cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Public Interest Lawyers and Resistance Movements

A major strand of social justice activism, both within and outside the United States, finds purpose in opposition to the economic, political, and social conditions of globalization and neoliberalism. In the course of these campaigns, sometimes targeting the state and at other times powerful private entities, these numerous, loosely-linked movements of resistance both confront and creatively make use of legal structures, including courts, elected officials, and regulatory agencies. The adversarial campaign for immigrant workers in New York against a corporate chain of high-end restaurants that is the subject of this article began in August 2003 and lasted eighteen months. It included a range of legal and extralegal pressure tactics initiated by both sides, including direct action protests, attempts to influence customers, elected officials, and funders, lawsuits in state and federal court, and charges before the National Labor Relations Board. It ended with the negotiation of a comprehensive settlement agreement between the worker-members of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY), a worker center based in Manhattan, and the corporation. This article will focus on the role of the lawyers and law students in the campaign and notes significant discontinuities from past public interest practice, including revised thinking on the accountability of lawyers to clients and the use of rights and rights-talk in adversarial campaigns. Additionally, this article focuses on the role of lawyers in relation to social movements, as intermediaries with the state and agents of cross-racial and globalized resistance movements.
Aggregate Settlements And Attorney Liability: The Evolving Landscape

This Article was prepared for the Hofstra Law Review conference on "Lawyers as Targets: Suing, Prosecuting, and Defending Lawyers."Over the past several decades, attorneys involved in mass tort settlements, especially those representing the plaintiffs, have faced an increasing number of large-dollar liability claims centered on the aggregate settlement rule: that is, the state equivalents to Rule 1.8(g) of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct. During this period, courts have held that fee forfeiture, potentially totaling millions of dollars, is an appropriate remedy for violations of the Rule, even in the absence of any demonstrated economic harm to the client. At the same time, courts and other authoritative bodies have expressed a variety of often conflicting views regarding the obligations that the Rule imposes on attorneys and when the Rule applies, resulting in much uncertainty and little guidance for attorneys.This Article offers both positive and normative clarification. It provides a thick description of the current interpretations of the aggregate settlement rule in order to identify the specific areas of disagreement among authorities. It goes on to offer a normative theory of the Rule and its purpose, which could usefully mitigate the current interpretive confusion regarding which settlements are "aggregate settlements" and what client disclosures are mandated by the Rule.
Control as a motivation for underpricing: a comparison of dual and single-class IPOs

Abstract We find that dual-class firms experience less underpricing than single-class firms and explore several hypotheses which explain this phenomenon. Compared to single-class firms, dual-class companies have slightly higher post-IPO institutional ownership and experience fewer control events. Although dual-class firms achieve a lower underpricing cost, they trade at lower prices relative to earnings and sales than single-class IPOs. This pricing differential, combined with evidence that dual-class managers earn higher compensation and that dual-class shares are common among media and entertainment industry IPOs, suggests that dual-class ownership structures protect private control benefits.
The privacy hierarchy: Trade secret and fourth amendment expectations

This Article examines public expectations of privacy in trade secret and the Fourth Amendment. Using an original, nationally representative survey of over a thousand respondents, we identify two privacy hierarchies. The first hierarchy is between domains: the public believes that surveillance conducted by commercial entities for competitive advantage is a greater violation of privacy than the same surveillance conducted by law enforcement without a warrant for criminal investigations. The second hierarchy involves types of surveillance: the same searches are rated as large (or small) privacy violations regardless of whether they are performed by law enforcement or a private company. From these empirical findings and an analysis of prior doctrine, we argue that Fourth Amendment restrictions on police surveillance should be viewed as a “floor” for trade secret restrictions on commercial surveillance. This approach reverses the relationship between public and private surveillance recently advocated by several prominent scholars and by Justice Gorsuch in his dissent in Carpenter v. United States, yet is consistent with longstanding trade secret doctrine. We argue further that this position provides practical benefits and is normatively justifiable given the differing objectives of trade secret and the Fourth Amendment. Practically, our framework provides guidance to courts that wish to draw upon the larger and more thorough case law of the Fourth Amendment when addressing issues that are novel to trade secret. Normatively, there is less public interest in exposing the trade secrets of companies than there is in investigating crimes. As a result, we believe there should be greater privacy protection in trade secret.
Insuring Corporate Crime

