cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
A Localist's Case for Decentralizing Immigration Policy

In the past year, local governments have made a foray into the hotly debated arena of immigration law and policy by adopting laws to address illegal immigration in their respective jurisdictions. Courts have struck down many of these laws on the grounds that they are preempted pursuant to a traditional view of federalism. From a localist perspective, however, this is troubling for two reasons. First, traditional federalism fails to recognize local control and autonomy by insisting on treating local governments as mere arms of the state. Instead of the traditional two-tier, federal-state federalism model, localists favor a more modern view of federalism that envisions a third tier of an empowered, if not sovereign, local government. Second, even if localists accept the traditional model, local governments may be required by the federal government to enforce its immigration laws. This requirement would constitute an unfunded mandate that undermines local control and self-government. This paper will explore these tensions and argue that empowering local governments will stimulate more innovative policy-making in the immigration arena that may generate macro-level solutions for what is seen as an intractable problem.
Justifying the Proof Structure of Criminal Trials

During criminal trials, defendants enjoy a presumption of innocence, the burden of proof is on the government, and the standard of proof it must meet—beyond a reasonable doubt—is exacting. This ‘proof structure’ of trials is usually justified with an error distribution rationale. Yet there are well-known difficulties in establishing the optimal ratio of errors of false conviction to errors of false acquittals and with determining whether the proof structure enables us to obtain that ratio over a sufficiently lengthy run of cases. According to an alternative justification of the proof structure, individuals have a second-order moral right to demand rigorous, independent evaluations of the evidence that they have committed crimes before their primary moral rights are curtailed by legal punishment. The proof structure of criminal trials is one way to honour this right. Various objections to this defence of the proof structure are considered.
Culture and unethical conduct: Understanding the impact of individualism and collectivism on actual plagiarism

This criterion study examined the impact of the cultural dimensions of individualism and collectivism on actual plagiarism in working business students. Given globalization of business and recent business scandals, furthering our understanding of international ethics remains critical. Business students are the potential employees, managers and leaders of organizations in the future. In this study we focus on one form of unethical conduct by business students, i.e. actual plagiarism, and seek to determine the link between this behavior and cultural values of individualism/collectivism and associated stereotypes of Asian/Caucasian students. Our findings suggest that individualists plagiarize more than collectivists, and that no significant differences in plagiarism exist between Asian and Caucasian students, contrary to popular beliefs. The implications of these findings for scholars and managers are discussed.
Authenticate This: Revamping Secondary Trademark Liability Standards to Address a Worldwide Web of Counterfeits

For years, eBay has described itself as an online sales platform that links buyers and sellers. In recent years, however, eBay has not only become the world’s largest online marketplace but also “the center of a new universe of counterfeit products.” Although eBay did not create the counterfeiting problem, its success as a forum for sales of counterfeit products has made it a target for luxury brand owners. Premier jeweler Tiffany & Co. (“Tiffany”) first filed suit against eBay in New York district court, claiming that eBay facilitated and allowed the sale of thousands of pieces of fake Tiffany products and, in the process, devalued the 150-year-old Tiffany brand. On appeal, the Second Circuit affirmed the district court’s conclusion that eBay was not contributorily liable for trademark infringement. Specifically, the court found that eBay’s prompt responses to notices of potentially infringing listings prevented it from possessing the specific knowledge of infringement necessary for a finding of contributory liability. This Note addresses the problem of trademark infringement of luxury brands on eBay. By examining the Second Circuit’s decision in Tiffany v. eBay, the efficacy of eBay’s current anti-fraud systems, and the conflicting interests at stake, this Note proposes a balancing framework that will likely promote the integrity of the online marketplace while allowing room for the public to engage in legitimate secondary market activity. Although counterfeiting is not limited to premium goods, luxury brands – especially coveted names like Tiffany, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci – are among the fastest-growing targets for counterfeits on the Internet. This Note explains how the Second Circuit’s approach to eBay’s secondary liability fails to lay a reasonable template for addressing misaligned interests and complex issues of technological change. Shielding eBay from liability where it lacks specific knowledge of infringement largely eliminates worthwhile incentives to develop more effective solutions. As there is evidence that eBay’s efforts at combating infringement have not been effective, a balancing framework will likely encourage eBay to adopt more effective alternative anti-counterfeiting mechanisms as they become available. Importantly, by putting pressure on eBay and Tiffany to work together, a balancing framework can promote a legitimate secondary marketplace without restricting technological innovation.
Realigning Research: A Proposed (Partial) Agenda for Sociolegal Scholars

