cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Moral accuracy and "Wobble" in capital sentencing

The comments that comprise this essay were presented as part of a Symposium, "Toward a Model Death Penalty Code: The Massachusetts Governor's Council Report," that was dedicated to examining the Massachusetts Governor's Council's proposed capital punishment statute. Cognizant of the many problems that have arisen with the death penalty, the Council defined its objective as "the creation of a fair capital punishment statute ... that is as narrowly tailored, and as infallible, as humanly possible." This essay acknowledges that the Council's proposed reforms constitute a significant improvement over current death penalty statutes, especially in providing far greater safeguards against the possibility of an innocent person being sentenced to death. The essay argues, however, that while "factual accuracy" must be addressed by any effort to provide a "fair capital punishment statute," another accuracy question exists that is just as important in asking whether a capital punishment statute is "fair." This question, which the essay terms "the moral accuracy question," looks at the moral judgment of the jury in imposing the death penalty and asks whether any capital punishment statute can guarantee that a jury's decision to impose a death sentence is morally accurate. Part of the problem in answering the question, of course, is that, unlike with factual guilt, no DNA test exists to determine whether a jury's moral judgment to impose a death sentence was correct or not. Traditionally, therefore, the legal system has tried to control for moral accuracy by asking whether the death penalty is being applied consistently to similar defendants for similar crimes. This essay maintains, however, that no matter what reforms are enacted, any capital punishment system inevitably will have "wobble" built into it. That is, certain wild card factors invariably will threaten consistency because they are inherent to any system where a jury is asked to make the moral judgment of whether someone should die. In making this argument, the essay focuses on two particular areas of "wobble": the quality of defense representation and the composition of the capital jury. The essay concludes, therefore, that as important as the "factual accuracy" question is in deciding whether a death penalty statute is fair, we also must ask the "moral accuracy" question: Given that a capital punishment system will always have some "wobble" built into it, how much inconsistency can we tolerate and still have what we would consider a fair and accurate death penalty?
A comparison of the information in the LIBOR and CMT term structures of interest rates

Abstract We investigate the information contained in the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and the U.S. Constant Maturity Treasury (CMT) term structure of interest rates and report three novel findings. First, we document that the information contained in term structures are significantly different from one another. Second, we provide evidence of a significant change in the nature of this difference as the financial crisis began. Third, we find that the significant changes in the information content of CMT and LIBOR are consistent with significant shocks to credit default swap rates and tenor swap rates.
Dynamic Choice and Risk Aversion

Author(s): Liu, Jun | Abstract: This paper explicitly solves a dynamic portfolio choice problem in which an investor allocates his wealth between a riskless and a risky asset. The solution shows that insights gained from studying static portfolio choice problems do not necessarily carry over to dynamic choice settings. For example, even though the risk premium of the risky asset in the problem presented here is strictly positive, holdings of that risky asset might increase with risk aversion. More surprisingly, a risk-averse investor might take a short position in the risky asset. The findings suggest that using stock holdings as a proxy for risk aversion may be inappropriate. Finally, I show that volatility might not prevent a risk averse investor from holding an infinite amount of a risky asset, contrary to Harry Markowitz’s insights on the static portfolio choice
On the Conditional Risk and Performance of Financially Distressed Stocks

Several recent articles find that stocks with high probabilities of bankruptcy or default earn anomalously low returns and negative unconditional capital asset pricing model (CAPM) alphas in the post-1980 period. I show that the conditional CAPM resolves the performance difference between high-and low-distress stocks. In particular, financially distressed stocks have relatively low exposure to market risk during bad economic times. I help to explain these findings through a theoretical model in which a levered firm's equity beta is negatively related to uncertainty about the unobserved value of its underlying assets. This paper was accepted by Wei Xiong, finance.
Theoretical study of hydrogen microstructure in models of hydrogenated amorphous silicon

We study the distribution of hydrogen and various hydride configurations in realistic models of a-Si:H for two different concentrations generated via experimentally constrained molecular relaxation approach (ECMR) [1]. The microstructure corresponding to low ( 20%) concentration of H atoms are addressed and are compared to the experimental results with particular emphasis on the size of H clusters and local environment of H atoms. The linewidths of the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrum for the model configurations are calculated in order to compare to the experimental NMR data. Our study shows the presence of isolated hydrogen atoms, small and relatively large clusters with average proton-proton neighbor distance in the clusters around 1.6-2.4 A that have been observed in multiple-quantum NMR (MQ-NMR) experiments.
A new method of projection-based inference in GMM with weakly identified nuisance parameters