Corporate criminal liability has become an important and much-talked about topic. This Article argues that entity-based liability – particularly the manner in which it is currently applied by the federal government –creates social costs in excess of its benefits. To help companies better deter employee crime, the Article suggests the abolition of entity-wide criminal liability, and in its place, the adoption of an insurance system, whereby carriers would examine corporate compliance programs, estimate the risk that a corporation’s employees would commit crimes, and then charge companies for those insuring those risks. The insurance would cover civil penalties associated with the entity’s employee-related criminal conduct. Part I begins with a discussion of corporate criminal liability and the costs that accrue from the manner in which it has been implemented by the Department of Justice. Part II examines several proposals to change corporate criminal liability, and explains why most of these proposals would barely alter the current structure. Part III lays out the proposal for an insurance system in lieu of entity-based criminal liability and explains, in rough form, how corporate entities might contract for insurance, how claims might be filed and how damages might be measured. Part III also addresses a number of arguments that others might raise against the
How trial judges should think about forensic science evidence

It is undeniable that there are serious problems with the presentation of forensic science evidence in U.S. courtrooms. Comprehensive studies by scientific bodies find that many forensic sciences have not been validated and none have provided sufficiently rigorous scientific evidence that supports a claim of low rates of error. However, trial courts and appellate courts have largely ignored these problems and have done nothing to motivate forensic scientists to improve the scientific quality of their courtroom testimony. This paper provides trial judges with guidance on how they should think about and evaluate the reliability of forensic science evidence.
Arguing with Friends

Judges sometimes disagree about the best way to resolve a case. But the conventional wisdom is that they should not be too swayed by such disagreement, and should do their best to decide the case by their own lights. An emerging critique questions this view, arguing instead for widespread humility. In the face of disagreement, the argument goes, judges should generally concede ambiguity and uncertainty in almost all contested cases. Both positions are wrong. Drawing on the philosophical concepts of “peer disagreement” and “epistemic peerhood,” we argue for a different approach: Judges ought to give significant weight to the views of others, but only when those others share the judge’s basic methodology or interpretive outlook – i.e., only when those others are methodological “friends.” Thus textualists should hesitate before disagreeing with other textualists, and pragmatists should hesitate before disagreeing with like-minded pragmatists. Disagreement between the two camps is, by contrast, “old news” and so provides neither camp additional reason for pause. We also suggest that judges should give weight to the views of all of their methodological friends, not just judges. And we suggest, even more tentatively, that our proposal may explain and, to some extent, justify the seemingly ideological clusters of justices on the Supreme Court. The most productive disagreements, we think, are ones that come from arguing with friends.
PUTTING THE "PUBLIC" BACK INTO PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Public-Private Partnerships are viewed quite positively. In the context of working with local government for economic development, the interests and concerns of the private appear to dominate the development decision-making. This Essay explores eminent domain decisions and community benefits agreements for standards for measuring the efficacy of these partnerships. It suggests ways in which we can begin to think about public accountability and public benefits to be derived from these partnerships.
Microfinance and Financial Development

Close to three billion people - half of the world's population - live on less than two dollars a day. Within these poor communities, one child in five will not live to see his or her fifth birthday. To boost international development, the United Nations announced the Millennium Development Goals, aimed at eradicating poverty by 2015. Yet the Goals will prove difficult to achieve. Domestic financial reforms have the potential to play a role in poverty alleviation by deepening financial markets and institutions that may contribute to economic growth, which can, in turn, sometimes help poverty alleviation. But the link between financial reform and poverty alleviation is not a straightforward one. This Article argues that microfinance can play an important role in financial development, and that by focusing on microfinance, development policy can strengthen the links between financial development, economic growth, and poverty alleviation. Rather than focusing exclusively on microfinance as an anti-poverty strategy, however, microfinance should be seen as an integral component of a developing country's broader financial development strategy. By demarginalizing microfinance programs serving the poor, we may be able more quickly to reach the Millennium Development Goals.
High-Sensitivity Accelerometry with a Feedback-Cooled Magnetically Levitated Microsphere

