cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
BRST Quantization of Cosmological Perturbations

BRST quantization is an elegant and powerful method to quantize theories with local symmetries. In this article we study the Hamiltonian BRST quantization of cosmological perturbations in a universe dominated by a scalar field, along with the closely related quantization method of Dirac. We describe how both formalisms apply to perturbations in a time-dependent background, and how expectation values of gauge-invariant operators can be calculated in the in-in formalism. Our analysis focuses mostly on the free theory. By appropriate canonical transformations we simplify and diagonalize the free Hamiltonian. BRST quantization in derivative gauges allows us to dramatically simplify the structure of the propagators, whereas Dirac quantization, which amounts to quantization in synchronous gauge, dispenses with the need to introduce ghosts and preserves the locality of the gauge-fixed action.
SIM(2) and SUSY

The proposal of hep-ph/0601236, that the laws of physics in flat spacetime need be invariant only under a SIM(2) subgroup of the Lorentz group, is extended to include supersymmetry. = 1 SUSY gauge theories which include SIM(2) couplings for the fermions in chiral multiplets are formulated. These theories contain two conserved supercharges rather than the usual four.
Towards Baselines for Shoulder Surfing on Mobile Authentication

Given the nature of mobile devices and unlock procedures, unlock authentication is a prime target for credential leaking via shoulder surfing, a form of an observation attack. While the research community has investigated solutions to minimize or prevent the threat of shoulder surfing, our understanding of how the attack performs on current systems is less well studied. In this paper, we describe a large online experiment (n = 1173) that works towards establishing a baseline of shoulder surfing vulnerability for current unlock authentication systems. Using controlled video recordings of a victim entering in a set of 4- and 6-length PINs and Android unlock patterns on different phones from different angles, we asked participants to act as attackers, trying to determine the authentication input based on the observation. We find that 6-digit PINs are the most elusive attacking surface where a single observation leads to just 10.8% successful attacks (26.5% with multiple observations). As a comparison, 6-length Android patterns, with one observation, were found to have an attack rate of 64.2% (79.9% with multiple observations). Removing feedback lines for patterns improves security to 35.3% (52.1% with multiple observations). This evidence, as well as other results related to hand position, phone size, and observation angle, suggests the best and worst case scenarios related to shoulder surfing vulnerability which can both help inform users to improve their security choices, as well as establish baselines for researchers.
Searching for a Search Method: Benchmarking Search Algorithms for Generating NLP Adversarial Examples

We study the behavior of several black-box search algorithms used for generating adversarial examples for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. We perform a fine-grained analysis of three elements relevant to search: search algorithm, search space, and search budget. When new search algorithms are proposed in past work, the attack search space is often modified alongside the search algorithm. Without ablation studies benchmarking the search algorithm change with the search space held constant, one cannot tell if an increase in attack success rate is a result of an improved search algorithm or a less restrictive search space. Additionally, many previous studies fail to properly consider the search algorithms’ run-time cost, which is essential for downstream tasks like adversarial training. Our experiments provide a reproducible benchmark of search algorithms across a variety of search spaces and query budgets to guide future research in adversarial NLP. Based on our experiments, we recommend greedy attacks with word importance ranking when under a time constraint or attacking long inputs, and either beam search or particle swarm optimization otherwise.
Electron Heating in Low Mach Number Perpendicular Shocks. II. Dependence on the Pre-shock Conditions

Recent X-ray observations of merger shocks in galaxy clusters have shown that the post-shock plasma is two-temperature, with the protons being hotter than the electrons. In this work, the second of a series, we investigate the efficiency of irreversible electron heating in perpendicular low Mach number shocks, by means of two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. We consider values of plasma beta (the ratio of thermal and magnetic pressures) in the range 4 β p0 32, and sonic Mach number (the ratio of shock speed to pre-shock sound speed) in the range 2 M s 5, as appropriate for galaxy cluster shocks. As shown in Paper I, magnetic field amplification—induced by shock compression of the pre-shock field, or by strong proton cyclotron and mirror modes accompanying the relaxation of proton temperature anisotropy—can drive the electron temperature anisotropy beyond the threshold of the electron whistler instability. The growth of whistler waves breaks the electron adiabatic invariance, and allows for efficient entropy production. We find that the post-shock electron temperature T e2 exceeds the adiabatic expectation by an amount (here, T e0 is the pre-shock temperature), which depends only weakly on the plasma beta over the range 4 β p0 32 that we have explored, as well as on the proton-to-electron mass ratio (the coefficient of 0.044 is measured for our fiducial , and we estimate that it will decrease to 0.03 for the realistic mass ratio). Our results have important implications for current and future observations of galaxy cluster shocks in the radio band (synchrotron emission and Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect) and at X-ray frequencies.
Exoplanet Radius Gap Dependence on Host Star Type

