cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
China's Failed War on Terror: Fanning the Flames of Uighur Separatist Violence

In terms of race, ethnicity, and religion, China is a surprisingly diverse nation. Although only 9 percent of China's population is comprised of ethnic minorities, over 60 percent of its vast landscape is pocketed and overlaid with diverse minority ethnic groups, together constituting 108.5 million people. China's diversity, of course, does not extend to politics, and its communist regime has demonstrated laser-like focus over the past several decades on assimilating China's minorities into the Han-dominated political, social, and religious mainstream, or, at the very least, extinguishing any independent impulses these groups might harbor. Although successful with some of China's smaller and less-distinct minorities, Beijing's efforts to assimilate minority populations have generated violent conflict among a handful of minority groups, most famously, of course, in Tibet. But Tibet is not alone in its resistance. In fact, the Uighurs — a group of over 18 million Muslims in China's arid and oft-forgotten northwest with close ethnic ties to Central Asia — have become one of China's primary targets in its crackdown on domestic separatist movements. While tensions between China's Uighur population and its central government have been high for well over a hundred years and have throughout that history erupted in violence (violence which, for a brief time, culminated in independence for the province), historically, those tensions have only rarely manifested themselves through terrorist violence. That can no longer be said. A little over ten years ago, China implemented its Strike Hard (da fa) campaign against any region with separatist sympathies, including Xinjiang, the Uighur homeland. The campaign's explicit goal is to "hit at enemy forces, purify society and educate the masses," and in the years since its initial implementation, the Chinese government periodically has renewed its Strike Hard campaign, deploying additional forces to the region and tightening restrictions on cultural expression and religious practice. In addition to the Strike Hard campaign's religious and political implications, China's industrialization policies, directed at integrating the region's ethnic minorities into the economy, have instead forced them to the periphery, engendering bitter anti-Han sentiment. Many Uighurs are convinced that China's ultimate goal is to overrun their homeland, outlaw their Muslim faith, and erase their cultural distinctiveness altogether.
The strategic use of download limits by a monopoly platform

We offer a new explanation for why platforms, such as Internet service providers and mobile-phone networks, offer plans with download limits: through one of two mechanisms, doing so causes content providers to reduce prices or improve quality. This generates greater surplus for consumers, which a platform captures via higher consumer access fees. Even accounting for congestion externalities, a platform limits downloads more than would be welfare maximizing; indeed, by so much, that barring such practices can be welfare superior to what a platform would do. Paradoxically, a platform will install more bandwidth when it can restrict downloads than when it cannot.
Investor flows and fragility in corporate bond funds

Abstract This paper explores flow patterns in corporate bond mutual funds. We show that corporate bond funds exhibit a concave flow-to-performance relationship: their outflows are sensitive to bad performance more than their inflows are sensitive to good performance. Moreover, corporate bond funds tend to have greater sensitivity of outflows to bad performance when they have more illiquid assets and when the overall market illiquidity is high. These results point to the possibility of fragility in the fast-growing corporate bond market. The illiquidity of corporate bonds may generate a first-mover advantage among investors in corporate bond funds, amplifying their response to bad performance.
The effects of school physical education grants on obesity, fitness, and academic achievement.

Abstract Objective Foundations and governments fund a number of programs that provide grants to improve school physical education or other forms of school-based physical activity. The effects of these grant programs are unknown. We evaluate the effects of Texas Fitness Now, a program in which the state of Texas granted $37 million to improve physical education in high-poverty middle schools over the 4 school years from 2007–08 to 2010–11. The stated goals of Texas Fitness Now were to reduce obesity, increase fitness, and raise academic achievement. Method We summarize how Texas Fitness Now funds were spent and estimate the impact of Texas Fitness Now using a fixed-effects longitudinal model that exploits changes in schools' eligibility over time. Changes in eligibility occurred when eligibility expanded to new schools after year 2 and when the program was terminated after year 4. Results Most Texas Fitness Now funds were spent on sports and fitness equipment. Smaller amounts were spent on anti-obesity curricula. Texas Fitness Now improved strength and flexibility, especially among girls, but it did not improve BMI or academic achievement, and it had mixed effects on aerobic capacity. The fitness benefits were not lost in the year after the program ended, perhaps because schools kept the equipment that they had bought during their years of eligibility. Conclusion The results of Texas Fitness Now were typical for an intervention that relied almost exclusively on physical activity. Programs that improve BMI as well as fitness tend to have a more fully developed nutrition component.
Copyright and Feminism in Digital Media