We show that a magnetically levitated microsphere in high vacuum can be used as an accelerometer by comparing its response to that of a commercially available geophone. This system shows great promise for ultrahigh acceleration sensitivities without the need for large masses or cryogenics. With feedback cooling, the transient decay time is reduced and the center-of-mass motion is cooled to 9 K or less. Remarkably, the levitated-particle accelerometer has a sensitivity down to $3.6\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}8}\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}\mathrm{g}/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$ and gives measurements similar to those of the commercial geophone at frequencies up to 14 Hz despite a test mass that is four billion times smaller. With no free parameters in the calibration, the responses of the accelerometers match within 3% at 5 Hz. The system reaches this sensitivity due to a relatively large particle mass of $0.25\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{g}$, a low center-of-mass oscillation frequency of 1.75 Hz, and an image-analysis method that can measure the displacement with an uncertainty of 1.6 nm in a single image.
Contracts, governance, and country risk in project finance: Theory and evidence

Abstract Project finance links financial structure to the operational characteristics of the project to optimize the allocations of various project risks. We develop a model in which concession grants and offtake agreements benefit both public and private sponsors in the presence of political risk. The public can use these contracts to incentivize the private sponsor to undertake an otherwise unacceptable project while benefiting from delegating the process of financing, building, and operating the project to the private sponsor. For the private sponsor, the government concession grant, while improving financial returns, entails political influence. We develop hypotheses connecting these contract choices to the public–private partnership governance structure of project finance and provide supporting evidence. Our findings suggest that a country's political and financial risks have significant impacts on the contract choice as well as the public–private governance structure in project finance. Projects in greater political risk countries tend to be structured with less government involvement in order to avoid political influence of the local government. Projects with the private finance initiative end up with more government involvement and control in order to protect the public interest.
Who Owns the Local Church? A Pressing Issue for Dioceses in Bankruptcy

The recent bankruptcies of Catholic Dioceses are unprecedented. For the first time, Bankruptcy Courts must deal with the difficult question of who owns the parish church. In this paper, I will explore two possible sources of confusion about this question. The first is the non-commercial, charitable nature of the Church. The second is its organizational complexity. Resolving the confusion requires a familiarity with various different sources of law including charities law, bankruptcy law, trust law, and Canon Law. In this paper I address this issue by: 1. discussing why the equities and policies that govern charitable bankruptcies are different from those that govern commercial bankruptcies; 2. laying out a road map for determining ownership issues that indicates what sub-questions must be answered and in what order; and 3. discussing the role that each of the different sources of law plays in answering these questions. My conclusion is that, in most circumstances, individual parishes do have a significant ownership stake in assets that are given or dedicated for their use.
Time variation in the size of the multiplier: a Kalecki–Harrod approach

A growing empirical literature demonstrates that the size of the expenditure multiplier varies over time, being both larger and consistently greater than one during periods of slow growth and/or recession. This paper contributes to the theory of the time-varying multiplier. It is shown that a combination of Kalecki's dynamic theory of investment and Harrod's 'satisficing' approach to the investment decision furnish a theory in which the 'crowding in' of investment expenditures following an initial demand stimulus gives rise to an elevated expenditure multiplier during times of pronounced macroeconomic distress.
The Denominator Blindness Effect: Accident Frequencies and the Misjudgment of Recklessness

