cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
A Disclosure Framework for Public Fund Investment Policies

Abstract Assets under management by public funds, including sovereign wealth funds and sovereign pension funds, continues to grow at a strong pace. As funds grow larger and new sovereign funds come into the market, the identification of suitable investments in an increasingly crowded marketplace becomes correspondingly more difficult. The universe of potential investments is narrowed by a trust deficit between many sovereign funds and the regulators in countries in which these funds invest; this trust deficit can result in higher transactional costs that price public funds out of the market, or can create unacceptably high regulatory risks that deter funds from considering certain investments. Because transparency can foster trust, this paper seeks to remedy the trust deficit by outlining a disclosure framework for investment policies that are most relevant to recipient country regulators.
Masking identification of discrete choice models under simulation methods

We present examples based on actual and synthetic datasets to illustrate how simulation methods can mask identification problems in the estimation of discrete choice models such as mixed logit. Simulation methods approximate an integral (without a closed form) by taking draws from the underlying distribution of the random variable of integration. Our examples reveal how a low number of draws can generate estimates that appear identified, but in fact, are either not theoretically identified by the model or not empirically identified by the data. For the particular case of maximum simulated likelihood estimation, we investigate the underlying source of the problem by focusing on the shape of the simulated log-likelihood function under different conditions.
Is there a Paradox of Learning from the Other? Four Questions and a Proposal

A common justification given for comparative political theory (and its cognate concepts) is that we will be morally and epistemically transformed by encounters with our "others." This is a fully warranted and admirable aim for expanded forms of ethical and political theory. However, it also raises some complex questions. First, who is the self being transformed? Do we understand the self in phenomenological, anthropological or ideological terms? Are we being transformed in reference to an existing repertoire of moral, political and epistemic commitments (say, liberal ones) or in reference to a universal self capable of critical reflection on all core value commitments? Second, who is our "other." How deep do we go in identifying core moral and epistemic commitments that are to be challenged by new encounters? More importantly, when we identify an "other" with whom we are in "conversation," are we by definition always just identifying values or commitments that we already have, for otherwise how would we be able to identifying what the "other" can teach us as being valuable or good? Is this the paradox of comparative political theory, or is there a deeper, genuinely transformative potential for learning and transformation?
Timing Rules and Legal Institutions

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 544 I. EXAMPLES 548 A. Constitutional Timing Rules 549 B. Statutory Timing Rules 551 C. Internal Timing Rules 553 1. Examples 553 2. The Puzzle of Waiver 555 II. THEORY 557 A. Optimal Timing in Light of Uncertainty 558 B. The Effect of Delay and Rapidity Rules 563 C. Internal Reasons for Regulating Timing 565 1. Passion and Delay 565 2. Group Polarization and Delay 566 3. Agenda-Setting and Delay 568 D. External Reasons for Regulating Timing 570 1. Timing Rules as Solutions 570 2. Timing Rules as Problems 573 III. EXTENSIONS 574 A. The Relationship Between Timing Rules and Other 574 Procedural Rules B. Enforcement 577 1. Congressional Enforcement 577 2. Presidential Enforcement 578 3. Judicial Enforcement 579 C. Retroactivity 582 D. Delegation of Regulatory Powers to the Executive Branch 584 CONCLUSION 588 Constitutional and legislative restrictions on the timing of legislation and regulation are ubiquitous, but these "timing rules" have received little attention in the legal literature. Yet the timing of a law can be just as important as its content. The timing of a law determines whether its benefits are created sooner or later. This determines how the costs and benefits are spread across time, and hence how they are distributed to the advantage or disadvantage of different private groups, citizens, and governmental officials. We argue that timing rules are, and should be, used to reduce agency problems within the legislature and between the le gislature and the public, and to mitigate deliberative pathologies. INTRODUCTION Most fights about new legislation focus on the legislation's substance. Yet legislators regularly decide not just what to do but also when to do it, and often decisions about the timing of new law are just as critical as decisions about its content. If a main goal of institutional design is to guard against undesirable legislative activity, regulating the timing of legislative choice might be more effective than directly regulating the content of legislation, or so we shall argue below. In the United States Congress and many other legislatures, choice about timing is heavily regulated by what we term timing rules, which have been largely ignored in the legal literature (1) and understudied in economics (2) and political science. (3) This is unfortunate because a panoply of constitutional, statutory, and internal congressional rules constrain the timing of legislative action, and "the 'mere' timing of a vote can mean nearly everything." (4) Some timing rules speed up legislative decisionmaking, while others slow it down. Some timing rules delay implementation of new law; others dictate complete and immediate implementation. In this Article, we develop a theory of timing rules, exploring both the optimal timing of legislative action and the implications for attempts to constrain legislative action. …
The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap

Women are currently the majority of U.S. college students and of those receiving a bachelor's degree, but were 39 percent of undergraduates in 1960. We use three longitudinal data sets of high school graduates in 1957, 1972, and 1992 to understand the narrowing of the gender gap in college and its reversal. From 1972 to 1992 high school girls narrowed the gap with boys in math and science course taking and in achievement test scores. These variables, which we term the proximate determinants, can account for 30 to 60 percent of the relative increase in women's college completion rate. Behind these changes were several others: the future work expectations of young women increased greatly between 1968 and 1979 and the age at first marriage for college graduate women rose by 2.5 years in the 1970s, allowing them to be more serious students. The reversal of the college gender gap, rather than just its elimination, was due in part to the persistence of behavioral and developmental differences between males and females.
"The Phantom Children of the Republic": International Surrogacy and the New Illegitimacy

This paper examines the new illegitimacy in Europe, a continent that embraces a much more robust commitment to marriage equality than we find in the United States and that has rejected discriminatory treatment of children born out of wedlock. The new illegitimacy in Europe results from the entrenchment of the principle that the legal mother of a child is always the gestational mother and the widespread disapproval and legal prohibition of surrogacy the principle entails. When citizens of countries that ban surrogacy choose to pursue surrogacy elsewhere, they and their children meet with hostility, opprobrium and exclusion upon their return. The resort to surrogacy abroad subjects these families to legal disabilities that recall the disadvantageous treatment of children born out of wedlock under what are now considered discriminatory legal regimes that violate human rights norms. This paper explores the resurgence of illegitimacy in Europe and reflects on the practice implications for attorneys advising couples and individuals who wish to use surrogacy in other countries.
The unintended consequences of divestment

Abstract A divestment campaign aims to depress share prices to induce managers to change firm behavior. Assuming that managers make profit-maximizing decisions in the absence of a campaign, firms that accede to divestors’ demands raise short-run share prices but depress long-run profits. Managers who are more interested in short-run prices are therefore more motivated by divestment than managers who care about long-run profits. We show that, as most managerial compensation contracts reward long-run profitability and stock returns, divestment can be ineffective at best, and perhaps counterproductive, rewarding managers who attract divestment campaigns. In a quantification exercise, we show that the wealth of most executives running likely divestment targets in 2015 would be unaffected by even large movements in share prices. Of those affected, a substantial majority would benefit from divestment.
Estimating risk preferences from deductible choice

We develop a structural econometric model to estimate risk preferences from data on deductible choices in auto insurance contracts. We account for adverse selection by modeling unobserved heterogeneity in both risk (claim rate) and risk aversion. We find large and skewed heterogeneity in risk attitudes. In addition, women are more risk averse than men, risk aversion exhibits a U-shape with respect to age, and proxies for income and wealth are positively associated with absolute risk aversion. Finally, unobserved heterogeneity in risk aversion is greater than that of risk, and, as we illustrate, has important implications for insurance pricing.
Auctions with Endogenous Valuations, The Snowball Effect Revisited

This paper looks at the determination of ownership of capacity when there are two ex-ante symmetric agents bidding for many units of capacity which are sold sequentially. It is shown that convexity of payoffs in the final stage of the game is sufficient to ensure monopolization of capacity, but that increasing returns to scale are not sufficient to ensure monopolization.
The Legal Development of the Informed Consent Doctrine: Past and Present

For millennia physicians were admonished to obscure the details of patients’ illnesses and poor prognoses. The Hippocratic ethic precludes physicians from including patients in medical decisionmaking. That ethic demanded of doctors that they “[p]erform [their duties] calmly and adroitly, concealing most things from the patient … revealing nothing of the patient's future or present condition.”
The Asymmetry of population ethics: experimental social choice and dual-process moral reasoning

Population ethics is widely considered to be exceptionally important and exceptionally difficult. One key source of difficulty is the conflict between certain moral intuitions and analytical results identifying requirements for rational (in the sense of complete and transitive) social choice over possible populations. One prominent such intuition is the Asymmetry, which jointly proposes that the fact that a possible child’s quality of life would be bad is a normative reason not to create the child, but the fact that a child’s quality of life would be good is not a reason to create the child. This paper reports a set of questionnaire experiments about the Asymmetry in the spirit of economists’ empirical social choice. Few survey respondents show support for the Asymmetry; instead respondents report that expectations of a good quality of life are relevant. Each experiment shows evidence (among at least some participants) of dual-process moral reasoning, in which cognitive reflection is statistically associated with reporting expected good quality of life to be normatively relevant. The paper discusses possible implications of these results for the economics of population-sensitive social welfare and for the conflict between moral mathematics and population intuition.
Watch & Learn: Illegal Behavior and Obedience to Legal Norms Through the Eyes of Israeli and American Popular Culture