In light of the potential paradigm-shifting nature of AB 109, California’s Realignment policy, which was instituted in the wake of Brown v. Plata, this article delineates several key research trajectories that might be pursued in order to understand its sociolegal impacts on the county criminal justice systems responsible for implementation. It outlines the major trajectories of scholarship that have already emerged or that are likely to emerge concerning the development, passage, and implementation of Realignment. It then focuses in on the potential for robust sociolegal scholarship on its transformation from policy to practice, making the case for two areas of research that should be pursued: transformations of local courts under Realignment, and the role of local jails as increasingly important places of punishment.
Designing an AI Health Coach and Studying Its Utility in Promoting Regular Aerobic Exercise

Our research aims to develop interactive, social agents that can coach people to learn new tasks, skills, and habits. In this article, we focus on coaching sedentary, overweight individuals (i.e., “trainees”) to exercise regularly. We employ adaptive goal setting in which the intelligent health coach generates, tracks, and revises personalized exercise goals for a trainee. The goals become incrementally more difficult as the trainee progresses through the training program. Our approach is model-based—the coach maintains a parameterized model of the trainee’s aerobic capability that drives its expectation of the trainee’s performance. The model is continually revised based on trainee-coach interactions. The coach is embodied in a smartphone application, NutriWalking, which serves as a medium for coach-trainee interaction. We adopt a task-centric evaluation approach for studying the utility of the proposed algorithm in promoting regular aerobic exercise. We show that our approach can adapt the trainee program not only to several trainees with different capabilities but also to how a trainee’s capability improves as they begin to exercise more. Experts rate the goals selected by the coach better than other plausible goals, demonstrating that our approach is consistent with clinical recommendations. Further, in a 6-week observational study with sedentary participants, we show that the proposed approach helps increase exercise volume performed each week.
The political economy of special economic zones

This paper is a first attempt to apply a robust political economy framework to explain when Special Economic Zones (SEZs) can contribute to economic development. A robust political economy is one that channels the actions of self-interested individuals with limited information to promote economic progress. In the right institutional context, SEZs tend to promote economic growth. In the wrong institutional context, they can cause resource misallocation and rent-seeking. Policy makers introducing SEZs must overcome the knowledge problem to avoid misdirected economic planning. Yet, the scheme can only fulfill its purpose if it also prevents destructive rent-seeking behavior, both from businesses and from government authorities. The political economy framework of SEZs can be applied to judge their potential efficacy, something that orthodox studies of country features such as natural resources, infrastructure, and zone location fail to do. The Indian and Chinese experiences with SEZs illustrate these points.
Alternative Methods of Appellate Review in Trade Remedy Cases: Examining Results of U.S. Judicial and NAFTA Binational Review of U.S. Agency Decisions from 1989 to 2005

When the United States and Canada agreed to replace U.S. judicial review of trade-remedy cases with a new dispute mechanism under Chapter 19 of the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (now the North American Free Trade Agreement), the U.S. Congress and trade negotiators expected that the new dispute settlement panels would apply U.S. law and the standard of review in the same manner as U.S. courts. This requirement was embodied in the text of the agreement and has at least nominally been applied by Chapter 19 panels ever since. Empirical analysis of seventeen years of decisions now allows a conclusion with a high degree of confidence that this has not been the case. Chapter 19 panels are far more likely than U.S. courts to overturn U.S. agency decisions. Not only that, but Chapter 19 panels have produced outcomes more favorable to Canadian importers than have U.S. courts. This outcome illustrates that the facial legal terms of an international agreement may give a misleading impression of how it will actually be implemented, and suggests that greater attention must be paid to how it will be interpreted and by whom.
The Impact of the 2005 Bankruptcy Law on Subprime Mortgage Performance

This article investigates the effects of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 on subprime mortgage performance. Based on a large mortgage dataset, the study quantifies that the new legislation successfully reduces the number of subprime mortgage borrowers filing for bankruptcy. However, the new law has significant and negative impacts on subprime mortgage performance. Specifically, it has caused an unnecessarily higher number of foreclosures and reduced the success rate of bankruptcy filings. This has a direct influence on the subprime financial crisis.
THE LIMITS OF A NONCONSEQUENTIALIST APPROACH TO TORTS

The nonconsequentialist revival in tort theory has focused almost exclusively on one issue: showing that the rules governing compensation for “wrongful” acts reflect corrective justice rather than welfarist norms. The literature either is silent on what makes an act wrongful in the first place or suggests criteria that seem indistinguishable from some version of cost/benefit analysis. As a result, cost/benefit analysis is currently the only game in town for determining appropriate standards of conduct for socially useful but risky acts. This is no small omission, and the failure of nonconsequentialists to acknowledge it or cure it can be traced to a number of recurring problems in the nonconsequentialist tort literature. Chief among them is the tendency to conflate prohibition and compensation, and to treat imposition of risk and imposition of harm as if they were distinct forms of conduct rather than the same conduct viewed from different temporal perspectives.
A Structural Approach to Identifying the Sources of Local-Currency Price Stability ∗

