cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
To Plead or Not to Plead: Effective Assistance and Client-Centered Counseling

This article analyzes the role of defense counsel in the defendant's crucial decision whether to accept or reject a plea offer. There is a vast amount of literature and there are numerous appellate decisions relating to effective assistance of counsel at trial, yet the overwhelming majority of criminal cases are resolved by plea. For too long, the defense attorney's counseling obligations have been free from constitutional regulation and scholarly examination. The unacceptable result is that some attorneys offer their clients no advice on the critical plea decision, while others, at the opposite end of the spectrum, bring considerable pressure to bear.This article criticizes the historical lack of attention to the constitutional dimensions of counseling, and analyzes salutary emerging trends in the federal courts of appeals, district courts, and state supreme courts. Specifically, the article argues against the laissez-faire approach to counseling countenanced by many scholars and courts, and concludes that defense counsel must advise clients whether to accept or reject a proffered plea, and attempt to persuade clients to accept his or her recommendation. The article also addresses the failure of most clinical legal educators and scholars to recognize the constitutional implications inherent when counseling defendants in criminal cases. Client-centered lawyering, a staple of clinical legal education, champions lawyer neutrality as an essential ingredient of client decisionmaking. The article argues that developing interpretations of the counseling requirements of constitutional effective assistance challenge the viability of traditional conceptions of client-centered counseling, and mandate that counsel, at a minimum, advise his or her client about the wisdom of accepting or rejecting a plea offer.
Supplier Encroachment Under Asymmetric Information

Prior literature has shown that, for a symmetric information setting, supplier encroachment into a reseller's market can mitigate double marginalization and benefit both the supplier and the reseller. This paper extends the investigation of supplier encroachment to the environment where the reseller might be better informed than the supplier. We find that the launch of the supplier's direct channel can result in costly signaling behavior on the part of the reseller, in which he reduces his order quantity when the market size is small. Such a downward order distortion can amplify double marginalization. As a result, in addition to the “win--win” and “win--lose” outcomes for the supplier and the reseller, supplier encroachment can also lead to “lose--lose” and “lose--win” outcomes, particularly when the reseller has a significant efficiency advantage in the selling process and the prior probability of a large market is low. We further explore the implications of those findings for information management in supply chains. Complementing the conventional understanding, we show that with the ability to encroach, the supplier may prefer to sell to either a better informed or an uninformed reseller in different scenarios. On the other hand, as a result of a supplier developing encroachment capability, a reseller either may choose not to develop an advanced informational capability or may become more willing to find a means of credibly sharing his information. This paper was accepted by Yossi Aviv, operations management.
Risk Management for Hedge Funds with Position Information

Risk management is a challenge for hedge funds because traditional risk measurement methods based on return data are unreliable for dynamic trading strategies. Yet managers can still use value at risk (VaR) methods to measure and control the market risk of hedge funds. Two key VaR features enable this: VaR 1) is based on current position information, and 2) focuses on a lower quantile of the distribution of losses or some other risk metric. For rapidly changing positions, VaR should be measured at frequent intervals, as would be the case for bank9s proprietary trading portfolios. An example demonstrates the usefulness of dynamic risk measures for a hypothetical hedge fund with short option positions. Imposition of daily ex ante VaR limits using position information can be successful in controlling realized risk.
Macroeconomic Uncertainty and Management Earnings Forecasts

SYNOPSIS: To provide evidence on the role macroeconomic uncertainty plays in managers' decision to issue management earnings forecasts (MFs), this study develops and tests hypotheses about how such uncertainty affects the issuance and characteristics of MFs. Macroeconomic uncertainty is measured using the dispersion in GDP forecasts and the CBOE's Volatility Index (VIX). We find that during periods of high macroeconomic uncertainty there is a decrease in the likelihood of MF issuance, consistent with managers assigning a higher cost to releasing forward-looking information as macroeconomic uncertainty increases. We also find that managers issue fewer good and bad news MFs, but more neutral MFs, during periods of high macroeconomic uncertainty. Macroeconomic uncertainty also affects the characteristics of the MFs that managers do issue; for example, managers shift to more earnings preannouncements and to shorter-horizon, but more precise, MFs. Further analysis indicates that the regulatory changes imbedde...
The impact of the options backdating scandal on shareholders

Abstract The revelation that scores of firms engaged in the illegal manipulation of stock options’ grant dates (i.e. “backdating”) captured much public attention. The evidence indicates that the consequences stemming from management misconduct and misrepresentation are of first-order importance in this context as shareholders of firms accused of backdating experience large negative, statistically significant abnormal returns. Furthermore, shareholders’ losses are directly related to firms’ likely culpability and the magnitude of the resulting restatements, despite the limited cash flow implications. And, tellingly, the losses are attenuated when tainted management of less successful firms is more likely to be replaced and relatively many firms become takeover targets.
At the End of the Day: Are the West's General Stream Adjudications Relevant to Modern Water Rights Administration?