Exoplanets smaller than Neptune are numerous, but the nature of the planet populations in the 1-4 Earth radii range remains a mystery. The complete Kepler sample of Q1-Q17 exoplanet candidates shows a radius gap at ~ 2 Earth radii, as reported by us in January 2017 in LPSC conference abstract #1576 (Zeng et al. 2017). A careful analysis of Kepler host stars spectroscopy by the CKS survey allowed Fulton et al. (2017) in March 2017 to unambiguously show this radius gap. The cause of this gap is still under discussion (Ginzburg et al. 2017; Lehmer & Catling 2017; Owen & Wu 2017). Here we add to our original analysis the dependence of the radius gap on host star type.
Spreading of a mycobacterial cell-surface lipid into host epithelial membranes promotes infectivity

Several virulence lipids populate the outer cell wall of pathogenic mycobacteria. Phthiocerol dimycocerosate (PDIM), one of the most abundant outer membrane lipids, plays important roles in both defending against host antimicrobial programs and in evading these programs altogether. Immediately following infection, mycobacteria rely on PDIM to evade Myd88-dependent recruitment of microbicidal monocytes which can clear infection. To circumvent the limitations in using genetics to understand virulence lipids, we developed a chemical approach to track PDIM during Mycobacterium marinum infection of zebrafish. We found that PDIM's methyl-branched lipid tails enabled it to spread into host epithelial membranes to prevent immune activation. Additionally, PDIM's affinity for cholesterol promoted this phenotype; treatment of zebrafish with statins, cholesterol synthesis inhibitors, decreased spreading and provided protection from infection. This work establishes that interactions between host and pathogen lipids influence mycobacterial infectivity and suggests the use of statins as tuberculosis preventive therapy by inhibiting PDIM spread.
Derived equivalences of twisted supersingular K3 surfaces

Abstract We study the derived categories of twisted supersingular K3 surfaces. We prove a derived crystalline Torelli theorem for twisted supersingular K3 surfaces, characterizing Fourier-Mukai equivalences in terms of the twisted K3 crystals introduced in [2] . This is a positive characteristic analog of the Hodge-theoretic derived Torelli theorem of Orlov [23] and its extension to twisted K3 surfaces by Huybrechts and Stellari [9] , [10] . We give applications to various questions concerning Fourier-Mukai partners, extending results of Caldararu [5] and Huybrechts and Stellari [9] . We also give an exact formula for the number of twisted Fourier-Mukai partners of a twisted supersingular K3 surface.
Undergraduate Student Research With Low Faculty Cost

Undergraduates are unlikely to even consider graduate research in Computer Science if they do not know what Computer Science research is. Many programs aimed at introducing undergraduate to research are structured like graduate research programs, with a small number of undergraduates working with a faculty advisor. Further, females, under-represented minorities, and first generation students may be too intimidated or the idea of research may be too amorphous, so that they miss out on these programs. As a consequence, we lose out on opportunities for greater diversity in CS research. We have started a pilot program in our department where a larger number of students (close to two dozen) work with a single faculty member as part of a research group focused on Machine Learning and related areas. The goal of this program is not to convince students to pursue a research career but rather to enable them to make a more informed decision about what role they would like research to play in their future. In order to evaluate our approach, we elicited student experience via two anonymized exit surveys. Students report that they develop a better understanding of what research in Computer Science is. Their interest in research was increased as was their reported confidence in their ability to do research, although not all students wanted to further pursue computer science research opportunities. Given the reported experience of female students, this program can offer a starting point for greater diversity in CS research.
High-Throughput Discovery and Characterization of Human Transcriptional Effectors.

Thousands of proteins localize to the nucleus; however, it remains unclear which contain transcriptional effectors. Here, we develop HT-recruit, a pooled assay where protein libraries are recruited to a reporter, and their transcriptional effects are measured by sequencing. Using this approach, we measure gene silencing and activation for thousands of domains. We find a relationship between repressor function and evolutionary age for the KRAB domains, discover that Homeodomain repressor strength is collinear with Hox genetic organization, and identify activities for several domains of unknown function. Deep mutational scanning of the CRISPRi KRAB maps the co-repressor binding surface and identifies substitutions that improve stability/silencing. By tiling 238 proteins, we find repressors as short as ten amino acids. Finally, we report new activator domains, including a divergent KRAB. These results provide a resource of 600 human proteins containing effectors and demonstrate a scalable strategy for assigning functions to protein domains.
Non-vanishing of class group L-functions for number fields with a small regulator

Let $E/\mathbb{Q}$ be a number field of degree $n$. We show that if $\operatorname{Reg}(E)\ll_n |\operatorname{Disc}(E)|^{1/4}$ then the fraction of class group characters for which the Hecke $L$-function does not vanish at the central point is $\gg_{n,\varepsilon} |\operatorname{Disc}|^{-1/4-\varepsilon}$. The proof is an interplay between almost equidistribution of Eisenstein periods over the toral packet in $\mathbf{PGL}_n(\mathbb{Z})\backslash\mathbf{PGL}_n(\mathbb{R})$ associated to the maximal order of $E$, and the escape of mass of the torus orbit associated to the trivial ideal class.
Event-Guided Denoising for Multilingual Relation Learning.