The inertia of the local-currency prices of traded goods in the face of exchange-rate changes is a well-documented phenomenon in International Economics. This paper develops a structural model to identify the sources of this local-currency price stability and applies it to micro data from the beer market. The empirical procedure exploits manufacturers’ and retailers’ first-order conditions in conjunction with detailed information on the frequency of price adjustments following exchange-rate changes to quantify the relative importance of local non-traded cost components, markup adjustment by manufacturers and retailers, and nominal price rigidities in the incomplete transmission of such changes to prices. We find that, on average, approximately 60% of the incomplete exchange rate pass-through is due to local non-traded costs; 8% to markup adjustment; 30% to the existence of own-brand price adjustment costs, and 1% to the indirect/strategic effect of such costs, though these results vary considerably across individual brands according to their market shares.
Hidden Costs of Mandatory Long-Term Compensation

After the 2008 financial panic, long-term compensation measures have gained favor as a way to limit managerial opportunism and excessive risk-taking. These measures, which may become mandatory for systemically important institutions, include restriction (i.e., deferral) of stock grants for a period of years, and, in the event of performance reversals, divestment of deferred stock and clawbacks of bonus compensation. These measures are considered uncontroversial enough that some have suggested that all public companies, not just systemically important firms, should adopt them. In this Article, I argue that the benefits of long-term compensation have been overstated while the potential downsides have been largely ignored. Restricted periods for equity grants must be large compared to the executive’s tenure in order to have a significant effect upon behavior overall, and mandatory clawback provisions end up transferring what would have been bonus pay into salary. Furthermore, to the extent that long-term compensation does affect behavior, these consequences are not necessarily good. I show that given fairly reasonable assumptions of executive risk aversion, the information content of long-term and short-term price signals, and managerial control over the timing of project execution and disclosure, a long-term focus can have significant negative effects.
Environmental Information and Market Reactions to Environmental Legislation

Environmental issues have attracted national attention and are becoming a focus at many firms. This paper examines the relation between stock price reactions to the Superfund Amendments and Reautho...
Reactions of Nonprofit Monitors to Financial Reporting Problems

ABSTRACT This study investigates how those in charge of monitoring nonprofits—donors and boards of directors—react to disclosure of financial reporting problems (accounting errors and internal cont...
Does it matter who serves on the Financial Accounting Standards Board? Bob Herz’s resignation and fair value accounting for loans

On August 24, 2010, Bob Herz, then chairman of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) resigned unexpectedly. Before his resignation, Herz supported a FASB proposal for applying fair value to loans and cast the deciding vote. This proposal received strong pushbacks from banks and bank regulators. Using an event study methodology, we examine whether Herz’s abrupt resignation changed the market’s expectation on whether the fair value proposal would be finalized. We find that bank investors responded positively to Herz’s resignation, especially banks that would have been affected more by the fair value requirement for loans. They also responded negatively to the initial proposal and positively to the later reversal of the proposal after Herz’s departure. Our results indicate that bank investors believed that Herz’s position on the fair value proposal is crucial to the final outcome of the proposal.
Protections for Electronic Communications: The Stored Communications Act and the Fourth Amendment

As e-mail and other forms of electronic communications began becoming widely used, Congress recognized the need to protect these new forms of communication from impermissible intrusion. Unsure whether the flexible approach to determining the extent of Fourth Amendment protections as announced in Katz v. United States would extend to electronic communications, Congress enacted the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to ensure a baseline level of protection. This Note argues that the Fourth Amendment does extend to electronic communications and, therefore, the provisions of the ECPA that allow the government to access certain electronic communications without a search warrant are unconstitutional.
AN EVALUATION OF INFLATION FORECASTS FROM SURVEYS USING REAL-TIME DATA

This paper carries out the task of evaluating inflation forecasts from the Livingston Survey and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, using the Real-Time Data Set for Macroeconomists as a source of real-time data. We examine the magnitude and patterns of revisions to the inflation rate based on the output price index. We then run tests on the forecasts from the surveys to see how good they are. We find that there are several episodes in which forecasters made persistent forecast errors, but the episodes are so short that by the time they can be identified, they have nearly disappeared. Thus, improving on the survey forecasts seems to be very difficult in real time, and the attempt to do so leads to increased forecast errors.
Governance under the Gun: Spillover Effects of Hedge Fund Activism