For all the monumental efforts involved, water rights adjudication is merely one piece of a larger water rights legal system that also includes permitting of new water uses, review of water use changes, and on-the-ground administration of water rights through distribution and enforcement. The integration of these processes is vitally important, because without comprehensive adjudication of historic water rights, it is difficult to determine whether water is available for new uses, whether changes may harm existing users, or whether water deliveries are correctly fulfilling legal rights to use water.As historic adjudications such as the Big Horn River and Snake River Basins reach finality, thoughts turn toward a post-adjudication world. One where emphasis shifts from determining the basic characteristics of water rights to creating nimble, predictable water rights systems that allow uses to adapt to the emerging needs of the West; one that fosters the accurate, efficient water delivery throughout complex, interconnected watersheds. And in places where adjudications are lagging (or languishing), the focus is on whether emerging lessons from these freshly-minted water decrees should trigger innovations in how future water courts approach their work. At bottom, these important and long overdue conversations center on how judicially driven water rights proceedings integrate with modern water rights permitting, record keeping, and distribution processes located predominantly within state agencies.This article provides a modest starting place for exploring how adjudications in various western states function together with modern permitting and administration of water rights. By locating adjudication within a state’s broader water rights system, the hope is to elevate in our water law discourse the question of whether, at the end of the day, adjudication proceedings are meaningful in the day-to-day world of water use. Part I summarizes in broad strokes the way various western states approach the interrelated functions of adjudication, permitting, and administration. Part II then highlights some common, emerging issues among state water systems as well as some emerging ideas for integrating judicial and agency water rights functions. This article concludes that the time has come to design the next generation of water rights systems so that adjudication and regulation speak a common language and function more seamlessly to best meet the water use needs of the West.
External Debts and Current Account Adjustments

This paper empirically investigates the efiect of net external debt holdings on the size of medium-term current account balances. It utilizes an approach where net external debt holdings behave like a\shadow interest rate"in afiecting the current account imbalances. This paper has four major flndings: First, in a simple accounting framework, net external debt holdings have a signiflcant dampening efiect on mediumterm current account imbalances: an increase in the net external debt holdings by 10% of GDP improves medium-term current account balances by 1% of GDP. Second, net external debt holdings afiect current account imbalances through their efiect on domestic investment and government expenditures. Private consumption, on the other hand, isn’t afiected by net external debt holdings. Third, across the country groups, it is found that OECD countries difier from developing countries in current account adjustments as government expenditures deteriorate more in developing countries than in OECD countries across the sample period. And flnally, net external debt holdings temper current account imbalances more during 1980s than 1990s.
Managerial foresight and attempted rent appropriation: insider trading on knowledge of imminent breakthroughs

In order to establish a competitive advantage, firms must acquire or create resources at a price below their value in use. Absent pure luck, this requires managers to exercise foresight about a resource's future value and/or complementarities with pre-existing capabilities. This foresight grants managers the opportunity to exploit information asymmetries for personal gain as well as building organizational capabilities. Nevertheless, there is limited research on the extent of foresight or how managers use it. In our study of insider trading, we found that managers purchase stock well before breakthrough patents are filed. We argue for further research on the extent of managerial foresight and how it affects rent generation and appropriation. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Highs and the Lows: A Theory of Credit Risk Assessment and Pricing through the Business Cycle

This paper develops a theory of how risk is assessed and priced through the business cycle by developing an intuitive model in which there is uncertainty about whether outcomes depend on the risk-management skills of banks or are just based on luck, in the spirit of Piketty’s (1995) model of “left-wing” and “right-wing” dynasties. Periods of sustained banking profitability cause all agents to rationally elevate their estimates of bankers’ skills, despite the uncertainty about what is driving outcomes. Everybody consequently becomes sanguine about bank risk, credit spreads decline, and banks choose increasingly risky assets. Conditional on subsequently observing unexpectedly high defaults, beliefs can endogenously shift to put more weight on outcomes being luck-driven, and this causes credit spreads to widen and may be enough to trigger a crisis. Regulatory implications of the analysis are extracted.
Public Choice and the Notion of Creative Communities