People seriously misjudge accident risks because they routinely neglect relevant information about exposure. Such risk judgments affect both personal and public policy decisions (e.g., choice of a transport mode) but also play a vital role in legal determinations, such as assessments of recklessness. Experimental evidence for a sample of 422 jury-eligible adults indicates that people incorporate information on the number of accidents, which is the numerator of the risk frequency calculation. However, they appear blind to information on exposure, such as the scale of a firm's operations, which is the risk frequency denominator. Hence, the actual observed accident frequency of accidents/exposure is not influential.
The Swan Song of Universal Jurisdiction in Spain

On 29 April 2009 the Spanish National Court opened a cause against the "perpetrators, the instigators, the necessary collaborators and accomplices" of alleged tortures at the Guantanamo camp and other overseas detention facilities. Before examining how these and other causes currently opened in Spain under the principle of universal jurisdiction enshrined by Art. 23.4 of the Organic Law of the Judicial Branch (LOPJ) are likely to be affected by the legislative reform of that very provision approved by the Spanish Congress of Deputies on 25 June 2009, we will first examine the sinuous - and now dramatically indicative in retrospect - jurisprudential evolution of the treatment of the principle of universal justice by Spanish Courts since the Constitutional Court enshrined a doctrine of unconditional universal jurisdiction in its widely celebrated Guatemala Genocide case in June 2005. This is complemented by an overview of the cases that, jurisdictionally based on the principle of universal justice enshrined by Article 23 of the LOPJ, are still currently open (from e.g., Tibet to Rwanda or Gaza) before Spanish Courts. In addition, set against the background provided by the release of the four so-called "torture memos" by the Obama Administration in April 2009, there is a brief examination of the possibilities of jurisdictional prosecution of both the perpetrators and those who formulated the legal guidance authorizing the "enhanced interrogators techniques" in both the U.S. domestic law system and international legal jurisdictional settings, including at the ICJ level. Eventually, an examination of the hasty procedure through which the new relevant Spanish provision in this area has been adopted and the legal effects, with reference to cases currently opened before the Spanish courts, of the newly reformed article give place to a brief reflection on the prospects of international law in the age of an emerging new international judiciary in view of the structural deficit of mechanisms of participatory democracy on the domestic plane with relevance in the international realm as dramatically epitomized at this juncture by the Spanish legal system.
Parental Parity: Intentional Parenthood's Promise

Parental Parity begins a critical dialogue regarding the reformation of legal parentage. Scholars have been advocating for more than a decade that courts and legislatures eschew traditional status based parentage (e.g., birth and biology) in the context of parentage establishment when assisted reproductive technologies (“ARTs”) are used. Parental Parity sets forth a much bolder agenda: to use intentional parenthood as the default framework to establish all legal parent-child relationships at birth. Intentional parenthood is a superior parentage establishment doctrine because it appropriately captures who should and should not be a parent. It avoids the over and under inclusive problems of traditional status based parentage. Most importantly, intentional parenthood yields parental parity: the doctrine’s neutrality prevents inherent discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, marital status, and class. While other scholars have written about the issue of intentional parenthood, no other scholar has specifically advocated for intentional parenthood as the default basis for establishing all parent-child relationships at birth. Parental Parity represents the culmination of my previous scholarship advocating against status-based parentage and sets forth a broader agenda and proposal to reform parenthood in the 21st century.
When Harry Bet with Sally: An Empirical Analysis of Multiple Peer Effects in Casino Gambling Behavior

In many consumption settings e.g., restaurants, individuals consume products either alone or with their peers e.g., friends. In this study, we propose a general framework for modeling peer effects by including two new peer effects: the exogenous peer effect exogenous factors that could change the peer's behavior and the peer presence effect when the peer is present but not consuming. We also include the well known endogenous peer effect. We develop an empirical model that allows us to identify all three effects simultaneously and apply the model to behavioral data from a casino setting. It is a simultaneous equation model with the structural parameters expressed as a function of the ratio of the reduced form parameters. This necessitates the use of the Minimum Expected Loss approach, allowing us to obtain consistent estimates at the individual level. Our data comprise detailed gambling activity for a panel of individuals at a single casino over a two-year period. Our results show that all three types of peer effects exist. These effects vary across individuals and exhibit considerable asymmetry within pairs of peers. We discuss how our results can help managers allocate resources more effectively and policy makers formulate regulatory guidelines with more complete information.
Is poor fitness contagious?: Evidence from randomly assigned friends

