cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Fertility Decline and Missing Women

Abstract The desire for smaller families is conjectured as one reason the male-to-female sex ratio has increased with economic development in several countries. Families that strongly want at least one son are less likely to obtain him by chance at low fertility, which could increase their use of sex-selective abortion. This paper quantifies the relationship between desired fertility and the sex ratio in India by eliciting sex composition preferences at specified fertility levels. I find that the desired sex ratio increases sharply as fertility falls and that fertility decline explains one third to one half of India's recent sex ratio increase. (JEL I21, J13, J16, O15, O18)
Evaluating the Role of Brown vs. Board of Education in School Equalization, Desegregation, and the Income of African Americans

The public profile of the Brown v. Board of Education decision tends to overshadow the well-established fact that racial disparities in school resources in the South began narrowing 20 years before the Brown decision and that school desegregation did not begin on a large scale in the Deep South until ten years after the Brown decision. We instead view Brown as a highly visible marker of public policy?s mid-century reversal on matters of race. When we examine the labor market outcomes of male workers in 1990, we find that southern-born blacks who would have finished their schooling just before effective desegregation occurred in the South fared poorly compared to southern-born blacks who followed behind them in school by just a few years, relative to northern-born blacks in same age cohorts.
Real Estate Mutual Funds: Performance and Persistence

This study analyses the performance of real estate mutual funds for 1993 through 2001 period. The results indicate that real estate mutual funds do not provide positive abnormal performance on aver...
Prenatal Screening Policy in International Perspective: Lessons from Israel, Cyprus, Taiwan, China, and Singapore

In Heredity and Hope, historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan defends modem genetic testing – the new genetics, by distinguishing it from twentieth century eugenics – the old genetics. Cowan maintains that although we rightly recoil from the old genetics, with its coercive methods and hateful motives, we should embrace the new genetics to enhance reproductive choice and promote the well-being of our offspring. This Book Review argues that the analogy between the old and new genetics can be less readily cast aside than Cowan appreciates. I argue that Cowan overlooks a moral similarity between the old genetics and new genetics: namely, whatever the differences between the means by which each is carried out, both are biological approaches to solve what are in large part social ills. I examine two ways in which the new genetics, no less than the old, might undermine social equality for people with disabilities. First, the new genetics threatens to express demeaning judgments about the lives of persons with disabilities. Second, a tendency to treat disabilities as predominantly genetic problems worthy of reproductive prevention could weaken our collective willingness to welcome into the world those whose abilities fail to meet the demands of modern society. My argument draws on comparisons among prenatal screening policy in the United States to contemporary policies from across Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean.
The Yield Curve and Real Activity

This paper attempts to formalize the link between the yield curve and real economic activity. A closed-form formula for the term structure of interest rates is derived. The paper then documents the use of bond market data for predicting GDP growth in the G-7 industrial countries. The results suggest that a simple measure of the slope of the yield curve, namely the yield spread, serves as a good predictor of future economic growth. The out-of-sample forecasting performance of the yield spread compares favorably with that of the alternative stock price-based model and a univariate time series (ARMA) model.
Asset accumulation and labor force participation of disability insurance applicants

Abstract This paper provides empirical evidence of the existence of forward-looking asset-accumulation behavior among disability-insurance applicants, previously examined only in the theoretical literature. Using panel data from the RAND Health and Retirement Study, I show that rejected applicants for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) possess significantly more assets than accepted applicants immediately prior to application and exhibit lower attachment to the labor force. These empirical results are consistent with the theoretical prediction in Diamond and Mirrlees (1978) and Golosov and Tsyvinski (2006) that certain individuals with high unwillingness to work maximize utility by planning in advance for their future disability insurance application. Because the existing empirical literature on disability insurance does not account for this intertemporal channel, it may underestimate the total work-disincentive effect of SSDI.
An Empirical Perspective on Medicaid as Social Insurance

This paper is a contribution to the symposium entitled Scalpel to Gavel: Exploring the Modern State of Health Law. This essay quantifies and explores the central role Medicaid now plays in our health insurance system. For its first forty-nine years, Medicaid covered less than half of the nation’s poor. Today, one in five Americans have Medicaid coverage during the course of a year, and that number soon will increase to one in four given the insurance expansions enacted through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Medicaid now effectively functions as social insurance for many of its enrollees. In this essay, we begin to explore how Medicaid, after the ACA, metamorphoses from exclusion and limitations in access and benefits to a form of social insurance that implicates theories of social justice. The social justice aspect of universality provides an important lens for understanding the numbers, both in terms of the states that are expanding and the states that so far are opting out. States that refuse to expand their Medicaid programs are denying millions of Americans the benefit of a precious legal entitlement. It is essential that states understand the power — and the potential — of this evolving social program and its newfound status as a vehicle of social insurance.
Probabilistic Goods: A Creative Way of Selling Products and Services

