cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
A First Episode Standard for Involuntary Treatment

This paper proposes a new standard for involuntary treatment, one that does not include a requirement of physical harm. Instead it requires that individuals are experiencing their first major episode of a psychiatric disorder. A first episode standard would allow for the involuntary treatment of individuals who are (1) over 18, (2) mentally ill (the presence of a mental disorder that diminishes a person’s ability to reason, resulting in an impairment of functioning), and (3) have never received psychiatric treatment for the disorder. This standard would soften the trauma of a first episode, assisting families in their attempts to intervene before their loved ones’ lives are in complete disarray and their episodes escalate to the point of violence. It would expand access to early, effective treatment, giving individuals experiencing their first major episodes the best chance for a healthy long-term prognosis. And, a first episode standard would save taxpayers’ money.
Is There a Market for Branded Gulf of Mexico Oysters

We administered an online choice experiment to a sample of U.S. raw-oyster consumers to identify factors influencing preferences for Gulf of Mexico oysters, determined the extent of preference heterogeneity, and estimated marginal willingness to pay for specific varieties and other key attributes. Results indicate significant preference heterogeneity among select varieties, with non-Gulf respondents estimated to require a price discount on Gulf oyster varieties on the order of 3/half dozen.
Beyond the Bedside: A Human Rights Approach to Adolescent Health

INTRODUCTION 192 I. CURRENT ADOLESCENT HEALTH ISSUES 193 A. Violence 194 B. Substance Use 201 C. Obesity 205 D. Other Issues 208 II. THE LIMITS OF THE MEDICAL MODEL 210 III. RETHINKING OUR APPROACH—A HUMAN RIGHTS FRAMEWORK 213 A. The Core Right to Health Provisions 215 B. The Human Rights Law Response to Adolescent Health Issues 219 CONCLUSION 228
Business Cycle in Czechoslovakia under Central Planning: Were Credit Shocks Causing It?

Abstract This paper examines credit origins of the business cycle in the former Czechoslovakia. Industrial production is found to be cointegrated with various measures of bank credit during 1976–1990. Noninvestment credits are shown to be Granger-causing industrial production and a feedback relation exists between investment credits and industrial production. Although the impact of credit supply shocks on industrial production has been changing, production decline (growth) seems to follow credit tightening (loosening). However, the paper confirms that credit shocks were only a minor part of the output decline in 1989–1990. J. Comp. Econom., June 1998, 26 (2), pp. 226–245. International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC 20431.
Ripeness of Self-Incrimination Clause Disputes

Historically, federal courts have resolved disputes over claims of the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination at the time that government compulsion is brought to bear on a person for the disclosure of information. This practice of resolving disputes over claims of the privilege at the time the dispute arises flows from the courts' assumption that the Self-Incrimination Clause protects two separate rights: the right not to have one's compelled words used against one in a criminal judicial proceeding, and the independent right not to have such words compelled by the government in the first place. However, this conventional wisdom regarding Self-Incrimination Clause rights is in serious tension with both the language of the Clause and the Supreme Court's recent decision in Chavez v. Martinez, in which the Court held that the Clause is not violated until a person's compelled self-incriminatory words are actually used against him in a criminal proceeding. This holding throws into question the courts' historic practice of addressing Self-Incrimination Clause disputes without regard for whether such use of the compelled disclosures is even likely to occur. In this Article, Professor Mannheimer applies the Supreme Court's ripeness doctrine to the universe of Self-Incrimination Clause disputes that are litigated under current law, and concludes that many of them should not be resolved at all because they are not ripe for review. Professor Mannheimer argues that federal courts generally should not adjudicate such disputes until the government clearly intends to use, or already has used, the compelled disclosures against the person invoking the Clause.
The Comparative Turn: Accident, Coincidence or Fate

The comparative turn taken by one of America’s most influential constitutional scholars can tell us much about the field of comparative constitutional law. In this paper, delivered as a Provocation at the Symposium in Honor of Professor Frank Michelman, at Harvard Law School, February 10-11, 2012, three hypothesis are given for this turn. The first hypothesis, accident, looks to the post-Cold war expansion of the field of comparative constitutional law and the upsurge of American constitutional influence at that time. The second hypothesis, coincidence, views Michelman’s seminal work on constitutional economic and social rights, as well as on property, equality, law and economics, and democracy, as singularly apposite for building constitutionalism in post-apartheid South Africa. The third hypothesis, fate, examines how the normative questions that Michelman posed transcended any one constitutional system, precipitating a critical reflection on the United States, South Africa, and other constitutional systems.
Analyzing Property in Different Societies

