cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Situationism, Responsibility, and Fair Opportunity

The situationist literature in psychology claims that conduct is not determined by character and reflects the operation of the agent's situation or environment. For instance, due to situational factors, compassionate behavior is much less common than we might have expected from people we believe to be compassionate. This article focuses on whether situationism should revise our beliefs about moral responsibility. It assesses the implications of situationism against the backdrop of a conception of responsibility that is grounded in norms about the fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing that require that agents to be normatively competent and possess situational control. Despite the low incidence of compassionate behavior revealed in situationist studies, situationism threatens neither situational control nor normative competence. Nonetheless situationism may force revision of our views about responsibility in particular contexts, such as wartime wrongdoing. Whereas a good case can be made that the heat of battle can create situational pressures that significantly impair normative competence and thus sometimes provide a full or partial excuse, there is reason to be skeptical of attempts to generalize this excuse to other contexts of wartime wrongdoing. If so, moral responsibility can take situationism on board without capsizing the boat.
Foreword: What We Talk About When We Talk About Workplace Privacy

This essay introduces a symposium on workplace privacy held at Louisiana State University in February 2006. It builds on new work contributed by Matthew Finkin, Catherine Fisk, Rafael Gely & Leonard Bierman, Steven Willborn, Pauline Kim, Charles Craver, and Michael Selmi. Invoking concepts familiar from the torts side of employment law - including dignity and dignitary entitlements, remedies for wrongful discharge, and contrasts between individual- and group-based enforcement of rights and interests - the essay contends that although workplace privacy has never been robust in statutory or judge-made law, it is central to the legal concept of privacy more generally. In its role of enhancing how Americans understand intrusion, humiliation, and the betrayal of justified expectations, workplace privacy may prove strong enough to undo - or at least gravely weaken - the doctrine of employment at will. Workplace privacy may also be tackling some of the problems that private-sector labor unions once were more able to address.
Moral Realism and the Heuristics Debate

There has been substantial debate about whether certain forms of universal moral intuitions“exist” —intuitions that are non-reflective and undefended—and, if so, whether these intuitions have a privileged normative status. This debate arguably has implications for jurisprudential debates about the existence of“natural law.” This essay explores the underappreciated homology between one instantiation of the debates about the nature and quality of intuitive “moral” reasoning, and debates, associated with the Heuristics and Biases (H&B) school and the “Fast and Frugal” (F&F) school, about the nature and quality of our capacity to make “self-interested” decisions.
Affirmative obligations and market making with inventory

Abstract Existing empirical studies provide little support for the theoretical prediction that market makers rebalance their inventory through revisions of quoted prices. This study provides evidence that the NYSE's specialist does engage in significant inventory rebalancing, but only when not constrained by the affirmative obligation to provide liquidity imposed by the Price Continuity rule. The evidence also suggests that such obligations are associated with better market quality, but impose significant costs on the specialist. The specialist mitigates these costs through discretionary trading when the rule is not binding. These findings shed light on how exchange rules affect market makers’ behavior and market quality.
Gravitational Waves and Time-Domain Astronomy

The gravitational wave window onto the universe will open in roughly five years, when Advanced LIGO and Virgo achieve the first detections of high frequency gravitational waves, most likely coming from compact binary mergers. Electromagnetic follow-up of these triggers, using radio, optical, and high energy telescopes, promises exciting opportunities in multi-messenger time domain astronomy. In the decade, space-based observations of low frequency gravitational waves from massive black hole mergers, and their electromagnetic counterparts, will open up further vistas for discovery. This two-part workshop featured brief presentations and stimulating discussions on the challenges and opportunities presented by gravitational wave astronomy. Highlights from the workshop, with the emphasis on strategies for electromagnetic follow-up, are presented in this report.
Justifying Intellectual Property Protection: Why the Interests of Content-Creators Usually Wins over Everyone Else's

I attempt to show that the law should, as a matter of political morality, provide limited protection of intellectual property interests. To this end, I argue that the issue of whether the law ought to coercively restrict liberty depends on an assessment of all the relevant competing interests. Further, I argue that the interests of content-creators in controlling the disposition of the content they create outweighs the interests of other persons in using that content in most, but not all, cases. I conclude that, in these cases, morality protects the interests of content-creators, but not the interests of other persons and hence would justify limited legal protection of the former interests. Forthcoming in Emma Rooksby (ed.), Information Technology and Social Justice, Idea Group, 2006.
Can Changes in the Cost of Carry Explain the Dynamics of Corporate “Cash” Holdings?

