cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Drought of Opportunities: Contemporaneous and Long-Term Impacts of Rainfall Shocks on Human Capital

Higher wages are generally thought to increase human capital production, particularly in the developing world. We introduce a simple model of human capital production in which investments and time allocation differ by age. Using data on test scores and schooling from rural India, we show that higher wages increase human capital investment in early life (in utero to age 2) but decrease human capital from age 5 to 16. Children switch out of school into productive work when rainfall is higher. The opportunity cost of schooling, even for fairly young children, is an important factor in determining overall human capital investment.
Client Industry Competition and Auditor Industry Concentration

Abstract Prior studies examining the association between auditor concentration and intra-industry competition in the client industry have yielded opposite results. I attempt to reconcile these findings by using an additional measure of intra-industry competition (the speed of adjustment of abnormal profits) and controlling for industry size. I document a negative association between auditor industry concentration and intra-industry competition, regardless of the measure of auditor concentration used. Thus, although the average level of auditor industry concentration is generally high, there is some evidence that a more competitive industry has lower auditor concentration. Therefore, involuntary audit market changes that reduce the number of audit firms available, may counter the effect of client industry competition in limiting auditor industry concentration.
Chevron ’s Flexible Agency Expertise Model: Applying the Chevron Doctrine to the BIA’s Interpretation of the INA’s Criminal Law–Based Aggravated Felony Provision

For nearly thirty years, courts have looked to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. when reviewing a challenge to an agency’s interpretation of statutory language and determining whether deference is appropriate. Despite Chevron’s longstanding role as one of administrative law’s most important legal doctrines, no specification exists as to whether judicial deference is required when an agency interprets language outside the scope of its expertise. As a result, the Second and Third Circuits have split on the issue of whether the Bureau of Immigration Appeals’ (BIA) interpretation of the term “aggravated felony,” a phrase drawn from criminal law, deserves a traditional Chevron analysis. This Note addresses the conflict and proposes a model of Chevron’s framework that permits courts to remain flexible when considering an agency’s nontraditional expertise, an outcome contemplated by Chevron’s theoretical framework and the Court’s ruling in Chevron itself. Ultimately, this Note resolves the split in favor of the application of Chevron deference to the BIA’s interpretation of language drawn from criminal law, despite the agency’s traditional expertise in immigration law.
Book Circulation Per U.S. Public Library User Since 1856

ABSTRACT. Underappreciated data concerning libraries' holdings and circulation over the past century and a half offer insights into the behavior of libraries and their users. Book circulation per public library user indicates an outcome of users' demand for books and libraries' supply of books. From 1856 to 1978, library users borrowed from U.S. public libraries about 15 books per user per year. From 1978 to 2004, about 25% of book circulation shifted to audio‐visual circulation. Over about a century and a half, library book circulation per user shows no strong, long‐run trend either up or down. This outcome suggests that libraries have adapted to maintain the stability of their operation and that library borrowing practices are well‐embedded in popular life. The opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Communications Commission, its Commissioners, or any staff other than the author.
Binders Full of Women & Closing the Gap

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney used the unfortunate phrase of seeking out “binders full of women” to claim that he wanted women to fill high administrative positions once he became Governor of Massachusetts.1 This came in the same period when Marissa Mayer, who was in her second trimester, was picked to be the CEO of Yahoo2 and Anne-Marie Slaughter was writing in The Atlantic that she had to leave her position in the State Department because her children needed her.3 Cracking through the glass ceiling to top-level positions is not only a hot topic in the United States but is in the European Union as well. On November 14, 2012, the European Commission adopted a proposed Directive that would require EU member states to require that boards of large European corporations be made up of “40% of the underrepresented gender” for non-executive, outside director seats.4 If the European Council and Parliament both adopt
An empirical comparison of continuous time models of the short term interest rate

This article tests the performance of a wide variety of well‐known continuous time models—with particular emphasis on the Black, Derman, and Toy (1990; henceforth BDT) term structure model—in capturing the stochastic behavior of the short term interest rate volatility. Many popular interest rate models are nested within a more flexible time‐varying BDT framework that allows us to compare the models and find the proper specification of the dynamics of short rates. The empirical results indicate that the equilibrium models that do not allow the drift and diffusion parameters to vary over time and parameterize the volatility only as a function of interest rate levels overemphasize the sensitivity of volatility to the level of interest rate and fail to model adequately the serial correlation in conditional variances. On the other hand, the GARCH‐based arbitrage‐free models with time‐dependent parameters in the drift and diffusion functions define the volatility only as a function of unexpected information shocks and fail to capture adequately the relationship between interest rate levels and volatility. This study shows that the most successful models in capturing the dynamics of short term interest rates are those that introduce time‐dependent parameters to the short rate process and define the conditional volatility as a function of both the interest rate levels and the last period's unexpected news. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19: 777–797, 1999
Beyond norms and interests: understanding the evolution of transnational human rights activism

