cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Subsidizing Creativity through Network Design: Zero-Pricing and Net Neutrality

This paper focuses on the pricing aspect of the "net neutrality" debate -- in particular, the de facto ban on fees levied by Internet service providers on content providers to reach users. This "zero-price" rule may prove desirable for several reasons. Using a two-sided market analysis, we suggest that it subsidizes creativity and innovation in new content creation -- goals shared by copyright and patent laws. The rule also helps to solve a coordination problem: since Internet service providers do not completely internalize the effects of their own pricing decisions, lack of regulation may lead to even higher fees charged by all. Finally, allowing for such fees runs the risk of creating horizontally differentiated Internet service providers with different libraries of accessible content, thereby foreclosing consumers and leading to Internet fragmentation.
Why Happiness?: A Commentary On Griffith's Progressive Taxation And Happiness

This Commentary examines three issues raised in Professor Thomas D. Griffith's Article on the connection between progressive taxation and subjective well-being, focusing on the selection of happiness as the measure of the gains of redistribution, the ability to measure happiness or subjective well-being, and the implications of using happiness analysis in determining tax policy. After arguing that the progressive taxation debate would benefit from further exploration of why happiness is the appropriate measure of success, this Commentary raises concerns about relying on self-reporting of subjective well-being and how happiness studies should be interpreted and can be improved. Finally, this Commentary notes that studies of income and happiness may inform tax policy design by helping to determine the appropriate balance between taxes and expenditures, outlining a role for the government in informing taxpayers' perceptions of happiness, and focusing additional research necessary for an effective progressive taxation policy.
An Empirical Analysis of Network Externalities in Peer-to-Peer Music-Sharing Networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks are an important medium for the distribution of information goods. However, there is little empirical research into the optimal design of these networks under real-world conditions. Early speculation about the behavior of P2P networks has focused on the role that positive network externalities play in improving performance as the network grows. However, negative network externalities also arise in P2P networks because of the consumption of scarce network resources or an increased propensity of users to free ride in larger networks, and the impact of these negative network externalities--while potentially important--has received far less attention.Our research addresses this gap in understanding by measuring the impact of both positive and negative network externalities on the optimal size of P2P networks. Our research uses a unique dataset collected from the six most popular OpenNap P2P networks between December 19, 2000, and April 22, 2001. We find that users contribute additional value to the network at a decreasing rate and impose costs on the network at an increasing rate, while the network increases in size. Our results also suggest that users are less likely to contribute resources to the network as the network size increases. Together, these results suggest that the optimal size of these centralized P2P networks is bounded--At some point the costs that a marginal user imposes on the network will exceed the value they provide to the network. This finding is in contrast to early predictions that larger P2P networks would always provide more value to users than smaller networks. Finally, these results also highlight the importance of considering user incentives--an important determinant of resource sharing in P2P networks--in network design.
Selling Confession: Setting the Stage With the "Sympathetic Detective With a Time-Limited Offer"

The effectiveness of an interrogation tactic dubbed the “sympathetic detective with a time limited offer” was tested. Participants read two versions of an interrogation transcript, with and without the tactic. Those who read the sympathetic detective version believed the detective had greater authority to determine whether and with what to charge the suspect, more beneficent intentions toward the suspect, and viewed confession as more wise. However, regression analyses indicated that for innocent suspects, only perceptions of the strength of evidence against the suspect and the detective’s beneficence and authority predicted the perceived wisdom of false confession. Interrogation tactics were generally effective, as indicated by participant recommendations of confession (vs. invoking Miranda, denial, or continuing to talk without admitting guilt) for both innocent (16.7%) and guilty (74.4%) suspects, and reasons offered for participants’ recommendations for confession versus other choices generally conformed to those reported by real-life confessors and interrogation scholars.
A Hobson's Choice Model for Religious Accommodation

Employers are sometimes required by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to accommodate the sincere religious practices and observances of their employees. That requirement is often ineffective for employees who seek accommodations. Explanations of that ineffectiveness typically focus on the permissive undue hardship defense; however, the problem is as much a result of an unbounded definition of sincere religious belief, practice, or observance as it is a failing of the undue hardship standard itself. Furthermore, courts have been too solicitous when plaintiffs attempt to turn run-of-the-mill disparate treatment claims into accommodation claims. Instead of amending Title VII to modify the undue burden standard as has been proposed in Congress, the reasonable accommodation requirement can be reinvigorated by utilizing it only in situations where a religious employee is faced with a true Hobson's choice between a sincere religious practice or observance and a religion-neutral, generally applicable work rule or policy. This paper describes the Hobson's Choice Model for religious accommodation claims by arguing for strengthening the sincerity review and strictly separating accommodation from traditional disparate treatment claims and using examples of cases involving religious expression.
Household Portfolio Choice and Retirement

