cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Public agencies and investor compensation: Examples from the SEC and CFTC

When financial regulators get positive press, it is often when they open investigations or recover large sums of money in other words, when the regulators are acting in their prosecutorial or counsel role. Similarly, compensation by these regulators hits the headlines when the agency has been the white knight, recovering and distributing funds to injured investors. Rarely do the papers laud financial regulators when they provide the judges in the financial market equivalent of small claims court. This Essay suggests revisiting the unglamorous business of resolving disputes between customers and brokers and recasting it as a potentially valuable source of industry information to the agencies tasked with enforcing securities and commodities laws. Renewed discussion of regulatory consolidation provides an opportunity to reshape the agencies' involvement in investor compensation. In March 2008, the Department of the Treasury (Treasury) proposed a restructuring
Discretionary accounting choices and the predictive ability of accruals with respect to future cash flows

Using a sample of restatement firms and a meet-or-beat model to classify firms as making discretionary accounting choices for opportunistic meet-or-beat (OP-MB) reasons, we show that originally reported earnings and accrual components are less predictive of future cash flows relative to the restated numbers. We find the opposite is true for firms classified as making discretionary accounting choices for non-OP-MB reasons. We consider a number of competing explanations for these latter results. Our findings are most consistent with the informational hypothesis, weakly consistent with conservative-motivated efficient contracting hypotheses, but inconsistent with opportunistic contracting and misapplication/errors of GAAP explanations.
Trust, cooperation, and implementation of sustainability programs: The case of Local Agenda 21

Abstract This paper provides evidence of the role of trust in ensuring desirable economic outcomes. We examine the implementation of Local Agenda 21, a regional sustainability initiative that requires the coordination of diverse decision-makers, in a sample of approximately 66 developing and industrialized countries. We use a game theoretic framework to motivate the empirical model. We find that higher levels of citizen trust are associated with more communities in a country adopting a program that requires coordination of multiple stakeholders. We also find that more programs are adopted when the country's institutional structure is likely to reduce the cost of coordination and when the benefits of the program, measured by environmental quality, would be expected to be greater.
Racism in Great Britain: Drawing the Line on Free Speech

On any given Sunday in Hyde Park, London's huge urban sanctuary of tailored ponds and manicured gardens, one is likely to hear outrageous and provocative public utterances about race and religion. A few of those venting their spleen here are practicing rhetoricians, a few are clearly acting-but others are absolutely sincere in their hatemongering and passionate in their vilification. All of them are focal points for assembled spectators of varying classes, many of whom are professional hecklers. The police, milling about to put down possible disturbances of the peace, are seldom called upon to quell roused rabble. Thus is this weekly theatre, Britain's custom-laden monument to free speech, neatly contained by day, boundary, and protocol. Would that such a basic human right, the simple freedom to express one's thoughts, be always everywhere maintained so easily? Beyond Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, however, the reality in Great Britain is quite different. Racial tension and the confrontations it engenders have appeared with increasing frequency during the 1980's. The religious warfare that has plagued Ireland for more than two decades has been barely contained. The British authorities, unlike their American counterparts, who are limited by a strictly construed First Amendment, have been much less hesitant to repress provocative speech. It goes almost without saying that in this country we take the freedom of speech to be virtually absolute. An American can parade through a predominantly Jewish community wearing full Nazi regalia, proclaim his allegiance to Hitler, and publicly spout justifications for genocide without fear of government reprisal. Such incitement would be severely restricted if not punished in all other Western democracies. In England, perhaps our closest relative as far as the recognition and protection of basic human rights are concerned, laws against incitement to racial hatred are likewise direct and restrictive, in sharp counterpoint to American notions of what true liberty is all about. This article traces the history and development of the group-libel laws in England, and addresses a fundamental question: have the British truly missed the point about freedom of speech-or is our perception of where the line should be drawn a misplaced preoccupation with blind principles? Given the continued requirement of the Attorney General's consent to prosecution, it seems unlikely that racist speech in Great Britain will be more vigorously controlled under the newest (1987) incitement statute. However, it is too early to access the new law's impact. Similarly, in view of popular misgivings over any restraint on expression, it appears even more unlikely that a group-libel action will soon be available, regardless of how desirable or even necessary its purpose may be. The British are on firm moral ground in seeking to draw a clear line between free speech and racism. But until they become more resolute in suppressing short-sighted political considerations, they are destined to failure in trying to practice the noble principle they preach.
The rationality of taking to the hills

