cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Improving Flood Insurance and Flood-Risk Management: Insights from St. Louis, Missouri

This paper examines the history of St. Louis, Mo. in coping with riverine flood risk over the past 15 years, with a focus on flood insurance. Six observations from a detailed case analysis are presented. They are (1) many property owners do not buy flood insurance; (2) people underestimate flood risk; (3) we need better flood maps; (4) we have a “love affair” with levees; (5) flood risk is increasing over time; and (6) we take deep pride in rebuilding after a disaster. Policy implications are discussed.
The Skills They Need: International and Foreign Legal Research

Law schools should offer classes in international and foreign legal research (IFLR) because the increasing globalization of law practice requires new skills of lawyers. Moreover, internationalized law school programs and curricula, including human rights clinics, exchange programs, and transnational law courses, require complementary research skills. Currently, few schools offer a stand-alone IFLR class. This article describes an ideal IFLR class, which would cover public and private international law, foreign law, and selected topics, and provide students with basic IFLR skills. The author notes that librarians are best suited to teach such a class because of their extensive knowledge of IFLR resources and usage.
An Empirical Investigation of Dynamic Ordering Policies

Adaptive base stock policy is a well-known tool for managing inventories in nonstationary demand environments. This paper presents empirical tests of this policy using aggregate, firm-level data. First, we extend a single-item adaptive base stock policy in previous literature to a multi-item case. Second, we transform the policy derived for the multi-item case to a regression model that relates firm-level inventory purchases to firm-level sales and changes in sales forecasts. We focus on two research questions: Can the adaptive base stock policy explain cross-sectional ordering behaviors under sales growth? To the extent that the adaptive base stock policy fails to explain ordering behaviors under sales growth, are there frictions that explain such a finding? Our empirical results demonstrate disparities in ordering behaviors between firms experiencing high and moderate sales growth. Contrary to theoretical prediction, this implies that inventory purchases are a function of not only current sales and changes in sales forecast but also past sales growth. As potential explanations for this departure from theoretical prediction, we show that both future demand dynamics and inventory holding risks depend on past sales growth. In addition, we find that firms' inventory holding risks may also be affected by purchasing constraints imposed by supply chain contracts. Our results provide managerial implications for practitioners and inform future theoretical research. This paper was accepted by Martin Lariviere, operations management.
Disclosure and the Cost of Capital: a Survey of the Theoretical Literature

This article offers a survey of theoretical research on disclosure and the cost of capital. We summarize the current state of the literature and discuss the channels through which information affects the cost of capital. After giving an overview of asset pricing theory, we examine the rationale for an accounting risk factor or an ex-ante effect of information on the cost of capital. Then, we discuss the role of voluntary disclosure, heterogenous beliefs, investor base, liquidity shocks, earnings management, and agency problems as determinants of the cost of capital. Linkages between productive decisions and the cost of capital, and their implication for investor welfare, are also examined.
Assuming the Risk: Tort Law, Policy, and Politics on the Slippery Slopes

Prominent jurists and legal scholars have long been critical of the doctrine of the assumption of risk, arguing that it is logically flawed and has sown confusion in the courts. This article takes a fresh look at the assumption of risk by focusing on legal conflicts over ski accidents in three ski-intensive states - Vermont, Colorado, and California. It argues that the tort doctrine of the assumption of risk remains vital, and highlights the way in which powerful political and economic actors with links to the ski industry have lobbied aggressively for state laws that codify the assumption of risk. The result has been state legislation that protects ski resort owners and operators from tort liability. By pointing to politics and economics as critical factors in the persistence of the doctrine of assumed risks, and exploring the social values implicated in the assumption of risk debate, the article deepens what has been an overly technical debate among tort law scholars and offers a way forward for future tort law scholarship on the idea of assumed risks.
The Contagion Effects of Accounting Restatements

We predict and find that accounting restatements that adversely affect shareholder wealth at the restating firm also induce share price declines among non‐restating firms in the same industry. These share price declines are unrelated to changes in analysts' earnings forecasts, but instead seem to reflect investors' accounting quality concerns. Peer firms with high industry‐adjusted accruals experience a more pronounced share price decline than do low‐accrual firms. This accounting contagion effect is concentrated among revenue restatements by relatively large firms in the industry. We also find that investors impose a larger penalty on the stock prices of peer firms with high earnings and high accruals when peer and restating firms use the same external auditor. Our results are consistent with the notion that some accounting restatements cause investors to reassess the financial statement information previously released by non‐restating firms.
The Modernizing Mission of Judicial Review