COPYRIGHT AND FEMINISM IN DIGITAL MEDIA D AN L. B URK * † Introduction 520 I. Feminism and Hypertext 522 II. Text and Authority 528 III. Authority and Hypertext 530 IV. Copyright and Hypertext 535 V. Copyright and Feminism 544 Conclusion 549 Although feminist perspectives have contributed substantially to the development of both theory and practice in many areas of law, feminism has contributed relatively little to discussions regarding intellectual property. This paper examines the relationship between hypermedia and feminist discourse and critiques the role of copyright in controlling or suppressing such discourses. Hypertext and related media may lend themselves to relational webs of meaning rather than linear progressions of meaning. Given the importance of non- hierarchical, associative webs to feminist discourse, digital media may lend itself to feminist modes of thinking or, at minimum, challenge dominant textual constructions. However, current copyright doctrine assumes that works remain linear, hierarchical, and controlled. The exclusive rights conferred by copyright, especially the right of adaptation, lend themselves to authorial control over not only the text, but also to a reader’s use of the text. This deterrent characteristic of copyright has appeared in several recent legal disputes involving hypertext linking and annotation. Thus, copyright Visiting Professor, Cornell Law School; Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly; Professor of Law, University of Minnesota. I wish to thank Julie Cohen, Cecile Konchar Farr, Mary LaFrance, Pam Samuelson, Rebecca Tushnet, and Molly Van Houwelling, as well as the participants of the American University workshop on “Gender and Intellectual Property” and of the Berkeley Intellectual Property Scholarship Seminar for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
The promise and challenges of new datasets for accounting research

Abstract I describe a brief summary of the development of databases used in accounting research and discuss the research questions addressed in traditional databases and ‘new’ databases. The new data include online searches such as Google Trends data; textual data from corporate disclosures, analyst reports, conference call transcripts, earnings press releases, and news media articles; social network and social media data from Twitter, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and other data. New data holds promise for research on attention or cognitive processing constraints; on tone/valence, affect, deceptiveness and credibility for capital market and financial reporting outcomes. I examine the econometric challenges of new data and suggest the potential for new data to offer new auditing tools to detect poor financial reporting, which will help to discourage earnings management.
He Said, He Said: Same-Sex Sexual Harassment Under Title VII and the "Reasonable Heterosexist" Standard

Under current sexual harassment law, the trier of fact in a same-sex sexual harassment lawsuit is likely to judge the alleged behavior of a gay sexual harassment defendant more harshly than it would judge the identical behavior in a context where the defendant was not of the same sex as the plaintiff. This bias to a gay sexual harassment defendant arises because the “reasonable person” constructed by the trier of fact in evaluating whether an alleged act of hostile environment sexual harassment should be actionable is, under the author's theory, a non-gay person with a heterosexist world view. The bias the author identifies exemplifies a common manifestation of such heterosexism: an activity that is condoned or even valued when engaged in by a non-gay person is condemned when engaged in by a gay person.One means for alleviating this bias is for courts to refuse to recognize a cause of action under Title VII for same-sex sexual harassment. This result would be consistent with the refusal of federal courts to apply the “but-for” or “differences” theory of sex discrimination to recognize that sexual orientation discrimination is sex discrimination. Courts have justified their refusal to recognize a cause of action for sexual orientation discrimination under Title VII's sex discrimination prohibition by arguing that Congress has not shown an intent to specifically proscribe sexual orientation discrimination. These courts should apply such a “negative inference” principle across the spectrum of sex discrimination cases and also refuse to proscribe same-sex sexual harassment because Congress has not shown any intent to make such behavior actionable under Title VII. An alternate means for alleviating the heterosexual bias that also recognizes the utility of having a remedy under Title VII for same-sex sexual harassment is for courts to instruct the trier of fact in a same-sex sexual harassment lawsuit to evaluate the actions of the defendant in the hypothetical context of a mixed-sex interaction. Thus, the gay supervisor who has commented on his male subordinate's physical appearance, in theory, would be judged as though he had commented on the appearance of a female subordinate.
On Political Order and the “Arab Spring”

A year has passed since a young vegetable vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, immolated himself after his cart and dignity were taken away by police in the provincial Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. Since the death of the 26-year-old, millions of similarly disenfranchised, poor, and prospect-less Arabs have risen in revolt across North Africa and the Middle East in a phenomenon widely dubbed the “Arab Spring.”
On generalized category $\mathcal{O}$ for a quiver variety

