cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Director–Liability–Reduction Laws and Conditional Conservatism

We study nonofficer directors’ influence on the accounting conservatism of U.S. public firms. Between 1986 and 2002, all 50 U.S. states enacted laws that limited nonofficer directors’ litigation risk but often left officer directors’ litigation risk unchanged. We find that conditional conservatism decreased after the staggered enactments of the laws, which we attribute to less nonofficer director monitoring of financial reporting in affected firms. Conservatism fell less when shareholder or debtholder power was high, consistent with major stakeholders moderating the influence of nonofficer directors. We verify that our results stem from reductions in the asymmetric timeliness of accruals and, specifically, its current assets components. We also show that affected firms switched away from Big N auditors more often, which reduced these firms’ commitment to conservative financial reports.
Learning competitive equilibrium in laboratory exchange economies

A laboratory market for two goods is instituted to examine the hypothesis that individuals will eventually coordinate on the induced competitive equilibrium. The mechanism for exchange strongly restricts the space of agent actions, facilitating the identification of decision rules. Evidence for learning competitive equilibrium is mixed due to strong heterogeneity in decision making. Some subjects forego immediately available gains when they expect the market to move in a more favorable direction, a condition necessary for coordinating on the competitive outcome. However, a majority do not, and many are content to satisfice, though the means to do better was reasonably transparent.
How Does Information Quality Affect Stock Returns

Using a simple dynamic asset pricing model, this paper investigates the relationship between the precision of public information about economic growth and stock market returns. After fully characterizing expected returns and conditional volatility, I show that (i) higher precision of signals tends to increase the risk premium, (ii) when signals are imprecise the equity premium is bounded above independently of investors' risk aversion, (iii) return volatility is U-shaped with respect to investors' risk aversion, and (iv) the relationship between conditional expected returns and conditional variance is ambiguous. IN MODERN FINANCIAL MARKETS, investors are flooded with a variety of information: corporations' earnings reports, revisions of macroeconomic indexes, policymakers' statements, and political news. These pieces of information are processed by investors to update their projections of the economy's future growth rate, inflation rate, and interest rate. In turn, these changes in investors' expectations affect stock market prices. However, even though it is clear that asset prices react to new information, several questions arise regarding the relationship between the quality of information that investors receive and asset returns. For example, what kind of effect does a noisy signal on the "health" of the economy have on stock market prices? If information is noisy, is there a risk premium? Or is the risk premium completely independent of the quality of information investors receive? Also, how does the precision of the signals affect stock market volatility? If signals are more precise, does stock market volatility decrease or increase? Finally, can we infer how good investors' information is from the behavior of stock market returns? In this paper I study a dynamic asset pricing model where I try to answer the above questions. Specifically, I assume that stock dividends are generated by a diffusion process whose drift rate is unknown to investors and may
Drinking Water and Exclusion: A Case Study from California's Central Valley

The American West is notorious for its water wars, and California’s complex water allocation and governance challenges serve as a bellwether for contemporary water governance across western states. Policy makers and environmental advocates typically represent California’s water woes as a regulatory problem—a failure to balance the needs of growing urban populations with ecological preservation and agricultural irrigation. These debates, however, often elide the issue of water deprivation, and they do not adequately address the concerns of an important constituency: low-income, rural communities.
The Limits of Public Sector Reforms: Evidence From the Maritime Sector

B. Lesser distingue quatre categories d'auteurs qui soutenaient la privatisation. L'A. souligne que les avocats de la privatisation se sont trompes en avancant que la principale cause de l'inefficacite de l'industrie dans les pays en developpement etait la propriete etatique. Bien que soutenant une plus grande implication du secteur prive dans l'industrie maritime de l'Afrique occidentale et centrale, l'A. montre que les problemes sont aussi lies aux changements dans la structure et la technologie de l'industrie mondiale de la navigation, aux contraintes geopolitiques intraregionales, aux contextes politiques internes, et au style de gestion des compagnies indigenes et des investissements maritimes. La corporatisation serait une solution
BOUNDARY EVOLUTION EQUATIONS FOR AMERICAN OPTIONS

We consider the problem of finding optimal exercise policies for American options, both under constant and stochastic volatility settings. Rather than work with the usual equations that characterize the price exclusively, we derive and use boundary evolution equations that characterize the evolution of the optimal exercise boundary. Using these boundary evolution equations we show how one can construct very efficient computational methods for pricing American options that avoid common sources of error. First, we detail a methodology for standard static grids and then describe an improvement that defines a grid that evolves dynamically while solving the problem. When integral representations are available, as in the Black–Scholes setting, we also describe a modified integral method that leverages on the representation to solve the boundary evolution equations. Finally we compare runtime and accuracy to other popular numerical methods. The ideas and methodology presented herein can easily be extended to other optimal stopping problems.
Tracing magnetic separators and their dependence on IMF clock angle in global magnetospheric simulations

