cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Lot of the Unemployed: A Time Use Perspective

This paper provides new evidence on time use and subjective well-being of employed and unemployed individuals in 14 countries. We devote particular attention to characterizing and modeling job search intensity, measured by the amount of time devoted to searching for a new job. Job search intensity varies considerably across countries, and is higher in countries that have higher wage dispersion. We also examine the relationship between unemployment benefits and job search.
Current Problems of Global Energy Security in Light of the Caspian Sea Region’s Recent Experience

Three related questions are: (1) if the energy crisis is real, then what should our future energy plans be; (2) what is the impact of energy on the world’s geo-political scenario today; and (3) what policies should be considered to ensure energy security. The third of these questions is the least variable. The answer to it should not change much, whether the energy crisis is real or not, whether we recognize such a crisis or not, and regardless of energy’s impact on global geo-politics. The first and second questions are far from unimportant. I have addressed them elsewhere, especially in relation to the development of energy resources of the Caspian Sea basin. However, in a short paper one has to choose, so here the third question will be at issue. Also, this approach allows previous work on the first and second questions to be brought into pragmatic and more generalized focus.
Law in Finance

Law’s relevance to finance is by now well recognized, in no small part due to the literature on "law and finance" (La Porta et al. 1998; La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, and Shleifer 2008) celebrated in this journal ten years ago under the heading "the new comparative economics" (Djankov et al. 2003). There will always be some debate as to whether a specific law or regulation distorts or supports markets, but few would argue today that law is irrelevant to financial markets or that they could operate entirely outside it. This special issue takes the debate about the relation between law and finance a step further by proposing that law is more central to contemporary finance than acknowledged in existing literatures: It lends authority to public and private financial instruments or means of pay; delegates power to different regulators, public or private; and vindicates financial products rooted in private contracts if they are generally consistent with the law. The relevance of law to finance has arguably increased with the shift from relational to entity and ultimately market-based finance: The fungibility of financial instruments in anonymous markets depends on credible contractual commitments that are enforceable in a court of law without prior investigation into the creditworthiness of the borrower, originator or intermediary. In short, law is not just an add-on to but is "in" finance.
Why did you do that? An economic examination of the effect of extrinsic compensation on intrinsic motivation and performance

Abstract According to empirical evidence, extrinsic incentives often crowd out intrinsic motivation, thus reducing the effort of workers. This article presents a principal–agent model utilizing a Benthamite interpretation of utility as overall satisfaction and incorporating insights from cognitive evaluation theory to explain motivation crowding out. In this context, motivation crowding out occurs when explicit rewards are perceived as controlling, which results in individuals having greater satisfaction by not being intrinsically motivated. The model shows that rewards could be perceived as controlling under two conditions. The first is when the object of an agent’s intrinsic motivation is also the source of the agent’s extrinsic compensation. The second is when the incentives offered to the agent are too large.
Helping Undergraduates Discover The Value Of A Dollar Through Self-Monitoring

Many college undergraduates lack basic financial management knowledge and skills while bearing ever increasing debt burdens upon graduation. In order to encourage students to become aware of their spending patterns and weigh those patterns against personal values, a self-monitoring project was implemented as a class activity. The resulting effect on financial behavior was examined. Analysis of participants’ self-reflection papers revealed that awareness of spending behaviors increased universally among participants, and a significant proportion of students spontaneously modified spending behaviors to more closely conform to personal values. Participants consistently reported the importance of a spending management tool in modifying spending behavior.
Doing Well by Doing Good: The Grand Illusion

The idea that companies can “do well by doing good” has caught the attention of executives, business academics, and public officials. It is based on the claim that firms have a corporate social responsibility to achieve some larger social goals, and can do so without a financial sacrifice. While this appealing proposition has convinced many people, it is fundamentally misleading. If markets are working well, there is no need to appeal to companies to fulfill some vague social responsibility. If there is a market failure, then there is a tradeoff between private profits and public interest; in that case, it is neither desirable nor effective to rely on the goodwill of managers to maximize social welfare. When markets fail, some constraints need to be imposed on them. There are four sources of constraints: corporate social responsibility, industry self-regulation, civil society activism, and government regulation. The importance of the latter is too frequently neglected by advocates of corporate social responsibility.
Restorative Justice and the Jewish Question