Abstract Projection-based tests for subsets of parameters are useful because they do not over-reject the true parameter values when either it is difficult to estimate the nuisance parameters or their identification status is questionable. However, they are also often criticized for being overly conservative. We overcome this conservativeness by introducing a new projection-based test that is more powerful than the traditional projection-based tests. The new test is even asymptotically equivalent to the related plug-in-based tests when all the parameters are identified. Extension to models with weakly identified parameters shows that the new test is not dominated by the related plug-in-based tests.
SO.3/ homology of graphs and links

Mikhail Khovanov [11] introduced a categorification of the Temperley–Lieb algebra. Recently, the first two authors [4] showed that there are chain complexes within this construction that become the Jones–Wenzl projectors in the image of the Grothendieck group K0 . These chain complexes are unique up to homotopy and idempotent with respect to the tensor product: C C ' C . It is now well-known (see Fendley and Krushkal [5]) that the chromatic algebra and the SO.3/ Birman–Murakami–Wenzl algebra can be constructed using the second Jones–Wenzl projector. In this paper we use the formulation of Bar-Natan [1] to extend the original categorification of the Temperley–Lieb algebra to categorifications of the SO.3/ BMW algebra and the chromatic algebra. Previous work of Helme-Guizon and Rong [9] and Stosic [15] on the categorification of the chromatic polynomial has been focused on constructions which are in many respects independent of structural choices such as the Frobenius algebra. In this paper we obtain an essentially unique categorification of the chromatic polynomial of planar graphs.
Finding the Golden Mean with Daubert: an Elusive, Perhaps Impossible, Goal

The essay is largely comprised of a series of thought experiments. The first two thought experiments arose in cases I tried before "junk science" became a widely used label and before Daubert was decided. They represent an often unexamined subset of expert evidence cases involving simple expertise, one of which seems remarkably hard to resolve to achieve the admissibility result that I believe is intuitively appropriate. They also provide an opportunity to suggest how Daubert analysis might impact moderately innovative litigants with limited funds. The third experiment, which is the most generally applicable, involves a critique of Kumho Tire, one of the decisions in the Daubert Trilogy, a decision that I believe may have been affected by the Supreme Court's arguably misguided assumption about the implausibility of the merits of the expert's conclusion. The final thought experiment is one that I keenly experienced while consulting on the admissibility of expert evidence in civil litigation. The case was initially governed by a standard different and less exacting than Daubert; it then shifted mid-process into full Daubert mode. Its message reflects the uncertainty of the standards that govern specific types of expertise, the resulting unpredictability about the trial court's choice of standards to apply. It suggests that either the standards should be clarified or the rigor of enforcement of unclear and unpredictable standards should be moderated. This essay concludes with the themes of the successful intersection of law, science and expertise: the importance of focusing on application rather than abstraction, and a willingness to embrace complication rather than insisting upon stark, abstract and neat solutions to problems in this area. In seeking the "golden mean," the article perhaps asks too much because that concept connotes simultaneously simplicity, moderation and perfection, which are expectations that only very rarely can be achieved by humans. The argument of the essay is more attainable. It moves toward a more modest and moderate approach to judging the admissibility of expert testimony, which far short of, but is on the way to, the idealized and elusive goal of the golden mean.
A Feature-Driven Approach for Identifying Pathogenic Social Media Accounts

Over the past few years, we have observed different media outlets’ attempts to shift public opinion by framing information to support a narrative that facilitate their goals. Malicious users referred to as “pathogenic social media” (PSM) accounts are more likely to amplify this phenomena by spreading misinformation to viral proportions. Understanding the spread of misinformation from account-level perspective is thus a pressing problem. In this work, we aim to present a feature-driven approach to detect PSM accounts in social media. Inspired by the literature, we set out to assess PSMs from three broad perspectives: (1) user-related information (e.g., user activity, profile characteristics), (2) source-related information (i.e., information linked via URLs shared by users) and (3) content-related information (e.g., tweets characteristics). For the user-related information, we investigate malicious signals using causality analysis (i.e., if user is frequently a cause of viral cascades) and profile characteristics (e.g., number of followers, etc.). For the source-related information, we explore various malicious properties linked to URLs (e.g., URL address, content of the associated website, etc.). Finally, for the content-related information, we examine attributes (e.g., number of hashtags, suspicious hashtags, etc.) from tweets posted by users. Experiments on real-world Twitter data from different countries demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in identifying PSM users.
Simultaneous or Sequential? Search Strategies in the U.S. Auto Insurance Industry

We study the identification of the search method consumers use when resolving uncertainty in the prices of alternatives. We show that the search method—simultaneous or sequential—is identified with data on consumers’ consideration sets (but not the sequence of searches), prices for the considered alternatives and marketwide price distributions. We show that identification comes from differences in the patterns of actual prices in consumers’ consideration sets across search methods. We also provide a new estimation approach for the sequential search model that uses such data. Using data on consumer shopping behavior in the U.S. auto insurance industry that contain information on consideration sets and choices, we find that the pattern of actual prices in consumers’ consideration sets is consistent with consumers searching simultaneously. Via counterfactuals we show that the consideration set and purchase market shares of the largest insurance companies are overpredicted under the incorrect assumption of se...
Governance Problems in Closely Held Corporations

