cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Contacts and Meetings: Location, Duration and Distance Traveled

Abstract The study of travel for social activities presents layered challenges because of the temporal and spatial flexibility with which such activities can be undertaken and the changing set of decision makers involved in each activity episode. This paper seeks to answer a set of questions based on empirical data about how relationship, social network variables, purpose, personal and household constraints, location attributes, and interdependence between meeting duration, distance, and other meetings provide some structure to the observed social activity location and duration decisions. In particular, we investigate what attributes determine whether a meeting takes place in or out of home, and what explains the distance travelled and the duration of meetings. Empirically we show that in-home meetings tend to occur most often with close contacts and less often with distant contacts. When looking at duration and distance travelled, we find that relationship related variables have some of the largest impacts on the distance travelled and the duration of meetings as compared to other variables. We find that meeting durations with close contacts are on average almost 45 min longer, and that respondents are willing to hold these meetings about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) further away from their residences than they would with non-close contacts. Overall the paper illustrates that relationship type, as well as other meeting specific and demographic variables are important in explaining the location, duration and distance travelled for social meetings.
Arrest Decision Making by School Resource Officers

Over the past two decades, school resource officers (SROs) have become an increasingly common fixture on the American educational landscape. Despite their prominence in schools, significant investi...
The Supreme Court and the Push for Transparency in Lower Court Appointments in Japan

In addition to deciding cases, the Japanese Supreme Court bears responsibility for another major category of decision making: judicial administration. One vital aspect is personnel management. The Supreme Court, through its General Secretariat, plays a central role in the selection of lower court judges and decides on promotions and transfers, which are a standard element of Japan's career judiciary. Over the years, many critics have contended that the Supreme Court General Secretariat uses its authority in personnel matters to reward some judges and punish others, with allegations that ideological and political considerations are involved. This, in turn, it has been argued, threatens judicial independence. For its part, the Supreme Court has steadfastly resisted responding to these charges, other than to provide assurances that the process is fair. The basic outline of the lower court appointment process is widely known. Yet the actual operation of that process has been shrouded in secrecy. The Supreme Court has held the governing standards and process for promotions and transfers in even greater secrecy.In 2001 the Justice System Reform Council issued a report that included various recommendations relating to the judiciary. Among its recommendations, the Reform Council called for reforms that would ensure the views of the public are reflected in the judicial appointment process and would secure transparency and objectivity in personnel evaluations. After reviewing the Supreme Court's role in the judicial appointment and personnel management process, this essay examines the set of reforms that were adopted to heighten transparency in that process. As this examination reveals, despite the push for transparency, appointments are still far from public, not to mention standards governing promotions and transfers. Japanese judges still work in relative anonymity. This supports the Japanese judiciary's ethos of uniformity built on a view (or mythology) that the identity of judges does not matter, since procedures and outcomes will be the same no matter who is on the bench.
Attracting Creativity: The initial and aggregate effects of contract selection on creativity-weighted productivity

ABSTRACT: Performance-based compensation contracts can affect productivity both by motivating effort and by attracting workers whose abilities align best with the offered contracts. Using an experiment in which participants design “rebus puzzles,” this study tests whether the incremental benefits of contract self-selection extend to a multi-dimensional performance environment in which participants choose between a contract that rewards both quantity and creativity versus a contract that rewards quantity only. Findings indicate that participants who choose a creativity-weighted pay scheme perceive themselves to have greater creative potential than those who choose a quantity-only scheme. This perceived creativity advantage manifests itself in the superior initial creativity ratings of such participants’ productive output. However, in the aggregate, participants paid only for quantity eventually surpass the creativity-weighted productivity scores of participants paid for creativity-weighted productivity, wh...
Ethics and International Law: Integrating the Global Justice Project(s)

Academic discourse on global justice is at an all-time high. Within ethics and international law, scholars are undertaking new inquiries into age-old questions of building a just world order. Ethics – within political and moral philosophy – poses fundamental questions about responsibilities at the global level and produces a tightly reasoned set of frameworks regarding world order. International law, with its focus on legal norms and institutional arrangements, provides a path, as well as illuminates the obstacles, to implementing theories of the right or of the good. Yet despite the complementarity of these two projects, neither is drawing what it should from the other. The result is ethical scholarship that often avoids, or even misinterprets, the law; and law that marginalizes ethics even as it recognizes the importance of justice. The cost of this avoidance is a set of missed opportunities for both fields. This article seeks to help transform the limited dialogue between philosophers and international lawyers into a meaningful collaboration. Through a critical stocktaking of the contributions of the two disciplines, examining where they do and do not engage with the other, it offers an appraisal of the causes and costs of separation and an argument for an interdisciplinary approach.
The Expressive Dimension of Donor Deferral