In The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), Scott revises the state generated narratives of the hill people of Zomia which describes them as an aboriginal population that have simply failed to become more civilized. As an alternative, Scott views hill peoples as state-repelling societies or even anti-state societies. As we suggest in this article, by at least implicitly employing a rational choice framework, Scott is able to make sense why people would attempt to avoid being state subjects by taking to the hills as well as why their descendants have remained in the hills.
Optimal pricing in a hazard rate model of demand

SUMMARY Optimal control theory is employed to derive explicitly the optimal (profit-maximizing) price of a durable new product over time. The sales rate dynamics depends on the product price and on the unsold portion of the market. Specifically, the hazard rate (i.e. the probability of a purchase by a new customer) increases as the price decreases in a linear fashion. It is shown that both the price and sales rate decline over time for finite horizon problems with or without discounting. In the discounted infinite horizon case, the price remains constant over time. When there is no discounting in the infinite horizon case, there does not exist an optimal solution. However, it is possible in this case to attain a profit level which is arbitrarily close to the theoretical, albeit unattainable, maximum level profit. Economic interpretations are provided for the various quantities that arise in the course of solving the optimal pricing problem. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Accountability, incentives and behavior: the impact of high-stakes testing in the Chicago Public Schools

The recent federal education bill, No Child Left Behind, requires states to test students in grades 3 to 8 each year and to judge school performance on the basis of these test scores. While intended to maximize student learning, there is little empirical evidence about the effectiveness of such policies. This study examines the impact of an accountability policy implemented in the Chicago Public Schools in 1996–1997. Using a panel of student-level, administrative data, I find that math and reading achievement increased sharply following the introduction of the accountability policy, in comparison to both prior achievement trends in the district and to changes experienced by other large, urban districts in the mid-west. However, for younger students, the policy did not increase performance on a state-administered, low-stakes exam. An item-level analysis suggests that the observed achievement gains were driven by increases in test-specific skills and student effort. I also find that teachers responded strategically to the incentives along a variety of dimensions—by increasing special education placements, preemptively retaining students and substituting away from low-stakes subjects like science and social studies.
Predicting chemical reaction outcomes: A grammar ontology-based transformer framework

Discovering and designing novel materials is a challenging problem as it often requires searching a combinatorially large space of potential candidates. Evaluation of all candidates experimentally is typically infeasible as it requires great amounts of effort, time, expertise, and money. The ability to predict reaction outcomes without performing extensive experiments is, therefore, important. Towards that goal, we report an approach that uses context-free grammar (CFG) based representations of molecules in a neural machine translation framework. We formulate the reaction-prediction task as a machine translation problem that involves discovering the transformations from the source sequence (comprising the reactants and agents) to the target sequence (comprising the major product) in the reaction. The grammar ontology-based representation of molecules hierarchically incorporates rich molecular structure information that, in principle, should be valuable for modeling chemical reactions. We achieve an accuracy of 80.1% on a standard reaction dataset using a model characterized by only a fraction of the number of training parameters in other sequence-to-sequence models based works in this area. Moreover, 99% of the predictions made on the same reaction dataset were found to be syntactically valid. We conclude that CFGs-based ontological representations could be an efficient way of incorporating structural information, ensuring chemically valid predictions, and overcoming overfitting in complex machine learning architectures employed in reaction prediction tasks.
Generalized deviations in risk analysis

General deviation measures are introduced and studied systematically for their potential applications to risk management in areas like portfolio optimization and engineering. Such measures include standard deviation as a special case but need not be symmetric with respect to ups and downs. Their properties are explored with a mind to generating a large assortment of examples and assessing which may exhibit superior behavior. Connections are shown with coherent risk measures in the sense of Artzner, Delbaen, Eber and Heath, when those are applied to the difference between a random variable and its expectation, instead of to the random variable itself. However, the correspondence is only one-to-one when both classes are restricted by properties called lower range dominance, on the one hand, and strict expectation boundedness on the other. Dual characterizations in terms of sets called risk envelopes are fully provided.
The Limits of Public Health: A Response

In his article in this issue, Daniel Goldberg advocates a broad definition of public health and expressly rejects the narrow definition of public health I proposed in a 2002 article. Goldberg asserts that public health should include all of the root causes of ill health in populations. Such a definition, however, would include within public health war, famine, crime, illiteracy and numerous other conditions on which public health professionals and agencies lack the resources, expertise and public support to act. The appropriate definition explicitly recognizes that public health is a legal term of art referring to specifically authorized activities by public officials to protect, promote and improve population health.
LAW AND WAR IN THE VIRTUAL ERA