This paper defines a unique type of product or service offering, termed probabilistic goods, and analyzes a novel selling strategy, termed probabilistic selling (PS). A probabilistic good is not a concrete product or service but an offer involving a probability of getting any one of a set of multiple distinct items. Under the probabilistic selling strategy, a multi-item seller creates probabilistic goods using the existing distinct products or services and offers such probabilistic goods as additional purchase choices. The probabilistic selling strategy allows sellers to benefit from introducing a new type of buyer uncertainty, i.e., uncertainty in product assignments. First, introducing such uncertainty enables sellers to create a “virtual” product or service (i.e., probabilistic good), which opens up a creative way to segment a market. We find that the probabilistic selling strategy is a general marketing tool that has the potential to benefit sellers in many different industries. Second, this paper shows that creating buyer uncertainty in product assignments is a new way for sellers to deal with their own market uncertainty. We illustrate two such benefits: (a) offering probabilistic goods can reduce the seller's information disadvantage and lessen the negative effect of demand uncertainty on profit, and (b) offering probabilistic goods can solve the mismatch between capacity and demand and enhance efficiency. Emerging technology is creating exciting (previously unfeasible) opportunities to implement PS and to obtain these many advantages.
Activists Vote Twice

Judicial activism has a bipolar press. It is widely extolled, and widely decried, often by the same people. Academic commentators see it as pervasive, the de facto norm in judicial determinations. Rarely, however, do they accept judicial activism with detached equanimity. More often, when a high-profile decision cuts against their preferential grain, they denounce it; and when it promises to advance their favored vision of the future, they wax rhapsodic. Critics of judicial activism assail it as a corruption of the judicial function, a substitution of judicial will for the outcome of political consensus, hence antimajoritarian and undemocratic. A refrain during the Warren era was that the courts had usurped other functions of government: they were running school systems, apportioning political districts, fine-tuning law enforcement down to the very words read to suspects, abetting the murder of innocent babies, and more. With shifting electoral tides and the alea of judicial mortality, the tune changed, and was sung by a new chorus. In recent years, the courts have been charged with "conservative activism." This charge impounds the additional vice of hypocrisy, because among the judges viewed as perpetrators of conservative activism are once and present proponents of judicial restraint. What follow are some thoughts on judicial activism. To give them focus, I will consider two recent Supreme Court decisions. One of them, Bush v Gore, 531 US 98 (2000), was immediately identified as an imperious stroke and demonized as judicial power run riot. The case attracted the full battery of epithets often directed at judicial activism. A "judicial coup," "corrupt decision," are two that come to mind. A dissenting Justice wrote that the decision would imperil the "Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law" (p 129). The other decision, Clinton v Jones, 520 US 681 (199 7), raised few hackles on this score. It was noticed, to be sure, because the appellant had a high public profile, but not especially as an instance of judicial overreaching.
Oil and Water: Easements and the Environment

The age of American environmentalism has arrived. Surveys show widespread public support for preservation policies, open spaces, and natural parks, while reflecting popular disdain for new development of wild lands. Federal and state governments have reacted to public sentiment by adding acreage to national preserves, increasing the budget for agencies tasked with preservation, and by enacting and enforcing pollution laws and regulations. Despite popular support and government-initiated efforts, forty million acres of land – larger than the state of Florida – were newly developed between 1992 and 2007. This paper addresses the historic and deeply rooted pro-development policy informing American property law. While critical in the country’s infancy, encouraging land use and development through legal constructs is less important and arguably detrimental now. Long-standing legal constructs encourage land use and as a result discourage conservation. Our need to develop wide swaths of wild land has changed; our common law has not. One area of property law, easements, fully embraces pro-development policies. The legal principles defining express easements, implied easements by necessity, easements by implied grant, and prescriptive easements champion the development of land while disfavoring parties that allow land to remain “idle.” The pro-development policy undergirding common law property tenets lacks a conservation counterbalance. This paper details several approaches that might curb pro-development bias in easement law.
Incomplete Contracts and Public Ownership: Remarks, and an Application to Public‐Private Partnerships*

The question of what should determine the boundaries between public and private firms in an advanced capitalist economy is a highly topical one. In this paper I discuss some recent theoretical thinking on this issue. I divide the paper into two parts. First, I make some general remarks about the relationship between the theoretical literature on privatisation and incomplete contracting theories of the firm. Second, I use some of the ideas from this literature to develop a very preliminary model of public-private partnerships.
Guarding Against False Positives in Qualitative Comparative Analysis