[1] A new, efficient, and highly accurate method for tracing magnetic separators in global magnetospheric simulations with arbitrary clock angle is presented. The technique is to begin at a magnetic null and iteratively march along the separator by finding where four magnetic topologies meet on a spherical surface. The technique is verified using exact solutions for separators resulting from an analytic magnetic field model that superposes dipolar and uniform magnetic fields. Global resistive magnetohydrodynamic simulations are performed using the three-dimensional Block-Adaptive Tree Solar-wind Roe-type Upwind Scheme code with a uniform resistivity, in eight distinct simulations with interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) clock angles ranging from 0° (parallel) to 180° (antiparallel). Magnetic nulls and separators are found in the simulations, and it is shown that separators traced here are accurate for any clock angle, unlike the last closed field line on the Sun-Earth line that fails for southward IMF. Trends in magnetic null locations and the structure of magnetic separators as a function of clock angle are presented and compared with those from the analytic field model. There are many qualitative similarities between the two models, but quantitative differences are also noted. Dependence on solar wind density is briefly investigated.
Heavy-quark energy loss in pQCD and SYM plasmas

We consider heavy-quark energy loss and p ⊥ -broadening in a strongly-coupled N=4 Super Yang–Mills (SYM) plasma, and the problem of finite-extent matter is addressed. When expressed in terms of the appropriate saturation momentum, one finds identical parametric forms for the energy loss in pQCD and SYM theory, while p ⊥ -broadening is radiation dominated in SYM theory and multiple scattering dominated in pQCD.
Life as We Know It: The Expansion of the Right to Life Under the Jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

The idea of protecting life within the context of human rights law is perhaps elemental since, as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has explained on numerous occasions, without protecting life all other human rights protections are meaningless. Indeed, a survey of international and regional human rights treaties and conventions demonstrates the uniformity of inclusion of the right to life as a guaranteed right across divergent state parties and instrument promulgation goals. And yet, the terms of the right to life and the construction of its meaning do vary between instruments. Of course, the meaning of these provisions depends not only on a plain text reading but also on the construction of these provisions by the appropriate international or regional body. This article focuses on the Inter-American Court of Human Right’s creation of a body of jurisprudence regarding the right to life that has expanded and become increasingly nuanced throughout the Court’s history. The Court is selected for analysis because, as the Court itself admits, it is at the forefront of developing human rights law and because it offers a strong example of how the right to life can be used by a juridical body to reflect the many facets of life and to holistically incorporate these facets into jurisprudence which protects life for individuals and communities. Studying the expansion of the Court’s jurisprudential construction of the right to life illustrates that the contours of life as we know it have changed – and will change – in order to ensure that they reflect and protect the intricate tapestry of human rights that are encompassed by the right to life. Ultimately, this article concludes with the observation that the Court’s expansion of the right to life as we know it is essential for maintaining the Inter-American human rights system as a vibrant mechanism of jurisprudence on human rights.
Enforcement without Foundation?—Insider Trading and China's Administrative Law Crisis

China’s securities regulator presently enforces insider trading prohibitions pursuant to non-legal and non-regulatory internal “guidance”. Reported agency decisions indicate that such enforcement is often only possible pursuant to this guidance, as the trading behavior identified is far outside of the scope of insider trading liability provided for in the governing statute. This paper argues that the agency guidance is itself unlawful and unenforceable, and outlines legal challenges to the norms and enforcement of them. The radical infirmity underlying the basis for well-governed and investor-attracting capital markets has implications not only for China’s securities regulation regime and healthy market development, but also for the entirety of China’s legal and administrative law system in the reform era. 1 Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School. In composing this article, I have benefited from the insights of Professors Donald Clarke, Cui Wei, Keith Hand, Jamie Horsley, Victoria Langland, Ben Liebman, Neysun Mahboubi, Curtis Milhaupt, Shen Kui, and Alex Wang, and the good comments and questions received at a workshop convened by the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law and the Yale Law School China Law Center in December 2011 and ____. For this article, I have modified the standard pinyin Romanization system for some Chinese terms to enhance reading for those who do not read or speak Chinese. Thus, the character sets properly rendered as “guiding” (the verb “to regulate” or the noun “legislative provisions”) and “fading” (meaning “stipulated in law”) are written “gui‟ding” and “fa‟ding” so as to avoid conjuring the English words in the phrases “the guiding light” or “the fading light.”
Clinical and economic factors associated with ambulance use to the emergency department.