This article explores the evolution of transnational human rights activism since the end of World War II. It argues that the scholarly literature has focused too much attention on how interests and principles drive transnational mobilisation, while neglecting the profound evolutionary changes within the sector itself. In challenging interest-based explanations of human rights activism, we show that human rights groups have shifted from predominantly reactive ‘shaming’ strategies to more proactive efforts designed to address root causes of gross violations.
The persistence of skin color discrimination for immigrants

Abstract Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination in employment on the basis of color is prohibited, and color is a protected basis independent from race. Using data from the spouses of the main respondents to the New Immigrant Survey 2003, this paper shows that immigrants with the lightest skin color earn on average 16–23% more than comparable immigrants with the darkest skin color. These estimates control for years of legal permanent residence in the US, education, English language proficiency, occupation in source country, Hispanic or Latino ethnicity, race, country of birth, as well as for extensive current labor market characteristics that may be themselves influenced by discrimination. Furthermore, the skin color penalty does not diminish over time. These results are consistent with persistent skin color discrimination affecting legal immigrants to the United States.
"Currency Manipulation" and World Trade

Central bank intervention in foreign exchange markets may, under some conditions, stimulate exports and retard imports. In the past few years, this issue has moved to center stage because of the foreign exchange policies of China. Numerous public officials and commentators argue that China has engaged in impermissible ‘currency manipulation’, and various proposals for stiff action against China have been advanced. This paper considers the relationship between exchange rate policy and international trade, and addresses the questions of whether and how currency manipulation should be addressed by the international trading system. Our conclusions are at odds with much of what is currently being said by proponents of multilateral or unilateral actions against China. In particular, we question whether China's practices can be adjudicated to be ‘manipulation’ under international law, and doubt that their trade effects can be identified with the degree of confidence necessary to ascertain whether the practices ‘frustrate the intent’ of WTO/GATT commitments. The difficulty of identifying the trade effects of currency practices undermines the ability of the WTO dispute resolution system to address them, and calls into question the wisdom and legitimacy of unilateral countermeasures that have been proposed in various quarters.
Using market valuation to assess public school spending

Abstract We examine whether school expenditures are valued by potential residents and whether the current level of public school provision is inefficient by estimating the effect of state education aid on residential property values. We find evidence that, overall, state aid is valued by potential residents and that school districts do not overspend on education. However, we find that districts may overspend in areas where residents have fewer schooling options but find no difference in efficiency by the degree of district unionization. One interpretation of these results is that increased competition may reduce overspending on public schools in some areas.
Energy and environmental challenges for developed and developing countries

A supply-oriented strategy which accepts current projections of development energy demands, and seeks to satisfy them, based on acquiring capital-intensive technologies requiring imported fuels is doomed to failure. Developing countries which follow such a strategy will be unable to meet either their energy needs or the basic development needs of their people. To the extent that their energy needs are thus met, it will be at horrendous cost of capital desperately needed for economic and social improvement in non-energy sectors and with tragic environmental consequences to the developing countries and to the world [17]. The opposite of a supply-oriented strategy is a demand-control one. Commercially available or near commercial energy efficient technologies will permit the developing countries to raise the standard of living of their people with only a modest increase in per capita energy consumption.
Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation

This article challenges the liberal, contractual theory of the corporation and argues for replacing it with a political theory of the corporation. Corporations are government-like in their powers, and government grants them both their external “personhood” and their internal governing authority. They are thus not simply private. Yet they are privately organized and financed and therefore not simply public. Corporations transgress all the basic dichotomies that structure liberal treatments of law, economics, and politics: public/private, government/market, privilege/equality, and status/contract. They are “franchise governments” that cannot be satisfactorily assimilated to liberalism. The liberal effort to assimilate them, treating them as contractually constituted associations of private property owners, endows them with rights they ought not have, exacerbates their irresponsibility, and compromises their principal public benefit of generating long-term growth. Instead, corporations need to be placed in a distinct category—neither public nor private, but “corporate”—to be regulated by distinct rules and norms.
International Law, Secularism, and the Islamic World

