cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Disabled By Solitude: The Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities And Its Impact On The Use Of Supermax Solitary Confinement

As the first human rights treaty of the twenty-first century, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) aims to protect the world’s largest minority — some 650 million people in the world living with a disability. While the major concern of the CRPD is to protect the rights and development of people with disabilities, this article argues that the use of supermax facilities is inconsistent with the CRPD because it produces a mental disability in prisoners. Part I of this article describes the procedural history of the CRPD. Part II discusses the background of the CRPD and the concept of disablement. Part III presents the history and current use of solitary confinement in the United States. Part IV discusses the medical and psychological effects of supermax solitary confinement and the implications of those effects in reference to the CRPD. Following that, Part V explains an additional avenue of relief for inmates under Article 15 of the CRPD. Lastly, Part VI analyzes possible reservations, understandings, and other procedural mechanisms that the United States might employ in order to limit the effect of a possible ratification of the CRPD.
Foreign Exchange Risk Premium : Does Fiscal Policy Matter? Evidence From Italian Data

This paper challenges the conventional view that foreign exchange risk premiums are small, not volatile, and unrelated to macroeconomic variables. For the Italian lira (1987-94), unconditional risk premiums—constructed using survey data to measure exchange rate expectations—are found to be sizable (relative to the dimension of the forward premium), highly volatile (relative to the variability of the forward bias), and predictable. Estimation of structural models of the risk premium suggests that anticipated fiscal contractions in Italy and lower uncertainty about the future path of fiscal policy are associated with a lower risk premium on lira-denominated assets.
Structural versus ethnic dimensions of housing segregation

Racial residential segregation is still very high in many American cities. Some portion of segregation is attributable to socioeconomic differences across racial lines (what we call structural fact...
An investigation of recent changes in going concern reporting decisions among Big N and non-Big N auditors

Corporate accounting failures and regulatory proceedings that led to the enactment of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 increased the scrutiny of auditors. We investigate whether these events resulted in a change in auditor behavior with respect to going concern reporting. Generally speaking, we find that non-Big N auditors became more conservative while Big N auditors became more accurate. Specifically, non-Big N auditors issued more going concern opinions to both failing and non-failing clients post-2001, reducing their Type II misclassifications at the expense of increased Type I misclassifications. However, Big N auditors decreased their Type I misclassifications with no corresponding increase in Type II misclassifications. Thus, our findings suggest that increased auditor scrutiny resulted in performance improvements in the area of going concern reporting primarily for larger auditors. For smaller auditors, improved going concern accuracy for subsequently bankrupt clients came at the cost of more going concern opinions being issued to subsequently non-failing clients.
The Dynamics of Discrete Bid and Ask Quotes

ABSTERACT This paper presents an empirical microstructure model of bid and ask quotes that features discreteness, random costs of market making, and ARCH volatility effects. Applied to intraday quotes at 15-minute intervals for Alcoa (a randomly chosen Dow stock), the results show that quote exposure costs contain stochastic components that are persistent and large relative to the deterministic intraday "U" components. Analysis of the filtered estimates of the system suggest that bid and ask costs contain common components, and that these costs reflect risk as proxied by ARCH variance forecasts. EMPIRICAL MARKET MICROSTRUCTURE SEEKS to characterize the dynamics of prices, spreads and volumes using specifications consistent with economic principles and actual institutional arrangements. Applications to U.S. equities markets, where the data are particularly rich, have been fruitful. The usual empirical methods employed here, however, presume that parameters are either constant in time or exhibit at best deterministic (e.g., intraday) variation. An important alternative line of research, exemplified by the ARCH literature, considers more general models that admit stochastic parameter variation. Yet although ARCH-family models have been estimated for highfrequency data, the specifications do not usually incorporate the structural market features that characterize the microstructure models. Thus, the two approaches have mostly evolved with distinct aims and methodologies. Integration promises mutual gains. The short-run adaptation of trading arrangements to stochastic changes in risk is, for example, a proper concern of microstructure. From the alternative perspective, volatility specifications may well be improved by conditioning on microstructure variables. The model proposed in this paper takes a step toward this integration, with a latent (unobserved) dynamic structure that involves ARCH price dynamics and stochastic costs of market making. In constructing a microstructure model with stochastic parameter variation, discreteness quickly arises as a potential concern. In most microstructure models (and in most actual markets), the determinants of security prices
Economic Evaluation of Scale Dependent Technology Investments

