cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Design Rule Checking with a CNN Based Feature Extractor

Design rule checking (DRC) is getting increasingly complex in advanced nodes technologies. It would be highly desirable to have a fast interactive DRC engine that could be used during layout. In this work, we establish the proof of feasibility for such an engine. The proposed model consists of a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained to detect DRC violations. The model was trained with artificial data that was derived from a set of 50 SRAM designs. The focus in this demonstration was metal 1 rules. Using this solution, we can detect multiple DRC violations 32x faster than Boolean checkers with an accuracy of up to 92%. The proposed solution can be easily expanded to a complete rule set.
The Phong Surface: Efficient 3D Model Fitting Using Lifted Optimization

Realtime perceptual and interaction capabilities in mixed reality require a range of 3D tracking problems to be solved at low latency on resource-constrained hardware such as head-mounted devices. Indeed, for devices such as HoloLens 2 where the CPU and GPU are left available for applications, multiple tracking subsystems are required to run on a continuous, real-time basis while sharing a single Digital Signal Processor. To solve model-fitting problems for HoloLens 2 hand tracking, where the computational budget is approximately 100 times smaller than an iPhone 7, we introduce a new surface model: the ‘Phong surface’. Using ideas from computer graphics, the Phong surface describes the same 3D shape as a triangulated mesh model, but with continuous surface normals which enable the use of lifting-based optimization, providing significant efficiency gains over ICP-based methods. We show that Phong surfaces retain the convergence benefits of smoother surface models, while triangle meshes do not.
Sentimental LIAR: Extended Corpus and Deep Learning Models for Fake Claim Classification

The rampant integration of social media in our every day lives and culture has given rise to fast and easier access to the flow of information than ever in human history. However, the inherently unsupervised nature of social media platforms has also made it easier to spread false information and fake news. Furthermore, the high volume and velocity of information flow in such platforms make manual supervision and control of information propagation infeasible. This paper aims to address this issue by proposing a novel deep learning approach for automated detection of false short-text claims on social media. We first introduce Sentimental LIAR, which extends the LIAR dataset of short claims by adding features based on sentiment and emotion analysis of claims. Furthermore, we propose a novel deep learning architecture based on the BERT-Base language model for classification of claims as genuine or fake. Our results demonstrate that the proposed architecture trained on Sentimental LIAR can achieve an accuracy of 70%, which is an improvement of 30% over previously reported results for the LIAR benchmark.
Trapped State at a Dislocation in a Weak Magnetomechanical Topological Insulator

So-called $w\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}e\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}a\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}k$ $t\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}o\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}p\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}o\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}l\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}o\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}g\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}i\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}c\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}a\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}l$ $i\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}n\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}s\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}u\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}l\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}a\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}t\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}o\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}r\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}s$ (WTIs, which require lattice translational symmetry for protected boundary states) are predicted to host unique topological features, but their sensitivity to disorder makes experimental confirmation challenging. The authors use a magnetomechanical metamaterial to realize a two-dimensional WTI, and experimentally demonstrate its anisotropic response. They furthermore show that the system can bind states at certain dislocation defects. This work points out an alternative path to obtaining lower-dimensional topologically protected states for robust sensors and other signal-processing devices that are resilient to disorder.
A Message-Passing Interpretation of Adjoint Logic

Abstract We present a system of session types based on adjoint logic which generalizes standard binary session types. Our system allows us to uniformly capture several new behaviors in the space of asynchronous message-passing communication, including multicast, where a process sends a single message to multiple clients, replicable services, which have multiple clients and replicate themselves on-demand to handle requests from those clients, and cancellation, where a process discards a channel without communicating along it. We provide session fidelity and deadlock-freedom results for this system, from which we then derive a logically justified form of garbage collection.
Newly reducible polynomial iterates

Given a field K and n > 1, we say that a polynomial f ∈ K[x] has newly reducible nth iterate over K if fn−1 is irreducible over K, but fn is not (here fi denotes the ith iterate of f). We pose the ...
Lapses in perceptual decisions reflect exploration