Firms until recently were effectively constrained to hold liquid assets in non-interest-bearing accounts. As a result, the cost of capital of firms’ liquid-assets portfolios exceeded the return, especially when the risk-free interest rate was high. The spread between cost and return is the cost of carry. Changes in the cost of carry explain the dynamics of corporate “cash” holdings both in the United States and abroad, and the level of cost of carry explains the level of liquid-asset holdings across countries. We conclude that current US corporate cash holdings are not abnormal in a historical or international comparison.
Two Visions of Corporate Law

In a recent paper, Professor Robert Ahdieh argues that the debate about whether corporate law federalism leads to a race to the top or the bottom is pointless because state corporate law has little to do with the quality of corporate governance. Ahdieh thinks that markets, like those for corporate control and labor, are what make corporate governance what it is, not state competition for corporate charters. This essay, which will appear in the George Washington Law Review as part of a colloquy on Ahdieh's thought-provoking paper, argues that the race debate matters because while the market for corporate control disciplines managers, it is competition among states that disciplines states from distorting the market for corporate control. After showing that the race debate matters, the essay then tries to explain the persistence and ideological valence of the debate. Why is it that the debate continues despite innumerable empirical and theoretical studies on both sides, and why is it that defenders of the federalism model are mostly conservatives and critics are mostly liberals? The answer to both questions is that the race debate is really a conflict between two visions of corporate law held by these groups. Using the framework developed by Thomas Sowell, the essay shows how the split in the academic community about the optimality of the corporate law model can be explained by one's faith in experts (what Sowell calls the "unconstrained" vision) or by one's faith in processes, like markets (what Sowell calls the "constrained" vision). The essay then offers some preliminary thoughts on the implications of this description for corporate law scholarship and some ideas on how to move the debate forward.
Currency Denomination of Intercompany Debt and Multinational Taxes

For multinational companies (MNCs) with foreign subsidiaries, the currency denomination of intercompany debt can have important effects on both taxes and financial statements. This paper analyzes the choice between an intercompany loan denominated in the home currency and one denominated in the subsidiary's functional currency. Using U.S. rules for financial accounting and taxes, the author demonstrates the expected impact of the loan's currency denomination on the expected level and variability of an MNCs overall taxes in the case where it has excess foreign tax credits. The author's analysis shows that the foreign currency loan denomination leads to lower expected tax if the foreign withholding tax rate on interest is higher than the parent's home income tax rate. At the same time, the parent currency denomination leads to lower expected taxes if the parent's home income tax rate is higher than the foreign withholding tax rate on interest. Moreover, if an MNCs excess foreign tax credits are attributable to the subsidiary, the foreign currency loan denomination leads to lower variability in overall taxes. But in cases where the excess foreign tax credits arise from other foreign operations, the parent currency denomination leads to lower variability of overall tax.
Macroeconomic Conditions, Firm Characteristics, and Credit Spreads

We study a structural model that allows us to examine how credit spreads are affected by the interaction of macroeconomic conditions and firm characteristics. Unlike most other structural models, our model explicitly incorporates equilibrium macroeconomic dynamics and models a firm's cash flow as primitive processes. Corporate securities are priced as contingent claims written on cash flows. Default occurs when the firm's cash flow cannot cover the interest payments and the recovery rate is dependent on the economic condition at default. Our model produces the following predictions: (i) credit spread is mostly negatively correlated with interest rate; (ii) credit spread yield curves are upward sloping for low-grade bonds; (iii) firm characteristics have significant effects on credit spreads and these effects also vary with economic conditions. These predictions are consistent with the available empirical evidence and generate implications for further empirical investigation.
Optimism and Pessimism with Expected Utility

Savage (1954) provided a set of axioms on preferences over acts that were equivalent to the existence of an expected utility representation. We show that in addition to this representation, there is a continuum of other “expected utility”representations in which for any act, the probability distribution over states depends on the corresponding outcomes. We suggest that optimism and pessimism can be captured by the stake-dependent probabilities in these alternative representations; e.g., for a pessimist, the probability of every outcome except the worst is distorted down from the Savage probability. Extending the DM’s preferences to be de…ned on both subjective acts and objective lotteries, we show how one may distinguish optimists from pessimists and separate attitude towards uncertainty from curvature of the utility function over monetary prizes.
Financial integration, capital mobility, and income convergence