What if anything is wrong with the government policy that excludes men who have sex with men (MSM) from giving blood? Federal guidelines require that blood collection agencies permanently refuse do...
The vicarious wisdom of crowds: toward a behavioral perspective on investor reactions to acquisition announcements

Although event-study methodology is invaluable to strategic management research, we argue that the traditional financial economic rationale on which it is based has led scholars to assume away the behavioral mechanisms underlying investor reactions. Building on behavioral theory from management, psychology, and economics, we set out to develop a behavioral perspective on investor reactions to acquisition announcements—one that relaxes the assumption of investors making objective, rational-deductive calculations. Given the information asymmetry they face, we theorize that investors (1) infer management's perception of an acquisition's synergistic potential from the premium it pays, and (2) draw on additional public information to assess the reliability of that perception. Using a multi-industry sample of acquisitions by North American firms, we find considerable support for our behavioral framework. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Europeanization and the Transformation of the Democratic Polity, 1945–2000

Since 1957, a far–reaching transformation of politics within the Member States, commonly described as Europeanization, is said to have taken place. This article contributes to the literature on this phenomenon by focusing on the impact of integration on the democratic polity — that is, the constellation of institutions, procedures and rules of parliamentary democracy, and the political dynamics that flow from them. The empirical analysis is based on Arend Lijphart’s path–breaking research on democracy. I discover that core features of the democratic polity across Europe have proved strikingly resilient in the face of the transformational effects of integration. An exception can be found among the newest democracies in the EU, which exhibit signs of modest convergence. Both of these findings are consistent with institutionalist theory. My conclusions suggest the presence of tangible limits to the reach of integration, and give cause for optimism about the continuing relevance of democratic institutions at the national level.
Measuring private information in a specialist market

Abstract Since the reduced forms of the popular measures of asymmetric information in the price formation process are not nested within larger models we cannot evaluate their fit using standard statistical tools. Furthermore, pairwise correlations amongst the measures are small. We benchmark these measures cross-sectionally to realized specialist loss rates (using alternatively volume and number of trades) in the TORQ data. While five of the six measures are significantly correlated with this benchmark, this is only because they are correlated with the specialist participation rate. We infer that the measures do not measure private information in order flow, even in the setting for which they are designed.
How much are differences in managerial ability worth

Abstract We identify manager/firm separations where managers quit for a new job and study abnormal returns associated with these events. Applying analyses from labor economics, we argue that the average ability of managers who resign for a similar position at another firm should be higher than that of managers who die suddenly. Controlling for age and tenure, we find that firms losing managers to other firms experience an average abnormal return of −1.51%, compared to +3.82% for firms whose managers die suddenly. We use differences in returns across groups to measure the value of differences in managerial ability.
Vacuum states of N=1∗ mass deformations of N=4 and N=2 conformal gauge theories and their brane interpretations

Abstract We find the classical supersymmetric vacuum states of a class of N =1 ∗ field theories obtained by mass deforming superconformal models with simple gauge groups and N =4 or N =2 supersymmetry. In particular, new classical vacuum states for mass-deformed N =4 models with Sp(2N) and SO(N) gauge symmetry are found. We also derive the classical vacua for various mass-deformed N =2 models with Sp(2N) and SU(N) gauge groups and antisymmetric (and symmetric) hypermultiplets. We suggest interpretations of the mass-deformed vacua in terms of three-branes expanded into five-brane configurations.
A Multinomial Logit Model of College Stopout and Dropout Behavior.

Abstract Studies of college attrition typically assume that all attrition is permanent. We use data from the 1990/94 Beginning Postsecondary Survey to distinguish between long-term dropout and short-term stopout behavior in order to test that assumption. We find significant differences between those who stop out and those who drop out in the first year. Failure to recognize these differences biases the results of standard attrition models and hence may cause policy makers to pursue inappropriate policy initiatives or incorrectly target at-risk populations. Furthermore, the type of financial aid received is found to have a differential impact on stopout versus dropout probabilities.
The Persistence and Pricing of the Cash Component of Earnings