General purpose relation extraction has recently seen considerable gains in part due to a massively data-intensive distant supervision technique from Soares et al. (2019) that produces state-of-the-art results across many benchmarks. In this work, we present a methodology for collecting high quality training data for relation extraction from unlabeled text that achieves a near-recreation of their zero-shot and few-shot results at a fraction of the training cost. Our approach exploits the predictable distributional structure of date-marked news articles to build a denoised corpus – the extraction process filters out low quality examples. We show that a smaller multilingual encoder trained on this corpus performs comparably to the current state-of-the-art (when both receive little to no fine-tuning) on few-shot and standard relation benchmarks in English and Spanish despite using many fewer examples (50k vs. 300mil+).
Intent Detection with WikiHow

Modern task-oriented dialog systems need to reliably understand users’ intents. Intent detection is even more challenging when moving to new domains or new languages, since there is little annotated data. To address this challenge, we present a suite of pretrained intent detection models which can predict a broad range of intended goals from many actions because they are trained on wikiHow, a comprehensive instructional website. Our models achieve state-of-the-art results on the Snips dataset, the Schema-Guided Dialogue dataset, and all 3 languages of the Facebook multilingual dialog datasets. Our models also demonstrate strong zero- and few-shot performance, reaching over 75% accuracy using only 100 training examples in all datasets.
Efficient Linear and Affine Codes for Correcting Insertions/Deletions

This paper studies \emph{linear} and \emph{affine} error-correcting codes for correcting synchronization errors such as insertions and deletions. We call such codes linear/affine insdel codes. Linear codes that can correct even a single deletion are limited to have information rate at most $1/2$ (achieved by the trivial 2-fold repetition code). Previously, it was (erroneously) reported that more generally no non-trivial linear codes correcting $k$ deletions exist, i.e., that the $(k+1)$-fold repetition codes and its rate of $1/(k+1)$ are basically optimal for any $k$. We disprove this and show the existence of binary linear codes of length $n$ and rate just below $1/2$ capable of correcting $\Omega(n)$ insertions and deletions. This identifies rate $1/2$ as a sharp threshold for recovery from deletions for linear codes, and reopens the quest for a better understanding of the capabilities of linear codes for correcting insertions/deletions. We prove novel outer bounds and existential inner bounds for the rate vs. (edit) distance trade-off of linear insdel codes. We complement our existential results with an efficient synchronization-string-based transformation that converts any asymptotically-good linear code for Hamming errors into an asymptotically-good linear code for insdel errors. Lastly, we show that the $\frac{1}{2}$-rate limitation does not hold for affine codes by giving an explicit affine code of rate $1-\epsilon$ which can efficiently correct a constant fraction of insdel errors.
An alternative method for extracting the von Neumann entropy from Rényi entropies

An alternative method is presented for extracting the von Neumann entropy − Tr(ρ ln ρ) from Tr(ρn) for integer n in a quantum system with density matrix ρ. Instead of relying on direct analytic continuation in n, the method uses a generating function − Tr{ρ ln[(1 − zρ)/(1 − z)]} of an auxiliary complex variable z. The generating function has a Taylor series that is absolutely convergent within |z| < 1, and may be analytically continued in z to z = −∞ where it gives the von Neumann entropy. As an example, we use the method to calculate analytically the CFT entanglement entropy of two intervals in the small cross ratio limit, reproducing a result that Calabrese et al. obtained by direct analytic continuation in n. Further examples are provided by numerical calculations of the entanglement entropy of two intervals for general cross ratios, and of one interval at finite temperature and finite interval length.
Diffeomorphic Shape Matching by Operator Splitting in 3D Cardiology Imaging

We develop an operator splitting approach to solve diffeomorphic matching problems for sequences of surfaces in three-dimensional space. The goal is to smoothly match, at very fast rate, finite sequences of observed 3D-snapshots extracted from movies recording the smooth dynamic deformations of “soft” surfaces. We have implemented our algorithms in a proprietary software installed at The Methodist Hospital (Cardiology) to monitor mitral valve strain through computer analysis of noninvasive patients echocardiographies.
Wideband Channel Estimation With a Generative Adversarial Network