Background: Concern about ambulance diversion and emergency department (ED) overcrowding has increased scrutiny of ambulance use. Knowledge is limited, however, about clinical and economic factors associated with ambulance use compared to other arrival methods. Objectives: To compare clinical and economic factors associated with different arrival methods at a large, urban, academic hospital ED. Methods: This was a retrospective, cross-sectional study of all patients seen during 2001 (N= 80,209) at an urban academic hospital ED. Data were obtained from hospital clinical and financial records. Outcomes included acuity and severity level, primary complaint, medical diagnosis, disposition, payment, length of stay, costs, and mode of arrival (bus, car, air-medical transport, walk-in, or ambulance). Multivariate logistic regression identified independent factors associated with ambulance use. Results: In multivariate analysis, factors associated with ambulance use included: triage acuity A (resuscitation) (adjusted odds ratio [OR], 51.3; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 33.1 to 79.6) or B (emergent) (OR, 9.2; 95% CI = 6.1 to 13.7), Diagnosis Related Group severity level 4 (most severe) (OR, 1.4; 95% CI = 1.2 to 1.8), died (OR, 3.8; 95% CI = 1.5 to 9.0), hospital intensive care unit/operating room admission (OR, 1.9; 95% CI = 1.6 to 2.1), motor vehicle crash (OR, 7.1; 95% CI = 6.4 to 7.9), gunshot/stab wound (OR, 2.1; 95% CI = 1.5 to 2.8), fell 0–10 ft (OR, 2.0; 95% CI = 1.8 to 2.3). Medicaid Traditional (OR, 2.0; 95% CI = 1.4 to 2.4), Medicare Traditional (OR, 1.8; 95% CI = 1.7 to 2.1), arrived weekday midnight–8 AM (OR, 2.0; 95% CI = 1.8 to 2.1), and age ≥65 years (OR, 1.3; 95% CI = 1.2 to 1.5). Conclusions: Ambulance use was related to severity of injury or illness, age, arrival time, and payer status. Patients arriving by ambulance were more likely to be acutely sick and severely injured and had longer ED length of stay and higher average costs, but they were less likely to have private managed care or to leave the ED against medical advice, compared to patients arriving by independent means.
USING STATISTICAL PROCESS CONTROL TO EVALUATE HAZARD ANALYSIS CRITICAL CONTROL POINT PLAN DATA

Food safety is particularly important for operators of cook/chill food services. The Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) Plan approach to food safety is advocated by public health authorities. The goal of this study was to determine if an evaluation of HACCP collected data using Statistical Process Control (SPC) tools would be useful for predicting the microbiological safety of cook/chill foods. The time-temperature data from 65 batches of a hospital's HACCP records of cook/chill prepared chicken were evaluated. Data analysis indicated an unexpected lack of variability among the batches of chicken suggesting that the data were not reliable. The research shows that managers should evaluate the HACCP data-collection procedures at food services to ensure that these data accurately reflect the cooking and chilling procedures at their facilities.
Out of Sight and Out of Line: The Need for Regulation of Lawyers' Negotiations with Unrepresented Poor Persons

In a variety of civil legal settings, negotiations between lawyers and unrepresented parties are common. Despite this fact, the ethical rules governing lawyers, as well as most ethics textbooks, fail to address such negotiations in any specific way. The ethical rules do, however, prohibit the giving of advice to unrepresented parties. Through an examination of the New York City Housing Court and other contexts where such negotiations are commonplace, the author concludes that lawyers frequently violate existing rules against giving advice to unrepresented parties. Because the unrepresented litigants often are poor, are people of color, and are women, these ethical violations fall most heavily on members of those groups. The author reviews several possible responses to lawyers' abuses of ethical rules, concluding that no single response will curtail the problem. He calls, therefore, for a strategy that combines enhanced enforcement of existing ethical rules, the passage of additional ethical rules concerning negotiations with unrepresented parties, increased supervision by courts, and expanded provision of counsel in civil actions.
Managing Stock Option Expense: The Manipulation of Option-Pricing Model Assumptions*