Public choice is one of the few examples of a “creative community” emerging from within the professional academic structures of economics in the postwar period. This article examines the early development of the public choice movement at the University of Virginia and how this movement both expanded and was solidified following the movement of a critical mass of public choice scholars to Virginia Tech. Drawing on the literature on creative communities, various archival materials from the period, and the scholarly literature on the history of the public choice movement, I attempt to show that while the seeds of this movement were sown at the University of Virginia, it was Virginia Tech that provided an environment in which a creative community could be established and flourish, and that this was a crucial factor in the evolution of the field of public choice.
Why does bad news increase volatility and decrease leverage

A recent literature shows how an increase in volatility reduces leverage. However, in order to explain pro-cyclical leverage it assumes that bad news increases volatility, that is, it assumes an inverse relationship between first and second moments of asset returns. This paper suggests a reason why bad news is more often than not associated with higher future volatility. We show that, in a model with endogenous leverage and heterogeneous beliefs, agents have the incentive to invest mostly in technologies that become more volatile in bad times. Agents choose these technologies because they can be leveraged more during normal times. Together with the existing literature this explains pro-cyclical leverage. The result also gives a rationale to the pattern of volatility smiles observed in stock options since 1987. Finally, the paper presents for the first time a dynamic model in which an asset is endogenously traded simultaneously at different margin requirements in equilibrium.
Joining a Queue or Staying Out: Effects of Information Structure and Service Time on Arrival and Staying Out Decisions

We study a class of single-server queueing systems with a finite population size, FIFO queue discipline, and no balking or reneging. In contrast to the predominant assumptions of queueing theory of exogenously determined arrivals and steady state behavior, we investigate queueing systems with endogenously determined arrival times and focus on transient rather than steady state behavior. When arrival times are endogenous, the resulting interactive decision process is modeled as a non-cooperative n-person game with complete information. Assuming discrete strategy spaces, the mixed-strategy equilibrium solution for groups of n = 20 agents is computed using a Markov chain method. Using a 2 × 2 between-subject design (private vs. public information by short vs. long service time), arrival and staying out decisions are presented and compared to the equilibrium predictions. The results indicate that players generate replicable patterns of behavior that are accounted for remarkably well on the aggregate, but not individual, level by the mixed-strategy equilibrium solution unless congestion is unavoidable and information about group behavior is not provided.
Understanding barriers to commercial-scale carbon capture and sequestration in the United States: An empirical assessment

Although a potentially useful climate change mitigation tool, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) efforts in the United States remain mired in demonstration and development. Prior studies suggest numerous reasons for this stagnation. This article empirically assesses those claims. Using an anonymous opinion survey completed by 229 CCS experts, we identified four primary barriers to CCS commercialization: (1) cost and cost recovery, (2) lack of a price signal or financial incentive, (3) long-term liability risks, and (4) lack of a comprehensive regulatory regime. These results give empirical weight to previous studies suggesting that CCS cost (and cost recovery) and liability risks are primary barriers to the technology. However, the need for comprehensive rather than piecemeal CCS regulation represents an emerging concern not previously singled out in the literature. Our results clearly show that the CCS community sees fragmented regulation as one of the most significant barriers to CCS deployment. Specifically, industry is united in its preference for a federal regulatory floor that is subject to state-level administration and sensitive to local conditions. Likewise, CCS experts share broad confidence in the technology's readiness, despite continued calls for commercial-scale demonstration projects before CCS is widely deployed.
Law and the Zero-Sum Game of Discrimination: Commentary on Norton and Sommers (2011).

Norton and Sommers (2011, this issue) find that Whites see discrimination as a zero-sum game that they are now losing. This psychological finding has serious implications for antidiscrimination law. This commentary briefly traces the relevant, recent history of antidiscrimination law and explains the consequences of the zero-sum finding in three related areas: affirmative action, disparate treatment, and disparate impact. In all three areas, the zero-sum finding—and the presumption of intentional discrimination against Whites that it indicates—upsets the structure of antidiscrimination law traditionally designed to remedy discrimination against historically disadvantaged racial minorities. Moreover, the zero-sum finding suggests that recent ballot initiatives banning affirmative action and recent, pivotal Supreme Court opinions limiting antidiscrimination laws that were originally erected to prevent the exclusion of racial minorities are not just the product of voters in a handful of states, of a few disg...
Asymmetric Effects on East Asian Financial Integration: Is There "Japanese Dominance"?

