cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Nonprofit boards: Size, performance and managerial incentives

Abstract We examine relations between board size, managerial incentives and enterprise performance in nonprofit organizations. We posit that a nonprofit's demand for directors increases in the number of programs it pursues, resulting in a positive association between program diversity and board size. Consequently, we predict that board size is inversely related to managerial pay-performance incentives and positively with overall organization performance. We find empirical evidence consistent with our hypotheses. The number of programs is positively related to board size. Board size is associated negatively with managerial incentives, positively with program spending and fundraising performance, and negatively with commercial revenue, in levels and changes.
Consider the Source (and the Message): Supreme Court Justices and Strategic Audits of Lower Court Decisions

Given scarce resources, Supreme Court justices hear cases that maximize their auditing capacities. The authors argue that justices rely on the identity of lower court judges and the ideological disposition of lower court decisions to decide which cases to review. The authors find justices are most likely to audit disagreeable lower court decisions rendered by ideologically disagreeable panel judges and are least likely to review agreeable lower court decisions rendered by ideologically agreeable panel judges. Furthermore, when faced with the same ideologically disagreeable lower court decision, justices are less likely to review decisions made by ideological allies than those by ideological foes.
Studies on economic reforms and development in China

In Studies in Economic Reform renowned and influential Chinese scholar and politician Siwei Cheng outlines his theories for bringing economic reform to China in the context of the increasingly global economy.
From Ballots to Bullets: District of Columbia v. Heller and the New Civil Rights

This article posits that the Supreme Court's recent Second Amendment ruling District of Columbia v. Heller is a victory for civil rights, but not in the sense that most activists from the 1960s would recognize. Rather than a product of mid-century legal liberalism, Heller marks the culmination of almost forty years of coalition-based popular constitutionalism aimed at transforming the individual right to bear arms and the common law right to "employ deadly force in self-defense" into new civil rights. The implications of this are potentially great. By declaring the right to use deadly force in self-defense an "essential" right, the Court has just positioned itself to use the same due process analysis that it did in Roe v. Wade to invalidate municipal gun bans, without having to overrule past opinions like Cruickshank or even bothering to incorporate the Second Amendment to the states.
Epistemic Value Theory and Information Ethics

Three of the major issues in information ethics – intellectual property, speech regulation, and privacy – concern the morality of restricting people’s access to certain information. Consequently, policies in these areas have a significant impact on the amount and types of knowledge that people acquire. As a result, epistemic considerations are critical to the ethics of information policy decisions (cf. Mill, 1978 [1859]). The fact that information ethics is a part of the philosophy of information highlights this important connection with epistemology. In this paper, I illustrate how a value-theoretic approach to epistemology can help to clarify these major issues in information ethics. However, I also identify several open questions about epistemic values that need to be answered before we will be able to evaluate the epistemic consequences of many information policies.
A Comparative Approach to Economic Espionage: Is Any Nation Effectively Dealing With This Global Threat?

In 1996, Congress passed the Economic Espionage Act (EEA), 18 U.S.C. Sections 1831 and 1832, to help thwart attempts by foreign entities intent on stealing U.S. proprietary information and trade secrets. Despite the passage of the EEA almost twenty years ago, if recent statistics are to be believed, there is so much trade secret thievery going around that the United States finds itself in the midst of an epidemic of economic espionage. Currently, any and all U.S. technology that is vulnerable and profitable is being targeted. Unfortunately, existing remedies and enforcement have barely blunted the onslaught against the U.S. which faces, according to the IP Commission Report, a potential 300 billion dollar loss of raw innovation every year. To date, there have only been a handful of § 1831 convictions since the Act was passed. That is hardly a deterrence or something to send shudders down the backs of would-be industrial spies. Despite U.S. shortcomings, the rest of the world has not done any better. This article explores the reasons behind the U.S. government’s two-pronged approach: preventing the thefts by educating and training private companies to improve security and safeguard their secrets, and reacting to acts of economic espionage by federally prosecuting offenders under the EEA, and why this approach is not succeeding. The U.S. approach has been weak for several reasons: (1) the EEA, specifically, 18 U.S.C. § 1831, has been difficult to prove; (2) the sentences under § 1831 have been minimal; (3) despite being educated on the pitfalls of lax cybersecurity and personnel controls, there is a lack of buy-in from private industry to cooperate with law enforcement and/or tighten office security measures to prevent IP theft; (4) the federal government has taken a relatively hands-off approach in assisting private enterprise; and (5) other countries do not assist in international investigations due to their own weak response or individual attitudes towards intellectual property theft or in some cases, are the same foreign countries involved in the theft. This article also examines how various countries are handling the economic espionage threat and how differences in cultural, historical, and nationalistic backgrounds as well as economic and political governance allow some countries to be unapologetic supporters of state-sponsored economic espionage. The overall global response to economic espionage is weak, and a stronger U.S. response is needed.
Do Liquidation Values Affect Financial Contracts? Evidence from Commercial Loan Contracts and Zoning Regulation