The various methodological techniques that fall under the umbrella description of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) are increasingly popular for modeling causal complexity and necessary or sufficient conditions in medium-N settings. Because QCA methods are not designed as statistical techniques, however, there is no way to assess the probability that the patterns they uncover are the result of chance. Moreover, the implications of the multiple hypothesis tests inherent in these techniques for the false positive rate of the results are not widely understood. This article fills both gaps by tailoring a simple permutation test to the needs of QCA users and adjusting the Type I error rate of the test to take into account the multiple hypothesis tests inherent in QCA. An empirical application — a reexamination of a study of protest-movement success in the Arab Spring — highlights the need for such a test by showing that even very strong QCA results may plausibly be the result of chance.
Exporting versus Direct Investment under Local Sourcing

This paper examines a setting where foreign direct investment (FDI) shifts demand for an intermediate good from the source to the host country. A do- mestic and a foreign firm choose between exports or FDI, always sourcing the in- termediate locally. We show that by increasing the price of the intermediate, out- ward FDI can act as a cost-raising strategy for a firm and that attracting FDI can raise host country welfare. Two-way FDI is the equilibrium when the countries have similar market sizes. However, such FDI reduces global welfare relative to two-way exporting since it eliminates indirect competition between suppliers. JEL no. F12, F13, F23, L13
A simple proof of functional Itô’s lemma for semimartingales with an application

Abstract The Ito formula was extended recently by Dupire (2009) to functionals of paths of continuous semimartingales, and by Cont and Fournie (2010a) to functionals of paths of RCLL semimartingales. In contrast to the traditional formula that applies to functions of the current value of a process, these extensions apply to functionals of the history of a process. By modifying Dupire’s setup we develop new proofs for both the continuous case and the more general RCLL case that are much simpler. We also examine an application to optimal control.
Empty voting and the efficiency of corporate governance.

Abstract We model corporate voting outcomes when an informed trader, such as a hedge fund, can establish separate positions in a firm's shares and votes (empty voting). The positions are separated by borrowing shares on the record date, hedging economic exposure, or trading between record and voting dates. We find that the trader's presence can improve efficiency overall despite the fact that it sometimes ends up selling to a net short position and then voting to decrease firm value. An efficiency improvement is likely if other shareholders’ votes are not highly correlated with the correct decision or if it is relatively expensive to separate votes from shares on the record date. On the other hand, empty voting will tend to decrease efficiency if it is relatively inexpensive to separate votes from shares and other shareholders are likely to vote the right way.
Gap opening beyond dead zones by photoevaporation

We propose a new hypothesis for the origin of protoplanetary discs with large inner holes (or gaps), so-called transition discs. Our gas disc model takes into account layered accretion, in which poorly ionized low-viscosity dead zones are sandwiched by high-viscosity surface layers, and photoevaporative winds induced by X-rays from the central stars. We find that a gap opens at a radius outside a dead zone, if the mass-loss rate due to photoevaporative winds exceeds the mass accretion rate in the dead zone region. Since the dead zone survives even after the gap opens, mass accretion on to the central star continues for a long time. This model can reproduce large gap sizes and high mass accretion rates seen in observed transition discs.
Accounting Fundamentals and Systematic Risk: Corporate Failure over the Business Cycle

In this paper, we use accounting fundamentals to measure systematic risk of distress. Our main testable prediction-that this risk increases with the probability of recessionary failure, P(R|F)-is b...
Filibuster Change and Judicial Appointments

In this Article, we consider the effects of filibuster change on judicial appointments, judicial voting, and opinion drafting. The filibuster effectively empowers a minority of forty-one Senators by requiring sixty votes to break off debate on a nomination. We develop a game-theoretic model that explains that the elimination of the filibuster changed the relevant “pivotal Senator” whose support was necessary to secure a nomination. Freed of the power of the minority of Senators, Presidents ought to exercise freer rein in naming judicial nominees closer to their preferred ideology. Moreover, sitting judges who seek elevation to a higher court ought to alter their “signal” that they would be good candidates to match the preferences of the newly-relevant pivotal Senator. To test our hypotheses empirically, we use the 2013 elimination of the filibuster in the U.S. Senate for lower federal court judicial nominations as an exogenous shock. We explore how the change in the filibuster rule affected the characteristics of judges President Obama nominated to the federal courts. We find statistically-significant shifts in the background characteristics of judges confirmed to the federal courts of appeals after the elimination of the filibuster. Compared to the earlier Obama appointees, these judges were more likely to be female, slightly younger, and to have previously clerked for a liberal judges, but less likely to be non-white. In addition, we find that there was a statistically-significant increase in the confirmation of judges with liberal ideologies, as measured by their common space campaign finance scores. These liberal ideologies mapped onto actual votes in politically-charged cases. Compared to Obama judges confirmed before the rule change, the judges were more likely to cast pro-choice votes in abortion cases and anti-death penalty votes in death penalty cases. We also find evidence that the elimination of the filibuster had a polarizing effect on sitting federal district judges, especially those with a greater chance of promotion to the courts of appeals. Using computational content analysis, we find that, after the change in the filibuster rule, Democratic judges were more likely to use politically-charged words signaling their very liberal ideological positions in abortion opinions and Republican judges were more likely to use words signaling their conservative views. These findings are useful in assessing the desirability of restoring the judicial filibuster, as well as to the debate over the retention of the legislative filibuster.
The 2011 Diane Sanger Memorial Lecture Protecting Investors in Securitization Transactions: Does Dodd–Frank Help, or Hurt?