Prior research shows that the cash component of earnings is more persistent than the accrual component. We decompose the cash component into: (1) the change in the cash balance, (2) issuances/distributions to debt, and (3) issuances/distributions to equity. We find that the higher persistence of the cash component is entirely due to the subcomponent related to equity. The other subcomponents have persistence levels almost identical to accruals. We investigate whether investors understand the implications of the differential persistence of the three subcomponents. Our results suggest that investors correctly price debt and equity issuances/distributions but misprice the change in the cash balance in a similar manner to accruals. Our tests enable us to empirically distinguish the “accrual” and “external financing” anomalies with results implying that the accrual anomaly subsumes the external financing anomaly. Our results also suggest that naive fixation on earnings is unlikely to be a complete explanation for the accrual anomaly. Our findings are more consistent with investors misunderstanding diminishing returns to new investments.
Are Statutes Really "Legislative Bargains"? The Failure of the Contract Analogy in Statutory Interpretation

Recent scholarship draws an analogy between contract and statutory interpretation. In this article, Professor Movsesian explores and rejects that analogy. There are key differences between contracts and statutes, he argues; the intentionalism of contract law is inappropriate in the context of statutory interpretation. After critically examining the literature on the topic and demonstrating the operative distinctions between contracts and statutes, Professor Movsesian provides a useful illustration in the form of the famous case of Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States. Professor Movsesian shows how a comparison of contract and statutory interpretation sheds light on a number of interesting questions, including the character of third-party beneficiary contracts, the nature of political representation, the role of bicameralism and presentment in the legislative process, and the ongoing debate about the use of legislative history in determining the meaning of statutory language.
Broker-hosted investor conferences

We examine the determinants and consequences of broker-hosted investor conferences. We find the number of brokers hosting a firm at conferences is positively related to institutional ownership and intangible assets, consistent with greater client demand for management access among hard-to-value firms. Younger firms and those that issue equity in the future attend more conferences, suggesting firms view conference participation as a means to enhance investor recognition. Hosting brokers are rewarded with increased commission revenue. Commission share increases by 0.61% during the conference week, with larger increases following more informative conference disclosures. Firms also benefit from conference participation. In the subsequent year, conference firms are followed by an additional 0.34 analysts, undergo a 6% reduction in bid-ask spread, and experience a 0.03 increase in Tobin's q.
TRIPs and Its Achilles' Heel

Written for the "15 Years of TRIPS Implementation" Symposium, this article examines why the TRIPS Agreement fails to provide effective global enforcement of intellectual property rights. It attributes such failure to five sets of challenges: historical, economic, tactical, disciplinary, and technological. The article then outlines the various actions taken by both developed and less developed countries to steer the TRIPS Agreement and the larger international intellectual property system toward their preferred positions. While developed countries push for the development of stronger enforcement norms, less developed countries resist those demands and complain about the use of bilateral, plurilateral, and regional trade agreements to establish TRIPS-plus standards. The article concludes with four lessons that can be drawn from the continuous battle between developed and less developed countries over international intellectual property enforcement norms. Given the significance of effective enforcement to both developed and less developed countries, it is the hope of this article that a better understanding of these four lessons will lead to a more balanced, robust, and sustainable global intellectual property enforcement regime.
A communication model with limited information-processing capacity of recipients

We develop a system dynamics model of message-based communication, where the informationprocessing capacity of message recipients is limited. Profit-seeking broadcasters send messages, but only some of these messages are valuable to recipients. Recipients cannot determine whether or not a message is valuable until it is processed. Information overload occurs when more messages arrive than recipients can process. Numerical experiments test alternative approaches for mitigating information overload. We show that message filtering can increase the flow of for-profit communication. Market-based mechanisms, while aimed at improving the social outcome, can actually lead to suboptimal results and to a complete collapse of for-profit communication. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Syst. Dyn. Rev. 24, 377–405, (2008)
Are Some Clients More Equal Than Others? An Analysis of Asset Management Companies’ Execution Costs

Pension plan sponsors often manage their portfolios via multiple management companies. We find that some plans receive systematically better prices when management companies trade the same stock, on the same day, in the same direction for multiple clients. The number of management companies per client is an important predictor of being a favored or disfavored client, consistent with competition over clients. Average magnitudes of transfers across clients are as large as 0.50% of dollar trade volume. We find that these transfers are larger when opportunities are greater, when clients are newer, and around year-end when client attention is high. Moreover, clients who benefit reward management companies with as much as a 50% increase in future dollar trading volume. We rule out alternative explanations such as market timing skill, directed brokerage arrangements and different trading practices. We interpret the collective results as evidence of conflicts of interest.
Developing economies and international investors : do investment promotion agencies bring them together ?