We examine the impact of asset liquidation value on debt contracting using a unique set of commercial property loan contracts. We employ commercial zoning regulation to capture the flexibility of a property’s permitted uses as a measure of an asset’s redeployability or value in its next best use. Within a census tract, more redeployable assets receive larger loans with longer maturities and durations, lower interest rates, and fewer creditors, controlling for the property’s type, sale price, and earnings-to-price ratio. These results are consistent with incomplete contracting and transaction cost theories of liquidation value and financial structure.
The many faces of emotional contagion An affective process theory of affective linkage

Emotional contagion—emotions being linked across people—has captured psychologists’ attention yet little is known about its mechanisms. Early influential treatments focused on primitive mimicry. Later accounts emphasized (a) social comparison, whereby people compare their feelings with compatriots’, (b) emotional interpretation, where others’ expressive displays serve as information, and (c) empathy, or imagining another person’s feelings. This paper introduces affective process theory (APT), which unifies these mechanisms and identifies others. Using a rule-governed theoretical process, APT reveals 10 distinct mechanisms that connect people’s affective states, which fall into three types. Convergent linkage occurs when individuals share the same vantage point and interpretations of emotionally evocative stimuli. Divergent linkage occurs with a shared vantage point but different interpretations. Complementary linkage occurs when the other person is itself the stimulus. APT integrates past findings on mode...
Cultural Cliteracy: Exposing the Contexts of Women's Not Coming

Cultural cliteracy denotes what an adequately educated person should know about the clitoris. This paper elaborates three ways to enlarge understandings of the clitoris. The first looks at the clitoris as a target of male aggression, a significant and persistent theme in Western history. The second describes an expanded anatomy of the clitoris, one which makes it as large and significant as the penis. The third connects consciousness of clitoral facts with empowerment beyond genital satisfaction and demonstrates that cultural cliteracy can improve readings of women's texts. To conclude, cultural cliteracy is shown to fuel growth, creativity, and individuation and to help women find and express personal power. This claim implies that integrating better understandings of and attitudes towards the clitoris into other academic and professional discourses could help women come into their own. "In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives."
Weaving Functional Brain Imaging Into the Tapestry of Evidence: A Case for Functional Neuroimaging in Federal Criminal Courts

Recent advances in brain imaging technologies allow researchers to “peer inside” a defendant’s brain. Although functional neuroimaging evidence is frequently used in civil litigation, federal courts have been hesitant to admit it into evidence in criminal trials. Scholars and commentators alike continue to debate the merits, detriments, and general admissibility of functional neuroimaging evidence in the criminal context. Meanwhile, federal judges repeatedly admit various forms of forensic science into evidence without evaluating them under the appropriate admissibility standards. This Note argues that this has created a double standard for evidence admissibility. Functional neuroimaging evidence may, in fact, be more scientifically reliable than some of the forensic science evidence currently admitted at trial. Accordingly, this Note proposes that judges should consider the disparity in evidentiary standards when considering the admissibility of functional neuroimaging evidence, and should carefully and fairly examine such evidence when proffered in federal criminal trials.
Intertemporal capital substitution and Hayekian booms

Hayek’s business cycle theory portrays monetary expansion and monetary contraction with counterintuitive asymmetry. On the one hand, it suggests that they both change relative prices and cause costly reallocations of production factors. At the same time, the theory predicts that while a monetary contraction causes the economic crisis, the monetary expansion comes with the boom. I argue that what I call intertemporal capital substitution in industries close to final consumption explains why there is a boom in spite of the costly reallocations. More specifically, monetary expansion only gradually increases the demand for nonspecific factors of production by industries that are temporally remote from final consumption. Responding to the expected higher cost of nonspecific factors, consumer-goods industries temporarily increase output and depreciate specific durable production factors faster than they planned.
The Dynamic Analytics of Property Law