We study the effect of financial risk on the economic evaluation of a project with capacity decisions. Capacity decisions have an important effect on the projects value through the up-front investment, the associated operating cost, and constraints on output. However, increased scale also affects the financial risk of the project through its effect on the operating leverage of the investment. Although it has long been recognized in the finance literature that operating leverage affects project risk, this result has not been incorporated in the operations management literature when evaluating projects. We study the decision problem of a firm that must choose project scale. Future cash flow uncertainty is introduced by uncertain future market prices. The firm's capacity decision affects the firm's potential sales, its expected price for output, and its costs. We study the firm's profit maximizing scale decision using the CAPM model for risk adjustment. Our results include that project risk, as measured by the required rate of return, is related to the inverse of the expected profit per unit sold. We also show that project risk is related to the scale choice. In contrast, in traditional discounted cash flow analysis (DCF), a fixed prescribed rate is used to evaluate the project and choose its scale. When a fixed rate is used with DCF, a manager will ignore the effect of scale on risk and choose suboptimal capacity that reduces project value. S/he will also misestimate project value. Use of DCF for choosing scale is studied for two special cases. It is shown that if the manager is directed to use a prescribed discount rate that induces the optimal scale decision, then the manager will greatly undervalue the project. In contrast, if the discount rate is set to the risk of the optimally-scaled project, the manager will undersize the project by a small amount, and slightly undervalue the project with the economic impact of the error being small. These results underline the importance of understanding the source of financial risk in projects where risk is endogenous to the project design.
Preemption in the Rehnquist Court: A Preliminary Empirical Assessment

The federal preemption of state law has emerged as a prominent field of study for legal scholars and political scientists. This rise to prominence of a technical and often dull field of jurisprudence is due to a number of developments-increasingly frequent federal statutory preemptions; the states' unprecedented aggressiveness in regulating business transactions, the expansion of corporate liability under state common law and the increased resort of corporate defendants to federal preemption defenses; and, not least, the Rehnquist Court's discovery of federalism and states' rights. Unfortunately, the preemption debate has been marred by misperceptions and a lack of reliable data. Extravagant attention has been lavished on a few landmark cases, which may not be a reliable guide to the preemption universe. Studies of judicial behavior in this area have relied on an inadequate empirical foundation. This Article presents an empirical overview and a preliminary analysis of the Rehnquist Court's preemption deci...
Solving the Good-Time Puzzle: Why Following the Rules Should Get You Out of Prison Early

Good-time programs have long been an important part of the American penal landscape. At least twenty-nine states and the federal government currently offer prison inmates early release, sometimes by many years, in return for good behavior. Written a generation ago, the leading law review article on good time presented a strong case against such programs. Although good time is traditionally justified by reference to its usefulness in deterring inmate misconduct—credits can be denied or withdrawn as a penalty for violations of prison rules—the article questioned how it could possibly be just to impose additional incarceration based on mere violations of administrative regulations. In response to this important challenge, the present Essay proposes a new way to conceptualize good-time credits, specifically, as a way to recognize atonement. Drawing on communicative theories of punishment, the Essay argues that good time can be seen as congruent with (and not, as is commonly supposed, in opposition to) the basic purposes of sentencing. The Essay then proposes reforms that would help good-time programs more fully to embody the atonement model.
Technology prospects and the cross-section of stock returns

Abstract In an economy with time-varying investment opportunities, the changes in technology prospects affect aggregate consumption and individual firm's future dividends, and lead to systematic technology risk. We construct a technology factor to track the changes in technology prospects measured by U.S. patent shocks, and find that this factor explains the growth of aggregate consumption, helps to price important stock portfolios, and carries significant risk premium. Our empirical results suggest the existence of technology risk in the cross-section of stock returns.
Does Going Public Affect Innovation

This paper investigates the effects of going public on innovation by comparing the innovation activity of firms that go public with firms that withdraw their initial public offering (IPO) filing and remain private. NASDAQ fluctuations during the book-building phase are used as an instrument for IPO completion. Using patent-based metrics, I find that the quality of internal innovation declines following the IPO, and firms experience both an exodus of skilled inventors and a decline in the productivity of the remaining inventors. However, public firms attract new human capital and acquire external innovation. The analysis reveals that going public changes firms' strategies in pursuing innovation
Public Debts and Private Assets: Explaining Capital Flight from Sub-Saharan African Countries