Many countries spend significant resources on investment promotion agencies in the hope of attracting inflows of foreign direct investment. Despite the importance of this question for public policy choices, little is known about the effectiveness of investment promotion efforts. This study uses newly collected data on national investment promotion agencies in 109 countries to examine the effects of investment promotion on foreign direct investment inflows. The empirical analysis follows two approaches. First, it tests whether sectors explicitly targeted by investment promotion agencies receive more foreign direct investment in the post-targeting period relative to the pre-targeting period and non-targeted sectors. Second, it examines whether the existence of an investment promotion agency is correlated with higher foreign direct investment inflows. Results from both approaches point to the same conclusion. Investment promotion efforts appear to increase foreign direct investment inflows to developing countries. Moreover, agency characteristics, such as the agency's legal status and reporting structure, affect the effectiveness of investment promotion. There is also evidence of diversion of foreign direct investment due to investment incentives offered by other countries in the same geographic region.
Death Qualification and True Bifurcation: Building on the Massachusetts Governor's Council's Work

In this essay we build on the work of the Massachusetts Governor's Council's on Capital Punishment and the ideas developed at a conference at Indiana University, using both as a spring-board for the formulation of an appropriate set of procedures for death-qualification in capital trials. In particular, we recommend the following approach to death-qualification and bifurcation in a capital trial: A capital defendant should be given the option of electing to have a separate jury impaneled for the sentencing phase of the trial, in the event that the guilt-phase jury convicts him of capital murder. The defendant should be allowed to exercise this option either prior to the guilt phase of the trial, or after conviction of capital murder. If the defendant makes a pretrial election to have a separate jury impaneled for sentencing, then the guilt-phase jury will not be death-qualified. If the defendant decides to defer the election until after conviction of capital murder, then the guilt-phase jury will be death-qualified. We argue in this essay that this approach meets both a state's interest in impaneling a jury willing to comply with its charge and the defendant's interest in having a jury as impartial as both practical and possible. While the procedures that we propose might require a greater expenditure of time and resources than currently-conducted capital trials, we believe such incremental increase is more than justified by the significant enhancement to fairness that such a system would provide. In fact, we argue that any state that takes seriously the goals of creating as fair a death penalty system as possible ought to include such a plan for true bifurcation and limited death-qualification.
Racial disparities in the delivery of health care.

Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.law.wne.edu/facschol Part of the Health Law Commons Copyright 1998 San Diego Law Review. Posted with the permission of the San Diego Law Review. Personal use of this material is permitted. In addition, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the San Diego Law Review. Hard copies and/or electronic download of this article may be obtained by contacting the William S. Hein Co., at http://www.wshein.com/ or EBSCO at http://ejournals.ebsco.com/home.asp or Lexis/Westlaw.
The Effects Of Endowment And Loss Aversion In Managerial Stock Option Valuation

Assuming a positive influence of stock price volatility on stock option value, incentive alignment proponents argue that stock option compensation encourages managerial risk seeking and, thus, aligns managers' and shareholders' risk preferences. Our findings show that stock option holders overvalue unexercisable options relative to options being offered and to normative (e.g., Black-Scholes) valuations. Further, the influence of stock price volatility on holders' subjective valuations depends on stock price trend. In sum, results suggest that during stock option valuation, managers draw on heuristics that financial options theory and models fail to capture. We discuss implications for compensation design and research.
Governance Mechanisms and Equity Prices

We investigate how the market for corporate control (external governance) and shareholder activism (internal governance) interact. A portfolio that buys firms with the highest level of takeover vulnerability and shorts firms with the lowest level of takeover vulnerability generates an annualized abnormal return of 10% to 15% only when public pension fund (blockholder) ownership is high as well. A similar portfolio created to capture the importance of internal governance generates annualized abnormal returns of 8%, though only in the presence of “high” vulnerability to takeovers. The complementarity effect exists for firms with lower industry-adjusted leverage and is stronger for smaller firms.
Enron and the Dark Side of Shareholder Value