This paper examines whether firms that voluntarily recognize stock option expense in their financial statements manage that expense downward more than firms that do not recognize the expense by adjusting option-pricing model assumptions. To examine this issue, I collect option-pricing model assumptions from fiscal year 2002 for both a sample of firms that voluntarily recognize stock option expense (“recognizing firms”) and a sample of control firms that do not (“disclosing firms”). The empirical results suggest that recognizing firms manage the recognized stock-based compensation expense reported in their financial statements downward more than do firms that only disclose the expense. Additional analyses reveal that recognizing firms assume a lower level of volatility than disclosing firms in the option-pricing model calculations; however, I find no evidence that recognizing firms manage the dividend yield and risk-free interest rate assumptions more than disclosing firms. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) recently issued Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 123(R), which requires the expensing of the fair value of stock options, so these results may be of interest to capital-market participants and the FASB as they assess the reliability of stock option expense as determined by option-pricing models.
Estimating the Value of Implicit Government Guarantees to Thai Banks

The paper estimates the contingent liability of the Thai government to their banking system prior to the 1997 financial crisis by maximizing a likelihood function that utilizes the established result that deposit insurance can be modeled as a put option on the value of bank assets. The results show that the estimated value of the government guarantee was large and statistically greater than the premium banks paid for this guarantee, suggesting that guarantees provided a subsidy to Thai banks. Additionally, the estimates are able to identify weak banks before the crisis emerged. These results suggest that the estimated value of implicit deposit guarantees can serve as an early warning indicator of banking crises. The paper contrasts the option pricing results with traditional balance sheet indicators, and demonstrates that these alternative indicators are unable to identify weaknesses in the Thai banking systems before the crisis.
DO SMALL BUSINESSES CREATE MORE JOBS? NEW EVIDENCE FOR THE UNITED STATES FROM THE NATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT TIME SERIES

We use a new database, the National Establishment Time Series (NETS), to revisit the debate about the role of small businesses in job creation. Birch (e.g., 1987) argued that small firms are the most important source of job creation in the U.S. economy. But Davis et al. (1996a) argued that this conclusion was flawed, and based on improved methods and using data for the manufacturing sector, they concluded that there was no relationship between establishment size and net job creation. Using the NETS data, we examine evidence for the overall economy, as well as for different sectors. The results indicate that small firms and small establishments create more jobs, on net, although the difference is much smaller than what is suggested by Birch’s methods. Moreover, in the recent period we study, a negative relationship between establishment size and job creation holds for both the manufacturing and services sectors.
Steps Towards Value-Aligned Systems

Algorithmic (including AI/ML) decision-making artifacts are an established and growing part of our decision-making ecosystem. They are now indispensable tools that help us manage the flood of information we use to try to make effective decisions in a complex world. The current literature is full of examples of how individual artifacts violate societal norms and expectations (e.g. violations of fairness, privacy, or safety norms). Against this backdrop, this discussion highlights an under-emphasized perspective in the body of research focused on assessing value misalignment in AI-equipped sociotechnical systems. The research on value misalignment so far has a strong focus on the behavior of individual tech artifacts. This discussion argues for a more structured systems-level approach for assessing value-alignment in sociotechnical systems. We rely primarily on the research on fairness to make our arguments more concrete. And we use the opportunity to highlight how adopting a system perspective improves our ability to explain and address value misalignments better. Our discussion ends with an exploration of priority questions that demand attention if we are to assure the value alignment of whole systems, not just individual artifacts.
Materiality Uncertainty and Earnings Misstatement

The concept of materiality provides a basis for auditors to ignore small misstatements, but the definition of “small” in this context is ambiguous. The issue of “materiality‐standard‐setting” has been raised recently by Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. We examine how materiality uncertainty affects the auditor's evaluation of audit evidence and a manager's choice of earnings overstatement in a strategic auditing model where earnings misstatements also include unintentional system error. We find that when the expected cost of accepting financial statements that are materially misstated, which we refer to as an audit failure, is relatively large, an increase in materiality uncertainty results in a more conservative auditor evaluation of the audit evidence and a decrease in the amount of intentional overstatement. Alternatively, if the auditor's expected cost of extending audit procedures is relatively high, then an increase in materiality uncertainty results in a les...
Agricultural decline and the secular rise in male retirement rates

Abstract Explanations for the decline in labor force participation rates of older men prior to 1950 have focused on the sectoral shift from agriculture to manufacturing in part because labor force participation rates of men living in farm households have been consistently higher than those of men living in nonfarm households. I argue that, at the beginning of the 20th century, men, who were farmers were no less likely to retire than nonfarmers. Past researchers, who examined cross-sectional data, were misled because retired farmers often migrated from their farms. The findings have implications for the secular rise in retirement rates and the secular decline of fertility.
Political-Liberal Legitimacy and the Question of Judicial Restraint