Recent studies have found that capital moves ‘uphill’ from poor to rich countries, and brings little or no growth dividend when it does flow into poor economies. We show that Europe does not conform to this paradigm. In the European experience of financial integration, capital has flown from rich to poor countries, and such inflows have been associated with significant acceleration of income convergence. Analysing broader samples of countries, we find that ‘downhill’ capital flows tend to be observed above certain thresholds in institutional quality and financial integration. But Europe remains different even when allowing for such threshold effects, and its experience is similar to that of interstate flows within the United States. Our findings are consistent with the notion that financial diversification reduces countries’ incentives to save in order to self-insure against specific shocks. —Abdul Abiad, Daniel Leigh and Ashoka Mody
Determination of glass transition temperature of polyimides from atomistic molecular dynamics simulations and machine-learning algorithms

Glass transition temperature ($T_{\text{g}}$) plays an important role in controlling the mechanical and thermal properties of a polymer. Polyimides are an important category of polymers with wide applications because of their superior heat resistance and mechanical strength. The capability of predicting $T_{\text{g}}$ for a polyimide $a~priori$ is therefore highly desirable in order to expedite the design and discovery of new polyimide polymers with targeted properties and applications. Here we explore three different approaches to either compute $T_{\text{g}}$ for a polyimide via all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations or predict $T_{\text{g}}$ via a mathematical model generated by using machine-learning algorithms to analyze existing data collected from literature. Our simulations reveal that $T_{\text{g}}$ can be determined from examining the diffusion coefficient of simple gas molecules in a polyimide as a function of temperature and the results are comparable to those derived from data on polymer density versus temperature and actually closer to the available experimental data. Furthermore, the predictive model of $T_{\text{g}}$ derived with machine-learning algorithms can be used to estimate $T_{\text{g}}$ successfully within an uncertainty of about 20 degrees, even for polyimides yet to be synthesized experimentally.
Effect of Dealing Patterns on Consumer Perceptions of Deal Frequency and Willingness to Pay

Research has shown that brands with higher deal frequency obtain a smaller market share gain on deal and have a lower expected price. However, the level of dealing must be perceived by consumers be...
Finiteness of variance is irrelevant in the practice of quantitative finance

Outside the Platonic world of financial models, assuming the underlying distribution is a scalable “power law,” we are unable to find a consequential difference between finite and infinite variance models—a central distinction emphasized in the econophysics literature and the financial economics tradition. Although distributions with power law tail exponents α > 2 are held to be amenable to Gaussian tools, owing to their “finite variance,” we fail to understand the difference in the application with other power laws (1 < α < 2) held to belong to the Pareto-Levy-Mandelbrot stable regime. The problem invalidates derivatives theory (dynamic hedging arguments) and portfolio construction based on mean-variance. This article discusses methods to deal with the implications of the point in a real world setting. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity, 2009
Do Firms Use Time‐Vested Stock‐Based Pay to Keep Research and Development Investments Secret?

I find that executives’ unvested equity holdings are larger when executives are employed by R&D-intensive firms in industries that rely more on secrecy to profit from R&D. Moreover, I find that this relation is more pronounced for executives with a greater ability to exploit R&D-related information and also holds for nonexecutive employees. In addition, I find that these firms use option grants with longer vesting periods and that unvested equity holdings reduce the likelihood that their executives leave to find employment elsewhere. Overall, my findings are consistent with firms using time-vested stock-based pay to reduce the leakage of R&D-related information to competitors through employee mobility.
Understanding the Black-White Test Score Gap in the First Two Years of School

In previous research, a substantial gap in test scores between white and black students persists, even after controlling for a wide range of observable characteristics. Using a newly available data set (the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study), we demonstrate that in stark contrast to earlier studies, the black-white test score gap among incoming kindergart- ners disappears when we control for a small number of covariates. Real gains by black children in recent cohorts appear to play an important role in explaining the differences between our e ndings and earlier research. The availability of better covariates also contributes. Over the e rst two years of school, however, blacks lose substantial ground relative to other races. There is suggestive evidence that differences in school quality may be an important part of the explanation. None of the other hypotheses we test to explain why blacks are losing ground receive any empirical backing.
PAYDAY LENDERS: HEROES OR VILLAINS?