In this paper, we give a method for relating the generalized category $$\mathcal {O}$$ defined by the author and collaborators to explicit finitely presented algebras, and apply this to quiver varieties. This allows us to describe combinatorially not just the structure of these category $$\mathcal {O}$$ ’s but also how certain interesting families of derived equivalences, the shuffling and twisting functors, act on them. In the case of Nakajima quiver varieties, the algebras that appear are weighted KLR algebras and their steadied quotients, defined by the author in earlier work. In particular, these give a geometric construction of canonical bases for simple representations, tensor products and Fock spaces. If the $$\mathbb {C}^{*}$$ -action used to define the category $$\mathcal {O}$$ is a “tensor product action” in the sense of Nakajima, then we arrive at the unique categorifications of tensor products; in particular, we obtain a geometric description of the braid group actions used by the author in defining categorifications of Reshetikhin–Turaev invariants. Similarly, in affine type A, an arbitrary action results in the diagrammatic algebra equivalent to blocks of category $$\mathcal {O}$$ for cyclotomic Cherednik algebras. This approach also allows us to show that these categories are Koszul and understand their Koszul duals; in particular, we can show that categorifications of minuscule tensor products in types ADE are Koszul. In the affine case, this shows that our category $$\mathcal {O}$$ ’s are Koszul and their Koszul duals are given by category $$\mathcal {O}$$ ’s with rank-level dual dimension data, and that this duality switches shuffling and twisting functors.
The Stock-REIT Relationship and Optimal Asset Allocations

Executive Summary.In this paper, the marginal effects of changes (due to non-stationarity or estimation errors) in the REIT-stock risk premium and the REIT-stock correlation on the optimal portfoli...
In Search of Limiting Principles: The Eleventh Circuit Invalidates the Individual Mandate in Florida v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

On August 12, 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held in Florida v. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services that Congress exceeded its power under the Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper Clause by requiring individuals to purchase health insurance as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In reaching its holding, the Eleventh Circuit rejected the Government’s argument that the individual mandate is a necessary and proper means for implementing its larger regulation of health insurance markets. Yet, this Comment argues that the Eleventh Circuit’s exacting review of Congress’s findings and underlying policy judgments, if adopted by the Supreme Court, may significantly constrain Congress’s power to craft a novel solution to a complex regulatory challenge.
Monetary Policy with a Credit Aggregate Target

The principal criteria for the selection of an intermediate target for monetary policy are (1) that the target be closely related to the nonfinancial objectives of monetary policy, (2) that it contain information about the future movements of those relevant aspects of the nonfinancial economy, (3) that it be closely connected to the instruments over which the central bank can exert direct control, and (4) that data on it be readily available on a timely basis. The evidence presented in this paper indicates that, on each of the four criteria considered, total net credit is just as suitable as any of the monetary aggregates to serve as an intermediate target for monetary policy in the United States. As long as the Federal Reserve Sys tem continues to use an intermediate target procedure, this evidence is consistent with adopting a two-target framework based on both money and credit, thereby drawing on information from both sides of the public's balance sheet for the set of signals that govern the systematic response of monetary policy to economic events.
Perceptions of Expertise and Transactive Memory in Work Relationships

People involved in close interpersonal relationships often develop a transactive memory system - a division of cognitive labor with respect to the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information fr...
Insuring Consumption Against Illness

One of the most sizable and least predictable shocks to economic opportunities in developing countries is major illness. We investigate the extent to which families are able to insure consumption against major illness using a unique panel data set from Indonesia that combines excellent measures of health status with consumption information. We find that there are significant economic costs associated with major illness, and that there is very imperfect insurance of consumption over illness episodes. These estimates suggest that public disability insurance or subsidies for medical care may improve welfare by providing consumption insurance.
Human resources in China: the birth quota, returns to schooling, and migration

. The rural elderly in China have 40% of the income of the urban elderly, spend a larger share of their income on food, are in worse health, work later into their lives and depend more on their children, lacking pensions and public services. The birth quota since 1980 has particularly restricted the childbearing of rural, less educated, women, who therefore have fewer children to rely on for support. This inequality is reinforced by increasing returns to schooling, especially beyond secondary school. Government restrictions on rural–urban migration reduces national efficiency, adds to the urban–rural wage gap and increases inequality.
The Influences of Entrepreneurial Motivation and New Business Acquisition on Strategic Decision Making

