic medical record (EMR) system on the productivity of physicians. Physicians influence a vast majority of treatment decisions and are central to the care delivery process; thus, it is important to understand how EMRs may impact the nature of their work. Our research builds on prior literature on physician productivity, IT productivity, and task–technology fit theory. We use a unique panel data set comprising 87 physicians specializing in internal medicine, pediatrics, and family practice, located in 12 primary care clinics of an academic healthcare system in the western United States. We employ the Arellano–Bond system generalized method of moments estimation technique on our data set, which contains 3,186 physician-month productivity observations collected over 39 months. We find that productivity drops sharply immediately after technology implementation and recovers partly over the next few months. The ultimate, longer-term impact depends on physician specialt...
Money market integration

We use transaction-level data and detailed modeling of the high-frequency behavior of federal funds–Eurodollar spreads to provide evidence of strong integration of the U.S. markets for federal funds and Eurodollars, the two core components of the dollar money market. Our evidence of negligible federal funds–Eurodollar premia contrasts with previous findings of large and predictable premia, which have been interpreted as evidence of segmentation between the markets for federal funds and Eurodollars. Our results, however, are consistent with possible persistent segmentation within the global Eurodollar market. We document several patterns in the behavior of federal funds–Eurodollar spreads, including liquidity effects from trading volume to yield spreads' volatility.
The Use of MTAs to Control Commercialization of Stem Cell Diagnostics and Therapeutics

While much of the commentary on obstacles to stem cell research focuses on patents, material transfer agreements (MTAs) governed by state contract and property law present equal if not greater challenges to researchers. This Article argues that the life sciences in general, and the stem cell field in particular, are increasingly employing a lease-license model - similar to that used by the software industry - such that end users only license and/or lease both patent rights and the biological materials themselves. The absence of a sale allows owners of patents and physical biological materials to impose greater restrictions on end users than the owners could impose in the context of even a conditioned sale. At the same time, owners can often weave together their intellectual property rights and physical property rights in contracts such as MTAs to allow each type of property right to reinforce the other. However, the control afforded by such a model can be used for both positive as well as negative purposes. The Article uses the case of the control of stem cell patents and stem cell lines by Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and its affiliate, the WiCell Research Institute, to illuminate this new trend in the life sciences. While the current stem cell research landscape is dominated by WARF's position, the Article offers ways that the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) and other public entities may use de facto research use exemptions to patent infringement to evade some of the reach of WARF's patents. The Article concludes by recommending that CIRM, and other stem cell research facilitators, initiate a comprehensive title chain plan that would govern biological materials from their original collection from donors through the materials' transfer first to non-commercial research entities and ultimately to commercialization firms. In this way, CIRM could play a role in encouraging positive uses of the lease-license model that could reduce the confusion and conflict currently surrounding the ownership, control, and use of biological materials in the life sciences.
Cross-Border Financing by the Industrial Sector Increases Competition in the Domestic Banking Sector

ABSTRACT We predict that access to cross-border financing by the industrial sector reduces firms' reliance on domestic banks, thereby leading to lower rents for banks and greater competition in the domestic banking sector. We also predict that banks take on more risk to offset these lost rents and remain competitive. Using mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) to identify variation in cross-border financing, we find evidence consistent with our hypotheses. Additional tests verify that the effects emanate from the demand side (i.e., firms not relying on banks) rather than the supply side (i.e., banks not willing to lend to firms). Overall, we document how competition from overseas financial markets influences the domestic banking sector.
Crystals in the Public Domain