This article addresses the implications that the Enron collapse holds out for the self regulatory system of corporate governance. The case shows that the incentive structure that motivates actors in the system generates much less powerful checks against abuse than many observers have believed. Even as academics have proclaimed rising governance standards, some standards have declined, particularly those addressed to the numerology of shareholder value. The article's inquiry begins with Enron's business plan. The article asserts that there may be more to Enron's "virtual firm" strategy than meets the eye beholding a firm in collapse. The article restates the strategy as an application of the incomplete contracts theory of the firm that prevails in microeconomics today and asserts that Enron failed because its pursuit of immediate shareholder value caused it to misapply the economics, mistaking its own inflated stock market capitalization for fundamental value. The article proceeds to Enron's collapse, telling four causation stories. This ex ante description draws on information available to the actors who forced Enron into bankruptcy in December 2001. The discussion accounts for the behavior of Enron's principals by reference to the shareholder value norm and Enron's corporate culture. Finally, the article takes up the self regulatory system of corporate governance, asserting that the case justifies no fundamental reform. The costs of any significant new regulation can outweigh the compliance yield, particularly in a system committed to open a wide field for entrepreneurial risk taking. If we seek high returns, we must discount for the risk that rationality and reputation will sometimes prove inadequate as constraints. At the same time, we should hold critical gatekeepers, particularly auditors, to high professional standards. The article argues that present reform discussions respecting the audit function do not adequately confront the problem of capture demonstrated in this case.
Move to Markets? An Empirical Analysis of Privatization in Developing Countries

Aspects of the privatization experience are analysed for a group of 35 low or middle-income developing countries, over the period 1982 through 1999. The theory turns on net political benefits, which in our model are the primary determinant of privatization policies. The decision to privatize is captured here in three related, but distinct, dependent variables: (i) timing; (ii) pace; and (iii) intensity. Our notion of the independent variable, ‘net political benefits’, is not measured directly, but is instead proxied by an array of macroeconomic, political, and institutional variables. Our key finding is that, though political benefits turn out to explain the timing, pace, and intensity of privatization, the effects are very different in each case. The timing hypothesis is tested using a Cox proportional hazard model, the pace hypothesis is tested using a random effects negative binomial model and the intensity hypothesis is tested using the random effects model. We find that the factors that improve timing delay intensity—early adopters are later implementers. Furthermore, we find that a privatization policy is much more likely to be a crisis-driven, last ditch effort to turn the economy around, rather than a carefully chosen policy with explicit, long-term goals. A related, and very important, finding in our analysis has to do with the ‘lock-in’ of institutions. The particular form of political institutions, foreign aid regimes, and level of development of property rights systems in the nation have significant conditioning influences on the extent of lock-in. These relationships may be important for informing policy decisions, and for understanding apparent ‘failures’ of privatization policies. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Imperative of Natural Rights in Today's World

If there is any group that really needs to understand the concept of natural rights, it is professors of constitutional law. The document they teach was written by a generation who uniformly believed in natural rights, used the concept to justify a violent revolution from their mother country, and professed their continued commitment to natural rights long after the separation - a commitment that only intensified in the years that culminated in the Civil War and the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet few constitutional law professors know much, if anything, about this fundamental concept even as a historical matter, much less as a concept worthy of continued application in today's world. The prime evidence of their lack of knowledge is the fact that they use the terms "natural rights" and "natural law" interchangeably despite the historical and theoretical distinctness of these terms. In this paper prepared for a panel sponsored by the Political Economy of the Good Society held at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, I provide what I hope will be viewed as a readily accessible explication of these concepts that has as much practical application today as it did in the days of John Locke or James Madison. Although this is decidedly my take on natural law and natural rights, I think it is true to the heart of the concept and can be used to make sense of historical materials that are otherwise inexplicable to modern constitutional scholars. And this vision of natural rights is as important today as it was in 1776 or 1868.
The causes and consequences of venture capital stage financing

Abstract This paper examines the causes and consequences of venture capital (VC) stage financing. Using information about the physical location of an entrepreneurial firm and the geographic distance between the VC investor and the firm, I show that VC investors located farther away from an entrepreneurial firm tend to finance the firm using a larger number of financing rounds, shorter durations between successive rounds, and investing a smaller amount in each round. However, VC investors' propensity to stage is independent of whether the firm is located in a close-knit community. I also find that VC staging positively affects the entrepreneurial firm's propensity to go public, operating performance in the initial public offering (IPO) year, and post-IPO survival rate, but only if the firm is located far away from the VC investor. However, the effect of VC staging on entrepreneurial firm's performance is independent of whether it is located in a close-knit community. The findings are robust to a variety of alternative proximity measures, instrumental variables, and econometric approaches for dealing with endogeneity problems.
In Defense of the 'Old' Public Health: The Legal Framework for the Regulation of Public Health