Unmanned aerial vehicles and other remotely controlled or "virtual" military technologies are refashioning the conduct of military operations, the functioning of military institutions, and even the objectives of war itself. Virtual technologies are unexpectedly and ironically giving unprecedented traction, transparency, and relevance to venerable jus in bello principles protecting civilians from the effects of hostilities, and are forcing states to confront revitalized and new duties to avoid causing harm to civilian populations.
Asset Pricing of Insurance Loss Liabilities: Some Examples

I construct examples of valuing insurance loss liabilities with asset pricing models, comparing the Rubinstein-Leland model with the better-known CAPM. The two models give different values only if the loss payment is asymmetric and correlated with the market portfolio, conditions which can result from the nature of the underlying loss or from the impact of insolvency on the insurer's payment. In examples where insolvency is not possible and there is no liquidity cost of raising new equity on short notice, the value of a loss liability is equal to the value of the underlying loss, i.e., of the promised coverage, and depends neither on (1) the size of the loss pool; nor on (2) the unsystematic risk of the insurer's liabilities; nor on (3) the composition of an insurer's investment portfolio; nor on (4) the amount of insurer equity. These factors do affect the value of a loss liability in examples where insolvency and liquidity costs are considered. Other things equal, if a factor increases the likelihood of insolvency, the fair value of a loss liability is lower because the insured is partially self-insuring; but the liquidity cost of maintaining solvency by raising new equity on short notice is higher, implying a higher fair value of the loss liability.
Government Data Mining and the Fourth Amendment

however, and especially since 9/11, government agencies have been eager to experiment with the data mining process as a way of nabbing criminals and terrorists. Although details of their operation often remain murky, a number of such programs have come to light since 2001. The best-known government data mining operation supposedly no longer exists. The federal program formerly known as Total Information Awareness-more recently dubbed Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA)-was sufficiently mysterious that Congress decided to cut off funding for it in 2003.' Spurred by rumors that TIA would involve the accumulation and analysis of vast amounts of data about the everyday transactions of American citizens, and probably influ
Behavioral and Rational Explanations of Stock Price Performance around SEOs: Evidence from a Decomposition of Market-to-Book Ratios

We examine the extent to which investment opportunities and/or mispricing motivate equity issuance and contribute to post-issue stock underperformance. We decompose market-to-book ratios into misvaluation and growth option components and find that issuing firms are both overvalued and have greater growth opportunities relative to nonissuers. Firms with greater growth opportunities invest more in capital expenditures and research and development (R&D) after issuance but do not experience lower post-issue stock returns. In contrast, issuing firms with greater mispricing tend to decrease long-term debt and/or increase cash holdings and do earn lower returns. Our findings are consistent with behavioral explanations for post-issue stock price underperformance.
Costly Factor Reallocation and Reduced Productivity Effects in International Trade

Most models of international trade assume extremes of factor mobility between productive uses. From perfectly mobile factors in the Heckscher–Ohlin model, to fixed capital and mobile labor in the Ricardo–Viner–Jones model, factors are assumed to move costlessly or not at all. In reality, factors are neither perfectly mobile nor fixed. This paper considers costs of reallocating factors between industries, deriving a measure of adjustment costs due to factor specificity in a two-period model of a firm's input allocation decision. The degrees of specificity for labor and capital are then estimated based on data for 15 industries in 16 countries covering eight years. Estimating a system of nonlinear first-order conditions using a three-stage least squares technique, I find that recently reallocated factors are indeed less productive. Labor is 14% less productive in the period after reallocation, while capital productivity falls by 43%. Thereafter, capital, unlike labor, moves quickly toward full productivity.
Prediction and nonparametric estimation for time series with heavy tails

Motivated by prediction problems for time series with heavy-tailed marginal distributions, we consider methods based on `local least absolute deviations' for estimating a regression median from dependent data. Unlike more conventional `local median' methods, which are in effect based on locally fitting a polynomial of degree 0, techniques founded on local least absolute deviations have quadratic bias right up to the boundary of the design interval. Also in contrast to local least-squares methods based on linear fits, the order of magnitude of variance does not depend on tail-weight of the error distribution. To make these points clear, we develop theory describing local applications to time series of both least-squares and least-absolute-deviations methods, showing for example that, in the case of heavy-tailed data, the conventional local-linear least-squares estimator suffers from an additional bias term as well as increased variance.
Modeling and Prediction of Rigid Body Motion With Planar Non-Convex Contact