Hedge fund activism is associated with improvements in the governance and performance of targeted firms. In this article, we show that these positive effects of activism reach beyond the targets, as nontargeted peers make similar improvements under the threat of activism. Peers with higher threat perception, as measured by director connections to past targets, are more likely to increase leverage and payout, decrease capital expenditures and cash, and improve return on assets and asset turnover. As a result, their valuations improve, and their probability of being targeted declines. Our results are not explained by time-varying industry conditions or competition effects whereby improved targets force their product market rivals to become more competitive.
South–South Migration: The Impact of Nicaraguan Immigrants on Earnings, Inequality and Poverty in Costa Rica

Summary More than half of those who emigrate from developing countries move to other developing countries, yet there have been few studies of the impact of this South–South migration. In this paper, we examine the impact of migration from one developing country, Nicaragua, on the labor market in another developing country, Costa Rica. We find little evidence to support the hypothesis that Nicaraguan migration to Costa Rica was an important factor contributing to falling earnings, increased inequality or stagnating poverty in Costa Rica.
How did increased competition affect credit ratings

Abstract The credit rating industry has historically been dominated by just two agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, leading to long-standing legislative and regulatory calls for increased competition. The material entry of a third rating agency (Fitch) to the competitive landscape offers a unique experiment to empirically examine how increased competition affects the credit ratings market. What we find is relatively troubling. Specifically, we discover that increased competition from Fitch coincides with lower quality ratings from the incumbents: Rating levels went up, the correlation between ratings and market-implied yields fell, and the ability of ratings to predict default deteriorated. We offer several possible explanations for these findings that are linked to existing theories.
Does Dworkin Commit Dworkin’s Fallacy?: A Reply to Justice in Robes

In an article entitled ‘Dworkin's Fallacy, Or What the Philosophy of Language Can't Teach Us about the Law’, I argued that in Law's Empire Ronald Dworkin misderived his interpretive theory of law from an implicit interpretive theory of meaning, thereby committing ‘Dworkin's fallacy’. In his recent book, Justice in Robes, Dworkin denies that he committed the fallacy. As evidence he points to the fact that he considered three theories of law—‘conventionalism’, ‘pragmatism’ and ‘law as integrity’—in Law's Empire. Only the last of these is interpretive, but each, he argues, is compatible with his interpretive theory of meaning, which he describes as the view that ‘the doctrinal concept of law is an interpretive concept’. In this Reply, I argue that Dworkin's argument that he does not commit Dworkin's fallacy is itself an example of the fallacy and that Dworkin's fallacy pervades Justice in Robes just as much as it did Law's Empire.
Orbifold biquotients of SU(3)

Abstract One of the main methods of constructing new spaces with positive or almost positive curvature is the study of biquotients first studied in detail by Eschenburg. In this paper we classify orbifold biquotients of the Lie Group SU ( 3 ) , and construct a new example of a 5-dimensional orbifold with almost positive curvature. Furthermore, we extend the work of Florit and Ziller on the geometric properties of the orbifolds SU ( 3 ) / / T 2 .
Liberty and Marriage - Baehr and Beyond: Due Process in 1998

Discussing justice, fairness and equality in marriage from a due process context, this paper was part of a symposium focused on Loving v. Virginia.
Gift and Danger

The intensity of the law’s interaction with gift giving suggests that examining their relationship might produce interesting insights about both gift giving and the law. Yet no social scientist has seriously examined the gift norms included in modern systems of private law. The complexity of gift law is due to the interaction of two competing social ideas: the law’s concern that gift giving represents a danger to society; and the power of customary gift obligations to engender and maintain social relationships. The law gets involved in gift giving when it feels that the parties need some protection, and this involvement varies considerably among legal systems. Some systems are suspicious of inter vivos transfers, while others tend to view gifts as they view exchange. Since the law’s formal requirements do not displace customary obligations this field provides an opportunity to examine how the law is shaped by the customary obligations Mauss elaborated.
Monopoly Quality Degradation and Regulation in Cable Television

Using an empirical framework based on the Mussa-Rosen model of monopoly quality choice, we calculate the degree of quality degradation in cable television markets and the impact of regulation on those choices. We find lower bounds of quality degradation ranging from 11 to 45 percent of offered service qualities. Furthermore, cable operators in markets with local regulatory oversight offer significantly higher quality, less degradation, and greater quality per dollar, despite higher prices.
The Authority to Regulate Broadband Internet Access Over Cable

What, in the eyes of the law, is cable broadband? The regulation of cable-based platforms for high-speed access to the Internet has become the most controversial subject in communications law. A trilogy of judicial decisions on the statutory status of cable broadband is forcing the Federal Communications Commission to confront a question it has consistently dodged. High-speed Internet access over cable is neither a "cable service" nor a "telecommunications service" under the Communications Act, but rather an "information service." From a statutory patchwork including the Clayton Act, the "advanced telecommunications capability" provision of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and longstanding grants of rulemaking authority, the Commission may require the operators of cable broadband facilities to offer their customers a choice of Internet service providers. This Article concludes that the Commission should exercise its power to impose open access requirements for cable
A Framework Convention on Global Health: Social Justice Lite, or a Light on Social Justice?