We investigate the determinants of capital flight from 30 sub-Saharan African countries, including 24 countries classified as severely indebted low-income countries, for the period 1970-1996. The econometric analysis reveals that external borrowing is positively and significantly related to capital flight, suggesting that to a large extent capital flight is debt-fueled. We estimate that for every dollar of external borrowing in the region, roughly 80 cents flowed back as capital flight in the same year. Capital flight also exhibits a high degree of persistence in the sense that past capital flight is correlated with current and future capital flight. The growth rate differential between the African country and its OECD trading partners is negatively related to capital flight. We also explore the effects of several other factors – inflation, fiscal policy indicators, the interest rate differential, exchange rate appreciation, financial development, and indicators of the political environment and governance. We discuss the implications of the results for debt relief and for policies aimed at preventing capital flight and attracting private capital held abroad.
Uncertainty, Precaution, and Adaptive Management in Wildlife Trade

Wildlife trade is big business and threatens extinction for many species. It is also rife with uncertainty. For the parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) every decision concerning a traded species has to navigate this uncertainty. This article addresses how the parties to CITES have dealt with uncertainty by analyzing their approach to precaution and adaptive management in the context of key operations of the treaty: listing criteria, guidance on non-detriment findings, and listing decisions for sharks, polar bears, and the African elephant.This article concludes that the parties to CITES have implemented precaution through adaptive management and monitoring, rather than explicitly endorsing a precautionary principle or precautionary approach. The parties thereby emphasize uncertainty arising from data gaps. However, while monitoring and adaptive management are necessary for decision-making on wildlife trade, they are not sufficient because they do not fully acknowledge the multiple sources of uncertainty. This article urges a dual role for precaution in wildlife trade decision-making – a procedural role that incorporates it within monitoring and adaptive management and a substantive role that builds in an additional layer of protection even in the face of uncertainty. The article applies these roles to the specific context of CITES decision-making.The complex mix of uncertainty and value debates is not unique to wildlife trade. Understanding how decision-makers can navigate this complexity and uncertainty without abandoning science-based decision-making is critical for conservationists and natural resource managers everywhere.
Financial innovation and the management and regulation of financial institutions

New security designs, improvements in computer and telecommunications technology and advances in the theory of finance have led to revolutionary changes in the structure of financial markets and institutions. This paper provides a functional perspective on the dynamics of institutional change and uses a series of examples to illustrate the breadth and depth of institutional change that is likely to occur. These examples emphasize the role of hedging versus equity capital in managing risk, the need for risk accounting and changes in methods for implementing both regulatory and stabilization public policy.
Social games: Matching and the play of finitely repeated games

Abstract We examine a new class of games, which we call social games, such that players not only choose strategies but also choose with whom they play. A group of players who are dissatisfied with the play of their current partners can join together and play a new equilibrium. This imposes new refinements on equilibrium play in games, and we show how play depends on the relative populations of players in different roles, among other things. We also introduce finitely repeated social games where players may choose to rematch in any period. Some equilibria of fixed-player finitely repeated games cannot be sustained as equilibria in a finitely repeated social game. Conversely, the set of repeated matching equilibria includes some plays that are not part of any subgame perfect equilibrium of the corresponding fixed-player repeated games. We explore existence of finitely repeated matching equilibria, the relationship to renegotiation-proof equilibrium, and show how new predictions are made in trust and centipede games.
The Effect of “China Bashing” on Sino-American Relations

Many scholars argue that a sizable share of the news about China published in U.S. newspapers engages in “China Bashing.” This paper quantifies the extent of the bashing and examines its effect on Sino-American relations. To measure bashing, I develop an index based on the count of articles in major U.S. newspapers that are related to China and also touch on one or more of the following issues: human rights, Tibet, democracy, child labor, and repression. I repeat this process for newspapers from Australia and New Zealand to net out “fundamental” news. To examine the effect of the bashing on Sino-American relations, I use the China-US relations score of Yan et al. (Zhongwai guanxi dingliang yuce, [中外关系定量预测; Quantitative Forecasts of China’s Foreign Relations]. Beijing, China: Shijie heshi chubanshe, 2009, Zhongwai guanxi jianlan 1950-2005—Zhongguo yu daguo guanxi dingliang hengliang [中外关系鉴览1950-2005—中国大国关系定量衡量; China’s Foreign Relations with Major Powers by the Numbers 1950-2005]. Beijing: Gaodeng jiaoyu chubanshe, 2010) and estimate a dynamic transfer model with the constructed bashing index, as well as other control variables. The results indicate that a one-standard-deviation shock in bashing leads to a 0.038 point decline in Yan’s Sino-American index after about four months. The results further imply that the cumulative long-run effect of persistent China bashing is equivalent to about 50 % of the decline in Sino-American relations that followed the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on May 7, 1999, the worst shock to Sino-American relations during the sample period, 1990 to 2010.
A New World Order for Addressing Patent Rights and Public Health.

