cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Long-term economic consequences of hedge fund activist interventions

We examine the long-term effects of interventions by activist hedge funds. Research documents positive equal-weighted long-term returns and operating performance improvements following activist interventions, and typically conclude that activism is beneficial. We extend the literature in two ways. First, we find that equal-weighted long-term returns are driven by the smallest 20% of firms, with an average market value of $22 million. The larger 80% of firms experience insignificant negative long-term returns. On a value-weighted basis, which likely best gauges the effects on shareholder wealth and the economy, we find that pre- to post-activism long-term returns insignificantly differ from zero. For operating performance, we find that prior results are a manifestation of abnormal trends in pre-activism performance. Using an appropriately matched sample, we find no evidence of abnormal post-activism performance improvements. Overall, our results do not strongly support the hypothesis that activist interventions drive long-term benefits for the typical shareholder, nor do we find evidence of shareholder harm.
Employer-Based Health Care Insurance: Not So Exceptional After All

For some time, it has been common for policy experts to criticize the U.S. health care system’s reliance on employer-sponsored insurance. For individuals, access to health care coverage before enactment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) often depended on employment with companies that provided good benefits. For companies, the connection between employment and health care coverage is thought to impose a competitive disadvantage with overseas counterparts, who do not have to provide health care coverage as an employee benefit. But the problems with employer-based coverage have been overstated and misfocused. While the United States may be unusual in its reliance on employer-sponsored insurance, U.S. employers are not exceptional in terms of their role in financing health care spending. Employers in France, Japan, and the Netherlands also shoulder a high percentage of their countries’ health care costs. Moreover, American businesses likely would not see a decrease in their share of health care spending even if the United States overcame political obstacles and adopted a government-operated, single-payer system. Instead of contributing to the cost of their employees’ private health care coverage, employers would have to contribute to the cost of the payroll or other tax that would fund single-payer care. There is less benefit than meets the eye for employers from an elimination of employer-sponsored coverage. The adoption of ACA diminishes even further the incentives to discard employer-sponsored coverage. Experts rightly criticized the effect of employer-sponsored coverage on workplace mobility. But the "job lock" problem largely disappears under ACA. Now, the entrepreneur will be assured of access to federal subsidies for the purchase of affordable, community-rated insurance.If there is an argument for abandoning employer-based coverage, it lies in concerns about cost containment. While U.S. employers may not bear a disproportionate share of health care costs compared to their overseas counterparts, their total employment costs may be driven up because health care spending is so high in the United States. But even if individuals were to purchase their policies directly from insurers or receive their coverage from the government, concerns about costs would exist. What is more important is that governments in other countries play a much bigger role than does the U.S. government in limiting health care spending. In other words, the role the government plays in regulating health care prices — whether paid by private or public insurers — is much more important than whether employers play a major role in the health care system.
Does home owning smooth the variability of future housing consumption

Abstract We show that the hedging benefit of owning a home reduces the variability of housing consumption after a move. When a current home owner’s house price covaries positively with housing costs in a future city, changes in the future cost of housing are offset by commensurate changes in wealth before the move. Using Census micro-data, we find that the cross-sectional variation in house values subsequent to a move is lower for home owners who moved between more highly covarying cities. Our preferred estimates imply that an increase in covariance of one standard deviation reduces the variance of subsequent housing consumption by about 11%. Households at the top end of the covariance distribution who are likely to have owned large homes before moving get the largest reductions, of up to 40% relative to households at the median.
A New Game in Town: Disseminating Sports Content in a Net Neutrality-Less Era—The Potential Implications for the Post-Broadcasting World

The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) repeal of the net neutrality rules has implications for the consumers of program content found on broadband internet service providers (ISPs). Under the former rule, such providers cannot engage in discrimination by favoring some content over others or by using their broadband to speed up favored content or slow down less favored content (practices known as “throttling”). With the demise of net neutrality, ISPs have the power to control what viewers see and how they see it, with few resources to fight such decisions. One key programming category is sports. The end of net neutrality can have an adverse impact to sports streams, because of the high amounts of broadband space and the rapid consolidation between sports content providers and ISPs. This article discusses the background of the powers of the FCC, the history of the net neutrality rules, the FCC’s 2018 order repealing the rules, and the legal and political reactions to it. It concludes by raising a number of hypothetical situations where the lack of net neutrality can have an adverse impact for consumers of sports material.
Information, Litigation, and Common Law Evolution