Analyzing property in societies which are fundamentally different of one’s own from a cultural, economic, geographical, political and social point of view presents a double challenge to anyone interested in such study. First, it requires the very careful analytical approach of facts which characterizes the craft of the anthropologist, and second, the extreme difficulty of translating on one’s own language the notions which have been identified in the course of the analysis, the ultimate question being that of a possible “legal nature” of such notions. The author expresses his own doubts as to the possibility of reaching the second objective without envisaging what may seem a utopia: developing a common legal language for what would then become a true science of law.
The Return to Capital in Ghana

We show that the real return to capital in Ghana's informal sector is high. For farmers, we find annual returns ranging from 205-350% in the new technology of pineapple cultivation, and 30-50% in well-established food crop cultivation. We also examine the relative prices of durable goods of varying durability, and estimate a lower bound to the opportunity cost of capital of 60%. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
Is it the great equalizer? a social class based longitudinal analysis of technology diffusion

Technology in general and the Internet in particular have often been seen as the ―great equalizer‖ in that it provides a level playing field for all individuals in the society in terms of competing for social and economic opportunities. However, technology philosophers such as Andrew Feenberg have argued that technology diffusion mirrors the existing social order. Which of these worldviews actually holds is an open question, and in this research, we try to answer it using data on adoption of multiple technologies by individuals in the US over different time periods. Our results suggest that technology diffusion largely takes place along existing social class lines, and that the arrival of newer technologies ensures that the digital divide perpetuates.
Hedonic versus informational evaluations: task dependent preferences for sequences of outcomes

This work examines how people form evaluations of extended experiences that vary in valence and intensity. It is documented that when people retrospectively evaluate such experiences, not all information is weighted equally. Some prior research demonstrates that earlier parts are weighted more than later parts, while other research shows the opposite. In this paper we suggest that differences in evaluation tasks shift the focus to different aspects of the experience, causing individuals to be differentially influenced by earlier or later parts of the experience. We show that ratings of feelings (hedonic evaluation tasks) lead to stronger preferences for improving experiences than do evaluative judgments (informational evaluation tasks), suggesting that later aspects of the experience are weighted more heavily in affective tasks. In addition, we investigate other evaluation tasks, demonstrating that whether the task is descriptive or predictive and whether the target of the evaluation is the source of the experience or the experience itself also alter the weight given to different parts of the experience. Our studies demonstrate systematic shifts driven by these different evaluation task, revealing changes in overall evaluations as well as changes in the underlying weighting of key characteristics of the experience (i.e., start, end, and trend). Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Disclosures About Disclosure

Chartered. A.B., Stanford University, 1989; J.D., Yale Law School, 1994. I am very grateful for comments from Michael J. Pitts and the other participants in the Indiana Law Review’s “The Law of Democracy” symposium and for the research assistance of Katherine Ann Sebastiano. I also thank the staff of the law review and particularly Ann Harris Smith for the incredibly wellorganized symposium. 1. 130 S. Ct. 876 (2010). 2. See id. at 914, 931 (Stevens, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). 3. Id. at 914-16. 4. Id. at 980-82 (Thomas, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). 5. For a discussion of the constitutional issues raised by campaign finance disclosure laws, see BRADLEY A. SMITH, UNFREE SPEECH: THE FOLLY OF CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM 221-23 (2001); Richard L. Hasen, The Surprisingly Complex Case for Disclosure of Contributions and Expenditures Funding Sham Issue Advocacy, 48 UCLA L. REV. 265 (2000). 6. See, e.g., Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act, H.R. 5175, 111th Cong. §§ 201-21, 301 (2010) [hereinafter House DISCLOSE Act]; Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act, S. DISCLOSURES ABOUT DISCLOSURE
Commercialized Intercollegiate Athletics: A Proposal for Targeted Reform Consistent with American Cultural Forces and Marketplace Realities

This article observes that American society’s passion for intercollegiate sports competition is an extremely powerful, naturally evolved cultural force. The marketplace responds to cultural forces, and the commercialization of college sports directly reflects the marketplace realities of our society. For example, colleges and universities rationally use their intercollegiate athletic programs, particularly NCAA Division 1 FBS football and basketball, as a means to achieve a wide range of legitimate objectives of higher education. Thus, the authors advocate that university athletic department revenues should continue to be exempt from federal taxation, specifically the unrelated business income tax (UBIT), despite the increasingly commercialized nature of intercollegiate sports. However, the commercialization of intercollegiate athletics creates the potential for conflict with a university’s academic mission and the risk that student-athletes may be exploited. The authors propose that Congress provide the ...
The Failure of International Global Warming Regulation to Promote Needed Renewable Energy