With the publication of the final report of the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, it becomes clear that there is considerable convergence between a policy agenda rooted on social epidemiology and one rooted in a concern for human rights. As commentators like Jonathan Mann have argued, concern for human rights and the achievement of social justice can inform and improve public health. In this article, we ask a different question: what does a health perspective adds to the enduring fight for a more just world? We consider three possibilities: (1) that public health, in an inversion of Mann's argument, actually provides useful tools for specifying social injustice; (2) that, contrary to the usual critical stance and assumption of weakness, the institutions of public health bring powerful capacities to the practical promotion of social justice; and (3) that health as a banner mobilizes people who would not be mobilized to act in the name of social justice.
Cunningham: Why Federal Practitioners and Policy Makers Should Pay Attention

Part of the Law Commons Publication Information Published as Michael M. O’Hear, Cunningham: Why Federal Practitioners and Policy Makers Should Pay Attention, 18 Fed. Sent’g Rep. 260 (2006). © 2006 by the Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Vera Institute of Justice. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Vera Institute of Justice for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® on Caliber (http://caliber.ucpress.net/) or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center, http://www.copyright.com.
Strategic Wages Policy and the Gains from Cooperation

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses strategic wages policy and the gains from cooperation. The policies of different countries in the world economy with regard to wage indexation have been varied. The analysis of wage indexation has been extensively studied both in the context of closed economies and for small open economies. A standard result of this literature is that the optimal degree of wage indexation is to index fully for demand shocks but to index only partially in the face of supply shocks. In the open economy, an important conclusion is that the optimal degree of wage indexation depends critically upon the form of exchange rate regime. Under flexible exchange rates, increased wage indexation typically generates a negative externality abroad, with the result that the Nash noncooperative equilibrium typically leads to over indexation relative to the Pareto-optimal cooperative equilibrium. Under fixed exchange rates, the retaliatory action of the foreign economy is able to eliminate these externalities, in which case, the noncooperative and cooperative equilibria coincide. A system of flexible exchange rates, with each country pursuing its own independent wages policy, will lead to a reasonable outcome.
Gifted kids or pushy parents? Foreign acquisitions and plant performance in Indonesia

This paper uses micro data from the Indonesian Census of Manufacturing to analyze the causal relationship between foreign ownership and plant productivity. To control for the possible endogeneity of the FDI decision, the difference in differences approach is combined with a matching technique. An advantage of this novel method is the ability to follow the timing of the observed changes in productivity and other aspects of plant performance. The results suggest that foreign ownership leads to significant productivity improvements in the acquired plants. The improvements become visible in the acquisition year and continue in the subsequent periods. After three years, the acquired plants outperform the control group in terms of productivity by 34 percentage points. The data also suggest that the rise in productivity is a result of restructuring, as acquired plants increase their investment outlays, employment, and wages. Foreign ownership also appears to enhance the integration of plants into the global economy through increased exports and imports.
Communication Costs, Information Acquisition, and Voting Decisions in Proxy Contests

This article synthesizes some recent progress in the theories of corporate control and political lobbying to model the proxy campaign as a political campaign. The model yields a number of testable implications, only some of which have been examined in the literature. For example, if the loss from voting for a "bad" dissident exceeds the gain from voting for a "good" dissident, the model predicts that as communication costs fall, the number of proxy fights increases, announcement day returns decrease, and the fraction of dissident wins first increases and then decreases. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.
The Real Rule of Reason: Bridging the Disconnect

One of the most famous rules in antitrust law is the "Rule of Reason." The common understanding of the Rule of Reason is that courts balance the anticompetitive and procompetitive effects of agreements. If the anticompetitve effects predominate, the agreement is invalidated; if the procompetitive effects win out, the agreement is upheld. This Article conducts an empirical analysis of all the Rule of Reason cases in the modern era. It concludes that, in contrast to the common understanding, courts in an astonishing 96% of Rule of Reason cases do not balance at all. Instead, courts engage in a burden-shifting analysis, dismissing the case at any of three stages preceding the ultimate balancing. The three stages focus on anticompetitive effects, procompetitive justifications, and reasonable necessity. In addition to presenting the results of the empirical analysis, the Article undertakes a normative analysis, asking whether the courts should consider each stage of Rule of Reason analysis. The conclusions are based on the legislative history of the Sherman Act, the common law preceding the Act, and the Chicago and Post-Chicago Schools. Relatedly, the Article examines whether courts are able to assess each stage of the analysis. Discovering the disconnect between what courts do and what everyone thinks they do leads to consequences: fewer lawsuits, more focused attention on the relevant factors, and a reconciliation of the reasoning and results of antitrust cases.
Valuation in Over-the-Counter Markets

