cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Free Trade and Laissez Faire: Has the Wheel Come Full Circle?

This paper notes that there is a need to get to a fourth stage in the evolution of the relationship of free trade to laissez faire going beyond the three stages identified in Max Cordon's magisterial book Trade Policy and Economic Welfare. In the first stage free trade was a special case of the argument for laissez faire. In the second stage many arguments for protection arose with various qualifications to the case of free trade and laissez faire. In the third stage the link between free trade and laissez faire was broken and in the theory of domestic distortions it was noted that all arguments for protection except in the case of monopoly power in trade were second best arguments. Moreover, it was possible to devise measures such as taxes and subsidies that reduced the distortion through government intervention. But noting that government intervention itself carries with it problems of rent seeking and directly unproductive activities as well as the taking into the proper role of Government, laissez faire seems the best policy. Hence the need for a fourth stage in the evolution of free trade and laissez faire to link them together again.
A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Transitional Justice and the Effacement of State Accountability for International Crimes

If international atrocity crimes are acts so egregious that their impunity cannot be legally tolerated, why don't we punish States that commit them? The rise of international criminal law is celebrated as an achievement of the international rule of law, yet its advance effectively may come at the expense of holding States accountable for their role in mass violence. Transitional justice has emerged as the dominant normative framework for how the international community responds to mass violence. Liberalism strongly influences transitional justice, which has produced individual criminal accountability as the desired form of legal accountability for atrocities. Transitional justice rejects punishing States for atrocities as illiberal (collective punishment) and illegitimate (lack of positive law). In fact, transitional justice theorization of justice largely ignores legal accountability for States. Without legal accountability, States enjoy moral and legal impunity for their crimes. States escape their legal obligations to repair the injury they cause and to institute reforms that secure a fuller measure of justice and peace. This Article examines * Clinical Professor of Law, University of California-Berkeley, School of Law; J.D., Harvard Law School, 1990; B.A., Brandeis University, 1986. I am grateful to Kathryn Abrams, Roxanna Altholz, Christopher Kutz, Saira Mohamed, Eric Stover, and Harvey M. Weinstein for their valuable feedback and engagement with this project. Participants in the International Workshop at the Frankfurter Cluster of Excellence 'The Formation of Normative Orders," the ASIL Research Forum, and faculty workshops at Berkeley Law and UCLA also provided helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I am indebted to Abigail Ludwig '15, Sahar Maali '15, and Bina Patel '16 for their research contributions, to the Berkeley Law librarians for their research support, and to Olivia Layug Balbarin for her generous administrative assistance.
On the Quantization of Seiberg-Witten Geometry

We propose a double quantization of four-dimensional $$ \mathcal{N} $$ = 2 Seiberg-Witten geometry, for all classical gauge groups and a wide variety of matter content. This can be understood as a set of certain non-perturbative Schwinger-Dyson identities, following the program initiated by Nekrasov [1]. The construction relies on the computation of the instanton partition function of the gauge theory on the so-called Ω-background on ℝ4, in the presence of half-BPS codimension 4 defects. The two quantization parameters are identified as the two parameters of this background. The Seiberg-Witten curve of each theory is recovered in the flat space limit. Whenever possible, we motivate our construction from type IIA string theory.
The Anti-Patient Psychology of Health Courts: Prescriptions from a Lawyer-Physician

Critics of the current medical malpractice tort system claim that adjudication of malpractice claims before generalist judges and lay juries contributes to rising costs of medical malpractice insurance premiums and medical care. They claim that properly deciding issues in this realm requires specialized knowledge of medicine and medical technology that juries, and even judges of general jurisdiction, do not possess. One lobbying group alleges there is a continuing medical malpractice litigation crisis in the United States, evidenced by increasing medical costs, deaths from needless medical errors, departure of physicians from the practice of medicine due to increasing medical malpractice insurance premiums, and random medical justice in medical malpractice cases. Whether there is a direct, causal correlation between the increasing cost of medical malpractice insurance premiums and medical malpractice litigation is debatable.
Text and Time: A Theory of Testamentary Obsolescence