Perceptual decision-makers often display a constant rate of errors independent of evidence strength. These 'lapses' are treated as a nuisance arising from noise tangential to the decision, e.g. inattention or motor errors. Here, we use a multisensory decision task in rats to demonstrate that these explanations cannot account for lapses' stimulus dependence. We propose a novel explanation: lapses reflect a strategic trade-off between exploiting known rewarding actions and exploring uncertain ones. We tested this model's predictions by selectively manipulating one action's reward magnitude or probability. As uniquely predicted by this model, changes were restricted to lapses associated with that action. Finally, we show that lapses are a powerful tool for assigning decision-related computations to neural structures based on disruption experiments (here, posterior striatum and secondary motor cortex). These results suggest that lapses reflect an integral component of decision-making and are informative about action values in normal and disrupted brain states.
From Automation to Autonomy: Legal and Ethical Responsibility Gaps in Artificial Intelligence Innovation

The increasing prominence of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in daily life and the evolving capacity of these systems to process data and act without human input raise important legal and ethical concerns. This article identifies three primary AI actors in the value chain (innovators, providers, and users) and three primary types of AI (automation, augmentation, and autonomy). It then considers responsibility in AI innovation from two perspectives: (i) strict liability claims arising out of the development, commercialization, and use of products with built-in AI capabilities (designated herein as “AI artifacts”); and (ii) an original research study on the ethical practices of developers and managers creating AI systems and AI artifacts. The ethical perspective is important because, at the moment, the law is poised to fall behind technological reality—if it hasn’t already. Consideration of the liability issues in tandem with ethical perspectives yields a more nuanced assessment of the likely consequences and adverse impacts of AI innovation. Companies should consider both legal and ethical strategies thinking about their own liability and ways to limit it, as well as policymakers considering AI regulation ex ante.
On Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and Contractual Conditions

This article uses the recent Delaware Chancery Court case ofHexion v. Huntsman as a template for motivating thoughts about how contract law should interpret contractual conditions in general--and "material adverse event"provisions in particular-within environments of extreme ambiguity (as opposed to risk). Although ambiguity and aversion thereto bear some facial similarities to risk and risk aversion, an optimal contractual allocation of uncertainty does not always track the optimal allocation of risk. After establishing these intuitions as a conceptual proposition, I endeavor to test them empirically, using a unique data set of528 actual material adverse event provisions in corporate acquisitions transactions between 2007 and 2008. My results are consistent with my conceptual account distinguishing risk from uncertainty. Although intuitive, the idea that material adverse event provisions can be a means for allocating uncertainty contrasts with the received wisdom in corporate law scholarship about the nature and purpose of such terms. Using MA C/MAE provisions as an animating narrative, this article concludes that the behavioral economics concept of ambiguity aversion is a helpful device for understanding contractual conditions and excuses.
Conservatism and Cross‐Sectional Variation in the Post–Earnings Announcement Drift

Accounting conservatism allows me to identify a previously undocumented source of predictable cross-sectional variation in Standardized Unexpected Earnings' autocorrelations viz. the sign of the most recent earnings realization and present evidence that the market ignores this variation ("loss effect"). It is possible to earn returns higher than from the Bernard and Thomas (1990) strategy by incorporating this feature. Additionally, the paper shows that the "loss effect" is different from the "cross quarter" effect shown by Rangan and Sloan (1998) and it is possible to combine the two effects to earn returns higher than either strategy alone. Thus, the paper corroborates the Bernard and Thomas finding that stock prices fail to reflect the extent to which quarterly earnings series differ from a seasonal random walk and extends it by showing that the market systematically underestimates time-series properties resulting from accounting conservatism.
The Joint Effect of Investor Protection and Big 4 Audits on Earnings Quality around the World

The association of a country's investor protection regime with the quality of reported earnings is examined for a large sample of firms from 42 countries. Three attributes of earnings are evaluated: the magnitude of abnormal accruals, the likelihood of reporting losses, and earnings conservatism (timely loss recognition). We find that earnings quality increases for firms with Big 4 auditors when a country's investor protection regime gives stronger protection to investors; specifically, abnormal accruals are smaller, there is a greater likelihood of reporting losses, and earnings conservatism is greater. In contrast, earnings of firms with non-Big 4 auditors are largely unaffected by different investor protection regimes. The study adds to a growing body of research showing that accounting practices are influenced by a country's institutions. However, our results differ from prior studies by demonstrating that country-level effects are mediated by audit enforcement, and in particular the incentives of Big 4 auditors to perform higher quality audits in countries with stricter investor protection regimes.
A hidden risk of auditor industry specialization: evidence from the financial crisis