Renewable power generation technologies exist today and comprise the foundation for the bridge to a sustainable international power generation infrastructure. However, the Kyoto Protocol (Kyoto) has failed to utilize these technologies. Kyoto also missed the forest for the trees: it disallowed forest preservation to count in its carbon currency. It also missed including the correct chemical base in developing countries. This Article examines what led international law not to focus on development in renewable power alternatives where they are most required in the international order: developing nations. It analyzes the critical role of international multilateral organizations to create the new architecture of carbon control before it is too late. This Article concludes by highlighting a little-noticed template for renewable power and carbon mitigation success that has been demonstrated in several developing countries. It highlights the changes to Kyoto and international law that are necessary to construct a bridge to the development of sustainable power generation
Conceptions of Corporate Purpose in Post-Crisis Financial Firms

American “populism” has had a major impact on the development of U.S. corporate governance throughout its history. Specifically, appeals to the perceived interests of average working people have exerted enormous social and political influence over prevailing conceptions of corporate purpose—that is, the aims toward which society expects corporate decision-making to be directed. In this Article, I assess the impact of American populism upon prevailing conceptions of corporate purpose, contrasting its unique expression in the context of financial firms with that arising in other contexts. I then examine its impact upon corporate governance reforms enacted in the wake of the financial and economic crisis that emerged in 2007. In Part II, I explore how populism has historically shaped conceptions of corporate purpose in the United States. I begin with nonfinancial firms, arguing that corporate law has long remained ambivalent regarding the consistency of shareholders’ interests and incentives with those of the broader public. The unique vulnerabilities of U.S. employees relative to their counterparts in otherwise similar common law countries have historically heightened this ambivalence. The consequence has been substantial social and political pressure to constrain the power of U.S. shareholders and to diminish their formal centrality to the corporate enterprise, toward the aim of enhancing firm sustainability. I contrast these dynamics with those observed in the context of financial firms, where U.S. misgivings regarding shareholders have historically been even greater, reflecting not only the economic significance of
Constitutional Taking Doctrine--Did Lucas Really Make a Difference?

This paper surveys the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Commission and examines the impact that this decision has had on private property rights. The paper also reviews the Supreme Court history of Commerce Clause jurisprudence and takings jurisprudence -- those cases which provided precedent for the Lucas opinion. The paper then concludes with observations on the impact that the Lucas decision has had other cases and on the private lives of citizens, and whether or not the decision really had a significant impact on takings jurisprudence.
Minimalism at War

When national security conflicts with individual liberty, reviewing courts might adopt one of three general orientations: National Security Maximalism, Liberty Maximalism, and minimalism. National Security Maximalism calls for a great deal of deference to the President, above all because of his authority as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. Liberty Maximalism asks courts to assume the same liberty-protecting posture in times of war as in times of peace. Minimalism asks courts to follow three precepts: the President needs clear congressional authorization for intruding on interests having a strong claim to constitutional protection; fair hearings should generally be provided to those who have been deprived of their freedom; and courts should discipline their own authority through narrow, incompletely theorized rulings. Of the three positions, Liberty Maximalism is the easiest to dismiss; courts will not and should not adopt it. National Security Maximalism is far more plausible, but it is in grave tension with the constitutional structure, and it is built on excessive optimism about the incentives of the President. The most appealing approach is minimalism, which does remarkably well in capturing prominent decisions of the Supreme Court in World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and the war on terrorism.
Some Thoughts on Shortsightedness and Intergenerational Equity

A STORY In an interesting (and funny) episode of South Park,1 the following takes place: A time portal appears just outside of town. It operates by “Terminator rules,” which means that the portal is unidirectional; only people from the future can enter the portal and emerge in the present. A single person from the distant future emerges. According to the local news, the person traveled back in time to the present in order to get a job, earn some money, and invest the money so that the person’s family could live a better life in the future.2 Apparently, things aren’t so good in the distant future. A flood of people from the future arrives. Evidently, the initial time traveler’s plan was successful. Unfortunately for the residents of South Park, the people from the future—referred to as “immigrants” from the future—are willing to work for less money than the residents of South Park. As the South Park residents lose their jobs, they begin to resent the people from the future. The South Park residents debate how they should respond to the dilemma posed by immigration from the future. Initially, the townspeople decide to stop the future from happening: “If there is no future, then there will be no people from the future to come back through the portal to take our jobs.” In the end, a young boy proposes a thoughtful solution. Invest today in making the future better and there will not be a need for people from the future to return to the past. As the episode nears its end, the South Park residents plant trees, and the people from the future fade away.
Race, Attorney Influence, and Bankruptcy Chapter Choice