I. TRIPS A. Patentability B. Patent Rights 1. Exclusive Rights—Article 28 2. Exceptions to Patent Rights a. Article 30—A “Limited Exception” to Patent Rights b. Article 31—“Other Use” C. Patent “Plus” Protection: Test Data II. TRIPS-PLUS A. Patentability B. Patent Rights 1. Limited Compulsory Licensing During Patent Term 2. Limits on Parallel Imports C. Tension within TRIPS-Plus Agreements and Negotiations III. MOVING BEYOND TRIPS-PLUS A. International Activity B. Domestic Efforts C. Technology Solutions 1. Working with the Existing Patent System 2. Solutions Outside the Patent System
Public Trust in Business and Its Determinants

Public trust in business, defined as the degree to which the public—meaning society at large—trusts business in general, is largely understudied. This article suggests four domains of existing trus...
Marriage, parentage, and child support

Child support calculations have become a matter of routine.1 The par enthood determinations, on which they rest, have not. Marriage once served as a system designed to channel childrearing into two-parent fam ilies and keep it there. Within this system, the marital presumption dis couraged efforts to inquire too closely into the circumstances that might rebut a husband's paternity and the stigma against nonmarital births and divorce eliminated much of the need for such determinations. Today, the messy facts of biology are only too plain to see. Forty-one percent of American births are nonmarital2 and may give rise to fights over parent age and support. Americans lead the world in family instability, cohabit ing, splitting, marrying, and divorcing, and, as a consequence, involve a host of unmarried parents, stepparents, and others in children's lives to a greater degree than in most of the rest of the developed world.3 And almost every parent who chooses to do so can discover the truth of bio logical parenthood, whether or not a court chooses to admit the evidence. Yet, no comprehensive system has arisen to replace marriage—or the marital presumption. During the seventies and early eighties, the United
The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Trust and the Gulf Coast Claims Facility: The “Superfund” Myth and the Law of Unintended Consequences

This Article, to be part of a 2011 Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal Symposium, compares the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Trust agreement with the Gulf Coast Claims Facility (“GCCF”) governing documents. It also traces the evolution of GCCF in 2010. The interaction of corporate law, international law, and environmental regulation complicates the situation. The inevitable limitation of resources available to address this matter ultimately exposes the competition for those resources among (1) individuals and businesses allegedly damaged in an economic sense, (2) those in the oil industry trying to produce the products upon which our economy relies, (3) government scientists seeking ecosystem restoration, and (4) prosecutors seeking retribution through criminal actions to “express societal outrage about the spill in ways that civil penalties cannot.” Just as dispersants have hidden much of the real spill below the surface, the ultimate role of the GCCF in compensating victims may be known only after we see how the complex components of that system (government and private lawsuits, comprehensive settlements, restoration of the Gulf oil, fishing, and tourism industries) play out and interact. In other words, we are still seeing more of the myth than the reality of the GCCF.
CEO Tax Effects on Acquisition Structure and Value

We hypothesize that prior evidence of target shareholder capital gains tax liabilities affecting acquisition features is driven by the tax liabilities of the target firm CEO. To test this, we estim...
School choice with asymmetric information: Priority design and the curse of acceptance

Abstract An implicit assumption in most of the matching literature is that all participants know their preferences. If there is variance in the effort agents spend researching options, some may know more about their preferences, while others may know less. When this is true, strategizing is complex, (ex-post) stable outcomes need not exist, and informed agents gain at the expense of less informed agents, outcomes we attribute to a curse of acceptance. However, we also show that if priorities are designed appropriately, positive results are recovered: equilibrium strategies are simple, the outcome is ex-post stable, and less informed students are protected from the curse of acceptance. Our results have implications for the current debate over priority design in school choice.
Coordination and social learning

This paper studies the interaction between coordination and social learning in a dynamic regime change game. Social learning provides public information, to which players overreact due to the coordination motive. Coordination affects the aggregation of private signals through players’ optimal choices. Such endogenous provision of public information results in informational cascades and thus inefficient herds, with positive probability, even if private signals have an unbounded likelihood ratio property. An extension shows that if players can individually learn, there exists an equilibrium in which inefficient herding disappears, and thus, coordination is almost surely successful.
Synchronization under uncertainty

A decision-maker needs to schedule several activities that take uncertain time to complete and are only valuable together. Some activities are bound to be finished earlier than others, therefore resuting in waiting costs. We show how to schedule activities optimally, how to give independent agents performing them incentives that implement the efficient schedule, and how to form teams in the presence of uncertainty. The present paper offers insights into important economic decisions such as planning large projects and coordinating product development activities.
Income and Democracy