The traditional forms of public health law were directly largely toward communicable disases and other externalities, such as pollution, with negative health impacts. The more modern view treats any health issue as one of public health so long as it effects large numbers of individuals, which would include such matters as obesity and diabetes. Historically, this paper examines the constitutional evolution of the public health principle from the narrower to the broader conception. It then argues that the narrower principle better defines the appropriate scope of coercive government intervention than the broader definition, which could easily authorize those forms of intervention in economic affairs whose indirect effects are likely to reduce overall social wealth and freedom, and with it the overall health levels of the population.
Capital expenditures and firm performance: evidence from a cross‐sectional analysis of stock returns

Using a simple two-period model of investment, we show that there should be a nonlinear relation between a firm's investment-to-capital ratio and its subsequent stock returns. This prediction finds substantial empirical support. The evidence indicates that the slope of the investment function is negative at low investment levels, close to zero at intermediate investment levels and negative at high investment levels. Our results, which are robust to the use of narrowly- and broadly-defined measures of capital investment, pose a challenge to the hypothesis that the negative cross-sectional correlation between investment and stock returns is attributable to some sort of overinvestment phenomenon.
Moral hazard and efficiency in general equilibrium with anonymous trading

A 'folk theorem' originating, among others, in the work of Stiglitz maintains that competitive equilibria are always or 'generically' inefficient (unless contracts directly specify consumption levels as in Prescott and Townsend, thus bypassing trading in anonymous markets). This paper critically reevaluates these claims in the context of a general equilibrium economy with moral hazard. We first formalize this folk theorem. Firms offer contracts to workers who choose an effort level that is private information and that affects worker productivity. To clarify the importance of trading in anonymous markets, we introduce a monitoring partition such that employment contracts can specify expenditures over subsets in the partition, but cannot regulate how this expenditure is subdivided among the commodities within a subset. We say that preferences are nonseparable (or more accurately, not weakly separable) when the marginal rate of substitution across commodities within a subset in the partition depends on the effort level, and that preferences are weakly separable when there exists no such subset. We prove that the equilibrium is always inefficient when a competitive equilibrium allocation involves less than full insurance and preferences are nonseparable. This result appears to support the conclusion of the above mentioned folk theorem. Nevertheless, our main result highlights its limitations. Most common-used preference structures do not satisfy the nonseparability condition. We show that when preferences are weakly separable, competitive equilibria with moral hazard are constrained optimal, in the sense that a social planner who can monitor all consumption levels cannot improve over competitive allocations. Moreover, we establish e-optimality when there are only small deviations from weak separability. These results suggest that considerable care is necessary in invoking the folk theorem about the inefficiency of competitive equilibria with private information.
Could Java Change Everything? The Competitive Propriety of a Proprietary Standard

The Internet software market is characterized by strong network effects and omnipresent intellectual property rights. In this paper, we attempt to explore the relationship between the two, focusing on two examples: the government's antitrust proceeding against Microsoft for browser tying, and Sun's suit against Microsoft for altering Java. We conclude that the social value of the Internet lies in its ability to facilitate interoperation, and this in turn argues in favor of open access to network standards. Such open standards may be achieved in the open market. Where they are not, the law may intervene, but it must be cautious not to overreach and to avoid disturbing the incentives provided by intellectual property protection.
Asset-Backed Securities: Costs and Benefits of “Bankruptcy Remoteness”

This paper focuses on a key property of asset-backed securities (ABS); namely, that ABS are designed to achieve "bankruptcy remoteness"of the securitized assets from the borrowing …rm. This provides lenders with maximal protection from dilution that is not available with other contracts, such as secured debt. ABS can have real eects in allowing …rms to commit to more e¢ cient investment decisions in bankruptcy. We show that securitization of replaceable assets (such as receivables) prevents ine¢ cient continuation in bankruptcy, but securitization of necessary assets can lead to ine¢ cient liquidations. In these circumstances, secured debt and/or leases can be preferred. Our model also predicts that greater legal risk of "bankruptcy remoteness"being undermined by courts leads to lower overall e¢ ciency and higher interest rates for ABS investors. We test this second prediction using a controversial decision in the Chap- ter 11 bankruptcy of LTV Steel, in which a securitization contract was unexpectedly treated as a secured loan. Using a dierence-in-dierences approach, we …nd that ABS spreads for securitizers eligible for Chapter 11 increased signi…cantly more than spreads for insured bank securitizers, who are not Chapter 11-eligible, in the period fol- lowing the LTV …ling. The results demonstrate that the creditor protection provided by "bankruptcy remoteness"is indeed valuable and priced in …nancial markets.
Time Varying Structural Vector Autoregressions and Monetary Policy