While the particular languages of our differing religious traditions do not seem to me to be good bases for a public criminal law, they are useful for considering familiar issues in an unfamiliar light. I therefore offer a reading of a set of unfamiliar texts from the Talmud, one of the foundational texts of the Jewish tradition, to make two basic points about criminal law with some applicability to the restorative justice debate. At the same time, their language and structure should illustrate how disparate our traditions are. First, criminal law should have a limited, nontranscendental goal. Torah law, like some of the more religious manifestations of restorative justice, claims divine authority and aims at ultimate justice - but the Jewish texts demonstrate that consistent working out of that view leads to the conclusion that ideal criminal law is impossible for humans to administer. In our democratic state, our goals should be less lofty; but the Jewish law experience suggests, I argue, that we nonetheless ought to be wary of the hubris inherent in any criminal law. Second, the Jewish law debate provides an alternative justification for the restorative justice emphasis on mediation and mutual agreement. Criminal law, in the end, must be defended on empirical grounds: primarily that it works to reduce crime and secondarily that it mitigates the pain caused by crime it fails to prevent. The historical experience of Jewish law's attempts to substitute mediation for coercion offer qualified support for the community-based mediation techniques of some versions of restorative justice. Mediation and compromise can be based in the spirit of humility that is appropriate when humans try to judge things that, in an ideal world, would not be judged by those of only human abilities. In short, this Article attempts to demonstrate the futility of particularist, religious-law based criminal law, using itself the language and traditions of a particular religious law system. If it succeeds, it will simultaneously illustrate the universality of the underlying concerns and the particularity of the language in which we debate them.
Testing the random walk hypothesis: Power versus frequency of observation

Abstract Power functions of tests of the random walk hypothesis versus stationary first-order autoregressive alternatives are tabulated for samples of fixed span but various frequencies of observation.
From “time pass” to transformative force: School-based human rights education in Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract This article presents data collected at the level of practice to highlight one non-governmental organization's approach to human rights education and how household-, school-, and community-level factors mediated student impact. Findings suggest that a variety of factors at the three levels contribute to the program's successful implementation in government schools serving marginalized students (where most HRE programs are in operation in India today). These responses emerge along a continuum from ‘time pass’—a commonly used term in India for anything that does not directly contribute to greater performance on high-stakes exams—to ‘transformative force’, wherein students internalize knowledge and values related to human rights and take action based on it. Responses to HRE were characterized in four areas and representative examples are provided of each: (1) personal changes; (2) attempts to intervene in situations of abuse; (3) reporting (or threatening to report) abuse; and (4) spreading awareness about human rights.
The effect of cash flow forecasts on accrual quality and benchmark beating

When analysts provide forecasts of both earnings and operating cash flow, they also implicitly provide a forecast of total operating accruals. We posit that this increases the transparency and the expected costs of accrual manipulations used to manage earnings. As a consequence, we predict and find that accrual quality improves and firms’ propensity to meet or beat earnings benchmarks declines following the provision of cash flow forecasts. We also predict and find that firms turn to other benchmark-beating mechanisms, such as real activities manipulation and earnings guidance in response to the provision of cash flow forecasts.
Teaching Real Torts: Using Barry Werth's Damages in the Law School Classroom

This essay was prepared for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas symposium on My Favorite Insurance Case.
Capital Gains Taxes and Asset Prices: Capitalization or Lock‐in?

This paper demonstrates that the equilibrium impact of capital gains taxes reflects both the capitalization effect (i.e., capital gains taxes decrease demand) and the lock-in effect (i.e., capital gains taxes decrease supply). Depending on time periods and stock characteristics, either effect may dominate. Using the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 as our event, we find evidence supporting a dominant capitalization effect in the week following news that sharply increased the probability of a reduction in the capital gains tax rate and a dominant lock-in effect in the week after the rate reduction became effective. THIS PAPER JOINTLY TESTS two effects of capital gains taxation on equity trading: a demand-side capitalization effect and a supply-side lock-in effect. While previous studies have tested these effects separately, to the best of our knowledge this is the first study to evaluate them jointly and empirically document the relative dominance of each effect surrounding a change in a tax rate. Employing an equilibrium approach, we show that these effects’ net tax impact on asset prices is ambiguous. Evaluating returns and trading volume around the 1997 reduction in the capital gains tax rate, we find evidence that the capitalization and the lock-in effects jointly affect trading. In particular, the capitalization effect dominates the lock-in effect in the week following an increase in the probability of a reduction in the capital gains tax rate, as buyers respond to information that future capital gains tax rates will be lower. The lock-in effect, however, dominates the capitalization effect after the rate reduction actually becomes effective. Taxation is one of the most prevalent market frictions in financial markets, affecting investors’ decisions and distorting the valuation of assets. Capital gains taxes in particular play an important role in determining an investor’s trading strategies and can ultimately affect asset prices. Because investors
Consecutive Earnings Surprises: Small and Large Trader Reactions