A major governance problem in closely held corporations is the majority shareholders’ expropriation of minority shareholders. As a solution, legal and finance research recommends that the main shareholder surrender some control to minority shareholders via ownership rights. We test this proposition on a large data set of closely held corporations. We find that shared-ownership firms report a substantially larger return on assets and lower expense-to-sales ratios. These findings are robust to institutionally motivated corrections for endogeneity of ownership structure. We provide evidence on the presence of governance problems and the effectiveness of shared ownership as a solution in settings characterized by illiquidity of ownership.
Involuntary Passive Euthanasia in U.S. Courts: Reassessing the Judicial Treatment of Medical Futility Cases

Over the past twenty-five years, a significant number of surrogate decision makers have demanded that a health care provider use medical technology to prolong a patient's life beyond the point thought medically appropriate. These surrogates want to continue life-sustaining medical treatment (LSMT) that providers want to stop. While most of these futility disputes are resolved informally inside the hospital, dozens have now been litigated in U.S. courts. Because the judicial treatment of these disputes casts a long, dark shadow on the informal resolution of all the others, it is important to ascertain exactly what guidance these court cases provide. In assessing the judicial treatment of futility cases, most of the medical, legal, and bioethical literature concludes that courts have generally disfavored providers. But these assessments are based on limited and outdated sets of cases. In this article I offer a comprehensive review of futility cases from 1983 to 2007. Based on this review, I argue that courts have generally neither prohibited nor punished the unilateral refusal of LSMT. Providers have regularly obtained both ex ante permission and ex post forgiveness for stopping LSMT without consent.
Present at the Resurrection: Islamic Finance and Islamic Law

This short paper summarizes an extremely stimulating plenary session, held at the XVIIIth Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law in Washington DC, dealing specifically with the topic of Islamic finance. The speakers were three renowned leaders in the field. Specifically, they were Kilian Balz, a partner at Amereller who has both practiced extensively in the field, and written about it while at the Harvard Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School, Frank Vogel, coauthor of a leading book on Islamic finance and former director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program, and Mahmoud El Gamal, a prolific writer and fierce critic of the practice who also served as the appointed Islamic finance scholar in residence at the Department of the Treasury in 2004.
Classification-based financial markets prediction using deep neural networks

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are powerful types of artificial neural networks (ANNs) that use several hidden layers. They have recently gained considerable attention in the speech transcription and image recognition community (Krizhevsky et al., 2012 ) for their superior predictive properties including robustness to overfitting. However their application to algorithmic trading has not been previously researched, partly because of their computational complexity. This paper describes the application of DNNs to predicting financial market movement directions. In particular we describe the configuration and training approach and then demonstrate their application to backtesting a simple trading strategy over 43 different Commodity and FX future mid-prices at 5-minute intervals. All results in this paper are generated using a C++ implementation on the Intel Xeon Phi co-processor which is 11.4x faster than the serial version and a Python strategy backtesting environment both of which are available as open source code written by the authors.
Mitigating the Effects of Low Birth Weight: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Adoptees

Infants who are underweight at birth earn less, score lower on tests, and become less educated as adults. Previous studies have found mixed evidence that socioeconomic status mitigates these effect...
CAFA's Impact on Litigation as a Public Good

Introduction 2517 I. The Public Benefit of Privatizing Regulation 2520 A. Privatizing Ex Post Enforcement 2522 B. Federalizing the Private Class Action 2525 II. CAFA’s Impact on Litigation As Regulation 2527 A. On Certification Procedure—The Substance-Procedure Quagmire 2528 1. Choice-of-Law 2529 2. Non-certification 2531 B. On Process 2533 1. A Normative Theory of Procedural Justice 2533 2. Consequentialist and Deontological Critique of Post-CAFA Process 2536 C. On the Public Benefits of Class Litigation 2546 1. Transparency 2547 2. Deterrence 2550 3. Decree Effects, Collaboration, Precedent, and Preclusion 2553 Conclusion 2555
The Exxon Valdez Litigation Marathon: A Window on Punitive Damages