We present a principled method for motion prediction via dynamic simulation for rigid bodies in intermittent contact with each other where the contact region is a planar non-convex contact patch. Such methods are useful in planning and control for robotic manipulation. The planar non-convex contact patch can either be a topologically connected set or disconnected set. Most work in rigid body dynamic simulation assume that the contact between objects is a point contact, which may not be valid in many applications. In this paper, by using the convex hull of the contact patch, we build on our recent work on simulating rigid bodies with convex contact patches for simulating motion of objects with planar non-convex contact patches. We formulate a discrete-time mixed complementarity problem where we solve the contact detection and integration of the equations of motion simultaneously. We solve for the equivalent contact point (ECP) and contact impulse of each contact patch simultaneously along with the state, i.e., configuration and velocity of the objects. We prove that although we are representing a patch contact by an equivalent point, our model for enforcing non-penetration constraints ensure that there is no artificial penetration between the contacting rigid bodies. We provide empirical evidence to show that our method can seamlessly capture transition among different contact modes like patch contact, multiple or single point contact.
Structuring and Restructuring Sovereign Debt: The Role of a Bankruptcy Regime

In an environment characterized by weak contractual enforcement, sovereign lenders can enhance the likelihood of repayment by making their claims more difficult to restructure ex post. We show, however, that competition for repayment between lenders may result in a sovereign debt that is excessively difficult to restructure in equilibrium. This inefficiency may be alleviated by a suitably designed bankruptcy regime that facilitates debt restructuring.
HOW WELL DOES “CORE” INFLATION CAPTURE PERMANENT PRICE CHANGES?

Does excluding food and energy prices from the Consumer Price Index (CPI) produce a measure that better captures permanent price changes? To examine this question, we decompose CPI inflation and “core” inflation into their permanent and transitory components, using a correlated unobserved-components model. The stationarity of inflation may be time-varying, so we examine the performance of the core measure of inflation separately for periods in which inflation is I(1) and I(0). For a period in which inflation appears to be I(1), we find that core inflation and the permanent component of overall inflation are closely related, but there are some caveats. For a period in which inflation appears to be I(0), we decompose the core and overall price levels and find that the permanent component of the core CPI is much more volatile than the actual core series and that the core excludes volatile permanent shocks to the overall price level.
News Shocks and Learning-by-doing

The idea that expectations about future economic fundamentals can drive business cycles dates back to the early twentieth century. However, the standard real business cycle (RBC) model fails to generate positive comovement in output, consumption, labor-hours and investment in response to news shocks. This paper proposes a simple and intuitive solution to this puzzling feature of the RBC model, based on a mechanism that has strong empirical support: learning-by-doing (LBD). First, we show that the one-sector RBC model augmented by LBD can generate aggregate comovement in response to news shock about technology. Second, we show that in the two-sector RBC model, LBD along with an intratemporal adjustment cost can generate sectoral comovement in response to news about three types of shocks: i) neutral technology shock, ii) consumption technology shock, and iii) investment technology shock. We show that these results hold for contemporaneous technology shocks and for dierent specications of LBD.
Time Allocation Decisions of Academic Scientists and Their Impact on Technology Commercialization

This study analyzes how the time allocation decisions of tenured and tenure-track academic scientists in U.S. research universities affect the odds of being engaged in the creation, transfer, and commercialization of novel technologies with one or more industrial partners. Academic scientists are making time allocation decisions across three types of activities typically associated with the academic profession: teaching, research, and service. In a representative sample of 1543 scientists, the empirical results show that those scientists spending more time on research funded by federal grants and industrial contracts have higher propensity of being engaged in technology commercialization efforts than those who spent less time on this type of research. In contrast, scientists spending more time on research that is not funded by grants or industry contracts have significantly lower chances of being involved in technology commercialization. Surprisingly, spending more time on either teaching undergraduate or graduate students does not affect scientists' chances for technology commercialization. Scientists doing more paid consulting also have a higher likelihood of being involved in technology commercialization. Finally, we found complementary and substituting effects between certain types of research and time spent on teaching undergraduate students and their impact on being involved in technology commercialization. We discuss the implications for policy and academic entrepreneurship.
Towards formally verified compilation of tag-based policy enforcement