Abstract The increase in obesity over the past 30 years has led researchers to investigate the role of social networks as a contributing factor. However, several challenges make it difficult to demonstrate a causal link between friends’ physical fitness and own fitness using observational data. To overcome these problems, we exploit data from a unique setting in which individuals are randomly assigned to peer groups. We find statistically significant positive peer effects that are roughly half as large as the own effect of prior fitness on current fitness. Evidence suggests that the effects are caused primarily by friends who were the least fit, thus supporting the provocative notion that poor physical fitness spreads on a person-to-person basis.
An integrated analysis of the association between accrual disclosure and the abnormal accrual anomaly

We find no evidence of accrual mispricing for firms that disclose accrual information at earnings announcements. For these firms, the market differentiates the discretionary from the nondiscretionary components of the earnings surprise. In contrast, the market fails to distinguish between the discretionary and the nondiscretionary components of the earnings surprise for firms that do not disclose accrual information at earnings announcements. These firms experience some stock price correction around the filing date. However, the correction is only partial, resulting in a post-filing drift.
The Effect of Deal Knowledge on Consumer Purchase Behavior

Research has shown that there is heterogeneity in consumer knowledge of prices and deals. In addition, it has been found that buyers’ purchase behavior can be influenced not only by the current pri...
Performance pay and information: Reducing child undernutrition in India

Abstract This paper provides evidence for the effectiveness of performance pay to government health workers and how performance pay interacts with demand-side information. In a controlled study covering 145 child day-care centers, I implement three separate treatments. First, I engineer an exogenous change in compensation for childcare workers from fixed wages to performance pay. Second, I only provide mothers with information without incentivizing the workers. Third, I combine the first two treatments. This helps us identify if performance pay and public information are complements or substitutes in reducing child malnutrition. I find that combining incentives to workers and information to mothers reduces weight-for-age malnutrition by 4.2 percentage points in 3 months, although individually the effects are negligible. This complementarity is shown to be driven by better mother–worker communication and the mother feeding more calorific food at home. There is also a sustained long-run positive impact of the combined treatment after the experiment concluded.
Longitudinal Guilt: Repeat Offenders, Plea Bargaining, and the Variable Standard of Proof

This Article introduces a new concept—“longitudinal guilt”—which invites readers to reconsider basic presuppositions about the way our criminal justice system determines guilt in criminal cases. In short, the idea is that a variety of features of criminal procedure, most importantly, plea bargaining, conspire to change the primary “truthfinding mission” of criminal law from one of adjudicating individual historical cases to one of identifying dangerous “offenders.” This change of mission is visible in the lower proof standards we apply to repeat criminal offenders. The first section of this Article explains how plea bargaining and graduated sentencing systems based on criminal history effectively combine to lower the standard of proof for repeat criminals. The second section describes several additional procedural and evidentiary rules that further effectively reduce the standard of proof for recidivists. The third section argues that the net effect is a criminal justice system that is primarily focused on the identification of a class of “dangerous offenders” based upon their repeated interactions with the system over time rather than the accurate resolution of specific allegations of wrongdoing in individual cases, as is conventionally supposed. In a phrase, we have moved toward a system that constructs guilt “longitudinally.” This Article concludes with a few brief thoughts on the merits and demerits of longitudinal guilt. INTRODUCTION 432 I. PLEA BARGAINING AND THE DECREASING STANDARD OF PROOF FOR REPEAT OFFENDERS 435 A. The Price of Guilty Pleas 435 B. P and the Standard of Proof 440 C. Plea Bargaining and the Special Case of First-Time Offenders 442 II. EVIDENCE RULES AND THE DECREASING STANDARD OF PROOF FOR REPEAT OFFENDERS 444 A. Repeat Offenders Do Worse at Trial than First-Time Offenders 444 ∗ Associate Professor, Georgia State University College of Law. This Article was presented at the Florida State University School of Law Faculty Workshop and benefited greatly from suggestions made by its participants. Special thanks are owed to Gregory Jones for his assistance in helping me to formally express some of the trickier (at least for me) mathematical relationships discussed in this Article. 1 Covey: Longitudinal Guilt: Repeat Offenders, Plea Bargaining, and the Va Published by UF Law Scholarship Repository, 2011 432 FLORIDA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 63 B. Comparative Ease of Conviction as a Lower Standard of Proof 448 C. Magnifying the Disparity 448 III. LONGITUDINAL GUILT 449 IV. CONCLUSION 455
The Subprime Crisis and House Price Appreciation