It is common in the legal academy to describe judicial decision trends leading to new common law rules as resulting from conscious judicial effort. Evolutionary models of litigation, in contrast, treat common law as resulting from pressure applied by litigants. One apparent difficulty in the theory of litigation is explaining how trends in judicial decisions favoring one litigant, and biasing the legal standard, could occur. This article presents a model in which an apparent bias in the legal standard can occur in the absence of any effort toward this end on the part of judges. Trends can develop favoring the better-informed litigant whose case is also meritorious. Although the model does not suggest an unambiguous trend toward efficient legal rules, it does show how private information from litigants becomes embodied in common law, an important part of the theory of efficient legal rules.
An Introduction to the Dataverse Network as an Infrastructure for Data Sharing

The author introduces a set of integrated developments in Web application software, networking, data citation standards, and statistical methods designed to increase scholarly recognition for data contributions; to put some of the universe of data and data-sharing practices on firmer ground; and to facilitate the public distribution of persistent, authorized, and verifiable data, with powerful and easy-to-use technology, even when the data are confidential or proprietary. The goal is to solve some of the political and sociological problems of data sharing via technological means, with the result intended to benefit both the scientific community and the sometimes apparently contradictory goals of individual researchers.
Self-regulation, taxation and public voluntary environmental agreements

An increasingly popular instrument for solving environmental problems is the 'public voluntary agreement (VA),' in which government offers technical assistance and positive publicity to firms that reach certain environmental goals. Prior papers treat such agreements as a superior, low-cost instrument that can be used to preempt a threat of traditional, inefficient, regulation. We present a more general model in which public VAs may instead be weak tools used when political opposition makes environmental taxes infeasible. We explore the conditions under which taxes, public VAs, and unilateral industry actions are to be expected, and the welfare implications of the various instruments. Notably, we also show that welfare may be reduced by the introduction of public VAs.  2002 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
The Line Item Veto and Public Sector Budgets: Evidence from the States

Abstract The paper examines the claim that gubernatorial line item veto power reduces state spending. Analysis of a rich set of state budget data indicates that long run budgets are not altered by an item veto and that, in the short run, the item veto's potency is contingent upon the political setting. In certain circumstances, governors with political incentives to use an item veto alter spending and revenues in a statistically significant and quantitatively important fashion. These results suggest that state budgets have not been importantly altered as a result of the existence of the line item veto and shed doubt on the use of the line item veto to reduce federal government spending.
How Costly is Financial (Not Economic) Distress? Evidence from Highly Leveraged Transactions that Became Distressed

This paper studies thirty-one highly leveraged transactions ~HLTs! that become financially, not economically, distressed. The net effect of the HLT and financial distress ~from pretransaction to distress resolution, market- or industry-adjusted! is to increase value slightly. This finding strongly suggests that, overall, the HLTs of the late 1980s created value. We present quantitative and qualitative estimates of the ~direct and indirect! costs of financial distress and their determinants. We estimate financial distress costs to be 10 to 20 percent of firm value. For a subset of firms that do not experience an adverse economic shock, financial distress costs are negligible. MANY OF THE HIGHLY LEVERAGED TRANSACTIONS ~HLTs! completed in the latter half of the 1980s subsequently defaulted on debt payments, filed for bankruptcy, and, in general, encountered financial distress. Kaplan and Stein ~1993a, 1993b!, for example, find that more than 30 percent of management buyouts ~MBOs! completed after 1985 later defaulted. Kaplan and Stein attribute the increased default rates to poorly designed capital and incentive structures; Jensen ~1991! argues that regulatory shocks and a downturn in the overall economy also played a role. In this paper, we study the effects and sources of financial distress for thirty-one HLTs from the samples in Kaplan and Stein ~1990, 1993a! that became distressed. The analysis follows each HLT from before the leveraging transaction to the resolution of financial distress.
Public debt dynamics: the effects of austerity, inflation, and growth shocks

We study the impact of macroeconomic shocks on US public debt dynamics using a VAR with debt feedback. Following a primary balance, or austerity, shock, the debt ratio initially declines but at a cost of lower growth. The debt ratio then rises to its pre-shock path, suggesting the austerity shock could be self-defeating. An inflation shock reduces the debt ratio initially, while a positive growth shock unambiguously lowers debt. Our specification, properly incorporating the debt equation, produces different debt impulse responses and forecasts from VAR models either excluding debt or including debt linearly.
Analyzing volatility risk and risk premium in option contracts: A new theory