We report on racially disparate uses of Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Currently, approximately 1,500,000 bankruptcy petitions are filed each year, with about 30 percent of those petitions being Chapter 13 cases. Although Chapter 13 can offer some legal advantages for persons seeking to protect valuable assets such as a house or automobile, it generally offers less relief and costs more than the primary alternative available to consumers, Chapter 7. The chief feature of a Chapter 13 bankruptcy case is a plan under which the debtor must devote all his or her disposable income to creditor repayment over a three- to five-year period. Chapter 7, in contrast, requires only that the debtor turn over all nonexempt assets, with over 90 percent of Chapter 7 debtors having no assets to turn over. This article reports on two studies, one using data from actual bankruptcy cases and the other involving an experiment with a national random sample of bankruptcy attorneys. Because the court system does not collect racial data on bankruptcy filers, the first study uses data from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project. Even after controlling for financial, demographic, and legal factors that might favor a Chapter 13 filing, African Americans are much more likely to file Chapter 13, as compared to debtors of other races. The second study reports on an experimental vignette sent to a random sample of consumer bankruptcy attorneys who represented debtors. The attorneys were more likely to recommend Chapter 13 when the hypothetical debtors were a couple named “Reggie & Latisha,” who attended an African Methodist Episcopal Church, as compared to a couple named “Todd & Allison,” who attended a United Methodist Church. Also, attorneys viewed “Reggie & Latisha” as having better values and being more competent when they expressed a preference for Chapter 13 as compared to “Todd & Allison,” who were seen as having better values and being more competent when they wanted to file Chapter 7, giving them a “fresh start.” Previous research and the results from the present experimental vignette study suggest that consumer bankruptcy attorneys may be playing a very important, although likely unintentional, role in creating the racial disparity in chapter choice. Together, the two studies raise questions about the fairness of the bankruptcy system.
Testing the Value of Probability Forecasts for Calibrated Combining.

Abstract We combine the probability forecasts of a real GDP decline from the US Survey of Professional Forecasters, after trimming the forecasts that do not have “value”, as measured by the Kuiper Skill Score and in the sense of Merton (1981). For this purpose, we use a simple test to evaluate the probability forecasts. The proposed test does not require the probabilities to be converted to binary forecasts before testing, and it accommodates serial correlation and skewness in the forecasts. We find that the number of forecasters making valuable forecasts decreases sharply as the horizon increases. The beta-transformed linear pool combination scheme, based on the valuable individual forecasts, is shown to outperform the simple average for all horizons on a number of performance measures, including calibration and sharpness. The test helps to identify the good forecasters ex ante, and therefore contributes to the accuracy of the combined forecasts.
Equality and Justice for Lesbian and Gay Families and Relationships.

In 1989, Tom Stoddard and Paula Ettelbrick, attorneys with the gay rights group Lambda Legal, published side-by-side opposing essays about whether marriage for same-sex couples should be a movement priority. Rutgers Law Review is publishing a 2009 symposium commemorating the 20th anniversary of these now-iconic essays. This article is part of that symposium. It places the Ettelbrick essay, and the groundbreaking case of Braschi v. Stahl Associates decided the same year, in the context of the gay rights movement's strong support of family diversity. It then critiques the contemporary right-wing marriage movement for blaming all social problems on family diversity/aka the decline of life-long heterosexual marriage. The gay rights marriage equality movement has fallen short as well for its acceptance of the primacy of marriage and its concomitant retreat from justice for diverse families and relationships. The article offers an alternative vision in which the law does not privilege marriage.
Holmes on Emergencies

It seems odd that despite the torrent of writing on emergencies and the law after 9/1 1, no one has systematically examined the view of emergencies held by our greatest judge. ] Perhaps the problem is that Justice Holmes has so often been subdivided along doctrinal lines. There is the Holmes of free speech law, represented by the majority opinion in Schenck v. United States2 and by the dissents in Abrams v. United States* and Gitlow v. New York.4 There is the
Vindicating the Rights of People Living with AIDS under the Alien Tort Claims Act

Life-saving medications currently do not reach the vast majority of people in the developing world living with AIDS. This is not an accident; pharmaceutical companies, defending their patents literally to the death, systematically pressure, manipulate, and threaten governments of developing countries to "respect" the intellectual property rights of U.S. corporate giants at the expense of the health and life of their populations. Having developed the international trade regime stacked in favor of U.S. corporate interests, pharmaceutical companies now go even further; they sue governments exercising the few remaining legal options for accessing low-cost medicines. This Article argues that this type of abuse of the legal system violates the human rights of people living with AIDS for whom hope of treatment remains a distant dream, and that the Alien Tort Claims Act presents one vehicle for the vindication of their rights.
Financial Innovation, Collateral, and Investment