The Exxon Valdez litigation marathon - a protracted, two-decade-long battle over the propriety and constitutionality of the jury’s $5 billion punitive damages award - provides a window into the past, present, and future of punitive damages. Acting akin to a common law court under federal admiralty jurisdiction, the U.S. Supreme Court provided a template for lower courts to follow. Free of constitutional constraints, the Court diagnoses the problem with punitive damages - unpredictability - and propose a solution: a 1:1 ratio of punitive to compensatory damages. The flaws in the Court’s statistical analysis provide a reminder that those “unsophisticated in statistics” should proceed with caution. The Court’s single-minded focus on unpredictability almost inexorably drives it to embrace and reinforce an exclusively retributive rationale for punitive damages. The Court invokes the analogy of the sentencing guidelines as a model for achieving greater predictability; once enamored with this model, the linkage between the guidelines and criminal retribution spills over to punitive damages as civil retribution. There is, moreover, an uncanny coincidence between the Court’s common law, policy-laden analysis, and the heavy-handed direction its constitutional excessiveness decisions had been taking. Three issues loom large on the horizon of punitive damages doctrine and policy. First, the Court’s fixation on unpredictability can be linked with a broader trend in the Court’s jurisprudence of circumscribing the role of the civil jury in the name of certainty, predictability, and efficiency. Second, the Court had before it a case in a unique procedural posture: the plaintiffs were part of a “limited fund,” mandatory, non-opt out class action for resolution of punitive damages only. Because that element of the case was not appealed to the Court, the Court left for another day resolution of the classwide determination of punitive damages. Third, the Court’s quest for a national solution to the punitive damages problem and its equation of punitive damages and criminal fines presage impending federalism battles. By elevating a single punitive damages goal - that of retributive punishment - the Court sets the stage for a clash with state courts and legislatures who might be inspired to define their legitimate state interests in punitive damages differently.
The Aging of the State Government Workforce: Trends and Implications

The aging of the baby boom generation, combined with the success of the New Public Management in downsizing the federal government, has led to a rapidly aging federal service, a reduced flow of new...
New Properties of the Kumaraswamy Distribution

The Kumaraswamy distribution is very similar to the Beta distribution but has the key advantage of a closed-form cumulative distribution function. This makes it much better suited than the Beta distribution for computation-intensive activities like simulation modeling and the estimation of models by simulation-based methods. However, in spite of the fact that the Kumaraswamy distribution was introduced in 1980, further theoretical research on the distribution was not developed until very recently (Garg, 2008; Jones, 2009; Mitnik, 2009; Nadarajah, 2008). This article contributes to this recent research and: (a) shows that Kumaraswamy variables exhibit closeness under exponentiation and under linear transformation; (b) derives an expression for the moments of the general form of the distribution; (c) specifies some of the distribution's limiting distributions; and (d) introduces an analytical expression for the mean absolute deviation around the median as a function of the parameters of the distribution, an...
Small fish–big issues: the effect of trade policy on the global shrimp market

It is a well-established theoretical result that the trade policy of a large country can directly affect its own and other countries' welfares by affecting international goods' prices. However, there exist very few empirical studies that analyze the effect of trade policy on international prices. With detailed data on unit values and tariffs, I show how policy actions in Europe disrupted the global shrimp market in a non-negligible way and set the stage for the anti-dumping case in the United States. The loss of Thailand's preferential trade status in Europe and the international differences in food-safety standards during the antibiotics crisis shifted especially Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese shrimp exports away from Europe toward the United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I document how those shifting markets have decreased US prices for shrimp significantly compared to those in Europe.
Political economy at any speed: What determines traffic citations?

Can speeding tickets be explained solely by a driver's excessive speed, or could they be seen as serving as supplemental local revenue, or reflecting officer preferences? Theory suggests that the levels of enforcement and punishment for traffic violations are based on the degree of infringe? ment by the offending party and the marginal returns to local safety (Gary S. Becker 1968; Isaac Ehrlich 1996; A. Mitchell Polinsky and Steven Shavell 1992). This view neglects other potential objectives for the police. Police officers are agents of the local or state government; these prin? cipals may be concerned about total revenues raised and about voter satisfaction. Furthermore, officers may have personal preferences, with regards to characteristics such as race or gender, which may motivate differential issuance of traffic tickets. The imposition of traffic fines to increase revenues is reminiscent of William A. Niskanen's (1971) long-standing hypothesis that bureaucrats maximize their agency's budget. Evidence has been scarce, however, and the hypothesis has been called into question because bureaucrats may not receive any direct benefit when their agency's budget size is enlarged (Ronald N. Johnson and Gary D. Libecap 1994). The budget maximizing hypothesis, however, has not been applied to the behavior of police officers engaged in the enforcement of traffic laws, although anecdotal evidence abounds1. More frequent and larger fines may lead to favorable employee evaluations, and contribute to a larger budget for the police department, higher officer salaries, and improved amenities. As police officers' monitoring superiors are elected officials, those officials may also encourage police officers to disproportionately raise revenues from nonvoters as opposed to local, voting citizens.
Measuring the Property-Value Effects of Local Land Use and Preservation Referenda