Communication at high carrier frequencies such as millimeter wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz) requires channel estimation for very large bandwidths at low SNR. Hence, allocating an orthogonal pilot tone for each coherence bandwidth leads to excessive number of pilots. We leverage generative adversarial networks (GANs) to accurately estimate frequency selective channels with few pilots at low SNR. The proposed estimator first learns to produce channel samples from the true but unknown channel distribution via training the generative network, and then uses this trained network as a prior to estimate the current channel by optimizing the network’s input vector in light of the current received signal. Our results show that at an SNR of −5 dB, even if a transceiver with one-bit phase shifters is employed, our design achieves the same channel estimation error as an LS estimator with SNR = 20 dB or the LMMSE estimator at 2.5 dB, both with fully digital architectures. Additionally, the GAN-based estimator reduces the required number of pilots by about 70% without significantly increasing the estimation error and required SNR. We also show that the generative network does not appear to require retraining even if the number of clusters and rays change considerably.
Financial Flexibility, Risk Management, and Payout Choice

Both risk management and payout decisions affect a firm's financial flexibility—the ability to avoid costly financial distress as well as underinvestment. We provide evidence of substitution between hedging and payout decisions using samples of both financial and nonfinancial firms. We find that a more flexible distribution, favoring repurchases over dividends, is negatively related to financial hedging within a firm, consistent with financial flexibility in payout decisions and hedging being substitutes. Our findings, which are robust to controlling for the endogeneity of hedging and payout choices, suggest that payout flexibility offers operational hedging benefits.
Social Software, Groups and Governance

Formal groups play an important role in the law. Informal groups largely lie outside it. Should the law be more attentive to informal groups? The paper argues that this and related questions are appearing more frequently as a number of computer technologies, which I collect under the heading social software, increase the salience of groups. In turn, that salience raises important questions about both the significance and the benefits of informal groups. The paper suggests that there may be important social benefits associated with informal groups, and that the law should move towards a framework for encouraging and recognizing them. Such a framework may be organized along three dimensions by which groups arise and sustain themselves: regulating places, things, and stories.
Chandra imaging of gamma-ray binaries

We review the multiwavelength properties of the few known γ -ray binaries, focusing on extended emission recently resolved with Chandra. We discuss the implications of these findings for the nature of compact objects and for physical processes operating in these systems. (© 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
As the Wind Blows: The Effects of Long-Term Exposure to Air Pollution on Mortality

There is strong evidence that short-run fluctuations in air pollution negatively impact infant health and contemporaneous adult health, but there is less evidence on the causal link between long-term exposure to air pollution and increased adult mortality. This project estimates the impact of long-term exposure to air pollution on mortality by leveraging quasi-random variation in pollution levels generated by wind patterns near major highways. I combine geocoded data on the residence of every decedent in Los Angeles over three years, high-frequency wind data, and Census short form data. Using these data, I estimate the effect of downwind exposure to highway-generated pollutants on the age-specific mortality rate by using orientation to the nearest major highway as an instrument for pollution exposure. I find that doubling the percentage of time spent downwind of a highway increases mortality among individuals 75 or older by 3.8%-6.5%. These estimates are robust and imply significant loss of life years.
Breaching a Leaking Dam?: Corporate Money and Elections

With a brief order issued at the end of its last term, the Supreme Court dramatically raised the stakes in Citizens United v. FEC. What many had predicted would be a case decided on narrow, technical grounds has now become a possible vehicle for overturning two key campaign finance precedents. By ordering re-argument and supplemental briefing on the issue of whether it should overrule either or both Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and the part of McConnell v. FEC which addresses the facial validity of Section 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, the Court signaled that it was considering breaching the already leaking dam that keeps corporate (and union) funds at least partially out of federal elections. The first part of this Article places the Citizens United case in context by reviewing the almost 100 years of gradually tightening federal election laws governing the use of corporate funds, including the Court’s decision in Austin that upheld a state election law ban on corporations making certain election-related expenditures. The second part reviews the specific facts and issues raised in Citizens United. The third part then addresses how the Court is likely to answer the new question it has posed. That part concludes that given the stated and likely positions of the current nine Justices, the argument that is most likely to convince a majority of the Court not to overturn Austin is the doctrine of stare decisis, although that result is far from assured. Even stare decisis is unlikely to preserve the relevant portion of McConnell, however. The fourth and final part addresses the potential ramifications if the Court overrules either or both of the precedents it cited, including the new pressure an overruling of Austin would place on seemingly unrelated federal tax laws governing tax-exempt, nonprofit corporations.
The End Of An Era: The Supreme Court (Finally) Butts Out of Punitive Damages For Good