Constitutional interpretation, as it is usually conceived, looks to the past—to an old text, to history, to precedent, to tradition—in an effort to limit political majorities. But over the last generation or so, a different approach to the Constitution has emerged. That approach, which might be called modernization, tries to anticipate trends in public opinion instead of taking lessons from the past; and a modernizing court, instead of facing down popular majorities, yields when it finds out that it has misgauged public opinion. This modernizing approach has characterized the Supreme Court’s recent work in many disparate areas, including, among others, the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment and the limits on sex discrimination imposed by the Equal Protection Clause. Perhaps most interesting, the substantive due process decisions of the last forty years are modernizing decisions, unlike the pre–New Deal substantive due process decisions to which they are often, mistakenly, compared. Modernization is an appealing approach in many ways. Among other things, it holds out the hope of more easily reconciling judicial review with democracy. But modernization also raises serious questions. There are questions of institutional competence—anticipating trends in public opinion sounds like a politician’s job, not a court’s—although there may be less to this objection than meets the eye. Perhaps the more important objections are that modernization may distort the political process, and it may cause courts to be too willing to accommodate what they perceive as the demands of popular opinion, at the expense of a principled judicial role.
On the Age of Information in Internet of Things Systems with Correlated Devices

In this paper, a real-time Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring system is considered in which multiple IoT devices must transmit timely updates on the status information of a common underlying physical process to a common destination. In particular, a real-world IoT scenario is considered in which multiple (partially) observed status information by different IoT devices are required at the destination, so that the real-time status of the physical process can be properly re-constructed. By taking into account such correlated status information at the IoT devices, the problem of IoT device scheduling is studied in order to jointly minimize the average age of information (AoI) at the destination and the average energy cost at the IoT devices. Particularly, two types of IoT devices are considered: Type-I devices whose status updates randomly arrive and type-II devices whose status updates can be generated-at-will with an associated sampling cost. This stochastic problem is formulated as an infinite horizon average cost Markov decision process (MDP). The optimal scheduling policy is shown to be threshold-based with respect to the AoI at the destination, and the threshold is non-increasing with the channel condition of each device. For a special case in which all devices are type-II, the original MDP can be reduced to an MDP with much smaller state and action spaces. The optimal policy is further shown to have a similar threshold-based structure and the threshold is non-decreasing with an energy cost function of the devices. Simulation results illustrate the structure of the optimal policy and show the effectiveness of the optimal policy compared with a myopic baseline policy.
The Body of the Mind: Embodied Cognition, Law, and Justice

Recent research from embodied cognition strongly contests the dualist notion of the mind as distinct and apart from the biological machine of the body—a conception that has powerfully shaped our laws, legal practices, theories, and institutions for centuries. According to the embodied (or grounded) cognition perspective, the body is involved in the constitution of the mind. Thus, beyond our conscious awareness, an abstract concept, like trustworthiness, may be primed by sensorimotor experience, like feeling physical warmth. This Article introduces recent insights from this budding field, discusses some of the potential implications of experiments in embodied cognition for courtroom interactions, and addresses the significant challenges to using this research as a means to reform. * Assistant Professor of Law, Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law, 3320 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, 215.571.4809, adam.benforado@drexel.edu. I would like to extend my gratitude to students in my Law and Mind Sciences seminar over the last two years who have eagerly debated the value and implications of embodied cognition research, and to Brooke Bailer, Kathryn Brady, and Geoff Goodwin for helpful comments. I am also indebted to the participants at the 2009 Childress Lecture, particularly the hardworking members of the Saint Louis University Law Journal, Joel Goldstein, and the great john powell. SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW 1186 SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 54:1185
The Importance of Corporate Models: Economic and Jurisprudential Values and the Future of Corporate Law

This article argues that the debate concerning the nature of the corporation is not finished and nor a mere intellectual exercise for interested legal academics. The current model of the corporation as an economic entity 'the firm' has a number of imbedded value assumptions. Given the common territory between corporate law and economics, some scholars have come to identify the two as equal partners striving for the same ends. This is a serious error which has had and continues to have significant negative consequences for both the economic situation of the majority and justice in society. These value assumptions are being seriously brought into question in light of developing economic experience and analysis. In light of experience, the values are far from being universally accepted. Furthermore, they do not promote a just society. Models of the corporation are fundamental to the debate because models are both descriptive and prescriptive. For society to develop on just lines, the debate of the fundamental values needs to be brought into the open and brought under closer scrutiny.
The iPhone Meets the Fourth Amendment