This paper examines a Massachusetts policy that encourages communities to raise money through referenda for preservation and affordable housing. I use difference-indifferences, fixed effects, and quantile regression to compare home prices before and after such referenda in two towns. I include covariates representing existing land uses, zoning, and historic resources to estimate the value of these amenities. Standard regression techniques indicate weak effects of the referenda, while the estimated coefficients on land use and historic preservation confirm that preservation has a positive effect on property values. The quantile regression sheds light on some heterogeneity that goes unnoticed in standard regression results.
Copy This Essay: How Fair Use Doctrine Harms Free Speech and How Copying Serves It

I. OVERVIEW: THE FIRST AMENDMENT, COPYRIGHT, AND THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THEM 538 A. What Free Speech Is For 538 B. Copyright and Fair Use 540 C. The First Amendment Value of Copying 545
Mandate-based health reform and the labor market: Evidence from the Massachusetts reform

We model the labor market impact of the key provisions of the national and Massachusetts "mandate-based" health reforms: individual mandates, employer mandates, and subsidies. We characterize the compensating differential for employer-sponsored health insurance (ESHI) and the welfare impact of reform in terms of "sufficient statistics." We compare welfare under mandate-based reform to welfare in a counterfactual world where individuals do not value ESHI. Relying on the Massachusetts reform, we find that jobs with ESHI pay $2812 less annually, somewhat less than the cost of ESHI to employers. Accordingly, the deadweight loss of mandate-based health reform was approximately 8 percent of its potential size.
The Right to Truth in the Fight against Impunity

The concept of a “right to the truth” gives the families of victims of serious human rights violations an independent enforceable right to learn the truth about what happened to their relatives. The right is rooted in those provisions of international human rights conventions that prohibit inhuman treatment and guarantee effective access to justice. This article traces the evolution of this concept, considers whether it has a correlation in international criminal law and considers some of the synergies that are created as the concept of the right to know continues to evolve as a principle of international law.
DUALISM IN THE LABOR MARKET: A PERSPECTIVE ON THE LEWIS MODEL AFTER HALF A CENTURY

This paper asks how the Lewis model might be viewed from the perspective of economic science half a century later. Many of the core propositions remain intact, some might be amplified and a small number might be revised.
Updating Constitutional Rules

The dominant mode of updating constitutional meaning in the United States is via judicial interpretation, or ordinary legislation, rather than constitutional amendment. On the Supreme Court’s current approach to interpretation, this also creates a serious potential problem when it comes to the updating of constitutional “rules”, as opposed to “standards” – because when it comes to such rules, the Court generally declines to adopt an evolutionary approach to the interpretation and also often strikes down attempts by Congress or state legislatures (or even voters) to pass substitute updating legislation existence. The article, however, argues that at least part of this current approach by the Court is mistaken, and that when it comes in particular to attempts by Congress or state legislatures to pass such updating legislation, the Court should instead apply a clear margin of deference to determining the validity of relevant legislative action. While theoretically novel, clear precedent for such an approach can be found in federal courts’ approach to the Treaty Clause, as well as several other constitutional contexts. By its indirect nature, such an approach also largely avoids potential objections to more direct forms of interpretive updating by the Court in the context of various constitutional rules.
The Logic of Feeling

The contribution of the feelings-as-information hypothesis to our understanding of the role of affect in judgment and decision making is discussed. Basic principles and regularities in how affective feelings guide judgments and decisions are then identified. Based on these principles and regularities, it is argued that the role of feelings in judgment and decision making may be more adaptive than has been assumed in most academic circles. This adaptivity transpires (a) in the variety of goal-relevant signals that feelings convey, (b) the flexibility with which feelings are interpreted, (c) the judgmental properties of feelings, and (d) the selectivity with which feelings are invoked. It is speculated that affective feelings may tap into a separate system of judgment and decision making with its unique strengths and weaknesses.
Taxes and Capital Structure

We use nearly 500 shifts in statutory corporate and personal income tax rates as natural experiments to assess the effect of corporate and personal taxes on capital structure. We find both corporate and personal income taxes to be significant determinants of capital structure. Based on ex post observed summary statistics, across Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries, taxes appear to be as important as other traditional variables in explaining capital structure choices. The results are stronger among corporate tax payers, dividend payers, and companies that are more likely to have an individual as the marginal investor.
Second-Best Theory and Law & Economics: An Introduction