Events may occur after a will is executed that ordinarily give rise to changes of intent regarding the estate plan - yet the testator may take no action to revoke or amend the original will. Should such a will be given literal effect? When, if ever, should lawmakers intervene to update a will on the testator's behalf? This is the problem of testamentary obsolescence. It reflects a fundamental, structural problem in law that can also crop up with regard to statutes, contracts, and other performative texts, any one of which may become timeworn. This article develops a theoretical framework for determining when lawmakers should - and should not - step in to revise wills that testators have left unaltered, and to locate this framework in the context of other forms of textual obsolescence. The article focuses on a variable I call friction - i.e., the extent of difficulty text makers face in revising texts on their own. Some changed circumstances display the interesting quality of altering testamentary intent while simultaneously disabling the testator from executing a new estate plan. In such instances, legal intervention to effectuate intent is warranted. Where the testator remains in a position to amend a will following a change of circumstance, the case for legal intervention becomes uneasy. Nevertheless, lesser forms of friction may continue to operate, affording testators less practical opportunity to redo their wills, and hence again giving cause for interpreting wills dynamically. When lawmakers do act to update a will, they should ordinarily do so on the basis of the testator's probable intent. Yet, I also argue that in some instances lawmakers do better to follow the testator's probable assumptions about what rule governs will interpretation, even if that rule fails to match most testators' preferences. I call this an error-minimizing default. In the Appendix, I show that under some conditions an error-minimizing default is more efficient than a majoritarian default, a contribution to default rule theory.
Interstate Competition and State Death Taxes: A Modern Crisis in Historical Perspective

State death taxes are one of the oldest forms of state revenue, dating back to the early 19th century. Yet, as the 21st century begins, these taxes face a significant crisis. In just the past five years, prompted by the 2001 repeal of the federal "state death tax credit" that had facilitated collection of these taxes, and yielding to increasingly vocal anti-tax rhetoric, half of the states simply have abandoned this form of tax revenue. This dramatic shift in state tax policy impacts not only the states that have repealed death taxes, but also those that still impose these taxes. The former now must find alternate forms of revenue or reduce governmental expenditures. The latter now must fear that taxpayers will "vote with their feet," abandoning the states that impose death taxes towards the growing number of states touting their more favorable tax climates. As interstate competition to attract these wealthy migrants intensifies, at stake is far more than the mere billions of dollars of state revenue generated by death taxes. Rather, the crisis implicates the fundamental nature of modern state taxation, raising the question of whether traditionally progressive forms of state taxation can survive in an increasingly mobile society. This Article contends that the current decline of state death taxes is not an isolated modern event, but rather one step in a decades-long interstate battle to attract and retain wealthy citizens. As such, before we can comprehend the potential consequences of the decline of state death taxes, and perhaps progressive taxes more generally, we must rightly address the fundamental underlying question: how did we get where we are today? The Article attempts to address that question and fill a gap in the modern literature by providing a comprehensive treatment of the history of how interstate competition shaped state death taxes and how the state death tax credit, now repealed, altered that history. By placing this modern tax crisis in its historical perspective, the Article reveals both a major current challenge facing state death taxes, as well as an underlying, brewing, battle between states that depend on progressive forms of taxation and states that provide a safe haven for taxpayers seeking to avoid such taxes.
Decentralization and Environmental Quality: An International Analysis of Water Pollution

The normative literature on decentralization of public goods provision has many testable empirical implications. This paper explores some of these implications by looking at the relationship between decentralization and an environmental public good, water quality in rivers at monitoring stations around the world. It examines pollution levels and interjurisdictional variation in these levels for both a local and a regional pollutant. The results suggest higher pollution levels with greater decentralization when fixed effects are included; the evidence is strongest for the regional pollutant, where it might result from interjurisdictional free riding. Federalism is associated with greater interjurisdictional variation in pollution within a country, consistent with the traditional view that decentralization allows policies more tailored to local conditions.
What We Didn't See Before

In this introduction to a special volume celebrating the publication of Judith Resnik’s and Denny Curtis’s book, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms, I categorize material representations of justice as either figural or architectural. Justice can be either "seen" or "sited," but in either case there is a connection between these visual and physical manifestations of justice and the desire of diverse governments to signal political and judicial values. Resnik and Curtis teach us to better understand the relationship between brick and mortar instantiations of justice -- as well as the artwork adorning these buildings -- and the architecture of procedural fairness and adjudicative democracy. As a result we do, in fact, see things when we look at a courthouse or a justice image that we may not have seen previous to their timely intervention.
Natural selection. III. Selection versus transmission and the levels of selection.