Imagine that police arrest an individual for a simple traffic infraction, such as running a stop sign. Under the search incident to arrest doctrine, officers are entitled to search the body of the person they are arresting to ensure that he does not have any weapons or will not destroy any evidence. The search incident to an arrest is automatic and allows officers to open containers on the person, even if there is no probable cause to believe there is anything illegal inside of those containers. What happens, however, when the arrestee is carrying an iPhone in his pocket? May the police search the iPhone's call history, cell phone contacts, emails, pictures, movies, calendar entries and, perhaps most significantly, the browsing history from recent internet use? Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent decided well before handheld technology was even contemplated, the answer appears to be yes. This article demonstrates how the full contents and multiple applications of iPhones can be searched without a warrant or probable cause under existing Supreme Court precedent. The article also offers approaches courts and legislatures might adopt to ensure greater protection for the soon-to-be pervasive iPhone devices.
Redistribution, taxes, and the median voter

Abstract We study a simple model of production, accumulation, and redistribution, where agents are heterogeneous in their initial wealth, and a sequence of redistributive tax rates is voted upon. Though the policy is infinite-dimensional, we prove that a median voter theorem holds if households have identical, Gorman aggregable preferences; furthermore, the tax policy preferred by the median voter has the “bang-bang” property.
A Review of IPO Activity, Pricing, and Allocations

We review the theory and evidence on IPO activity: why firms go public, why they reward first-day investors with considerable underpricing, and how IPOs perform in the long run. Our perspective is threefold: First, we believe that many IPO phenomena are not stationary. Second, we believe research into share allocation issues is the most promising area of research in IPOs at the moment. Third, we argue that asymmetric information is not the primary driver of many IPO phenomena. Instead, we believe future progress in the literature will come from nonrational and agency conf lict explanations. We describe some promising such alternatives. From 1980 to 2001, the number of companies going public in the United States exceeded one per business day. The number of initial public offerings ~IPOs! has varied from year to year, however, with some years seeing fewer than 100 IPOs, and others seeing more than 400. These IPOs raised $488 billion ~in 2001 dollars! in gross proceeds, an average of $78 million per deal. At the end of the first day of trading, their shares traded on average at 18.8 percent above the price at which the company sold them. For an investor buying shares at the first-day closing price and holding them for three years, IPOs returned 22.6 percent. Still, over three years, the average IPO underperformed the CRSP value-weighted market index by 23.4 percent and underperformed seasoned companies with the same market capitalization and book-to-market ratio by 5.1 percent. In a nutshell, these numbers summarize the patterns in issuing activity, underpricing, and long-run underperformance, which have been the focus of a large theoretical and empirical literature. We survey this literature, focusing on recent papers. Space constraints force us to take a U.S.-centric point of view and to omit a description of the institutional aspects of going public. The interested reader can consult Ellis, Michaely, and O’Hara ~2000!,
Toward an understanding of household vulnerability in rural Kenya

Considerations of risk and vulnerability are key to understanding the dynamics of poverty. This study conceives vulnerability as expected poverty and illustrates a methodology to empirically assess household vulnerability using pseudo panel data derived from repeated cross sections augmented with historical information on shocks. Application of the methodology to data from rural Kenya shows that in 1994 rural households faced on average a 40 percent chance of becoming poor in the future. Households in arid areas that experience large rainfall volatility appear more vulnerable than those in non-arid areas, where malaria emerges as a key risk factor. Idiosyncratic shocks also cause non-negligible consumption volatility. Possession of cattle and sheep/goats appears ineffective in protecting consumption against covariant shocks, though sheep/goat help reduce the effect of idiosyncratic shocks, especially in arid zones. Of the policy instruments simulated, interventions directed at reducing the incidence of malaria, promoting adult literacy, and improving market accessibility hold most promise to reduce vulnerability.
Sequential Cross-border Mergers in Models of Oligopoly

Anti-competitive mergers may be held up when outside firms respond pro-competitively. I examine the profitability of cross-border mergers by embedding a class of oligopoly models—where mergers are anti-competitive and actions are strategic substitutes—in a sequential merger game, cast in a two-country setting. I find that cross-border mergers: (i) are held up only when ‘international differences’ are minimal; (ii) happen in clusters, not in isolation; and (iii) can be interdependent. I illustrate with two standard oligopolies. The ‘bumpiness’ of the world suggests that the hold-up problem is less pervasive in an open-economy context.
Seeking Reconciliation of Self-Determination, Territorial Integrity, and Humanitarian Intervention (Introduction to Special Project: Humanitarian Intervention and Kosovo)