According to The General Theory of Second Best, if one or more members of a set of optimal conditions cannot be fulfilled, there is no general reason to believe that fulfilling more of the remaining conditions will bring you closer to the optimum than fulfilling fewer of the remaining conditions. This Article explains that The General Theory implies that unless one can generate an argument to the contrary that focuses on the other Pareto imperfections in the system and the feedback relationships to whose importance it calls attention a policy that reduces the number or extent of Pareto imperfections in the economy without eliminating all such imperfections will be as likely to decrease as to increase allocative (economic) efficiency on that account. After pointing out the dramatic implications of this conclusion for standard law-and-economics analyses of the allocative efficiency of eliminating particular Pareto imperfections, it argues that standard first-best-allocative-efficiency analyses must be replaced with third-best-allocative-efficiency analyses, which take into consideration not only the Pareto-imperfectness and interconnectedness of the economy but also the inevitable cost and inaccuracy of both data and analysis. The Article also lists nine reasons why economists and law-and-economics scholars have failed to switch from first-best to third-best analysis despite the intellectual necessity of doing so.
Short sellers and the informativeness of stock prices with respect to future earnings

We examine whether short interest improves the informativeness of stock prices with respect to future earnings. We find that short selling strengthens the relation between current returns and future earnings, especially in settings where short sellers are likely to possess an information advantage, such as when a firm’s information environment is weak or when analysts are highly optimistic about future earnings growth. Collectively, our results illustrate the important role that short sellers play in improving the extent to which current stock prices reflect information about future earnings and thus in improving market efficiency.
Anticipatory Self-Defence and International Law—A Re-Evaluation

Traditional state v state war is largely a relic. How then does a nation-state defend itself, pre-emptively, against an unseen enemy? Existing international law—the Caroline Doctrine, UN Charter Article 51, Security Council Resolutions 1368 and 1373—does not provide sufficiently clear guidelines regarding when a state may take pre-emptive or anticipatory action against a non-state actor. This article proposes rearticulating international law to allow a state to act earlier provided sufficient intelligence is available. After examining international law, this article proposes a process-based ‘strict scrutiny’ approach to self-defence. Under this approach, the executive will have to convince a court, based on relevant, reliable, viable and corroborated intelligence, that pre-emptive action is appropriate. This process leads to a check on the power of the executive by placing a judicial check on pre-emptive action, consequently establishing objective legal criteria for operational counterterrorism.
The Utility of Sport and Returns to Ownership

Previous research demonstrates conclusively that owning thoroughbred racehorses tends to be a losing financial proposition. Owners pay a premium to enter the game of racing. Recent evidence has concluded that this premium is approximately constant across thoroughbred prices. This article generalizes recent work by allowing multiple determinants of the premium rather than one. It concludes that although the premium is approximately constant for relatively low-priced horses, it increases with the cost of the animal, at least for the most expensive ones. Evidently, a sizable number of owners are willing to pay increasing prices for talent in the quest to own a champion. To the extent this preference for champions generalizes to other sports, it has important implications for public policy and social welfare.
Golden and Its Emanations: The Surprising Origins of Smart Growth

This article provides the background for the adoption of the Ramapo ordinance, explains its precocious inventions in some detail, and describes other dramatic local inventions emanating from the Ramapo approach to smart growth. It ends with a reflection on the Quiet Revolution, the continuing disquiet that accompanies the spectacular smart growth inventions of local governments in this country, and modest recommendations for reform. Along the way, the reader will encounter the rebirth of performance zoning, local environmental laws that protect critical environmental resources, a local abandoned property reclamation act, the use of mediation to solve border wars between localities, an intermunicipal incentive zoning program based on cooperative annexation, and the emergence of a number of sub-regional land use compacts among local governments.
Equity volatility as a determinant of future term-structure volatility

Abstract We show that equity volatility serves as a determinant of future Treasury term-structure volatility over the recent October 1997 to June 2013 period. We find that equity volatility contains incrementally reliable information for the subsequent volatility of: (1) 10-year and 30-year bond futures returns, (2) the term-structure׳s level, and (3) the term-structure׳s slope. We present additional evidence that suggests a flight-to-quality/flight-from-quality pricing avenue is a likely contributor to the volatility linkages, where time-varying economic uncertainty can generate both a large positive serial correlation in stock volatility and a time-variation in the precautionary savings motive and diversification benefits of holding bonds.
From Enron to Worldcom and Beyond: Life and Crime After Sarbanes-Oxley