Securitization has been criticized because of its role in the recent financial crisis. Securitization refers to a category of financing transactions in which companies sell rights to payment under mortgage loans, accounts receivable, lease rentals, and other types of income-producing financial assets to a trust or other special-purpose vehicle (an “SPV,” sometimes interchangeably called a special-purpose entity or SPE). The goal is to separate these assets from the risks generally associated with the company—usually called the “originator” to distinguish it from the SPV. The originator then can use these assets, held by the SPV, to raise funds in the capital markets at a lower cost than if it had borrowed the funds. Securitization accomplishes this cost saving for two reasons. First, by raising funds without having to borrow from a bank or other financial intermediary, the originator avoids the intermediary’s profit mark-up. This approach, called “disintermediation,” is similar to buying wholesale (rather than retail). Second, the interest rate payable on the securities issued by an SPV is ordinarily lower than the interest rate payable on corporate securities issued directly by the originator. This interest-rate
The Effects of Irreversibility and Uncertainty on Capital Accumulation

Abstract Irreversibility and uncertainty increase the user cost of capital which tends to reduce the capital stock. Working in the opposite direction is a hangover effect, which arises because irreversibility prevents the firm from selling capital even when the marginal revenue product of capital is low. Neither the user cost effect nor the hangover effect dominates globally, so that irreversibility may increase or decrease capital accumulation. Furthermore, an increase in uncertainty can either increase or decrease the long-run capital stock under irreversibility relative to that under reversibility. Other effects that we consider, however, have unambiguous effects on long-run capital accumulation.
Policies for green design

Abstract A simple general equilibrium model is used to analyze disposal-content fees, subsidies for recyclable designs, unit-pricing of household disposal, deposit-refund systems, and manufacturer “take-back” requirements. Firms use primary and recycled inputs to produce output that has two “attributes”: packaging per unit output, and recyclability. If households pay the social cost of disposal, then they send the right signals to producers to reduce packaging and to design products that can more easily be recycled. If garbage is collected for free, then socially optimum attributes can still be achieved by a tax on producers' use of packaging and subsidy to recyclable designs.
Quantum Hall physics = noncommutative field theory

In this note, we study a matrix-regularized version of non-commutative U(1) Chern-Simons theory proposed recently by Polychronakos. We determine a complete minimal basis of exact wavefunctions for the theory at arbitrary level k and rank N. We show that these have a form highly reminiscent of Laughlin-type wavefunctions describing excitations of a quantum Hall droplet composed of N electrons at filling fraction 1/k, and demonstrate explicitly that the energy levels and degeneracies of the two theories are identical. Thus, at the level of the Hilbert space, finite matrix Chern-Simons theory is identical to the theory of composite fermions in the lowest Landau level, believed to provide an accurate description of the filling fraction 1/k fractional quantum Hall state. In the large N limit, this provides further evidence that level k noncommutative U(1) Chern-Simons theory is equivalent to the Laughlin theory of the filling fraction 1/k quantum Hall fluid, as conjectured recently by Susskind.
Reaching Goals by a deadline: digital options and continuous-time active portfolio management