George Williams defined an evolutionary unit as hereditary information for which the selection bias between competing units dominates the informational decay caused by imperfect transmission. In this article, I extend Williams’ approach to show that the ratio of selection bias to transmission bias provides a unifying framework for diverse biological problems. Specific examples include Haldane and Lande’s mutation-selection balance, Eigen’s error threshold and quasispecies, Van Valen’s clade selection, Price’s multilevel formulation of group selection, Szathmary and Demeter’s evolutionary origin of primitive cells, Levin and Bull’s short-sighted evolution of HIV virulence, Frank’s timescale analysis of microbial metabolism, and Maynard Smith and Szathmary’s major transitions in evolution. The insights from these diverse applications lead to a deeper understanding of kin selection, group selection, multilevel evolutionary analysis, and the philosophical problems of evolutionary units and individuality.
Performance Measurement of Corporate Tax Departments

ABSTRACT: We investigate why firms choose to evaluate a tax department as a profit center (“contributor to the bottom line”) as opposed to as a cost center and the association between this choice and effective tax rates (ETRs). Using data from a confidential survey taken in 1999 of Chief Financial Officers, we develop and test a theory for choosing between these two methods of evaluating a tax department. We find that the likelihood of evaluating the tax department as a profit center is increasing in firm decentralization characteristics and tax-planning opportunities. We then employ instrumental variables to investigate whether evaluating a tax department as a profit center provides an effective incentive for the tax department to contribute to net income through lower ETRs. We find that our instrument for profit center firms is associated with significantly lower ETRs than cost center firms.
Return to the River: Environmental Flow Policy in the United States and Canada

Abstract: This paper provides an overview and summary of United States and Canadian federal, state, and provincial laws that offer some form of legal protection for environmental flows. Special attention is given to the new “second generation” law established in Texas and to ways western states are beginning to encourage transactions that help restore dewatered streams. Progress in the eastern states and some Canadian provinces to provide environmental flow protection is addressed. Based on this review, this paper presents recommended elements of a “model” environmental flow policy.
Measuring Corporate Political Sensitivity

The sensitivity of U.S. firms to domestic political uncertainty is an under-conceptualized yet critical component of nonmarket strategy. Using financial and political prediction market data, we dev...
Interjurisdictional housing prices and spatial amenities: Which measures of housing prices reflect local public goods?

Abstract Understanding the spatial variation in housing prices plays a crucial role in topics ranging from the cost of living to quality-of-life indices to studies of public goods and household mobility. Yet analysts have not reached a consensus on the best source of such data, variously using transaction values, self-reported values from the census, and rental values. Additionally, while most studies use micro-level data, some have used summary statistics such as the median housing value. Assessing community housing price indices in Los Angeles, we find that indices based on transaction prices are highly correlated with indices based on self-reported values, but that the former are better correlated with public goods. Moreover, rental values have a higher correlation with public goods and income levels than either asset-value measure. Finally, indices based on median values are poorly correlated with the other indices, public goods, and income.
Genetics and criminal responsibility

Some believe that genetics threatens privacy and autonomy and will eviscerate the concept of human nature. Despite the astonishing research advances, however, none of these dire predictions and no radical transformation of the law have occurred. Advocates have tried to use genetic evidence to affect judgments of criminal responsibility. At present, however genetic research can provide little aid to assessments of criminal responsibility and it does not suggest a radical critique of responsibility.
Accounting for discrepancies in bilateral trade: The case of China, Hong Kong, and the United States

China's reported exports to the United States have long been smaller than U.S.-reported imports from China. Earlier explanations for this focused on re-exports through Hong Kong, and appeared to account for most of the difference. Now, even after taking Hong Kong into account properly, there has emerged a new and growing discrepancy which amounted in 2005 to $46 billion, perhaps 20 percent of the "true" value. Comparisons of detailed customs records from China, Hong, Kong, and the United States shows that direct exports from Chinese ports and Chinese exports through third countries account for much of the discrepancy, relative to trade flows involving Hong Kong. The extent of the problem varies markedly across sectors. Some robust correlates for the discrepancy relate to valuation issues, U.S. tariffs, and re-exporting through the United States itself. The estimated behavior of other potentially important influences is sensitive to the econometric specification
Event study methodologies in information systems research

Event studies are based on the theoretical framework of efficient capital markets and the notion that security prices include all information available to the market. As a result, announcements made by firms provide to market participants information that can be impounded into the market price. This paper investigates the use of event studies in information systems and accounting information systems research using a three-pronged approach. First, this paper provides a comprehensive survey of research that uses event study methodologies, where the events are announcements made by firms about issues related to information systems, e.g., announcements of the adoption of enterprise resource planning systems and of the effect of security breaches in firms' information systems. Second, this paper summarizes event study methodologies used in prior research, along with some of the key parameters and concerns associated with their implementation. Third, this paper provides remarks on key event study modeling issues, and it offers recommendations to researchers.
From Victims to Litigants