We identify situations in which auditor industry specialization could be detrimental for audit outcomes. We predict that during periods of heightened industry-specific risk, specialist auditors from the affected industry could struggle to secure and allocate sufficient resources to mitigate the heightened risk because they have client portfolios concentrated in the affected industry. Using a measure of office-level industry concentration/specialization (as opposed to a market-based measure), we find that banking auditor industry specialization is associated with higher audit quality and more timely audits during the period before the financial crisis. However, during the financial crisis, banking industry specialization is associated with lower audit quality and less timely audits. Collectively, our results suggest that auditor industry specialization can be detrimental in certain circumstances and that audit firms and audit regulators should consider whether the audit markets have become too specialized to handle the resource allocation problems that crisis situations present.
Student Services in the 21st Century: Evolution and Innovation in Discovering Student Needs, Teaching Information Literacy, and Designing Library 2.0-Based Services

SUMMARY The authors discuss the changing library needs of law students as computers, technology, and legal publishing evolve. In order to track the evolving needs of students, the authors discuss ways that librarians can survey students and explain how focus groups and usability tests can provide further insights regarding students' research skills and information needs. The article examines the literature regarding information literacy and suggests minimum standards for legal information literacy upon graduation, and the authors suggest new services that law librarians could create for law students. Next the authors examine the recent literature about Library 2.0 services, and offer suggestions on incorporating Library 2.0 principles into law library services.
How Long Was the Workday in 1880

This article develops the first comprehensive set of estimates of daily hours of work in 1880 using new data from the Census of Manufactures. We conclude that the average workday was almost exactly 10 hours in 1880—almost a decade earlier than hitherto supposed. Our statistical analysis also reveals small but statistically significant variations in hours between firms and industries, between regions, and by location. We also find that higher-paid workers probably substituted leisure for income, that total employment was unresponsive to hours, and that hours and days of employment during the year moved together.
How Salary Receipt Affects consumers' Regulatory Motivations and Product Preferences.

Abstract In this article, the authors find that consumers' preferences change as a function of their temporal distance from the receipt of their last salary. The authors propose and test that when consumers have just received their salary (“the near-salary condition”), they exhibit promotion motivations in their product preferences. However, they exhibit prevention motivations in their product preferences when significant time has elapsed since their last salary receipt (“the far-from-salary condition”). The authors collected data from two longitudinal studies to validate these findings and to test the underlying process. Using actual purchase behavior and collecting product preference during a one-month period, the authors show that consumers' product preferences change in response to temporal distance from their last salary receipt. The findings suggest to managers that the best time to promote products or messages with a promotion appeal is near to consumers' last salary receipt and that the best time ...
Accountability of independent directors - Evidence from firms subject to securities litigation

Abstract We examine which independent directors are held accountable when investors sue firms for financial and disclosure-related fraud. Investors can name independent directors as defendants in lawsuits, and they can vote against their reelection to express displeasure over the directors’ ineffectiveness at monitoring managers. In a sample of securities class action lawsuits from 1996 to 2010, about 11% of independent directors are named as defendants. The likelihood of being named is greater for audit committee members and directors who sell stock during the class period. Named directors receive more negative recommendations from Institutional Shareholder Services, a proxy advisory firm, and significantly more negative votes from shareholders than directors in a benchmark sample. They are also more likely than other independent directors to leave sued firms. Overall, shareholders use litigation along with director elections and director retention to hold some independent directors more accountable than others when firms experience financial fraud.
Reversal of gender gaps in child development: Evidence from young children in India

This paper provides unique evidence of a reversal of gender gaps in cognitive development in early childhood. We find steep caste and gender gradients and few substantive changes once children enter school. The gender gap, however, reverses its sign for the upper caste, with girls performing better than boys at age 5 but thereafter following the general pattern in India of boys performing better.
The Long-term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades

Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa’s slave trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance. To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades, and use instrumental variables. Together the evidence suggests that the slave trades have had an adverse effect on economic development.
A Solution to Matching with Preferences over Colleagues

We study many-to-one matchings, such as the assignment of students to colleges, where the students have preferences over the other students who would attend the same college. It is well known that the core of this model may be empty, without strong assumptions on agents' preferences. We introduce a method that finds all core matchings, if any exist. The method requires no assumptions on preferences. Our method also finds certain partial solutions that may be useful when the core is empty.
Environmental Justice and Collaborative Governance: Building a Socio-Spatial Perspective for Facility Siting