What do popular media tell us about the way we perceive the rule of law in our society? What conceptions of legal norms and obedience to these norms control popular mass media? How do these conceptions shape and reflect the legal culture of a given society? This paper aims to explore empirically these questions, through the analysis of American TV shows and Israeli TV shows that became popular in Israel. To achieve this goal a dual empirical strategy was adopted—content analysis of popular TV shows, and an Internet survey among Israeli respondents. This approach addresses a methodological and substantive gap in existing literature on law and popular culture since it integrates the two elements of law and popular culture that are usually treated separately—the messages conveyed in the popular artifact and the way the audience actually perceives those messages. The content analysis seemed to reveal a disregard towards legal rules when doing so served an important interest for the characters, as well as undermining the competence of law enforcement agencies. Furthermore, the research revealed differences between Israeli and American shows, suggesting that the legal cultures of these societies may well differ. This portrayal was supported by the survey results. Moreover, the survey suggested a correlation between viewing habits and the acceptance of illegality, contributing to the evolving literature on the cultivating effects of mass media. The comparative
The Other Election Controversy of Y2K: Core First Amendment Values and High-Tech Political Coalitions

As the 2000 campaign reached its climax, some renegade supporters of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader countered critics’ charges that they were “handing the election to Bush” by creating websites encouraging vote-swapping. The theory of this practice was: A Nader supporter in a hotly contested state would agree to vote for Al Gore if a Gore supporter in an uncontested state would vote for Ralph Nader. The object was to help deliver five percent of the popular vote to the Green Party (so that the Greens would receive federal matching funds for the 2004 presidential election) while simultaneously working to prevent a George W. Bush presidency. With the election less than a week away, and the poll margins closer than any election in recent history, several state election officials acted to snuff out the online vote-swapping movement by threatening vote-swap site operators with fines and/or imprisonment. The chilling effect brought about by the letters from state regulators may have tipped the scales in the 2000 campaign, even though no one knew whether prohibiting voteswapping was constitutional. This study introduces the reader to the concept and practice of voteswapping. It examines the chilling effect of the threats of prosecution issued during the 2000 election and these effects’ possible electoral consequences. This study analyzes online vote-swapping under various state laws and state constitutions and extends the analysis to encompass federal election law and federal constitutional law. Finally, this study examines the ethics of vote-swapping and concludes that the practice is legal under most state election laws, protected under most state constitutions, protected by the federal Constitution, and an ethical use of personal voting power.
Ordinary People, Extraordinary Risks: Participation in an Ethnic Rebellion

Why do ordinary people take extraordinary risks and join an ethnic armed rebellion? This article tests a series of well-established hypotheses about selfish and identity based motivations and a new hypothesis based on prospect theory. It then employs a unique multimethod research strategy combining one of the most comprehensive datasets on insurgent recruitment that contains biographical information about 8,266 Kurdish militants with extensive fieldwork involving in-depth interviews with relatives of the militants to test these hypotheses. The findings show the decision to rebel is as much political as economic and social. While security concerns and expectations of benefits affect the decision to rebel, social commitments, identities radicalized by state repression, and collective threat perceptions among efficacious individuals generated by political mobilization, rather than preexisting ethnic cleavages, also lead to participation in an ethnic insurgency. The latter findings explain the durability of insurgencies with limited economic resources and their ability to attract educated fighters.
Does liking or wanting determine repeat consumption delay

Does liking or wanting predict the delay between consumption episodes? Although these psychological processes are correlated, we find that memory for liking, rather than wanting, determines the number of days that pass until the consumption of a food is repeated. Experiment 1 found that liking (but not wanting) for a food at the end of a consumption experience predicted how many days passed until participants wanted to consume it again. Experiment 2 showed that mitigating the decrease in liking resulting from the repeated consumption of a food eliminates its effect on delay. Together, these findings suggest that end liking has a greater influence on when people will consume a food again in the future.
The anatomy of french production hierarchies

We study the internal organization of French manufacturing firms. We divide the employees of each firm into “layers” using occupational categories. Layers are hierarchical in that the typical worker in a higher layer earns more, and the typical firm occupies less of them. The probability of adding/dropping a layer is positively/negatively correlated with value added. Reorganization, through changes in layers, is essential to understanding how firms grow. Firms that expand substantially add layers and pay lower average wages in all preexisting layers. In contrast, firms that expand little and do not reorganize pay higher average wages in all preexisting layers.
The Effect of Regulatory Benchmarks on Firm Reporting Behavior