ABSTRACT: Prior research demonstrates that investors respond differently to earnings surprises that are part of a string of consecutive earnings increases or surprises than to those that are not. To shed light on who values these patterns, I compare trading responses of small and large traders to earnings surprises that occur during a series of positive or negative surprises. I find that the relative intensity of small traders' trading response (and, to a lesser extent, that of medium traders) to earnings surprises generally increases as a series progresses. Small traders respond more negatively to the second (third) negative surprise in a series than to the first (second), and more positively for the first three surprises in a positive series. Moreover, I find that announcement-period returns are related to the trading of small and medium traders. These results suggest that less sophisticated smaller traders, responding to earnings series, contribute to previously documented pricing patterns. Data Availa...
COLLEGE FOOTBALL RANKINGS AND MARKET EFFICIENCY

The results in this article show that various college football ranking systems have useful independent information for predicting the outcomes of games. Optimal weights for the systems are estimated, and the use of these weights produces a predictive system that is more accurate than any of the individual systems. The results also provide a fairly precise estimate of the size of the home-field advantage. These results may be of interest to the Bowl Championship Series in choosing which teams to play in the national championship game. The results also show, however, that none of the systems, including the optimal combination, contains any useful information that is not in the final Las Vegas point spread. It is argued that this is a fairly strong test of the efficiency of the college football betting market.
Interim Fund Performance and Fundraising in Private Equity

General partners (GPs) in private equity (PE) report the performance of an existing fund while raising capital for a follow-on fund. Interim performance has large effects on fundraising outcomes. The impact is greatest when backed by exits and for low reputation GPs. Faced with these incentives, GPs time their fundraising to coincide with periods of peak performance through two strategies: (1) exit and fundraise and (2) net asset value (NAV) management. Consistent with the former, performance peaks are greatest for funds with high realization rates. Consistent with the latter, low reputation GPs with low realization rates experience performance peaks and erosions in performance after fundraising.
Distribution costs and real exchange rate dynamics during exchange-rate-based stabilizations

This paper studies the role played by distribution costs in shaping the behavior of the real exchange rate during exchange-rate-based stabilizations . We document that distribution costs are very large for the average consumer good: they represent more than 40 percent of the retail price in the US and roughly 60 percent of the retail price in Argentina. Distribution services require local labor and land so they drive a natural wedge between retail prices in different countries. We show that introducing a distribution sector in an otherwise standard model of exchange -rate-based stabilizations dramatically improves its ability to rationalize observed real exchange rate dynamics.
Gate-Defined Wires in HgTe Quantum Wells: From Majorana Fermions to Spintronics

We introduce a promising new platform for Majorana zero-modes and various spintronics applications based on gate-defined wires in HgTe quantum wells. Due to the Dirac-like band structure for HgTe the physics of such systems differs markedly from that of conventional quantum wires. Most strikingly, we show that the subband parameters for gate-defined HgTe wires exhibit exquisite tunability: modest gate voltage variation allows one to modulate the Rashba spin-orbit energies from zero up to ~30K, and the effective g-factors from zero up to giant values exceeding 600. The large achievable spin-orbit coupling and g-factors together allow one to access Majorana modes in this setting at exceptionally low magnetic fields while maintaining robustness against disorder. As an additional benefit, gate-defined wires (in HgTe or other settings) should greatly facilitate the fabrication of networks for refined transport experiments used to detect Majoranas, as well as the realization of non-Abelian statistics and quantum information devices.
The Pricing Effects of Securities Class Action Lawsuits and Litigation Insurance

The price reactions to corrective disclosures often serve as a benchmark for settlements in securities class action lawsuits. When the firm bears litigation costs, this benchmark creates a feedback effect that exacerbates the price reaction to news that contradicts managers’ earlier reports. Litigation insurance provides value in this setting by reducing the need for investors to price the effects of anticipated litigation. Insurance also affects how changes in the litigation environment impact the firm, with some changes having opposite effects on the frequency of lawsuits against uninsured and insured firms. The pricing behavior of rational investors eliminates the valuation impact of the portion of settlements paid to the investors, similar to dividends. The valuation impact of litigation arises from transaction costs, such as attorney fees, which the firm can mitigate by constraining misreporting and by purchasing insurance. (JEL G14, G30, K22, M41).
Entrepreneurial optimism, credit availability, and cost of financing: Evidence from U.S. small businesses

Abstract Using a large sample of U.S. small businesses and a new measure of optimism, we examine the role of entrepreneurial optimism in small business lending. We provide evidence that optimistic entrepreneurs are not rationed by lenders. Quite the opposite, our results suggest that they often have better credit accessibility and obtain lower cost of financing. Our results are robust to alternative measures of optimism and controls for private information between lenders and borrowers.
The Limits of Enumeration