The standard property trilogy of private, commons, and state has become so outdated that it now impedes imagination and innovation at the frontiers of ownership. This essay suggests two approaches - creating new ideal types and synthesizing existing ones - that may help update our static property metaphors. Using these dynamic approaches to property analytics, legal theory can move beyond polarizing oppositions that have made jurisprudential debates unsolvable and rendered concrete problems invisible.
The Presidential Ranking Game: Critical Review and Some New Discoveries

that rating scores can be predicted with relative ease. Furthermore, new measures are found to be significant—two operationalizing the latest extension of Stephen Skowronek’s “political time” thesis and one controlling for cultural level preferences favoring “progressive” presidents. This suggeststhatexpertevaluatorstakenoteofpresidentialperformancewithincontext.Italsosuggests thatexpertsofallpoliticalstripesareinfluencedbythemilieuinwhichtheirevaluationtakesplace. Intheend,whilenoclaimismadethatthepopularexpertsurveysusedinthisstudyprovideatrue measureofpresidentialgreatness,itisarguedthatrankingpollsmaytellusmorethancriticsadmit. Ever since the results of Arthur Schlesinger Sr.’s first survey of presidential experts were released in Life magazine, the presidential ranking game has been a fixture of political journalism (1948). At regular intervals, media titans and research institutes can now be expected to release new poll results updating purported evaluation of presidential greatness (for example see C-SPAN 2009; Siena Research Institute 2010; Wall Street Journal 2005). However, despite their popularity with the public, it is probably fair to say that most political scientists feel that expert presidential ranking polls are simply “not very rigorous” (Pfiffner 2003, 23). Indeed, given the Justice Potter Stewart—“I know it when I see it”—subjective standard of evaluation often employed, even the experts who sometimes take part in the polls usually assume that they do not tell us much. This study investigates this premise—with as much rigor and openness as the source material permits. It thus helps to fill the gap that exists between the public’s
Income Quintiles: Examining Changes in the Characteristics of Respondents

This research identified the characteristics of respondents in different quintiles of the income distribution using data from the three most recent Surveys of Consumer Finances (1998, 2001, and 2004). Using multinomial logistic regression, each quintile was compared to the middle quintile of the income distribution (41 st to 60 th income percentile) for each of the three surveys. The findings can be used by financial advisors and educators to compare the characteristics of their clients and their target audiences with a national sample and to help clients assess their current situation. However, an important first step is to discuss with clients what they want to achieve because each client is likely to have different goals.
Children's competence to provide informed consent for mental health treatment.

Controversy continues over whether to allow children unilaterally to consent to mental health treatment or, to refuse treatment and thus override parental wishes. The question involves diverse constitutional analysis of procedural and substantive due process, privacy, and equal protection, as well as societal values regarding the rights, roles, and responsibilities of parents in deciding about treatment for their children. While society, as reflected through our laws, has generally viewed children as incapable of mature, adult-like decision-making, recent empirical research suggests that even children as young as eleven are able to provide informed consent for treatment and participate meaningfully in treatment decision-making. Allowing children to provide informed consent for mental health treatment is particularly important because of the potentially significant liberty and privacy interests involved, the potentially significant impact of treatment upon future life choices, and the treatment-enhancing effects of allowing children to participate in treatment decision-making. Giving children a voice in deciding treatment options is particularly important in the mental health context because parents do not always act in the child's best interests. The purposes of this article are (1) to suggest a new view about the competence of children to provide consent for mental health treatment; (2) to propose needed legal reform by way of a statutory scheme; and (3) to suggest practical approaches for informing children and determining a child's capacity to provide informed consent. The paper presents proposals for new legal definitions of competence and standards for informed consent when minors are involved. A new statutory scheme is also proposed, based upon empirical research on children's competence, which presents different standards according to the type of mental health treatment at issue: civil commitment, outpatient psychopharmacological treatment, or outpatient psychotherapy. The framework is designed to help ensure children's due process rights by giving them a voice in their own treatment planning to the greatest extent possible. No statutory scheme has yet been developed or proposed that provides children an opportunity to consent to mental health treatment commensurate with their capacity.
Varying the course in patenting genetic material: a counter-proposal to Richard Epstein's steady course.