ABSTRACT: Accounting researchers question the effect of (“bright-line”) regulations on firms' financial reporting behavior. To offer evidence on this issue, we take advantage of the regulatory environment in the Chinese setting. In China, regulators have created a bright-line at which firms must disclose within 30 days after the fiscal year-end expected changes in net income of 50 percent or greater. Consistent with earnings management to avoid reporting earnings that miss this explicit regulation-generated benchmark, we find that far more firms than would be expected just beat the −50 percent threshold (i.e., there is a distinct “kink” in the earnings change distribution at −50 percent). As further evidence of earnings management, firms just beating the −50 percent threshold have higher abnormal accruals and excess non-operating income. The ability of firms to avoid missing the −50 percent regulatory benchmark, however, is reduced for those with stronger monitoring (foreign investors, exchange regulators...
Cognition-Enhancing Drugs: Can We Say No?

Normative analysis of cognition-enhancing drugs frequently weighs the liberty interests of drug users against egalitarian values. Yet those who would refuse to engage in neuroenhancement may well find their liberty to do so limited in a society where such drugs are widespread. To the extent that unvarnished emotional responses are world-disclosive, neurocosmetics also threaten to foist faulty data upon all their users. This essay examines underappreciated liberty-based and epistemic rationales for regulating cognition-enhancing drugs.
In the Wake of Thoreau: Four Morden Legal Philosophers and the Theory of Nonviolent Civil Disobedience

This Article opens with a discussion of Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience and then examines the ideas of four modem legal philosophers, Joseph Raz, Kent Greenawalt, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin, on the subject. Next, the Article compares the respective thinking of all five men regarding the circumstances that would justify the use of civil disobedience. To facilitate the comparison as well as to make it more relevant to the reader, the Article examines five related contemporary illustrations involving situations in which the use of civil disobedience might arguably be morally justified. This Article concludes with some general thoughts on the circumstances justifying the use of nonviolent civil disobedience.
Lessons from Law About Incomplete Commodification in the Egg Market

This article seeks to illustrate egg donation's incompletely commodified status through an analysis of two cases of first impression, highlighting the tensions that arise from attempts to reconcile egg donation's reality as a robust commercial industry with the nonmarket norms that traditionally underlie reproduction. Antitrust and taxation litigation may seem unlikely sources for guidance in navigating the tensions in egg donation's uncertain place between the worlds of gift and market exchange. Nonetheless, this litigation forces an explicit consideration of how egg donation is perceived, talked about, and operationalized, and where along the gift-market spectrum it fits. These cases also engage familiar questions of commodification, coercion, and exploitation, which are surprisingly central litigation issues.
Who Invented Local Power Analysis

Asymptotic local power analysis has become an important and increasingly used technique in econometrics. This paper reviews the history of local power analysis and delineates the contribution of J. Neyman, E.J.G. Pitman, and G. Noether.
Recalibrating the legal risks of cross-border health care.

The nascent scholarship surrounding "medical tourism" assumes, without much scrutiny, that foreign jurisdictions provide few legal remedies to patients, instead focusing on whether U.S. patients can sue in U.S. courts. This article tests that assumption by examining whether patients might recover adequate compensation not only in the United States, but in four common destinations: India, Thailand, Singapore, and Mexico. I analyze how each jurisdiction handles medical malpractice complaints and discuss the unique obstacles patients might face when navigating each of these systems. I conclude that U.S. patients will struggle to recover remotely adequate compensation in each of these jurisdictions. This finding is important because patients are frequently asked to waive any legal claims they might assert in U.S. courts, thus outsourcing not only the surgery, but the legal remedies as well. In fact, medical tourists are simply told not to travel overseas if they are at all concerned about their potential legal remedies. Given these findings, I suggest several ways we might reallocate the legal risks of cross-border health care so they do not fall squarely on patients. I scrutinize private sector responses to this imbalance and suggest ways the public sector can help mitigate it.
The Meritocracy Myth and the Illusion of Equal Employment Opportunity