According to a well-known principle of constitutional interpretation here identified as the “internal-limits canon,” the powers of Congress must always be construed as authorizing less legislation than a general police power would. This Article argues that the internallimits canon is unsound. Whether the powers of Congress would in practice authorize any legislation that a police power would authorize is a matter of contingency: it depends on the relationship between the powers and the social world at a given time. There is no reason why, at a given time, the powers cannot turn out to authorize any legislation that a police power would. This Article explains why setting aside the internal-limits canon is consistent with the interests of federalism, with fidelity to the Founding design, and with the text of the Constitution. author. Theodore J. St. Antoine Collegiate Professor, the University of Michigan Law School. For comments on previous drafts, I thank Evan Caminker, Richard Friedman, Abbe Gluck, Kelly Hagen, Scott Hershovitz, Don Herzog, William Novak, Kermit Roosevelt, and Dayna Zolle. Thanks also to Akhil Amar, Samuel Bagenstos, Nicholas Bagley, Scott Bloomberg, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Kristina Daugirdas, Monica Hakimi, Rick Hills, Gerard Magliocca, Charles Primus, Romana Primus, Adam Pritchard, Eli Temkin, and David Uhlmann, as well as the participants in faculty workshops at the University of Michigan Law School and the University of Notre Dame Law School. The title of this Article is of course reminiscent of Gil Seinfeld’s Article I, Article III, and the Limits of Enumeration, 108 MICH. L. REV. 1389 (2010); I thank Seinfeld for his long-running and productively skeptical engagement with the idea presented here. Research for this project was funded in part by the Cook Endowment. the limits of enumeration 577 article contents
Towards neutrino transport with flavor mixing in supernovae: the Liouville operator

The calculation of neutrino decoupling from nuclear matter requires a transport formalism capable of handling both collisions and flavor mixing. The first steps towards such a formalism are the construction of neutrino and antineutrino ‘distribution matrices,’ and a determination of the Liouville equations they satisfy in the noninteracting case. These steps are accomplished through study of a Wigner-transformed ‘density function,’ the mean value of paired neutrino quantum field operators.
The Case against Ethics Review in the Social Sciences

For decades, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have questioned the appropriateness and utility of prior review of their research by human subjects' ethics committees. This essay seeks to organize thematically some of their published complaints and to serve as a brief restatement of the major critiques of ethics review. In particular, it argues that 1) ethics committees impose silly restrictions, 2) ethics review is a solution in search of a problem, 3) ethics committees lack expertise, 4) ethics committees apply inappropriate principles, 5) ethics review harms the innocent, and 6) better options exist.
On the benefits of allowing CEOs to time their stock option exercises

This article examines the costs and benefits of permitting executives to use inside information to time their stock option exercises. Whereas prior research has focused on the negative effects of timing discretion, I show that such discretion can have beneficial incentive effects in that it leads to improved project abandonment decisions. This result follows because at-the-money options used to induce managerial effort tilt the CEO's preferences toward project continuation. When the CEO is free to unload stock options at will, he will do so exactly in those states where the continuation bias is most detrimental (i.e., in the event of bad news), making the CEO willing to abandon the project.
Toward the Restorative Constitution: A Restorative Justice Critique of Anti-Gang Public Nuisance Injunctions

Gang members from elsewhere congregated on lawns, on sidewalks, and in front of apartment complexes at all hours. They displayed a casual contempt for notions of law, order, and decency -- openly drinking, smoking dope, sniffing toluene, and even snorting cocaine laid out in neat lines on the hoods of residents' cars. San Jose prosecutors responded by obtaining and enforcing a broad injunction against the gangs and their members, based on the finding that the gangs' activities constituted a public nuisance. California prosecutors have sought such anti-gang public nuisance injunctions since 1987. Their constitutionality was in doubt for ten years until People ex rel. Gallo v. Acuna, in which the California Supreme Court upheld this injunction as a lawful and important means to hold the gang members accountable and restore community to Rocksprings.This Article critiques anti-gang public nuisance injunctions through the lens of restorative justice principles. The rhetorical justification for anti-gang injunctions is strikingly similar to the rhetoric of the restorative justice movement. Restorative justice rests on the tenets that any crime is injurious, and that the best response is one that heals the injuries caused to the victim, the community, and the offender. The anti-gang public nuisance injunctions share significant similarities with typical restorative justice programs: both are deviations from traditional criminal court (or even juvenile court) models; both privilege participation of affected communities; both re-conceive lawbreaking as injury; and both, at least in theory, are based on notions of redress of those injuries. Further, both provoke serious opposition from civil libertarians. Fundamentally, though, the anti-gang public nuisance injunctions undermine the promise of restorative justice as deeply as they weaken traditional rights-based protections, and the betrayal of the goals of restorative justice may be of even greater consequence.
The False Dilemma of the Economic Loss Doctrine