The law increasingly treats copyright as if it were any other form of property, and numerous writers decry this trend. In particular, scholars who express solicitude for the public domain fear that the “propertization” of copyright threatens an inevitable accretion of private rights in information at the expense of the public domain. This Article questions this conventional view, arguing that the propertization of copyright has unappreciated advantages for users of public information. The conventional view relies on an overly narrow view of what propertization means. The treatment of copyright as a form of property generally entails not only reduction of entitlements to private ownership, but also the bounding of those entitlements with clearly demarcated, or “crystalline” borders. Although many writers prefer “muddy” entitlements that create fluidity regarding the extent of the public domain, this Article argues instead that it is this very fluidity that is at fault for excessive accretion of private rights in information. Uncertainty about the extent of public entitlements in information allows well-capitalized private actors to lay claim to resources whose public/private status is at all ambiguous, and then deter the public’s claims through threats of litigation. By contrast, a public domain characterized by crystalline rule structures would benefit users, as well as owners, by allowing them to better comprehend the extent of their entitlements and thus to exploit common resources without fear of suit. Three examples illustrate how copyright law could be reformed to create user-friendly crystalline entitlement structures. The Article concludes by situating the propertization of copyright law, and this critique of the dominant narrative of that trend, in the context of current debates in property law. * Associate Professor, Southwestern Law School. J.D., Harvard Law School; A.B., Harvard College. Thanks to Douglas Baird, Tom W. Bell, Michael Carroll, Michael Dorff, Richard Epstein, Judy Gloom, Warren Grimes, Sung Hui Kim, Jim Kushner, Saul Levmore, Robert Lind, Mike Madison, Gowri Ramachandran, Angela Riley, and Rebecca Tushnet for helpful comments on previous drafts. Participants in the University of Chicago Law School Faculty Workshop, the American University IP Works in Progress Conference, the PrawfsFest! Workshop at Loyola-Los Angeles Law School, the Southwestern Law School Faculty Workshop, and the IP Scholars’ Round Table at Drake University Law School also provided valuable insights. 140 Boston College Law Review [Vol. 50:139
Is the Bankruptcy Code an Adequate Mechanism for Resolving the Distress of Systemically Important Institutions

Lehman’s bankruptcy has triggered calls for new approaches to rescuing systemically important institutions. This essay assesses and confirms the need for a new approach. It identifies the inadequacies of the Bankruptcy Code and advocates an approach modeled on the current regime governing commercial banks. That regime includes both close monitoring when a bank is healthy and aggressive intervention when it is distressed. The two tasks—monitoring and intervention—are closely tied, ensuring that intervention occurs only when there is a well-established need for it. The same approach should be applied to all systemically important institutions. President Obama and the Congress are now considering such an approach, though it is unclear whether it will establish a sufficiently close connection between the power to intervene and the duty to monitor. The proposed legislation is unwise if it gives the government power to seize an institution regardless of whether it was previously subject to monitoring and other regulations.
Will Tort Reform Bend the Cost Curve? Evidence from Texas

Will tort reform “bend the cost curve?” Health-care providers and tort reform advocates insist the answer is “yes.” They claim that defensive medicine is responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars in health-care spending every year. If providers and reform advocates are right, once damages are capped and lawsuits are otherwise restricted, defensive medicine, and thus overall health-care spending, will fall substantially. We study how Medicare spending changed after Texas adopted comprehensive tort reform in 2003, including a strict damages cap. We compare Medicare spending in Texas counties with high claim rates (high risk) to spending in Texas counties with low claim rates (low risk), since tort reform should have a greater impact on physician incentives in high-risk counties. Pre-reform, Medicare spending levels and trends were similar in high- and low-risk counties. Post-reform, we find no evidence that spending levels or trends in high-risk counties declined relative to low-risk counties and some evidence of increased physician spending in high-risk counties. We also compare spending trends in Texas to national trends, and find no evidence of reduced spending in Texas post-reform, and some evidence that physician spending rose in Texas relative to control states. In sum, we find no evidence that Texas's tort reforms bent the cost curve downward.
Scope for renegotiation in private debt contracts

Abstract I study whether the demand for monitoring explains the scope for renegotiation in private debt contracts. Theory suggests that renegotiation trades off the benefits of enhanced monitoring with the costs of creditor intervention. Consistent with this tradeoff, I show that monitoring demand proxies bear a positive association with renegotiation intensity. In contrast, the costs of creditor intervention are associated with less frequent renegotiations. I also find that contractual monitoring mechanisms, such as covenants and concentrated syndicate structures, are positively related to renegotiation intensity. Furthermore, renegotiations transmit new information to the market, in line with private creditors discovering information during renegotiations.
The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews

Abstract The authors examine the effect of consumer reviews on relative sales of books at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. The authors find that (1) reviews are overwhelmingly positive at both sites, but there are more reviews and longer reviews at Amazon.com; (2) an improvement in a book's reviews leads to an increase in relative sales at that site; (3) for most samples in the study, the impact of one-star reviews is greater than the impact of five-star reviews; and (4) evidence from review-length data suggests that customers read review text rather than relying only on summary statistics.
John Paul II: The Quintessential Religious Witness in the Public Square

Upon the death of Pope John Paul II, United Nations General Secretary Kofi Annan commented: “Quite apart from his role as spiritual guide to more than a billion men, women and children, he was a tireless advocate of peace, a true pioneer in interfaith dialogue and a strong force for critical self-evaluation by the Church itself.”1 In so describing the late Pope’s inspired advocacy for human dignity, the General Secretary put it exactly backwards. Our late Pontiff engaged the world, and provoked the world in turn to engage with the Catholic Church and its teachings, not “quite apart from his role as spiritual guide,” but quite precisely because of it. John Paul, the Vicar of Christ and heir to Peter in the Apostolic Succession, and John Paul, the social activist and political statesman, were always and inextricably one and the same. When John Paul II was consecrated as Bishop for the See of St. Peter nearly thirty years ago, political and legal scholars and commentators in the United States were about to enter into a vitally important intellectual debate on the proper place and appropriate comportment of religious voices in the public square. As that scholarly debate unfolded, John Paul offered through his papacy the model case example for the religious witness in public life. Over the past quarter-century, he left a broad and
Rotten Apples: An Investigation of the Prevalence and Predictors of Teacher Cheating

NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES ROTTEN APPLES: AN INVESTIGATION OF THE PREVALENCE AND PREDICTORS OF TEACHER CHEATING Brian A. Jacob Steven D. Levitt Working Paper 9413 http://www.nber.org/papers/w9413 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 December 2002 We would like to thank Suzanne Cooper, Mark Duggan, Sue Dynarski, Arne Duncan, Michael Greenstone, James Heckman, Lars Lefgren, and seminar participants too numerous to mention for helpful comments and discussions. We also thank Arne Duncan, Phil Hansen, Carol Perlman, and Jessie Qualles of the Chicago Public Schools for their help and cooperation on the project. Financial support was provided by the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation. All remaining errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Bureau of Economic Research. © 2002 by Brian A. Jacob and Steven D. Levitt. All rights reserved. Short sections of text not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit including, © notice, is given to the source.
The Japanese Constitution As Law and the Legitimacy of the Supreme Court's Constitutional Decisions: A Response to Matsui

This article, from a conference at the Washington University School of Law on the Supreme Court of Japan, responds to an article by Shigenori Matsui, “Why is the Japanese Supreme Court is so conservative?” Professor Matsui’s article makes the argument that a significant factor is the extent to which the judges fail to view the Constitution as positive law requiring judicial enforcement. It is novel in its emphasis on an explanation grounded in law, and the decision-making process, rather than the political, institutional, and cultural explanations that are so often offered. In this article, Borrowing from Kermit Roosevelt’s arguments on judicial activism, I suggest that rather than framing the question in terms of the Court’s “conservatism”, Matsui’s argument would be that much more powerful by asking whether the Court’s constitutional decision-making is “legitimate”. The article explores why the term “conservative” can have various different meanings and is ultimately not a very useful basis for evaluating a court. It examines how the concept of legitimacy might be more meaningful, and explores how such legitimacy might be analyzed under various approaches to constitutional interpretation and theories of judicial review. The article employs two very different but well established analytical models, from the proportionality principle approach and from process theory, to analyze the 2006 Tokyo Metropolitan Government case for the purposes of illustrating how the court’s reasoning might be assessed for legitimacy. The exercise demonstrates that the judgment would not meet the legitimacy requirements under either approach, and indeed the reasons provide some compelling evidence to support Matsui’s central claim.The point is not, of course, that all of the Court’s constitutional jurisprudence is illegitimate, but that a systematic examination of the Court’s decisions from this perspective could provide powerful evidence in support of Matsui’s argument that many of the judges do not view the Constitution as positive law requiring judicial enforcement. Given that Matsui’s argument focuses on the operation of the Court as a legal institution, rather than as a political entity engaged in competition with the other branches of government, reframing the inquiry to examine the legitimacy of the decision-making process of judges would enhance the normative power of his claims.
The Asian miracle and modern growth theory