Strategic management is the domain of upper-level corporate management. The ability to make corporate decisions based on the company's internal strengths and externalities in the macro-environment is a key duty of top management. In small businesses, the business owner or founder generally operates the business and is in a leadership role as the CEO. Are the strategic management and decision-making processes similar for small entrepreneurial businesses? Is the strategic or long-term decision making the same for all entrepreneurs who start their own companies? Does the involvement of top managers in entrepreneurial companies vary in their day-to-day versus their long-term decision making? Small businesses may be inherited from family, started from scratch by an entrepreneur, or purchased as an existing entity. Is the involvement by the small business owner in decision making influenced by the way the business was founded or acquired? The purpose of this exploratory paper is to investigate the decision-making tactics of the small business owner or entrepreneur and to determine the influence, if any, of the means of business acquisition. Discussion and ideas for further research are presented.
Terrestrial Exoplanet Light Curves

The phase or orbital light curves of extrasolar terrestrial planets in reflected or emitted light will contain information about their atmospheres and surfaces complementary to data obtained by other techniques such as spectrosopy. We show calculated light curves at optical and thermal infrared wavelengths for a variety of Earth-like and Earth-unlike planets. We also show that large satellites of Earth-sized planets are detectable, but may cause aliasing effects if the lightcurve is insufficiently sampled.
Revisiting Factor VIII cases: is it time for an agency adjudication system?

It has been extensively argued that an agency adjudication system to supplant state tort claims is preferable in a plaintiff’s winning case, based on the presumption that a jury would only see the injury caused by the medical product and ignore the benefit brought about by the same product. The view is best reflected by the Supreme Court’s opinion in Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc. The Riegel Court expressly stated its disfavor of juries in a medical-device context. The Court advanced a policy argument that “tort law, applied by juries under a negligence or strict-liability standard, is less deserving of preservation.” Nevertheless, there are cases that never have a chance to reach the jury. They are the plaintiffs’ losing cases.Factor VIII cases are the plaintiff’s losing case. They are a class of cases sharing the same or similar factual context: hemophiliacs who contracted AIDS by using HIV-infected blood products in the early 80s. They represent a class of cases that tort law cannot resolve. Contrary to a plaintiff’s winning case, Factor VIII cases may help to illustrate why an agency adjudication system is favorable even in a plaintiff’s losing situation.The dissent’s major concern in Riegel was that an outright preemption of state common-law suits would “remove all means of judicial recourse.” Even though the Riegel holding only applies to medical devices that are subject to FDA’s pre-market approval, FDA’s regulation of drugs and food additives provided the model for its regulation of medical devices. Therefore the Supreme Court did not exclude extending preemption to FDA approved drugs and additives. Whether or not preemption would eventually extend to FDA approved drugs, an agency adjudication system to supplant common-law suits may be preferable or favorable in most, if not all, medical-product-liability contexts.An agency adjudication system is generally exercised by appointed experts, rather than lay jurors. As the Riegel Court has stated in the dicta, “[a] state statute, or a regulation adopted by a state agency, could at least be expected to apply cost-benefit analysis similar to that applied by the experts at the FDA.” In addition, the Court acknowledged that “while the common-law remedy is limited to damages, a liability award can be, indeed is designed to be, a potent method of governing conduct and controlling policy.” Adopting an agency adjudication system on a no-fault basis to supplant common-law suits in a medical-product-liability context would provide recourse to the victims without contradicting with the Riegel Court’s concern.
On the speed of algebraically defined graph classes

Abstract The speed of a class of graphs counts the number of graphs on the vertex set { 1 , … , n } inside the class as a function of n. In this paper, we investigate this function for many classes of graphs that naturally arise in discrete geometry, for example intersection graphs of segments or disks in the plane. While upper bounds follow from Warren's theorem (a variant of a theorem of Milnor and Thom), all the previously known lower bounds were obtained from ad hoc constructions for very specific classes. We prove a general theorem giving an essentially tight lower bound for the number of graphs on { 1 , … , n } whose edges are defined using the signs of a given finite list of polynomials, assuming these polynomials satisfy some reasonable conditions. This in particular implies lower bounds for the speed of many different classes of intersection graphs, which essentially match the known upper bounds. Our general result also gives essentially tight lower bounds for counting containment orders of various families of geometric objects, including circle orders and angle orders. Some of the applications presented in this paper are new, whereas others recover results of Alon-Scheinerman, Fox, McDiarmid-Muller and Shi. For the proof of our result we use some tools from algebraic geometry and differential topology.
The importance of the internal information environment for tax avoidance

Abstract We show that firms׳ ability to avoid taxes is affected by the quality of their internal information environment, with lower effective tax rates (ETRs) for firms that have high internal information quality. The effect of internal information quality on tax avoidance is stronger for firms in which information is likely to play a more important role. For example, firms with greater coordination needs because of a dispersed geographical presence benefit more from high internal information quality. Similarly, firms operating in a more uncertain environment benefit more from the quality of their internal information in helping them to reduce ETRs. In addition, we provide evidence that high internal information quality allows firms to achieve lower ETRs without increasing the risk of their tax strategies (as measured by ETR volatility). Overall, our study contributes to the literature on tax avoidance by providing evidence that the internal information environment of the firm is important for understanding its tax avoidance outcomes.
The Anatomy of Distressed Debt Markets