This paper argues that econometric analysis of housing price indexes before 2006 generated forecasts of future long-term price growth and low estimated probabilities of extreme price decreases. These forecasts of future increases in home-loan collateral values may have affected both the demand and the supply of mortgages. Standard time series models using repeat-sales indexes suggest that positive trends had a long half-life. Expectations based on such models could lead to an asset bubble. Analysis of data from the HMDA loan database and LoanPerformance.com at the MSA level and at the loan level substantiates the effects of past price trends on the demand and supply of subprime mortgages. On the demand side, at the MSA level, past home price increases are associated with more subprime applications, higher loan to income ratios and lower loan to value ratios of applications for both prime and subprime mortgages. This is consistent with the notion that households not only borrowed more but also invested more in home equity conditional on greater past house price increases. On the supply side, past home price appreciation had a significantly greater impact on the approval rate of subprime applications than the approval rate of prime applications. Loan level analysis indicates that past home price appreciation increased the approval rate of subprime applications but did not affect the approval rate of prime applications. Further, approved HMDA subprime loans had higher loan to income ratios in MSAs with greater past house price trends.
Mending Holes in the Rule of (Administrative) Law

The past decade has witnessed a surge of interest in Carl Schmitt‘s controversial assertion that the rule of law inevitably bends under the demands of state necessity during national emergencies. According to Schmitt, legal norms cannot constrain sovereign discretion during emergencies because ―the precise details of an emergency cannot be anticipated‖ in advance. The sovereign must therefore possess unfettered discretion to determine both ―whether there is an extreme emergency‖ and ―what must be done to eliminate it.‖ Few legal scholars have embraced Schmitt‘s theory of emergencies with the enthusiasm and sophistication of Adrian Vermeule, the John H. Watson, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. In an article published recently in the Harvard Law Review, Vermeule argues that American administrative law is fundamentally ―Schmittian‖ in the sense that it permits federal agencies to operate outside the constraints of administrative procedure and meaningful judicial review during emergencies. Vermeule contends that the federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA) is replete with procedural exceptions, which generate ―black holes‖—zones where federal agencies are free to act outside the constraints of legal order. In addition, he suggests that federal courts manipulate flexible legal standards to accord heightened deference to federal agencies during national crises, transforming standards such as ―reasonableness‖ and ―good cause‖ into ―grey holes‖—legal devices which preserve the facade, but not the reality,
Corporate Governance and Director Accountability: an Institutional Comparative Perspective*

This paper examines the role of boards of directors in light of institutional contingencies and recent best practice governance guidelines and regulation such as the United Kingdom Higgs Review and the United States Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002. Particular attention is paid to discussing the role of independent directors across countries, and the implications for corporate governance innovation. It concludes by posing questions about recent corporate governance transformations and providing suggestions for future research.
Toward a Limited Right of Publicity: An Argument for the Convergence of the Right of Publicity, Unfair Competition and Trademark Law