I. CONSTITUTIONALIZING PUNITIVE DAMAGES 531 A. The Excessive Fines Clause Does Not Apply to Punitive Damages 532 B. Procedural Due Process Places Constitutional Limits on Punitive Damages Awards 533 1. Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. v. Haslip 533 2. Honda Motor Co. v. Oberg 535 C. Substantive Due Process Mandates that Punitive Damages Awards Not Be Grossly Excessive 535 1. TXO Production Corp. v. Alliance Resources Corp. ......... 535 2. BMW of North America, Inc. v. Gore 538 a. Establishment of Guideposts 541 i. Degree of Reprehensibility 541 ii. Ratio 542 iii. Other Sanctions 542 b. Analysis of Guideposts 543 3. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. v. Campbell 545
Postmodern "Progress": Reconsidering the Copyright and Patent Power

An early take on intellectual property's policy balance, in which I posit a right of access to knowledge based upon Madison's views of the purposes of property.
Quantifying Regulatory Benefits

This Essay makes three principal claims. First, it shows that breakeven analysis is a useful technique for adding structure to costbenefit analysis when a regulatory benefit has not been quantified. In particular, breakeven analysis can sometimes address the judicial hostility to using nonquantified benefits as trumps. But it is a secondbest approach because actually quantifying the benefit can provide far more useful information to the regulatory process. Second, the Essay argues that the categories of “quantifiable” and “nonquantifiable” benefits are not immutable. “Unquantifiable” benefits are simply benefits that have not yet been quantified. Over the last few decades, important categories of benefits that were once considered unquantifiable were subsequently quantified: the two most significant for current regulatory purposes are the “value of a statistical life” (VSL) and the social cost of carbon (SCC). Third, the Essay shows that the federal government has played a significant role in providing resources for the quantification of important categories of benefits and should be regarded as a catalyst for future efforts of this sort. Recent congressional threats to cut the funding for research in the social sciences are a worrisome development in this regard. As a result, the push for breakeven analysis is a salutary development unless it diverts attention and resources from the actual quantification of regulatory benefits.
Engaging the consumer: The science and art of the value creation process

Regulatory engagement theory [Higgins, E. T. (2006). Value from hedonic experience and engagement. Psychological Review, 113, 439–460.] proposes that value is a motivational force of attraction to or repulsion from something, and that strength of engagement contributes to value intensity independent of hedonic and other sources of value direction. This paper reviews different sources of engagement strength, including dealing with challenges by opposing interfering forces and overcoming personal resistance, preparing for something that is likely to happen, and using “fit” or “proper” means of goal pursuit. We present evidence that each of these sources of engagement strength can intensify the value of something, and we show how stronger engagement can not only make something positive more positive but also make something negative more negative. We also discuss how these effects of stronger engagement on the value of something else are independent of actors' own personal experiences during goal pursuit. We then broaden regulatory engagement theory by describing the nature of these personal experiences from different sources of engagement strength—distinct positive experiences (e.g., feeling “pleasure” vs. feeling “right”) and distinct negative experiences (e.g., feeling “tension” vs. feeling “defiance”)—and consider the science and art of combining them with engagement strength for maximal persuasion and influence.
Technical Change, Inequality, and the Labor Market

Abstract This essay discusses the effect of technical change on wage inequality. I argue that the behavior of wages and returns to schooling indicates that technical change has been skill-biased during the past sixty years. Furthermore, the recent increase in inequality is most likely due to an acceleration in skill bias. In contrast to twentieth-century developments, much of the technical change during the early nineteenth century appears to be skill-replacing. I suggest that this is because the increased supply of unskilled workers in the English cities made the introduction of these technologies profitable. On the other hand, the twentieth century has been characterized by skill-biased technical change because the rapid increase in the supply of skilled workers has induced the development of skillcomplementary technologies. The recent acceleration in skill bias is in turn likely to have been a response to the acceleration in the supply of skills during the past several decades.
Bundling and Menus of Two‐Part Tariffs

Inducing self-selection among different segments of consumers is an important issue in pricing. Some firms induce self-selection by offering a menu of two-part tariffs (e.g., different rate plans) and letting consumers select the tariff and quantity they prefer. Other firms induce self-selection by offering a menu of price-quantity bundles (e.g., different package sizes) and letting consumers select only from among these bundles. We show that bundling is more profitable absent cost considerations. Social welfare may be higher or lower with bundling.
Technology, unemployment, and relative wages in a global economy

Abstract Arguably the most important development in recent decades in US factor markets is the decline in the relative wage of the unskilled. By contrast, in Europe it is undoubtedly the rise and persistence of unemployment. Technology has been identified as a key reason for the rising US wage inequality, while labor market rigidities are often cited as a key reason for European unemployment. This paper seeks to provide a unified account of these major factor market developments. It models the impact of technical change on relative wages and unemployment in a world in which one country has flexible and the other rigid labor market institutions. The results depart significantly but sensibly from what one would expect in a fully flexible wage world. Stylized facts help to narrow the field to a few candidates to account for these factor market developments.
The Social Reform of Banking