A defective product causes various types of damages. The type of damage suffered generally determines whether contract or tort law will govern resolution of the parties’ dispute. Contract law will control when the loss suffered is considered to be solely economic loss. For example, when a machine does not produce the number of parts/minute as warranted by the seller, the loss is solely an economic loss. On the other hand, when a defective product causes personal injury, tort law will be utilized to resolve the dispute. However, when the defective product causes “other property” damage (not economic loss or personal injury), both contract law and tort law claim application. The Uniform Commercial Code (U.C.C.) expressly provides for recovery of other property damage caused by a defective product. Coincidentally, the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Products Liability also expressly provides for recovery of other property damage caused by a defective product. The purpose of this Article is to offer a fresh approach to addressing other property damage disputes that emphasizes both contract and tort law rather than the current approach that requires a court to choose between contract or tort coverage.
Individual Retirement Accounts, saving and labor supply☆

Abstract This paper builds a general equilibrium model of overlapping generations and studies the effects of tax-deferred saving and alternative retirement saving policies on life-cycle saving and labor supply of households and on the aggregate economy.
Communicating Entitlements: Property and the Internet

Communication about property rights is essential to our lives. Property rights determine fundamental aspects of our behavior, such as where we can walk, live, and work. For these rights to have meaning, many parties must communicate. For example, potential buyers, potential trespassers, and authorities must understand the nature and extent of an owner's property. This communication involves costs, like the costs of fencing or of surveying the boundaries of a parcel of land before constructing a building. These costs must be balanced against the benefits of successful communication, which include the gains from transferring entitlements and the cost reductions of avoiding infringements of property rights. Prevention of infringement through successful communication may be cheaper than securing redress for infringed entitlements. For example, if the boundaries of a parcel of real property are not accurately communicated, an adjoining owner may construct a building that spans the property line. Even if the encroachment is small, the misplaced building may have to be demolished. Communication costs are a type of transaction cost, and should be addressed in an efficient manner -- that is, additional communication costs should be incurred until the marginal costs exceed the marginal benefits. Existing scholarship analyzes some of the concerns involved in communicating property entitlements and suggests some techniques for achieving efficient communication. In this Paper, I seek to fashion a general framework that supports a more comprehensive analysis of communication costs while also accounting for these existing theories. This approach helps identify and fill both minor and more significant gaps and also suggests that this framework can be applied to some non-property communicative contexts, including the Internet.
We Will Still Live: Confronting Stigma and Discrimination Against Women Living With HIV/AIDS in Malawi

This report presents the findings of this research effort. Part I sets out Malawi’s obligations under international and domestic law regarding the right of women living with HIV/AIDS to be free from discrimination and also explores non-binding international documents that provide guidance to governments in confronting discrimination against PLWHA. Part I then explores the ways in which lack of sexual autonomy, economic dependency, physical and sexual abuse, harmful traditional practices, commercial sex work, sexual exploitation of girls and young women, and conceptions of male sexuality increase women’s vulnerability to HIV/AIDS in Malawi. Part II documents widespread community-level stigma against women living with HIV/AIDS in the form of verbal attacks, social exclusion, and the interpretation of HIV status as an indicator of sexual immorality. Part II also explores how fear of stigma discourages women from disclosing their HIV status and how denial of HIV/AIDS-related stigma and discrimination further handicaps communities. Part II then documents the ways in which discriminatory notions regarding HIV-positive peoples’ labor capacities limits the participation of WLWHA in the federal fertilizer subsidy program, public works projects, and microfinance programs. Part II ends by suggesting community-level interventions and policy reforms to confront stigma and discrimination. Finally, Part III explores possible legal interventions. Part III begins by documenting women’s lack of access to justice in response to their experiences of stigma and discrimination. Part III then offers recommendations to address this lack of judicial recourse, including linking health and legal services through the establishment of referral networks in health clinics to legal aid and paralegal service providers and the integration of these services directly into the health setting, the drafting of HIV/AIDS anti-discrimination legislation coupled with awareness raising campaigns and strong enforcement mechanisms, and the encouragement of public interest litigation to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS-related issues.
Educating the next generation of health leaders: medical-legal partnership and interprofessional graduate education.