We develop a new option pricing framework that tightly integrates with how institutional investors manage options positions. The framework starts with the near-term dynamics of the implied volatility surface and derives no-arbitrage constraints on its current shape. Within this framework, we show that just like option implied volatilities, realized and expected volatilities can also be constructed specific to, and different across, option contracts. Applying the new theory to the S&P 500 index time series and options data, we extract volatility risk and risk premium from the volatility surfaces, and find that the extracted risk premium significantly predicts future stock returns.
Collaborative Product Development with Competitors to Stimulate Downstream Innovation

Open innovation through collaboration could be beneficial for various reasons, but participating firms must also consider the strategic consequences of their formation on the supply chain. This study is concerned with how open innovation through inter-firm collaboration and strategic alliances may generate value for competing suppliers by stimulating the adoption of the new component innovation by the downstream supply chain. The analysis specifically examines three types of firm interaction representing different levels of open innovation. First, in the joint venture, fully integrated suppliers would develop and market the component. Second, in the development alliance, partially integrated suppliers share the development outcome, but compete in marketing. Finally, independent suppliers do not form any kind of collaborative formation. The findings reveal that the value of open innovation comes not only from technology development, but also how well it stimulates the downstream OEM to invest.
Zero Tolerance Policies: Criminalizing Childhood and Disenfranchising the Next Generation of Citizens

Zero tolerance policies were adopted in response to tragic school shooting events. Under these policies, students are suspended or expelled for specified offenses with no exceptions, regardless of the severity of the infraction, mitigating circumstances, or the context in which the offense occurred. School administrators and teachers no longer have the discretion to handle student behavior. Instead, they are often required to refer such conduct to law enforcement, which in many instances are present on school grounds, thereby criminalizing childhood behavior. With no discretion allowed to create individualized sanctions, students view the punishment as irrational, impersonal, and unjustified. Non-discretionary zero tolerance policies breed contempt for the rule of law, irreparably harm students’ notions of fairness and justice, and contribute to the creation of the same divisions between students and teachers that exist between citizens and law enforcement. While these policies are designed to address behavior without regard for individual student characteristics, that is not the case. Prior research has shown that minority students are disproportionately punished in educational institutions, and often punished more harshly than their white peers. Yet, there is no evidence that African-American and Latino students misbehave more than their white peers. Zero tolerance policies have disproportionately impacted students of color as African-American and Latino students are more likely than their white peers to be arrested in school, regardless of the demographics of the school’s enrollment. By removing students from the educational setting, especially students of color, zero tolerance policies are contributing to the disenfranchisement of the next generation of citizens. This Article conceptualizes disenfranchisement as the deprivation of a fundamental right, thereby resulting in the undermining of one’s full citizenship. Zero tolerance policies deprive students of a fundamental right, e.g. education, in the same way that felon disenfranchisement laws deprive ex-felons of a fundamental right, e.g. the right to vote. With automatic suspensions and expulsions, achievement is at risk because of missed academic time. Moreover, the risk of students not returning after suspension or attending another school following expulsion increases. Depriving students of access and interfering with the educational process, zero tolerance policies directly undermine the limited citizenship that students’ experience and jeopardize the full citizenship to which they are entitled. No longer do schools then serve as pathways to responsible full citizenship but rather they become pipelines to prison.
Middle Eastern and North African Hydropolitics: From Eddies of Indecision to Emerging International Law

The death of Yasser Arafat, removal of Saddam Hussein, passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483, and conflict in Sudan significantly alter the geopolitics of the Middle East and North Africa. International law consists of the accretion of co-aquifer agreements as well as international treaties. Recent codification efforts have provided a framework with which co-aquifer states can address transboundary natural resources through flexible water use provisions, equitable distribution of water benefits, and strong dispute resolution mechanisms. This article applies the multifactor balancing test of the Draft Convention on the Law of Transboundary Aquifers to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and analyzes Middle Eastern and North African hydropolitics in light of emerging international law.
Corporate governance, incentives, and tax avoidance☆

Abstract We examine the link between corporate governance, managerial incentives, and corporate tax avoidance. Similar to other investment opportunities that involve risky expected cash flows, unresolved agency problems may lead managers to engage in more or less corporate tax avoidance than shareholders would otherwise prefer. Consistent with the mixed results reported in prior studies, we find no relation between various corporate governance mechanisms and tax avoidance at the conditional mean and median of the tax avoidance distribution. However, using quantile regression, we find a positive relation between board independence and financial sophistication for low levels of tax avoidance, but a negative relation for high levels of tax avoidance. These results indicate that these governance attributes have a stronger relation with more extreme levels of tax avoidance, which are more likely to be symptomatic of over- and under-investment by managers.
Cash holdings and R&D smoothing