Environmental justice concerns, in part, the distribution of both environmental hazards and nuisances such that impoverished communities, particularly impoverished communities of color, contend more with the effects of industry than those who are affluent. As communities of color have organized to confront this problem, their claims of injustice have revealed significant issues across all sectors of environmental governance, both in the U.S. and internationally, and reflect failures of representative institutions in urban land management. In this manuscript, we derive a socio-spatial approach to management of facility siting decisions based on the research in environmental justice. Then we discuss some reforms to facility siting that have been proposed and implemented in the U.S., Canada, and western Europe over the course of three decades, and how these reforms can improve the legitimacy of facility siting decisions.
An Economic Analysis of Libel Law

This paper examines the welfare implications of different libel law standards as applied to newspapers in publishing stories. Our work extends the current literature by permitting private and public incentives to deviate, giving rise to an agency problem, and by formulating a two-stage decision model based on a story's expected value. We show that the negligence standard provides incentives for the agent to take actions, merely to insure itself against liability. This results in a deadweight loss to society. We also show that both standards can be socially inefficient; however, correction using policy tools under strict liability places a lower informational burden on policy makers, than does the negligence standard.
International Copyright Law and Litigation: A Mechanism for Improvement

INTRODUCTION 78 I. AVAILABLE REMEDIES FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT 82 II. PLACE OF INFRINGEMENT AND QUESTIONS OF CHOICE OF LAW 88 III. EXERCISING RIGHTS IN THE RIGHT FORUM—QUESTIONS OF JURISDICTION 100 A. Jurisdiction in European Union or Civil Law Tradition Countries 101 B. Jurisdiction in the United States and Common Law Tradition Countries 106 IV. THE FAILED HAGUE DRAFT CONVENTION–AN EXPLANATION OF ITS INEFFECTIVE NEGOTIATIONS 109 V. PROPOSED MECHANISM 112 A. International Convention on Recognition of Copyright Decrees and Judgments 112 1. Application 113 2. Jurisdiction 115 3. Preliminary Injunctions 120 4. Applicable Law 125 5. Grounds for Non-Recognition 125 6. Revisiting the Basic Proposed Rules 130 B. Comity and Reciprocity 130 C. Reliance on Administrative Procedures 134 VI. PROBABLE EXTRATERRITORIAL EFFECTS AND A PUBLIC CHOICE DEMOCRACY PERSPECTIVE 137 CONCLUSION 146
Bridging the gap in pension participation: how much can universal tax-deferred pension coverage hope to achieve?

In light of the declining pension coverage of low-income workers, policy makers have discussed requiring all employers to offer individual retirement accounts, similar to defined contribution plans. How likely to participate are workers who currently do not have access to a pension plan? We address this question by using plausibly exogenous variation in pension-plan availability to estimate the determinants of participation in a standard selection on unobservables model. We find that currently uncovered low-income workers are fairly likely to participate in a newly offered plan, yet they are much less likely to do so than currently covered workers.
Bridging the Channel

Soon after Lord Reid had left this question partially unanswered, Great Britain became a member of the European Economic Community, brought, a t last, to the shores of the continent. The limelight which, until then, was mainly focused on the economic and political problems of European integration now had to include within i ts coverage a third major component part of integration: law. The additional dimensional problem of British membership in the EEC raised the very sensitive issue which centuries of hostility and rapprochement, indifference and mutual concern, had not yet had to face-that is, whether, the civil law and the common law systems could find a modus vivendi under economic and political constraints. Indeed, European community law is more than a few / treaties, i t is more than a series of regulations or directives, i t is more than judicial decisions from a European court; i t is a system of i law. Moreover, i t is a civil law system identified by its particular style of drafting legislation and its methodology of legal reasoning. ] \ 1
Can sticky consumption cause business cycles

Sticky aggregate consumption is a demonstrable phenomenon in economies throughout the world, but to our knowledge it has not yet been incorporated into capital structure macroeconomics. Doing so suggests an explanation for business cycles. On the heels of a technological advance, sticky consumption facilitates increased savings and lower real interest rates. These lower rates lead to accelerating elongations in the capital structure. Even though such elongations facilitate more rapid economic growth, if duplicative overinvestment in research and development occurs, economic contraction will follow the exposure of such error.
Richard Thaler and the Rise of Behavioral Economics

Richard Thaler was awarded the 2017 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his contributions to behavioral economics. In this article, I review and discuss these contributions.
Self-Selection and Information Role of Online Product Reviews