With the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the fields of health and law are moving from a single perspective approach to a cooperative, holistic, and integrated app...
Quantitative interpretation of time-resolved coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy with all Gaussian pulses

Coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering is a powerful nonlinear optical spectroscopic technique primarily used in chemistry and biology for detection and diagnostics by excitation and probing of coherent molecular vibrations. Despite many advantages, there are certain limitations to the application of this technique due to the existence of the non-resonant four-wave mixing contamination. This issue is addressed here by offering the time-resolved exact solutions with all Gaussian input pulses. The paper explains signal enhancement with a suppression of the background at the threshold delay time of the probe and presents a one-to-one comparison between the solutions and experimental observations that provides a reconstruction of the pure coherent Raman resonant contribution. These findings add to the deep understanding of coherent Raman spectroscopic experimental data as a hands-on interpreting tool. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A Legislature or a Legislator Like Me? Citizen Demand for Collective and Dyadic Political Representation

American politics scholars have long distinguished between legislature-level “collective” and legislator-level “dyadic” representation. However, most research on these concepts focuses on elite-lev...
The Voting Rights Act of 1965: A Selected Annotated Bibliography

Several remedial or �special� provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which were enacted as temporary measures and were set to expire in August 2007 if not reauthorized by Congress, were recently extended for another twenty-five years. Ms. Conroy offers a selected bibliography of resources to introduce researchers to the issues involved in the debate over the Act�s reauthorization and its future implementation.
A theory of failed bank resolution: Technological change and political economics

Abstract We model the failed bank resolution process as a repeated game between a utility-maximizing government resolution authority (RA) and a profit-maximizing banking industry. Limits to resolution technology and political/economic pressure create incentives for the RA to bail out failed complex banks; the inability of the RA to credibly commit to closing these banks creates an incentive for bank complexity. We solve the game in mixed strategies and find equilibrium conditions remarkably descriptive of government responses to actual and potential large bank insolvencies during the recent financial crisis. The central role of the technology constraint in this model highlights a crucial determinant of failed bank resolution policy that has been overlooked in the theory literature to date; without improved resolution technologies, future bank bailouts are inevitable. The effects of political pressure in this model remind us that regulatory reform (e.g., Dodd-Frank ) is only as good as the regulators that implement the reform.
Inference for econometric modeling in antidumping, countervailing duty and safeguard investigations

This paper examines how to make inferences from econometric models prepared for antidumping, countervailing duty, and safeguard investigations. Analysis of these models has typically entailed drawing inferences from point estimates that are significantly different from zero at a fixed level of confidence. This paper suggests a more flexible approach of drawing inferences using confidence intervals at various significance levels and reporting p-values for the relevant test of injury. Use of confidence intervals and p-values to identify insights and data patterns would have more impact on USITC trade remedy determinations than definitive conclusions about injury based on whether estimates are statistically significant.
Willingness to Pay to Reduce White-Collar and Corporate Crime

Consumer protection and financial regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) regulate various types of consumer, investor and financial frauds. Whether required or not, rulemaking proceedings oftentimes include some form of benefit-cost analysis. Thus, the benefits of proposed regulations – whether fully quantified or not – are an increasingly important component of rulemaking decisions. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the impact on victims in some cases includes significant time and financial hardships and even pain, suffering, and reduced quality of life. Further, the existence of these offenses causes nonvictims to take costly precautionary behavior and might even inhibit legitimate business activities. Yet, little is known about the true costs of consumer and financial crimes other than the out-of-pocket monetary losses incurred by victims. To the extent society wishes to optimally deter such crimes, without better data on nonmonetary costs, any benefit-cost analyses of criminal justice or prevention programs designed to reduce these crimes will inevitably underestimate program benefits. This paper provides an initial framework and empirical estimates of the willingness to pay (WTP) to reduce four types of white-collar and corporate offenses – consumer fraud, financial fraud, corporate crime, and corporate financial crime. Utilizing a contingent valuation survey approach that has been used to estimate the cost of street crimes, the average WTP for a 10% reduction in each of these four offenses is estimated to range between 19,000.
Explaining Theoretical Disagreement