Recent developments in banking, including high-profile prosecutions for illegal activities, suggest further regulatory interventions on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet the structure of much banking regulation requires banks to make good faith determinations of the type of risks to which their loans give rise—determinations that can be and, in some cases have been, manipulated. Rather than evaluating specific regulatory interventions, this chapter will focus on the culture within financial institutions themselves, particularly the global entities that are explicitly or implicitly too big to fail, and on approaches to regulation that might affect and be affected by that culture. Our analysis is informed by the perspectives of anthropology, organizational and social psychology, and new governance regulatory theory.
Perceptions of Justice in Employment Selection Decisions: The Role of Applicant Gender

In contrast to the vast majority of justice literature that controls for applicant gender, the present study investigated the role of applicant gender in relation to applicant procedural and distributive justice perceptions after being informed of an organization's reject/accept decision. A sample of 503 students completed a selection test, believing the results would be used to make initial selection decisions for an organization recruiting from a university. Two weeks later, participants were given selection decisions (randomly assigned), and procedural and distributive justice perceptions were assessed. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated gender moderated the relationship between selection decision favorability and organizational justice perceptions. As hypothesized, in comparison with rejected males, rejected female applicants reacted most negatively to both forms of justice. On the other hand, selected female applicants had a more positive reaction than selected male applicants to both procedural and distributive justice. Potential implications for these and other findings are discussed.
Legal Rights and the Limits of Conceptual Analysis: A Case Study

Legal philosophers divide over whether it is possible to analyze legal concepts without engaging in normative argument. The influential analysis of legal rights advanced by Jules Coleman and Jody Kraus some years ago serves as a useful case study to consider this issue because even some legal philosophers who are generally skeptical of the neutrality claims of conceptual analysts have concluded that Coleman and Kraus's analysis manages to maintain such neutrality. But that analysis does depend in subtle but important ways on normative claims. Their argument assumes not only a positivist concept of law, but also that it counts in favor of an analysis of legal rights that it increases the number of options available to legal decisionmakers. Thus, whether Coleman and Kraus's analysis is right in the end depends on whether those normative assumptions are justified. If even their analysis, which makes the thinnest of conceptual claims, depends on normative premises, that fact serves as strong evidence of the difficulty of analyzing legal concepts while remaining agnostic on moral and political questions.
A logic model for electronic contracting

Abstract: Contracting is an essential aspectof doing business. Electronic contracting uses telecommunications and artificial intelligence to improve contracting processes by streamlining red tape enforcing legal correctness. To do this, the underlying conceptual structures of contracts and contracting must be carefully understood. A logic model is presented that emphasizes temporal, deontic and performative aspects of contracting.
Ambiguity shifts and the 2007–2008 financial crisis

Abstract Faced with doubts about the quality of information and the quality of modeling techniques, ambiguity-averse agents assign higher probabilities to lower utility states, leading to higher CDS premia and lower equity prices. Using data on financial institutions, I find that the sudden increases in credit spreads during the recent crisis can be explained by changes in the amount of ambiguity faced by market participants and changes in how the total amount of ambiguity was distributed between ambiguity about information quality and ambiguity about model quality.
Demystifying the Refi-Share Mystery

The refinance shares reported by Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey (PMMS), the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), and the National Mortgage News...
Ethical Leadership in Professional Life

The economy is in yet another train wreck with $50 trillion in wealth erased on a global basis over the last 18 months caused by failures of morally responsible leadership in both the government and private financial sector. Virtually no leaders in either government or the private financial sector are undertaking a self-assessment to ask about personal responsibility for their catastrophic failures and what can be learned to improve in the future. The legal profession, more than other occupations, dominates leadership positions with formal directing authority in government regulation of the financial sector and plays a major leadership role through positions of persuasion and influence in shaping the decisions of private financial sector enterprises. It follows that the legal profession and legal education should undertake an assessment of the profession’s role in the financial sector catastrophe. Among the private-sector gatekeeper occupations (those people trusted to protect the public from unlawful conduct and catastrophic failures of prudence by boards and executive management, including rating agencies, auditors, accountants and lawyers), the legal profession plays a uniquely important role. In comparison with rating agencies, accountants
On the selection of forecasting models