Richard Epstein’s ‘‘Steady the Course: Property Rights in Genetic Material’’ makes a case for an all-or-nothing approach to patent protection for the fruits of biotechnology research, a case that rejects initiatives that would ‘‘tweak’’ the system to assure the availability of biomedical advances for use in basic research. Epstein believes that we have stumbled into the best of all possible worlds and should instead stay, as his title suggests, on a steady course. Reading his paper makes one wonder why the literature questioning aspects of genomic patenting and proposing the sorts of interventions that he rejects—compulsory
Behavioral economics: implications for regulatory behavior

Behavioral economics (BE) examines the implications for decision-mak- ing when actors suffer from biases documented in the psychological literature. This article considers how such biases affect regulatory decisions. The article posits a sim- ple model of a regulator who serves as an agent to a political overseer. The regulator chooses a policy that accounts for the rewards she receives from the political over- seer—whose optimal policy is assumed to maximize short-run outputs that garner political support, rather than long-term welfare outcomes—and the weight the regula- tor puts on the optimal long run policy. Flawed heuristics and myopia are likely to lead regulators to adopt policies closer to the preferences of political overseers than they would otherwise. The incentive structure for regulators is likely to reward those who adopt politically expedient policies, either intentionally (due to a desire to please the political overseer) or accidentally (due to bounded rationality). The article urges that careful thought be given to calls for greater state intervention, especially when those calls seek to correct firm biases. The article proposes measures that focus rewards to regulators on outcomes rather than outputs as a way to help ameliorate regulatory biases.
Marks, Morals, and Markets

This article proposes to analyze trademark law as a system of moral obligations between producers and consumers. Trademark theory to date is overwhelmingly consequentialist in approach, and much current debate over trademark doctrine rests on empirical claims that doctrinal innovations are producing undesirable results. Of approaches that do not follow consequentialist reasoning, the extant theoretical frameworks focus on the mark itself as a storehouse of meaning, the property-like “moral rights” that inhere in a mark, or the moral obligations of producers to one another as competitors. To the extent that the modern view of trademark law is that it seeks to vindicate not only producer interests but consumer interests as well, the absence of a robust deontological account of the relationship between mark owners and their customers is a significant shortcoming of the current scholarly literature.
Design and Renegotiation of Debt Covenants

We analyze the design and renegotiation of covenants in debt contracts as a particular example of the contractual assignment of property rights under asymmetric information. In particular, we consider a setting where future flrm investments are e‐cient in some states, but also involve a transfer from the lender(s) to shareholders. While there is symmetric information regarding investment e‐ciency, managers are better informed about any potential transfer than the lender. The lender can learn this information, but at a cost. In this setting, we show that the simple adverse selection problem leads to the allocation of greater ex-ante decision rights to the uninformed party than would follow under symmetric information. Consequently, ex-post renegotiation is in turn biased towards the uninformed party giving up these excessive rights. In many settings, this result yields the opposite implication from standard Property Rights results regarding contracting under incomplete contracts and ex-ante investments, whereby rights should be allocated to minimize ine‐ciencies due to distortions in ex-ante investments. Indeed, for debt contracts as well as other settings, the uninformed party, who receives strong decision rights in our setting, is likely to have few signiflcant ex-ante investments to undertake relative to the informed party.
The Quality and Price of Investment Banks’ Service: Evidence from the PIPE Market

We investigate the market structure and the pricing by placement agents of private investments in public equities (PIPEs). Our findings indicate that more reputable agents are associated with larger offers and with firms possessing lower risk. Agent reputation is positively associated with lower discounts and an enhanced post-PIPE trading environment. Issuers pay a higher dollar fee for these benefits, although more reputable agents charge a lower percentage fee. The evidence suggests that it is the quality of the issuing firm, and the pricing and reputational concern of the placement agent, that drives the equilibrium in the PIPE market.
Tax Rebates and the Cycle of Payday Borrowing

I examine whether receipt of a $300 tax rebate by payday borrowers affects their likelihood of borrowing, loan size, or default behavior. Results from fixed-effects models show that the rebate decreases the probability of taking out a payday loan in the short run. These impacts are most apparent among credit-constrained, infrequent borrowers. Those who take out loans around the time of the rebate borrow amounts typical of their normal borrowing behavior but are more likely to default. Overall, however, the rebate's effects are small and short-lived, suggesting a muted response to this cash windfall in payday borrowing and repayment.
THE USE AND ABUSE OF LABOR'S CAPITAL