Over the last 30 years, the distressed debt market has come a long way and is now a legitimate investment asset class, albeit with periodic dramatic activity. Despite the benign credit cycle in US ...
Application and assessment of an ethics presentation for accounting and business classes

This paper describes a presentation on ethics for accounting and business students. In 2001 and 2002, major corporate failures such as Enron and Worldcom, combined with questionable accounting practices, made ethics a paramount concern to persons working in business and accounting. While financial statement analysis and regulatory requirements are important technical topics, the issue of ethics provides faculty a unique and very appropriate setting to discuss deeper truths about doing business and living life well. This paper briefly describes the development and assessment of one approach to presenting ethics built around a computerized slide show (PowerPoint). The goal of the presentation is to increase students’ understanding of the essential role of ethics to accounting and business. Following the presentation, students indicated a heightened recognition of the importance of ethics. Educators should do all that they can to encourage students to do the “right” thing, even in difficult circumstances. This encouragement may serve them well in school and later in their careers.
Comparative Value Relevance Among German, U.S., and International Accounting Standards: A German Stock Market Perspective:

In recent years, German companies have reported consolidated financial statements under German GAAP, U.S. GAAP, or International Accounting Standards (IAS). Market observers, researchers, and regulators have argued that financial statements prepared under the shareholder (or investor) model, such as U.S. GAAP or IAS, provide better information than financial statements prepared under the stakeholder model (German GAAP). They further have argued that U.S. GAAP is more rigorously defined and, therefore, provides information superior to that under IAS. We investigate comparative value relevance, measured as the slope coefficient of the returns/earnings regression. Within our sample of German companies traded on German stock exchanges, the value relevance of U.S. GAAP- and IAS-based earnings is higher than that of German GAAP-based earnings. Our result holds only for profit observations, suggesting that reporting regime does not have an influence on the quality of earnings in the case of loss firms. However, ...
Context-Dependent Product Evaluations: An Empirical Analysis of Internet Book Reviews

Abstract Using book review data on Amazon.com, the authors extend current research into online consumer reviews by empirically investigating the context dependence effect in the review writing process. They find that when product quality remains constant, later reviews tend to differ from previously posted ones, and the difference is moderated by the popularity of the product, the variance of previous reviews, whether later reviews explicitly refer to previous reviews, and the age of the product and the reviews. This phenomenon can be explained by both consumer expectation and self-selection effects in review writing. The implications of this research can help practitioners understand the reviewing process and provide some guidelines for improving the objectivity of online product reviews.
A Simple Robust Link Between American Puts and Credit Protection

We develop a simple robust link between deep out-of-the-money American put options on a company's stock and a credit insurance contract on the company's bond. We assume that the stock price stays above a barrier B before default but drops below a lower barrier A after default, thus generating a default corridor [A,B] that the stock price can never enter. Given the presence of this default corridor, a spread between two co-terminal American put options struck within the corridor replicates a pure credit contract, paying off when and only when default occurs prior to the option expiry. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com., Oxford University Press.
Risk and capital structure in Asian project finance

We develop and test hypotheses derived from a multi-level theoretical framework for understanding factors shaping the credit risk and capital structure of a quintessentially Asian form of investment known as project finance. It differs from other corporate financing approaches. A project company is separate and bankruptcy remote from the investing firm sponsors that create it. The project company relies extensively on debt capital provided by creditors to fund project operations. Creditors provide more (less) debt as a percentage of overall project capital when there is less (more) risk of project failure and non-repayment. We define a target risk framework identifying country-, industry-, syndicate-, firm-, and project-related factors shaping Asian project finance company credit risk and thus, project debt. In a sample of 238 project finance companies announced in 13 Asian countries from 1995–2004, we observe substantial effects on project capital structure with respect to country-level factors linked to institutional and macroeconomic theories, syndicate structure factors linked to agency theory, and lead sponsor experience and project size factors linked to learning and transaction cost theories. We argue that these and other determinants of project finance company credit risk and capital structure in Asia since the mid-1990s anticipate similar relationships now emerging elsewhere around the globe.
Securitized markets, international capital flows, and global welfare