Abstract The sharp increase in R&D investment in recent decades has important but unexplored implications for corporate liquidity management. Because R&D has high adjustment costs and is financed with volatile sources, it is very expensive for firms to adjust the flow of R&D in response to transitory finance shocks. The main contribution of this paper is to directly examine whether firms use cash reserves to smooth their R&D expenditures. We estimate dynamic R&D models and find that firms most likely to face financing frictions rely extensively on cash holdings to smooth R&D. In particular, our estimates suggest that young firms used cash holdings to dampen the volatility in R&D by approximately 75% during the 1998–2002 boom and bust in equity issues. Firms less likely to face financing frictions appear to smooth R&D without the use of costly cash holdings. Our findings provide new insights into the value of liquidity and the financing of intangible investment, and suggest that R&D smoothing with cash reserves is now important for understanding cash management for a substantial fraction of publicly traded firms.
“The Google Challenge”: Enforcement of Noncompete and Trade Secret Agreements for Employees Working in China

Terry College of Business, University of Georgia, Athens, GA. I gratefully acknowledge funding from a Terry-Sanford research grant and a Coca-Cola Center for International Business Programs Award from the University of Georgia for this project. I am indebted to Grace Fei for her research assistance and case translations and to the following individuals for their assistance in obtaining Chinese case law: Yuming Bao, Taide Law Firm, Beijing; Jiang Lu, Tsinghua University, Beijing; and Tao Peihua, Fudan University, Shanghai.
THE GEOGRAPHIC EFFECTS OF TRADE LIBERALIZATION WITH INCREASING RETURNS IN TRANSPORTATION

In order to investigate how the distribution of economic activity may change as a country liberalizes its foreign trade, this study develops a model of economic geography with several distinctive features. The model recognizes that transportation is costly between locations within a nation as well as between nations, and that these transportation costs are subject to increasing returns to scale. The model demonstrates that trade liberalization may cause the populations of a country to become more concentrated in a single megalopolis, which may reduce welfare due to congestion costs. These findings suggest that a country might actually be left worse off as a result of liberalization.
A study of analyst-run mutual funds: The abilities and roles of buy-side analysts

We assess the abilities and the role of buy-side analysts within mutual fund families by analyzing mutual funds managed by buy-side analysts from fourteen fund families. Buy-side analysts exhibit investment abilities by realizing positive style- and risk-adjusted returns and generating superior risk-return tradeoffs. Analysts' skills have a positive impact on the performance of funds from the same family. Although some managers benefit from closely following their buy-side analysts' ideas, research generated by these analysts is generally being underutilized by affiliated managers. The underutilization is consistent with longer-tenured managers choosing to forgo some of the analysts' ideas due to career considerations.
Toward a Feminist Revision of Torts

Introduction 139 I. The Importance of Torts for Feminists 140 II. General Approaches 142 III. Applications 143 A. Injury, Liability, Gender, and Race 143 1. Recognizing Status Injury to White Women: Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railway v. Luther 143 2. Undermining Sexualized Racism through Duty and Liability: Bullock v. Tamiami Trail Tours, Inc. 148 3. Conclusion 152 B. Domestic Violence 153 1. Tort Law and Scholarship’s Omission of Domestic Violence 153 2. Feminist Responses 157 Conclusion 159
Complex and Collaborative Problem Solving: New, Unique, and Useful?

Commentary on Neubert, J. C., Mainert, J., Kretzschmar, A., & Greiff, S. (in press). The assessment of 21st century skills in industrial and organizational psychology: complex and collaborative problem solving. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice.
Toward a Quantitative General Equilibrium Asset Pricing Model with Intangible Capital

We model investment options as intangible capital in a production economy in which younger vintages of assets in place have lower exposure to aggregate productivity risk. In equilibrium, physical capital requires a substantially higher expected return than intangible capital. Quantitatively, our model rationalizes a significant share of the observed difference in the average return of book-to-market-sorted portfolios (value premium). Our economy also produces (1) a high premium of the aggregate stock market over the risk-free interest rate, (2) a low and smooth risk-free interest rate, and (3) key features of the consumption and investment dynamics in the U.S. data. The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com., Oxford University Press.
Financial Reporting: An Enterprise Operations Perspective

ABSTRACT: Studies related to the measurement of accounting numbers have tended to focus on accounting as it relates to: changes in equity values; equity valuation; estimation of the cost of equity capital; and prediction of equity earnings. I propose and justify a perspective for financial accounting research on measurement of accounting numbers that differs from the current generally applied perspective. I argue that important new insights will be gained if research efforts turn toward accounting measurement and valuation at the enterprise/operating/firm level.
Distance functions with dense singular sets

We characterize the denseness of the singular set of the distance function from a C 1 -hypersurface in terms of an inner ball condition and we address the problem of the existence of viscosity solu...
Padilla v. Kentucky and the Evolving Right to Deportation Counsel: Watershed or Work-in-Progress?