This paper examines the extent of asymmetric effects and the hypothesis of Japanese dominance in East Asian financial integration by analyzing the transmission mechanism to local interest rates from interest rates originating in both Japan and the US. The results support a weak version of the hypothesis in the cases of Malaysia and Taiwan, since there exist unidirectional causality effects from Japan. In addition, empirical evidence indicates that the sensitivity of local interest rates to US interest rate has declined in Korea and Thailand after they abandoned pegged exchange rate regimes in the post-crisis period.
Religious hospitals and the federal community benefit standard--counting religious purpose as a tax-exemption factor for hospitals.

This Article argues that the religious purpose of religious hospitals should be explicitly counted for purposes of determining tax exemption under federal corporate income tax law as well as state tax law. This argument is premised upon the special protections secured to religious institutions under federal and state constitutions, the history of tax exemptions extended to religious and charitable institutions, the separate enumeration of religious purpose as an exempt purpose in § 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and the important role of nonprofit organizations in American society. This Article develops this argument in several steps. First, it traces some of the historical background regarding the tax exemption of nonprofit and religious hospitals in the United States, including the development of the community benefit standard. Second, it examines recent federal legislative and regulatory initiatives, including the Affordable Care Act, that have amplified the community benefit standard with additional requirements that hospitals must meet to qualify for and retain tax-exempt status under federal income tax law. Third, it offers a range of reasons that support counting the religious purpose of religious hospitals for determining tax-exempt status. Fourth, it sets forth a typology of nonprofit hospitals and offers two sets of proposals — the first suggesting revisions to federal income tax exemption law and regulation, and the second encouraging religious hospitals to make their religious purpose more evident in their organizations and operations.
The Association between Sustainability Governance Characteristics and the Assurance of Corporate Sustainability Reports

SUMMARY: This study provides evidence on whether sustainability-oriented corporate governance mechanisms impact the voluntary assurance of corporate sustainability reports. Specifically, we consid...
The Use of Expert Services by Privately Retained Criminal Defense Attorneys

This Article explores how constraints operate to impair the use of expert services by privatey retained criminal defense attorneys. The discussion focuses on the use of expert services during the pretrial and sentencing stages of the judicial process. Accordingly, the discussion begins with a hypothetical situation involving a criminal act, and outlines the manner in which a criminal attorney would ideally utilize expert services in preparing a defense for the accused. The Article then examines both the perceived inadequate use of experts by privately retained criminal defense attorneys and the structual factors in our legal system reponsible for this condition, and concludes by suggesting several ways to help eliminate some of the existing impediments to more effective use of expert services.
Shadowy Banking: Theft By Safety Net

Shadowy Banking is financial activity that is engineered to extract implicit subsidies from government safety nets. It substitutes innovative corporate entities and products for activities that could be performed more straightforwardly within a traditional banking firm. The shadows obscure organizational forms and transactions strategies that circumvent regulatory restraints and extract subsidies by regulation-induced innovation. Because government support kicks in when private equity is exhausted, safety nets are implicit contracts that offer loss-absorbing equity capital from taxpayers. Unlike lenders and insurers who assess and absorb risk, taxpayers accept unquantifiable Knightian uncertainty. As coerced equity investors whose liability is unlimited, taxpayers would be better served if information systems and corporate law were revised to give them at least the same safeguards and rights of disclosure that minority shareholders enjoy.
Resuscitating businessman risk: A rationale for familiarity-based portfolios

Abstract This paper studies two frequently observed portfolio behaviors that are seemingly inconsistent with rational portfolio choice. The first is the tendency of workers and entrepreneurs to hold their companyʼs stock. The second is the propensity of workers to limit their equity holdings through time. The explanation offered here for both of these behaviors lies in the option to switch jobs when oneʼs company does poorly. This is equivalent to holding put options on oneʼs own company stock and call options on the other companyʼs stock, where both options must be exercised at the same time. Given these initial undiversified implicit financial holdings, workers need to allocate a relatively large share of their regular financial assets to their own companyʼs stock and a relatively small share to the stock of their alternative employment simply to restore overall portfolio balance. Although this effect can only create some hedging demand for companyʼs stock, it is a factor of potentially major import for assessing the suitability of workersʼ financial decisions. I find that, under certain conditions, workers optimally hold almost 40% of their financial wealth in their companyʼs stock.
A Methodology for Discovering how to Adaptively Personalize to Users using Experimental Comparisons.