This article discusses International law, secularism, and the Islamic world from the perspective of Global Critical Race Feminism (GCRF). After providing a brief overview of GCRF, Part I introduces fundamentalism as a current trend in the Muslim world. Part II discusses illustrations of Muslims in several societies where this religious-secular tension exists focusing on France, Turkey, Tunisia, and Palestine. Tunisia and Turkey are discussed in particular interest because they are the two predominantly Muslim countries that have chosen, for many years, to be secular in most aspects of their legal systems. The Article concludes with some practical suggestions as to how Americans can address the complexities which will be raised as the futures of the United States and the Muslim world become more intertwined.
Complementarities and spillovers in mergers: an empirical investigation using patent data

We investigate the merger behavior of firms in the plant biotechnology sector using firm-level patent data for public and private firms in the 1980s and 1990s. Conditional logit estimation is used to estimate the probability that the firms will match in mergers and spinoffs. We calculate several patent portfolio-based measures of complementarity and spillovers between firms, and find that both are important to defining a good match of acquirer and target. However, complementarities provide the more robust explanation. The mergers and spinoffs observed in plant biotechnology may have been designed to overcome the anti-commons problem of mutually blocking technology, an extreme form of complementarity. Our results highlight the need to integrate patent and competition policy.
Investor Protection and Real Investment by U.S. Multinationals

In spite of the growing research concerning investor protection, the relation between in vestor protection and real investment by foreign multinationals is largely unexplored. Rec ognizing this relation, however, is especially important in light of the surge in cross-border activity in recent decades and the potential impact cross-border investment can have on a country's economic development. We find that U.S. multinational foreign investment is significantly greater both when shareholder protection is poor and when creditor protection is poor. Consistent with existing literature, our results suggest that U.S. firms have greater comparative advantages when local firms in poor investor protection countries either i) in vest suboptimally due to agency problems or ii) have constrained access to debt capital. The increased investment by U.S. multinationals in poor investor protection countries is of particular interest, because it suggests an important way in which adverse outcomes related to poor investor protection may be mitigated.
More is Less: Publicizing Information and Market Feedback

We study whether and how publicizing internal information affects the value of financial markets to the real economy. By publicizing corporate filings, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval) web platform reduces the cost of acquiring internal information for outsiders and so makes it relatively less attractive to gather external information. We find that the staggered introduction of EDGAR reduced the sensitivity of firm investment to prices, consistent with prices being less informative to managers due to the crowding out of external information gathering. This crowding out effect is stronger when outsiders’ incentives for gathering information are stronger and for firms that rely more on external information. Our findings suggest that policies designed to “level the playing field” by publicizing internal information can have significant unintended consequences by reducing the informativeness of prices for real decisions.
The assembled and annotated genome of the pigeon louse Columbicola columbae, a model ectoparasite

The pigeon louse Columbicola columbae is a longstanding and important model for studies of ectoparasitism and host-parasite coevolution. However, a deeper understanding of its evolution and capacity for rapid adaptation is limited by a lack of genomic resources. Here, we present a high-quality draft assembly of the C. columbae genome, produced using a combination of Oxford Nanopore, Illumina, and Hi-C technologies. The final assembly is 208 Mb in length, with 12 chromosome-size scaffolds representing 98.1% of the assembly. For gene model prediction, we used a novel clustering method (wavy_choose) for Oxford Nanopore RNA-seq reads to feed into the MAKER annotation pipeline. High recovery of conserved single-copy orthologs (BUSCOs) suggests that our assembly and annotation are both highly complete and highly accurate. Consistent with the results of the only other assembled louse genome, Pediculus humanus, we find that C. columbae has a relatively low density of repetitive elements, the majority of which are DNA transposons. Also similar to P. humanus, we find a reduced number of genes encoding opsins, G protein-coupled receptors, odorant receptors, insulin signaling pathway components, and detoxification proteins in the C. columbae genome, relative to other insects. We propose that such losses might characterize the genomes of obligate, permanent ectoparasites with predictable habitats, limited foraging complexity, and simple dietary regimes. The sequencing and analysis for this genome were relatively low cost, and took advantage of a new clustering technique for Oxford Nanopore RNAseq reads that will be useful to future genome projects.
Annual Saltman Lecture: Further Beyond Reason: Emotions, the Core Concerns, and Mindfulness in Negotiation