This Article reports findings from an ethnographic study of self-help programs in two western states. The study investigated how self-help assistance provided by partnerships between courts and nongovernmental organizations implicates advocacy and access to justice for domestic violence survivors. The primary finding is that self-help programs may inadvertently work to curtail, rather than expand, advocacy resources. Furthermore, problems identified with self-help service delivery and negative impacts on advocacy systems may be explained by the structure of work within self-help programs and the nature of partnerships to provide self-help services. The Author uncovers previously unseen impacts of self-help programs on survivors and on the resources to help them. She concludes with a discussion of the implications for future research directions and describes what can be done now to improve self-help services for survivors.
Integrating the Financial Crisis in the Business Associations Course: Benefits and Pitfalls

In a time of economic turmoil, teaching business law classes can be both inspiring and precarious. The inspiration is easy to come by; in a class that students once took somewhat begrudgingly, they are now participating in impassioned discussions. At the same time, one cannot ignore the difficulties that can arise when discussing such tumultuous activity. The challenges of teaching about economic turmoil are magnified when teaching about a global financial crisis, the likes of which the world has not seen in many decades. It is often difficult to balance conveying the essential substantive material that should be covered in a class with the undertaking to help students comprehend the crisis, especially at a time when its causes and full effects are not yet fully understood. This essay provides a first-hand account of integrating the financial crisis in the Business Associations course and discusses the benefits and pitfalls in doing so.
Updating Subjective Risks in the Presence of Conflicting Information: An Application to Climate Change

Willingness to support public programs for risk management often depends on individual subjective risk perceptions in the face of uncertain science. As part of a larger study concerning climate change, we explore individual updated subjective risks as a function of individual priors, the nature of external information, and individual attributes. We examine several rival hypotheses about how subjective risks change in the face of new information (Bayesian updating, alarmist learning, and ambiguity aversion). The source and nature of external information, as well as its collective ambiguity, can have varying effects across the population, in terms of both expectations and uncertainty.
The effect of the term auction facility on the London interbank offered rate

Abstract The Term Auction Facility (TAF), the first auction-based liquidity initiative by the Federal Reserve during the global financial crisis, was aimed at improving conditions in the dollar money market and bringing down the significantly elevated London interbank offered rate (Libor). The effectiveness of this innovative policy tool is crucial for understanding the role of the central bank in financial stability, but academic studies disagree on the empirical evidence of the TAF effect on Libor. We show that the disagreement arises from mis-specifications of econometric models. Regressions using the daily level of the Libor-OIS spread as the dependent variable miss either the permanent or temporary TAF effect, depending on whether the dummy variable indicates the events of the TAF or the regimes before and after an TAF event. Those regressions also suffer from the unit-root problem and produce unreliable test statistics. By contrast, regressions using the daily change in the Libor-OIS spread are robust to the persistence of the TAF effect and the unit-root problem, consistently producing reliable evidence that the downward shifts of the Libor-OIS spread were associated with the TAF. The evidence indicates the efficacy of the TAF in helping the interbank market to relieve liquidity strains.
AI buzzwords explained: multi-agent path finding (MAPF)

Kiva Systems was founded in 2003 to develop robot technology that automates the fetching of goods in order-fulfillment centers. It was acquired by Amazon in 2012 and changed its name to Amazon Robotics in 2014. Amazon order-fulfillment centers have inventory stations on the perimeter of the warehouse and storage locations in its center, see Figure 1. Each storage location can store one inventory pod. Each inventory pod holds one or more kinds of goods. A large number of warehouse robots operate autonomously in the warehouse. Each warehouse robot is able to pick up, carry and put down one inventory pod at a time. The warehouse robots move inventory pods from their storage locations to the inventory stations where the needed goods are removed from the inventory pods (to be boxed and eventually shipped to customers) and then back to the same or different empty storage locations (Wurman, D'Andrea, & Mountz, 2008).1
Who's Got the Data? Interdependencies in Science and Technology Collaborations

Science and technology always have been interdependent, but never more so than with today’s highly instrumented data collection practices. We report on a long-term study of collaboration between environmental scientists (biology, ecology, marine sciences), computer scientists, and engineering research teams as part of a five-university distributed science and technology research center devoted to embedded networked sensing. The science and technology teams go into the field with mutual interests in gathering scientific data. “Data” are constituted very differently between the research teams. What are data to the science teams may be context to the technology teams, and vice versa. Interdependencies between the teams determine the ability to collect, use, and manage data in both the short and long terms. Four types of data were identified, which are managed separately, limiting both reusability of data and replication of research. Decisions on what data to curate, for whom, for what purposes, and for how long, should consider the interdependencies between scientific and technical processes, the complexities of data collection, and the disposition of the resulting data.
The Right to Food: Holding Global Actors Accountable Under International Law