We explain and provide examples of a formalism that supports the methodology of discovering how to adapt and personalize technology by combining randomized experiments with variables associated with user models. We characterize a formal relationship between the use of technology to conduct A/B experiments and use of technology for adaptive personalization. The MOOClet Formalism [11] captures the equivalence between experimentation and personalization in its conceptualization of modular components of a technology. This motivates a unified software design pattern that enables technology components that can be compared in an experiment to also be adapted based on contextual data, or personalized based on user characteristics. With the aid of a concrete use case, we illustrate the potential of the MOOClet formalism for a methodology that uses randomized experiments of alternative micro-designs to discover how to adapt technology based on user characteristics, and then dynamically implements these personalized improvements in real time.
Political Institutions and Policy Volatility

Checks and balances that limit the discretion of policy-makers reduce the volatility of government expenditure and revenue. While this assumption is at the heart of a large body of empirical work, the association between political institutions and policy volatility has itself been the focus of only limited empirical testing. The results presented here support the existence of this link, allow for a comparison between two prominent measures of checks and balances and provide insight into the relative impact of checks and balances on the volatility of nine different types of fiscal policy both during times of macroeconomic stability and upheaval.
Superfund Cleanups, Ethics and Environmental Risk Assessment

Risk assessment procedures are the methods and techniques that are being used by government, and sometimes industry, to determine the magnitude and probability of the risks posed by hazardous chemicals or other environmental threats.
Taxes and Time Allocation: Evidence from Single Women and Men

The classic model of Becker (1965) suggests that labor supply decisions should be analyzed within the broader context of time allocation and market good consumption choices, but most empirical work on policy has focused exclusively on measuring impacts on market work. This paper examines how income taxes affect time allocation during the entire day, and how these time allocation decisions interact with expenditure patterns. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1975 to 2004, we analyze the response of single women's housework, labor supply, and other time to variation in tax and transfer schedules across income levels, number of children, states, and time. We find that when the economic reward to participating in the labor force increases, market work increases and housework decreases, with the decrease in housework accounting for approximately two-thirds of the increase in market work. Analysis of repeated cross-sections of time diary data from 1975 to 2004 shows that "home production" decreases substantially when market hours of work increase in response to policy changes. Data on expenditures from the Consumer Expenditure Survey from 1980 to 2003 show some evidence that expenditures on market goods likely to substitute for housework increase in response to a greater incentive to join the labor force. The baseline estimates imply that the elasticity of substitution between consumption of home and market goods is 2.61. The results are consistent with the Becker model. Meanwhile, single men show little response to changes in tax policy, and we are able to rule out an elasticity of substitution between home and market goods for this group of more than 1.52.
The European View of American Justice

The European view of American justice is heavily influenced by European attitudes towards the death penalty. Indeed, all fifteen of the original European Union countries have abolished the death penalty.1 Perhaps the sharpest difference between the United States and the rest of the world is on the issue of the use of the death penalty against juvenile offenders. Since January 1990, only seven countries other than the United States are known to have executed juvenile offenders: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen, China, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.2 China, Yemen, and Pakistan have now outlawed the practice.3 In the 1990s, more executions of child offenders occurred in the United States than in the rest of the world combined. Symbolically, the European view towards the American death penalty was reflected by the special illuminations of the Coliseum in Rome, Italy during the years 2000 and 2001. It was lit up twice because of the actions of Illinois Governor Ryan in imposing a death penalty moratorium and then commuting the death sentences for all death row inmates.5
An Aggregate Measure for Benefit–Cost Analysis

The Kaldor–Hicks (KH) criterion has long been the standard for benefit–cost analyses, but it has also been widely criticized as ignoring equity and, arguably, moral sentiments in general. We suggest the use of an aggregate measure (KHM) instead of KH, where M stands for moral sentiments. KHM simply adds to the traditional KH criterion the requirement that all goods for which there is a willingness to pay or accept count as economic goods. This addition, however, runs up against objections to counting moral sentiments in general and non-paternalistic altruism in particular. We show these concerns are unwarranted and suggest that the KHM criterion is superior to KH because it provides better information.
Improving Forecasts of State Failure