Two years ago, I developed an exercise for my students, most of whom major in business, in the hope of creating classroom discussion about what the word "qualified" means in the context of employment decisions. I had been frustrated by the students' beliefs that employers could select with accuracy the most qualified candidate for any particular position and that affirmative action worked to rob qualified white and male candidates of jobs. I figured that, with a well-written exercise, I could convince my students of the malleability and imprecision of hiring criteria and the fallacy that merit alone determines employment success. The exercise required students to act as members of a municipal hiring committee charged with choosing between John Williams and Cathy Jones, two white police officers, for a road officer position with the City, a suburban working class community of 200,000 residents. I deliberately designed the exercise so that Williams and Jones had different strengths, which often is the case in hiring and promotion decisions. To draw attention to the problems posed by subjective criteria, I included, as a hiring criterion, an interview by three male police officers, two of whom worked for the City and one who worked for a neighboring police department. The interview panel gave Williams a 49 out of 50 on his interview, and Jones a 42 out of 50. The panel felt that Jones knew the law very well, in particular the law on search and seizure, but it believed that Jones was "not aggressive enough" in her responses to some of the hypothetical situations posed.I also included information about the City's affirmative action plan, which provided that the City could consider a candidate's race or sex in an employment decision when candidates were equally qualified. Finally, the exercise contained information about the number of women officers (10 out of 240) and evidence of both past and current sex discrimination within the police department.
Analysts’ role in shaping non-GAAP reporting: evidence from a natural experiment

We examine how exogenous changes in analyst coverage influence (1) the likelihood that managers will voluntarily disclose customized (non-GAAP) performance metrics and (2) the relative quality of their non-GAAP disclosures. Specifically, we use a quasi-natural-experimental setting in which brokerage firms terminate analyst coverage and find that, following an unanticipated decrease in analyst coverage, managers are more likely to disclose non-GAAP earnings per share (EPS) numbers. We also find that managers become more aggressive in their disclosure choices and that the quality of their non-GAAP exclusions decreases after analysts terminate coverage. These effects are more pronounced among firms losing an analyst with greater ability and firms with weaker corporate governance. Overall, our evidence suggests that analysts’ monitoring deters aggressive non-GAAP reporting.
Luminous blue variable eruptions and related transients: diversity of progenitors and outburst properties

We present new light curves and optical spectra for a number of extragalactic optical transients or 'supernova impostors' related to giant eruptions of luminous blue variables (LBVs), and we provide a comparative discussion of LBV-like giant eruptions known thus far. New data include photometry and spectroscopy of supernovae (SNe) 1999bw, 2000ch, 2001ac, 2002bu, 2006bv and 2010dn. SN 2010dn appears to be a carbon copy of SN 2008S and NGC 300-OT, whereas SN 2002bu shows spectral evolution from a normal LBV at early times to a twin of these cooler transients at late times. SN 2008S, NGC 300-OT and SN 2010dn appear to be special cases of a broader eruptive phenomenon where the progenitor star was enshrouded by dust, perhaps from a previous unseen eruptive episode. Evidence suggests that their progenitors have initial masses in the range 10―20 M ⊙ , extending the range of masses susceptible to the violent eruptive phenomenon below the canonical LBV mass range. Examining the full sample, SN impostors are characterized by strong photometric variability on a range of time-scales from a day to decades, potentially suffering multiple eruptions of the same source. The upper end of the luminosity distribution overlaps with the least-luminous core-collapse SNe, but in most cases a distinction can be made based on spectra. The low end of the luminosity distribution is far less well defined, and a distinction between LBV giant eruptions, S Doradus phases of LBVs, novae and possible eruptions of intermediate-mass stars is not entirely clear. We discuss observational clues concerning stellar winds or shocks as the relevant mass-loss mechanism, and we evaluate possible ideas for the physical mechanisms of outbursts, but there is still a great need for theoretical work on this problem. Although known examples of these eruptions are sufficient to illustrate their remarkably wide diversity in the peak absolute magnitude, duration, progenitor stars, outburst spectra and other observable properties, their statistical distribution is an area that will benefit greatly from current and upcoming transient surveys. Based on the distribution of these eruptive properties, we propose that the prototypical object SN 1961V was not a member of this class of impostors after all, but was instead a true core-collapse Type IIn SN that was preceded by a giant LBV eruption.
Games with incomplete information when players are partially aware of others’ signals

Abstract Empirical and experimental findings suggest that players may underestimate others’ private information in incomplete-information games. We modify standard epistemic assumptions of static incomplete-information games to allow partial signal-awareness. That is, players can be unaware of some of the signals available to others. When learning to play, players form conjectures that underrepresent the sophistication of others’ strategy profile. The resulting solution concept is equilibrium with partial signal-awareness (EPSA). We illustrate EPSA by various examples and prove an existence result and an equivalence result between it and Bayesian Nash equilibrium. We then compare EPSA and analogy-based expectation equilibrium (ABEE) (Jehiel and Koessler, 2008) and prove an equivalence result between them for analogy-based expectation games that satisfy the condition of comparative-informativeness. We also discuss how they differ.
Using the Coronal Evolution to Successfully Forward Model CMEs' In Situ Magnetic Profiles