It is standard in applied work to select forecasting models by ranking candidate models by their prediction mean squared error (PMSE) in simulated out-of-sample (SOOS) forecasts. Alternatively, forecast models may be selected using information criteria (IC). We compare the asymptotic and finite-sample properties of these methods in terms of their ability to mimimize the true out-of-sample PMSE, allowing for possible misspecification of the forecast models under consideration. We show that under suitable conditions the IC method will be consistent for the best approximating model among the candidate models. In contrast, under standard assumptions the SOOS method, whether based on recursive or rolling regressions, will select overparameterized models with positive probability, resulting in excessive finite-sample PMSEs.
Entry and survival: the case of foreign banks in Norway

Abstract After a long history of closure to foreign banks, Norway opened in 1985. The foreign banks that then entered had divergent firm-specific resources and followed divergent strategies. Key factors in entry were the foreign banks’ prior experience in Norway itself, the foreign banks’ advantages vis-a-vis domestic banks, and rivalrous interaction with home-country banks. Key survival factors included the pre-existence of relationships with Norwegian firms, prior experience in Norway, the size of the entrant at start-up, and the size of the parent.
New Insights into Rental Housing Markets across the United States: Web Scraping and Analyzing Craigslist Rental Listings:

Current sources of data on rental housing—such as the census or commercial databases that focus on large apartment complexes—do not reflect recent market activity or the full scope of the US rental market. To address this gap, we collected, cleaned, analyzed, mapped, and visualized eleven million Craigslist rental housing listings. The data reveal fine-grained spatial and temporal patterns within and across metropolitan housing markets in the United States. We find that some metropolitan areas have only single-digit percentages of listings below fair market rent. Nontraditional sources of volunteered geographic information offer planners real-time, local-scale estimates of rent and housing characteristics currently lacking in alternative sources, such as census data.
Kramer vs. Kramer Revisited: A Comment on the Miller Commission Report and the Obligation of Divorce Lawyers for Parents to Discuss Alternative Dispute Resolution with Their Clients

The 2006 Report of New York State's Matrimonial Commission to Chief Judge Kaye (commonly know as the Miller Commission Report) recommended that New York begin to incorporate alternative dispute resolution into the State's fragmented and adversarial divorce system. This Comment argues that it should have more strongly recommended that divorce lawyers be mandated to discuss alternative dispute resolution, particularly mediation, with parent-clients before filing suit. The Comment begins by describing the advice given to a parent client in the movie Kramer vs. Kramer and argues that that advice constitutes zealous advocacy as famously described by Henry Lord Brougham in Queen Caroline's Case. While the advice given the parent client in Kramer v. Kramer is consistent with current notions of professional responsibility for lawyers, it does not serve the best interests of children in that it did not incorporate advice about the general importance of reducing conflict between parents to the best interests of children or discuss methods for doing so. The Comment contrasts zealous advocacy as portrayed in Kramer v. Kramer with problem solving advocacy as described by Lincoln, Gandhi and the Bounds of Advocacy of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. It argues that empirical research has demonstrated that judicial and legislative mandates that lawyers discuss alternative dispute resolution with clients are in the best interests of children, promote problem solving advocacy, and are generally appreciated by divorcing parent clients. Finally, this Comment briefly explores whether divorce lawyers should have a mandatory ethical responsibility to children of parents, and concludes that for the present, that duty should be aspirational only.
On Tariff Preferences And Delegation Decisions In Customs Unions: A Heckscher¿Ohlin Approach

This paper studies preferences of customs union (CU) members over common external tariff (CET) levels and extends the literature on delegation decisions over trade policy in models with production. In a model with similar CU members, we prove that most-preferred CETs can be ranked with the help of compensated price elasticities of import demand functions. In the Heckscher–Ohlin trade model, we show these elasticities depend on inter-country differences in relative factor endowments and inter-sectoral differences in technology. This helps identify the optimal policy maker in a CU and demonstrates delegation decisions over trade policy can be integrated into mainstream trade theory. The proliferation of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) in the 1990s has presented policy analysts with a dual challenge: to identify how these arrangements affect policy makers’ incentives to intervene in trade and to predict their implications for welfare. Economists responded to this challenge vigorously. Thanks to their research efforts, a substantial body of work is now available addressing these issues under alternative assumptions regarding the theoretical environment considered – including the objectives of policy makers, the nature of their interactions, the (GATT) rules that might constrain these interactions, market structure, the process of coalition formation, etc. 1 Still, while undeniably valuable, the recent literature on regionalism has shed limited light on an important issue: how heterogeneity among partners in a PTA shapes their national preferences over external tariff levels and how these preferences in turn manifest themselves in the formation of actual trade
Countercyclical retirement accounts