Online product reviews may be subject to self-selection biases that impact consumer purchase behavior, online ratings' time series, and consumer surplus. This occurs if early buyers hold different preferences than do later consumers about the quality of a given product. Readers of early product reviews may not successfully correct for these preference differences when interpreting ratings and making purchases. In this study, we develop a model that examines how idiosyncratic preferences of early buyers can affect long-term consumer purchase behavior as well as the social welfare created by review systems. Our model provides an explanation for the structure of product ratings over time, which we empirically test using online book reviews posted on Amazon.com. Our analysis suggests that firms could benefit from altering their marketing strategies such as pricing, advertising, or product design to encourage consumers likely to yield positive reports to self-select into the market early and generate positive ...
Rule and Revenue in Egypt and Rome: Political Stability and Fiscal Institutions

Herrschaft und Staatseinkommen in ?gypten und Rom: Zur Wechselwirkung von Politischer Stabilit?t und Besteuerung?. This paper investigates what determines fiscal institutions and the burden of taxation using a case study from ancient history. It evaluates Levi's model of taxation in the Roman Republic, according to which rulers' high discount rates in periods of political instability encour age them to adopt a more predatory fiscal regime. The evi dence for fiscal reform in the transition from the Republic to the Principate seems to support her hypothesis but re mains a matter of debate among historians. Egypt's transi tion from a Hellenistic kingdom to a Roman province under the Principate provides an analogous case for which there are better data. The Egyptian evidence shows a correlation between rulers' discount rates and fiscal regimes that is consistent with Levi's hypothesis.
The Portfolio Theory of Exchange Rates—Then and Now

In the early 1970s, the portfolio theory of exchange rates with rational expectations was introduced to explain the behavior of floating exchange rates. While attractive in principle, the approach failed along with other theories to provide empirically convincing results. Over the years, the theory has been extended to a general equilibrium setting and modified to include central bank intervention and non-rational expectations. More recently, it has become a platform for the micro-structural approach emphasizing order flows, which shows increasing promise as an empirical explanation of exchange rate behavior.
Evaluating Pricing Strategy Using e-Commerce Data: Evidence and Estimation Challenges

As Internet-based commerce becomes increasingly widespread, large data sets about the demand for and pricing of a wide variety of products become available. These present exciting new opportunities for empirical economic and business research, but also raise new statistical issues and challenges. In this article, we summarize research that aims to assess the optimality of price discrimination in the software industry using a large e-commerce panel data set gathered from Amazon.com. We describe the key parameters that relate to demand and cost that must be reliably estimated to accomplish this research successfully, and we outline our approach to estimating these parameters. This includes a method for “reverse engineering” actual demand levels from the sales ranks reported by Amazon, and approaches to estimating demand elasticity, variable costs and the optimality of pricing choices directly from publicly available e-commerce data. Our analysis raises many new challenges to the reliable statistical analysis of e-commerce data and we conclude with a brief summary of some salient ones.
Whither the Pickering Rights of Federal Employees

As a result of the Supreme Court's 1983 decision in Bush v. Lucas, federal employees are not permitted to bring Bivens constitutional tort claims directly to federal court to vindicate their First Amendment rights to free speech under Pickering v. Bd. of Education. Instead, the Bush Court found that Congress had established an effective, alternative statutory scheme for vindication of such claims under the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA of 1978). This places federal employees in a less favorable predicament than their state and local employee counterparts who are able to directly proceed to court on their First Amendment retaliation claims under Section 1983. The issue examined in this paper for the first time is whether an alternative remedy of bringing a First Amendment Pickering claim to an administrative judge designated by the Merit Systems Protection Board (Board), and then potentially to the Board itself, and finally to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, provides meaningful redress for federal employees with First Amendment Pickering claims. An empirical analysis of all First Amendment Pickering cases decided by the MSPB and the Federal Circuit leads to a startling finding: there has not been one successful employee claim of this type under the administrative scheme. My conclusion is that because there is not meaningful redress, Bush v. Lucas should be revisited and overturned, and a Bivens claim implied to vindicate the First Amendment interests of federal employees.
Pascal spreading of short‐term interest rate contracts