This study examines household portfolio choice through the retirement transition. I show that couples significantly decrease their stock allocations after retirement, whereas singles’ allocations remain relatively unchanged. Reallocations are concentrated among couples in which the wife is more risk averse than her husband. Husbands’ and wives’ respective retirement events are followed by opposite-signed changes in stock allocations. These findings are consistent with a model of collective household decision making in which spouses have heterogeneous risk preferences, and suggest that dynamics in the distribution of intrahousehold bargaining power generate time-varying household risk aversion.
The Labor Supply of Undocumented Immigrants

Abstract Over 11 million undocumented persons reside in the United States. This paper examines the labor supply of this population. Using newly developed methods that impute undocumented status for persons in the Current Population Surveys, the study documents a number of findings. The labor force participation rate of undocumented men is larger than that of natives or legal immigrants; this gap widened over the past two decades; and the labor supply of undocumented men is more inelastic than that of other groups. In contrast, the participation rate of undocumented women is far below that of both legal immigrants and natives.
Aggregate Investment and Investor Sentiment

Using bottom-up information from corporate financial statements, we examine the relation between aggregate investment, future equity returns, and investor sentiment. Consistent with the business cycle literature, corporate investments peak during periods of positive sentiment, yet these periods are followed by lower equity returns. This pattern exists in most developed countries and survives controls for discount rates, equity flows, valuation multiples, operating accruals, and other investor sentiment measures. Higher aggregate investments also precede greater earnings disappointments, lower short-window earnings announcement returns, and lower macroeconomic growth. We conclude aggregate corporate investment is an alternative, and possibly sharper, measure of market-wide investor sentiment.
The Procedural Attack on Civil Rights: The Empirical Reality of Buckhannon for the Private Attorney General

The Procedural Attack on Civil Rights: The Empirical Reality of Buckhannon for the Private Attorney General Catherine R. Albiston † Laura Beth Nielsen ‡ In 2001, in Buckhannon Board & Care Home, Inc. v. West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, the Supreme Court rejected the catalyst theory for recovery of attorneys’ fees in civil rights enforcement actions. In doing so, the Court dismissed concerns that plaintiffs with meritorious but expensive claims would be discouraged from bringing suit, finding these concerns “entirely speculative and unsupported by any empirical evidence.” This article presents original data from a national survey of more than 200 public interest organizations that call into question the Court’s empirical assumptions. These data indicate that organizations that take on paradigmatic public interest cases, such as class actions seeking injunctive relief against government actors, are the most likely to be negatively affected by Buckhannon. In addition, our respondents report that Buckhannon encourages “strategic capitulation,” makes settlement more difficult, and discourages attorneys from representing civil rights plaintiffs. We argue that these far reaching effects herald a shift away from private rights enforcement and toward more government power, both to resist rights claims and to control the meaning of civil rights. Assistant Professor of Law, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2001; J.D., University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, 1993; M.A., Stanford University, 1989; B.A., Stanford University, 1987. Research Fellow, American Bar Foundation, and Assistant Professor of Sociology and Law, Northwestern University. Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1999; J.D., University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, 1996; B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1992. This research was generously supported by the American Bar Foundation, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin Law School. The authors wish to thank Kathryn Abrams, Kenneth Bamberger, Lauren Edelman, Scott Eliason, Anne Joseph, Goodwin Liu, Stewart Macaulay, Erin Murphy, Rebecca Sandefur, Jeff Selbin, and Molly Van Houweling, for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript, and Sandy Levitsky and Lisa Montague for their able research assistance.
IMF retrospective and prospective: A public goods viewpoint *

The paper investigates changes in IMF activities using the analytical framework of international public goods. The IMF promotes international financial stability, whose outputs are joint products with varying degrees of publicness. In recent years, IMF loans (recipient-specific benefits) have assumed decreased importance, while the Fund’s technical assistance and monitoring activities have taken on greater importance. As a consequence, the club and purely public outputs (e.g., disseminating best practices) have grown as a share of IMF activities. Changes in the mix of IMF activities alter the mix of international public goods and, in so doing, change policy recommendations regarding the role of IMF. The future of IMF is also addressed, especially in light of increased private capital flows.
Lawyer Speech in the Regulatory State