Negative emotions can impede good negotiation, especially good interest-based negotiation. Positive emotions can foster good negotiation. Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro have proposed the Core Concerns System for addressing the emotional dimension of negotiation by attending to five core concerns that everyone shares: Appreciation, Affiliation, Autonomy, Status, and Role. They recommend using the core concerns both as a “lens” to understand a negotiation situation and as a “lever” to produce positive emotions, thus enhancing the likelihood of good, interest based negotiation. This system is simple and often effective. Not infrequently, however, negotiators who have mastered the Core Concerns System, and intend and prepare to use it in a particular negotiation, fail to do so; sometimes, looking back, they wish that they had used that approach because they believe it would have produced a better process and outcome. When this happens, it typically results from deficiencies in present-moment awareness. One way to remedy such deficiencies is present-moment mindful awareness, or “mindfulness.” (Mindfulness is a certain way of paying attention - deliberately, moment-to-moment, and without judgment - to whatever passes through the traditional senses and the mind. A person cultivates this skill in silent meditation and then deploys it in everyday life.) Reciprocally, the Core Concerns System can help a person maintain mindfulness. Through such mutual reinforcement, mindfulness and the Core Concerns System could do more together than they could separately to reduce self-centered thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and encourage more other-centered thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in negotiation.
Cost-Benefit Analysis of Space Exploration: Some Ethical Considerations

Abstract Humanity faces many important decisions about space exploration. A major but controversial decision-making paradigm is cost–benefit analysis (CBA). This paper discusses some ethical considerations in CBA that are important to decision making about space exploration, including how we define costs and benefits; space exploration's non-market value; the standing of future humans and of extraterrestrials; and the role of discounting in evaluating long-term space exploration projects.
Accounting Research in the Japanese Setting

In this commentary I offer some thoughts on the possibilities for accounting research that uses the Japanese setting. I argue that the uniqueness of the Japanese setting offers many opportunities for researchers, and hope that we can encourage more researchers to take advantage of this setting to advance the literature on financial reporting and disclosure.
Ownership and trade from evolutionary games

Abstract This article describes how ownership status serves as a natural asymmetrizing criterion enabling resolution of property conflicts. Two new evolutionary game models are presented where ownership and trade emerge from anarchy as evolutionary stable strategies.
Supply Chain Visibility and Social Responsibility: Investigating Consumers’ Behaviors and Motives

Consumers increasingly want to know more about where and how the products they purchase are being made. To create transparency requires a company to both gain visibility into its supply chain and d...
Do Pensions Increase the Labor Supply of Older Men

This paper investigates the relationship between pension coverage and the retirement behavior of older men. Pensions are associated with higher work involvement for males in their late fifties and early sixties but with lower rates of job holding for those aged 65-69. Age of entry into pension employment is shown to be positively correlated with future labor supply. When combined with evidence on age-specific changes in labor force participation rates, this pattern casts doubt on the hypothesis that broadened pension coverage explains a substantial portion of the trend towards earlier male retirement.
Egypt’s Growth Performance Under Economic Liberalism: A Reassessment With New GDP Estimates, 1886–1945

The stagnation of Egyptian living standards in the first half of the 20th century has been widely presumed in economic history. However, this conventional wisdom is partially based on a fragmented body of evidence on aggregate output. In particular, no estimates of national income exist for any extended period prior to World War II. Using a money-based cointegration approach and a new measure of broad money, we exploit Egypt’s intimate economic links with the U.K. to provide the first continuous estimates of GDP for the period 1886–1945. Our estimates are consistent with trends in agriculture and other stylized facts about the Egyptian economy in the late 19th and early 20th century. The empirical results provide qualified support to the conventional wisdom about Egypt’s growth performance in addition to offering a detailed characterization of output cycles.
Environmental Education, Wicked Problems, and Virtue

INTRODUCTION Academics and policymakers continue to look to the promise of participatory approaches for addressing environmental problems. Approaches range from deliberative risk assessment methods to community-based participatory research to citizen cells and consensus conferences. Though increasing and improving participation is popular today, even the most promising ideas face difficulties often owing to the intractability, or wickedness, of many environmental problems. A problem can be described as wicked when it involves deep disagreement and distrust among policymakers and stakeholders (even over how to formulate the problem itself), high degrees of scientific uncertainty, and a lack of any set of solutions that will not be harmful or disadvantageous to someone in some relevant way. In the contexts of wicked problems, participatory approaches may not have any traction with government officials and policymakers and serve to amplify disagreements among participants.
Study of Going-Concern Opinions:

Findings indicate that a Shumway method of decomposition of individual ratios is more explanatory of the existence of going concerns than a summary Altman Z score. Obfuscation of financial statement information appears to occur when going-concern footnotes are reported.
The ASA’s Missed Opportunity to Promote Sound Science in Court