This article examines the spreading and pricing of short-term interest rate futures contracts and shows how traditional types of calendar spread positions can emerge as explicit arbitrage solutions. A specific set of intuitive spreading structures, Pascal’s spreading triangle, arises when the underlying daily risk factors are identified as the stochastic coefficients of a high-order polynomial approximation to the yield curve. No empirically estimated hedge ratios are required for these arbitrage strategies. Application of this Pascal spread framework to pricing and trading the London International Financial Futures Exchange (LIFFE) short sterling deposit futures market over the 1989 to 1998 sample period revealed that the LIFFE’s short sterling arbitrage sector’s efficiency improved markedly over time. The improvement over the decade coincided with dramatic declines in futures trading transactions costs. As a byproduct, the framework extracts and measures the quantitative impact of the Y2K millennium-turn pricing distortion on the December 1999 short sterling futures contract. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 20:889–910, 2000
Stimulating managerial capital in emerging markets : the impact of business and financial literacy for young entrepreneurs

Identifying the determinants of entrepreneurship is an important research and policy goal, especially in emerging market economies where lack of capital and supporting infrastructure often imposes stringent constraints on business growth. This paper studies the impact of a comprehensive business and financial literacy program on firm outcomes of young entrepreneurs in an emerging post-conflict economy, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The authors conduct a randomized control trial and find that while the training program did not influence business survival, it significantly improved business practices, investments, and loan terms for surviving businesses. Entrepreneurs with higher ex-ante financial literacy further exhibited some improvements in business performance and sales.
A Theoretical Analysis Connecting Conservative Accounting to the Cost of Capital

Abstract We connect conservative accounting to the cost of capital by developing an accounting model within an asset pricing framework. The model has three distinctive features: (1) transaction-cycle-conformity, where the book value equals the value of cash at the beginning and the end of a cash-to-cash transaction cycle; (2) a revenue recognition principle, where uncertainty affects the amount of revenues recognized; (3) a matching principle, where expenses are matched with revenue with a conservative bias due to uncertainty. We demonstrate how the growth rate of expected earnings, the accruals-to-cash ratio, and the expected earnings yield relate to the expected stock return.
Switching Costs and Dynamic Price Competition in Network Industries

In network industries, switching costs have two opposite effects on the tendency towards market dominance. First, the fat cat effect makes the larger firm price less aggressively and lose consumers to the smaller firm. This effect works against market dominance. Second, the network solidification effect reinforces network effects by heightening the exit barrier for locked-in consumers and making a network size advantage longer-lasting. This effect facilitates tipping towards market dominance. When there does not exist an outside good so that the market size isfixed, at low switching costs the network solidification effect dominates, but at high switching costs the fat cat effect takes over. When there exists an outside good, the fat cat effect is dampened by the competition from the outside good and switching costs tend to increase the likelihood of market dominance. The effects of switching costs on prices and welfare also critically depend on the strength of the network effect and the quality of the outside good.
Rethinking Television Audience Measures: An Exploration into the Construct of Audience Connectedness

Seeking to extend the scope of current audience measurement methods, this paper qualitatively investigates audiences' relationships with television programs. A content analysis of viewers' discourse from focus groups, Internet “fan forums” and five phenomenological interviews suggests a construct we label“connectedness.” Transcending involvement, audience connectedness defines intense relationships between the audience and a television program that extend beyond the television watching experience into individuals' personal and social lives. Highly connected audiences were found to be more susceptible to the consumption images presented in television programs, hence illustrating the moderating effect of connectedness on television influence. Implications for audience measurement methods and marketing efforts are discussed.
Discussion of On the Asymmetric Recognition of Good and Bad News in France, Germany and the United Kingdom

Giner & Rees (2001) report that the asymmetry in the timeliness of earnings decreases as one moves across the U. K., France and Germany. These results are similar to those previously predicted and reported by Ball, Kothari & Robin (2000). The authors extend this prior research by examining the robustness of the results to size, industry, and alternative deflator choices. More importantly, they contribute by examining the interaction between the traditional textbook definition of conservatism, which focuses on choices between accounting methods, and the more recent asymmetric timeliness definition, which focuses on the asymmetric recognition of unrealized gains and unrealized losses. Their other important contribution is to simultaneously examine the explanatory power of lagged earnings and current returns using the asymmetric conservatism predictions.The conference discussion focused on defining conservatism, the endogeneity of legal systems and business environments, and differences in cost of capital across industries and firm sizes. The following discussion examines different aspects of conservatism, and their interactions; the relative and incremental ability of lagged earnings and current returns to explain current earnings; several specification issues; estimation of cost of equity from earnings-return regressions; and why asymmetric conservatism appears to be increasing in Europe.
Telling a Less Suspicious Story: Notes Toward a Non-Skeptical Approach to Legal/Cultural Analysis