In roughly two years since the corporate meltdown began, federal and state regulators have initiated criminal fraud investigations involving dozens of corporations, including Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, HealthSouth, McKesson, and Qwest. To date, some ninety corporate owners, executives, and employees have been criminally charged, and the investigations are ongoing. It was against this backdrop that zeal for corporate governance reform gained unexpected momentum in Congress and resulted in the surprisingly quick enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Although its principal purpose is to address systemic weaknesses in corporate governance structures, Sarbanes-Oxley also augments prosecutorial tools available in major fraud cases. Critics complain that Sarbanes-Oxley's criminal provisions are needlessly redundant, rely too heavily on enhanced criminal penalties to achieve their goals, and attach far too much importance to filling minor gaps in the coverage of existing laws. This article presents the alternative view that the Act's criminal provisions make significant strides toward piercing the veil of corporate silence. Using as its central focus the essential roles that whistleblowers and cooperating witnesses have played in recent corporate fraud investigations, the article evaluates key criminal provisions in Sarbanes-Oxley that extend new legal protections to whistleblowers and that are likely to provide powerful incentives for potential targets of fraud investigations to become cooperating witnesses. An appendix to the article tracks criminal charges brought against nearly ninety corporate officers and employees in some fifty major fraud prosecutions the Justice Department filed between March, 2002 - when it first charged Arthur Andersen with obstruction of justice - and August, 2003.
The Media and the Anti-corruption Crusade in Kenya: Weighing the Achievements, Challenges, and Prospects

Kenya's post-independence life has been blighted by various forms of corruption and economic crimes. The vice has become so deep-seated that it has become the day-to-day national preoccupation. Its impacts on legal, political, social, economic and cultural development of the nation have been profound. Over the years, various actors have attempted to address the problem, under the popular banner of "anti-corruption crusade". This article explores the role of the media in the crusade. It attempts to modestly take stock of the progress made so far, the challenges encountered, and the prospects in the new Kenya. On this platform, the author avails recommendations to shape the way forward for Kenya, in the fight against the vice.
The Restatement of Gay (

This Symposium—the “Restatement Of . . .” conference— brings together scholars with expertise in a range of subjectmatter fields to consider existing Restatements and whether new Restatements are in order. The specific question we ask is whether there should be a Restatement or other type of American Law Institute (ALI) publication1 devoted to legal issues affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people; or, to put it in a less cumbersome but more crude fashion, whether the ALI should produce The Restatement of Gay.2
Arbitration and Judicialization

The arbitral world is at a crucial point in its historical development, poised between two conflicting conceptions of its nature, purpose, and political legitimacy. Formally, the arbitrator is an agent of the contracting parties in dispute, a creature of a discrete contract gone wrong. Yet, increasingly, arbitrators are treated as agents of a larger global community, and arbitration houses concern themselves with the general and prospective impact of important awards. In this paper, I address these questions, first, from the standpoint of delegation theory. In Part I, I introduce the basic “Principal-Agent” framework [P-A] used by social scientists to explain why actors create new institutions, and then briefly discuss how P-A has been applied to the study of courts. Part II uses delegation theory to frame discussion of arbitration as a mode of governance for transnational business and investment. In Part III, I argue that the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) is presently in the throes of judicialization, indicators of which include the enhanced use of precedent-based argumentation and justification, the acceptance of third-party briefs, and a flirtation with proportionality balancing. Part IV focuses on the first wave of awards rendered by ICSID tribunals pursuant to Argentina’s response to the crushing economic crisis of 2000-02, wherein proportionality emerged, adapted from the jurisprudence of the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization.
Impact: Stanford University's Economic Impact Via Innovation and Entrepreneurship

This report focuses on data gathered from a large-scale, systematic survey of Stanford alumni, faculty and selected staff in 2011 to assess the universityâs economic impact based on its involvement in entrepreneurship. The report describes Stanfordâs role in fostering entrepreneurship, discusses how the Stanford environment encourages creativity and entrepreneurship and details best practices for creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem. The report on the 2011 survey, estimates that 39,900 active companies can trace their roots to Stanford. If these companies collectively formed an independent nation, its estimated economy would be the worldâs 10th largest. Extrapolating from survey results, those companies have created an estimated 5.4 million jobs and generate annual world revenues of $2.7 trillion.
Equity Market Structure Regulation: Time to Start Over

Over the past half century, the SEC’s regulations have become key determinants of the way in which stocks trade and the fees that exchanges charge for their services. The current equity market structure rules are contained primarily in the SEC’s Regulation NMS. The theory behind Regulation NMS is that a system of dispersed markets operating pursuant to SEC-mandated information and order routing links will provide the benefits of consolidation and competition simultaneously. This paper argues that Regulation NMS has failed in that quest. It has produced fragmented markets and created questionable incentives for market participants, possibly producing socially excessive investments in speed and secrecy. It discourages exchange innovation, provides insufficient incentives for traders to price orders aggressively, requires brokers to act against their customers’ interests, and forces the SEC to act as a price regulator. The paper contends that the SEC should replace Regulation NMS with three simple design principles—issuer choice, exchange autonomy, and regulatory consistency. These would allow market forces rather than regulatory mandates to determine the design and pricing of trading platforms and the trading strategies of broker-dealers. They would better align the private incentives of trading platforms with the social objectives of improving liquidity and price discovery.
Multi-Pass Graph Streaming Lower Bounds for Cycle Counting, MAX-CUT, Matching Size, and Other Problems