We study a variety of optimal investment problems for objectives related to attaining goals by a fixed terminal time. We start by finding the policy that maximizes the probability of reaching a given wealth level by a given fixed terminal time ,f or the case where an investor can allocate his wealth at any time between n + 1 investment opportunities: n risky stocks, as well as a risk-free asset that has a positive return. This generalizes results recently obtained by Kulldorff and Heath for the case of a single investment opportunity. We then use this to solve related problems for cases where the investor has an external source of income, and where the investor is interested solely in beating the return of a given stochastic benchmark, as is sometimes the case in institutional money management. One of the benchmarks we consider for this last problem is that of the return of the optimal growth policy, for which the resulting controlled process is a supermartingale. Nevertheless, we still find an optimal strategy. For the general case, we provide a thorough analysis of the optimal strategy, and obtain new insights into the behavior of the optimal policy. For one special case, namely that of a single stock with constant coefficients, the optimal policy is independent of the underlying drift. We explain this by exhibiting a correspondence between the probability maximizing results and the pricing and hedging of a particular derivative security, known as a digital or binary option. In fact, we show that for this case, the optimal policy to maximize the probability of reaching a given value of wealth by a predetermined time is equivalent to simply buying a European digital option with a particular strike price and payoff. A similar result holds for the general case, but with the stock replaced by a particular (index) portfolio, namely the optimal growth or log-optimal portfolio.
How good is the quenched approximation of QCD

The quenched approximation for QCD is, at present and in the foreseeable future, unavoidable in lattice calculations with realistic choices of the lattice spacing, volume and quark masses. In this talk, I review an analytic study of the effects of quenching based on chiral perturbation theory. Quenched chiral perturbation theory leads to quantitative insight on the difference between quenched and unquenched QCD, and reveals clearly some of the diseases which are expected to plague quenched QCD.
The Effects of the Lubanga Case on Understanding and Preventing Child Soldiering

On March 14, 2012, a trial chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) convicted Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, a rebel leader from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for child-soldier-related crimes. Some months later, Lubanga was sentenced to a prison term of fourteen years. On August 7, 2012, an ICC trial chamber issued its decision regarding the principles and procedures to be applied to reparations in the Lubanga case. This Article unpacks the relationships between the Lubanga proceedings and how the international community conceptualizes, and strives to prevent, child soldiering. This Article contends that the Lubanga proceedings reinforce, and incubate, a stylized portrayal of the child soldier as a faultless passive victim, psychologically devastated, and irreparably damaged. Although arguably facilitating criminal convictions of adult recruiters, these portrayals trigger a variety of troublesome externalities when it comes to the reintegration and rehabilitation of the former child soldiers and other youth (and adults) affected by conflict. This Article proceeds through several steps. First, it defines the term child soldier. Second, and drawing from the author’s prior work, it discusses how child soldiers are portrayed within the international legal imagination. Third, the on-the-ground realities of child soldiering are set out and contrasted with the prevailing imagery. The discussion, fourthly, then moves to a detailed analysis of the Lubanga trial and sentencing judgments, which are placed within broader discursive and socio-legal contexts. The Article concludes with discussion of the Lubanga reparations decision.
Target leverage and the costs of issuing seasoned equity

In this paper, I examine the relation between the direct costs of issuing seasoned equity (SEO gross spreads) and the change in deviation of firms’ leverage ratios from their estimated targets following SEOs. If underwriters have bargaining power vis-a-vis issuing firms in setting SEO fees and if the tradeoff theory of capital structure holds, then SEO fees should be negatively related to the post-SEO change in absolute deviation of firms’ leverage ratios from targets. I find that this relation is indeed negative and economically and statistically significant, especially in cases in which underwriters have relatively high bargaining power, suggesting that one of the important determinants of SEO fees is the change in firms’ absolute deviations from their target leverage as a result of issuing seasoned equity, and that underwriters are able to capture part of the value created by firms moving towards their leverage targets.
Can the World Cut Poverty in Half? How Policy Reform and Effective Aid Can Meet International Development Goals

Abstract Poverty in the developing world will decline by about one-half by 2015 if the trends of the 1990s persist. Most of this poverty reduction will occur in Asia, however, while poverty will decline only slightly in Africa. Effective aid could make a contribution to greater poverty reduction in lagging regions. Even more potent would be significant policy reform in these countries. We develop a model of efficient aid in which flows respond to policy improvements that create a better environment for poverty reduction and effective aid. We investigate scenarios of policy reform and efficient aid that point the way to how the world can cut poverty in half in every major region.
Get Out the Vote-by-Mail? A Randomized Field Experiment Testing the Effect of Mobilization in Traditional and Vote-by-Mail Precincts:

This study extends previous field experimental research on turnout by considering how institutional context moderates the effect of mobilization. Taking advantage of a setting in which some registrants are assigned to vote by mail, the authors find that a door-to-door mobilization campaign has a larger effect on the participation of those who vote at polling places than on registrants assigned to cast mail ballots, but only among individuals whose voting behavior is most likely to be shaped by extrinsic social rewards. The authors conclude that there may be payoff for election reform strategies that tap into voting’s social rewards.
Socially Optimal Mistakes? Debiasing COVID-19 Mortality Risk Perceptions and Prosocial Behavior