The expansion of the modern regulatory state demands a corresponding safeguard to ensure that officials act in the public’s interest and advance democratic values.3 Preserving space for free-flowing speech about corruption, illegal behavior, and other wrongdoing within the government agency workplace is an important way to protect the public, promote democracy, and preserve institutional legitimacy. While it is true that “[t]he tendency of officials to abuse their public trust is a theme that has permeated political thought from classical times to the present,”4 the value of speech directed to curb the abuse of power is especially high in our modern era of massive government bureaucracy5 accompanied by the rise
A Decade of Deficits and Debt: Japanese Fiscal Policy and the Rise and Fall of the Fiscal Structural Reform Act of 1997

Japanese budgetary and fiscal policy have experienced dramatic changes during the last several years, marked by the rise and fall of the Fiscal Structural Reform Act of 1997. This act altered the budgetary process with the goal of reducing Japan’s rapidly growing deficit and debt. Yet the onset of recession in 1998 led Japan to engage again in large-scale deficit spending to stimulate the economy, and in the process discard its budget reforms.
Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism? A Reappraisal of the Resource Curse

A large body of scholarship finds a negative relationship between natural resources and democracy. Extant cross-country regressions, however, assume random effects and are run on panel datasets with relatively short time dimensions. Because natural resource reliance is not an exogenous variable, this is not an effective strategy for uncovering causal relationships. Numerous sources of bias may be driving the results, the most serious of which is omitted variable bias induced by unobserved country-specific and time-invariant heterogeneity. To address these problems, we develop unique historical datasets, employ time-series centric techniques, and operationalize explicitly specified counterfactuals. We test to see if there is a long-run relationship between resource reliance and regime type within countries over time, both on a country-by-country basis and across several different panels. We find that increases in resource reliance are not associated with authoritarianism. In fact, in many specifications we generate results that suggest a resource blessing.
Performance standards in incentive contracts

Abstract Research in incentives has focused on performance measures and pay-performance sensitivities but has largely ignored the “performance standard”, which generates important incentives whenever plan participants can influence the standard-setting process. “Internally determined” standards are directly affected by management actions in the current or prior year, while “externally determined” standards are less easily affected. I show that companies choose external standards when prior performance is a noisy estimate of contemporaneous performance. In addition, companies using budget based and other internally determined performance standards have less-variable bonus payouts, and are more likely to smooth earnings, than companies using externally determined standards.
Getting the Fly out of the Bottle: The False Problem of Free Will and Determinism

Ludwig Wittgenstein liked to say that the true aim of philosophy is negative in nature. The aim of philosophy, he said, is not to induce correct ways of thinking, but to eradicate false philosophical problems—that is, to eradicate false ways of thinking that philosophical reflection itself engenders. Wittgenstein illustrated the aim with an analogy of a “fly” trapped in a “fly bottle.” The fly doesn’t see the glass against which it repeatedly hits its head,
The maturation of global corporate R&D: Evidence from the activity of U.S. foreign subsidiaries

Abstract This study empirically investigates the impact of foreign country factors like market size, technological strength of industries, and science and engineering (SE industries including Machinery, Automobiles, and Transport equipment are primarily attracted by the technological strength of foreign industry; U.S. R&D in Chemicals mostly follows overseas markets. We discuss the implications of our results to the global organization of innovative activity and innovation policy.
HOW WELL DO MARKET TIMING, CATERING, AND CLASSICAL THEORIES EXPLAIN CORPORATE DECISIONS?

An important debate in corporate finance is whether chief executive officers (CEOs) exploit equity mispricing. In this article I construct a measure of the unexplained change in the CEO’s stockholdings of the firm to empirically test the contrasting predictions of market timing, catering, and classical theories of corporate decisions. Consistent with the predictions of classical theories, I find that the firm increases its investments and even uses expensive capital to finance investments when there is an unexplained increase in the CEO’s stockholdings. However, I find no empirical support for catering predictions and weak empirical support for market timing predictions.
Enron, DOMA, and Spousal Privileges: Rethinking the Marriage Plot

The story of the collapse of Enron, at one time the world’s seventh largest company, is familiar to many. What is less well known is the issue Enron almost raised about DOMA and spousal privileges. This “almost raised” issue is the subject this Essay, which recounts the story of the first executive to be arrested as part of the Enron debacle, Michael Kopper, who happens to be gay. On the surface, the story of Kopper and his partner William Dodson may seem insignificant — unlikely to repeat itself, inconsequential, and illustrative of just one of the hundreds of disadvantages facing same-sex couples under DOMA. After all, how important is an “almost raised” story about the interplay of evidentiary rules and DOMA? But dig deeper, and the Kopper and Dodson story raises questions that go well beyond Enron, DOMA, and spousal privileges. Indeed, it raises issues that go beyond the solution advocated by many mainstream LGBT advocacy group: the solution of marriage equality. In short, the Kopper and Dodson story ultimately raises questions about the prioritization of marriage equality as a goal by LGBT groups, and about the belief, shared by many, that marriage equality will be the catalyst remedying other inequalities.
Extent of Cooperative Enforcement: Effect of the Regulator-Regulated Facility Relationship on Audit Frequency