The term “judicial restraint,” applied to courts engaged in judicial constitutional review, may refer to any one or more of three possible postures of such courts, which we here will distinguish as “quiescent,” “tolerant,” and “weak-form.” A quiescent court deploys its powers sparingly, strictly limiting the agenda of social disputes on which it will pronounce in the constitution’s name. A tolerant court confirms as valid laws whose constitutional compatibility it finds to be reasonable sustainable, even though it independently would conclude to the contrary. A weak-form court acts on the understanding that its pronouncements on matters constitutional will be duly open to considered rejection by other political agencies. Theory commonly tends to treat the question of judicial restraint as turning on a bedrock political value of democracy. We may also, however, understand debates over judicial restraint in the light of a different bedrock value, that of political legitimacy. Where democracy is the focal concern, debaters may tend toward conflating into one measure the three dimensions of judicial restraint. A focus on legitimacy rather tends toward a dis-bundling of the three dimensions, thus complicating the choices while also clarifying the stakes. The political philosophy of John Rawls helps us to see how and why this occurs.
Standards and verification for fair-exchange and atomicity in e-commerce transactions

Electronic commerce can be defined as the conduct of commerce in goods and services, with the assistance of telecommunications and telecommunications-based tools. The economic growth potential of e-commerce is extraordinary-but so are the challenges that lie on the path toward success. One of the more pressing challenges is how to ensure the integrity and reliability of the transaction process: key aspects being fair-exchange and atomicity assurance. This paper delineates an extended fair-exchange standard, which includes atomicity assurance, intended for a wide audience including e-commerce designers, managers, users, and auditors. We demonstrate how such a standard prevents or mitigates important e-commerce concerns. To bridge theory with practice, we illustrate how the application of model checking can be used to verify the correctness of the implementation of e-commerce protocols to prevent the failure of such protocols when unforeseen circumstances occur.
The City As An Ecological Space: Social Capital and Urban Land Use

The notion that certain uses of public and private property can have negative effects beyond legally defined property boundaries is firmly embedded in land use law. We are now comfortable regulating land use to prevent and control for impacts to our natural resources, environmental quality, and nuisances to third parties. This idea is partly rooted in economic theory—i.e. the existence of negative externalities, but also in the theory of ecology—i.e. the notion that property is inextricably part of a network of social and economic relationships and that its impacts traverse legally defined property boundaries. But not all impacts, or costs, of land use are properly accounted for in land use regulation. This Article highlights a category of social costs that remain largely exogenous to the norms underlying our system of land use controls. Scholars from a variety of disciplines recognize the importance of social capital to, and the deleterious impacts from its loss on, urban communities. Yet legal scholars have not taken seriously social capital when normatively evaluating urban land use regulation and policy. This Article argues that the failure to account seriously for the ways that land use decisions interact with social capital, particularly in the most socially vulnerable communities, underlies many contemporary disputes involving the persistent fragmentation and *Albert A. Walsh Professor of Law, Fordham University School of Law. I am deeply grateful to the following individuals who read and commented on drafts of this Article at various stages: Elise Boddie, Colin Crawford, Lee Fennell, Rachel Godsil, Sonia Katyal, Carolyn Merchant, Wendell Pritchett, Cliff Rechtschaffen, Aaron Saiger, Benjamin Zipursky. I also want to thank the faculty at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at University of California, Berkeley, at University of Alabama Law School, and at Georgetown University Law Center, where I presented this Article in workshops. I am also grateful to the students in Wendell Pritchett’s Spring 2006 Urban Policy Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law and students in my Urban Land Use seminar at Fordham Law School where I presented this Article and received valuable feedback. This Article was made possible by the generous financial support from Fordham School of Law and benefited immensely from the excellent research assistance provided by Terry Kim. FOSTER_ABSTRACT 1/18/2007 10:44:27 AM 102 N O T R E D A M E L A W R E V I E W [VOL. 82:2 social inequities of urban metropolitan space. The Article concludes by suggesting that only through a rethinking of the city commons can we begin to take social capital seriously in land use policy and law. Instead of conceptualizing the city as an aggregation of private property rights, we should instead seek to identify and protect common resources and interests in the city commons through limited access rights and collaborative governance strategies that preserve and draw upon existing social networks to manage common city resources.
Dormant Ties: The Value Of Reconnecting