Though widely heralded by immigration and human rights lawyers as a “landmark,” possible “watershed,” and even “Gideon decision” for immigrants, Padilla v. Kentucky is perhaps better understood as a Rorschach test, than as a clear constitutional precedent. It is surely a very interesting and important U.S. Supreme Court case in the (rapidly converging) fields of immigration and criminal law in which the Court struggles with the functional relationship between ostensibly “civil” deportation proceedings and criminal convictions. This is a gratifying development, for reasons not only of justice, fairness, proportionality, and basic human decency, but also (perhaps) of doctrinal consistency. The Court’s choice to rely upon the Sixth Amendment is understandable and in many respects salutary. However, this choice is also in tension with the civil/criminal distinction, and it raises complex questions about the process that might be due deportees both in criminal courts and immigration proceedings.
Ex Ante Costs of Violating Absolute Priority in Bankruptcy

A basic question for the design of bankruptcy law concerns whether value should be divided in accordance with absolute priority. Research done in the past decade has suggested that deviations from absolute priority have beneficial ex ante effects. In contrast, this paper shows that ex post deviations from absolute priority also have negative effects on ex ante decisions taken by shareholders. Such deviations aggravate the moral hazard problem with respect to project choice—increasing the equityholders’ incentive to favor risky projects—as well as with respect to borrowing and dividend decisions.
American options in Lévy models with stochastic interest rates

A general numerical method for pricing American options in regime-switching jump-diffusion models of stock dynamics with stochastic interest rates and/or volatility is developed. Time derivative and infinitesimal generator of the process for factors that determine the dynamics of the interest rate and/or volatility are discretized. The result is a sequence of embedded perpetual options in a Markov-modulated Levy model. Options in this sequence are solved using an iteration method based on the Wiener-Hopf factorization. An explicit algorithm for the case of positive stochastic interest rates driven by a process of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type is derived. Efficiency of the method is illustrated with numerical examples
Promoting global financial development: vive la différence!

This paper is based on the author’s comments before the Group of 15 (G15) Conference "Cooperation among G15 Stock Market Exchanges -G15 Capital Markets: Challenges & Opportunities in the New World". The conference was hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Egypt, and sponsored and organized by the Cairo & Alexandria Stock Exchanges. Dr. Trimbath addressed the topic of “Financial Crisis Management and Prevention Mechanisms” for banks and stock exchanges. The conference took place March 25 26, 2001 at the Semiramis Intercontinental Hotel, Cairo, Egypt.
The Association between Management Earnings Forecast Errors and Accruals

ABSTRACT: We investigate the association between errors in management forecasts of subsequent year earnings and current year accruals. In an uncertain operating environment, managers' assessments of their firms' business prospects are imperfect. Since managers' imperfect business assessments influence both accruals generation and earnings projection, we hypothesize that management earnings forecasts exhibit greater optimism (pessimism) when accruals are relatively high (low). Consistent with this hypothesis, we find a positive association between management earnings forecast errors and accruals. This positive association is stronger for firms operating in a more uncertain business environment and for firms in industries exhibiting greater covariation between accruals and growth‐related activities. Moreover, this positive association is significant when accruals likely reflect managers' true beliefs about firms' business prospects, but is nonexistent when accruals are likely manipulated to boost managers' ...
Dissent from the United States Sentencing Commission's Proposed Guidelines

I believe that the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984,1 which created the United States Sentencing Commission, contains two main directives. First, the Commission's guidelines must provide a rational and principled sentencing system2 that will further the purposes of just punishment and crime control.3 Second, the guidelines must reduce unwarranted disparity among sentences for similar offenders who commit similar offenses.4 The Act provides
Prepopulating Audit Workpapers with Prior Year Assessments: Default Option Effects on Risk Rating Accuracy