Abstract Does access to high-interest credit (payday loans) exacerbate or mitigate individual financial distress. Using natural disasters as an exogenous shock, I apply a propensity score-matched, triple-difference specification to identify a causal relation between welfare and access to credit. California foreclosures increase by 4.5 units per 1,000 homes after a natural disaster. The existence of payday lenders mitigates 1.0–1.3 of them, with the caveat that not all payday loans are for emergency distress. Payday lenders also mitigate larcenies (but not burglaries or vehicle thefts). In a placebo test of disasters covered by homeowner insurance, payday lending has no mitigation effect.
Reason Giving and Rule Making in Procedural Law

Judges are the managers of the cases litigated before them and the administrators of the procedural rules that govern the litigation of cases. This Article investigates problems with the procedural rules closely associated with a judge’s managerial capacity and suggests a new paradigm for crafting and evaluating these rules by drawing on the administrative law principles of reason giving in decisionmaking.I argue that for certain types of procedural rules, rulemakers should abandon the task of trying to regulate procedure by promulgating rules or standards regarding the desired outcome of the application of the device at issue. Instead, they should turn their attention to regulating the process by which judges make procedural decisions. Borrowing concepts from administrative law, this Article argues that rulemakers should employ the technique of reason giving to regulate select procedural devices. Reason giving and the information it produces can work in tandem in the procedural realm by leveraging a core intuition — that requiring regulators and the regulated to engage in a reasoning process constitutes an effective form of regulation. The Article envisions how rulemakers can promote this sort of process among trial court judges, and how that process can ameliorate some of the problems that rulemakers encounter in current attempts to regulate procedural devices.The Article concludes by suggesting that commentators rethink the value of precedential opinions in some procedural decisions. Rather than straining to identify uniformity in the application of vague standards, rulemakers should be satisfied that they have regulated an area through the delegation of authority and the promotion of a systematic use of that authority by judges as regulators and regulated subjects. These sorts of decisions have the potential for developing stability and standards in certain areas of procedural law.
Equitable relief as a relay between juridical and biopower: the case of school desegregation

The present paper looks at the intersection of juridical and biopower in the U.S. Supreme Court’s school desegregation cases. These cases generally deploy “equitable relief” as a relay between the juridicially-specified injury of segregation and the biopolitical mandates of integration, allowing broad-based biopolitical remedies for juridically identified problems. This strategy enabled the Courts to negotiate between these forms of power. The analysis here thus suggests the continued relevance of juridical power, and also the limits of Foucault’s own analysis, which suggested that biopower tended to fully colonize juridical power by way of norms.
Ethical Issues in eBusiness: A Proposal for Creating the eBusiness Principles

e Business seems to be the topic of conversation, wherever a businessperson turns today. Retailers small and large are creating web sites, and business-to-business ecommerce is expanding exponentially. In the ebusiness paradigm, employees regularly telecommute, cell phones are pervasive, and email is the preferred method of communication. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are revolutionizing the internal operations of the corporation, while customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) applications are integrating partnerships with environmental entities. eBusiness success stories are touted in newspapers and airplane magazines, and Amazon.com is as well known as companies ten times as old. Despite some much publicized bumps in the road, the information age has arrived. However, there are long-term ethical and social implications of these business trends that may be overlooked, as they do not fit into the profit picture. In addition, ethical principles needed as guides in conducting ebusiness are lacking. This article
“Robin Hood” and Texas School District Borrowing Costs

The “Robin Hood” system of school financing in Texas takes property tax funds from wealthy school districts and gives them to poorer districts. This paper examines Permanent School Fund-insured, school district debt and discovers that under the “Robin Hood” system, Texas school districts with either Aa or A1 underlying credit ratings have higher borrowing costs than districts with lower ratings. Also, the borrowing costs of Texas school districts with underlying credit ratings of Aa and A1 are higher than those for non-Texas, privately insured school districts with the same ratings, while the borrowing costs of A and Baa-rated Texas school districts are lower.
Resolving Conflicts of Duty in Fiduciary Relationships

Introduction 76 I. Conflicts of Duty 80 A. The Problem 81 B. Approaches to Addressing Conflicts of Duty 86 1. Balancing the interests 86 2. Applying a property theory 89 3. Determining the actio libera in causa 91 4. Determining which interest was present first 94 5. Seeking the view of a neutral third party 96 II. Loyalty and Care 98 A. The Duty of Loyalty 99 1. The nature of the duty of loyalty 100 2. The duty of loyalty as a perfect duty 106 B. The Duty of Care 109 1. The nature of the duty of care 110 a. Positive duties 110 b. Open-ended duties 113 2. The duty of care as an imperfect duty 120 III. Resolving Conflicts of Duty 125 A. Attorneys and Clients 126
The Trouble with Categories: What Theory Can Teach Us about the Doctrine-Skills Divide