The social networks literature suggests that ties must be maintained to retain value. In contrast, we show that reconnecting dormant ties---former ties, now out of touch---can be extremely useful. Our research prompted Executive MBA students to consult their dormant contacts about an important work project; outcomes compared favorably to those of their current ties. In addition, reconnecting previously strong ties led to all of the four benefits that are usually associated with either weak ties (efficiency and novelty) or strong ties (trust and shared perspective). These findings suggest that dormant relationships---often overlooked or underutilized---can be a valuable source of knowledge and social capital.
On the dynamics of standards

It is common to judge individuals by comparing their work to work done by others. Test scores of one generation of students may be compared to the previous generation’s scores to determine passing grades. Candidates for promotion are compared to people who have been promoted in the past. Journal reviewers use the quality of recent issues of the journal to determine which articles should be published. In these examples, success is judged relative to the past performance of others; successful agents become the standard by which future agents are judged. This article studies the dynamic performance of promotion rules based on relative comparisons. It describes systematic biases that lead to increases and decreases in standards. The models contain three types of agent: members of the elite, candidates, and judges. Members of the elite have acquired a credential. They could be high school graduates, tenured faculty members, or members of a professional honors society. Candidates are people who aspire to the credential that the members of the elite already have. Judges are people who decide whether candidates should enter the elite. Standards are the level of achievement needed to enter the elite. A candidate makes a costly investment that determines his level of accomplishment (a vector called the candidate’s characteristic). If sufficiently many judges believe that a candidate compares favorably to a fixed fraction of the existing elite, then the candidate is promoted. Promoted candidates become members of the elite. Judges compare future candidates to them. Three examples motivate the analysis. In faculty tenure decisions, candidates are assistant professors. The members of the elite are the senior faculty in the department or possibly individuals working in related areas at different institutions. The judges are outside referees, the senior faculty, and university administrators. The senior faculty typically selects the outside reviewers. Candidates may be compared to their senior colleagues, but they are also likely to be compared
The Pull of Patents

This Symposium aims to study how intellectual property laws intermediate the relationships between different systems of information production and exchange. The panel for which this essay was prepared specifically focused on the relationships between university and commercial systems. This essay focuses on a particular dynamic: the “pull of patents,” which refers to the manner in which patents facilitate a commercially driven demand pull on university resources.1
Providing Adequate Educational Funding: A State–by–State Analysis of Expenditure Needs

While school finance research and litigation has traditionally focused on the equity of funding across school districts, courts and policy makers are increasingly addressing the adequacy of educational resources. This article reviews recent developments in adequacy research and estimates the additional expenditures required to achieve adequacy across states. Using the cost–adjusted national median of current per–pupil expenditures as a benchmark for adequacy, the results suggest that additional spending of $15.6–18.5 billion is needed nationally to reach the benchmark in all districts. The additional spending would be concentrated in a small number of states, particularly in urban and urban fringe districts.
Shift: Speedy Histological-to-Immunofluorescent Translation of Whole Slide Images Enabled by Deep Learning

Spatially-resolved molecular profiling by immunostaining tissue sections is a key feature in cancer diagnosis, subtyping, and treatment, where it complements routine histopathological evaluation by clarifying tumor phenotypes. In this work, we present a deep learning-based method called speedy histological-to-immunofluorescent translation (SHIFT) which takes histologic images of hematoxylin and eosin-stained tissue as input, then in near-real time returns inferred virtual immunofluorescence (IF) images that accurately depict the underlying distribution of phenotypes without requiring immunostaining of the tissue being tested. We show that deep learning-extracted feature representations of histological images can guide representative sample selection, which improves SHIFT generalizability. SHIFT could serve as an efficient preliminary, auxiliary, or substitute for IF by delivering multiplexed virtual IF images for a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time required by nascent multiplexed imaging technologies.
Educational Investment Responses to Economic Opportunity: Evidence from Indian Road Construction

The rural poor in developing countries, once economically isolated, are increasingly being connected to regional markets. Whether these new connections crowd out or encourage educational investment is a central question. We examine the impacts on educational choices of 115,000 new roads built under India's flagship road construction program. We find that children stay in school longer and perform better on standardized exams. Treatment heterogeneity supports the predictions of a standard human capital investment model: enrollment increases are largest where nearby labor markets offer the highest returns to education and lowest where they imply high opportunity costs of schooling.
International Law: A Welfarist Approach