The right of publicity — the most recently developed type of intellectual property — allows a person to control commercial use of his or her identity. The scope of the right has expanded significantly since its inception because many courts and commentators have misinterpreted it, viewing it as a pure property right justified by a labor or unjust enrichment theory. Rather, this article contends that it should be evaluated in light of the utilitarian justification for intellectual property law. Rewarding people by allowing them to monetize their public persona is not the goal of the right of publicity. The goal should be to incentivize individuals to engage in creative endeavors for the benefit of the public. Accordingly, a right of publicity action should only be available if commercial use of an individual’s persona will result in the likelihood that consumers will be misled into thinking the individual endorsed or approved of the use of his or her identity. However, such confusion-based conduct is already actionable under trademark and unfair competition law. Therefore, I argue that any use of a person’s persona that creates an association with the person but does not create a likelihood that consumers will think the person endorsed or approved of the commercial use should only be actionable if the person is famous. This is consistent with trademark dilution law, which limits association-based trademark actions to famous trademarks. This approach places the right of publicity within the domain of intellectual property law and preserves the existing balances between protecting property rights, preventing free riding, and preserving robust free speech rights.
Related Lending and Economic Performance: Evidence from Mexico

Related lending, a widespread practice in LDCs, is widely held to encourage bankers to loot their banks at the expense of minority shareholders and depositors. We argue that neither looting nor credit misallocation are necessary outcomes of related lending. On the contrary, related lending often exists as a response to high information and contract-enforcement costs. Whether it encourages looting depends on other institutions, particularly those that create incentives to monitor directors. We examine Mexico's banking system, 1888–1913, in which there was widespread related lending. We find little evidence of credit misallocation, despite a financial crisis and government-organized rescue.
The Relationship of the Court and Defense Counsel: The Impact on Competent Representation and Proposals for Reform

This Article examines the impact of the trial court upon the quality of legal assistance provided the indigent criminal defendant. The court, when confronted with public defenders so overburdened with cases that they have not had the time to adequately prepare, all too often exacerbates the situation by refusing to permit counsel additional time for investigation and preparation. The trial judge may be affected by administrative pressures to dispose of cases, move the calendar, and get pleas. The defender's overload is therefore compounded by the court's overload, and the situation results in the sacrifice of the indigent defendant's right to competent representation. As both counsel and court attempt to minimize the amount of time expended on each case, the defendant's claim to a just proceeding and fair trial is forfeited.
What's In a Name? That Which We Call Capital Controls

SUMMARYThis paper investigates why controls on capital inflows have a bad name by tracing how capital controls have been used and perceived since the laissez-faire era of the classical gold standard. While advanced economies often employed capital controls to tame inflows during the last century, we conjecture that several factors undermined their subsequent use – most notably, a ‘guilt by association’ with controls on capital outflows, which have typically been employed by autocratic regimes or those with failed macroeconomic policies. We formalize the idea of a possible guilt by association between inflow controls and outflow controls in a signalling model and provide some empirics consistent with it.
Trading in derivatives when the underlying is scarce.

Abstract Regulatory restrictions and market frictions can constrain the aggregate quantity of long and short positions in a security. When these constraints bind, we refer to the security as scarce, and its price becomes distorted relative to its value in a frictionless market. We show that an otherwise redundant derivative can reduce the price distortion of the underlying security by relaxing its scarcity. We also show that it is especially important to analyze the underlying and derivative markets jointly when evaluating the impact of regulation, such as short-sales bans and position limits in derivatives, that restricts trade.
Hyper preemption: A reordering of the state-local relationship?

The role of cities in our federalist system is once again in the news. President Donald Trump’s executive order purporting to cut federal funding for “sanctuary cities” made headlines across the country. However, this federal–municipal showdown is part of a much larger story about the changing regulatory role of cities. Even as cities cast themselves as defiant against conservative federal policies, many are finding themselves in a much weaker position with respect to state policymaking. Already, state legislators across the country are introducing bills that would cut state funding to local governments implementing “sanctuary city” policies. Such efforts are among the many preemption bills pending in statehouses across the country. Local governments, as creatures of state law, are required to conform to state law, and legislatures have used this power to block municipal regulatory policies. Scholars have noted this uptick in preemption efforts and discussed the effect of particular preemption policies. This Article addresses an important and emerging trend in intrastate preemption. This new brand of preemption statutes seeks not just to curtail specific local policies but, rather, to chill local policymaking. These punitive statutes punish local governments or their public officials for taking policy positions and deny them access to the typical legal processes for determining the legality of local ordinances. In this Article, I identify this phenomenon as “hyper preemption” and describe its various incarnations. I argue that these hyper preemption statutes are different than traditional preemption statutes, which focus on asserting state control over specific policy areas and often involve specifically local regulatory efforts. I then discuss legal and institutional limits on this hyper preemption model.
When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals may not Recognize