Those of us who labor in academia— either in law or in the humanities— are, at a very basic level, storytellers. Both in my scholarly writing and in the classroom, I find that most of my effort is focused on constructing narratives of meaning from the complicated and multifaceted material that makes up our lived reality. Philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey wrote that “ reality only exists for us in the facts of consciousness given by inner experience.” 1 But for every experience there is a wide range of possible meanings that can be assigned. And for every possible meaning there is a range of stories we can tell. As anthropologist Edward Bruner has pointed out, “ If we write or tell about the French Revolution, for example, we must decide where to begin and where to end, which is not so easy, so that by our arbitrary construction of beginnings and endings we establish limits, frame the experience, and thereby construct it.” 2 On this view, “ Every
Divergence of US and Local Returns in the After‐market for Equity Issuing ADRs

We study one-year post-listing prices and returns to equity issuing ADRs that listed in the US between January 1991 and October 2000. ADRs from countries that impose restrictions on capital flows are priced at a premium to their home market ordinaries. While the mean premium for the full sample is statistically indistinguishable from zero, after an adjustment for asynchronous trading, the magnitude of the premium to ADRs from restricted markets is 11.33% at the 300-day post listing interval, which is statistically significant. In the short run (30 days) following listing, the magnitude of the premium is larger for ADRs with larger excess demand from US investors. At the longer 300-day horizon, Nasdaq listed ADRs earn a larger premium than their NYSE/AMEX listed counterparts. Time-series regressions and two-stage cross-sectional regressions establish that the premium to foreign equity issuers is greater if the US listing attracts liquidity and if US returns have a lower correlation with the local country index.
Parties Without Brands? Evidence from California's 1878–79 Constitutional Convention

Why do legislative parties emerge in democracies where elections are contested by individual candidates, rather than national party organizations? And can parties survive in the absence electoral pressure for their members to work on shared political goals? In this article, we examine the emergence and maintenance of party discipline in an atypical legislative context: California's 1878–79 constitutional convention. The unusual partisan alignments among the delegates at the California convention provide us with a unique empirical opportunity to test election- and policy-based explanations for legislative discipline. Our study combines a careful reading of the historical record with a statistical analysis of roll call votes cast at the convention to show how leaders of the “Nonpartisan” majority held together their disparate coalition of Democratic and Republican members in the face of conflicting preferences, ideological divisions, and well-organized political opponents. Our findings provide evidence that cohesive parties can exist even in the absence of broadly shared electoral pressures or policy goals.
Church, State, and the Practice of Love

In his first encyclical letter, Deus caritas est, Pope Benedict XVI describes the Church as a community of love. In this letter, he explores the organized practice love by and through the Church, and the relationship between this practice, on the one hand, and the Church's commitment to the just ordering of the State and society, on the other. God is love, he writes. This paper considers the implications of this fact for the inescapably complicated nexus of church-state relations in our constitutional order. The specific goal for this paper is to draw from Deus caritas est some insight into what is a fundamental and - at present - the most pressing challenge in church-state law, namely, the preservation of the Church's moral and legal right to govern herself in accord with her own norms and in response to her own calling. It asks, what does the new Pope's work and thinking, about the future and present state of the Church and her organized practice of love, suggest about the appropriate content and vulnerable state of the rights and independence of religious groups - and of the freedom of the Church?
Vertical integration to avoid contracting with potential competitors: Evidence from bankers' banks $

Abstract We examine a vertical integration decision within the commercial banking industry. During the last quarter of the 20th century, some community banks reduced their traditional reliance on correspondent banks for upstream products and services by joining bankers' banks, a form of business cooperative. Research on vertical integration focuses primarily on firm-specific investment, market power, and government regulation. However, this case is difficult to explain in terms of these standard vertical integration motives. Our evidence suggests that bankers' banks are a response to technological change and deregulation that results in increased costs faced by community banks in dealing with correspondent banks as both suppliers and potential competitors. For instance, loan participations require sharing proprietary information about major loan customers, something a community bank would not want to provide to a potential competitor.
Is CEO Cash Compensation Punished for Poor Firm Performance

ABSTRACT: Leone et al. (2006) conclude that CEO cash compensation is more sensitive to negative stock returns than to positive stock returns, due to Boards of Directors enforcing an ex post settling up on CEOs. Dechow (2006) conjectures that Leone et al.’s (2006) results might be due to the sign of stock returns misclassifying firm performance. Using three-way performance partitions, we find no asymmetry in CEO cash compensation for firms with low stock returns. Further, we find that CEO cash compensation is less sensitive to poor earnings performance than it is to better earnings performance. Thus, we find no evidence consistent with ex post settling up for poor firm performance, even among the very worst performing firms with strong corporate governance. We find similar results when examining changes in CEO bonus pay and when partitioning firm performance using earnings-based measures. In sum, our results suggest that CEO cash compensation is not punished for poor firm performance.
Height and per capita income.