This paper evaluates international law from a welfarist perspective. Global welfarism requires that international law advance the well being of everyone in the world, and scholars influenced by global welfarism and similar cosmopolitan principles have advocated radical restructuring of international law. But global welfarism is subject to several constraints, including (1) heterogeneity of preferences of the world population, which produces the state system; (2) agency costs, which produce imperfect governments; and (3) the problem of collective action. These constraints place limits on what policies motivated by global welfarism can achieve, and explain some broad features of international law that otherwise remain puzzling. These features include the central place of state sovereignty in international law despite the moral arbitrariness of borders; the weakness of multilateral treaties; the limited role of individual liability in international law; the predominantly legislative nature of international institutions and the weakness of executive and judicial institutions; and the absence of redistributive obligations in international law.
Poverty and Time Preference

This paper estimates the time preference of poor households in rural Mexico by combining experimental variation with simulation-based econometric methods. I use data from PROGRESA, a program that randomly assigned communities to treatment and control groups and paid cash transfers to poor households in treatment communities. The randomization implies that dierences in the consumption proles of control and treatment households are due to the program. A standard buer stock model predicts how consumption will respond to cash transfers as a function of the discount factor. I use the method of simulated moments to estimate such a model by matching simulated treatment eects on consumption to sample treatment eects. My estimates indicate that, under a range of assumptions, households in the PROGRESA sample have very low discount factors. It is dicult to reconcile their behavior with the much higher discount factors that have been estimated for U.S. households. I conclude that either poor households are very impatient or a richer model is needed to describe the consumption behavior of poor households in developing countries.
Persistence of Power, Elites and Institutions

We construct a model to study the implications of changes in political insti? tutions for economic institutions. A change in political institutions alters the distribution of de jure political power, but creates incentives for investments in de facto political power to partially or even fully offset change in de jure power. The model can imply a pattern of captured democracy, whereby a democratic regime may survive but choose economic institutions favoring an elite. The model provides conditions under which economic or policy outcomes will be invariant to changes in political institutions, and economic institutions them? selves will persist over time. (JEL D02, D72) The domination of an organized minority ... over the unor? ganized majority is inevitable. The power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organized minor? ity. At the same time, the minority is organized for the very reason that it is a minority.
Estimating the effect of unearned income on labor supply, earnings, savings and consumption: Evidence from a survey of lottery players

This paper provides empirical evidence about the effect of unearned income on earnings. consumption, and savings. Using an original survey of people playing the lottery in Massachusetts in the mid-1980's, the effects of the magnitude of lottery prizes on economic behavior are analyzed. The critical assumption is that among lottery winners the magnitude of the prize is randomly assigned. It is found that unearned income reduces labor earnings, with a marginal propensity to consume leisure of approximately 11 percent, with larger effects for individuals between 55 and 65 years old. After receiving about half their prize, individuals saved about 16 percent.
Traded and Nontraded Goods and Real Wages

The paper explains most, if not all, observations made by the empirical literature regarding the behavior of skilled and unskilled real wages in the United States, especially those since 1980. Generalizing the Stopler–Samuelson theorem, the authors show that the nontraded sector is critical to explaining the effects of changes in the price of traded goods on relative and absolute wages. Factor-intensities play their role as in the traditional Stolper–Samuelson model, but the output of the nontraded sector matters as well. Specifically, freer trade benefits capital and hurts both the skilled and unskilled labor if the import as well as the nontraded sectors contract. This is a new result to the literature on Stolper–Samuelson issues.
Shipping out instead of shaping up: rehospitalization from nursing homes as an unintended effect of public reporting.

Abstract Public reporting of health care quality has become a popular tool for incenting quality improvement. A fundamental question about public reporting is whether it causes providers to select healthier patients for treatment. In the nursing home post-acute setting, where patients must achieve a minimum length of stay to be included in quality measures, selection may take the form of discharge from the nursing home using rehospitalization, a particularly costly and undesirable outcome. We study the population of post-acute patients of skilled nursing facilities nationwide during 1999–2005 to assess whether selective rehospitalization occurred when public reporting was instituted in 2002, using multiple quasi-experimental designs to identify effects. We find that after public reporting was implemented, rehospitalizations before the length-of-stay cutoff increased. We conclude that nursing homes rehospitalize higher-risk post-acute patients to improve scores, providing evidence for selection behavior on the part of nursing home providers in the presence of public reporting.
Robust and efficient fitting of the generalized Pareto distribution with actuarial applications in view