Abstract The perception of risk affects how people behave during crises. We conduct a series of experiments to explore how people form COVID-19 mortality risk beliefs and the implications for prosocial behavior. We first document that people overestimate their own risk and that of young people, while underestimating the risk old people face. We show that the availability heuristic contributes to these biased beliefs. Using information about the actual risk to debias people’s own risk perception does not affect donations to the Centers for Disease Control but does decrease the amount of time invested in learning how to protect older people. This constitutes a debiasing social dilemma. Additionally providing information on the risk for the elderly, however, counteracts these negative effects. Importantly, debiasing seems to operate through the subjective categorization of and emotional response to new information.
Past and Present Proposed Amendments to the United States Constitution Regarding Marriage

Proposals to amend the Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriages were recently actively discussed in the U.S. Senate and are likely to receive attention in the House before the year's end. This article situates arguments for these proposals within the history of attempts to amend the Constitution related to marriage by providing the first detailed, synthetic analysis of such previously proposed amendments. This examination reveals 133 previously proposed amendments to the Constitution relating to marriage, consisting primarily of proposals to prohibit interracial marriage, proposals to prohibit polygamy, and proposals to empower Congress to make uniform laws concerning marriage and divorce. By tracing the arguments made in support of these amendments, this article reveals a strong resonance between prior attempts to constitutionalize aspects of the institution of marriage and current proposed amendments. The article also argues that, in hindsight, the previously proposed amendments were not necessary because state and federal legislatures and courts were able to address problems relating to marriage without amending the Constitution and without destabilizing the delicate balance of power between states and the federal government. Against this background, the article concludes that current proposals to amend the Constitution are similarly neither necessary nor wise.
India: The use of temporary trade barriers

While India did not use antidumping, safeguards, and countervailing measures (temporary trade barriers) prior to 1992, it subsequently came to become the WTO system’s dominant user of those policies. Using detailed product-level data from the World Banks’ Temporary Trade Barriers Database from 1992-2009, we first study India’s use of temporary trade barriers over time, and across products, sectors and targeted countries, to then establish changes in previous patterns that may have taken place during the global economic crisis of 2008-2009. We find that there has been an increase in the stock of products subject to antidumping measures during 1992-2009. Moreover, the percentage of tariff line products affected by an antidumping measure increased during the recent global recession, from 1.82% in 2007 to 4.03% in 2009, and the evidence suggests that such increase is larger than would be predicted by the observed pre-crisis trend. We also find a shift in the incidence of India’s antidumping policy towards China and other developing countries in recent years. Furthermore, another dimension along which India’s antidumping protection increased during 2008-9 was via the failure to remove policies that were imposed prior to the global economic crisis and were supposed to be terminated during the crisis under the five-year ‘Sunset Review’ limit. There was also an increase in India’s use of global safeguard investigations as well as Chinaspecific safeguards during the global economic crisis. However, the process of tariff liberalisation continued during such period, and it is possible that India’s use of temporary trade barriers might have helped it move in that direction.
The Value of Disappearing Beaches: A hedonic pricing model with endogenous beach width

Abstract Beach nourishment is a policy used to rebuild eroding beaches with sand dredged from other locations. Previous studies indicate that beach width positively affects coastal property values, but these studies ignore the dynamic features of beaches and the feedback that nourishment has on shoreline retreat. We correct for the resulting attenuation and endogeneity bias in a hedonic property value model by instrumenting for beach width using spatially varying coastal geological features. We find that the beach width coefficient is nearly five times larger than the OLS estimate, suggesting that beach width is a much larger portion of property value than previously thought. We use the empirical results to parameterize a dynamic optimization model of beach nourishment decisions and show that the predicted interval between nourishment projects is closer to what we observe in the data when we use the estimate from the instrumental variables model rather than OLS. As coastal communities adapt to climate change, we find that the long-term net value of coastal residential property can fall by as much as 52% when erosion rate triples and cost of nourishment sand quadruples.
Arbitration of Statutory Claims in the Unionized Workplace: Is Bargaining with the Union Required?