Existing studies establish a strong cross-country correlation between income and democracy but do not control for factors that simultaneously affect both variables. We show that controlling for such factors by including country fixed effects removes the statistical association between income per capita and vari- ous measures of democracy. We present instrumental-variables estimates that also show no causal effect of income on democracy. The cross-country corre - lation between income and democracy reflects a positive correlation between changes in income and democracy over the past 500 years. This pattern is con - sistent with the idea that societies embarked on divergent political-economic development paths at certain critical junctures. (JEL D7�, E�1)
Civil wars beyond their borders: The human capital and health consequences of hosting refugees

Abstract In early 1994, Kagera – a region in northwestern Tanzania – was flooded by more than 500,000 refugees fleeing from the genocides of Burundi and Rwanda. I use this population shock and a series of topographic barriers that resulted in variation in refugee intensity to investigate the short- and long-run causal effects of hosting refugees on outcomes of local children. This strategy provides evidence of adverse impacts over one year after the shock: a worsening of children's anthropometrics (0.3 standard deviations), an increase in the incidence of infectious diseases (15–20 percentage points) and an increase in mortality for children under five (7 percentage points). I also find that intra- and inter-cohort variation in childhood exposure to the refugee crisis reduced height in early adulthood by 1.8 cm (1.2%), schooling by 0.2 years (7.1%) and literacy by 7 percentage points (8.6%). Designs using the distance to the border with Rwanda as an alternative identification strategy for refugee intensity support the findings. The estimates are robust across different samples, specifications and estimation methods and provide evidence of a previously undocumented indirect effect of civil wars on the well-being of children and subsequent economic growth in refugee-hosting communities.
Effects of bank insolvency on corporate incentives in transition economies

In transition countries, the real impact of banking crises has so far been rather moderate. We study the effect of bank insolvency on corporate incentives in a model where incumbent banks possess an informational advantage. We find that bank insolvency reduces the incentive to restructure for firms whose incumbent bank becomes insolvent. However, bank insolvency provides an additional incen- tive for firms that enter the credit market to develop new projects because it reduces asymmetric information between banks. Firms' credit costs are thereby lowered. We also explain a path-dependent development by demonstrating that the firms' decision to develop new projects depends on the banks' share of non- performing loans.
Regulatory Parallels to Daubert: Stakeholder Influence, “Sound Science,” and the Delayed Adoption of Health-Protective Standards

There is broad agreement that regulatory decisions should be based on evidence. But interested parties have used the “sound science” mantle to demand extended research, analysis, and review of evidence for the sole purpose of delaying health-protective regulation. This historical review shows how the forces behind the “sound science” reasoning leading to the Daubert v Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc decision on science in the courtroom have operated in parallel in environmental regulation.Like Daubert, certain “sound science” regulatory tools can be used to improve decision quality. However, these tools can also challenge the federal government’s ability to safeguard the public’s health and well-being. Most recently, political tampering with science provides the foundation for some policymakers to disregard science completely in the environmental regulatory process.
Reputation for a Servant of Two Masters

Classic models of reputation consider an agent taking costly actions to affect a single, homogeneous audience’s beliefs about his ability, preferences or other characteristic. However, in many economic settings, agents must maintain a reputation with multiple parties with diverse interests. In this paper we study reputation incentives for an agent who faces two audiences with opposed preferences. We ask if the existence of multiple audiences per se changes reputation incentives. Further, should the agent deal with the different audiences commonly or separately? Our analysis yields some new qualitative insights. Specifically, the presences of heterogeneous audiences is more likely to lead the agent towards “pooling” equilibria in which he takes an intermediate compromise action. Instead, dealing with only one audience leads the agent to cater towards that audience’s preferences, giving rise to a “separating” outcome or pooling on some extreme action. We analyze the welfare implications, and show that the agent most prefers that both audiences commonly observe all the actions that he takes. In our setting, reputation acts as an informal contract that enforces desirable behavior through future continuation payoffs. Our analysis highlights that the presence of multiple heterogeneous audiences can, naturally, lead these rewards to be non-monotonic in an agent’s reputation. We show different ways that this non-monotonicity arises. In an infinite horizon setting, it can emerge through endogenous interactions between the audiences, through equilibrium expectations of the agent’s choice of action. It can also arise, perhaps more trivially, through direct payoff interactions. Acknowledgements. We thank Jack Fanning, Bengt Holmstrom, Navin Kartik, Jin Li, David Miller, Volker Nocke, Martin Peitz, Debraj Ray, Larry Samuelson, Ron Siegel, Steve Tadelis, Michael Waldman, and audiences at the University of Mannheim, Econometric Society Noth American Winter Meeting, University of British Columbia, Olin School of Business, University of Maryland, Simon Graduate School of Business, University of Essex, New York University amd NBER Working Group in Organizational Economics. Email: joyee.deb@nyu.edu Email: joyee.deb@nyu.edu
Why we need health care reform now.