This article offers the first independent scholarly evaluation of the claims, forecasts, and causal inferences of the State Failure Task Force and its efforts to forecast when states will fail. State failure refers to the collapse of the authority of the central government to impose order, as in civil wars, revolutionary wars, genocides, politicides, and adverse or disruptive regime transitions. States that sponsor terrorism or allow it to be organized within their borders are all failed states. This task force, set up at the behest of Vice President Gore in 1994, has been led by a group of distinguished academics working as consultants to the U.S. CIA. State Failure Task Force reports and publications have received attention in the media, in academia, and from public decision makers. The article identifies several methodological errors in the task force work that cause its reported forecast probabilities of conflict to be too large, its causal inferences to be biased in unpredictable directions, and its claims of forecasting performance to be exaggerated. However, the article also finds that the task force has amassed the best and most carefully collected data on state failure to date, and the required corrections provided in this article, although very large in effect, are easy to implement. The article also demonstrates how to improve forecasting performance to levels significantly greater than even corrected versions of its models. Although the matter is still a highly uncertain endeavor, the authors are nevertheless able to offer the first accurate forecasts of state failure, along with procedures and results that may be of practical use in informing foreign policy decision making. The article also describes a number of strong empirical regularities that may help in ascertaining the causes of state failure.
Deposit Rate Advantages at the Largest Banks

We estimate differences in funding costs between the largest banks and the rest of the industry in the United States. Using a novel data set on deposit rates offered at the branch level, we document significant pricing advantages at the largest banks on comparable deposit products and deposit risk premiums. Between 2007 and 2008, the risk premium paid by the largest banks was 35 bps lower than the risk premium at other banks. This difference vanishes following a regulatory change in the deposit limit. These findings are consistent with a significant too-big-to-fail subsidy captured by the largest banks through lower risk premiums on uninsured deposits.
THE IMPACT OF AGENCY PROCEDURES AND JUDICIAL REVIEW ON TAX REFORM

This paper discusses hurdles that the IRS and Treasury would face following tax reform in their efforts to respond quickly with guidance that courts will uphold. These hurdles include the impact of the Tax Anti-Injunction Act and the Declaratory Relief Act, heightened interest in the course of tax litigation regarding compliance by the IRS and Treasury with the Administrative Procedure Act, and provisions enacted in 1988 and 1996 limiting temporary and retroactive regulations. The paper then outlines several approaches Congress could consider to mitigate possible untoward consequences.
The once and future accountant: ethics and the future outlook of the US accounting profession

This research study examines perceptions regarding the trustworthiness and integrity of the accounting profession. Perceptions were obtained from accounting practitioners, accounting educators, and future practitioners (students). Survey results indicate that, compared to accounting practitioners and educators, students are generally more concerned about events surrounding the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and feel a stronger need for changes to enhance confidence in the capital markets. Concerning the future of the accounting profession, significant differences of opinion exist among groups. Public accountants are the most optimistic about the future, followed by students, then faculty and industry accountants.
Affirming Brahimi: East Timor Makes the Case for a Model Criminal Code

In August of 2000, the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (the “Brahimi Report”) considered the issue of transitional civil administration as an element of United Nations field operations. The Brahimi Report recommended the creation of an interim legal code as part of a U.N. justice package so that any future UN transitional administrations would be able to address the issue of “applicable law” in the early stages of its mission. Using the experience of the United National Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) as a case study, this article establishes how and why a complete model criminal code for transitional governance would have assisted UNTAET. Providing evidence that a model code would have fostered respect for the rule of law, protected particularly vulnerable segments of the post-conflict population and saved the UN from the embarrassment of running afoul of the international human rights standards it helped to establish, this article contends that a model criminal code would serve as an essential tool for future transitional administrations.
Merchant or Two-Sided Platform?

This paper provides a first pass at comparing two polar strategies for market intermediation: “merchant” mode – buying from sellers and reselling to buyers - and “two-sided platform” mode – enabling affiliated sellers to sell directly to affiliated buyers. The merchant mode is more profitable when the chicken-and-egg problem for the two-sided platform is more severe and when the degree of complementarity among sellers’ products is higher. The platform mode is preferred when seller investment incentives are important or when there is asymmetric information regarding seller product quality. We discuss these tradeoffs in the context of several prominent digital intermediaries.
Teaching America's Antitrust Laws and Their Enforcement

I have the great pleasure of teaching an interdisciplinary American Legal History seminar on "The History and Philosophy of America's Antitrust Laws and Their Enforcement." The course is designed to help students explore the historical, cultural, and philosophical underpinnings of America's antitrust laws while building their interdisciplinary research and writing, oral advocacy, and teamwork skills.
Granger's representation theorem: A closed‐form expression for I(1) processes