Predicting the effects of a coronal mass ejection (CME) impact requires knowing if impact will occur, which part of the CME impacts, and its magnetic properties. We explore the relation between CME deflections and rotations, which change the position and orientation of a CME, and the resulting magnetic profiles at 1 AU. For 45 STEREO-era, Earth-impacting CMEs, we determine the solar source of each CME, reconstruct its coronal position and orientation, and perform a ForeCAT (Forecasting a CME's Altered Trajectory) simulation of the coronal dei¬‚ection and rotation. From the reconstructed and modeled CME deflections and rotations, we determine the solar cycle variation and correlations with CME properties. We assume no evolution between the outer corona and 1 AU and use the ForeCAT results to drive the ForeCAT In situ Data Observer (FIDO) in situ magnetic field model, allowing for comparisons with ACE and Wind observations. We do not attempt to reproduce the arrival time. On average FIDO reproduces the in situ magnetic field for each vector component with an error equivalent to 35 percent of the average total magnetic field strength when the total modeled magnetic field is scaled to match the average observed value. Random walk best fits distinguish between ForeCAT's ability to determine FIDO's input parameters and the limitations of the simple flux rope model. These best fits reduce the average error to 30 percent.The FIDO results are sensitive to changes of order a degree in the CME latitude, longitude, and tilt, suggesting that accurate space weather predictions require accurate measurements of a CME's position and orientation.
Information Content of Unsolicited Credit Ratings and Incentives of Rating Agencies: A Theory

Abstract Unsolicited credit ratings are issued solely at the discretion of rating agencies based on public information. This paper analyzes firms' incentives to solicit credit ratings to signal their quality and rating agencies' incentives to issue unsolicited ratings. Conditions for two types of equilibria are derived. When rating agencies are compensated for the accuracy of ratings under the subscriber-fee scheme, a quasi-separating equilibrium is likely to occur, in which firm quality is revealed through unsolicited ratings. When rating agencies are compensated only for solicited ratings under the issuer-fee scheme, a separating equilibrium results, in which high-quality firms signal through solicited ratings while low-quality firms are revealed through unsolicited ratings. We show that rating agencies have strong incentives to selectively issue unsolicited ratings in order to induce more fee-based solicited ratings under the issuer-fee scheme.
Quantifying the Immediate Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Scientists

The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly disrupted the scientific enterprise, but we lack empirical evidence on the nature and magnitude of these disruptions. Here we report the results of a survey of approximately 4,500 Principal Investigators (PIs) at U.S.- and Europe- based research institutions. Distributed in mid-April 2020, the survey solicited information about how scientists’ work changed from the onset of the pandemic, how their research output might be affected in the near future, and a wide range of individuals’ characteristics. Scientists report a sharp decline in time spent on research on average, but there is substantial heterogeneity with a significant share reporting no change or even increases. Some of this heterogeneity is due to field-specific differences, with laboratory-based fields being the most negatively affected, and some is due to gender, with female scientists reporting larger declines. However, among the individuals’ characteristics examined, the largest disruptions are connected to a usually unobserved dimension: childcare. Reporting a young dependent is associated with declines similar in magnitude to those reported by the laboratory-based fields and can account for a significant fraction of gender differences. Amidst scarce evidence about the role of parenting in scientists’ work, these results highlight the fundamental and heterogeneous ways this pandemic is affecting the scientific workforce, and may have broad relevance for shaping responses to the pandemic’s effect on science and beyond.
The Underappreciated Importance of Personal Jurisdiction in Delaware's Success

The judges of the Delaware Court of Chancery are aggressively trying to stop stockholder/plaintiffs from filing corporate law cases outside of Delaware. Delaware believes that its position as the center of corporate litigation is in danger because cases are no longer filed exclusively there. If litigation continues to flow away from Delaware, it would jeopardize Delaware’s prominence in corporate law and the large revenues Delaware receives from out of state businesses that are incorporated there. I argue that scholars and the Delaware judges underappreciate the vital importance of personal jurisdiction over corporate directors in Delaware’s quest to become and remain the center of corporate litigation. I show that Delaware’s dominance in litigation in large part stemmed from, and is now dependent upon, its unique system of personal jurisdiction. None of Delaware’s attempts to stop cases from flowing out of Delaware will be enduringly successful without addressing the weaknesses in its current personal jurisdiction statute. I argue that Delaware should adopt a new statute that both will remedy the current flaws and will be effective in encouraging stockholder/plaintiffs to litigate in Delaware.
Managerial Ability and Credit Risk Assessment