This article reviews the key provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 and explains that we urgently need health reform — and not only to insure the 6 percent of Americans that it does not attempt to cover. Under the ACA health insurance exchanges will not regulate policies obtained through an employer or large group. As a result, four related problems still plague our health system. First, access to insurance (outside the exchange) does not ensure adequate coverage or access. Second, paying for insurance burdens low-and middle-income Americans yet often fails to prevent economic hardship, or ruin, from illness. Third, America lacks the means to control spending increases that erode coverage and raise premiums. Fourth, financial conflicts of interest distort medical care practice. The article proposes first steps to resolve these problems.
Stock Prices Under Time-Varying Dividend Risk: An Exact Solution in an Infinite-Horizon General Equilibrium Model

Abstract The effects on asset prices of changes in risk are studied in a general equilibrium model in which the conditional risk evolves stochastically over time. The saving decisions of consumers take account of the fact that conditional risk is a serially correlated random variable. By restricting the specification of consumers' preferences and the stochastic specification of dividends, it is possible to obtain an exact solution for the prices of the aggregate stock and riskless one-period bonds. An increase in the conditional risk reduces the stock price if and only if the elasticity of marginal utility is less than one.
The Conflict between Communal Religious Freedom and Women's Equality: A Proposal for Reform of the Hindu Succession Act of 1956

The Hindu Succession Act of 1956, as part of a movement to codify the system of religious personal laws after India gained its independence in 1947, revolutionized the legal rules governing gender and inheritance. However, as a codification of ancient Hindu law and colonial amendments, the Act retained many limitations on women's rights regarding full ownership of ancestral and other property. Despite the drafters' intent to equalize the property and inheritance rights of Hindu women, a tension persists between the rights granted to women and the limitations preserved within the Act.This article investigates the provisions in the Act that enshrine gender discrimination in one of the most important legal aspects of personal law: inheritance. In particular, this article advocates for changes to the Hindu Succession Act that would equalize the position of men and women in relation to joint families and property rights. [Note: This paper was published prior to the 2005 amendments to the Hindu Succession Act, which removed many of the gender discriminatory provisions.]
On the Political Economy of Land Value Capitalization and Local Public Sector Rent-Seeking in a Tiebout Model

Abstract The political economy of capitalization in a Tiebout model when there is a rent-seeking local public sector is examined. A new approach to test for the effects of successful local public worker rent seeking on property values is suggested and initial results are presented. We find evidence that potential residents are compensated through lower property prices in cities where local public employees earn substantially higher wages than similar local public employees earn on average in other cities. Finally, we expand upon how landowners, public workers, and renters can use the regulatory process to capture a share of the short-run rents associated with a Tiebout disequilibrium.
Disclosure transparency about activity in valuation allowance and reserve accounts and accruals-based earnings management

We examine the relation between the transparency of disclosures about activity in valuation allowance and reserve accounts and accruals-based earnings management. We classify disclosures as being transparent if they provide detailed information about activity in the allowance and reserve accounts during the fiscal period. We find strong evidence that the extent of accruals-based earnings management is lower among companies with transparent disclosures than among companies without transparent disclosures. We also investigate whether the extent of accruals-based earnings management is lower for companies that provide transparent disclosures in one comprehensive schedule (i.e., the Schedule II) relative to those that provide transparent disclosures spread throughout the notes to the financial statements. Although regulators have expressed concern that the omission of a Schedule II could indicate a greater likelihood of earnings management, our results indicate that it is the omission of transparent disclosures rather than the omission of a comprehensive schedule outlining activity in the allowance and reserve accounts that affects earnings management. Our findings suggest that regulators, auditors, and investors should consider subjecting companies that fail to provide transparent disclosures to additional scrutiny.
Macroeconomic determinants of the term structure: Long-run and short-run dynamics

Abstract We propose a no-arbitrage term structure model with a Taylor rule and two macroeconomic variables, real activity growth and inflation, that each contain long-run and short-run components. Variance decompositions indicate that the impact of macroeconomic variables on the term structure differs from existing models. For short maturities, inflation is relatively more important than real activity growth at short forecast horizons. For longer maturity yields, the long-run component of inflation explains most of the long-horizon forecast variance, but real activity growth matters for short forecast horizons. Unlike existing macro models, the model implies plausible term premia and expectations of short rates. The long-run components also improve the prediction of bond excess returns relative to information in the yield curve and macro variables. Measures of in-sample and out-of-sample fit confirm the benefits of allowing for long- and short-run components.
How Much Over-parameterization Is Sufficient to Learn Deep ReLU Networks?