Employers are increasingly seeking to compel employees to arbitrate, rather than litigate, statutory claims. Some employers have sought judicial dismissal of statutory discrimination claims on the basis that employees must arbitrate such claims under their collective bargaining agreements. The Supreme Court has not decided whether the union can waive the employee's right to litigate a statutory claim, but the Court did hold in 1998 that any such waiver must be clear and unequivocal. This paper explores the intimately related question of whether such waivers are mandatory subjects of bargaining under the National Labor Relations Act. If they are, then employers can insist to impasse on their inclusion in the collective bargaining agreement. If not, then the union is not required to bargain about waivers and can resist their incorporation in the agreement. The paper argues that the waivers are not mandatory subjects of bargaining because they condition the statutory right to bargain on waiver of other rights, i.e. the right to a judicial forum for litigation of a statutory claim. This conclusion follows from NLRB decisions which prohibit both unions and employers from conditioning bargaining on general releases of employee claims or settlement of unfair labor practice charges or lawsuits. Although the waiver of the right to a judicial forum is not a mandatory subject of bargaining, all other aspects of arbitration of statutory claims, such as the arbitration process, come within the definition of mandatory bargaining subjects and thus, bargaining is required. This determination that waivers are not a mandatory bargaining subject does not mandate the conclusion that the employer can condition employment of the employees on individual waivers of their rights, however, for the waivers are so intertwined with mandatory bargaining subjects that permitting the employer to deal directly with the employees decollectivizes the employment relationship.
THE MULTIPRODUCT DEPOSITORY FIRM, INTEREST‐BEARING TRANSACTION BALANCES, INTEREST‐BEARING RESERVES, AND UNCERTAINTY

In this paper a model of depository firm behavior is developed in which the depository institution acts as a multiple product producer. The multi-product model is an application of the general theory of value to the particular case of depository firms. It generalizes the theory of bank behavior to include production and cost aspects of banking activity as well as its financial aspects and reconciles the rivaling intermediary and firm-theoretic views on depository institutions. By so doing, it bridges the gap between models which treat depository firms as mere portfolio holders and those which analyze the check clearance function in isolation. Risk aversion, production function constraint, jointness, and multiple sources of uncertainty are simultaneously introduced. The model is used to analyze the effects of interest payment on transaction balances, interest payment on reserves of depository institutions by the Central bank, and the Central bank policy swings.
How Presidents Shape Their Party's Reputation and Prospects: New Evidence

Previous work has demonstrated presidents have a powerful influence on their party's popularity, reputation for competence, perceived ideological leanings, and attractiveness as an object of personal identification. This article extends the analysis by examining (1) how presidents shape popular opinions of congressional parties and leaders, (2) how evaluations of the president's handling of specific policy areas affect his party's reputation for effectiveness in handing these domains, (3) how presidents affect perceptions of their party's sympathy for ordinary people, (4) how presidents influence generic preferences for House candidates and party control of Congress as measured in surveys between elections, and (5) how presidents affect the partisan leanings of the generation that comes of political age during their administrations. The evidence confirms that popular reactions to presidents have both immediate and longer-term consequences for how his party and, to a lesser extent, the rival party are regarded by the American people.
Business cycle, storage, and energy prices

Abstract This study examines the effect of the state of the economy and inventory on interest-adjusted bases and expected returns for five energy commodities. We find that interest-adjusted bases and returns have a business cycle pattern. Consistent with the theory of storage, demand shocks near business cycle peaks generate negative interest-adjusted bases and positive returns. In recessions, the bases become positive, and the average returns are negative. Our regression results also show that the interest-adjusted bases of energy commodities are counter-cyclical and the expected returns are pro-cyclical. For petroleum commodities, inventory has a significant effect on interest-adjusted bases at low levels of inventory, whereas at high inventory levels the effect of inventory on the bases is weak. Finally, we find that the bases and economic conditions predict spot returns in energy commodity markets.
What if there are no ‘best practices’?

Developing persuasive and consistent models of educational performance has proved elusive. Existing modelling suggests no clear relationship between resources and student performance. This mirrors observed policy outcomes. A possible explanation is that the achievement process is a complicated interactive one such that simple linear additive formulations break down. This analysis presents a stylized model of achievement where unmeasured teacher quality interacts with both resources and specific educational programs. Standard econometric analyses then replicate the aggregate findings in the literature. A policy implication is that finding ‘best practices’ may fail without recognition of the fundamental interactions.
Skating with Donovan: Thoughts on Librarianship As a Profession

James M. Donovan's article: "Skating on Thin Intermedi- ation: Can Libraries Survive?" argues that librarians place more emphasis than they might on providing service to library users at a time when infor- mation seekers are relying less on intermediaries, and that over-emphasizing service to the detriment of other values diminishes the status of librarianship as a profession. The article presents two contrasting models of librarianship. This article discusses Donovan's models and comments on the continuing importance of the service model to librarianship.
Increasing web survey response rates in innovation research: An experimental study of static and dynamic contact design features