A traveler walking in the forest came across an extraordinary sight. On every tree, there was a target with an arrow dead center. Marveling at the marksmanship, the traveler followed the trail of bull’s-eyes in search of the archer. Eventually, he came across a small boy with a bow and arrow. The traveler asked the boy where he had learned such skillful archery. “Well,” the boy explained, “first I shoot at the tree. Then I draw a target around the arrow.” –Attributed to the Magid of Dubnow, described in A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life, and Mind1
Why “Good” Firms do Bad Things: The Effects of High Aspirations, High Expectations, and Prominence on the Incidence of Corporate Illegality

Recent high-profile corporate scandals involving prominent, high-performing firms cast doubt on assertions that the costs of getting caught decrease the likelihood such high performers will act illegally. We explain this paradox by using theories of loss aversion and hubris to examine a sample of S&P 500 manufacturers. Results demonstrate that both performance above internal aspirations and performance above external expectations increase the likelihood of illegal activities. The sample firms' prominence enhanced the effects of performance above expectations on the likelihood of illegal actions. Prominent and less prominent firms displayed different patterns of behavior when their performance failed to meet aspirations.
Economic Interests and Public Support for American Global Activism

This research note evaluates the effect of economic interests on public support for American global activism. Those who were relatively well-positioned to benefit economically from the American-backed postwar international order, mainly those with better access to human and financial capital, or who hailed from relatively export-oriented parts of the country, should be more likely to support it. An analysis of American National Election Study data on support for isolationism between 1956 and 2000 supports this line of argument. Individual self-interest is probably the most important pathway through which the international economy has influenced public opinion. However, the aggregate effects of exports and imports on respondents' home states have also made a difference. The effects of these economic interests are substantively large and fairly consistent over time.A previous version of this work was presented to the 2006 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. I would like to thank Michael A. Bailey, Larry Bartels, Matthew Baum, Adam Berinsky, and Kenneth Schultz for their comments. Any remaining errors and omissions are solely the responsibility of the author.
China's Banking Sector as the Foundation of Financial Reform

China is in the process of undertaking financial reform in many directions—introducing small private banks in the banking sector, promoting bond and equity finance, increasing exchange rate and capital account liberalization, enhancing financial regulation, and promoting the efficiency and scope of finance. While some foreign analysts have focused on the importance of liberalizing the exchange rate and capital account, we believe these aspects of reform take second priority to traditional banking reform, even though the ongoing process in practice is to slowly implement reforms in all areas at once.
CEO Reputation and Earnings Quality

We examine the association between CEO reputation (proxied by the extent of press coverage) and the quality of the firm’s earnings (proxied by two accruals-based measures). We test three explanations for an association between these constructs: the efficient contracting hypothesis suggests that reputed CEOs are associated with good earnings quality, while the rent extraction and matching explanations argue that reputed CEOs are associated with poor earnings quality. Using a simultaneous equations system to capture the endogeneity of the constructs, we find (consistent with the rent extraction and matching arguments) that more reputed CEOs are associated with poorer earnings quality than are less-reputed CEOs. Further tests find little support for the rent extraction hypothesis. We conclude that the reason more reputed CEOs are associated with poor earnings quality firms is that such firms require more talented managers and, therefore, employ more reputed CEOs.
When Do Governments Resort to Election Violence

When are governments most likely to use election violence, and what factors can mitigate government incentives to resort to violence? How do the dynamics of election violence differ in the pre- and post-election periods? The central argument of this article is that an incumbent's fear of losing power as the result of an election, as well as institutionalized constraints on the incumbent's decision-making powers, are pivotal in her decision to use election violence. While it may seem obvious to suggest that incumbents use election violence in an effort to fend off threats to their power, it is not obvious how to gauge these threats. Thus, a central objective of this article is to identify sources of information about the incumbent's popularity that can help predict the likelihood of election violence. The observable implications of this argument are tested using newly available cross-national evidence on elections, government use of pre- and post-election violence, and post-election protests from 1981 to 2004.
A Critical Assessment of the Theoretical and Empirical Research on German Works Councils

The article reviews the existing English- and German-speaking literature on the German works council. Three major research topics are discussed: the ontology and typologies of works councils; their current practice and transformation; and their economic outcomes. Although much research has been conducted on the internal functioning of the works council–management relationship, it is clear that we still know little about the determinants of different workplace relations and their outcomes. The article concludes by advocating a reviving research interest in the link between codetermination and political democracy.
Public goods and ethnic divisions