The recent financial crisis has jeopardized the retirement savings of twenty-seven million Americans who depend on public pension funds, leading to cuts in benefits, increased employee contributions, job losses, and the rollback of legal rights like collective bargaining. This Article examines ways in which public pension funds invest against the economic interests of their own participants and beneficiaries, and the legal implications of these investments. In particular, the Article focuses on the use of public pensions to fund privatization of public employee jobs. Under the ascendant—and flawed—interpretation of the fiduciary duty of loyalty, public pension trustees owe their allegiance to the fund itself, rather than to the fund’s participants and beneficiaries, notwithstanding the fact that the duty of loyalty commands trustees to invest “solely in the interest of the participants and beneficiaries” according to ERISA and similar state pension codes. I argue that this “fund-first” view distorts the duty of loyalty and turns the role of trustee on its head, leading to investments that undermine, rather than enhance, the economic interests of public employees. I turn to ERISA, trust law, agency law, and corporate law to argue that public pension trustees should consider the impact of the funds’ investments on the jobs and job security of the funds’ participants and beneficiaries, where relevant. I also adduce evidence that these controversial investments are widespread. I propose that public pension funds be governed by a “member-first” view of fiduciary duty focused on the economic interests of public employees in their retirement funds, which go beyond maximizing return to the funds. I argue that this view is more faithful to the original purpose of the duty of loyalty than is the fund-first view. I suggest ways to implement the member-first view, discuss potential extensions beyond the jobs impact of investments, and assess the proposed reform’s practical effects.
The Hughes Court and Constitutional Consultation

This lecture, delivered to the Supreme Court Historical Society, details the ways in which justices of the Hughes Court provided guidance to members of the political branches in formulating constitutional solutions to the economic crisis of the 1930s. Among the policy areas considered are farm debt relief, energy policy, agricultural policy, civilian relief and public works, retirement pensions, and unemployment compensation.
Financial sophistication and portfolio choice over the life cycle

Abstract We develop a novel model of rational choice in the presence of information frictions–frictions which we interpret as arising from imperfect financial sophistication. In our framework, investors with smaller information frictions are better able to distinguish between potential investment vehicles, which both allows them to identify higher-quality assets and reduces the subjective uncertainty about returns to investment for any given asset. We embed our framework into an otherwise-standard quantitative model of saving and investment over the life cycle. Our calibrated model generates substantial financial income inequality across investors and is fully consistent with the empirical evidence that financially unsophisticated investors save at lower rates, participate less in the stock market, obtain less well-diversified portfolios when they do, and as a result, accumulate less wealth by retirement than their financially sophisticated peers.
Counteracting Strategic Purchase Deferrals: The Impact of Online Retailers’ Return Policy Decisions

Online shoppers value lenient return policies as they are unable to assess whether products match their expectations. We study how consumers’ discount-seeking purchase deferrals affect online retailers’ return policy choices. Lenient returns may induce higher full-price sales by limiting consumer regret, while signaling clearance unavailability risk. Contrasting earlier research that concluded a monopolist must set the refund at the clearance price when strategic consumers were overlooked, we find that an optimal refund bounded by the clearance price can mitigate purchase deferrals only when a monopolist salvages at mild discounts. To explore conditions under which a monopolist permits “full-refund returns,” we consider three scenarios: we permit clearing inventory without a loss; we assume lenient returns stimulate aggregate demand; we consider consumers’ transaction costs. We also derive a unique rational expectations equilibrium for competing retailers, wherein each retailer’s equilibrium refund is non...
Online Learning and Optimization for Revenue Management Problems with Add-on Discounts

We study in this paper a revenue management problem with add-on discounts. The problem is motivated by the practice in the video game industry, where a retailer offers discounts on selected supportive products (e.g. video games) to customers who have also purchased the core products (e.g. video game consoles). We formulate this problem as an optimization problem to determine the prices of different products and the selection of products for add-on discounts. In the base model, we focus on an independent demand structure. To overcome the computational challenge of this optimization problem, we propose an efficient FPTAS algorithm that solves the problem approximately to any desired accuracy. Moreover, we consider the problem in the setting where the retailer has no prior knowledge of the demand functions of different products. To solve this joint learning and optimization problem, we propose a UCB-based learning algorithm that uses the FPTAS optimization algorithm as a subroutine. We show that our learning algorithm can converge to the optimal algorithm that has access to the true demand functions, and the convergence rate is tight up to a certain logarithmic term. We further show that these results for the independent demand model can be extended to multinomial logit (MNL) choice models. In addition, we conduct numerical experiments with the real-world transaction data we collect from a popular video gaming brand's online store on Tmall.com. The experiment results illustrate our learning algorithm's robust performance and fast convergence in various scenarios. We also compare our algorithm with the optimal policy that does not use any add-on discount. The comparison results show the advantages of using the add-on discount strategy in practice.
Large sample properties of spectral estimators for a class of stationary nonlinear processes

. We consider the standard spectral estimators based on a sample from a class of strictly stationary nonlinear processes which include, in particular, the bilinear and Volterra processes. It is shown that these estimators, under certain mild regularity conditions are both consistent and asymptotically normal.
What do the VARs mean? Measuring the output effects of monetary policy