Abstract This paper examines an unconventional, but potentially effective, new fiscal policy tool that can increase saving during good times and increase spending during bad times—a cyclical matching rate on contributions to retirement savings accounts. The combination of matching rates and matching limits on retirement savings plans creates sharp kinks in intertemporal budget sets that induce many households to save exactly at the matching limit, even when economic conditions might call for a fiscal policy to encourage spending, rather than saving. What if the matching rate instead disappeared during bad aggregate states? I model an economy with liquid and illiquid savings accounts in which matching is suspended during downturns. The economy features the usual sources of heterogeneity in education and earnings processes, and it allows for time-inconsistent preferences and heterogeneity in the discount rate. Although the theoretical effects of a countercyclical match are ambiguous due to income and substitution effects operating in different directions, the simulations of the model indicate that the policy delivers a large average increase in consumption from a set of households that look like the “wealthy hand to mouth” of Kaplan et al. (2014). And crucially, in contrast to conventional fiscal policy, the stimulus associated with countercyclical retirement actually improves the government’s financing.
National Identity and Public Goods Provision

This research investigates the relationship between national identity and public goods provision across a wide range of countries. The analysis shows that national identity, measured based on survey data, and public goods provision, measured by a broad set of indicators, are negatively related. This result is explained through a proposed short-run model on country stability, where the provision of national identity and public goods are substitutable. The findings challenge the conventional wisdom on nation-building as a policy tool for mitigating the adverse effects of fractionalization, suggesting that generally it is used as a tool for governments to divert the attention of its citizens from most pressing issues, such as the provision of elementary public goods.
Corporate Misconduct and the Perfect Storm of Shareholder Litigation

When it comes to combating corporate misconduct, is more litigation necessarily better? The conventional wisdom is that we should deploy every weapon in the law’s arsenal to combat corporate misconduct. This wisdom, however, reflects legal scholarship that is confined to analyzing securities class actions and derivative suits in isolation, with little inquiry into the interplay between them. By failing to take a broader view of shareholder litigation, legal scholars have missed an opportunity to provide courts with the conceptual tools necessary to meet the complex challenges of complex corporate litigation. In courtrooms and boardrooms across the country, a debate is raging over whether courts should permit shareholders to file parallel securities class actions and derivative suits arising out of the same allegations of corporate wrongdoing—a debate that has gone almost entirely unnoticed in the legal academy. The time has come for legal theory to catch up with legal practice. We must re-conceptualize the tools we use to combat corporate misconduct, recognizing that securities class actions and derivative suits can work together to achieve the diverse goals of shareholder litigation. We should then bring these new conceptual insights to bear on the current legal debate over how courts should handle parallel securities class actions and derivative suits. Now is the perfect time to calm the perfect storm of shareholder litigation.
Robert Bork's Forgotten Role in the Transaction Cost Revolution

The last few decades have witnessed a scientific revolution in the field of industrial organization in the form of transaction cost economics (TCE). This revolution has radically altered economists’ understanding and interpretation of both partial and complete economic integration. Not surprisingly, this sea change has substantially influenced antitrust law and policy, impelling the Supreme Court to reverse or greatly modify various precedents.
Incorporating a "Best Interests of the Child" Approach Into Immigration Law and Procedure

United States immigration law and procedure frequently ignore the plight of children directly affected by immigration proceedings. This ignorance means decision makers often lack the discretion to protect a child from persecution by halting the deportation of a parent, while parents must choose between abandoning their children in a foreign land or risk the torture of their children. United States immigration law systematically fails to consider the best interests of children directly affected by immigration proceedings. This failure has resulted in a federal circuit split regarding whether the persecution a child faces can be used to halt the deportation of a parent. The omission of a "best interests of the child" approach in immigration law and procedure for children who are accompanied by a legal guardian results in a failure to protect foreign national and United States citizen children and must be remedied. Models for eliminating these protection failures exist in United States child welfare law and procedure, international law, and immigration law of other nations such as Canada. Building from these models, the United States must implement and give substantial weight to the best interests of directly affected children in its immigration law and procedure.
Prosecution and Race: The Power and Privilege of Discretion

This article examines prosecutorial discretion and argues it is a major cause of racial inequality in the criminal justice system. It asserts that prosecutorial discretion may instead be used to construct effective solutions to racial injustice. The article maintains that since prosecutors have more power than any other criminal justice officials, with practically no corresponding accountability to the public they serve, they have the responsibility to use their discretion to help eradicate the discriminatory treatment of African Americans in the criminal justice system.Part I of the Article explains the importance and impact of the prosecution function. Part II discusses the role of race and racism in discretionary prosecutorial decisions. Part III examines the difficulty in bringing successful legal challenges to discriminatory prosecutorial decisions. Part IV suggests the use of prosecutorial discretion as a remedy for race discrimination in the criminal justice system. Finally, Part V proposes the use of racial impact studies in prosecution offices to advance the responsible, nondiscriminatory exercise of prosecutorial discretion.