The authors present a model that links heterogeneity of preferences across ethnic groups in a city to the amount and type of public good the city supplies. Results show that the shares of spending on productive public goods - education, roads, sewers, and trash pickup _ in U.S. cities (metro areas/urban counties) are inversely related to the city's (metro area's/county's) ethnic fragmentation, even after controlling for other socioeconomic and demographic determinants. They conclude that the ethnic conflict is an important determinant of local public finances. In cities where ethnic groups are polarized, and where politicians have ethnic constituencies, the share of spending that goes to public goods is low. Their results are driven mainly by how white-majority cities react to varying minority-groups sizes. Voters choose lower public goods when a significant fraction of tax revenues collected from one ethnic group is used to provide public goods shared with other ethnic groups.
Reputation management and the disclosure of earnings forecasts

In this paper, managers differ from each other in terms of the probability that they are “forthcoming” (and disclose all the earnings forecasts they receive) or “strategic” (and disclose the earnings forecasts they receive only when it is in their self-interest to do so). Strategic managers choose whether to disclose their forecasts based on both the disclosure’s effects on their firms’ stock price and on their reputation among investors for being forthcoming. Our findings include: strategic managers can build a reputation for being forthcoming by disclosing unfavorable forecasts; managers’ incentive to build a reputation for being forthcoming may be so strong that they disclose even the most negative forecasts; as managers become more concerned about their reputation: (a) the current price of the firm in the event the manager makes no forecast increases; (b) managers who have a high probability of behaving strategically (as forthcoming) in the future issue forecasts more (less) often in the present.
On Brian P. West's Professionalism and Accounting Rules

This article analyzes the book Professionalism and Accounting Rules written by B. West, in an effort to demonstrate that accounting rules do not yield serviceable financial information and that expertise in interpreting and applying those rules does not substantiate a cognitive authority of the kind expected of a professional occupation. Accounting is an instrument that should guide actions in financial affairs in ways similar to those of instruments in motor vehicles and aircraft. If they fail to convey the measurements that operators need and think they are getting, avoidable crashes are bound to occur. Knowledge is described as justified true belief where truth requires correspondence with observable independent evidence as well as the internal consistency, or coherence, of a set of true statements. West sees generally accepted accounting principles as failing on both counts. These serious defects in our rule book are widely understood, as is the political basis for standards setters' failure to repair them. Another serious weakness in the rule book is the lack of consistency between accounting rules and the function of accounting.
Why I Teach (A Prescription for the Post-Tenure Blues)

In this brief essay from a collection of articles designed to demonstrate the scope and breadth of issues in legal pedagogy, Professor Michael Cassidy explores an important psychological event for many in the legal academy - the post-tenure blues. He offers reasons to keep doing what we do - teach with joy, inspiration and a sense of purpose for the next generation. He encourages us to think of our own reasons for what keeps us going in an occupation that many of us think is one of the best in the world.
Can Behavioral Economics Inform Our Understanding of Securities Arbitration

The classical economic approach assumes that parties take rational account of the effects of ADR on the likely disposition of their disputes and adopt predispute arbitration agreements (PDAAs) when they mutually benefit the parties. Accordingly, there should be a presumption in favor of enforcing PDAAs so long as the parties have entered into them knowingly and voluntarily, but there is generally no reason for the state to favor PDAAs. In contrast, critics of mandatory consumer arbitration believe that, as a practical reality, consumers cannot bargain over PDAAs and have little choice but to accept the deal offered by the business. In addition, relying on the behavioral economics literature, they assert that consumers typically are not as rational as classic economic theory supposes.The opposing positions in this debate over consumer arbitration have been well fleshed out in the academic literature. This paper will focus specifically on securities arbitration in the FINRA forum, where there are unique differences in the FINRA process that add complexity to this issue. I pose three questions regarding the staying power of PDAAs and explore whether classic or behavioral economic theory can help answer them. I then explore what would happen if the SEC or Congress prohibited PDAAs in customers' agreements. I conclude that if Congress or the SEC prohibits PDAAs in securities arbitration, the effect on the FINRA arbitration forum may not be beneficial to investors withsmall claims.
Discounting telephone service: An examination of participation in the Lifeline Assistance Program using panel data

Abstract We examine the Lifeline Assistance Program to consider reasons people forgo a program providing financial benefits. Using panel data we employ a feasible generalized least squares estimation in which the dependent variable is the logit of the Lifeline participation rate. Our unique database incorporates characteristics of the eligible rather than the general population. We find incumbent telecommunications providers’ enrollment efforts are statistically significant, and that home ownership and female head of household are associated with greater participation; being elderly and less educated are associated with less participation. Additionally, we find that an increase in the local phone rate is associated with increased participation. Our findings are important for regulatory policy surrounding the Lifeline program and universal service programs generally.
JUDICIAL MINDSETS: THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF IMPLICIT THEORIES AND THE LAW