Extent of Cooperative Enforcement: Effect of the Regulator-Regulated Facility Relationship on Audit Frequency
Strategies for the reinterpretation of normative texts within the Hebrew Bible

Contemporary constitutional theory remains divided between competing approaches to the interpretation of normative texts: between originalism or original intent, on the one hand, and living constitution approaches, on the other. The purpose of this article is to complicate that problematic dichotomy by showing how cultures having a tradition of prestigious or authoritative texts addressed the problem of literary and legal innovation in antiquity. The study begins with cuneiform law from Mesopotamia and the Hittite Empire, and then shows how ancient Israel’s development of the idea of divine revelation of law creates a cluster of constraints that would be expected to impede legal revision or amendment. The well-known Decalogue or Ten Commandments provides a valuable test-case, with its normative statement that God punishes sinners across generations (vicariously extending the punishment due them to three or four generations of their progeny). A series of inner-biblical and post-biblical responses to that rule demonstrates, however, that later writers were able to criticize, challenge, reject, and replace it with the alternative notion of individual accountability. The article will provide a series of close readings of the texts involved, drawing attention to their legal language and hermeneutical strategies. The conclusions stress the remarkable freedom to modify ostensibly normative statements available to ancient judicial interpreters, despite the expected constraints of a formative religious canon attributed to divine revelation.
Herd Behavior and Mutual Fund Performance

I develop fund-level measures of the similarity in trading of mutual fund managers, resulting in the identification of leaders, contemporaneously herding managers, and followers. I find evidence of a persistent group of funds whose trades lead the aggregate trades of the mutual fund industry; these leader funds exhibit strong subsequent performance, consistent with informed trading. By contrast, there is no evidence that managers that trade together, either contemporaneously or with a lag, outperform. These findings suggest that managers of leader funds receive in advance private signals regarding the information upon which other funds focus. This paper was accepted by Lauren Cohen, finance.
The 80/20 rule: Corporate support for innovation by employees

We model an employee's decision to pursue an innovative idea at his employing firm (internally) or as a start-up (externally). We characterize an idea by its market profitability and the degree of positive/negative externality that it imposes on the employing firm's profits. The innovation process consists of exploration and development. Exploring an idea internally grants the employee access to exploration support provided by the firm but reduces his appropriability of the idea. We demonstrate that ideas exhibiting weak externalities are explored and developed externally, whereas ideas with strong externalities are explored and handled internally. Moderate externalities are associated with internal exploration but subsequent external development. An increase in the firm's exploration support attracts internal exploration of a wider range of ideas but may increase the likelihood of subsequent external development. We further show that while the optimal level of exploration support rises with the firm's innovation appropriability, overall profits may decline.
The Discovery Sombrero and Other Metaphors for Litigation

Academics, judges, and policymakers know little about the timing, volume, and cost of discovery in our civil justice system. This information deficit is most severe with respect to the most salient discovery-related issue for practitioners today: preservation — the duty to preserve relevant data when litigation is reasonably anticipated. This collective ignorance feeds uncertainty at both the policy level and at the doctrinal level. In this paper, I present original, empirical research on the nature and costs of preservation and discovery. This research is the first, and to date only, systematic effort to measure the extent and costs of preservation activity. I describe key findings and propose three new stylized facts: the discovery sombrero, the preservation iceberg, and the long tail of litigation costs. I then provide examples of how these stylized facts help inform doctrinal and policy questions on preservation and discovery, including the choice between common law development and federal rule-making, the choice between reliance on legal reform or technological innovation to control costs, and the question of how to tailor the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to heterogeneous cases without sacrificing the Rules’ commitment to transubstantivity.
New activities, the welfare cost of uncertainty and investment policies