We provide the impact on asset prices of search-and-bargaining frictions in over-the-counter markets. Under certain conditions, illiquidity discounts are higher when counterparties are harder to find, when sellers have less bargaining power, when the fraction of qualified owners is smaller, or when risk aversion, volatility, or hedging demand is larger. Supply shocks cause prices to jump, and then 'recover' over time, with a time signature that is exaggerated by search frictions: The price jump is larger and the recovery is slower in less liquid markets. We discuss a variety of empirical implications. , Oxford University Press.
Responding to Relative Decline: The Plank Road Boom of Antebellum New York

From 1847 to 1853 New Yorkers built more than 3,500 miles of wooden roads. Financed primarily by residents of declining rural townships, plank roads were seen as a means of linking isolated areas to the canal and railroad network. A broad range of individuals invested in the roads, suggesting that the drive for bigger markets was supported by a large cross section of the population. Considerable community spirit animated the movement, indicating that New Yorkers used the social capital of the community to reach their entrepreneurial aspirations.
Trade and direct investment in producer services and the domestic market for expertise

. Foreign producer services can provide substantial benefits for domestic firms. We build on earlier monopolistic-competition models of intermediate producer services in this paper. Results show that: (1) while foreign services are partial-equilibrium substitutes for domestic skilled labour, they may be general-equilibrium complements, (2) service trade can provide crucial missing inputs that reverse comparative advantage in final goods, (3) the ‘optimal’ tax on imported services may be a subsidy, and (4) in our dynamic formulation, there may be earnings losses for immobile workers along a transition path that suggest potentially important equity consequences of reform. JEL classification: F12, F16, F23 Commerce international et investissement direct dans les services de production et le marche interieur de l’expertise. Les services de production en provenance de l’etranger peuvent engendrer des avantages substantiels pour les entreprises domestiques. Dans ce memoire, les auteurs construisent sur la base de certains modeles anterieurs de concurrence monopolistique de services de production intermediaires. Les resultats montrent que: (1) alors que les services de l’etranger sont des substituts pour le travail domestique specialise en equilibre partiel, en equilibre general, ils peuvent etre des complements; (2) le commerce de services peut fournir des intrants cruciaux qui manquent et ce faisant renverser les avantages comparatifs dans les produits finaux; (3) la fiscalite optimale imposee sur les services importes peut etre une subvention; et (4) dans la formulation dynamique du modele, il peut y avoir perte de revenus pour les travailleurs immobiles le long du sentier de transition, ce qui suggere qu’il peut y avoir des consequences importantes au plan de l’equite associees a certaines reformes.
Sloppy Tags and Metacrap? Quality of User Contributed Tags in Collaborative Social Tagging Systems

There have been an increasing number of social tagging systems on the web that allow users to contribute tags collaboratively to describe various resources. As the number of tags continue to grow, it is important that we can describe and measure their quality. There have been conflicting opinions about the quality of user-contributed tags but the issue has not been systematically studied. In this work-in-progress paper, we propose a preliminary methodology for assessing tag quality. The methodology identifies three aspects of tag quality in a social tagging system: individual tags, collections of tags, and the association of the tags with the corresponding resources. The proposed methodology is being empirically evaluated using the tags of several social tagging systems. In addition to validating and refining the tag quality assessment methodology, the empirical analysis is expected to provide new findings about various properties of the tags. These findings will be used to improve the design of tagging systems by incorporating mechanisms that induce the contribution of high quality tags.
Anatomy of Corruption: An Approach to the Political Economy of Underdevelopment

Abstract. An examination and critique of the functionalist literature on corruption in the political administration of Less Developed Countries (LDCs) indicate that its claims are without empirical foundation. Its theses with regard to the political, economic and administrative effects in most LDCs contrast with the facts. No benefits for development from corruption are found; market corruption, for example, does not appear to improve allocative efficiency. The erosion in a government's capacity to formulate and implement policies making for economic growth is an obstacle to economic progress.
Can (and Should) an Insurance Defense Attorney Be Held Liable for Insurance Bad Faith