Hardware-assisted reference monitoring is receiving increasing attention as a way to improve the security of existing software. One example is the PIPE architecture extension, which attaches metadata tags to register and memory values and executes tag-based rules at each machine instruction to enforce a software-defined security policy. To use PIPE effectively, engineers should be able to write security policies in terms of source-level concepts like functions, local variables, and structured control operators, which are not visible at machine level. It is the job of the compiler to generate PIPE-aware machine code that enforces these source-level policies. The compiler thus becomes part of the monitored system’s trusted computing base---and hence a prime candidate for verification. To formalize compiler correctness in this setting, we extend the source language semantics with its own form of user-specified tag-based monitoring, and show that the compiler preserves that monitoring behavior. The challenges of compilation include mapping source-level monitoring policies to instruction-level tag rules, preserving fail-stop behaviors, and satisfying the surprisingly complex preconditions for conventional optimizations. In this paper, we describe the design and verification of Tagine, a small prototype compiler that translates a simple tagged WHILE language to a tagged register transfer language and performs simple optimizations. Tagine is based on the RTLgen and Deadcode phases of the CompCert compiler, and hence is written and verified in Coq. This work is a first step toward verification of a full-scale compiler for a realistic tagged source language.
Understanding the accumulation of bank and thrift reserves during the U.S. financial crisis

Abstract The level of aggregate excess reserves held by U.S. depository institutions increased significantly at the peak of the 2007–2009 financial crisis. Although the amount of aggregate reserves is determined almost entirely by the policy initiatives of the central bank that act on the asset side of its balance sheet, the motivations of individual banks in accumulating reserves differ and respond to the impact of changes in the economic environment on individual institutions. We undertake a systematic analysis of this massive accumulation of excess reserves using bank-level data for more than 7000 commercial banks and almost 1000 savings institutions during the U.S. financial crisis. We propose a testable stochastic model of reserves determination when interest is paid on reserves, which we estimate using bank-level data and censored regression methods. We find evidence primarily of a precautionary motive for reserves accumulation with some notable heterogeneity in the response of reserves accumulation to external and internal factors of the largest banks compared with smaller banks. We combine propensity score matching and a difference-in-differences approach to determine whether the beneficiaries of the Capital Purchase Program of the Troubled Asset Relief Program accumulated less cash, including reserves, than non-beneficiaries. Contrary to anecdotal evidence, we find that banks that participated in the program accumulated less cash, including reserves, than nonparticipants in the initial quarters after the capital injection.
Credit Supply and the Rise in College Tuition: Evidence from the Expansion in Federal Student Aid Programs

We study the link between the student credit expansion of the past 15 years and the contemporaneous rise in college tuition. To disentangle simultaneity issues, we analyze the effects of increases in federal student loan caps using detailed student-level financial data. We find a pass-through effect on tuition of changes in subsidized loan maximums of about 60 cents on the dollar and of about 20 cents on the dollar for unsubsidized federal loans. The effect is most pronounced for more expensive degrees and degrees offered by for-profit and 2-year institutions. Received February 23, 2017; editorial decision March 8, 2018 by Editor Wei Jiang. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.
Golden Parachute as a Compensation-Shifting Mechanism

We demonstrate how a golden parachute can be used to improve the target shareholders' net return by partially shifting the managerial compensation burden to the buyer through a higher acquisition price. Consistent with the empirical observations, we show that (1) the golden parachute will be contingent on a change-of-control rather than solely on the manager's layoff, (2) the golden parachute will be promised early, for example, at the time of the manager's employment, not just in the face of a takeover or a merger, (3) the shareholders would want to extend its coverage to other employees, and (4) the size of the parachute can be much larger than the manager's annual compensation. We also examine the effect of a golden parachute on the managerial incentive scheme. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.
From Pirates to Partners (Episode II): Protecting Intellectual Property in Post-WTO China

In From Pirates to Partners: Protecting Intellectual Property in China in the Twenty-First Century, I criticized the ineffectiveness and short-sightedness of the U.S.-China intellectual property policy. As I argued, the approach taken by the administration in the 1980s and early 1990s had created a cycle of futility in which China and the United States repeatedly threatened each other with trade wars only to back down in the eleventh hour with a compromise that did not provide sustainable improvements in intellectual property protection. Since I wrote that article five years ago, China has joined the WTO and undertook a complete overhaul of its intellectual property system. Because of China's WTO membership, the United States can no longer impose unilateral sanctions on the country, as it threatened to do a decade ago. Instead, the United States has to resolve the dispute through the WTO dispute settlement process. As the U.S. administration is currently reviewing its options and preparing for a possible WTO dispute against China, it is timely and important to reopen the debate about how to design an effective American intellectual property policy toward China. This article begins by challenging the conventional view that the intellectual property law amendments introduced in China in the wake of WTO accession were mostly introduced to conform Chinese intellectual property laws to WTO standards. It argues that many of the amendments were created as responses to the emerging socialist market economy and the rapidly-changing local conditions in the country. In addition, the article takes on the recent proposals for the U.S. administration to file a formal complaint with the WTO Dispute Settlement Body over inadequate enforcement of intellectual property rights in China and explains why the United States should not do so. The article then explores alternative protection strategies by presenting five case studies in which intellectual property rights holders were able to protect their assets without relying on intellectual property laws. It questions the effectiveness of the litigious approach taken by foreign businesses while exploring differences between the Chinese and Western legal cultures. The article concludes by examining the progress China made in the intellectual property arena by focusing on three widely-reported incidents: the unauthorized reproduction, translation, and adaptation of Harry Potter novels, the State Intellectual Property Office's recent decision to invalidate Pfizer's patent in Viagra, and the Chinese authorities' heightened effort to protect trademarks used in relation to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Post-listing underperformance: Is it really bad to move trading locations?