Risk assessment is a critical audit task, as auditors’ accuracy therein affects audit effectiveness and financial reporting quality, as well as audit efficiency. We propose that risk assessment accuracy for client risks that have changed from the prior year is affected by the manner in which auditors access prior year risk assessments, specifically whether they face a default option created by the prepopulation of current year workpapers with those assessments. We find that auditors with prepopulated (vs. blank) workpapers are less accurate for risks that have changed because they are more likely to stick with last year's assessments, and also to work fast. We then show that auditor characteristics reflecting a preference for accuracy reduce, but do not eliminate, these effects. Finally, we provide exploratory evidence that sticking and working fast are associated with, respectively, motivated reasoning and superficial processing. Collectively, these findings suggest the critical need for an intervention, and also have implications outside auditing.
Incentives for experimenting agents

We examine a repeated interaction between an agent who undertakes experiments and a principal who provides the requisite funding. A dynamic agency cost arises�the more lucrative the agent's stream of rents following a failure, the more costly are current incentives, giving the principal a motivation to reduce the project's continuation value. We characterize the set of recursive Markov equilibria. Efficient equilibria front-load the agent's effort, inducing maximum experimentation over an initial period, until switching to the worst possible continuation equilibrium. The initial phase concentrates effort near the beginning, when most valuable, whereas the switch attenuates the dynamic agency cost.
Private education provision and public finance : the Netherlands

One of the key features of the Dutch education system is freedom of education, freedom to establish schools and organize teaching. Almost 70 percent of schools in the Netherlands are administered by private school boards, and all schools are government funded equally. This allows school choice. Using an instrument to identify private school attendance, it is shown that the Dutch system promotes academic performance. The instrumental variables results show that private school attendance is associated with higher test scores. Private school size effects in math, reading and science achievement are 0.19, 0.31 and 0.21.
Investor protection and income inequality : risk sharing vs risk taking

Abstract This paper studies the relationship between investor protection and income inequality. In the presence of market frictions, better protection makes investors more willing to take on entrepreneurial risk when lending to firms, thereby improving the degree of risk sharing between financiers and entrepreneurs. On the other hand, by increasing risk sharing, investor protection also induces more risk taking. By increasing entrepreneurial risk taking, it raises income dispersion. By reducing the risk faced by entrepreneurs, it reduces income volatility. As a result, the relationship between investor protection and income inequality is non monotonic, since the risk-taking effect dominates at low levels of investor protection, while risk sharing becomes stronger when more risk is taken. Empirical evidence from up to sixty-seven countries spanning the period 1976–2004 supports the predictions of the model.
Fed Policy Expectations and Portfolio Flows to Emerging Markets

The empirical literature has long established that U.S. interest rates are an important driver of international portfolio flows, with lower rates “pushing” capital to emerging markets. On the basis of this literature, it is often argued that the Federal Reserve’s imminent policy tightening cycle is likely to weigh on portfolio flows to emerging markets in coming years. The analysis presented in this paper offers a different interpretation of the literature, suggesting that it is the surprise element of monetary policy that affects EM portfolio inflows. A shift in market expectations towards easier future U.S. monetary policy leads to greater foreign portfolio inflows and vice versa. Given current market expectations of sustained increases in the federal funds rate in coming years, EM portfolio flows could be boosted by a slower pace of Fed tightening than currently expected or could be reduced by a faster pace of Fed tightening.
Multiple freeze-thaw cycles lead to a loss of consistency in poly(A)-enriched RNA sequencing.

Both RNA-Seq and sample freeze-thaw are ubiquitous. However, knowledge about the impact of freeze-thaw on downstream analyses is limited. The lack of common quality metrics that are sufficiently sensitive to freeze-thaw and RNA degradation, e.g. the RNA Integrity Score, makes such assessments challenging. Here we quantify the impact of repeated freeze-thaw cycles on the reliability of RNA-Seq by examining poly(A)-enriched and ribosomal RNA depleted RNA-seq from frozen leukocytes drawn from a toddler Autism cohort. To do so, we estimate the relative noise, or percentage of random counts, separating technical replicates. Using this approach we measured noise associated with RIN and freeze-thaw cycles. As expected, RIN does not fully capture sample degradation due to freeze-thaw. We further examined differential expression results and found that three freeze-thaws should extinguish the differential expression reproducibility of similar experiments. Freeze-thaw also resulted in a 3′ shift in the read coverage distribution along the gene body of poly(A)-enriched samples compared to ribosomal RNA depleted samples, suggesting that library preparation may exacerbate freeze-thaw-induced sample degradation. The use of poly(A)-enrichment for RNA sequencing is pervasive in library preparation of frozen tissue, and thus, it is important during experimental design and data analysis to consider the impact of repeated freeze-thaw cycles on reproducibility.
An Objective View of Fault in Patent Infringement