The American Sociological Association (ASA) filed an amicus brief in Wal-Mart v. Dukes in which the ASA defended the testimony of the plaintiffs’ sociological expert. Unfortunately, the ASA’s portrayal and defense of the method and opinions of this expert do not match the actual method used, and opinions offered, by the expert in the Wal-Mart case. The authors demonstrate that none of the ASA’s defenses of the expert’s method has merit and that the expert violated basic methodological rules set out by the ASA’s own sources. The opinions to which the expert testified, therefore, lacked a scientific foundation.
Why International Law Favors Emigration Over Immigration

International law favors the right to emigrate over the right to immigrate. This divergence is inconsistent with the liberal norms that underlie international law. Liberal theory requires substantial freedom both to emigrate and immigrate, subject to a balancing process that also gives substantial weight to the interests of others affected thereby in both the home and receiving countries. International law overly protects the right to emigrate because it gives insufficient consideration to the impact of emigration on the home country; and it under protects the right to immigrate by granting nations the substantially unlimited right to regulate immigration without regard to the impact on prospective migrants. The divergence is better explained through an historical-materialist analysis of an increasingly globalized world economy dominated by the richer capitalist nations, and especially by the United States which has a greatly disproportionate share of the world's migrants. Permissive emigration assures the United States a ready supply of needed workers, while regulating who may enter enables the United States to control immigration to its advantage. Outside of Latin America, legal immigration to the United States favors the well educated and highly skilled, thereby enhancing the US's dominance and undermining the development of the less well off nations. Immigration from Latin America, much of which is illegal, serves as a safety valve against social upheaval in countries close to the United States, and provides scapegoats through which to divide the working class by distracting attention from the true causes of the increasing domestic inequalities. The final section of the paper speculates on how socialist nations and a socialist world community would address freedom of movement. In the short run the grotesque inequalities produced by capitalism might require some limits on movement, although directed toward the end of human well-being rather than profit. In the longer run, as socialism produces greater equality, it might be possible to practice freedom of movement.
The Devil's Choice: Re-Thinking Law, Ethics, and Symptom Relief in Palliative Care

In 1982, cinemas around the world screened Sophie's Choice, a film starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, adapted from the book by William Styron. The film opens with Stingo, a young journalist from the South, who arrives in New York in 1947 and rents a room in Brooklyn. Stingo is drawn into a relationship with Sophie and Nathan, the couple who live upstairs. Sophie is a Polish concentration camp survivor; Nathan is the man who saved her when she arrived in America. Nathan is charismatic, schizophrenic, and violent. In one of the film's flashbacks, a German soldier imposes a terrible choice on Sophie, a young mother who arrives at Auschwitz with other prisoners from Krakow. Sophie is ordered to choose which of her two children will be sent to the ovens, and which will live.
Effects of Earnings Forecasts and Heightened Professional Skepticism on the Outcomes of Client–Auditor Negotiation

Ethics has been identified as an important factor that potentially affects auditors’ professional skepticism. For example, prior research finds that auditors who are more concerned with professional ethics exhibit greater professional skepticism. Further, the literature suggests that professional skepticism may lead the auditor to more vigilantly resist the client’s position in financial reporting disputes. These reporting disputes are generally resolved through negotiations between the auditor and client to arrive at the final reported amounts. To date, the role that professional skepticism potentially plays in the negotiation process has been relatively unexplored. The literature prior to the enactment of Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX) suggests that auditors are more likely to approve a client position when the matter in dispute is relatively ambiguous and when changing the client’s position will result in the client failing to meet analysts’ expectations. However, changes resulting from SOX have led auditors to be more vigilant and therefore results found in the pre-SOX environment may not hold in the current environment where auditors are held more accountable for their actions. Results from an experiment with experienced audit managers and partners suggest that in the post-SOX climate, auditors’ negotiations do not appear to be substantively influenced by management being able to meet or beat forecasts. Moreover, we find that when auditors exhibit heightened professional skepticism, they are more ethical by being conservative and they stand more resolute than when auditors do not exhibit heightened professional skepticism. Finally, although we do not find a main effect for the influence of earnings forecast, we do find a significant interaction between earnings forecast and heightened professional skepticism. Implications for practice and research are then presented.
Special Purpose Vehicles: Empirical Evidence on Determinants and Earnings Management

ABSTRACT: We investigate the use, determinants, and earnings effects of special purpose vehicles (SPVs). Based on a proxy of SPV activity that can be applied to a broad cross‐section of firms over time, we find a two‐and‐a‐half fold monotonic increase in the percentage of firms using at least one SPV during the eight‐year period from 1997 through 2004. Tobit regressions of the determinants of SPV use show that SPV activity increases with financial reporting incentives and economic and tax motivations, but strong corporate governance tends to mitigate their use. In addition, the evidence is consistent with SPVs arranged for financial reporting purposes being associated with earnings management, whereas the same does not appear to be the case for SPVs set up mainly for economic, tax, and other reasons.
Public debt and social expenditure: Friends or foes?