This paper studies the effect of policy uncertainty on the formation of new activities in Romer's (1994) type of economy, where productivity of labor increases with the number of capital goods. Adding a new capital good requires a capital specific set-up cost, invested prior to using the capital good. Agents are disappointment averse, putting greater utility weight on downside risk (as modeled by Gul, 1991). Policy uncertainty is induced by "revenue seeking" administrations, which tend to tax the "quasi fixed" capital, ignoring long term costs. Disappointment aversion implies that investment, labor and capitalists income drop at a rate proportional to the standard deviation of the tax rate. Hence, policy uncertainty induces first-order adverse effects, whereas policy uncertainty leads to second-order effects when consumers maximize the conventional expected utility. The adverse effects of policy uncertainty can be partially overcome by a proper investment policy. The paper interprets the tax concessions granted to multinationals as a commitment device that helps overcoming the adverse implications of policy uncertainty. Copyright @ 1998 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. All rights reserved.
First-principles predictions of electronic properties of GaAs1-x-yPyBix and GaAs1-x-yPyBix-based heterojunctions

Significant efficiency droop is a major concern for light-emitting diodes and laser diodes operating at high current density. Recent study has suggested that heavily Bi-alloyed GaAs can decrease the non-radiative Auger recombination and therefore alleviate the efficiency droop. Using density functional theory, we studied a newly fabricated quaternary alloy, GaAs1-x-yPyBix, which can host significant amounts of Bi, through calculations of its band gap, spin-orbit splitting, and band offsets with GaAs. We found that the band gap changes of GaAs1-x-yPyBix relative to GaAs are determined mainly by the local structural changes around P and Bi atoms rather than their electronic structure differences. To obtain alloy with lower Auger recombination than GaAs bulk, we identified the necessary constraints on the compositions of P and Bi. Finally, we demonstrated that GaAs/GaAs1-x-yPyBix heterojunctions with potentially low Auger recombination can exhibit small lattice mismatch and large enough band offsets for stro...
Shifts in the Beveridge curve

Abstract We put the current shift in the Beveridge curve into context by examining the behavior of the curve since 1950. Outward shifts in the Beveridge curve have been common occurrences during U.S. recoveries. By itself, the presence of a shift has not been a good predictor of whether the unemployment rate at the end of the expansion following a shift was higher or lower than that in the preceding expansion.
Verifiability and Group Formation in Markets

Abstract We consider group formation in markets with asymmetric information. Our model nests standard matching problems, including one-to-one, many-to-one, and many-to-many matching, as well as matching with salaries or contracts and matching with incomplete information. Prices for group positions and private goods as well as the groups that form are determined endogenously in equilibrium, as a result of demand and supply forces. The setup includes problems as diverse as moral hazard in teams, screening on ability, and mechanism design. Our analysis, including the definition of equilibrium and existence, revolves around the randomness in matching. Our main results characterize the limits on efficiency in such a general equilibrium, and show that a sufficiently rich set of group types can ensure the existence of an efficient equilibrium.
Further Evidence on Consequences of Debt Covenant Violations

We present new evidence on debt covenant violation (DCV) consequences that have not previously been examined in the literature. In particular, we show that a DCV triggers significant information asymmetry and uncertainty on the part of shareholders and auditors as reflected in higher bid–ask spreads, return volatility, and audit fees. Further, these consequences occur even when lender-imposed costs are relatively lower, consistent with the act of default itself triggering shareholder and auditor uncertainty. The results highlight costs to the firm of having bright-line rules in contracts, and add to an understanding of the consequences of DCVs.
Ripples through markets: Inter-market impacts generated by large trades

Abstract This paper uses a sample of large trades executed on the London Stock Exchange's SEAQ-I market for European cross-traded firms to investigate their impact on home market prices when parallel markets suffer from information frictions. I find that (a) large London trades produce price impacts in home markets even though no timely information is published, (b) market makers appear to pre- and post-position their inventories by splitting orders across markets, and (c) the price discovery process across markets changes significantly around large trades with the foreign market making a significantly bigger contribution to price discovery at this time, even though information opaqueness exists.
Managing Earnings Using Classification Shifting: Evidence from Quarterly Special Items

ABSTRACT: McVay (2006) concludes that managers opportunistically shift core expenses to special items to inflate current core earnings, resulting in a positive relation between unexpected core earnings and income-decreasing special items. However, she further notes that this relation disappears when contemporaneous accruals are dropped from the core earnings expectations model. McVay (2006) calls for research to improve the core earnings expectations model and to provide additional cross-sectional tests of classification shifting. Using a core earnings expectations model that is not dependent on accrual special items, we show that classification shifting is more likely in the fourth quarter than in interim quarters. We also find more evidence of classification shifting when the ability of managers to manipulate accruals appears to be constrained and in meeting a range of earnings benchmarks. Overall, our evidence provides broad support for McVay’s (2006) conclusion that managers engage in classification s...
Interpreting life-cycle inequality patterns as an efficient allocation: Mission impossible?