Summary The Granger representation theorem states that a cointegrated vector autoregressive process can be decomposed into four components: a random walk, a stationary process, a deterministic part, and a term that depends on the initial values. In this paper, we present a new proof of the theorem. This proof enables us to derive closed-form expressions of all terms of the representation and allows a unified treatment of models with different deterministic specifications. The applicability of our results is illustrated by examples. For example, the closed-form expressions are useful for impulse response analyses and facilitate the analysis of cointegration models with structural changes.
Disruptive Technology and Securities Regulation

Nowhere has disruptive technology had a more profound impact than in financial services — and yet nowhere more do academics and policymakers lack a coherent theory of the phenomenon, much less a coherent set of regulatory prescriptions. Part of the challenge lies in the varied channels through which innovation upends market practices. Problems also lurk in the popular assumption that securities regulation operates against the backdrop of stable market gatekeepers like exchanges, broker-dealers and clearing systems — a fact scenario increasingly out of sync in 21st century capital markets. This Article explains how technological innovation not only “disrupts” capital markets — but also the exercise of regulatory supervision and oversight. It provides the first theoretical account tracking the migration of technology across multiple domains of today’s securities infrastructure and argues that an array of technological innovations are facilitating what can be understood as the disintermediation of the traditional gatekeepers that regulatory authorities have relied on (and regulated) since the 1930s for investor protection and market integrity. Effective securities regulation will thus have to be upgraded to account for a computerized (and often virtual) market microstructure that is subject to accelerating change. To provide context, the paper examines two key sources of disruptive innovation: 1) the automated financial services that are transforming the meaning and operation of market liquidity and 2) the private markets — specifically, the dark pools, ECNs, 144A trading platforms, and crowdfunding websites — that are creating an ever-expanding array of alternatives for both securities issuances and trading.
Inducements versus Constraints: Disaggregating “Corporatism”

The concept of “corporatism” has usefully called attention to the importance of systems of interest representation based on non-competing groups that are officially sanctioned, subsidized, and supervised by the state. Yet these patterns have appeared in such a remarkable variety of political contexts that this concept may be too broad to be useful. On the basis of an analysis of the relationship between the state and organized labor in Latin America, this article argues that the concept of corporatism can be disaggregated so that it sheds light on rather than obscures the different power relationships and political contexts with which it is associated. The analysis focuses on the distinction between “inducements” extended by the state to win the cooperation of groups and “constraints” through which the state directly controls groups. This disaggregated approach enables one to distinguish more subtly among systems of group representation, to conceive of state-group relations in more interactive terms, and to gain insights into the larger political context.
Equity Compensation and Tax Avoidance: Disentangling Managerial Incentives from Tax Benefits and Reexamining the Effect of Shareholder Rights

ABSTRACT: Much empirical evidence is consistent with properly incentivized executives engaging in more tax avoidance. However, other studies provide evidence consistent with tax avoidance facilitat...
Maximizing behavior & market forces: the microfoundations of spontaneous order theorizing in Gordon Tullock’s contributions to Smithian political economy

I explore the microfoundations of Gordon Tullock’s contributions to political economy and argue that his approach is consistent with the “invisible hand” theorizing of Adam Smith. While Smith (and Hayek) are celebrated for their emphasis on the “bright-side” of spontaneous social cooperation, Tullock emphasized the “dark-side” of social processes when the incentives are perverse and information is distorted. By explicating the microfoundations of Tullock’s rendering of Smithian political economy this paper will set the stage for a reassessment of Tullock as a spontaneous order theorist.
Speculation, risk aversion, and risk premiums in the crude oil market

Abstract Speculative activity in commodity markets has increased dramatically since 2002. This paper investigates how aggregate risk aversion and risk premiums in the crude oil market covary with the level of speculation. Using crude oil futures and option data, we estimate aggregate risk aversion in the crude oil market and find that it is significantly lower between 2005 and 2008 when speculative activity increases dramatically. Risk premiums implied by the state-dependent risk aversion are also negatively correlated with speculative activity and are on average lower and more volatile during this period. These findings, together with the increased index fund and managed-money infusion in the commodity market, suggest that speculators who demand commodity futures for the purpose of portfolio diversification are willing to accept lower compensation for their positions. Decreasing speculation after 2009 amid increased producers’ hedging demand has a reverse impact on the market risk aversion and risk premiums.
Spreading Success Beyond the Laboratory: Applying the RE-AIM Framework for Effective Environmental Communication Interventions at Scale*

The RE-AIM framework, created by Russell Glasgow and colleagues, addresses five major factors involved with sustained population-level effectiveness of public health interventions—Reach, Efficacy a...
The Harvard Law Review and the Iroquois Influence Thesis