In this article, Linda Malone introduces the Special Project: Humanitarian Intervention and Kosovo. The Kosovo crisis caused a whirl of debate that made reference to standards of territorial integrity and self-determination, of prohibitions on force excluding self-defense, and of humanitarian intervention. The unclear legal history of humanitarian intervention is jumbled even more by the intervention dependent humanitarian causes.
Chandra High Resolution Camera Imaging of GRS 1758–258

We observed the "microquasar" GRS 1758-258 four times with Chandra. Two observations with the imaging detector of the High Resolution Camera (HRC-I) were made in 2000 September-October spanning an intermediate-to-hard spectral transition (identified with the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer). Another HRC-I observation and an Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer/High Energy Transmission Grating (HETG) observation were made in 2001 March following a hard-to-soft transition to a very low flux state. Based on the three HRC images and the HETG zero-order image, the accurate position (J2000) of the X-ray source is R.A. = 18h01m1239, decl. = -25°44'361 (90% confidence radius = 045), consistent with the purported variable radio counterpart. All three HRC images are consistent with GRS 1758-258 being a point source, indicating that any bright jet is less than ~1 lt-month in projected length, assuming a distance of 8.5 kpc.
Is Cheap Talk Effective at Eliminating Hypothetical Bias in a Provision Point Mechanism

Significant difference between response to real and hypothetical valuation questions is often referred to as hypothetical bias. Some economists have had success with using “cheap talk” (which entails reading a script that explicitly highlights the hypothetical bias problem before participants make any decisions) as a means of generating unbiased responses in a referendum format. In this article, we test the robustness of cheap talk using a voluntary contribution mechanism with a provision point over a wide range of possible payment amounts. Our results confirm the existence of hypothetical bias, and suggest that cheap talk may eliminate hypothetical bias, but only for respondents facing higher payments.
Health Regulators as Data Stewards

INTRODUCTION 1605 I. MAKING DATA BIGGER 1609 A. Federal Government as Data Generator 1611 B. Federal Government as Data Collector 1612 C. Federal Government as Data Aggregator 1614 D. Federal Government as Data Facilitator 1617 E. Federal Government as Data Funder 1620 II. MAKING DATA SMALLER 1621 A. Patient Decision Aids 1622 B. Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute 1623 C. Meaningful Use Regulations 1624 D. Health-Related Quality Reporting 1625 III. REMAKING DATA 1628 CONCLUSION 1636
When Bias is Bipartisan: Teaching about the Democratic Process in an Intellectual Property Law Republic

Intellectual property law courses offer law professors the opportunity to teach a subject area rich with complicated statutory and court-made doctrines about which students do not usually have strong or extensively delineated moral views. It also gives everyone in the classroom a refreshing break from the traditional partisanship of political party politics. Identification as a Democrat or Republican does not provide too much guidance or create too many expectations about a person’s views of intellectual property issues, freeing classroom debates from the constrictions that political loyalties impose in so many other contexts.
A Post-Keynesian View of Central Bank Independence, Policy Targets, and the Rules-versus-Discretion Debate

This paper addresses three monetary policy issues—policy independence, choice of targets, and rules versus discretion. According to the new monetary consensus, the central bank needs policy independence to build credibility, the operating target is the overnight interbank lending rate, and the ultimate goal is price stability. An alternative view is presented, arguing that an effective central bank cannot be independent as conventionally defined, where effectiveness is indicated by the ability to hit an overnight nominal interest rate target. Discretionary policy and conventional views of central bank ability to achieve traditional goals such as robust growth, low inflation, or high employment are rejected. Thus, the paper returns to Keynes's call for low interest rates and euthanasia of the rentier.
Labor market distortions in Cote d'Ivoire : analyses of employer-employee data from the manufacturing sector

The authors investigate the extent and nature of distortions in the labor market in the Republic of Cote d'Ivoire by using quantile regression analysis on employer-employee data from the manufacturing sector. They find that the labor markets in Cote d'Ivoire do not seem to be much distorted. Unions may influence employment through tenure but do not seem to influence wages directly except for vulnerable minorities that seem protected by unions. Establishment-size wage effects are pronounced and highest for white-collar workers. This may be explained by the efficiency wage theory, so that, even in the absence of unions, segmentation and inefficiencies will still be present as long as firms seek to retain their employees by paying wages above the market clearing level. The inefficiency arising from establishment-size wage effects can be mitigated by education. Furthermore, the authors find that the premium to education is highly significantly positive only for higher education, and not for basic education, indicating that educational policies should also focus on higher education.
Life-Cycle Consumption and the Age-Adjusted Value of Life