Financial innovations that change how promises are collateralized affect prices and investment, even in the absence of any change in fundamentals. In C-models, the ability to leverage an asset always generates overinvestment compared to Arrow-Debreu. Credit Default Swaps always leads to underinvestment with respect to Arrow-Debreu, and in some cases even robustly destroy competitive equilibrium. The need for collateral would seem to cause underinvestment. Our analysis illustrates a countervailing force: goods that serve as collateral yield additional services and can therefore be over-valued and over-produced. In models without cash flow problems there is never marginal underinvestment on collateral. (JEL D52, D86, D92, E44, G01, G12, R31)
HOPE for the Pell? Institutional Effects in the Intersection of Merit-Based and Need-Based Aid

Prior empirical evidence finds that general enrollment effects of merit-aid programs such as the Georgia Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally (HOPE) scholarship are large and significant, while the effects of need-based aid programs such as the Pell grant are modest and often insignificant. This paper uses new panel data on Pell awards to examine the influence of the Georgia HOPE scholarship on needy-student enrollments. We demonstrate that the introduction of merit aid in Georgia generally improves the college access of needy students and has been leveraged into greater federal Pell assistance. While institution-specific increases in both Pell enrollment and funding are largest at two-year and less selective four-year institutions, the results suggest that Pell students are not crowded out of more selective schools by HOPE'S intent to retain the best Georgia high school students, as might have been anticipated.
Risk Aversion and Wealth: Evidence from Person-to-Person Lending Portfolios

We estimate risk aversion from investors’ financial decisions in a person-to-person lending platform. We develop a method that obtains a risk-aversion parameter from each portfolio choice. Since the same individuals invest repeatedly, we construct a panel data set that we use to disentangle heterogeneity in attitudes toward risk across investors, from the elasticity of risk aversion to changes in wealth. We find that wealthier investors are more risk averse in the cross section and that investors become more risk averse after a negative housing wealth shock. Thus, investors exhibit preferences consistent with decreasing relative risk aversion and habit formation. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2317. This paper was accepted by Amit Seru, finance.
Boomerang CEOs: What Happens When the CEO Comes Back?

CEO successions represent critical junctures for firms. Although extant research explores the performance consequences resulting from different succession types, what remains unexplored is what hap...
DEMOGRAPHY AND GROWTH: A UNIFIED TREATMENT OF OVERLAPPING GENERATIONS

We construct a unified overlapping-generations framework of equilibrium growth that includes the Blanchard “perpetual youth” model, the Samuelson model, and the infinitely lived–agent model as limit specifications for a “realistic” two-parameter survivorship function. We assess how the limit specifications compare with the general survival function, and analyze how exogenous changes in demographic conditions affect equilibrium growth and savings rates. Predicted effects are consistent with some cross-country correlations between demographic conditions and growth rates.
Truth and Legitimacy (in Courts)

This Article draws upon empirical and theoretical scholarship from philosophy, economics, social science, psychology, political science, ethics, and jurisprudence, in addition to more traditional legal sources such as Supreme Court decisions, to develop an articulation of the meaning, role, and importance of truth in courts. It is frequently articulated that trials are a search for truth. But as insiders to the judicial system know, if this is so then it is a meaning of truth that differs what truth means in any other context. And exposing this definitional dissonance in turn exposes that the legitimacy of the courts rests on an eroding foundation as courts increasingly are not doing what the community believes courts are doing.
Non-Diversifiable Volatility Risk and Risk Premiums at Earnings Announcements

ABSTRACT: This study seeks to determine whether earnings announcements pose non-diversifiable volatility risk that commands a risk premium. We find that investors anticipate some earnings announcements to convey news that increases market return volatility and pay a premium to hedge this non-diversifiable risk. In particular, we find evidence of risk premiums embedded in prices of firms' traded options that are significantly positively associated with the extent to which the firms' earnings announcements pose non-diversifiable volatility risk. In addition, we find that volatility risk premiums are concentrated among bellwether firms and result in predictable variation in option straddle returns around earnings announcements. Taken together, our findings show that some earnings announcements pose non-diversifiable volatility risk that commands a risk premium. JEL Classifications: M41; G12; G13; G14
Understanding Service Quality and Relationship Quality in is Outsourcing: Client Orientation & Promotion, Project Management Effectiveness, and the Task-Technology-Structure Fit

A national survey of firms that participated in outsourcing relationships was conducted, and service quality and relationship quality were found to be significantly and positively related to each other and both had a significant impact on user satisfaction. However, the intricacies of the causal effects between the two autonomous constructs, service quality and relationship quality, are a source of interest. In post-analysis theory building, we give a conceptual model that proposes that the positive causal effect of service quality on relationship quality would be positively moderated by the client orientation and promotion effectiveness of the vendor, while the positive causal effect of relationship quality on service quality would be mediated by the project management effectiveness. Hence, this paper comprises of two related parts: first an empirical study, and secondly developing a theory and conceptual model that delve into the causalities involved in service quality, relationship quality, and the rol...
Which Side Are You On? Unionization in Social Service Nonprofits