Economic globalization represents both an unmet opportunity and a significant challenge for the fulfillment of social and economic rights, including the right to food. While corporate sector accountability and the responsibility of international financial institutions (IFIs) to ensure social and economic rights are now at the forefront of the globalization discourse, greater attention must be paid to how these actors can be held accountable under international law. The existing human rights legal framework is ill-equipped to deal with violations committed by non-state actors, such as transnational corporations (TNCs), and multi-state actors, such as IFIs. Using the right to food as an entry point, this Article argues that international law is in need of rethinking under globalization. The Article begins with a comparison of economic and rights-based approaches to economic development and food security. Part I articulates the normative content of the right to food and examines threats to the right to food from states, IFIs, and TNCs. In particular, it analyzes the economic prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund and the growth of TNCs in both the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. Part I then argues that effective implementation of the right to food is undermined by the state-centric focus and jurisdictional constraints of international human rights law. Part II asserts that under the obligation of international cooperation, States Parties to the ICESCR must respect and protect the right to food extraterritorially. This includes an obligation to regulate the activities of TNCs and IFIs over which they exercise influence or control. Part III addresses the need to locate the right to food outside of the international treaty law framework to ensure the accountability of non-ICESCR ratifying states. It analyzes the right to food as customary international law and concludes that the minimum core component of the right to food - the right to be free from hunger - may have already achieved customary status.
Information Uncertainty and Analyst Forecast Behavior

Prior literature observes that information uncertainty exacerbates investor underreaction behavior. In this paper, I investigate whether, as professional investment intermediaries, sell-side analysts suffer more behavioral biases in cases of greater information uncertainty. I show that greater information uncertainty predicts more positive (negative) forecast errors and subsequent forecast revisions following good (bad) news, which corroborates previous findings on the post-analyst-revision drift. The opposite effects of information uncertainty on forecast errors and subsequent forecast revisions following good versus bad news support the analyst underreaction hypothesis and are inconsistent with analyst forecast rationality or optimism suggested in prior literature.
Revisiting procedure and precedent in the WTO : an analysis of "US : countervailing and anti-dumping measures (China)"

After not applying countervailing duty (CVD) law against non-market economies (NMEs) for two decades, the United States opened a CVD investigation against China in 2006. After extensive litigation, a US appeals court ruled that it was illegal to apply CVD law to NMEs. While that ruling was being appealed, the US Congress passed legislation stipulating that the application of CVD law to NMEs starting in 2006 was legal. China challenged this legislation at the WTO. The dispute resulted in a ruling that left open the possibility that the legislation violated the GATT, as well as a finding that the United States must investigate its application of countervailing and antidumping duties against China. This dispute has implications for a number of current WTO debates including: whether Appellate Body rulings create a binding precedent, whether the Appellate Body should have authority to remand cases, and what information should be required in panel requests.
On the interaction between momentum effect and size effect

Abstract This paper uses a sample of firms listed in the NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ between January 1963 and December 2012 to analyze the interaction between size effect and momentum effect in cross-sectional stock returns. Furthermore, this paper focuses on the evolution of this interaction through different market states. I report a significant shift in stock returns structure during the rising markets of the 1990s and the 2000s. First, momentum has absorbed the size effect. Second, the momentum effect has become stronger in larger, not smaller, firms. These patterns are indicative of a strong interaction between the two effects. Conceivably, in up markets, firms grow fast, and thus, the size and momentum effects stem from a common economic phenomenon: growth. The findings are robust to variations in the length of the formation period and to the use of residual return (instead of total return) to rank stocks.
Modeling Payment Timing in Multiechelon Inventory Systems with Applications to Supply Chain Coordination

Problem definition: How can one adapt multiechelon inventory models to capture the cash flows generated by various payment-timing contracts? What competitive inventory policy behavior arises under ...
Teaching the Principles of Economics: A Proposal for a Multi-paradigmatic Approach

(2003). Teaching the Principles of Economics: A Proposal for a Multi-paradigmatic Approach. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 697-725.
Insights gained from conversations with labor market decision makers

I describe insights into wage dynamics and downward wage rigidity obtained from more than two hundred interviews with businesspeople, labor leaders, and various labor market intermediaries and made in the early 1990s in the Northeast of the United States. I explain the morale explanation for downward rigidity of the pay of existing employees and discuss what morale is, why businesspeople care about it, and why pay cuts damage it. I discuss the origin and nature of pay structures internal to an establishment, the relation between pay at different establishments, and why firms tend to lay off workers rather than cut pay. The findings of the study to be discussed are reported in detail in Truman Bewley, Why Wages Don’t Fall during a Recession. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1999). JEL Classification: E3, J3, J5
Incentive effects of executive compensation and the valuation of firm assets