Our research presents new evidence on the age pattern of the implicit value of life revealed from workers' differential wages and job safety pairings. Although aging reduces the number of years of life expectancy, aging can affect the value of life through an effect on planned life-cycle consumption. The elderly could, a priori, have the highest implicit value of life if there is a life-cycle plan to defer consumption until old age. We find that largely due to the age pattern of consumption, which is non-constant, the implicit value of life rises and falls over the lifetime in a way that the value for the elderly is higher than the average over all ages or for the young. There are important health policy implications of our empirical results. Because there may be age-specific benefits of programs to save statistical lives, instead of valuing the lives of the elderly at less than the young, health policymakers should more correctly value the lives of the elderly at as much as twice the young because of relatively greater consumption lost when accidental death occurs.
Capital Account Policies and the Real Exchange Rate

This paper presents a simple model of how a small open economy can undervalue its real exchange rate using its capital account policies. The paper presents several properties of such policies, and proposes a rule of thumb to assess their welfare cost. The model is applied to an analysis of Chinese capital account policies.
Indirectly productive entrepreneurship

Purpose – Since Baumol (1990), the economic literature has distinguished between two broad categories of entrepreneurship: productive and unproductive. The purpose of this paper is to introduce another subcategory: indirectly productive entrepreneurship. Sometimes, profit-seeking entrepreneurs allocate their talents to indirectly productive activities to mitigate the new costs market participants endure as a result of a government regulation. The resources used to mitigate these costs must be diverted from other uses. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses the example of cell phone storage outside New York City’s high schools to illustrate an indirectly productive entrepreneurial activity that mitigates the inefficiencies or costs created by a regulation. These costs and the resulting entrepreneurship would not have arisen absent the regulation. Findings – These profit opportunities do not result from market entrepreneurial errors or successes but emerge from inefficiencies or unintended consequenc...
Means, Motives and Opportunities in Ethno-Nationalist Mobilization

Building on the most important theoretical tools from the literatures on social movements and nationalism, we propose a model of the intensity of nationalist political behavior in which a community...
Using the Master’s ‘Tool’ to Dismantle His House: Why Justice Clarence Thomas Makes the Case for Affirmative Action

Justice Clarence Thomas, the second black man to sit on the Supreme Court, is famous, or rather infamous, for his opposition to affirmative action. His strongest critics condemn him for attacking the very preferences that helped him reach the Supreme Court. None, however, have considered how Thomas’s life itself may be used as a justification for affirmative action. In what ways can the master’s “tool” be used to dismantle his house?
The Cost to Firms of Cooking the Books

We examine the penalties imposed on the 585 firms targeted by SEC enforcement actions for financial misrepresentation from 1978–2002, which we track through November 15, 2005. The penalties imposed on firms through the legal system average only $3.83. In the cross section, the reputation loss is positively related to measures of the firm's reliance on implicit contracts. This evidence belies a widespread belief that financial misrepresentation is disciplined lightly. To the contrary, reputation losses impose substantial penalties for cooking the books.
Semiparametric Bayesian Inference of Long‐Memory Stochastic Volatility Models

. In this paper, a semiparametric, Bayesian estimator of the long-memory stochastic volatility model's fractional order of integration is presented. This new estimator relies on a highly efficient, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler of the model's posterior distribution. The MCMC algorithm is set forth in the time-scale domain of the stochastic volatility model's wavelet representation. The key to and centerpiece of this new algorithm is the quick and efficient multi-state sampler of the latent volatility's wavelet coefficients. A multi-state sampler of the latent wavelet coefficients is only possible because of the near-independent multivariate distribution of the long-memory process's wavelet coefficients. Using simulated and empirical stock return data, we find that our algorithm produces uncorrelated draws of the posterior distribution and point estimates that rival existing long-memory stochastic volatility estimators.
China's Legal System and the WTO: Prospects for Compliance

It is well understood both inside and outside of China that the task of making China’s laws and regulations conform to World Trade Organization (WTO) requirements is a huge one. But a key feature of China’s accession to the WTO that sets it apart from most other countries is not the size of the task, but the fact that accession is part of a larger strategy of massive and fundamental economic reform. China’s economic reform era is now over twenty years old. The scope of the planned economy has been steadily shrinking, and few state-owned enterprises can afford to ignore market principles. Tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers had been steadily dropping prior to WTO entry, while rules on foreign investment were gradually liberalized. The Chinese government has embarked on this strategy for its own sake, not to fulfill treaty commitments to foreigners, and Chinese leaders have sought WTO membership not simply because they believe that it will open more markets to Chinese products, but because they see membership as giving them extra leverage to force through difficult changes in the domestic economic system. Many in the leadership understand that China’s WTO commitments, while labeled “concessions” in the language of international trade negotiations, are not really “concessions” to be reluctantly yielded at all, but rather sound policies that China would be wise to adopt even without WTO membership. 1 Reforms simply imposed from outside are
Distributive Injustice and Private Law