The article argues that the rapid growth in a number of Asian economies that occurred between 1960 and 1996 was accompanied by a major change in the structure of their economies including shifts in the size of firms and the sectors of specialisation. These changes were a fundamental component of the growth process. While capital accumulation was an important source of growth, its productive assimilation was a critical component of the success of these economies. Estimates of the contribution of total factor productivity to aggregate growth that neglect these phenomena may lead to erroneous estimates.
Surprise! TAA Can Work in Quiet Markets

A tactical asset allocation process most typically adds value during the volatile periods of the market cycle, when there is substantial divergence in asset class returns. A tactical options program will add value during the trendless periods of the market cycle. Two such programs together are highly complementary, providing a mechanism to add value during the inevitable quiet - hence unprofitable - periods for TAA. The authors discuss simulated results.
Why Amazon uses both the New York Times Best Seller List and customer reviews: An empirical study of multiplier effects on product sales from multiple earned media

Abstract In today's dynamic media landscape, products are reviewed by consumers in social media and reported by journalists in traditional media. This paper will focus on the relationship among the two types of “earned” media and product sales. Previous studies have focused on either traditional or social earned media, but rarely both. We will aim to bridge that gap using the following points of analysis: the New York Times Best Seller List as traditional media; Amazon user reviews as social media; and book purchases through Amazon as product sales. We find that: (1) both traditional and social earned media influence sales; (2) sales have a reciprocal effect on social earned media; and (3) traditional and social earned media influence each other. Communication through multiple media is known to produce the “synergy effect” in which one media activity enhances the effect of another. Our results suggest a new benefit unique to the use of multiple earned media. We call this the “multiplier effect,” which occurs when one earned media activity increases the level of another by becoming a “sounding board” that amplifies positive messages, as well as a bridge that allows messages to propagate freely in an interactive media system. Therefore, multiple earned media produce combined sales effects greater than those resulting from the sum of their parts. This analysis supports Amazon's decision to use multiple earned media to benefit from an ecosystem where product sales and earned media both influence and are influenced by one another. The paper will address the implications for marketing communication and media industry.
Solving Charity Failures

Introduction 156 I. The Economic Subsidy Theory of the Charitable Contribution Deduction 159 A. Nonprofits and Charities 160 B. Charitable Contributions 161 C. The Economic Subsidy Theory 162 D. Market Failures in Public Goods 163 E. Government Failures in Public Goods 164 F. Charitable Goods Resemble Public Goods 165 II. The Economic Subsidy Theory of Charity Law 166 A. Charity Law Solves Market and Government Failures in Charitable Goods 166 1. The Economic Subsidy Theory 166 2. The Problem of Free Riding 166 3. How the Deduction Solves Market Failures and Government Failures 167 4. Limits to Solving Market Failures and Government Failures 168 B. Vertical Equity and Distributive Justice 169 C. Charity Failures 171 1. What Is a Charity Failure? 171 2. Who Is Affected by Charity Failures? 172 III. Solving Charity Failures 175
Business cycle variation in the risk-return trade-off