Abstract This paper examines how executive compensation influences the market value of the firm's assets. After controlling for endogeneity, we find that boards have set the incentive to incur risk (vega) to maximize shareholder value, but that incentives to increase returns (delta) do not maximize shareholder value. We also find that current levels of cash compensation do not maximize shareholder value. Finally, we consider the moneyness of stock options. We find that the level of at- and out-of-the money options maximize shareholder value, but the level of in-the money options do not maximize shareholder value.
Dollar Index Adjusted Stock Indices

This paper presents stock indices that reflect changes in both stock value and underlying currency value. An earlier study develops the first known currency adjusted stock index. This paper extends the literature by utilizing a better measure of US dollar value to develop currency value adjusted indices. We examine distributional properties of the indices and determine the portion of wealth change attributable to stock value change and currency value change. The results show significant differences in return variance between original and dollar adjusted indexes. The results further show that changes in the stock index level explain most wealth changes. However, changes in currency value explain as much as 14.9 percent of wealth changes.
A Machine Made of Words: Our Incompletely Theorized Constitution

The conventional wisdom says that the U.S. Constitution represents "a comfortable and even emphatic agreement on... general principle, accompanied by sharp disagreement about particular cases." This essay draws attention to an often overlooked feature of the Constitution that lies in tension with the conventional view. For a document that is assumed to represent an agreement on general principles, the U.S. Constitution contains remarkably few statements of principle. In fact, an empirical analysis suggests that the U.S. Constitution has a good claim to containing the least abstract theorizing of any constitutional document of its era. The Constitution is thus an “incompletely theorized agreement” not only in the sense of being a work of broad theoretical agreement that breaks down at the level of particularity, but also in the sense of being an agreement on particular, concrete rules accompanied by disagreement on the abstract theories supporting those rules.
Determinants of contract completeness: An environmental regulatory application

Abstract There is a tradeoff that must be addressed any time a contract is written; whether or not to make a contract flexible but incomplete or rigid but comprehensive. This paper investigates the completeness of hydroelectric license contracts over a nearly three decade time span and finds that as environmental concerns increase, so does contract flexibility, ultimately confirming the predictions of transaction cost theory. The paper offers an interesting historical look at the development of the U.S. hydroelectric dam license as it ages over time and responds to growing environmental concerns. It also, in a novel empirical application, combines traditional regression analysis with insights from textual analysis and computational linguistics.
No Small Feat: Who Won the Health Care Case (and Why Did So Many Law Professors Miss the Boat)?

In this Essay, prepared as the basis for the 2013 Dunwody Distinguished Lecture in Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, I describe five aspects of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius that are sometimes overlooked or misunderstood: (1) the Court held that imposing economic mandates on the people was unconstitutional under the Commerce and Necessary and Proper Clauses; (2) Chief Justice John Roberts’s reasoning was the holding in the case, whether viewed from a formalist or a realist perspective; (3) the Court did not uphold the constitutionality of the individual insurance mandate under the tax power; (4) the newfound power to tax inactivity is far less dangerous than the commerce power advocated for by the Government and most law professors; and (5) the doctrine established by NFIB matters (to the extent that constitutional law doctrine ever matters). Finally, I turn my attention to the question of why so many law professors got this case so wrong. After providing a lengthy compendium of law professors’ published opinions about the case, I suggest that most missed the boat because they have failed to appreciate the constitutional gestalt that informed the Rehnquist Court’s New Federalism and carried over to a majority of the Roberts Court. INTRODUCTION 1332 I. ECONOMIC MANDATES ARE UNCONSTITUTIONAL 1333 II. THE REASONING OF CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS’S OPINION IS THE HOLDING OF THE CASE 1336 III. THE COURT DID NOT UPHOLD THE INDIVIDUAL MANDATE UNDER THE TAX POWER 1337 ∗ Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory, Georgetown University Law Center; Director, Georgetown Center for the Constitution. This Essay was prepared as the basis for the 2013 Dunwody Distinguished Lecture in Law at the Fredric G. Levin College of Law, University of Florida, on March 22, 2013. I thank Jason Kestecher for his research assistance. † By permission of Oxford University Press. Extracts from pp.17–27 Ch.2 Who Won the Obamacare Case? by Randy E. Barnett from “Health Care Case: The Supreme Court's Decision and Its Implications” edited by Persily, Metzger & Morrison (2013). 1 Barnett: No Small Feat: Who Won the Health Care Case (and Why Did So Many Published by UF Law Scholarship Repository, 2013 1332 FLORIDA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 65 IV. THE BAD DOCTRINE THAT CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS MADE WAS NOT AS BAD AS THE ALTERNATIVE 1340 V. DOES THE DOCTRINE MATTER? 1341 VI. WHY WERE THE LAW PROFESSORS SO WRONG? 1343 CONCLUSION: THE GRAVITATIONAL FORCE OF ORIGINALISM 1349
Looking Down the Barrel of a Loaded Gun: The Effect of Mandatory Handgun Purchase Delays on Homicide and Suicide