Abstract The life-cycle patterns of consumption, wage and hours inequality observed in U.S. cross-sectional data are commonly viewed as incompatible with a Pareto efficient allocation. We determine the extent to which these qualitative and quantitative patterns can or cannot be produced by Pareto efficient allocations in models with preference shocks, wage shocks and full information.
Can Retributivism Be Progressive? A Reply to Professor Gray and Jonathan Huber

Professor David Gray and Jonathan Huber have done a great service in their Response to my Article, “Retribution and Reform.” They have helped me to see the wrong turns in my argument and the areas in which my argument needs to be clarified and amplified. In this brief Reply, I attempt to respond to some of their concerns.
Order Without (Enforceable) Law: Why Countries Enter into Non-Enforceable Competition Policy Chapters in Free Trade Agreements

There has been an explosion in the past 10-15 years of bilateral and regional free trade agreements in Latin America (together "preferential free trade agreements" or PTAs). The purpose of PTAs is to increase trade, regulatory and investment liberalization. As trade liberalization requires more than just a reduction of tariffs, PTAs include "chapters" in a number of areas of domestic regulation. These chapters that address domestic regulation, create binding commitments to liberalize domestic regulation that may impact foreign trade. Among chapters that address domestic regulation, many of the Latin American PTAs include a chapter on antitrust/competition policy. Until now, the effectiveness of such chapters has remained unanswered. This article undertakes the first empirical analysis of Latin American antitrust/competition policy chapters in PTAs. To understand the dynamics of PTAs, this article begins with some context of Latin American development. First, the article provides an overview of the process of liberalization in Latin America. It then describes how domestic antitrust fits within Latin American liberalization. The article then describes competition policy chapters within Latin American PTAs based on the results of coding these provisions. The standard practice in PTAs is to create binding commitments that have third party adjudication for potential disputes. The choice of binding international institutions, such as PTAs, is based on the perception of the relative strength of PTAs over purely domestic approaches. A comparison of the institutional alternatives to PTAs illustrates that this perception is not born out by the facts. This article finds that antitrust chapters within PTAs go against the standard practice of binding commitments. Competition policy chapters, unlike other chapters of the same trade agreement, lack binding dispute settlement. All Latin American PTAs lack dispute settlement for core antitrust issues of mergers, collusive agreements and monopolization within the competition policy chapters. This departure from the standard PTA practice is more striking given that other chapters in the same trade agreement have binding dispute resolution. These other chapters include some competition element to them, such as services and intellectual property. The remainder of the paper explores the dynamics of these chapters, including why PTAs treat antitrust differently from other areas of domestic regulation.
Further Reflections on the Guillotine

Shortly before the war of 1914, an assassin whose crime was particularly repulsive (he had slaughtered a family of farmers, including the children) was condemned to death in Algiers. He was a farm worker who had killed in a sort of bloodthirsty frenzy but has aggravated his case by robbing his victims. The affair created a great stir. It was generally thought that decapitation too mild a punishment for such a monster. This was the opinion, I have been told, of my father, who was especially aroused by the murder of the children. One of the few things I know about him, in any case, is that he wanted to witness the execution, for the first time in his life. He got up in the dark to go to the place of execution at the other end of town amid a great crowd of people. What he saw that morning he never told anyone. My mother relates merely that he came rushing home, his face distorted, refused to talk, lay down for a moment on the bed, and suddenly began to vomit. He had just discovered the reality hidden under the noble phrases with which it was masked. Instead of thinking of the slaughtered children, he could think of nothing but that quivering body that had just been dropped onto a board to have its head cut off.2
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy in Japan: consumers’ food safety perceptions and willingness to pay for tested beef

The discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as ‘mad cow disease’, in Japan caused anxiety about consuming beef and beef products. As a result, there was a sudden fall in sales of beef that hurt the Japanese beef industry as well as major beef exporters to Japan. We analyse factors that affect Japanese consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) price premiums for BSE-tested beef and estimate the mean WTP for BSE-tested beef using data obtained from a consumer survey in Japan. A single-bounded dichotomous choice contingent valuation model is used to recover the premium amount. We find that attitudes to food safety, reduction in beef consumption following the BSE outbreak, and being female all have a statistically significant positive effect on the WTP for BSE-tested beef. Interestingly, demographic variables such as age and income do not affect the WTP, possibly indicating that the BSE scare similarly affected multiple segments of the population. In our sample, consumers are willing to pay a premium on average of greater than 50 per cent for BSE-tested beef.
Roll over Langdell, Tell Llewellyn the News: A Brief History of American Legal Education