This Article explores the tensions inherent in nonprofit union organizing. The growth of nonprofit unionization has laid bare the complementary aims of nonprofits and unions, but also class divisions within nonprofits. Arguing that social service nonprofits play the dual institutional role of advancing society's highest ideals and serving as governance structures mediating the vagaries of state social spending, the author calls for industry-wide unionization as the only way to harmonize these two roles.
The Pricing of Embedded Options in Real Estate Lease Contracts

Leases and rental agreements often have options attached or embedded in them. These options sometimes depend on a number of economic variables such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a real estate ...
Comparing the Incidence of Taxes and Social Spending in Brazil and the United States

We perform the rst comprehensive scal incidence analyses in Brazil and the US, including direct cash and food transfers, targeted housing and heating subsidies, public spending on education and health, and personal income, payroll, corporate income, property, and expenditure taxes. In both countries, primary spending is close to 40 percent of GDP. The US achieves higher redistribution through direct taxes and transfers, primarily due to underutilization of the personal income tax in Brazil and the fact that Brazil’s highly progressive cash and food transfer programs are small while larger transfer programs are less progressive. However, when health and non-tertiary education spending are added to income using the government cost approach, the two countries achieve similar levels of redistribution. This result may be a reection of better-o households in Brazil opting out of public services due to quality concerns rather than a result of government eort to make spending more equitable.
Randomized Control Trials in the United States Legal Profession

We assemble studies within a set that we label randomized control trials (RCTs) in the US legal profession. These studies are field experiments conducted for the purpose of obtaining knowledge in which randomization replaces a decision that would otherwise have been made by a member of the US legal profession. We use our assembly of approximately 50 studies to begin addressing the question of why the US legal profession, in contrast to the US medical profession, has resisted the use of the RCT as a knowledge-generating device.
The Limits of Quantification

The problem of nonquantifiability is a recurrent one in both public policy and ordinary life. Much of the time, we cannot quantify the benefits of potential courses of action, or the costs, or both, and we must nonetheless decided whether and how to proceed. Under existing Executive Orders, agencies are generally required to quantify both benefits and costs, and (to the extent permitted by law) to show that the former justify the latter. But agencies are also permitted to consider apparently nonquantifiable factors, such as human dignity and fairness, and also to consider factors that are not quantifiable because of the limits of existing knowledge. When quantification is impossible, agencies should engage in “breakeven analysis,” by which they explore how high the nonquantifiable benefits would have to be in order for the benefits to justify the costs. Breakeven analysis can be used and potentially disciplined in three different ways. (1) Sometimes agencies are able to identity lower or upper bounds, either through point estimates or through an assessment of expected value. (2) Agencies can often make progress by exploring comparison cases in which relevant values have already been assigned (such as for a statistical life). (3) When agencies cannot identify lower or upper bounds, and when helpful comparisons are unavailable, breakeven analysis requires agencies to identify what information is missing and to specify the conditions under which benefits would justify costs (“conditional justification”). In admittedly rare cases, regulators, no less than individuals, might have to “pick” or instead to “opt.”
Goals and Governance in Municipal Bankruptcy