(1983). Height and Per Capita Income. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 1-7.
International Media Law Reform and First Amendment Agnosticism: Review of Lee Bollinger’s Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century

Scholars and practitioners in communications law and the First Amendment will recognize Lee Bollinger’s status as our most preeminent and thoughtful writer on press freedom. His latest effort, Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century, is a slim, elegant, and forceful piece of advocacy, taking its title from the most celebrated line in First Amendment jurisprudence, and perhaps in all of
From discovery to commercialization: accretive intellectual property strategies among small, knowledge-based firms

This paper explores the use of publications and patents and their covariates among small, knowledge-based firms pursuing technology commercialization. It does so through an empirical examination of 1180 small firms’ R&D projects, all of which were funded through Phase II U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards. As such, the paper responds to recent calls to investigate not only how small, knowledge-based firms utilize specific IP strategies but also how accretive logic specifically differs from competitive publishing and patenting logic.
Using high, low, open, and closing prices to estimate the effects of cash settlement on futures prices

Abstract Due to dwindling commercial interest in the feeder cattle futures contract, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) decided to replace the contract's physical delivery provision with a cash settlement provision, arguing that cash settlement would help reduce price volatility and attracts more commercial interests. In this article, we apply stochastic volatility models to investigate the CME conjecture, using four different estimators based on opening, high, low, and closing prices, respectively. With each estimator, we find that the volatility of the feeder cattle futures price decreases after the implementation of cash settlement. We conclude that the change in the contract specification enhances price discovery and the contract's hedging performance.
Another Look at Mutual Fund Tournaments

Daily returns are used to examine how mutual funds actively alter the risk of their portfolios in response to past performance. Compared to monthly data, daily returns produce much more efficient estimates of fund volatility, which give vastly different inferences about the behavior of fund managers. In particular, monthly results consistent with under-performers increasing their risk relative to better performing funds disappear with daily data. The differences in the monthly and daily results arise from biases in the monthly volatility estimates attributable to daily return autocorrelation.
Social Networks, HIV/AIDS and Risk Perceptions

Understanding the determinants of individuals’ perceptions of their risk of becoming infected with HIV and their perceptions of acceptable strategies of prevention is an essential step towards curtailing the spread of this disease. We focus in this paper on learning and decision-making about AIDS in the context of high uncertainty about the disease and appropriate behavioral responses, and we argue that social interaction is an important determinant of risk perceptions and the acceptability of behavioral change. Using longitudinal survey data from rural Kenya and Malawi, we test this hypothesis. We investigate whether social interactions—and especially the extent to which social network partners perceive themselves to be at risk ‐exert causal influences on respondents’ risk perceptions and on one approach to prevention, spousal communication about the threat of AIDS to the couple and their children. The study explicitly allows for the possibility that important characteristics, such as unobserved preferences or community characteristics, determine not only the outcomes of interest but also the size and composition of networks. The most important empirical result is that social networks have significant and substantial eects on risk perception and the adoption of new behaviors even after controlling for unobserved factors.
The Confidence Game: Manipulation of the Markets by Governmental Authorities

backed securities issued by financial institutions were reflected in banks’ share prices. The crisis represented a massive global loss of confidence in the ability of the world's financial markets to value financial assets appropriately which has raised a range of issues for legislators and regulators. The global financial crisis thus renders visible and urgent a perennial (although often ignored) tension in financial regulation with respect to the extent to which governments should intervene to fix the financial markets. Governments have 4
Moving Toward Exclusive Tribal Autonomy over Lands and Natural Resources

Tribal governments and individual American Indians lack autonomy over their lands and natural resources. Rather than owning their lands outright and enjoying the autonomy that property ownership ensures, tribes are relegated to a beneficiary status beholden to the federal government as the trustee over tribal lands. This article, by advocating a return to tribal control, provides new alternatives to the out-dated federal policies controlling the tribal land tenure system.