We study the effect of collateralized lending and securitization on the global supply of securitized assets, welfare, and international net and gross capital flows in a two country general equilibrium model with idiosyncratic investment risk. The financial sectors in the two countries, Home and Foreign, differ by the collateral requirement for investment loans, with Home requiring lower margins. In autarky, Home endogenously supplies more assets and enables more risk sharing. Upon financial integration, capital flows from Foreign to Home, leading to lower interest rates and an increase in the global supply of assets. Foreign enjoys substantial welfare gains through better risk sharing and portfolio reallocation, while the welfare experience for Home is ambiguous. Gross capital flows arise when agents face aggregate shocks to the expected payoff to investment projects, but can collapse when shocks concern the variance of returns.
Just Punch My Bankruptcy Ticket: A Qualitative Study of Mandatory Debtor Financial Education

When Congress amended the Bankruptcy Code in 2005 through the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), it mandated that individual consumer debtors undergo two debtor education courses, one as a condition precedent to filing for bankruptcy relief, and a second for later receiving a discharge of indebtedness. As for the pre-filing credit counseling course, Congressional aim was to have prospective debtors understand the potential alternatives to filing for bankruptcy relief with the goal of having some percentage of debtors settle their debt obligations outside of the bankruptcy system. Regarding the post-filing financial management course, Congress wanted debtors who utilized the bankruptcy system to learn effective financial management techniques to employ after the closing of their bankruptcy cases. Ever since the prospect of debtor education as a formal component of the bankruptcy process was raised decades ago, bankruptcy scholars and commentators have offered empirical studies and opinions about the efficacy of such a program. To date, however, no empirical study has appeared in the legal literature regarding the effectiveness of the mandated debtor education courses imposed by BAPCPA. Accordingly, the purpose of this Article is to report the findings of my own qualitative study of Chapter 7 debtors regarding their experiences with, and impressions of, the current debtor education courses required by the Bankruptcy Code. My study sought to address two research questions. First, do either, or both, of these mandated debtor education courses help individuals in the way Congress intended? And second, do consumer debtors change their financial behaviors as a result of participating in either, or both, of these mandated debtor education courses? As will be reported herein, the vast majority of the participants interviewed for this study did not find the courses to be of any help to them in their financial lives, and for most, any positive changes made to their financial wellbeing following bankruptcy was not attributed to anything learned from the education courses themselves, but from the experience of going through the bankruptcy process, never again wanting to find themselves in such a desperate and vulnerable place in life. Nevertheless, a small population of debtors interviewed for this study, less than seven percent, did find the debtor education courses helpful in the ways Congress intended.
The Dynamics of Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Data

Introduction 1. Excess Entry and Entrepreneurial Decisions: the Role of Overconfidence 2. Understanding The Gender Gap In Entrepreneurship: A Multi-Country Examination 3. Defining and Identifying Family Entrepreneurship: a New View of Entrepreneurs 4. Investor Altruism: Financial Returns from Informal Investments in Businesses Owned by Relatives, Friends, and Strangers 5. The Contribution of Migrants and Ethnic Minorities to Entrepreneurship in the United Kingdom 6. Entrepreneurship in World Cities 7. Interregional Disparities, Entrepreneurship, and EU Regional Policy 8. Entrepreneurship in Transition Economies: The Role of Institutions and Generational Change 9. Poverty and Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries 10. Ambitious Entrepreneurship, High-growth Firms and Macroeconomic Growth 11. High-Aspiration Entrepreneurship 12. Entrepreneurship and the Decision to Export Conclusion Data Appendix
The Piracy Analogy: Modern Universal Jurisdiction's Hollow Foundation

In recent years, courts around the world have relied on universal jurisdiction with increasing frequency to justify proceedings against alleged perpetrators of human rights offenses in foreign countries.1 The doctrine of universal jurisdiction holds that a nation can prosecute offenses to which it has no connection at all—the jurisdiction is based solely on the extraordinary heinousness of the alleged conduct.2 According to the doctrine, any nation can prosecute universal offenses, even over the objection of the defendants’ and victims’ home states.3 Examples of universal jurisdiction include Belgium’s indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for alleged responsibility for war crimes committed by Christian Arabs against Muslim Arabs in Lebanon and the conviction by German and Swiss courts of Serbian ofacials who committed war crimes against Bosnian Muslims.4
Credit enhancement through financial engineering: Freeport McMoRan's gold-denominated depositary shares

Abstract In 1993 and 1994, FreeportMcMoRan Copper and Gold issued two series of gold-denominated depositary shares to finance the expansion of its mining capacity in Indonesia. The pricing of these securities reflected their enhanced credit quality, which arose from the positive correlation between the value of the firm and the value of the securities. This feature of the securities effectively bundles a gold hedge with financing. A bundled hedge avoids wealth transfers to senior bondholders, since junior bondholders can effectively net their bond-related claims on the firm against their hedge-related liability to the firm. Such securities cannot be replicated by conventional hedging strategies, and they also mitigate the asset substitution problem.
Bureaucrats as entrepreneurs: Do municipal telecommunications providers hinder private entrepreneurs?