Research on the credit rating process has primarily focused on how rating agencies incorporate firm characteristics into their rating opinions. We contribute to this literature by examining the impact of managerial ability on the credit rating process. Given debt market participants' interest in assessing default risk, we begin by documenting that higher managerial ability is associated with lower variability in future earnings and stock returns. We then show that higher managerial ability is associated with higher credit ratings i.e., lower assessments of credit risk. To provide more direct identification of the impact of managerial ability, we examine chief executive officer CEO replacements and document that ratings increase decrease when CEOs are replaced with more less able CEOs. Finally, we show that managerial ability also has capital market implications by documenting that managerial ability is associated with bond offering credit spreads. Collectively, our evidence suggests that managerial ability is an important factor that bond market participants impound into their assessments of firm credit risk. This paper was accepted by Mary Barth, accounting.
Friendships Moderate an Association Between a Dopamine Gene Variant and Political Ideology

Scholars in many fields have long noted the importance of social context in the development of political ideology. Recent work suggests that political ideology also has a heritable component, but no specific gene variant or combination of variants associated with political ideology have so far been identified. Here, we hypothesize that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences will tend to be more liberal, but only if they are embedded in a social context that provides them with multiple points of view. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we test this hypothesis by investigating an association between self-reported political ideology and the 7R variant of the dopamine receptor D4 gene (DRD4), which has previously been associated with novelty seeking. Among those with DRD4-7R, we find that the number of friendships a person has in adolescence is significantly associated with liberal political ideology. Among those without the gene variant, there is no association. This is the first study to elaborate a specific gene-environment interaction that contributes to ideological self-identification, and it highlights the importance of incorporating both nature and nurture into the study of political preferences.
Canon Shortfalls and the Virtues of Political Branch Interpretive Assets

As a legislation scholar, Philip Frickey was present at the creation.1 Along with his coauthor William Eskridge, Frickey reconceptualized the field of legislation and statutory interpretation. In doing so, he opened the door to an unparalleled period of inquiry and debate about the meaning of statutes, among both judges and academics. The Eskridge and Frickey casebook, published in 1988,2 was justly hailed by Judge Richard Posner as having "done for legislation what Hart and Sacks did for legal process, or Hart and Wechsler for federal courts: it has demonstrated the existence of a subject."3 Over the ensuing two decades, Frickey has been at once a major contributor to and an essential chronicler of developments in this field.4 A
Short selling after hours

Abstract Diether, Lee, and Werner (2009) show that, in general, short sellers are contrarian in both contemporaneous and past returns and able to impressively predict future returns. This study examines these trading characteristics during both the trading day and the after-hours period. Interestingly, we find short sellers are less contrarian during the after-hours period. However, the return predictability contained in short sales is nearly five times less during after-hours trading than during regular trading hours. These results indicate that higher levels of information asymmetry and price discovery during the after-hours period ( Barclay and Hendershott, 2003 , Barclay and Hendershott, 2004 ) are not driven by the trading of after-hour short sellers.
Is Silence Golden? Audit Team Leader Reactions to Subordinates Who Speak Up “In the Moment” and at Performance Appraisal

ABSTRACT This paper examines audit team leader reactions to auditors who speak up about potentially important audit issues. Study 1 is a survey of interacting audit teams and provides evidence of h...
Diversification and cash dynamics

Abstract Why do diversified firms hold significantly less cash than focused firms? We study this question using a dynamic model of corporate investment, saving, and diversification decisions. We find that investment dynamics are more important in explaining the cash differences than financing frictions. More efficient internal capital markets increase cash differences and are especially valuable when a firm diversifies or refocuses. Contrary to static models, more diverse conglomerates have lower cash differences. Endogenous selection (diversifying firms are larger and have better growth opportunities) accounts for 68% of the cash difference, and the diversification event itself reduces cash holdings by 32%.
American Responses to German Legal Scholarship: From the Civil War to World War I

AbstractGerman legal scholarship had an enormous impact in the United States from the Civil War until World War I. During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, American legal scholars in all specialties relied heavily, though not uncritically, on the historical analysis of law developed by Friedrich Karl von Savigny in the early nineteenth century. American legal historians, who wrote internationally recognised works on the history of English law while stressing its Germanic origins, built on German scholarship about early Germanic law, particularly on books by Rudolph Sohm and Heinrich Brunner. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Roscoe Pound repeatedly invoked Rudolph von Jhering while promoting sociological jurisprudence as an alternative to historical jurisprudence. Unfairly ascribing to prior American scholars his interpretation of Jhering's attack on German formalism, Pound created a misleading impression of late nineteenth-century American legal thought that remains dominant today.
Federalism, Preclearance, and the Rehnquist Court