Abstract This paper assesses the effects of total public debt on social expenditure using an unbalanced panel of 50 countries between 1985 and 2003. The most robust finding is that higher debt ratios reduce social expenditures. Loans from multilateral organizations do not seem to ameliorate the adverse consequences of debt. Results indicate that defaults may have a direct positive effect on social expenditures. The main policy implication is that to protect social expenditures overindebtedness must be avoided.
Long-Run PPP May Not Hold After All

Abstract Recent tests using long data series find evidence in favor of long-run PPP. These tests may have reached the wrong conclusion. Using artificial data calibrated to nominal exchange rates and disaggregated data on prices, we show that tests on long-run PPP have serious size biases. In the baseline case, unit root and cointegration tests with a nominal size of 5% have true sizes that range from 0.90 to 0.99 in 100-year long data series, even though there is a permanent component that accounts for 42% of the 100-year forecast variance of the real exchange rate. Tests of stationarity are shown to have very low power in the same circumstances.
THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN: SURVEY AND EXTENSIONS

SUMMARY This paper investigates the capabilities of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg and others, for their current and potential impact on the supply chain. In particular, this paper examines the use of social media to capture the impact on supply-chain events and develop a context for those events. This paper also analyses the use of social media in the supply chain to build relationships among supply-chain participants. Further, this paper investigates the of use of user-supplied tags as a basis of evaluating and extending an ontology for supply chains. In addition, using knowledge discovery from social media, a number of concepts related to the supply chain are examined, including supply-chain reputation and influence within the supply chain. Prediction markets are analysed for their potential use in supply chains. Finally, this paper investigates the integration of traditional knowledge management along with knowledge generated from social media. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The CAFA Mass Action Numerosity Requirement: Three Problems with Counting to 100

This Note examines the mass action provision of the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA) and the difficulties courts have encountered when applying its seemingly simple 100-person numerosity requirement. “Mass actions” are a broad category of nonclass aggregate litigation over which CAFA extended federal jurisdiction. This Note examines three interpretations of the numerosity requirement advanced in recent cases. These interpretations have advocated, in turn, not finding a mass action when a case has more than 100 formally joined plaintiffs, recognizing the existence of a single mass action broken up among parallel suits with fewer than 100 plaintiffs, and finding a mass action in cases with only a single, representational plaintiff. These arguments concerning the meaning of the mass action numerosity requirement stem from the confluence of three factors: Congress’s intent for courts to interpret CAFA broadly, the similarities between class actions and nonclass aggregate litigation, and ambiguities in the mass action statute. Although no perfect reading of the statute is possible, this Note suggests that courts strictly interpret the statute going forward, only counting formal parties to a single action in order to determine if CAFA’s numerosity threshold has been achieved.
Are individuals entering self‐employment overly optimistic? an empirical test of plans and projections on nascent entrepreneur expectations

This research examines the rationality of the expectations of nascent entrepreneurs. Consistent with conjectures regarding entry into self-employment, I find substantial overoptimism in nascent entrepreneurs' expectations, in that they overestimate the probability that their nascent activity will result in an operating venture. Further, for those ventures that achieve operation, individuals overestimate the expected future sales and employment. To explain variations in overoptimism, I posit that those individuals who adopt an inside view to forecasting through the use of plans and financial projections, will exhibit greater ex ante bias in their expectations. Consistent with the inside view causing overoptimism in expectations, I find that the preparation of projected financial statements results in more overly optimistic venture sale forecasts. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Immigrants' Labor Supply and Exchange Rate Volatility †

Abstract Are an immigrant's decisions affected in real time by her home country's economy? I examine this question by exploiting exchange rate variations as exogenous price shocks to immigrants' budget constraints. I find that in response to a 10 percent dollar appreciation, an immigrant decreases her earnings by 0.92 percent, mainly by reducing hours worked. The exchange rate effect is greater for recent immigrants, married immigrants with absent spouses, Mexicans close to the border, and immigrants from countries with higher remittance flows. A neoclassical interpretation of these findings suggests that the income effect exceeds the cross-substitution effect. Remittance targets offer an alternative explanation. (JEL F24, F31, J22, J61)
Economic Sanctions: Astute Policy or Just another Barrier to Free Trade?