Abstract We consider how government-owned enterprises affect privately owned rivals. Specifically, we compare the types of markets that municipally owned telecommunications providers in the United States serve to the types of markets that competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) serve. We find that CLECs focus on potential profitability while municipalities appear to respond to other factors, such as political considerations or the desire to provide competition to incumbents. As a result, municipal providers tend to serve markets that CLECs do not. We also find that the presence of a municipal provider in a market does not affect the probability that a CLEC also serves that market. Our results suggest municipalities may not pose a significant competitive threat to CLECs and do not preclude CLEC participation.
Earnings, retained earnings, and book-to-market in the cross section of expected returns

Abstract Book value of equity consists of two economically different components: retained earnings and contributed capital. We predict that book-to-market strategies work because the retained earnings component of the book value of equity includes the accumulation and, hence, the averaging of past earnings. Retained earnings-to-market predicts the cross section of average returns in U.S. and international data and subsumes book-to-market. Contributed capital-to-market has no predictive power. We show that retained earnings-to-market, and, by extension, book-to-market, predicts returns because it is a good proxy for underlying earnings yield (Ball, 1978; Berk, 1995) and not because book value represents intrinsic value.
The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation

In Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, henceforth AJR, (2001), we advanced the hypothesis that the mortality rates faced by Europeans in different parts of the world after 1500 affected their willingness to establish settlements and choice of colonization strategy. Places that were relatively healthy (for Europeans) were—when they fell under European control—more likely to receive better economic and political institutions. In contrast, places where European settlers were less likely to go were more likely to have “extractive” institutions imposed. We also posited that this early pattern of institutions has persisted over time and influences the extent and nature of institutions in the modern world. On this basis, we proposed using estimates of potential European settler mortality as an instrument for institutional variation in former European colonies today. Data on settlers themselves are unfortunately patchy—particularly because not many went to places they believed, with good reason, to be most unhealthy. We therefore followed the lead of Curtin (1989 and 1998) who compiled data on the death rates faced by European soldiers in various overseas postings. 1 Curtin’s data were based on pathbreaking data collection and statistical work initiated by the British military in the mid-nineteenth century. These data became part of the foundation of both contemporary thinking about public health (for soldiers and for civilians) and the life insurance industry (as actuaries and executives considered the
MALDEF and the Legal Investment in a Multi-Colored America

This is an essay that comes out of a roundtable on Mexican American Citizenship at the 2006 Annual Meetings of the Western History Association. This essay focuses on the early legal strategy of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) to tentatively explore the role that color consciousness played in MALDEF's understanding of law and jurisprudence. Accordingly, the essay briefly explores the manner by which the organization began to conceptualize the non-Whiteness of Mexican Americans as a matter of law in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The analysis is therefore suggestive of not only an important transformation in the color consciousness for many in the Mexican American community, but of an emerging critique of the Black-White paradigm in American law. Indeed, the essay argues that as numerous Mexican Americans became legally invested in their non-White color status largely but not exclusively as Chicana/os, the legal strategy pursued by MALDEF in this formative moment reflected the extent that many in community remained similarly committed to a categorization that recognized Chicana/os distinctive status as a non-White and non-Black group.
Graphical Models for Processing Missing Data

This article reviews recent advances in missing data research using graphical models to represent multivariate dependencies. We first examine the limitations of traditional frameworks from three di...
Deferring versus Expediting Consumption: The Effect of Outcome Concreteness on Sensitivity to Time Horizon:

Abstract This work examines consumers' preferences for consumption timing. Specifically, the authors examine how temporal framing (deferring versus expediting) of a decision moderates the sensitivity of consumers' pattern of discounting to changes in time horizon. The results from three experiments show greater decline in consumers' discount rates with time horizon (i.e., greater present bias) when they defer than when they expedite consumption. These results are robust to using monetary and nonmonetary outcomes, as well as to different time horizons (months, days). The authors further demonstrate that the different levels of mental representations (concreteness) triggered by the two decision frames moderate this difference in sensitivity.
The implications of first-order risk aversion for asset market risk premiums