Table of ContentsI. Introduction 405II. The Delicate Balance of State and FederalPower Preserved in Chapter 9: Does it Render Municipal Bankruptcy Useless? 410A. Chapter 9 and Control over the Debtor and Its Property 411B. Does Chapter 9 "Work?": A Survey ofRecent Scholarship 4161. Is Chapter 9 Based on a Faulty Premise? 4182. Does Chapter 9 Give Too Much Power to the Debtor? 4213. Must Chapter 9 and State Intervention Run on Parallel Tracks? 425III. Bankruptcy's Goal-Oriented Governance 429A. Bankruptcy Governance over Individuals 430B. Bankruptcy Governance over Entities 432C. Bankruptcy Governance over Municipalities 437IV. A History of Chapter 9 from a GovernancePerspective 440A. Why Municipal Bankruptcy? 440B. The 1930s Wish List and Resulting Statutes 446C. Congress Revisits Municipal Financial Distress in 1976 453V. Specific Authorization to File for Chapter 9: An Invitation to Govern 457A. Reasons for and Evolution of the Authorization Requirement 458B. Implementation of State Authorization 461VI. Authorization Meets Governance, Eventually: Pennsylvania's Story 471VII. Where the Holes Are: Issues for Judicial or Legislative Resolution 478A. Continuing Questions About the Relationship Between State and Federal Law 480B. Debtor Governance in Weak Governance States 483VIII. Conclusion 485I IntroductionMunicipal bankruptcy occupies a rarely studied corner of bankruptcy law. Coverage of its governing Bankruptcy Code (Code) chapter, Chapter 9,1 in law school casebooks and treatises is almost nonexistent,2 and scholars turn their attention to the subject only when a high-profile case is filed.3 There is a simple reason for this lack of attention: very few municipalities have filed for bankruptcy.* * * 4 Fewer than 700 cases have been filed since 1938,5 when the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a municipal bankruptcy chapter.6 Even this number is misleadingly high; the overwhelming majority of the municipalities that have filed for bankruptcy were specialpurpose districts such as water and sewer districts7 rather than general-purpose municipalities such as cities, counties, and towns.The years from 2011 to 2013 were therefore remarkable in municipal bankruptcy terms. During those years, several generalpurpose municipalities took the rare step of filing for bankruptcy under Chapter 9. Among those filing were a small Rhode Island city, Central Falls;8 Pennsylvania's capital city, Harrisburg (whose filing was dismissed six weeks later);9 Jefferson County, Alabama;10 and Stockton, California.* 11 Just over a month after Stockton filed, another California city, San Bernardino, filed for Chapter 9 protection.12 The media described the Jefferson County and Stockton bankruptcies in superlative terms: Jefferson County as the largest municipal bankruptcy ever filed measured by outstanding debt,13 and Stockton as the largest city measured by population ever to file for bankruptcy. …
Corporate Governance and Liquidity

We investigate the empirical relation between corporate governance and stock market liquidity. We find that firms with better corporate governance have narrower spreads, higher market quality index, smaller price impact of trades, and lower probability of information-based trading. In addition, we show that changes in our liquidity measures are significantly related to changes in the governance index over time. These results suggest that firms may alleviate information-based trading and improve stock market liquidity by adopting corporate governance standards that mitigate informational asymmetries. Our results are remarkably robust to alternative model specifications, across exchanges, and to different measures of liquidity.
Error Cost and Auditors' Termination Decisions

Recent studies have shown that auditor changes are frequently initiated by the auditor rather than the client. In this study, we argue that auditors' decisions to resign or decline engagements can ...
Magazine prices revisited

This paper examines price adjustment behaviour in the magazine industry. In a frequently cited study, Cecchetti (1986) constructs a reduced-form (S, s) model for firms. Cecchetti assumes that a firm's pricing rules are fixed for non-overlapping three-year intervals and estimates the model using a conditional logit specification from Chamberlain (1980). The estimates are inconsistent, however, due to the duration-dependent specification of the model. Two alternative specifications are used to obtain consistent estimation. The consistent estimates continue to provide strong evidence in favour of state-dependent pricing models, but only weak evidence on the behaviour of price adjustment costs. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Investments of uncertain cost

Abstract This paper examines irreversible investment decisions when projects take time to complete and are subject to two types of cost uncertainty. The first is technical uncertainty, i.e., uncertainty over the physical difficulty of completing a project, which is only resolved as the investment proceeds. The second is input cost uncertainty, i.e., uncertainty over the prices of construction inputs or over government regulations affecting construction costs, which is external to the firm. These two types of uncertainty have very different effects on the investment decision. A simple investment rule is derived that maximizes firm value, and is used to analyze the decision to start or continue building a nuclear power plant during the 1980s.
Can by-product lobbying firms compete?

Abstract Olson (1965) argues that some large groups can overcome the free-rider problem through by-product lobbying. The by-product firm sells a private good to potential members of the interest group and finances lobbying with its profits. Others argue that by-product lobbying firms cannot survive competition with for-profit firms, since this would compete away monopoly rents, leaving the firm unable to lobby. In a model of monopolistic competition, I show that the by-product firm can enter the market and earn enough profits to exceed the noncooperative level of lobbying. This is true despite the free entry of for-profit firms.
An Empirical Study of Empirical Legal Scholarship: The Top Law Schools

Empirical legal scholarship is arguably the most significant emerging intellectual movement. Empirical legal scholarship (ELS), as the term is generally used in law schools, refers to a specific type of empirical research: a model-based approach coupled with a quantitative method. This paper ranks law schools based on their place in the ELS movement and offers an essential ranking framework that can be adopted for other intellectual movements. A revised version of the paper was posted on October 11. The updated tables reflect additional data.
Antitrust and Vertical Integration in “New Economy” Industries with Application to Broadband Access