Consider the following gap cycle counting problem in the streaming model: The edges of a 2-regular $n$ -vertex graph $G$ are arriving one-by-one in a stream and we are promised that $G$ is a disjoint union of either $k$ -cycles or $2k$ -cycles for some small $k$ ; the goal is to distinguish between these two cases using a limited memory. Verbin and Yu [SODA 2011] introduced this problem and showed that any single-pass streaming algorithm solving it requires $n^{1-\Omega(1/k)}$ space. This result and the proof technique behind it—the Boolean Hidden Hypermatching communication problem—has since been used extensively for proving streaming lower bounds for various problems, including approximating MAX-CUT, matching size, property testing, matrix rank and Schatten norms, streaming unique games and CSPs, and many others. Despite its significance and broad range of applications, the lower bound technique of Verbin and Yu comes with a key weakness that is also inherited by all subsequent results: the Boolean Hidden Hypermatching problem is hard only if there is exactly one round of communication and, in fact, can be solved with logarithmic communication in two rounds. Therefore, all streaming lower bounds derived from this problem only hold for single-pass algorithms. Our goal in this paper is to remedy this state-of-affairs. We prove the first multi-pass lower bound for the gap cycle counting problem: Any $p$ -pass streaming algorithm that can distinguish between disjoint union of $k$ -cycles vs $2k$ -cycles—or even $k$ -cycles vs one Hamiltonian cycle-requires $n^{1-1/k^{\Omega(1/p)}}$ space. This makes progress on multiple open questions in this line of research dating back to the work of Verbin and Yu. As a corollary of this result and by simple (or even no) modification of prior reductions, we can extend many of previous lower bounds to multi-pass algorithms. For instance, we can now prove that any streaming algorithm that ( $1+\varepsilon$ ) -approximates the value of MAX-CUT, maximum matching size, or rank of an $n$ -by- $n$ matrix, requires either $n^{\Omega(1)}$ space or $\Omega(\log({}^{1}\!/\!_{\varepsilon}))$ passes. For all these problems, prior work left open the possibility of even an $O(\log n)$ space algorithm in only two passes.
Optimal experimental design for infinite-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems governed by PDEs: a review

We present a review of methods for optimal experimental design (OED) for Bayesian inverse problems governed by partial differential equations with infinite-dimensional parameters. The focus is on problems where one seeks to optimize the placement of measurement points, at which data are collected, such that the uncertainty in the estimated parameters is minimized. We present the mathematical foundations of OED in this context and survey the computational methods for the class of OED problems under study. We also outline some directions for future research in this area.
Low-Rank Matrix Recovery with Composite Optimization: Good Conditioning and Rapid Convergence

The task of recovering a low-rank matrix from its noisy linear measurements plays a central role in computational science. Smooth formulations of the problem often exhibit an undesirable phenomenon: the condition number, classically defined, scales poorly with the dimension of the ambient space. In contrast, we here show that in a variety of concrete circumstances, nonsmooth penalty formulations do not suffer from the same type of ill-conditioning. Consequently, standard algorithms for nonsmooth optimization, such as subgradient and prox-linear methods, converge at a rapid dimension-independent rate when initialized within constant relative error of the solution. Moreover, nonsmooth formulations are naturally robust against outliers. Our framework subsumes such important computational tasks as phase retrieval, blind deconvolution, quadratic sensing, matrix completion, and robust PCA. Numerical experiments on these problems illustrate the benefits of the proposed approach.
Second-harmonic generation in nonlinear plasmonic lattices enhanced by quantum emitter gain medium

We report on a theoretical study of second-harmonic generation (SHG) in plasmonic nanostructures interacting with two-level quantum emitters (QEs) under incoherent energy pump. We generalize the driven-dissipative Tavis–Cummings model by introducing the anharmonic surface plasmon-polariton (SPP) mode coupled to QEs and examine physical properties of corresponding SPP-QE polariton states. Our calculations of the SHG efficiency for strong QE-SPP coupling demonstrate orders of magnitude enhancement facilitated by the polariton gain. We further discuss time-domain numerical simulations of SHG in a square lattice comprising Ag nanopillars coupled to QEs utilizing a fully vectorial nonperturbative nonlinear hydrodynamic model for conduction electrons coupled to Maxwell–Bloch equations for QEs. The simulations support the idea of gain enhanced SHG and show orders of magnitude increase in the SHG efficiency as the QEs are tuned in resonance with the lattice plasmon mode and brought above the population inversion threshold by incoherent pumping. By varying pump frequency and tuning QEs to a localized plasmon mode, we demonstrate further enhancement of the SHG efficiency facilitated by strong local electric fields. The incident light polarization dependence of the SHG is examined and related to the symmetries of participating plasmon modes.