Abstract In an effort to explain simultaneously the excess return predictability observed in equity, bond and foreign exchange markets, we incorporate preferences exhibiting first-order risk aversion into a general equilibrium two-country monetary model. When we calibrate the model to US and Japanese data, we find that first-order risk aversion substantially increases excess return predictability. However, this increased predictability is insufficient to match the data. We conclude that the observed patterns of excess return predictability are unlikely to be explained purely by time-varying risk premiums generated by highly risk averse agents in a complete markets economy.
The Dynamic Effects of Educational Accountability

This paper provides the first evidence that value-added education accountability schemes induce dynamic distortions. Extending earlier dynamic moral hazard models, I propose a new test for ratchet effects, showing that classroom inputs are distorted less when schools face a shorter horizon over which they can influence student performance. I then exploit grade span variation using rich educational data to credibly identify the extent of dynamic gaming and find compelling evidence of ratchet effects based on a triple-differences approach. Further analysis indicates that these effects are driven primarily by effort distortions, with teacher reallocations playing a secondary role.
Optimal control for the infinity obstacle problem

In this note, we show that a natural optimal control problem for the $\infty$-obstacle problem admits an optimal control which is also an optimal state. Moreover, we show the convergence of the minimal value of an optimal control problem for the $p$-obstacle problem to the minimal value of our optimal control problem for the $\infty$-obstacle problem, as $p\to\infty$.
Treating Measurement Error in Tobin's q

We compare the ability of three measurement error remedies to deliver unbiased estimates of coefficients in investment regressions. We examine high-order moment estimators, dynamic panel estimators, and simple instrumental variables estimators that use lagged mismeasured regressors as instruments. We show that recent investigations of this question are largely uninformative. We find that all estimators can perform well under correct specification, all can be biased under misspecification, and misspecification is easiest to detect in the case of high-order moment estimators. We develop and demonstrate a minimum distance technique that extends the high-order moment estimators to be used on unbalanced panel data. Published by Oxford University Press 2011., Oxford University Press.
Functional‐coefficient models under unit root behaviour

Summary We analyze the statistical properties of non-parametrically estimated functions in a functional-coefficient model if the data have a unit root. We show that the estimated function converges at a faster rate than under the stationary case. However, the estimator has a mixed normal distribution so that point-wise confidence intervals are calculated using the usual normal distribution theory rather than a Dickey–Fuller distribution. The results are used to show how one can discriminate between a unit root process and a non-linear functional-coefficient process. We illustrate the procedure using U.S. unemployment and interest rate data.
Upholding EPA Regulation of Greenhouse Gases: The Precautionary Principle Redux

The debate over the precautionary principle versus cost-benefit analysis in environmental decision making has engaged legal and policy experts for decades. At its heart, the precautionary principle counsels that governmental action should be taken to reduce the risk of serious harms, even if the evidence defining the harm is not sufficient to meet the evidentiary standard of certainty in a civil proceeding, and even if uncertainty is too great to be able to quantify and compare costs and benefits with precision. In Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles on the ground that such emissions endanger public health and welfare. Both EPA and the court placed primary reliance on the precautionary principle of the Clean Air Act’s endangerment standard as construed in the 1976 D.C. Circuit case Ethyl Corp. v. EPA, upholding EPA’s regulation of another motor vehicle pollutant, lead emissions resulting from the use of lead additives in gasoline. This Article contends that the issues and outcomes of the two regulatory decisions demonstrate why a precautionary approach— balancing probability and severity of harm and acting before full quantification of benefits and costs is possible—is a necessary framework for sound decision making on the most complex and consequential threats to the environment, including the extraordinary challenge of climate change.
Dark energy and extending the geodesic equations of motion: connecting the galactic and cosmological length scales

Recently, an extension of the geodesic equations of motion using the Dark Energy length scale was proposed. Here, we apply this extension to analyzing the motion of test particles at the galactic scale and longer. A cosmological check of the extension is made using the observed rotational velocity curves and core sizes of 1,393 spiral galaxies. We derive the density profile of a model galaxy using this extension, and with it, we calculate σ8 to be 0.73±0.12; this is within experimental error of the WMAP value of 0.761 +0.049 −0.048 . We then calculate R200 to be 206±53 kpc, which is in reasonable agreement with observations.
The opium wars, opium legalization and opium consumption in China

The effect of drug prohibition on drug consumption is a critical issue in debates over drug policy. One episode that provides information on the consumption-reducing efffect of drug prohibition is the Chinese legalization of opium in 1858. In this paper we examine the impact of China's opium legalization on the quantity and price of British opium exports from India to China during the nineteenth century. We find little evidence that legalization increased exports or decreased price. Thus, the evidence suggests China's opium prohibition had a minimal impact on opium consumption.