The Article explores the Rehnquist Court's seemingly contradictory assessment of "federalism costs" in recent decisions construing section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Reno v. Bossier Parish, 520 U.S. 471 (1997), and Reno v. Bossier Parish, 528 U.S. 320 (2000), narrowly construe the VRA's preclearance provision and invoke federalism concerns as justification. Lopez v. Monterey County, 525 U.S. 266 (1999), by contrast, interprets the preclearance provision broadly, acknowledging that "substantial federalism costs" result, but affirming as constitutionally permissible the infringement that the section 5 preclearance process "by its nature" effects on state sovereignty. This Article seeks to explain why the Court understood the federalism costs implicated in the Bossier Parish cases to be preclusively high while it viewed the costs at issue in Lopez to be the necessary and justifiable result of implementing the VRA. The Rehnquist Court has long been convinced that the Department of Justice has systematically abused its authority in the preclearance process and thereby exacerbated the federalism costs that inhere in the VRA. The Bossier Parish cases involved DOJ's refusal to preclear a districting plan that the agency deemed to contain an insufficient number of majority-minority districts, and thus they presented the Court with the type of DOJ conduct that the justices have repeatedly found most objectionable. The Bossier Parish decisions rejected the Department's position on preclearance, and construed section 5 narrowly in order to curb the opportunities for institutional overreaching by the Department. Lopez, by contrast, did not directly implicate conduct by DOJ, and instead addressed the question over which the Department has no authority, namely whether the disputed changes were subject to preclearance at all. While the decision renders more conduct subject to preclearance and hence to review by DOJ, Lopez required the Court neither to review a specific decision made by the Department nor to confront the prospect that DOJ would implement the construction of the statute adopted. The Court, consequently, was able to construe section 5 broadly without directly facing concerns about DOJ overreaching, and thereby to embrace the resulting federalism costs as a justified consequence of implementing congressional intent in the VRA.
Accounting for Income Taxes: Primer, Extant Research, and Future Directions

Introduction. Why Study Accounting for Income Taxes? An Overview of the AFIT Rules and a Discussion of Related Descriptive Studies. AFIT Misconceptions. Earnings Management. The Association between Book-Tax Differences and Earnings Characteristics. The Pricing of Tax Information Reported in the Financial Statements. Book-Tax Conformity. Unresolved Issues. Closing Remarks. References. Appendices.
Enforcement and capacity building in international cooperation

I examine enforcement and capacity building in international cooperation. In a game-theoretic model, a wealthy donor gives foreign aid in exchange for policy implementation by a poor recipient. The recipient has limited capacity to comply with international agreements, so the donor is not sure if cooperation failure is caused by willful disobedience or unintended error. I show that if perceived cooperation failure prompts reciprocal suspension of cooperation, the donor and recipient have a common preference for capacity building. But when the donor can request compensation for perceived cooperation failure, it only chooses to build capacity if cooperation is otherwise impossible. Consequently, the choice of enforcement mechanism shapes capacity building. This result lays a foundation for a genuine synthesis between the enforcement and managerialist schools of compliance. It generates falsifiable hypotheses and explains why reciprocal enforcement, which unfortunately inflicts collateral damage on the victim, is often considered legitimate.
Can Enforcement Backfire? Crime Displacement in the Context of Customs Reform in the Philippines

Abstract Increased enforcement can displace crime to alternative lawbreaking methods. This paper examines a customs reform in the Philippines that raised enforcement against a specific method of avoiding import duties. Increased enforcement applied only to shipments from some countries, so shipments from other countries serve as a control group. Increased enforcement reduced the targeted duty-avoidance method, but caused substantial displacement to an alternative method. The hypothesis of zero change in total duty avoidance cannot be rejected. Displacement was greater for products with higher tariff rates and import volumes, consistent with the existence of fixed costs of switching to alternative duty-avoidance methods.
An empirical study of the financial community network on Twitter

Twitter, one of the several major social media platforms, has been identified as an influential factor to financial markets by multiple academic and professional publications in recent years. The motivation of this study hinges on the growing popularity of the use of social media and the increasing prevalence of its influence among the financial investment community. This paper presents an empirical evidence of a financial community in Twitter in which users' interests align with the financial market. From a large-scale data gathering effort using Twitter API, we establish a methodology in extracting relevant Twitter users to form the financial community, and we present empirical findings of its network characteristics. We find that this financial community behaves similarly to a small-world network, and we further identify groups of critical nodes and analyze their influence within the financial community based on several network centrality measures. Moreover, we document that the sentiment extracted from tweet messages of these critical nodes is significantly correlated with the Dow Jones Industrial Index price and volatility series. By forming a financial community within the Twitter universe, we argue that the critical Twitter users within the financial community provide a better proxy between social sentiment and financial market movement. Hence, sentiment extracted from these critical nodes provides a more robust predictor of financial markets than the general social sentiment.