Abstract VARs describe the history of output and other variables following monetary shocks. To measure the effects of monetary shocks, one must add economic identifying assumptions. I specify the relative effects of anticipated and unanticipated money, and I calculate how VAR-based measures of the effect of money on output change as one varies this assumption. The anticipated/unanticipated assumption influences measured output effects as much or more than the variable selection and shock orthogonalization assumptions on which the VAR literature focuses. Assuming that anticipated monetary policy can have some effect on output results in much shorter, smaller, and perhaps more believable estimates of the output response to monetary shocks.
Competition and Long–run Productivity Growth in the UK and US Tobacco Industries, 1879–1939

The UK and US tobacco industries provide a particularly clean place to examine the impact of changes in market structure on firm conduct and productivity in a rapidly innovating industry. Although each industry had roughly equal access to new manufacturing technologies, the industries were monopolized at different times. The US lost an early productivity lead after the formation of the Tobacco Trust in 1890, but regained it after the UK industry merged to monopoly in 1902 and the Trust was broken up in 1911. Supplementary evidence suggests that technological innovation and consolidation of production were more rapid during competitive periods.
The Uneasy and Often Unhelpful Interaction of Tort Law and Constitutional Law in First Amendment Litigation

There are increasing tensions between the First Amendment and the common-law torts of intentional infliction of emotional distress, defamation, and privacy. This Article discusses the conflicting interactions among the three models that are competing for primacy as the tort law governing expressive activities evolves to accommodate the requirements of the First Amendment. At one extreme there is the model that expression containing information which has been lawfully obtained that contains neither intentional falsehoods nor incitements to immediate violence can only be sanctioned in narrowly defined exceptional circumstances, even if that expression involves matters that are universally regarded as being of no public interest. At the other extreme is the model that some expression which, though lawfully obtained, reveals to a wider audience intimate private information about another should be subject to sanction, as should verbal abuse of a private figure even if there is no implicit threat of physical violence. Some provisions of the American Restatement adopted with scant attention to constitutional developments have taken, and to some extent continue to take, that position. Finally, there is an intermediate model — now gaining wide-spread support in Europe and to some extent in America, even among some members of the United States Supreme Court — that expression which does not concern matters of “public concern” can be subject to public sanction even if it has been lawfully acquired and involves no threats of physical aggression against others. This Article sets out how this confusing impasse has come about and the dangers that this lack of clarity present for freedom of expression.
Brownfields and BRAC: A Surprising "Compatibility"

Comparing the environmental features of the base closing (BRAC) process with state voluntary cleanup programs for brownfields sites, the article finds that lessons learned from the BRAC process turn out to be surprisingly useful not only in assessing how the military should remediate sites before transferring them, but also in discussing how the private sector should remediate andreuse real property.
Feeling the Future: The Emotional Oracle Effect

Eight studies reveal an intriguing phenomenon: individuals who have higher trust in their feelings can predict the outcomes of future events better than individuals with lower trust in their feelings. This emotional oracle effect was found across a variety of prediction domains, including ( a ) the 2008 US Democratic presidential nomination, ( b ) movie box-office success, ( c ) the winner of American Idol , ( d ) the stock market, ( e ) college football, and even ( f ) the weather. It is mostly high trust in feelings that improves prediction accuracy rather than low trust in feelings that impairs it. However, the effect occurs only among individuals who possess sufficient background knowledge about the prediction domain, and it dissipates when the prediction criterion becomes inherently unpredictable. The authors hypothesize that the effect arises because trusting one's feelings encourages access to a “privileged window” into the vast amount of predictive information that people learn, often unconsciously, about their environments.
Innovation and firm performance: Evidence from the capital market

This paper 1 examines the role of innovation in firm performance by drawing empirical evidence from the capital market. The current study analyzes risk premiums and risk-adjusted excess returns of a portfolio of the most innovative firms in the US from 2006 to 2010. The results show that average risk premiums of an equal-weighted portfolio of the most innovative firms in the US are economically larger than the CRSP 2 value-weighted index risk premiums four years in a row from 2006 to 2009 and are economically greater than the standard and poor (S&P) 500 index risk premiums from 2006 to 2010. The portfolio exhibits average statistically significant and positive risk-adjusted excess returns for the 3-year and 5-year holding period intervals. The findings serve as evidence of the favorable role of innovation in firm performance.
Service Level Constrained Inventory Systems