When mentioning free trade the topic of economic sanctions is seldom mentioned. However, governments of the developed world, especially the United States, have used economic sanctions as a foreign policy tool to compel other countries to change their behavior. The increasing use of economic sanctions as a form of foreign policy is not without cost, however, and that cost is borne by citizens of sanctioned countries and businesses who find international markets closed to them, either entirely or in part. In addition, consumers pay a price through less choice and higher prices. Economic sanctions are barriers to free trade and interfere with the free flow of goods and services. This case examines the current state of economic sanctions imposed by the United States and explores sanctions imposed on Cuba, Myanmar and Iran; three heavily sanctioned countries which recently have experienced a change in U.S. foreign policy action, yet still suffer from trade restrictions. NOTE: A Teaching Note is available upon request for verified university faculty.
Firm Leverage and Unemployment during the Great Recession

We argue that firms’ balance sheets were instrumental in the propagation of shocks during the Great Recession. Using establishment-level data, we show that firms that tightened their debt capacity in the run-up (“high-leverage firms”) exhibit a significantly larger decline in employment in response to household demand shocks than firms that freed up debt capacity (“low-leverage firms”). In fact, all of the job losses associated with falling house prices during the Great Recession are concentrated among establishments of high-leverage firms. At the county level, we find that counties with a larger fraction of establishments belonging to high-leverage firms exhibit a significantly larger decline in employment in response to household demand shocks. Thus, firms’ balance sheets also matter for aggregate employment.
Institutional Ownership and Monitoring Effectiveness: It's Not Just How Much but What Else You Own

Corporate governance research indicates that large owners provide effective monitoring. In this article, we expand firm-level notions of monitoring to include large institutional owners' investment portfolios and suggest that portfolio characteristics affect owners' motivation and capacity to monitor, which compromises the positive effects of monitoring at the firm level. Specifically, using data from 533 large firms over a 10-year period, we find that increases in the size of portfolio holdings, number of portfolio blockholdings, portfolio turnover, and the importance of a particular holding reduce monitoring effectiveness in the context of executive compensation. Overall, we provide preliminary evidence that the portfolio characteristics of the largest institutional owners contradict firm-level monitoring effects; therefore, we strongly recommend that future studies consider both firm-and portfolio-level effects simultaneously to understand monitoring effectiveness.
Conceptions of Lawyers' Agency in Legal Ethics Scholarship

I have recently commented elsewhere in the pages of this journal on one of many pressing problems I see facing the legal profession in the twenty-first century. I will focus here on what I think is one of the most urgent problems faced by those who study the pressing problems of the legal profession-i.e., legal ethics professors and scholars. That problem is how to conceive of lawyers' individual and collective "agency" in working to reform the profession and society more generally. By this I mean: how should we evaluate lawyers' ability to bring about meaningful change in the enormously complex, resistant, and ambiguous set of institutions we lump together when we refer to "the legal profession"?The problem of how to conceive of individual and collective agency is, of course, a problem that pervades legal scholarship. On the one hand, the idea that people at a fundamental level "choose" how they conduct their lives is enormously appealing, having roots deep in classical philosophical liberalism and related Anglo-American jurisprudential justifications for holding individuals "morally accountable" for their acts.2 On the other hand, strong conceptions of unconstrained agency defy our observations of the way in which social position affects life trajectory. Not only do we observe this phenomenon reflected in our personal social worlds, but a large sociological and historical literature amply documents the constraints imposed on individuals' opportunities in law as a result of structural barriers including race, gender, class, religion, and ethnicity. This literature further establishes that some of these barriers persist through nearly invisible but no less pernicious mechanisms, despite efforts to eradicate them.
A neglected gap in the Weber thesis? The long economic lag of capitalism from Protestantism:

This article identifies and explains a certain previously undetected or downplayed analytical problem in Max Weber’s thesis arising from a causal link between Protestantism, above all Calvinism, an...
The Post- Citizens United Fantasy-land

First, a bouquet for the illuminating facts presented by Professors Wert, Gaddie, and Bullock.1 They make dramatically clear how minuscule independent spending by corporate PACs has been (that is, those PACs’ direct spending as distinct from support by those PACs or their corporate sponsors for spending by intermediaries like the Chamber of Commerce).2 Their showing is borne out by experience this year: corporate support for campaigns is almost all hidden, flowing through intermediaries,3 which is why getting effective disclosure is more important than ever, as the Court clearly recognizes4 (We probably owe much to Justice Kennedy for the fact that the opinion treats disclosure as it does.).5
Minority Religions and the Religion Clauses