We exploit within-state variation across time in both the existence and length of statutory delays—both explicit wait periods and delays created by licensing requirements—between the purchase and delivery of a firearm to examine the effect of purchase delays on homicides and suicides. We find that the existence of a purchase delay reduces firearm related suicides by between 2 to 5 percent with no statistically significant increase in non-firearm suicides. Purchase delays are not associated with statistically significant changes in homicide rates. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
How Dynamical Quantum Memories Forget

Motivated by recent work showing that a quantum error correcting code can be generated by hybrid dynamics of unitaries and measurements, we study the long time behavior of such systems. We demonstrate that even in the “mixed” phase, a maximally mixed initial density matrix is purified on a time scale equal to the Hilbert space dimension (i.e., exponential in system size), albeit with noisy dynamics at intermediate times which we connect to Dyson Brownian motion. In contrast, we show that free fermion systems — i.e., ones where the unitaries are generated by quadratic Hamiltonians and the measurements are of fermion bilinears — purify in a time quadratic in the system size. In particular, a volume law phase for the second Renyi entropy cannot be sustained in a free fermion system.
Mobility behavior of the elderly

Mobility patterns of the elderly provide a particularly interesting theoretical subcase of a more general migration model which interacts individual-specific traits (e.g., health and retirement status) and location-specific traits (e.g., amenities, rents, and wages). The spatially invariant incomes (pensions, dividends, etc.) of the retired are shown to lead to migration toward areas where the wage and rent compensation for amenities (necessary for spatial equilibrium) occurs primarily in the labor market, rather than in the land market. Empirical evidence appears to be consistent with theoretical expectations; more investigation, however, is clearly desirable.
The effects of compensatory inferences for attributes on the choice of incomplete product options

Abstract Choice options almost always have some information that is unavailable. Some researchers have argued that consumers do not form inferences in these situations, while others have shown that consumers rely on existing attributes to infer missing ones. This paper focuses on what happens to choices for incomplete options when consumers make compensatory inferences in an attempt to balance rival products' attributes. We examine situations in which the incomplete options are inferior on available attributes and missing more or less important attributes. We find that regardless of whether consumers are explicitly prompted to make inferences about missing attributes or they voluntarily make inferences, the mere act of inference making increases the choice of product options that are missing vital attributes. This tendency decreases the potential advantage of product options that have complete attribute information.
On defining ex ante payoffs in games with diffuse prior

While the diffuse prior has been widely used in applied economic theory for its technical convenience and as a way of modeling complete lack of knowledge, it is not formally defined, nor are ex ante payoffs in games under this prior. In this paper, we provide a formal treatment of the diffuse prior which can validate its application in games. We consider stationary games, in which players’ signals are translation invariant in the true state and players’ payoffs are translation invariant in actions together with the state. We show that strategies which admit well-defined expected payoffs under the diffuse prior are essentially stationary, being almost translation invariant in signals. Our analysis builds on two formal definitions. We define the diffuse prior through a limit construction, using sequences of well-defined priors that become increasingly dispersed. A class of strategy profiles is admissible if for any strategy profile, each player’s ex ante payoff along these sequences converges to a limit that does not depend on the particular sequence. A secondary contribution of the paper is an extension of the concept of distributional strategies (Milgrom and Weber in Math Oper Res 10:619–632, 1985) to a class of multistage games.
Europe and the Globalization of Antitrust Law