Motivated by the importance of service quality in today's customer business environment, we consider two periodic-review stochastic inventory models with probabilistic service-level guarantees for restricting stockout probabilities: (i) the classical inventory control model with backlogging and (ii) the remanufacturing inventory control model with random product returns. We assume that demands are stochastic nonstationary, evolving and correlated over time. We establish the optimality of generalized base-stock policies, and propose new 2-approximation algorithms for both models. The core concept developed in this paper is called the delayed forced holding and production cost, which is proven effective in dealing with service-level constrained inventory systems. Our extensive computational experiments show that the proposed algorithms on average perform within 2% error of optimality.
Periodicity in the cohomology of symmetric groups via divided powers

A famous theorem of Nakaoka asserts that the cohomology of the symmetric group stabilizes. The first author generalized this theorem to non-trivial coefficient systems, in the form of $\mathrm{FI}$-modules over a field, though one now obtains periodicity of the cohomology instead of stability. In this paper, we further refine these results. Our main theorem states that if $M$ is a finitely generated $\mathrm{FI}$-module over a noetherian ring $\mathbf{k}$ then $\bigoplus_{n \ge 0} \mathrm{H}^t(S_n, M_n)$ admits the structure of a $\mathbf{D}$-module, where $\mathbf{D}$ is the divided power algebra over $\mathbf{k}$ in a single variable, and moreover, this $\mathbf{D}$-module is "nearly" finitely presented. This immediately recovers the periodicity result when $\mathbf{k}$ is a field, but also shows, for example, how the torsion varies with $n$ when $\mathbf{k}=\mathbf{Z}$. Using the theory of connections on $\mathbf{D}$-modules, we establish sharp bounds on the period in the case where $\mathbf{k}$ is a field. We apply our theory to obtain results on the modular cohomology of Specht modules and the integral cohomology of unordered configuration spaces of manifolds.
On the Human Right to Democracy: Searching for Sense without Stilts

In this paper I argue that once we get clear on the various ways in which universal justice-based moral rights are transformed into human rights by virtue of being of special significance or concern to the international community, we will see that in one, arguably basic, sense of human rights there is no human right to democracy, but in another sense there is. In the former sense, there is no human right to democracy in the sense of a right that a polity must secure for its members in order to merit full recognition, standing or membership within the international community or full ongoing participation in its main activities. In the latter sense, there is a human right to democracy in the sense of a right the noncoercive pursuit and promotion of which, consistent with just international interaction and cooperation, many if not all members of the international community have identified as a high priority and with respect to which they seek to make common cause. The argument for the conclusion reached, namely that in one sense there is and in one sense there isn't a human right to democracy, proceeds from premises fully consistent with and even expressive of the core commitments of liberal democratic conceptions of justice.
Double barrier options in regime-switching hyper-exponential jump-diffusion models

We present a very fast and accurate algorithm for calculating prices of finite lived double barrier options with arbitrary terminal payoff functions under regime-switching hyper-exponential jump-diffusion (HEJD) models, which generalize the double-exponential jump-diffusion model pioneered by Kou and Lipton. Numerical tests demonstrate an excellent agreement of our results with those obtained using other methods, as well as a significant increase in computation speed (sometimes by a factor of 5). The first step of our approach is Carr's randomization, whose convergence we prove for barrier and double barrier options under strong Markov processes of a wide class. The resulting sequence of perpetual option pricing problems is solved using an efficient iteration algorithm and the Wiener-Hopf factorization.
Against (Mere) Restyling

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have been completely rewritten. Unless the Supreme Court balks or the Congress intervenes, the bench and bar will be using the new restyled version of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in a little more than a year. As have other procedural reformers before them, the restylists seek to make procedural rules simpler, clearer, more accessible, and easier to understand. Yet the restylists have set themselves a goal that is at once insufficiently ambitious and overly difficult. Unlike prior reformers, they do not seek to create a better procedure. Unlike those who brought us the original Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, they do not seek to supersede reexisting statutory procedures. To the contrary, the restylists attempt to completely rewrite the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure while leaving the law of procedure the same as it was before their reform. This task is nearly impossible, as this Essay illustrates with some examples drawn from the changes made to the proposed restyled rules in response to public comment. In addition, the goal of preserving existing meaning is at war with the goal of clarity and simplicity. Rather than confront this dilemma head on, the proposed restyled rules add an additional layer of ambiguity, and do so in a way that brings to the fore the interpretive battle that rages between those who follow the plain meaning of the text and those who seek the lawmakers' purpose in legislative history. Finally, although the restylists have attempted to prevent their handiwork from superseding statutory procedures, their method of doing so rests on a view of the supersession provision of the Rules Enabling Act that is almost certainly wrong. For these reasons, the proposed restyled Federal Rules of Civil Procedure should not be approved.
Nonprofit Fund-Raising in Competitive Donor Markets:

Fund-raising expenditures represent an important strategic decision for nonprofit managers in the face of scarced on or resources. Privately, nonprofit managers weigh the trade-off between reaching...
Monetary Policy and the Lost Decade: Lessons from Japan

I investigate how monetary policy can avoid a deflationary slump when policy rates are near zero by studying interest rate policy during Japan's “Lost Decade.” Estimation results suggest that the Bank of Japan's interest rate policy fits a conventional reaction function with an inflation target near 1%. The disapointing economic performance thus seems primarily due to adverse economic shocks rather than extraordinary policy errors. Also, counterfactual policy simulations suggest that simply raising the inflation target would not have substantially improved performance. However, price-level targeting or combining a higher inflation target with an aggressive output response would have achieved superior stabilization results.
The Wealth-Consumption Ratio

We derive new estimates of total wealth, the returns on total wealth, and the wealth effect on consumption. We estimate the prices of aggregate risk from bond yields and stock returns using a no-arbitrage model. Using these risk prices, we compute total wealth as the price of a claim to aggregate consumption. We find that U.S. households have a surprising amount of total wealth, most of it human wealth. This wealth is much less risky than stock market wealth. Events in long-term bond markets, not stock markets, drive most total wealth fluctuations. The wealth effect on consumption is small and varies over time with real interest rates.
“Rulers ruled by women”: an economic analysis of the rise and fall of women’s rights in ancient Sparta

Until modern times, most women possessed relatively few formal rights. The women of ancient Sparta were a striking exception. Although they could not vote, Spartan women reportedly owned 40 percent of Sparta’s agricultural land, and enjoyed other rights that were equally extraordinary. We offer a simple economic explanation for the Spartan anomaly. The defining moment for Sparta was its conquest of a neighboring land and people, which fundamentally changed the marginal products of Spartan men’s and Spartan women’s labor. To exploit the potential gains from a reallocation of labor—specifically, to provide the appropriate incentives and the proper human capital formation—men granted women property (and other) rights. Consistent with our explanation for the rise of women’s rights, when Sparta lost the conquered land several centuries later, the rights for women disappeared. Two conclusions emerge that may help explain why women’s rights have been so rare for most of history. First, in contrast to the historical norm, the optimal (from the men’s perspective) division of labor among Spartans involved women in work that was not easily monitored by men. Second, the rights held by Spartan women may have been part of an unstable equilibrium, which contained the seeds of its own destruction.
Transition Losses in the Electric Power Market: A Challenge to the Premises Underlying the Arguments for Compensation

In this Article, Professor Lois R. Lupica examines whether the electric utility industry, currently in the midst of deregulation, ought to sustain the resulting transition losses. Due to the significant modification of legal rules affecting the electric power market and changes in regulatory policy, the utilities currently have expenditures and expectations that are unrecoverable in a competitive market. In recent years, momentum has moved in the direction of compensating the electric utilities and their investors for these losses. Professor Lupica challenges the arguments for transition loss recovery and ultimately concludes that the doctrinal premises in support of transition loss recovery are flawed.The Article begins by examining the history of the electric power market and continues by addressing the central arguments in favor of transition loss recovery. Proponents of transition loss recovery argue that investors will suffer losses as a result of a change in market dynamics or legal rules, and because the changes were not foreseeable, investors should be insulated from these resulting losses. Advocates of transition loss recovery further perceive the regulatory environment as contract-based, and thus argue that the 650 modification of the market's legal rules constitutes a breach of contract. Finally, some advocates claim that changes in legal rules and the resulting transition losses is a taking of property under the Fifth Amendment. Professor Lupica addresses each of these arguments and contends that the premises underlying these arguments are faulty. She further argues that transition losses are not unique to this context, and that, in addition to acknowledging the doctrinal challenges to recovery advocates' arguments, policy makers must evaluate transition loss recovery as an issue of fundamental fairness to utility consumers.
CEO Stock Ownership Policies: Rhetoric and Reality

This Article is the first academic endeavor to analyze the efficacy and transparency of stock ownership policies (SOPs) in U.S. public firms. SOPs generally require managers to hold some of their firms’ stock for the long term. Following the 2008 financial crisis, firms universally adopted these policies and cited them more than any other policy as a key element in their mitigation of risk. However, my analysis of the recent SOPs of SP this is because these policies generally function in a way that allows CEOs to immediately unload virtually all of the stock they own. Second, I show that firms camouflage this weakness in their public filings. I explain why my findings are troubling and I propose a regulatory reform to make SOPs transparent. Transparency can be expected to push boards and shareholders to improve the actual content of these policies.