Abstract Due to advances in extreme value theory, the generalized Pareto distribution (GPD) emerged as a natural family for modeling exceedances over a high threshold. Its importance in applications (e.g., insurance, finance, economics, engineering and numerous other fields) can hardly be overstated and is widely documented. However, despite the sound theoretical basis and wide applicability, fitting of this distribution in practice is not a trivial exercise. Traditional methods such as maximum likelihood and method-of-moments are undefined in some regions of the parameter space. Alternative approaches exist but they lack either robustness (e.g., probability-weighted moments) or efficiency (e.g., method-of-medians), or present significant numerical problems (e.g., minimum-divergence procedures). In this article, we propose a computationally tractable method for fitting the GPD, which is applicable for all parameter values and offers competitive trade-offs between robustness and efficiency. The method is based on ‘trimmed moments’. Large-sample properties of the new estimators are provided, and their small-sample behavior under several scenarios of data contamination is investigated through simulations. We also study the effect of our methodology on actuarial applications. In particular, using the new approach, we fit the GPD to the Danish insurance data and apply the fitted model to a few risk measurement and ratemaking exercises.
Primary market characteristics and secondary market frictions of stocks

Abstract We analyze the primary market characteristics and the secondary market trading frictions of new stocks. IPOs issued in hot markets, with low offer price, low-reputation underwriters or no VC backing face higher liquidity frictions, higher information constraints, and worse short-sale constraints. Underpriced IPOs are more liquid and more recognizable, but they have higher idiosyncratic risk and higher short-sale constraints. Also, we find an interesting time trend in the evolution of the new stocks' trading frictions: the mean-reversion of an average IPO stock toward a typical seasoned stock takes more than a few years. We propose a quality-based explanation for these findings.
Conflicting Signals: Understanding US Immigration Reform Through the Evolution of US Immigration Law

Este estudio pone de manifiesto las senales contradictorias transmitidas a lo largo de la historia por la legislacion sobre inmigracion de los EE.UU. Una caracteristica constante del desarrollo de la legislacion sobre inmigracion es que hamostrado senyales tanto de acogida como de control estricto. Entender esta lectura contradictoria ayuda a explicar los debates actuales sobre la reforma de la inmigracion en los Estados Unidos. Las senales contradictorias son evidentes en los debates sobre la eficacia del sistema destinado a seleccionar a los inmigrantes (incluyendo las funciones de ejecucion) y en los debates sobre el futuro del sistema de resolucion administrativa sobre inmigracion. Las visiones opuestas en estos debates reflejan las senales historicas de acogida y de control estricto.
Rules, Standards and Geeks

Policymakers and scholars generally assume that information technology is best regulated using standards, not rules. This Article argues that rules are often the superior choice. Those favoring standards typically focus on the wrong problem: they seek to prevent data spills, rather than to mitigate their impact. Rules can helpfully reduce a breach's effects. For technology, rules are preferable when they can specify a minimum level of protection that is relatively effective; where obsolescence occurs slowly; and where monitoring implementation is low-cost and accurate. The Article sets out examples of where each type of approach is superior. Application design is best governed by standards, while the transport and storage of data, along with identification of access to information, are best dealt with via rules. The Article questions the prevailing consensus in favor of standards for regulating technology, and also seeks to create testable predictions about when rules will work better.
Dynamic pricing of network goods with boundedly rational consumers

We present a model of dynamic monopoly pricing for a good that displays network effects. In contrast with the standard notion of a rational-expectations equilibrium, we model consumers as boundedly rational and unable either to pay immediate attention to each price change or to make accurate forecasts of the adoption of the network good. Our analysis shows that the seller’s optimal price trajectory has the following structure: The price is low when the user base is below a target level, is high when the user base is above the target, and is set to keep the user base stationary once the target level has been attained. We show that this pricing policy is robust to a number of extensions, which include the product’s user base evolving over time and consumers basing their choices on a mixture of a myopic and a “stubborn” expectation of adoption. Our results differ significantly from those that would be predicted by a model based on rational-expectations equilibrium and are more consistent with the pricing of network goods observed in practice.
The role of the media in disseminating insider-trading news

We use the process through which insider trading (SEC Form 4) filings are made public to investigate whether media coverage affects the way securities markets assimilate news. To do this, we use recent changes in disclosure rules governing insider trades as well as the initiation of coverage by Dow Jones to cleanly identify media effects. Using high-resolution intraday data, we find clear effects of media dissemination on the way prices and volume respond to insider trading news in the minutes after its release. These results help to resolve open questions regarding the role of the media in capital markets, including why apparently second hand news affects securities prices.