Scott Shapiro has recently argued that Ronald Dworkin posed a new objection to legal positivism in Law’s Empire, to which positivists, he says, have not adequately responded. Positivists, the objection goes, have no satisfactory account of what Dworkin calls “theoretical disagreement” about law, that is, disagreement about “the grounds of law” or what positivists would call the criteria of legal validity. I agree with Shapiro that the critique is new but disagree that it has not been met. Positivism cannot offer an explanation that preserves the “Face Value” of theoretical disagreements, because the only intelligible dispute about the criteria of legal validity is an empirical or “head count” dispute, that is, a dispute about what judges are doing, and how many of them are doing it (since it is the actual practice of officials and their attitudes towards that practice that fixes the criteria of legal validity according to the positivist). Positivism, however, has two other explanations for theoretical disagreement, which “explain away” rather than preserve the “Face Value” disagreement. According to positivists, theoretical disagreements are either (1) disingenuous, in the sense that the parties, consciously or unconsciously, are really trying to change the law—they are trying to say, as Dworkin puts it, “what it should be” not “what the law is,” or (2) simply predicated on error because parties to the disagreement honestly think there is a fact of the matter about what the grounds of law are, and thus what the law is, in the context of their disagreement, but they are mistaken, because, in truth, there is no fact of the matter about the grounds of law in this instance precisely because there is no convergent practice of behavior among officials constituting a Rule of Recognition on this point. This Article explores the “Disingenuity” and “Error Theory” accounts of theoretical disagreement, with attention to the theoretical desiderata (for example, simplicity, consilience, methodological conservativism) at stake in choosing between competing explanatory theories. Particular attention is given to the best explanation for Riggs v Palmer in light of the actual historical context of the decision and other opinions by the Riggs judges in contemporaneous cases.
The pitkin affair: A study of fraud in early english bankruptcy

In 1705, two London merchants, Thomas Brerewood and Thomas Pitkin, attempted to pull off a massive bankruptcy fraud. Although the conspirators were quickly caught, unraveling the scam required three large insolvencies and four acts of Parliament over the course of more than forty years. Along the way, the Pitkin Affair and its aftereffects would test and expand the boundaries of then-existing bankruptcy law. This article presents the story of the Pitkin Affair as a parable to remind us that the current scandals with which we are confronted are not new. Neither are the reactions of the parties caught in the middle of the resulting financial catastrophe. Most lied; some cheated; and many could not let go of their sense of injustice and accept that their own misjudgment, and even greed, had also contributed to their losses.
Pre-auction inventory and bidding behavior: Evidence from Canadian Treasury auctions☆

Abstract Bidders enter the Government of Canada securities auctions with short, neutral, or long pre-auction inventory. We find that bidding strategies and auction performance vary with pre-auction ownership structure. Short and long bidders bid higher average prices, demand larger quantities, and submit fewer bids than do bidders with neutral pre-auction inventory. These bidding strategies imply less underpricing in auctions with aggregate pre-auction inventory tilted in one way or the other. We analyze whether a concern for post-auction short squeeze influences observed bidding strategies and auction performance.
From Here All-the-Way-Down, or How to Write a Festschrift Piece

This essay was written for the Tulsa Law Review Symposium, “Not Your Father’s Federalism”, devoted to the work of Heather Gerken. It explores Gerken’s work on “uncooperative federalism” and “dissenting by deciding,” two of the most important recent steps forward in understanding how “our federalism” works in practice. After lavishing deserved praise for a number of pages, as one does in a festschrift essay, I try to say something a little bit novel. Relying on authorities including Susan Rose-Ackerman, Morris Fiorina, Tone Lōc, Kenneth Arrow, Whit Stillman, Joseph Schumpeter, Arcade Fire, John Updike, The Wire, and some guy named Schleicher, I argue that, because of the role played in state and local politics by national-level mediating institutions like political parties, there remain serious questions about whether we see a sub-optimal amount of uncooperative federalism and dissenting by deciding. I conclude by noting that, even though Gerken’s work has attracted an enormous amount of attention, it deserves even more, particularly work discussing what reforms would generate more dissent and less cooperation.
Defining the Universe of Social Enterprise: Competing Metaphors

After more than a decade of research the debate over social enterprise definitions and classifications continues. EMES network in Europe argues that there is an ideal type of social enterprise to which all ventures should aspire. The spectrum approach emphasizes the trade-off between pure profit-making and social impact, locating organizations on this continuum. The Schumpeterians take innovation as its central focus, arguing that the disruption of the status quo is an important differentiator. We argue that each falls short of providing an adequate framework for future research, policy, and practice. Instead we offer an alternative metaphor, that of a social enterprise zoo; many different “animals” combine social and market goals in substantially different ways and each species has distinct environments and needs. Using the metaphor we consider the important components of a meaningful research agenda and examine the place of social entrepreneurs within the social enterprise zoo.
Intergenerational earnings mobility, inequality and growth

Abstract We examine a model in which per capita income, inequality, intergenerational mobility, and returns to education are all determined endogenously. Individuals earn wages depending on their ability, which is a random variable. They purchase an education with transfers received from their parents, and are subject to liquidity constraints. In the model, multiple steady-state equilibria are possible: countries with identical tastes and technologies can reach differing rates of mobility, inequality and per capita income. Equilibria with higher levels of output also have lower inequality, higher mobility, and more efficient distribution of education.
lead Independent Directors: Good governance or window dressing?