A recent line of research on deep learning focuses on the extremely over-parameterized setting, and shows that when the network width is larger than a high degree polynomial of the training sample size n and the inverse of the target error ϵ−1, deep neural networks learned by (stochastic) gradient descent enjoy nice optimization and generalization guarantees. Very recently, it is shown that under certain margin assumptions on the training data, a polylogarithmic width condition suffices for two-layer ReLU networks to converge and generalize (Ji and Telgarsky, 2020). However, whether deep neural networks can be learned with such a mild over-parameterization is still an open question. In this work, we answer this question affirmatively and establish sharper learning guarantees for deep ReLU networks trained by (stochastic) gradient descent. In specific, under certain assumptions made in previous work, our optimization and generalization guarantees hold with network width polylogarithmic in n and ϵ−1. Our results push the study of over-parameterized deep neural networks towards more practical settings.
Peeling Away the Populist Rhetoric: Toward a Taxonomy of Anti-Tax Ballot Initiatives

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to both the fiscal and policy impact of tax and expenditure limitation ballot initiatives. This article instead examines how statewide anti-tax measures come to be placed before the general public for popular votes. It critically assesses six anti-tax measures on statewide ballots in 1996, questioning the wisdom that they were populist undertakings. While tax crusaders continue to draw on grassroots themes and use populist rhetoric, there are important differences across the groups sponsoring the six anti-tax measures, including their organizational history, professionalization, membership, and sources of financial support.
Risk Management with Supply Contracts

Purchase obligations are forward contracts with suppliers and are used more broadly than traded commodity derivatives. This paper is the first to document that these contracts are a risk management tool and have a material impact on corporate hedging activity. Firms that expand their risk management options following the introduction of steel futures contracts substitute financial hedging for purchase obligations. Contracting frictions – such as bargaining power and settlement risk – as well as potential hold-up issues associated with relationship-specific investment affects the use of purchase obligations in the cross-section as well as how firms respond to the introduction of steel futures.
Measuring the Benefits of Homeowning: Effects on Children

Abstract In this paper we examine whether homeowning benefits children by testing whether children of homeowners stay in school longer than children of renters and whether daughters of homeowners are less likely to have children as teenagers than daughters of renters. We use both probit models and a bivariate probit technique which takes account of possible selection bias due to differences between parents who choose to own versus rent. We find in several data sets that both effects are statistically significant and quantitatively important—particularly for low-income households. We also estimate that the dollar benefit per low- income household of parents being homeowners rather than renters is at least $31,000.
Economic development and the decline of rural and urban community‐based networks*

This paper studies how traditional networks in rural and urban India have responded to economic development. In rural areas, the impact of the Green Revolution on within-network inequality has resulted in defection by the wealthiest members of caste-based social insurance networks. In Bombay, the most able members of the caste-based labour market networks are exiting from the traditional occupations to participate in new occupations in which individual rather than group ability is rewarded. In both cases, the weakest members of the community are left in networks that now have lowered capacity to provide services.
Optimal stopping with random maturity under nonlinear expectations

Abstract We analyze an optimal stopping problem sup γ ∈ T E ¯ 0 [ Y γ ∧ τ 0 ] with random maturity τ 0 under a nonlinear expectation E ¯ 0 [ ⋅ ] : = sup P ∈ P E P [ ⋅ ] , where P is a weakly compact set of mutually singular probabilities. The maturity τ 0 is specified as the hitting time to level 0 of some continuous index process X at which the payoff process Y is even allowed to have a positive jump. When P collects a variety of semimartingale measures, the optimal stopping problem can be viewed as a discretionary stopping problem for a player who can influence both drift and volatility of the dynamic of underlying stochastic flow. We utilize a martingale approach to construct an optimal pair ( P ∗ , γ ∗ ) for sup ( P , γ ) ∈ P × T E P [ Y γ ∧ τ 0 ] , in which γ ∗ is the first time Y meets the limit Z of its approximating E ¯ − Snell envelopes. To overcome the technical subtleties caused by the mutual singularity of probabilities in P and the discontinuity of the payoff process Y , we approximate τ 0 by an increasing sequence of Lipschitz continuous stopping times and approximate Y by a sequence of uniformly continuous processes.
Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl: Two-and-a-Half Ways to Destroy Indian Law