Abstract Web surveys have become increasingly central to innovation research but often suffer from low response rates. Based on a cost–benefits framework and the explicit consideration of heterogeneity across respondents, we consider the effects of key contact design features such as personalization, incentives, and the exact timing of survey contacts on web survey response rates. We also consider the benefits of a “dynamic strategy”, i.e., the approach to change features of survey contacts over the survey life cycle. We explore these effects experimentally using a career survey sent to over 24,000 junior scientists and engineers. The results show that personalization increases the odds of responding by as much as 48%, while lottery incentives with a high payoff and a low chance of winning increase the odds of responding by 30%. Furthermore, changing the wording of reminders over the survey life cycle increases the odds of a response by over 30%, while changes in contact timing (day of the week or hour of the day) did not have significant benefits. Improvements in response rates did not come at the expense of lower data quality. Our results provide novel insights into web survey response behavior and suggest useful tools for innovation researchers seeking to increase survey participation.
Grounded spaces: deictic -self anaphors in the poetry of Emily Dickinson:

Ungrammaticality in poetry, when it is considered 'acceptable' by literary critics, has been characteristically dismissed as 'poetic licence', as though poets are somehow exempt from the constraints on linguistic usage. Autonomous (traditional or transformational) grammar has no explanation for the occurrence of forms such as Emily Dickinson's -self anaphor pronouns. On the contrary, under a cognitive linguistic account, her apparently ungrammatical -self anaphors are perfectly grammatical. Dickinson's -self anaphors, grounded in mental spaces, are triggered by the subject/agent of their originating space. That the grounding of these -self anaphors makes them deictic is attested by the existence of 'crossover' spaces. Dickinson's use of the -self anaphor in projected mental spaces makes the self deictically present in that space: not any self, but the self as agent in the originating space. By using the principle of -self anaphor projection from the subject/agent in one mental space into another, Dickinso...
Controlling for District Court Judges' Preferences

This study invokes the common space scores of executives and senators to generate a number of alternative preference point positions for U.S. District Court judges. Tests of these continuous measures against a null case fact specification suggest that the legal model always proves an effective predictor of decisions, but that ideological influences have incrementally grown throughout the last century. Continuous preference measures that assume a traditional norm of senatorial courtesy tend to be robust in limited samples of more recent outcomes. However, measures that account for cyclical changes in interbranch appointment relationships are more effective for temporally lengthy large N samples. The magnitude of these ideological effects is modest, but not unsubstantial. During the recent era of independent executive-vetting practices, the likelihood of a conservative decision is approximately 78 to 85 percent for Democratic appointees, and 85 to 90 percent for Republican appointees.
Takeover Activity as a Response to Time‐Varying Changes in Investment Opportunity Sets: Evidence from Takeover Sequences

We study takeover sequences that contain at least five acquisitions made over a period greater than 12 months, with no two acquisitions separated by more than 24 months. Acquisitions made within such sequences represent more than a quarter of aggregate takeover activity by U.S. public firms from 1982–1999. Our fi ndings are consistent with a proposition that takeover sequences occur in the context of time-varying changes in an acquirer's growth opportunity set. Takeover sequences begin (end) subsequent to an expansion (contraction) of this opportunity set.
Current Accounts in Debtor and Creditor Countries

The authors reexamine a classic question in international economics: What is the current account response to a transitory income shock such as a temporary improvement in the terms of trade, a transfer from abroad, or unusually high production? To answer this question, they construct a world equilibrium model in which productivity varies across countries and international borrowing and lending take place to exploit good investment opportunities. Despite its conventional ingredients, the model generates the novel prediction that favorable income shocks lead to current account deficits in debtor countries and current account surpluses in creditor countries. Evidence from thirteen OECD countries broadly supports this theoretical prediction.
Employer Learning and Statistical Discrimination

We show that if firms statistically discriminate among young workers on the basis of easily observable characteristics such as education, then as firms learn about productivity, the coefficients on the easily observed variables should fall, and the coefficients on hard-to-observe correlates of productivity should rise. We find support for this proposition using NLSY79 data on education, the AFQT test, father's education, and wages for young men and their siblings. We find little evidence for statistical discrimination in wages on the basis of race. Our analysis has a wide range of applications in the labor market and elsewhere.
Target Date Funds: Characteristics and Performance

As a result of poor asset allocation decisions by 401(k) participants, 72% of all plans now offer target date funds, and participants heavily invest in them. Here, we study the characteristics and performance of TDFs, providing a unique view by employing data on TDFs holdings. We show that additional expenses charged by TDFs are largely offset by the low-cost share classes they hold, not normally open to their investors. Additionally, TDFs are very active in their allocation decisions and increasingly bet on nonstandard asset classes. However, TDFs do not earn alpha from timing or their selection of individual assets.