Abstract We reexamine the post-listing puzzle by studying the stock performance of 2103 firms that moved from NASDAQ to NYSE or AMEX, or from AMEX to NYSE during 1973–1999. The matched four-factor regressions demonstrate that the listing firms do not underperform. Size-and-book-to-market matched factor regression finds that the “post-listing drift” is confined to the small set of firms moving from NASDAQ to AMEX during 1981–1990, within size deciles 3–6 and book-to-market quintiles 1–3. A further control of the industry effect is able to resolve the remaining abnormal returns. Our results are consistent with the pseudo market timing hypothesis in Schultz, (2003) [Schultz, P., 2003. Pseudo market timing and the long-run underperformance of IPOs. J. Fin. 58, 483–517.].
The Optimal Size of Countercyclical Budget Stabilization Funds: A Case Study of Ohio

Ohio is one of several states that has instituted a Budget Stabilization Fund to serve as a tool to fight the impacts of economic fluctuations on state finances. The optimal size and rate of contribution to the fund are explored in this study. A widely accepted target of 5 percent of general fund revenue for the budget stabilization fund is found inadequate to provide any degree of normalization of state general fund revenue when Ohio's recent fiscal experiences are examined. An optimal size of close to 13 percent emerges as a more likely target for Ohio along with an annual contribution rate approaching 4 percent of revenues in average non-contractionary years.
Bankruptcy spillover effects on strategic alliance partners

Abstract This paper examines whether a party to a strategic alliance or joint venture suffers from spillover effects when the other partner files for bankruptcy. We find that the non-bankrupt strategic alliance partners, on average, experience a negative stock price reaction around their partner firm's bankruptcy filing announcement. This negative effect is strongest for longer partnerships and those with higher returns at the announcement of the initial alliance formation. Furthermore, horizontal alliance firms in declining industries have lower returns, indicating that industry conditions can exacerbate expected problems for the non-bankrupt firm. Non-bankrupt partners also experience drops in profit margins and investment levels in the subsequent two years with the worst performance concentrated among the longer-term agreements. There is very little impact on the returns or performance for joint venture partners, which suggests that these agreements are more insulating for the partner firm.
The Suitability of ASEAN for a Regional Currency Arrangement

This paper examines the costs, benefits, preconditions, and implications of an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) regional currency arrangement that is assumed to culminate in a regional currency. On economic criteria, ASEAN appears less suited for a regional currency arrangement than Europe before the Maastricht Treaty, although the difference is not large. The transition to European Monetary Union (EMU) indicates that the path toward a common currency is fraught with difficulty. A firm political commitment would seem to be vital to ensuring that an attempt to form a regional currency arrangement is not viewed as simply another fixed exchange rate regime, open to speculative crises.
How to Judge Shari'a Contracts: A Guide to Islamic Marriage Agreements in American Courts

This Article thus has two goals. The first is to show how the Muslim conception of marriage diverges from the Christian-influenced norms that dominate American law and society. Understanding this divergence provides a necessary background to Islamic mahr contracts. The second goal is to provide lawyers and judges with a doctrinal framework within our current law for analyzing these contracts and reaching sensible results in concrete cases.The remainder of this Article will proceed as follows: Part II provides an introduction to Islamic law in general, and the law of marriage and divorce in particular, as well as some discussion of how these rules function in practice. Part III summarizes the way in which American courts have dealt with mahr contracts, showing how both husbands and wives seek to deploy arguments based on contract law, the law of premarital agreements, and constitutional law. Part IV provides a framework for analyzing mahr contracts. It argues that such contracts are best dealt with using traditional contract doctrines. Indeed, once the meaning of mahr contracts are properly understood, this Article argues that the common law of contracts is capable of dealing with potential problems presented by mahr contracts without any dramatic legal innovations.
On production of Gamma rays and Relativistic Runaway Electron Avalanches from Martian dust storms