This article looks at the European experience with competition law against the backdrop of the globalization of antitrust law. Antitrust is no longer the province of the United States alone or of a small group of industrialized states. It is increasingly an international phenomenon that operates in some fashion in many states. It impacts economic activity to an increasing extent and in an increasing number of ways, and it has become a major policy concern of governments and of business decision-makers almost everywhere. European experience with competition law plays a central, and increasingly important, role in this development, and thus it is important to understand that experience.My central thesis is that images of European competition law are often seriously distorted. I suggest that these distortions can both hamper effective lawyering in transnational contexts and impede the process of developing an international legal framework for the protection of competition. My objective is to identify some of these distortions and indicate their significance for international lawyering and for the evolution of competition law and policy. Note that I will refer to images of European competition law experience that are widely held in the United States, but these images are also often highly influential elsewhere, including in Europe itself.
Crafting an Amnesty with Traditional Tools Registration and Cancellation

Immigration amnesty while widely believed to be an anomaly has strong historical precedent, and is found in various provisions of the current immigration law. Large numbers of undocumented persons are currently residing in the United States and amnesty is one way of bringing these people out from under the shadows. This article argues that in order for an amnesty to be effective that it must be both uncomplicated and broad. The article argues further that a careful updating of registry and cancellation of removal, two traditional tools found in U.S. immigration laws offer the best possibility for a successful amnesty program.
An empirical study of observational learning.

This article provides an empirical examination of observational learning. Using data from an online market for music, I find that observational learning benefits consumers, producers of high-quality music, and the online platform. I also study the role of pricing as a friction to the learning process by comparing outcomes under demand-based pricing to counterfactual pricing schemes. I find that employing a fixed price (the industry standard) can hamper learning by reducing the incentive to experiment, resulting in less consumer surplus, but more expected revenue for the platform.
Asymmetric investor behavior between buyside and sellside: Evidence from investor classes in the Sri Lankan stock market

Abstract Using unique trading data for investor classes from Sri Lanka, this study finds asymmetric investor behavior between buyside and sellside in large trades. Investors are positive feedback traders on the buyside and contrarians on the sellside. Domestic investors exhibit more feedback and contrarian behavior than foreign investors, suggesting that foreign investors are more informed on the buyside and less informed on the sellside. Individuals are more feedback and contrarian traders than institutions. Foreign institutional investor sales do not precede, coincide with, or lead to significant returns. Trades do not lead to price momentum or reversals, but leave a permanent positive price effect.
Capital requirements for over-the-counter derivatives central counterparties☆

Abstract This paper assesses the sensitivity of the risk buffers, or capital requirements, of central counterparties clearing over-the-counter derivatives trades to a range of model inputs. It finds capital requirements to be highly sensitive to whether key model parameters are calibrated on a point-in-time versus stress-period basis, whether the risk tolerance metric adequately captures tail-risk events, and the ability – or lack thereof – to define exposures on the basis of netting sets spanning multiple risk factors. Our results suggest that there are considerable benefits from prudential authorities adopting a more prescriptive approach to central counterparties’ risk buffers, in line with recent enhancement of the capital regime for banks’ trading books.
On the Evolution of the World Income Distribution

The post-World War II period has seen substantial changes in the distribution of GDP per worker around the world. In the upper half of the distribution, a number of countries have exhibited large increases in income relative to the richest countries. In the bottom half, several countries have seen incomes fall relative to the richest countries. The net result of these changes is a movement in the shape of the world income distribution from something that looks like a normal distribution in 1960 to a bi-modal \twin-peaks" distribution in 1988. Projecting these changes into the future suggests a number of interesting ndings. First, it seems likely that the United States will lose its position as the country with the highest level of GDP per worker. Second, growth miracles have been more common in recent decades than growth disasters. If these dynamics continue, the future income distribution will involve far more \rich" countries and far fewer \poor" countries than currently observed.
THE CONDITIONS OF MORAL REALISM

My aim is to provide an account of the conditions of moral realism whereby there are still significant metaphysical commitments made by the realist that set the view apart as a distinct position in the contemporary meta-ethical landscape. In order to do so, I will be appealing to a general account of what it is for realism to be true in any domain of experience, whether it be realism about universals, realism about unobservable scientific entities, realism about artifacts, and so forth. If the result is an informative taxonomy of meta-ethical positions, which can isolate something that is still at stake between the rival positions, then such a result should be of significant interest to philosophers working in this area.
Economic Catastrophe Bonds

The central insight of asset pricing is that a security's value depends both on its distribution of payoffs across economic states and on state prices. In fixed income markets, many investors focus exclusively on estimates of expected payoffs, such as credit ratings, without considering the state of the economy in which default occurs. Such investors are likely to be attracted to securities whose payoffs resemble economic catastrophe bonds—bonds that default only under severe economic conditions. We show that many structured finance instruments can be characterized as economic catastrophe bonds, but offer far less compensation than alternatives with comparable payoff profiles. (JEL G11, G12)