This article introduces Dr. Carol Dweck’s seminal and significant line of psychological research on the phenomenon of implicit theories and draws on this research as a lens through which we might better understand judicial decision-making. In particular, the article focuses on the implications of two types of implicit theories – whether people believe that phenomena are static and fixed versus dynamic and malleable. By introducing this research, this article aims to forward a research agenda designed to examine how social, contextual, and situational forces influence judicial behavior. An entity theory reflects the mindset that phenomena are fixed and unlikely to change. An incremental theory reflects the mindset that phenomena are malleable and can be developed. Humans hold entity or incremental implicit theories about, for example, human nature, social institutions, and society. These theories, or “mindsets,” affect perception, judgment, and decision-making and strongly shape how people organize their experience in, knowledge about, and transactions in the world. When an entity theory is salient, people expect that phenomena are fixed, immutable and unchangeable. However, when an incremental theory is salient, humans believe that phenomena are malleable, changeable, and affected by contexts and situations. Whether one holds an entity theory versus an incremental theory is often driven by situations, contexts, and social influences: a form of situated cognition. Implicit theories affect how jurists find facts, draw inferences, and impose punishment. Research on implicit theories, moreover, can enrich our understanding of how jurists apply the common law, engage in statutory interpretation, and construe the Constitution, offering novel insight into a timeless legal debate: whether American law is static versus dynamic. The article sets forth a research agenda that will form a line of psychological experiments to examine these processes.
The non-problem of free will in forensic psychiatry and psychology.

This article demonstrates that there is no free will problem in forensic psychiatry by showing that free will or its lack is not a criterion for any legal doctrine and it is not an underlying general foundation for legal responsibility doctrines and practices. There is a genuine metaphysical free will problem, but the article explains why it is not relevant to forensic practice. Forensic practitioners are urged to avoid all usage of free will in their forensic thinking and work product because it is irrelevant and spawns confusion. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Impacts of the Affordable Care Act dependent coverage provision on health-related outcomes of young adults

The first major insurance expansion of the Affordable Care Act - a provision requiring insurers to allow dependents to remain on parents' health insurance until turning 26 - took effect in September 2010. We estimate this mandate's impacts on numerous outcomes related to health care access, preventive care utilization, risky behaviors, and self-assessed health. We estimate difference-in-differences models with 23-25 year olds as the treatment group and 27-29 year olds as the control group. For the full sample, the dependent coverage provision increased the probabilities of having health insurance, a primary care doctor, and excellent self-assessed health, while reducing body mass index. However, the mandate also increased risky drinking and did not lead to any significant increases in preventive care utilization. Subsample analyses reveal particularly large gains for men and college graduates.
A Score Based Approach to Wild Bootstrap Inference

We propose a generalization of the wild bootstrap of Wu (1986) and Liu (1988) based upon perturbing the scores of M-estimators. This “score bootstrap” procedure avoids recomputing the estimator in each bootstrap iteration, making it substantially less costly to compute than the conventional nonparametric bootstrap, particularly in complex nonlinear models. Despite this computational advantage, in the linear model, the score bootstrap studentized test statistic is equivalent to that of the conventional wild bootstrap up to order Op(n 1 ). We establish the consistency of the procedure for Wald and Lagrange Multiplier type tests and tests of moment restrictions for a wide class of M-estimators under clustering and potential misspecification. In an extensive series of Monte Carlo experiments we find that the performance of the score bootstrap is comparable to competing approaches despite its computational savings.
Toward Choice-Theoretic Foundations for Behavioral Welfare Economics

Interest in behavioral economics has grown in recent years, stimulated largely by accumulating evidence that the standard model of consumer decision making provides an inadequate, positive description of human behavior. Behavioral models are increasingly finding their way into policy evaluation, which inevitably involves welfare analysis. No consensus concerning the appropriate standards and criteria for behavioral welfare analysis has emerged yet. This paper summarizes our effort to develop a unified framework for behavioral welfare economics (for a detailed discussion see Bernheim and Rangel 2007) — one that can be viewed as a natural extension of standard welfare economics. Standard welfare analysis is based on choice, not on utility or preferences. In its simplest form, it instructs the planner to respect the choices an individual would make for himself. The guiding normative principle is an extension of the libertarian deference to freedom of choice, which takes the view that it is better to give a person the thing he would choose for himself rather than something that someone else would choose for him. We show that it is possible to extend the standard choice-theoretic approach to welfare analysis to situations where individuals make inconsistent choices, which are prevalent in behavioral economics.
Chevron Deference, the Rule of Law, and Presidential Influence in the Administrative State