Imperfect rights are not held against any single person, and when violated, they do not ground a claim for any particular quantum of redress. The right to an adequate income may be an imperfect right. Because imperfect rights have been asserted only as claims against the state, and because they do not lend themselves to constitutional adjudication, they have had little traction. In my paper, I will emphasize that any claim on the state is derivative from the right held as against other citizens. Even those who believe that individuals have perfect social rights against the state should concede an imperfect right against other individuals in the ubiquitous case of (at best) partial compliance by the state.Because the right to basic income ultimately is held against other individuals, it is effective outside the boundaries of public law. I will argue that, though the United States does not recognize a constitutional right to adequate income, the common law does implicitly recognize certain imperfect social rights. Imperfect rights shape rights and responsibilities with respect to individuals against whom an imperfect right-holder does not otherwise bear a direct claim under private law.Theorists of private law have been reluctant to recognize any role for distributive justice in private law because social rights are perceived as collective in nature, and therefore, without import for the scope of obligation between individuals. I show that imperfect social rights may be taken into account in a way that respects the foundational status of individual responsibility in private law.
Promises, Reliance, and Psychological Lock-In

AbstractWe obtain experimental evidence that suggests that promisors are more likely to keep promises the more they were relied on by a promisee; that this effect is anticipated by promisees, who a...
Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Multi-Regional Economic Growth and Welfare: A Theoretical Research Agenda

We discuss a prospective, theoretical research agenda about the connections between entrepreneurship, innovation, and multi-regional economic growth and welfare. This agenda advocates the use of endogenous economic growth theory and advances in new economic geography to analyze models that will shed light on the effects of innovative entrepreneurship on economic growth and welfare in multiple regions. Four salient questions comprise the subject matter of this paper. First, what are the impacts of human capital use, innovative activities, and alternate patent policies on economic growth and welfare in any region i where i=1,...,~N? Second, what are the effects of human capital use and negative externalities in innovation on economic growth and welfare in this ith region? Third, what are the impacts of alternate tax policies on innovation driven economic growth in the ith region? Finally, what role does the human capital in the ith region play in influencing innovation driven economic growth and welfare in this region?
The Roberts Court and the Law of Human Resources

The rise of human resources departments parallels the increase in the myriad statutory and regulatory requirements that govern the workplace. The Supreme Court's decisions in labor and employment law cases are largely monitored and implemented by HR professionals who must carry out these directives on a daily basis. This article looks at the Roberts Court's labor and employment law cases through the lens of human resources. In adopting an approach that is solicitous towards HR departments and concerns, the Roberts Court reflects a willingness to empower these private institutional players. Even if labor and employment law scholars do not agree with the solicitousness, they should use the opportunity to develop a positive theory of HR, one that directs this workforce in a just and ethical manner.
Growth Capital-Backed IPOs

Growth capital investing is the financing of growing businesses that are investing in tangible assets and the acquisition of other companies. Growth capital is common in retailing, restaurant chains, and health care management, and represents 12% of all venture capital (VC)-backed initial public offerings (IPOs). Since 1980, investing in growth capital-backed IPOs has produced mean three-year style-adjusted buy-and-hold returns of +25.2%, in contrast to style-adjusted returns of approximately zero for other VC-backed and buyout-backed IPOs. One-third of growth capital-backed IPOs are rollups and these have produced much higher returns for investors than rollups without a financial sponsor.
The psychology of job loss: using social media data to characterize and predict unemployment

Using data from social media, we study the relationship between the macroeconomic shock of employment instability and psychological well-being. We analyze more than 1.2B Twitter posts from over 230,000 U.S. users who either lost a job or gained a new job over a period spanning five years, from 2010 to 2015. First we quantify the magnitude and length of effects of job loss/gain on psychological variables such as anxiety, sadness, and anger. We then define a behavioral macroeconomic model that leverages these changes in psychological state to predict levels of unemployment in the U.S. Our results show that our psychological well-being measures are leading indicators, predicting economic indices weeks in advance with higher accuracy than baseline models. Taken together, these findings suggest that by capturing the human experience of a shock like job loss, social media data can augment current economic models to generate a better understanding of the overall causes and consequences of macroeconomic performance.
On the Importance to Economic Success of Property Rights in Finance and Innovation