The origin of this essay is a presentation the author made at the Office of the Attorney General of the State of Texas on December 10, 2008. This essay is derived from the author's presentation, which originally was entitled "A Brief and Highly Selective History of American Legal Education and Jurisprudence. " In this essay, the author provides an overview of the history and development of legal education in America, emphasizing the establishment and evolution of the case method of instruction in American law schools and focusing on the influence of American jurisprudence on the development of legal education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on Christopher Columbus Langdell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Benjamin N. Cardozo, and Karl N. Llewellyn (among others), the author discusses the impact that American legal education has had on American jurisprudence and the reciprocal impact that American jurisprudence has had on both the means and the ends of legal education in the United States. The author concludes with a brief exploration of the direction of American legal education in the early twenty-first century.
Herd Behavior in Designer Genes

The ability of individuals to choose their children's genes has increased over time and may ultimately culminate in a world involving free market reprogenetic technologies. Reprogenetic technologies combine advances in reproductive biology and genetics to provide humans increased control over their children's genes. This Article offers economic perspectives that are helpful in understanding the possibly unexpected ethical, legal, and social issues at stake in using reprogenetic technologies for trait enhancement selection. The Appendix analyzes two competitive games that might arise in such a biotechnological society. Specifically, the Article focuses on herd behavior, caused by either a popularity contest or positional competition, in the choice of genetic traits. The analytical game-theoretic models in the Appendix can have several equilibrium outcomes in terms of individual reprogenetic technological choices and corresponding beliefs about such choices by others. This multiplicity of potential social outcomes suggests that a society can attain efficiency if the state or some private organization transforms individual parents' beliefs over the choices of other parents regarding their children's traits and, thus, coordinates parental reprogenetic decisions by selecting, as focal, certain beliefs over parents' reprogenetic decisions.
Is silence golden? An empirical analysis of firms that stop giving quarterly earnings guidance

Abstract We investigate firms that stop providing earnings guidance (“stoppers”) either by publicly announcing their decision (“announcers”) or doing so quietly (“quiet stoppers”). Relative to firms that continue guiding, stoppers have poorer prior performance, more uncertain operating environments, and fewer informed investors. Announcers commit to non-disclosure because they (i) do not expect to report future good news or (ii) have lower incentives to guide due to the presence of long-term investors. The three-day return around the announcement is negative. Stoppers subsequently experience increases in analyst forecast dispersion and decreases in forecast accuracy but no change in return volatility or analyst following.
The Economics of Civil Procedure

The economic analysis of procedure reduces most issues to direct costs and error costs. Direct costs are ordinary litigation costs. Error costs are the reduction in deterrence and the increase in chilling that result from inaccurate adjudication. The goal of procedure is the minimization of the sum of direct and error costs. This framework has been applied to many procedural issues, and this survey focuses on three: dispositive motions (motions to dismiss and summary judgment), discovery, and jurisdiction. Economic analysis has yielded significant insights in these areas, but important questions remain for future researchers. Because theory is often indeterminate, this survey discusses empirical as well as theoretical work, although, unfortunately, empirical work has focused on direct costs and has largely neglected error costs.
Iron and obesity in females in the United States.

Since the late 1980s, the United States has witnessed a dramatic increase in average BMI levels and the proportion of individuals categorized as obese. Obesity is a major risk factor for a variety of illnesses, and an increase in obesity is, therefore, implicated in increased health-care costs in the United States. These ultimately translate to a major health and economic problem for the United States. The present analysis examines a pathway to increased levels of obesity as of yet almost entirely unexplored. Specifically, we examine the relationship between obesity and iron deficiency via analyses of blood samples. The current analysis employs public-use data files from the continuous National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) (1999–2006) survey to determine the relationship between obesity and an individual's iron blood content. Results suggest a negative relationship between levels of iron blood content and individual BMI after controlling for other individual characteristics. These results hold for nearly all eight panels tested in the ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions.
A Spatiotemporal Model of Shifting Cultivation and Forest Cover Dynamics

Sustainable use of humid forest resources as a source of fertile land for cultivation requires long periods of fallow and the ability to move the zone of active cultivation from one location to another over time. At the individual field level, shifting cultivation is essentially a resource extraction problem akin to a pulse fishery – a short period of intensive use of the stock of soil fertility followed by a long idle period permitting regeneration. This paper describes a spatiotemporal model of resource extraction adapted to the use of forest resources by shifting cultivators. Theoretically grounded in the spatial and household modelling literature, it is a structural simulation model of household decision-making, and includes a demonstration of the concept with a limited data set from southern Cameroon. Use of a stated preference approach to modelling decision-making identifies individual preferences and spatial path-dependency as important sources of shortened fallows and resource degradation.
Teacher, Student, Ticket: John Frank, Leon Higginbotham, and One Afternoon at the Supreme Court- Not a Trifling Thing