Unlike direct patent infringement (a strict liability claim), indirect and willful infringement require the patent holder to demonstrate fault on the part of the accused infringer. The conventional approach to the fault elements of these doctrines views them as involving a subjective inquiry into the accused party’s state of mind. Inducement of infringement, for example, requires that the alleged infringer possess mental culpability for it to be found liable. The question presented by the Supreme Court’s recent grant of certiorari in Global-Tech v. SEB is the quintessential illustration of this conventional view, asking whether the “state of mind” of the accused party is one of “deliberate indifference” or “purpose.” This mens rea-based approach to fault is likely the product of indirect infringement’s origins as an adaptation of the tort theory of aiding and abetting, an intentional tort.This paper asserts that this conventional view of fault for indirect infringement is inherently flawed, and is largely nonsensical in the modern context in which indirect infringement is assessed. In large part this is because fault in patent infringement, unlike the tort tradition in which it was developed, involves assessment of particular legal – as opposed to factual – consequences, consequences that are both rarely certain and unlikely to ever be desired. Rather than continuing to view the fault elements of these doctrines as if they were traditional intentional torts, this paper proposes that the law should instead apply an objective test more closely tailored to the specific context in which patent infringement arises. Specifically, it suggests that a better approach is to conceive of the fault element as requiring an objective inquiry into whether a high risk of patent infringement would have been obvious to another in the accused party’s position. In addition to providing a more accurate and usable articulation of the fault element, viewing the question in terms of risk enables finer tuning of the doctrine when seeking optimal deterrence effects. Furthermore, this change would parallel recent shifts in the approach to fault in the context of willful infringement, and would be consistent with the actual normative standard being applied by courts.
The effect of using grouped data on the estimation of the Gini income elasticity

Abstract The use of grouped data results in a downward bias in estimates of inequality because grouping omits intra-group inequality. This note shows that using grouped data may not lead to similar difficulties when estimating statistics such as the Gini income elasticity, which provides information on the impact on inequality of a marginal change in an income source, tax, or transfer.
Re-evaluating community policing in a polycentric system

Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues in The Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in Bloomington conducted fieldwork in metropolitan police departments across the United States. Their findings in support of community policing dealt a blow to the popular belief that consolidation and centralization of services was the only way to effectively provide citizens with public goods. However, subsequent empirical literature suggests that the widespread implementation of community policing has been generally ineffective and in many ways unsustainable. We argue that the failures are the result of strategic interplay between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies that has resulted in the prioritization of federal over community initiatives, the militarization of domestic police, and the erosion of genuine community-police partnerships.
Reflections On Determining Competency

Psychiatrists are the health care professionals most frequently called upon to determine the competence of a patient to refuse treatment. The motives for determining competency vary in morally significant ways. This paper explores what I term 'the ideal motivational situation' for determining a patient's competency: a desire to respect the patient's autonomy, a desire to promote the patient's overall best interests, and a belief that when these two motives conflict the patient's autonomy should not be dismissed out of hand as a partial patient interest which is naturally outweighed by the totality of his or her interests. I claim that in a liberal, democratic society autonomy ought to trump best interests and be the sole criterion of patient competence. I conclude by offering an essentially aesthetic criterion for determining autonomy.
Turf Wars: Street Gangs and the Outer Limits of RICO's "Affecting Commerce" Requirement

In response to the increasingly vast economic impact of organized crime, Congress in 1970 enacted the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to provide federal prosecutors additional tools to combat such crime. RICO requires that enterprises whose members are charged with violating the Act must affect interstate commerce. Courts have held that RICO may be applied to enterprises with no economic motivation so long as they minimally affect interstate commerce. However, given the Act's economic history and interstate commerce element, its application to noneconomic intrastate enterprises presents a special problem. This Note argues that, consistent with relevant Commerce Clause jurisprudence and doctrines of statutory interpretation, future courts should read RICO to require that noneconomic intrastate enterprises substantially affect interstate commerce.
Complementarity and the Measurement of Individual Risk Tradeoffs: Accounting for Quantity and Quality of Life Effects