Insurance defense lawyers are faced with many practical and ethical challenges in the contemporary practice of law. Outside of the practical and ethical challenges looms a question concerning insurance bad faith – can (and should) an insurance defense attorney and/or insurance defense law firm ever be held liable for insurance bad faith?In this article, I state that with the ever-increasing expanse of bad faith liability today, insurance defense attorneys and law firms are potentially next to be encompassed in the liability circle. Today, as a general rule, insurance defense attorneys and law firms are not directly liable to an insured or a third-party claimant for breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and thus cannot be directly liable for bad faith. However, the road to this rule was not always clear, and this article examines the history behind this doctrinal rule.Although courts currently do not allow direct liability of insurance defense attorneys/firms for insurance bad faith, courts have allowed exposure to indirect liability for insurance bad faith. This scenario occurs typically as an indemnity suit that is filed by an insurer against a law firm.In an era of expanding bad faith liability, I contend that the doctrinal rule should still stand that first-party and third-party insurance bad faith liability should not be imposed on law firms and/or attorneys. I argue that the direct liability of an insurance defense attorney/law firm for insurance bad faith should be an idea whose time an age has come in the past and has gone, to be gone, forever.
Public Service Professionalism for Performance Measurement and Evaluation

For over fifty years, efforts have been made to measure the results of government activities. Most recently, performance measurement and evaluation have been key components of government reforms in many countries in reaction to loss of confidence in governments and budget stringency. Emphasis is on measuring outcomes or results within a general framework of strategic planning and objective setting, and in a context of devolution, managerial decentralization, and privatization. While it seems reasonable that governments should justify their use of public funds by demonstrating the effectiveness of their programs and activities, performance measurement in practice is by no means straightforward and demands considerable thought in its design and implementation.
Competition Policy and Comparative Corporate Governance of State-Owned Enterprises

ABSTRACT The legal origins literature overlooks a key area of corporate governance-the governance of state-owned enterprises ("SOEs"). There are key theoretical differences between SOEs and publicly-traded corporations. In comparing the differences of both internal and external controls of SOEs, none of the existing legal origins allow for effective corporate governance monitoring. Because of the difficulties of undertaking a cross-country quantitative review of the governance of SOEs, this Article examines, through a series of case studies, SOE governance issues among postal providers. The examination of postal firms supports the larger theoretical claim about the weaknesses of SOE governance across legal origins. In itself, the lack of effective corporate governance would not be fatal if some of the SOE's inefficient and societal-welfare-reducing behavior could be remedied under antitrust law. However, a review of antitrust decisions on the issue of predatory pricing by SOEs reveals that antitrust is equally ineffective in its attempts to monitor SOEs. This Article concludes by identifying a number of devices to reduce the current inadequacies of both antitrust and corporate governance of SOEs. I. INTRODUCTION 1715 II. PRIVATE VS. GOVERNMENT CONTROL OF FIRMS 1720 A. Setting the Stage 1720 B. Firms Generally 1724 C. SOEs Generally 1727 D. Internal Controls 1724 1. Corporations 1731 2. Managerial ownership and pay 1733 3. Board oversight 1735 E. External Controls 1737 1. Market for corporate control 1737 2. Equity 1738 3. Debt 1739 4. Market for managers 1740 5. Bankruptcy 1742 F. Transparency 1742 III. POSTAL ECONOMICS 1744 A. Importance of Postal and Express Services 1746 B. Regulation of Postal Service 1747 C. Potential Anti-Competitive Abuses in the Postal Industry 1748 D. Problem of Universal Service Obligations 1750 E. Scope and Problem of SOEs in the Postal Sector ........ 1752 IV. CORPORATE GOVERNANCE OF POSTAL SOES 1753 A. Chile 1754 B. New Zealand 1756 C. United Kingdom 1758 D. Sweden 1760 E. South Africa 1762 F. Canada 1764 G. Korea 1765 H. Japan 1767 I. United States . …
In the Village Square: Risk Misperception and Decisionmaking in the Regulation of Low-Level Radioactive Waste

Every year, commercial and governmental sources in the United States generate approximately 1.4 million cubic feet of "low-level" radioactive waste (LLRW) - slightly-contaminated material discarded by a variety of institutional, medical, utility and government users of radiation. For numerous reasons, public perceptions of radioactive waste disposal have become increasingly negative. As a result, the public now perceives the risks associated with LLRW and its disposal to be far greater than current estimates of the actual risk. The regulatory structure that governs LLRW disposal and, in particular, the federal Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act of 1980 and its 1985 amendments (LLRWPA), aggravate this difficulty. In this article, I describe the current regulatory framework for LLRW regulation in the United States, including recent Supreme Court interpretation of the LLRWPA, and then propose an efficient auction-based approach to siting LLRW disposal facilities that properly accounts for risk levels.
A general equilibrium model of statistical discrimination