Monetary policy and the private sector behavior of the US economy are modeled as a time varying structural vector autoregression, where the sources of time variation are both the coefficients and the variance covariance matrix of the innovations. The paper develops a new, simple modeling strategy for the law of motion of the variance covariance matrix and proposes an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for the model likelihood/posterior numerical evaluation. The main empirical conclusions are: 1) both systematic and non-systematic monetary policy have changed during the last forty years. In particular, systematic responses of the interest rate to inflation and unemployment exhibit a trend toward a more aggressive behavior, despite remarkable oscillations; 2) this has had a negligible effect on the rest of the economy. The role played by exogenous non-policy shocks seems more important than interest rate policy in explaining the high inflation and unemployment episodes in recent US economic history.
Pair consensus decoding improves accuracy of neural network basecallers for nanopore sequencing

We develop a general computational approach for improving the accuracy of basecalling with Oxford Nanopore's 1D2 and related sequencing protocols. Our software PoreOver ( https://github.com/jordisr/poreover ) finds the consensus of two neural networks by aligning their probability profiles, and is compatible with multiple nanopore basecallers. When applied to the recently-released Bonito basecaller, our method reduces the median sequencing error by more than half.
The Effect of Issuing Biased Earnings Forecasts on Analysts' Access to Management and Survival

This study offers evidence on the earnings forecast bias analysts use to please firm management and the associated benefits they obtain from issuing such biased forecasts in the years prior to Regulation Fair Disclosure. Analysts who issue initial optimistic earnings forecasts followed by pessimistic earnings forecasts before the earnings announcement produce more accurate earnings forecasts and are less likely to be fired by their employers. The effect of such biased earnings forecasts on forecast accuracy and firing is stronger for analysts who follow firms with heavy insider selling and hard-to-predict earnings. The above results hold regardless of whether a brokerage firm has investment banking business or not. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that analysts use biased earnings forecasts to curry favor with firm management in order to obtain better access to management's private information.
Angel Investors: Who They Are and What They Do; Can I Be One, Too?

Angel investors go by many definitions. By all definitions, however, angel investors act as informal venture capitalists and collectively invest billions of dollars in thousands of entrepreneurial projects annually. Despite their importance to small businesses and entrepreneurs, angel investments have received comparatively little attention from investment managers and writers. This article describes the advantages and disadvantages of angel investing and suggests ways for investors to extract the maximum benefits—both pecuniary and nonpecuniary—from angel investing.
The Dutch Auction Myth

The bursting of the internet bubble continues to have ripple effects on the initial public offering (IPO) process. Critics of this process have fashioned a complex set of interconnected objections to the orthodox bookbuilding method for conducting IPOs, pricing shares, and allocating them to preferred investors. Critics instead hail online reverse-bid, or Dutch, auctions (Dutch IPOs) as an alternative method promising more equitable access, efficient prices, and egalitarian allocations. This article comprehensively assesses the case for Dutch IPOs. Part I dissects critiques of bookbuilding, which rely on anomalous data, derogate established financial literature, and largely evaporate in the face of recent regulations. Part II examines the empirical performance of Dutch IPOs, which have failed to distinguish themselves in the United States and around the world. Part III reveals ways in which Dutch IPOs may be susceptible to fraud and manipulation that bookbuilding is not. Ultimately, claims of the Dutch IPO's superiority over bookbuilding are unproven at best and at worst fail to appreciate certain risks.
Civil Rights Violations = Broken Windows: De Minimis Curet Lex

Civil rights violations that appear relatively slight may warrant judicial redress despite their small size; some of them point up important principles. Leaving these violations unremedied may contribute to an ambient lawlessness that can foster bigger harms. A small infringement in this respect resembles the criminological construct of “broken windows,” which in its prescriptive form urges governments to view de minimis violations as harbingers of more disorder to come. Using broken windows to understand privately initiated civil rights claims honors a statutory mandate and helps to achieve progressive ends. This application is potentially better than the one that police impose on the street, which has raised concerns about both justice and efficacy. Rendered as a maxim, the precept that this Article commends is De minimis curet lex: The law ought to concern itself with some affronts that appear small. INTRODUCTION 897 I. “BROKEN WINDOWS” AS METAPHOR AND REPARATIVE TECHNIQUE 902 A. The Hypothesis 902 1. Disorder (in Contradistinction to Crime) 902 2. Order 902 3. Order and Disorder as Transitions 903 4. From Small to Large 903 5. Bad Behavior Emboldened 903 6. Alienation 903 B. The Critique 904 1. A Problematic Metaphor about Order and Disorder 904 2. Entrenching Discrimination 907 3. Scant Improvements 908 C. Broken Windows Distilled to Its Uncontroversial Elements 910 1. Affronts and Social Meaning 910 2. Coarsening Sensibilities 912 3. Deterioration as a Social Phenomenon 914 * Anita and Stuart Subotnick Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School. I thank my Brooklyn colleagues for the insightful comments they offered at a meeting of our summer writers’ group. Meghan Moroney and Tyler Korff contributed ingenious research assistance. Brilliant comments on a draft came from Ed Cheng, Shari Motro, and Diane Fahey. My thanks also to Wendy Brazil for the help I needed with Latin conjugation, and to the Brooklyn Law School summer research program for its support.
Portfolio Reallocation and Exchange Rate Dynamics