A path to greatness often begins with a special teacher, and this is such a story. In the fall of 1949, John P. Frank was a new associate professor at the Yale Law School. He previously had earned undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Wisconsin, clerked at the Supreme Court for Justice Hugo L. Black during the October 1942 Term, practiced law, earned a J.S.D. degree at Yale and begun teaching law at Indiana University. John Frank was a major constitutional law scholar by the time he joined the Yale law faculty in fall 1949. In 1947, Frank had begun publishing in the University of Chicago Law Review his extensive, interestingly opinionated, and sometimes even spicy, annual reports on the Supreme Court's just-completed Term.1 Frank had, in 1948, published a biographical sketch of Justice Black along with a compilation of his leading opinions from his first ten years on the Court.2 Frank also was the author of numerous articles on topics in constitu-
Teaching Torts with Sports

One of the most enjoyable and interesting subjects for students taking a business law or legal environment course is the study of torts. Whether a course only allows this discussion for a week or longer, seasoned professors realize that they can capture the attention of students by covering torts topics such as slip-and-fall litigation, defective products that cause injuries, and fisticuffs among neighbors. The purpose of this article is to offer a roadmap for engaging students through sports-related tort issues and litigation. This article encourages the use of sports torts because they are of particular interest to many students and also because they facilitate an active learning environment. The article discusses tort issues that can be examined using sports cases and cites numerous examples. Sports torts present a natural opportunity to use video clips in the classroom. Videos are an invaluable technological tool to demonstrate various torts to the students, and sports videos are ubiquitous. Usually, students are quite eager to watch videos with action. Therefore, throughout the entire semester, videos showing late hits, athletes kicking cameramen, fighting among fans, misbehavior by athletes or mascots, and attacks on sports reporters are effective and energizing both in and out of the classroom environment. The
How Do Doctors Behave When Some (But Not All) of Their Patients are in Managed Care

Most physicians today treat a variety of patients within their practices where a variety of insurance arrangements co-exist. In this paper, we propose several theoretical explanations for physician treatment patterns when the patient population is heterogeneous at the practice level. Data from the 1993-1996 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) are used to test how practice level managed care penetration affects treatment intensity. Practice composition has strong effects on treatment. Visit duration appears to be constant across patients within a practice, while medications prescribed appear to be converging as managed care penetration increases.
Growing, Growing, Gone: Cascades, Diffusion, and Turning Points in the Product Life Cycle

Research on the product life cycle (PLC) has focused primarily on the role of diffusion. This study takes a broader theoretical perspective on the PLC by incorporating informational cascades and developing and testing many new hypotheses based on this theory. On average, across 30 product categories, the authors find that: (i) New consumer durables have a typical pattern of rapid growth of 45% per year over 8 years. (ii) This period of growth is followed by a slowdown when sales decline by 15% and stay below those of the previous peak for 5 years. (iii) Slowdown occurs at 34% population penetration and about 50% of ultimate market penetration. (iv) Products with large sales increases at takeoff tend to have larger sales declines at slowdown. (v) Leisure-enhancing products tend to have higher growth rates and shorter growth stages than nonleisure-enhancing products. Time-saving products tend to have lower growth rates and longer growth stages than nontime-saving products. (vi) Lower probability of slowdown is associated with steeper price reductions, lower penetration, and higher economic growth. (vii) A hazard model can provide reasonable predictions of the slowdown as early as the takeoff.The authors discuss the implications of these findings.
Risk Analysis for Large Pools of Loans

Financial institutions, government-sponsored enterprises, and asset-backed security investors are often exposed to delinquency and prepayment risk from large numbers of loans. Examples include mortgages, credit cards, and auto, student, and business loans. Because of the size of the pools, the measurement of these exposures is computationally expensive. This paper develops and tests efficient numerical methods for the analysis of large pools of loans as well as asset-backed securities backed by such pools. For a broad class of statistical and machine learning models of loan-level risk in discrete time, we prove a law of large numbers and a central limit theorem for the pool-level risk. The asymptotics are then used to construct computationally efficient approximations for a large pool. The approximations aggregate the full loan-level dynamics, making it possible to take advantage of the detailed loan-level data often available in practice. We furthermore prove a convergence rate for the approximation and ...