Production of runaway electron avalanches and gamma rays originating inside Martian dust storms are studied using Monte Carlo simulations. In the absence of in-situ measurements, we use theoretical predictions of electric fields inside dust storms. Electrons are produced through the Relativistic Runaway Electron Avalanches (RREA) process, and energetic photons are results of the bremsstrahlung scattering of the electrons with the air. Characteristic lengths of the runaway electron avalanche for different electric fields and the energy spectrum of electrons are derived and compared to their terrestrial counterparts. It is found that it is possible for Martian dust storms to develop energetic electron avalanches and produce large fluxes of gamma ray photons similar to Terrestrial Gamma ray Flashes (TGFs) from Earth's thunderstorms. The phenomenon could be called Martian Gamma ray Flash (MGF), and due to the very thin atmosphere on Mars, it can be observed by both ground-based instruments or satellites orbiting the planet.
Toxic Torts, Politics, and Environmental Justice: The Case for Crimtorts *

The borderline between criminal and tort law has been increasingly blurred over the past quarter century by the emergence of new “crimtort” remedies which have evolved to deter and punish corporate polluters. Punitive damages, multiple damages, and other “crimtort” remedies are under unrelenting assault by neo-conservatives principally because, under this paradigm, the punishment for wrongdoing can be calibrated to the wealth of the polluter. If wealth-based punishment is eliminated by the “tort reformers,” plaintiffs’ victories in crimtort actions such as those portrayed in the movies Silkwood, A Class Action, and Erin Brockovich will become an endangered species.
Missed Opportunities: How the Courts Struck Down the Florida School Voucher Program

The future of American school voucher programs appeared promising after the Supreme Court held in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that a program enabling parents to use vouchers to send their children to parochial schools did not violate the federal Establishment Clause. The debate over vouchers has always been inextricably bound with the question about the proper relationship between religion and the state. The fact that over 85% of private primary and secondary schools possess a religious affiliation makes the implementation of a voucher program limited to secular institutions extremely difficult. Voucher opponents did not let Zelman stop them, however, and they turned the debate into one over the interpretation of various related aspects of state constitutions. The recently completed litigation over the Opportunity Scholarships Program (OSP) in Florida is highly significant in that context. In 1999, Florida was the first state to adopt a statewide voucher program. The premise of the OSP appeared simple: children who attended schools that received a grade of
The Underlying Constraints on Corporate Bond Market Development in Southeast Asia

Abstract There has been little analysis on the underlying institutional constraints to corporate bond market development in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Research so far has concentrated on weaknesses in market infrastructure. This paper illustrates the interlocking relationships between corporations, banks and governments that have dissuaded bond issuance by companies and also contributed to the underdevelopment of the demand side of the market. The implication of this research is that, in addition to the often recommended measures to strengthen the market infrastructure, corporate bond market development in these countries is also contingent upon deep-set institutional change.
Disaster Tradeoffs: The Doubtful Case for Public Necessity

When government takes private property for a public purpose, the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires just compensation. Courts, however, have long recognized an exception to takings law for the destruction of private property when necessary to prevent a public disaster. In those circumstances, unless the state accepts an obligation to pay damages, individuals must bear their own losses. This Article contends that the public necessity defense should be rejected. First, the tight time frame and limited options typical in a disaster response threaten to obscure the crucial role of government in planning for disasters and mitigating vulnerability. Second, and more fundamentally, the deliberate infliction of harm remains wrongful, even if all available alternatives are worse and the situation could not have been averted or ameliorated through proper advance planning. A just compensation rule—whether instituted via statute or judicial reinterpretation of the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause—would preserve the government’s emergency powers while reaffirming the rule of law and advancing the interests of social jus-
Rescuing the Strong Precautionary Principle from Its Critics