Abstract We study a general equilibrium model with endogenous human capital formation in which ex ante identical groups may be treated asymmetrically in equilibrium. The interaction between an informational externality and general equilibrium effects creates incentives for groups to specialize. Discrimination may arise even if the corresponding model with a single group has a unique equilibrium. The dominant group gains from discrimination, rationalizing why a majority may be reluctant to eliminate discrimination. The model is also consistent with “reverse discrimination” as a remedy against discrimination since it may be necessary to decrease the welfare of the dominant group to achieve parity.
The rise of social bots

Today's social bots are sophisticated and sometimes menacing. Indeed, their presence can endanger online ecosystems as well as our society.
Long Forward Probabilities, Recovery, and the Term Structure of Bond Risk Premiums

We show that the martingale component in the long-term factorization of the stochastic discount factor due to Alvarez and Jermann (2005) and Hansen and Scheinkman (2009) is highly volatile, produces a downward-sloping term structure of bond Sharpe ratios, and implies that the long bond is far from growth optimality. In contrast, the long forward probabilities forecast an upward sloping term structure of bond Sharpe ratios that starts from zero for short-term bonds and implies that the long bond is growth optimal. Thus, transition independence and degeneracy of the martingale component are implausible assumptions in the bond market.
The labor/land ratio and India's caste system

This paper proposes that India's caste system and involuntary labor were joint responses by a nonworking landowning class to a low labor/land ratio in which the rules of the caste system supported the institution of involuntary labor. The hypothesis is tested in two ways: longitudinally, with data from ancient religious texts, and cross-sectionally, with twentieth-century statistics on regional population/land ratios linked to anthropological measures of caste-system rigidity. Both the longitudinal and cross-sectional evidence suggest that the labor/land ratio affected the caste system's development, persistence, and rigidity over time and across regions of India.
Sidgwick's Utilitarian Analysis of Law: A Bridge from Bentham to Becker?

Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian analysis of crime and punishment is regularly characterized as an inspiration for the economic analysis of law, whereas Henry Sidgwick has been all but ignored in the discussions of the history of law and economics. Sidgwick is well known as the godfather of Cambridge welfare economics. Yet, as we will show, his utilitarian analysis of issues in property, contract, tort, and, criminal law reflects themes now associated with the Chicago approach and advances on Bentham in multiple ways?including through the use of marginal analysis?making him a bridge on the road from Bentham to Becker.
Shall Businesses Profit If Their Owners Lose Their Souls? Examining Whether Closely Held Corporations May Seek Exemptions from the Contraceptive Mandate

May for-profit, secular corporations claim the protection of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA)? This question is central to numerous lawsuits against the federal government in which business owners argue that certain regulations under the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act substantially burden the exercise of their religion. This Note examines the threshold hurdle that forprofit business owners must clear to successfully state a claim under RFRA: the question of whether the businesses are “persons” the statute protects. This is an issue of first impression for the U.S. Supreme Court, and it has split the circuit courts of appeal. First, this Note provides an overview of free exercise jurisprudence, with a focus on the ebbs and flows of the Supreme Court’s exemption doctrine. This overview includes a discussion of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the laws, regulations, and religious objections that form the basis of the current disputes. Second, this Note introduces the conflict among circuit courts and their varying interpretations of whether for-profit corporations are “persons” under RFRA. Third, this Note assesses this conflict by examining RFRA’s text and the context in which Congress enacted the statute. Nothing within this context precludes corporations from stating RFRA claims. In addition, this Note examines legislative history that supports application of the Dictionary Act, which explains that the word “person” in federal statutes includes corporations. This Note ultimately concludes that RFRA does indeed grant corporations the ability to seek exemptions, but that the statute will require courts to undertake the task of ascertaining the proper contours of the law as applied to different corporate forms.
Contractual barriers to transparency in electronic voting

We analyze a data set of 55 contracts between state and local election jurisdictions and voting system vendors for transparency-inhibiting terms and provisions. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of certain provisions and make recommendations that jurisdictions can follow to better support transparency in the elections process.
Impact of ownership type on environment-strategy linkage and performance: Evidence from a transitional economy

In this study I contend that the ownership type has a significant impact on the environment–strategy configurations amongst different firms in a transitional economy. The influence of ownership type on the environment–strategy configuration is tested, based on an analysis of surveys of 201 managers from four types of companies in China: state-owned, collectively-owned, privately-owned, and foreign joint ventures. Results support the central notion that each ownership type exhibits a distinct environment–strategy configuration, which in turn has important performance implications for the firms.