This Essay surveys recent developments across the fields of finance and innovation to highlight some common themes concerning the importance of property rights to economic success. Society regularly makes choices when shaping the precise contours of the legal institutions that govern the behavior of market actors, often in response to high profile issues like the collapse of Enron and the patenting of lifesaving AIDS drugs. Recognizing that no set of legal institutions or related enforcement mechanisms will be perfect, this Essay explores some particularly helpful institutional features based on property rights that too often are overlooked by policy makers and commentators, even though these property-based institutional features have long been associated with economic success in a number of diverse settings. ∗ Stephen H. Haber is the A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences and Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. F. Scott Kieff is a Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis and Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Troy A. Paredes is a Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. They have initiated the Hoover Project on Commercializing Innovation to study the law, economics, and politics of commercializing innovation. Comments are welcome at fskieff.91@alum.mit.edu. Washington University Open Scholarship p 215 Haber Kieff Paredes book pages.doc 7/29/2008 10:33:00 AM 216 Journal of Law & Policy [Vol. 26:215
The SEC's Global Accounting Vision: A Realistic Appraisal of a Quixotic Quest

In the most revolutionary securities law development since the New Deal, the SEC is poised to jettison rules requiring companies to apply recognized US accounting standards by inviting use of a new set of international ones created by a private Londonbased organization. This radical shift follows decades of gradual movement towards international standards that has gained momentum since 2005 when all listed companies in the European Union were required to use them. For the US, the SEC could give companies the option to use either or establish a medium-term plan to move US companies to international standards within a decade. Analysis of the SEC’s vision for this quest reveals that it contains contradictions, paradoxes and ironies that suggest quixotic thinking. A contradiction: the SEC touts its vision as promoting comparability, yet proposes injecting choice and competition into accounting standards that would reduce it. A paradox: the SEC celebrates a single set of global standards while advocating changes that would create a double set within the US and overlooks factors that justify skepticism about the possibility of a single set of written standards translating into uniform application. An irony: the SEC acknowledges that pursuing global standards is “very complex” while its Chairman says the SEC has “declared a war on complexity” in accounting. A more realistic vision of the quest appreciates that, under either an optional or mandatory route, the shift amounts to a leap of faith posing both large costs for the US and potentially large gains for it and the world. This realistic appraisal lowers expectations about actual comparability; highlights serious risks that competing standards would impair comparability; recognizes needs the SEC has scantly examined to render elaborate infrastructural changes; and, above all, faces the realization that the abrupt shift is less about the SEC’s historical mandate to protect investors than about a newly undertaken mission to expand global capitalism. * Professor of Law, George Washington University. Thanks to participants in a workshop at Yale Law School and Yale School of Management; participants in the Business Associations Section panel at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools; and to Jacob Barney, Erik Gerding, and David Walker. THE SEC’S GLOBAL ACCOUNTING VISION
Accounting disclosures and corporate payout policy: Special dividends versus stock repurchases

This study examines whether the choice of stock repurchases versus special dividends for one-time cash distributions is related to the level of a firm's accounting disclosures. The results indicate...
A Dynamic Model of Optimal Creditor Dispersion

Borrowing from multiple creditors exposes firms to rollover risk due to coordination problems among creditors, but it also improves firms' repayment incentives, thereby increasing pledgeability. Based on this trade‐off, I develop a dynamic debt rollover model to analyze the evolution of creditor dispersion. Consistent with empirical evidence, I find that firms optimally increase creditor dispersion after poor performance. In contrast, cross‐sectionally higher‐growth firms can support more dispersed creditors. Frequent debt renegotiation limits firms' ability to increase pledgeability by having more creditors. Finally, holding a cash balance while borrowing from multiple creditors improves firms' repayment incentives uniformly across all future states.
Demographic, Residential, and Socioeconomic Effects on the Distribution of 19th Century White Body Mass Index Values

Little research exists on the body mass index values of 19th century Americans of European descent. Using a new BMI data set and robust statistics, between 1860 and 1880, BMIs decreased across the distribution; however, after 1880, BMIs in the highest quantiles increased, while those in lower BMI quantiles continued to decrease. Late 19th and early 20th century white BMIs increased at older ages in higher quantiles and decreased in lower quantiles, indicating significant net biological disparity by age. During industrialization, white BMIs were lower in Kentucky, Missouri, and urban Philadelphia.
Ethnic Capital and Intergenerational Mobility

This paper analyzes the extent to which ethnic skill differentials are transmitted across generations. I assume that ethnicity acts as an externality in the human capital accumulation process. The skills of the next generation depend on parental inputs and on the quality of the ethnic environment in which parents make their investments, or "ethnic capital." The empirical evidence reveals that the skills of today's generation depend not only on the skills of their parents, but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parent's generation.
Offshore Hedge Funds: Survival and Performance 1989-1995