The Strong Precautionary Principle, an approach to risk regulation that shifts the burden of proof on safety, can provide a valuable framework for preventing harm to human health and the environment. Cass Sunstein and other scholars, however, have consistently criticized the Principle, rejecting it as paralyzing, inflexible, and extreme. In this reassessment of the Strong Precautionary Principle, I highlight the significant benefits of the Principle for risk decision making, with the aim of rescuing the Principle from its dismissive critics. The Principle sends a clear message that firms must research the health and environmental risks of their products, before harm occurs. It does not call for the elimination of all risk, nor does it ignore tradeoffs, as Sunstein has alleged. Rather, through burden shifting, the Principle legitimately requires risk creators to research and justify the risks they impose on society. By exploring where the Principle already operates successfully in U.S. law—examples often overlooked by the critics—I highlight the Principle’s flexibility and utility in regulatory law. This Article uses chemical regulation as a case study in how the Principle can guide Congress in an ongoing controversy. Congress is considering a major overhaul of the flawed Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 (TSCA), and this change could be one of the most significant developments in environmental law in a generation. This Article advocates implementing the Strong Precautionary Principle in a replacement statute for TSCA. Under my proposed licensing system, chemical manufacturers would carry the burden to demonstrate that their products do not pose significant risks to human health or the en-
Taking Property Rights Seriously: The Case of Climate Change

The dominant approach to environmental policy endorsed by conservative and libertarian policy thinkers, so-called “free market environmentalism” (FME), is grounded in the recognition and protection of property rights in environmental resources. Despite this normative commitment to property rights, most self-described FME advocates adopt a utilitarian, welfare-maximization approach to climate change policy, arguing that the costs of mitigation measures could outweigh the costs of climate change itself. Yet even if anthropogenic climate change is decidedly less than catastrophic, human-induced climate change is likely to contribute to environmental changes that violate traditional conceptions of property rights. Viewed globally, the actions of some countries—primarily industrialized nations—are likely to increase environmental harms suffered by other countries—less developed nations that have not (as of yet) made any significant contribution to climate change. It may well be that aggregate human welfare would be maximized in a warmer, wealthier world, or that the gains from climate change will offset environmental losses. Yet such claims, even if demonstrated, would not address the normative concern that the consequences of anthropogenic global warming would infringe upon the rights of people in less-developed nations. As a consequence, this paper calls for a rethinking of FME approaches to climate change policy.
Earnings Volatility, Cash Flow Volatility, and Informed Trading

I examine whether earnings that are smoother or more volatile than cash flows provide or garble information. Consistent with theories that predict more informed trading when public information is less informative, I find that bid-ask spreads and the probability of informed trading are higher both when earnings are smoother than cash flows and also when earnings are more volatile than cash flows. Additional tests suggest that managers' discretionary choices that lead to smoother or more volatile earnings than cash flows garble information, on average. However, I find that informed trading is attenuated in settings in which theory suggests that discretionary smoothing or volatizing of earnings is likely to be informative.
Financial sophistication and the distribution of the welfare cost of inflation

Abstract The welfare cost of anticipated inflation is quantified in a calibrated model of the U.S. economy that exhibits tractable equilibrium dispersion in wealth and earnings. Inflation does not generate large losses in societal welfare, yet its impact varies noticeably across segments of society depending also on the financial sophistication of the economy. If money is the only asset, then inflation mostly hurts the wealthier and more productive agents, while those poorer and less productive may even benefit from inflation. The converse holds in a more sophisticated financial environment where agents can insure against consumption risk with assets other than money.
The Cultural Life of Things: Anthropological Approaches to Law and Society in Conditions of Globalization

Anthropologists address historical developments such as the global restructuring of capital, post-Fordism, and the flexible accumulation of capital from perspectives that diverge substantially from those employed by lawyers, political scientists, or economists. The global restructuring of capital and the intensified flows of capital, goods, imagery, people, and ideas has shaken the authority of nation states, cast cultural differences into sharp relief, and undermined the capacity of governments to deal with social welfare concerns. The woman who purchases day care service without filling out social security forms, the "gypsy cab" driver who serves poor neighborhoods without benefit of a license, the moonlighting software consultant, the craftsman building furniture in an area not zoned for manufacturing activity, the immigrant woman reading pap smears or sewing teddy bears in a poorly lit suburban garage, and the unlicensed African street vendor are all participating in the burgeoning informal economy that characterizes a global city like New York.
Public information in Markov games

Abstract In a Markov game, players engage in a sequence of games determined by a Markov process. In this setting, this paper investigates the impact of varying the informativeness of public information, as defined by Blackwell [8] , [9] , pertaining to the games that will be played in future periods. In brief, when a curvature condition on payoffs is satisfied, the finding is that, for any fixed discount factor, the set of strongly symmetric subgame perfect equilibrium payoffs of a Markov game with more informative signals is contained in this set of equilibrium payoffs if the Markov game is played with any less informative signals. The second result shows that larger equilibrium payoffs are possible with less informative signals when the curvature condition fails, but only for some discount factors. The third result strengthens the curvature condition, but generalizes the first result to all subgame perfect equilibrium payoffs. Finally, a collusion application is presented to illustrate the curvature condition.