In a recent Developments in the Law chapter on the Indian Civil Rights Act, authors and editors at the Harvard Law Review seemed to take seriously the so-called “Iroquois influence thesis,” the idea that basic principles of the American government were derived from American Indian nations, in particular the Iroquois Confederacy. Although the influence thesis has acquired a life of its own, being taught in some of America’s elementary and secondary schools, it is nonsense. (One of the sources cited in support of this made-up history is a congressional resolution, as if Congress has some special, historical expertise.) Nothing in American Indian law and policy should depend on the influence thesis, and it is unfortunate that a prominent law review has given it credence. This article explains how the Harvard folks were misguided and why the influence thesis should be interred.
The Richness of Contract Theory

When I teach the doctrine of good faith performance, I assign an exchange between two distinguished contracts scholars, Robert Summers and Steven Burton, that has come to be known as the "Summers-Burton" debate.' This debate is interesting not only for the contrasting views of its protagonists concerning the doctrine of good faith, but also because of the generational shift in modes of scholarship it represents. In the 1950s and 1960s, contracts scholars, like so many others, rejected so-called "conceptualist" or "formalist" approaches that attempted to dictate the outcome of cases with general concepts and rules. Contracts scholarship was dominated by supposedly "realist" inquiries into the complexities of actual commercial practice, inquiries which sought to identify the multiple factors or considerations that judges do or should take into account when deciding cases. Usually it was denied that these factors could or should be weighted or organized in some manner in advance of a legal dispute. Any effort to reduce the vast complexity of the real world of commercial practice to some verbal formula was dismissed as "reductionist" or "simplistic." The Oxford English Dictionary defines "reductionist" as: "An advocate of reductionism; one who attempts to analyse or account for a complex theory or phenomenon by reduction."2 And it defines "simplistic" as: "Of the nature of, or characterized by, (extreme) simplicity. Now usu[ally] with the connotation of excessive or misleading simplification."3 An 1881 example of the word's usage captures the "realist" spirit that eventually captured the imagi-
Loyalty Rewards Facilitate Tacit Collusion

Using a dynamic overlapping-generations model, we show that loyalty rewards robustly facilitate tacit collusion. We compare the sustainability of tacit collusion when uniform prices are used, when loyal customers are rewarded without using commitment, and when loyalty rewards are implemented by committing to offering customers either lower fixed repeat-purchase prices or fixed repeat-purchase discounts. We find that, relative to uniform prices, rewarding loyalty without using commitment on the equilibrium path makes tacit collusion easier to sustain, because a deviating firm is unable to steal one period of industry profit before losing all future profits. When loyalty rewards are offered by firms committing to repeat-purchase prices, collusion is even easier to sustain, because a deviating firm cannot renege on its discounted price for repeat-purchase customers. When firms commit to repeat-purchase discounts, they also commit to lowering the price for their repeat-purchase customers if they undercut the regular price, rendering tacit collusion to be even more readily sustainable. Our results hold whether products are homogeneous or horizontally differentiated as in a Hotelling model.
Reformulating competition? Gasoline content regulation and wholesale gasoline prices

The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments stipulated gasoline content requirements for metropolitan areas with air pollution levels above predetermined federal thresholds. The legislation led to exogenous changes in the type of gasoline required for sale across US metropolitan areas. This paper uses a panel of detailed wholesale gasoline price data to estimate the effect of gasoline content regulation on wholesale prices and price volatility. We investigate the extent to which the estimated price effects are driven by changes in the number of suppliers versus geographic segmentation resulting from regulation. We find that prices in regulated metropolitan areas increase significantly, relative to a control group, by an average of 3 cents/gal. The price effect, however, varies by 8 cents/gal across regulated markets and the heterogeneity across markets is correlated with the degree of geographic isolation generated by the discontinuous regulatory requirements.
Lay Theories of Emotion Transience and the Search for Happiness: A Fresh Perspective on Affect Regulation

Across six studies, we demonstrate that consumers have beliefs pertaining to the transience of emotion, which, along with their current feelings, determine the extent to which they regulate their immediate affect. If consumers believe that emotion is fleeting, those feeling happy (vs. unhappy) engage in affect regulation because they infer that they need to take actions to maintain their positive feelings. In contrast, if consumers believe that emotion is lasting, those feeling unhappy (vs. happy) engage in affect regulation because they infer that the negative feelings will persist unless they take actions to repair them. These effects are obtained with measured and with manipulated beliefs, and they occur only when the theories pertain specifically to emotion. Implications and areas for future research are discussed.