We examine the performance of the off-shore hedge fund industry over the period 1989 through 1995 using a database that includes defunct as well as currently operating funds. The industry is characterized by high attrition rates of funds and little evidence of differential manager skill. We develop endogenous style categories for relative fund performance measures and find that repeat-winner and repeat-loser patterns in the data are largely due to style effects in that data.
To Have and to Hold: What Does Love (of Money) Have to Do with Joint Tax Filing

Wealthy taxpayers have always attempted to reduce their federal income taxes. Before 1948, when the United States had an individual-based system, one popular method was to shift income between spouses so that more of a husband's income could be reported by and taxed to his lower-income, and thus lower-tax-bracket, wife. Congress eliminated the reward for this tax-avoidance behavior in 1948 by nationalizing income splitting via the joint return. Today, there are proposals to return to an individual-based system. Evaluating the proposal for individual filing, this Article first explores the development of the income-splitting joint return as a historical guide to the potential costs of this proposal. The Article then rejects the prospect that today's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will be able to rein in a resurgence of this type of tax avoidance. Finally, in addition to these practical concerns, this Article contends that calculations on a unitary basis remain today, as in the past, more accurate and more just for judging a married couple's ability to pay taxes when compared to other taxpayers. As a result of these considerations, the joint return is the more equitable method of marital tax filing.
The Place of the User in Copyright Law

The past decade has witnessed an upsurge of interest, on the part of both copyright owners and copyright scholars, in users of copyrighted works. Copyright doctrine, however, is characterized by the absence of the user. This absence produces a domino effect that ripples through the structure of copyright law, shaping both its unquestioned rules and its thorniest dilemmas. The essay traces the effects of the user's absence, and argues that a theory of the user is needed to restore doctrinal and theoretical balance. Specifically, it is commonly understood that users play two important roles within the copyright system: users receive copyrighted works, and some users become authors. Both roles further the copyright system's larger project to promote the progress of knowledge. But copyright law and policy have shown little interest in understanding the processes by which these roles are performed, nor in inquiring what users need to perform their roles in a way that optimizes the performance of the copyright system as a whole. The models of the user offered by copyright scholars have not helped as much as they could in answering these questions. In broad brush, scholarly efforts to cast the user have produced three fully fledged candidates, each more unrealistic than the last: the economic user, the postmodern user, and the romantic user. As the essay shows, none of these characters provides a satisfying account of the user's role within the copyright system. This essay introduces a new character, the situated user, who engages cultural goods found within the context of her culture through a variety of activities ranging from consumption to creative play, and whose activities are the vehicle through which copyright's collective project is advanced.
Inventory investment and the cost of capital

We examine the relation between inventory investment and the cost of capital in the time series and the cross section. We find consistent evidence that risk premiums, rather than real interest rates, are strongly negatively related to future inventory growth at the aggregate, industry, and firm levels. The effect is stronger for firms in industries that produce durables rather than nondurables, exhibit greater cyclicality in sales, require longer lead times, and are subject to more technological innovation. We then construct a production-based asset pricing model with two types of capital, fixed capital and inventories, to explain these empirical findings. Convex adjustment costs and a countercyclical price of risk lead to negative time series and cross-sectional relations between expected returns and inventory growth.
Predictability and Nonobviousness in Patent Law After KSR

In KSR International Co. v. Teleflex, Inc., the Supreme Court addressed the doctrine of nonobviousness, the ultimate question of patentability, for the first time in thirty years. In addition to mandating a flexible approach to deciding nonobviousness, the KSR opinion also introduced two predictability standards for determining nonobviousness. The Court described predictability of use (“Type I predictability”) — whether the inventor used the prior art in a predictable manner to create the invention — and predictability of the result (“Type II predictability”) — whether the invention produced a predictable result — both as a means for proving obviousness. While Type I predictability is easily explained as part of the flexible approach endorsed by KSR, Type II predictability represents a possible radical shift in the nonobviousness doctrine. Instead of focusing on whether reasons already existed to create the invention, like Type I predictability does, a Type II predictability analysis takes the invention’s creation as a given and looks instead at the invention’s operation. Type II predictability moves the analysis away from the gap between the prior art and the invention to the invention only.The Patent Office, the Federal Circuit, and lower courts are using Type II predictability fairly extensively. The problem with this usage is that Type II predictability runs counter to statutory language, introduces hindsight bias, discriminates against certain technologies, and conflicts with basic patent theory. Accordingly, the Patent Office and courts need to reconsider how they use Type II predictability and interpret this part of KSR.