This paper considers the factors responsible for differences with age in estimates of the wage compensation an individual requires to accept increased occupational fatality risk. We derive a relationship between the value of a statistical life (VSL) and the degree of complementarity between consumption and labor supplied when health status serves as a potential source of variation in this relationship. Our empirical analysis finds that variations in an individual’s health status or quality of life and anticipated longevity threats lead to significant differences in the estimated wage/risk tradeoffs. We describe how extensions to the specification of hedonic wage models, including measures for quality of life and anticipated longevity threats, help to explain the diversity in past studies examining how the estimated wage–risk tradeoff changes with age.
Overconfidence and Corporate Tax Policy

Using a sample of firms experiencing exogenous CEO departures, we investigate whether firms with overconfident CEOs avoid more tax. We find robust evidence of a positive relation between proxies for corporate tax avoidance and CEO overconfidence. Because our empirical tests use a panel of firm-years with exogenous CEO departures and include controls for stationary firm effects as well as observable firm characteristics, we can better isolate the role of an idiosyncratic personality trait (i.e., overconfidence) on corporate tax outcomes, thus adding to the literatures on overconfidence, managerial effects, and tax avoidance.
Archimedean Metaethics Defended

We sometimes say our moral claims are ‘‘objectively true,’’ or are ‘‘right, even if nobody believes it.’’ These additional claims are often taken to be staking out metaethical positions, representative of a certain kind of theorizing about morality that ‘‘steps outside’’ the practice in order to comment on its status. Ronald Dworkin has argued that skepticism about these claims so understood is not tenable because it is impossible to step outside such practices. I show that externally skeptical metaethical theory can withstand his attacks, thereby defending the possibility of this kind of metatheoretical method and showing that the additional objectivity claims still make sense as external claims. Four interpretations of the additional objectivity claims can still be understood externally: as secondary properties, as arguing for some form of causal correspondence, as explaining error, and under Blackburn’s expressivism. In the end, Dworkin’s argument can be turned against itself.
Do gender differences in preferences for competition matter for occupational expectations

Abstract Occupational segregation by gender is prevalent and can explain some of the gender wage gap. I empirically investigate a possible explanation for this segregation: the gender difference in preferences for competition, which in recent experimental studies has been found to affect economic outcomes. My findings suggest that women’s greater distaste for competition decreases educational achievement. It can also explain part of the gender segregation in occupational fields. Specifically, accounting for distaste for competition seems to reduce gender segregation in the fields of Law, Business & Management, Health, and Education.
Power, Inequality and the Bargain: The Role of Bargaining Power in the Law of Contract - Symposium Introduction

In the Spring of 2006, I was privileged to host and moderate symposium presentations by an extraordinarily talented group of scholars who gathered at Michigan State University College of Law to analyze and discuss the role and relevancy of the legal concept of bargaining power in twenty-first century contract law. Just as dramatic social, political, and economic changes at the turn of the twentieth century drove the development of legal conceptions of bargaining power disparities and introduced those conceptions as explicit elements of many contract doctrines, the turn of the twenty-first century may prove similarly transformative. This symposium issue includes contributions by W. David Slawson, Larry A. DiMatteo, Blake D. Morant, Rachel Arnow-Richman, Curtis Bridgeman, and James F. Hogg that explore the appropriate role of bargaining power as a legal concept in the now-mature information era, with each participant developing their own unique perspective on how and whether such issues impact the regulation of contract.
Friends with Benefits

Family law has long been intensely interested in certain adult intimate relationships, namely marriage and marriage-like relationships, and silent about other adult intimate relationships, namely friendship. This Article examines the effects of that focus, illustrating how it frustrates one of the goals embraced by most family law scholars over the past forty years: the achievement of gender equality, within the family and without. Part I examines the current scope of family law doctrine and scholarship, highlighting the ways that the home is still the organizing structure for family. Despite calls for increased legal recognition of diverse families, few scholars have considered whether family law should recognize care provided outside of the home, and no scholar has considered whether family law should recognize the care provided and received by friends. Part II turns to friendship, considering the practices of people who self-identify as friends and the ways that such practices are already influenced by the law's maintenance of a divide between friendship and family. That divide amounts to state support of the types of domestic caregiving that traditionally played vital roles in maintaining state-supported patriarchy and that still largely follow gendered patterns today. Family law thereby reinforces traditional gender role expectations rather than alleviating them. Part III then explores how simultaneous legal recognition of friendship and family could lead to greater opportunities to structure life free from state-supported gender role expectations. By supporting more pluralistic personal relationships and conceptions of care, family law could transform not just friendship and marriage, but gender itself.