Whether the firms that supply Internet hardware and software should face restrictions on the use of their property is an important and controversial policy issue. Advocates of “net neutrality”—including President Obama and the current FCC majority—believe that owners of broadband distribution systems (hardware used to distribute Internet and video services) and producers of certain “must-have” video content should be subject to prophylactic regulation that transcends present-day antitrust law enforcement. In the economic terms that are used in debates on competition policy, the concern is with vertical integration that may give firms both the opportunity (through denial of access or price discrimination) and incentive (increased profit) to restrict competition. This paper’s central point is that virtually every production process in the economy is vertically integrated, and economics predicts changes in the extent of vertical integration—that is, changes in the boundaries of the firm—in response to changes in relative prices, technology, or institutions. Both vertical integration and changes in the extent of vertical integration are benign characteristics of efficient, dynamic, competitive markets. While there is no shortage of theoretical models in which vertical integration may be harmful, most such models have restrictive assumptions and ambiguous welfare predictions—even when market power is assumed to be present. Empirical evidence that vertical integration or vertical restraints are harmful is weak, compared to evidence that vertical integration is beneficial—again, even in cases where market power appears to be present. Thus, it is reasonable to conclude that prophylactic regulation is not necessary, and may well reduce welfare. Sound policy is to wait for ex post evidence of harm to justify interventions in specific cases. Net neutrality, recently enacted by the FCC but subject to judicial review, is an unfortunate idea.
Fiscal Decentralization as Development Policy

Fiscal Decentralization is a popular economic development strategy among transition and developing countries. This article reviews the advantages of fiscal decentralization in a theoretical context, but critiques the relevance of the standard theory of federalism as it applies to emerging economies. It is argued that the macroeconomic benefits of fiscal centralization, the absence of good instruments of local government finance, and the centralist politics that characterize most low income countries have been strong enough to hold back increased emphasis on local government finance.
The Effect of Pharmaceutical Innovation on Longevity: Patient Level Evidence from the 1996–2002 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and Linked Mortality Public-use Files

This study uses patient-level data to analyze the effect of technological change embodied in pharmaceuticals on the longevity of elderly Americans. Previous patient-level studies could not control for important patient attributes such as education, income, and race; they did not provide estimates of the effect of using newer drugs on life expectancy, or of the overall cost-effectiveness of new drugs relative to old drugs; and they were not based on nationally representative samples of individuals. Our data, primarily derived from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and the Linked Mortality Public-use Files, enable us to overcome those limitations. We investigate the effect of the vintage (year of U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval) of the prescription drugs used by an individual on his or her survival and medical expenditure, controlling for a number of demographic characteristics and indicators and determinants of health status. When we control only for age, sex, and interview year, we estimate that a 1-year increase in drug vintage increases life expectancy by 0.52%. Controlling for a much more extensive set of other attributes (the mean year the person started taking his or her medications, and dummy variables for activity limitations, race, education, family income as a percent of the poverty line, insurance coverage, Census region, body mass index, smoking, and more than 100 medical conditions) has virtually no effect on the estimate of the effect of drug vintage on life expectancy. Between 1996 and 2003, the mean vintage of prescription drugs increased by 6.6 years. This is estimated to have increased the life expectancy of elderly Americans by 0.41-0.47 years. This suggests that not less than two-thirds of the 0.6-year increase in the life expectancy of elderly Americans during 1996-2003 was due to the increase in drug vintage. The 1996-2003 increase in drug vintage is also estimated to have increased annual drug expenditure per elderly American by $207, and annual total medical expenditure per elderly American by $218. This implies that the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (cost per life-year gained) of pharmaceutical innovation was about $12,900. This estimate of the cost per life-year gained from the use of newer drugs is a small fraction of leading economists' estimates of the value of (willingness to pay for) an additional year of life. It is also consistent with estimates from clinical trials.
Tying and innovation: A dynamic analysis of tying arrangements*

This paper analyses the effects of tying arrangements on R&D incentives. It shows that tying is a means through which a firm can commit to more aggressive R&D investment in the tied goods market. Tying also has the strategic effect of reducing rivals’ incentives to invest in R&D. The strategy of tying is a profitable one if the gains, via an increased share of dynamic rents in the tied goods market, exceed the losses that result from intensified price competition in the market. The welfare implications of tying, and consequently the appropriate antitrust policy, are discussed.
Fines, Appeals and Liability in Public Enforcement with Stochastic Damage and Asymmetric Information

This paper studies an enforcement game between a regulator and firms that can cause harmful accidents. The distribution of potential accident damage is private information to the firms, and realized damage can be observed only at the cost of going to court. Under conditions described in the paper, an optimal policy involves the separate assessment of regulatory/settlement fines and court liability. In this optimum, injurers self-select by appealing (or not) to the court process; liability takes a ‘threshold’ form, assessing maximal liability when damages are high and zero liability otherwise; and, vis-a-vis a first-best, some firms are over-deterred—and others under-deterred—from having accidents.