This Article explores a minority-protection approach to interpreting the First Amendment's Religion Clauses. Under such a theory, the Religion Clauses together should be read to protect minority religious beliefs and practices from government burdens, and to equalize the status of minority religions before the government with that of majority faiths. Protecting minorities is not the sole or overriding purpose of the clauses, but it is a significant one. I build on previous scholarly work concerning religious minorities, but in some respects I critique them and reach different conclusions about where a minority-protection approach properly leads. Part I argues that protection of minority religions should be an important consideration in interpreting the Religion Clauses. Part II addresses difficulties and complications in the idea of protecting minority faiths. The constitutional text protects all religious faiths, not just minorities. In addition, defining which faiths are minorities is more complicated than previous commentators have allowed. Because of America's complex patterns of religious identities, who is a minority will often vary depending on the geographical location, on the institutional setting of a legal dispute, and on how one chooses the key religious differences that sort groups into different categories. Given these complications, courts generally should refrain from singling out certain religious groups as minorities and treating them differently than other groups. Instead, courts should develop principles for various cases that are applicable to all faiths, but that tend to protect whoever happens to be a minority in the given geographical location, institution, or cultural atmosphere. Part III develops such principles for the leading categories of Religion Clause disputes. As other commentators have argued, courts seeking to protect religious minorities should read the Free Exercise Clause expansively to exempt religiously motivated conduct from certain laws that impose significant burdens on the conduct. Likewise, the Establishment Clause should be broadly interpreted to restrict government-sponsored religious practices in public schools and other government institutions because of their inherent majoritarian bias. However, contrary to the common strict-separationist wisdom, permitting government assistance for private religious education and social services can have positive aspects for many religious minorities. The Court's increasing approval of programs of aid is quite defensible under a minority-protection approach, if the program includes measures to protect children and families from being pushed into schools that teach a faith different from their own.
Regional Adjustment to Trade Liberalization

Abstract In this paper, I examine the effect of trade reform on regional employment in Mexico. Three factors condition regional labor demand: (1) transport costs, which encourage firms to locate in regions with good access to foreign markets; (2) backward–forward linkages, which encourage firms to locate near buyers and suppliers, and (3) agglomeration economies, which reinforce the pre-trade pattern of industry location. The results suggest transport costs and backward–forward linkages influence regional employment. Post-trade employment growth is relatively high in regional industries that are close to the United States and near upstream and downstream industries. Trade reform appears to have contributed to the breakup of the Mexico City manufacturing belt and the formation of new industry centers in northern Mexico.
Investment Cycles and Sovereign Debt Overhang

This paper explores the joint dynamics of sovereign debt and foreign direct investment in a small open economy. Our analysis brings to the forefront two important political economy considerations. We follow the seminal work of Thomas and Worrall (1994) in that the government cannot commit, leaving capital and debt exposed to expropriation or repudiation. However, in Thomas and Worrall (and more generally in Ray, 2002), the government eventually accumulates sufficient assets to overcome its lack of commitment. To this environment, we introduce a second prominent political economy implication. Namely, that the risk of losing office makes the government impatient relative to the market. This simple but empirically relevant change in environment leads to dramatically different long-run properties of the economy. We show that the combination of the government’s impatience and inability to commit generates perpetual cycles in both sovereign debt and foreign direct investment in an environment in which the first best capital stock is constant. The expected tax on capital endogenously varies with the state of the economy, and investment is distorted by more in recessions than in booms, amplifying the effect of shocks. The predictions of the model are consistent with two important phenomena in less developed markets. One is the well-known “debt overhang effect” on investment, where current levels of debt negatively affect future investment. Second is the rise in expropriation risk during crises in emerging markets and the depressed level of investment following these crises. We also use our framework to analyse the effect of budgetary restrictions,
Synergy between Accounting Disclosures and Forward-Looking Information in Stock Prices

ABSTRACT: It is well recognized that stock prices provide relevant feedback that can guide future firm decisions. This paper develops a model to examine how accounting disclosures affect the decision-usefulness of such stock market reactions. We demonstrate that information in accounting reports can prove useful because it helps observers better interpret and isolate the decision-relevant information embedded in the ensuing stock price reaction. This leads to natural synergies between accounting reports and stock prices in directing firm strategies—the more forward-looking information that can potentially be gleaned from stock prices, the more the firm will invest in improving precision of accounting disclosures even when such disclosures pertain to unrelated current activities.