In the United States and other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, the expected returns on stocks, adjusted for volatility, are much higher in recessions than in expansions. We consider feasible trading strategies that buy or sell shortly after business cycle turning points that are identifiable in real time and involve holding periods of up to 1 year. The observed business cycle changes in expected returns are not spuriously driven by changes in expected near-term dividend growth. Our findings imply that value-maximizing managers face much higher risk-adjusted costs of capital in their investment decisions during recessions than expansions.
Brand Perceptions and the Market for Common Stock

This paper investigates the effect of company brand perceptions on investor propensities to hold stocks. We find that, after controlling for other determinants of stockholdings, there is a negative and significant cross-sectional relation between institutional holdings and brand visibility, which is consistent with the notion that individual investors prefer to invest in stocks with easily recognized products. Furthermore, we find that institutional holdings are positively related to firm size and beta. Our analysis supports the notion that institutional portfolios eschew relatively neglected small firms, whereas individuals prefer holding stocks with high recognition and, consequently, greater information precision.
Law and the Myth of the Self in Mass Media Representations

In the story/counter-story dynamic of criminal trials, trial lawyers need to keep two meaning making strategies in mind: 1) the strategy of narrative seduction, and 2) the strategy of disbelief.
Strong convergence and dynamic economic models

Morton and Wecker (1977) stated that the value iteration algorithm solves a dynamic program's policy function faster than its value function when the limiting Markov chain is ergodic. I show that their proof is incomplete, and provide a new proof of this classic result. I use this result to accelerate the estimation of Markov decision processes and the solution of Markov perfect equilibria. Markov decision process Markov perfect equilibrium strong convergence relative value iteration dynamic discrete choice nested fixed point nested pseudo‐likelihood C01 C13 C15 C61 C63 C65
Market value assessment and idiosyncratic tax-price risk: Understanding the consequences of alternative definitions of the property tax base

Abstract I develop a framework, based on tax price, which measures the distributional consequences of any alternative property tax base definition. Using administrative data, I show that defining tax base as market value produces large amounts of idiosyncratic tax-price risk. I show that an assessment limit can reduce the tax-price risk generated by the market value definition and that the benefits of the assessment limit vary over time and accrue to a majority of taxpayers. In addition, I argue that the tax-price framework is appropriate for estimating behavioral responses to alternative tax base definitions.
SURVIVAL AND GROWTH IN RETAIL AND SERVICE INDUSTRIES: EVIDENCE FROM FRANCHISED CHAINS *

Using data on franchised chains, which are the type of single-product entities emphasized in industry dynamics models, we show that age and size affect growth and survival even after controlling for chain characteristics and unobserved chain-specific efficiency. This implies that age and size affect firm growth and survival for reasons other than those emphasized in learning-type models. We also find that several chain characteristics affect growth and survival directly, and thus controlling for firm characteristics is important. Finally, we find that chain size increases rather than decreases exit among young chains, and chains converge in size over time.
Mediation, Arbitration, and Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR)

This article defines and describes modern processes of dispute resolution beyond court adjudication, including negotiation, mediation (facilitated negotiation), arbitration (decisions by party chosen private dispute resolvers), and a variety of new hybrid forms of dispute resolution (e.g., med-arb, summary jury trials, public policy consensus building) that are used in both public and private disputes. The article reviews the history and theory behind these processes, outlining quantitative and qualitative reasons for their use, and then reviews a variety of controversies associated with their use, including the privatization of dispute resolution, difficulty in evaluating their effectiveness, and power imbalances in their use. The aspirational qualities of process pluralism (peaceful, better quality, and consent-based resolution of conflicts) are contrasted to the realities of their use and cooptation in some contexts, such as when powerful private and public parties dictate the form that dispute resolution takes, without true party consent.
Smart Forward Shooting

In this paper we develop a set of innovative forward-shooting algorithms that solve for the global nonlinear saddle path in models with 1---3 jump variables. Exploiting the fact that the algorithms are mechanical and model-free, we have placed canned, fully automated programs in the public domain. The programs do not require any substantive human input. The user's only responsibility is to type in the equations of the model correctly.