Abstract We document the emergence of the Lead Independent Director (LID) board role in a sample of U.S. firms from 1999–2015. We find that firms that adopt an LID board role are larger and have more independent boards, higher institutional investor holdings, and an NYSE listing. Firms with greater anticipated benefits from monitoring also adopt an LID role, e.g., firms with dual CEO-Chairman, with more takeover defense mechanisms, and with higher cash holdings. Using an event study methodology, we find that investors respond positively to the adoption of an LID board role. Lastly, using instrumental variables to address endogeneity in the LID board role, we find that firms with an LID are more likely to terminate poorly performing CEOs. Taken as a whole, these results suggest that the LID board role enhances firm value and improves the quality of corporate governance.
Real wage rigidities and the new Keynesian model

Most central banks perceive a trade‐off between stabilizing inflation and stabilizing the gap between output and desired output. However, the standard new Keynesian framework implies no such trade‐off. In that framework, stabilizing inflation is equivalent to stabilizing the welfare‐relevant output gap. In this paper, we argue that this property of the new Keynesian framework, which we call the divine coincidence, is due to a special feature of the model: the absence of nontrivial real imperfections. We focus on one such real imperfection, namely, real wage rigidities. When the baseline new Keynesian model is extended to allow for real wage rigidities, the divine coincidence disappears, and central banks indeed face a trade‐off between stabilizing inflation and stabilizing the welfare‐relevant output gap. We show that not only does the extended model have more realistic normative implications, but it also has appealing positive properties. In particular, it provides a natural interpretation for the dynamic inflation‐unemployment relation found in the data.
A contingent claims analysis of the interest rate risk characteristics of corporate liabilities

Abstract This paper provides a contingent claims analysis of the interest rate risk characteristics of corporate liabilities by identifying Merton's (1973) option pricing model with Vasicek's (1977) mean reverting term structure model. Only a non-zero positive range of duration values for the firms' assets is shown to be consistent with the previous empirical evidence on the interest rate sensitivity of corporate stocks and bonds. Chance's (1990) duration measure is shown to be biased downward under empirically realistic conditions. Theoretical conditions are derived under which the duration of a default-prone zero coupon bond can be either higher or lower than the duration of the corresponding default-free bond. The duration of the default-prone bond of a firm with high (low) interest rate sensitive assets is shown to be an increasing (decreasing) function of the bond's default-risk.
Exorcising the Ghosts of Bowers v. Hardwick: Uprooting Invalid Precedents

After the Supreme Court ruled in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) that the Due Process Clause did not bar states from criminalizing private consensual gay sex, many lower federal courts relied upon this ruling to reason that governmental discrimination against gay people would not violate the Equal Protection Clause, because the Supreme Court had approved the ultimate anti-gay discrimination: making the conduct that defines the class a crime. Although Romer v. Evans (1996) should have put an end to such reasoning, it did not, and neither has Lawrence v. Texas (2003), in which the Court overruled Bowers. The author argues that with Bowers overruled, the lower court decisions relying upon it in Equal Protection cases should be rejected as precedents, and courts should evaluate afresh the issue of heightened or strict scrutiny for sexual orientation discrimination.
Accruals, cash flows, and operating profitability in the cross section of stock returns☆

Accruals are the non-cash component of earnings. They represent adjustments made to cash flows to generate a profit measure largely unaffected by the timing of receipts and payments of cash. Prior research uncovers two anomalies: expected returns increase in profitability and decrease in accruals. We show that cash-based operating profitability (a measure that excludes accruals) outperforms measures of profitability that include accruals. Further, cash-based operating profitability subsumes accruals in predicting the cross section of average returns. An investor can increase a strategy’s Sharpe ratio more by adding just a cash-based operating profitability factor to the investment opportunity set than by adding both an accruals factor and a profitability factor that includes accruals.
Religious Liberty and the Quincentenary: Old World Intolerance, New World Realities, and Modern Implications

In this article, Professor Finkelman discusses the journey to religious liberty and tolerance in America. At the time of Columbus’ voyage to the New World, Europe was exceedingly intolerant of religious diversity. Continuing into the Colonial period, each European nation that established a colony brought with it a different set of beliefs and traditions that it hoped to further in America. Professor Finkelman holds that it was the religious intolerance of Europe that made tolerance possible in the United States.