On April 16th, the US Supreme court will hear arguments in the case Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. This case involves an Indian child whose attempted adoption by a non-Indian couple in South Carolina violated the provisions of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). Because of this violation, the family court ordered her return to her biological father. The case has received extensive media attention and has resulted in the vilification of ICWA. Nevertheless, the Court’s decision to hear the case was surprising. The issues in the case are straightforward and the lower courts’ decisions were clearly correct. Consequently, the Supreme Court’s interest likely indicates that this case will be used to address broader issues than those delineated in the questions presented. This essay explores the legal issues raised by the Baby Girl case and examine the ways in which the Court is likely to use this decision to redefine current understanding of ICWA and maybe all of Indian law.
Trade restrictiveness and efficiency

This article proposes a trade restrictiveness quantity index (TRQI) to measure the welfare impact of trade restrictions based on a distance functions approach. The TRQI embodies two Farrell measures of efficiency—respectively for producers and consumers—that can be computed using standard efficiency measurement techniques. The TRQI can also be decomposed into a trade distortion and domestic distortion component. In the context of the debate on the interlinkages between openness and economic performance, the TRQI offers a means to disentangle economic inefficiencies induced by trade restrictions alone, from otherwise not directly trade-related economic inefficiencies induced by domestic distortions.
Optimal Malliavin Weighting Function for the Computation of the Greeks

This paper reexamines the Malliavin weighting functions introduced by Fournie et al. (1999) as a new method for efficient and fast computations of the Greeks. Reexpressing the weighting function generator in terms of its Skorohod integrand, we show that these weighting functions have to satisfy necessary and sufficient conditions expressed as conditional expectations. We then derive the weighting function with the smallest total variance. This is of particular interest as it bridges the method of Malliavin weights and the one of likelihood ratio, as introduced by Broadie and Glasserman (1996). The likelihood ratio is precisely the weighting function with the smallest total variance. We finally examine when to use the Malliavin method and when to prefer finite difference.
“Dope” Dilemmas in a Budding Future Industry: An Examination of the Current Status of Marijuana Legalization in the United States

This article provides an in-depth analysis of the current status regarding legalization of marijuana in the United States. It begins by tracing a brief history of legalization in this country, with a particularized focus on the current activities of Colorado and Washington. The next section addresses the federal-state law conflict issue, coupled with a thorough analysis of two recent and relatively unexamined developments — the Department of Justice’s August 29, 2013 memorandum issued as a guide to federal prosecutors concerning marijuana law enforcement, and the September 10, 2013 judicial committee hearing on the conflict between federal and state marijuana laws. Lawyers seeking to aid clients in this newly emerging business will be confronted with ethical dilemmas. This article provides a specialized focus on the role of the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, and its potential effect on this budding and lucrative industry. So long as the federal-state law conflict exists, it seems that the current climate, filled with uncertainty and ambiguity, allows for possible arbitrary abuse of power and selective prosecution by the federal government. The final section will briefly discuss what the future of federally legalized marijuana might look like — how marijuana might be dealt with as a controlled and regulated substance in the business sector, how the law would handle such a shift, and what overarching effects this shift might have on the criminal justice system.
Loving and Legitimacy: IRS Regulation of Tax Return Preparation

The validity of regulations promulgated by the Department of Treasury is a principal battleground in contemporary federal taxation. So far, the clash has had two phases: establishment and implementation. Phase one entailed the destruction of the citadel of tax insularity, the bastion within which tax specialists thought to keep themselves safe from having to learn and apply general administrative law. In cases such as Swallows, Mannella, Lantz, Mayo, and the welter of cases culminating in Home Concrete, the old guard was defeated. It is now firmly established that tax, no less than other regulatory areas, is subject to the rules of administrative law. That proposition having been settled, we are now in phase two: implementation, the application of specific administrative law rules in particular tax contexts.
Flight-to-liquidity, market uncertainty, and the actions of mutual fund investors

Abstract We explore the trading decisions of equity mutual funds during ten periods of extreme market uncertainty. We find that mutual funds reduced their aggregate holdings of illiquid stocks. Exploring the drivers behind this result reveals that this is mainly driven by larger withdrawals from funds that hold less liquid stocks. We further find that the sell-off of illiquid stocks occurred only after initial deterioration in market conditions, consistent with retail investors’ response to bad performance. At a broader level, this shows that mutual funds consumed liquidity during periods where liquidity was most valuable. Moreover, the fact that fund managers traded in response to these withdrawals suggests a potentially magnifying channel for the drop in illiquid stock prices, also known as flight-to-liquidity.