Adrian Vermeule has accurately observed that ―[t]he administrative state is the central and unavoidable topic of modern constitutional theorizing.‖1 So it is also with administrative law theorizing. The topic is inevitably central because ―administrative state‖ describes the government under which we live. The topic is unavoidable for two reasons. First, the combination of regulatory and enforcement authority in the same hands challenges Americans‘ civics-book understanding of the separation of powers. Despite the constitutional vesting of legislative power in Congress, ―the citizen confronting thousands of pages of regulations—promulgated by an agency directed by Congress to regulate, say, in the public interest‘— can perhaps be excused for thinking that it is the agency really doing the legislating.‖2 Second, in the face of Americans‘ oft-voiced aspiration for a government of laws, the bureaucracy appears to be awash in discretion. This discretion is arguably controlled only at the margins by a federal judiciary that sanctions the passing of policymaking authority to administrative agencies under a rarely enforced nondelegation doctrine.3 For both reasons, the legitimacy of the administrative state is always a topic ripe for debate. To those anxious about the administrative state‘s legitimacy, the U.S. Supreme Court‘s now-iconic Chevron4 decision could well be troubling. Especially if read literally, its famous two-step framework for judicial review of agency legal interpretation affords administrative agencies considerable deference in imputing meaning to Congress‘s enactments. Federal courts are to defer to any ―permissible‖ interpretation of the law in
The Rescue, Stewardship, and Return of the Lysi Frescoes by the Menil Foundation

The return of works of art by museums to nations of origin has generated considerable scholarly response, yet there has been little engagement with the potential role museums could have as responsible stewards for works of art that are at risk. One important example can be seen in the actions of the Menil Foundation. The Menil, with the permission of the Church of Cyprus, conserved a series of frescoes and created a purpose-built gallery on the Menil campus in Houston to safely house them. It was a novel solution to the problems caused by the situation in Cyprus. Acquiring and saving these thirteenth century frescoes gives an important template for the rescue and conservation of works of art that are at risk, but also exposes similarly-situated actors to the moral dilemma of purchasing looted art with the consent of the original owner.
The political economy of insecure property rights: insights from the Kingdom of Sicily

How did the evolution of the rule of law become stunted in Sicily during the 19th century? The work of economist Yoram Barzel, particularly his property-rights approach to understanding the political economy of state formation, is uniquely suited to understanding the failure of Italy's unification process to secure the rule of law in Sicily during the 19th century. This failure can be explained by a lack of a credible commitment to the rule of law in the state formation process. I argue that this lack of credible commitment manifested itself in the abolition of previously existing parliamentary institutions as an independent collective action mechanism, as well as prior constitutional agreements that existed in the Kingdom of Sicily. The resulting uncertainty over the security and legal definition of property rights over land raised the transaction costs of competing for resources through productive specialization and market exchange. In turn, it reduced the relative costs of competition for land ownership and the use of enforcement through other means, such as rent seeking or organized crime.
A tale of two uncertainties

Abstract Consistent with Bayesian learning models, I find that two types of uncertainty—market uncertainty and firm-signal uncertainty—have opposite effects on investors’ learning from new information. I provide novel evidence that investor learning increases with the level of prior market uncertainty and decreases with firm-signal uncertainty (i.e., signal precision). Specifically, I find that the stock price response to earnings announcements increases with market volatility and decreases with earnings volatility. The results indicate that investor learning increases linearly with market uncertainty and decreases nonlinearly with firm-signal uncertainty. The effect of market uncertainty is stronger for large firms, firms with more market information in their returns, and firms with more institutional ownership.
THE LIBERTY OF PROGRESS: INCREASING RETURNS, INSTITUTIONS, AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP

This essay argues that liberty generates progress via the generalized increasing returns to commercial activity. These increasing returns to expanding commercial activity follow from the gradual, cumulative process of institutionalizing particular liberties. As a society adopts an institutional framework from accumulated liberties, there is greater scope for productive specialization and social cooperation under the division of labor. Greater scope for market exchange also delivers social norms and commercial values that tolerate experimentation and innovation. Taken together, the accumulation and institutionalization of liberties gives rise to generalized increasing returns to commercial activity. It is through this cumulative process that the creative powers of a free civilization are unleashed, delivering societies from poverty and subjugation.