Abstract This paper explains exchange rate dynamics by linking financial customers’ foreign exchange order flow with their dynamic portfolio reallocation. For any currency pair in a particular period, one currency has higher assets return than the other and can be considered the high-return-currency (HRC). Financial institutions attempt to hold more HRC assets when they become more risk-loving or the relative return of the assets is expected to increase. Such a portfolio reallocation generates buy order toward the HRC and the currency appreciates. As the HRC changes over time, the direction that the relative return and risk appetite affect the exchange rate varies in different regimes.
How fast can the new economy grow? A Bayesian analysis of the evolution of trend growth

Abstract This paper develops a Bayesian filtering strategy for estimating trend growth in the new economy. The filtering strategy involves three elements. Consumption data are used to help disentangle changes in the trend from ordinary cyclical movements. Drifting parameters are introduced to let the economy’s law of motion evolve, and Bayesian methods are used to estimate the drifting parameters. The evidence points to a modest net increase in trend growth over the last decade. In per capita terms, the economy may grow more rapidly than in the 1970s, but probably not as fast as in the 1950s or 1960s.
ON THE EVOLUTION OF PARETO-OPTIMAL BEHAVIOR IN REPEATED COORDINATION PROBLEMS*

I characterize the asymptotic behavior of a society facing a repeated-common-interest game. In this society, new individuals enter to replace their “parents” at random times. Each entrant has possibly different beliefs about others' behavior than his or her predecessor. A self-confirming equilibrium (SCE) belief process describes an evolution of beliefs in this society consistent with a self-confirming equilibrium of the repeated game. The main result shows that for any common-interest game, the Pareto-dominant equilibrium is a globally absorbing state of the behavioral dynamics when the SCE beliefs of new entrants satisfy certain independence and full-support properties. This result does not involve either of the usual assumptions of myopia or large inertia common in evolutionary models, nor is this result possible if only Nash rather than self-confirming equilibria are considered.
Adverse Selection in Reinsurance Markets

This paper looks for evidence of adverse selection in the relationship between primary insurers and reinsurers. We test the implications of a model in which informational asymmetry—and therefore, its negative consequences—decline over time. Our tests involve a data panel consisting of U.S. property-liability insurance firms that reported to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners during the period 1993–2012. We find that the amount of reinsurance, insurer profitability, and insurer credit quality all increase with the tenure of the insurer–reinsurer relationship.
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

The author reviews Acemoglu and Robinson's book, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.
R&D Reporting Biases and their Consequences

The immediate expensing of research and development (R&D) expenditures is often justified by the conservatism principle. However, no accounting procedure consistently applied can be conservative throughout the firm’s life. We therefore ask the following questions: (1) When is the expensing of R&D conservative and when is it aggressive, relative to R&D capitalization? (2) What are the capital-market implications of these reporting biases? To address these questions we construct a model of profitability biases (differences between reported profitability under R&D expensing and capitalization) and show that the key drivers of the reporting biases are the differences between R&D growth and earnings growth (momentum), and between R&D growth and return on equity (ROE). Companies with a high R&D growth rate relative to their profitability (typically early life-cycle companies) report conservatively, while firms with a low R&D growth rate (mature companies) tend to report aggressively under current generally accepted accounting principles. Our empirical analysis, covering the period 1972‐2003, generally supports the analytical predictions. In the valuation analysis we find evidence consistent with investor fixation on the reported profitability measures: we detect undervaluation of conservatively reporting firms and overvaluation of aggressively reporting firms. These misvaluations appear to be corrected when the reporting biases reverse from conservative to aggressive and vice versa. This evidence is consistent with behavioral finance arguments about investor cognitive biases.