Researchers in moral psychology and social justice have agreed that morality is about matters of harm, rights, and justice. On this definition of morality, conservative opposition to social justice programs appears to be immoral, and has been explained as a product of various non-moral processes such as system justification or social dominance orientation. In this article we argue that, from an anthropological perspective, the moral domain is usually much broader, encompassing many more aspects of social life and valuing institutions as much or more than individuals. We present theoretical and empirical reasons for believing that there are five psychological systems that provide the foundations for the worlds many moralities. The five foundations are psychological preparations for detecting and reacting emotionally to issues related to harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Political liberals have moral intuitions primarily based upon the first two foundations, and therefore misunderstand the moral motivations of political conservatives, who generally rely upon all five foundations.
Organizational Structure and the Limits of Knowledge Sharing: Incentive Conflict and Agency in Car Leasing

This paper argues that conflicting incentives among managers may impede potential knowledge-sharing benefits from vertical integration. I study knowledge-based agency costs from vertical integration in car leasing, where manufacturer-owned captive lessors compete with independent lessors. Both organizational forms must acquire and integrate diffuse knowledge to accurately predict vehicle depreciation---a condition critical for profitability. Using a data set of 180,000 leases, I compare contracts of independent and captive lessors across car models, market conditions, and product life cycles. I find that managers in vertically integrated firms have conflicting incentives on whether to accurately and completely share proprietary knowledge, and show that these incentives appear to generate agency costs inconsistent with corporate profitability as managers selectively use and share knowledge for personal gain. The findings suggest that most knowledge benefits of vertical integration will be nullified when managerial interests are incompatible with the profit concerns of the firm. This paper was accepted by Bruno Cassiman, business strategy.
The Influence of Institutional Constraints on Outsourcing

Drawing on transaction cost economics and institutional theory we argue that the effects of institutional constraints on the transaction costs of outsourcing vary systematically with the type of service outsourced and the ownership structure of the outsourcing firm. Using data from hospitals, we demonstrate that these effects lead to a higher extent of outsourcing of nonclinical compared to clinical services, and larger outsourcing response of nonclinical services to cost pressures from managed care. Further, the effects of ownership structure and associated governance mechanisms on institutional constraints are reflected in the empirical results as cross-sectional variations in the extent to which outsourcing is invoked as a response to cost pressures by hospitals of different ownership. ©, University of Chicago on behalf of the Accounting Research Center, 2010.
Statistical discrimination from composition effects in the market for low-skilled workers

Abstract In a random search environment with two racial groups each composed of identical numbers of high and low productivity workers, firms use an imperfect screening device (interviews) to control hiring. If inconclusive interviews lead firms to hire majority workers but not minority workers, then the unemployment pool for majority workers is of higher average quality. This can justify the initial hiring choices. Color-blind hiring always eliminates racial disparities but is not necessarily beneficial; in the USA it would improve welfare with only a brief small increase in white unemployment.
Initial Coin Offerings.

This paper examines the market for initial coin offerings (ICOs). ICOs are smart contracts based on blockchain technology that are designed for entrepreneurs to raise external finance by issuing tokens without an intermediary. Unlike existing mechanisms for early-stage finance, tokens potentially provide investors with rapid opportunities thanks to liquid trading platforms. The marketability of tokens offers novel insights into entrepreneurial finance, which I explore in this paper. First, I document that investors earn on average 8.2% on the first day of trading. However, about 40% of all ICOs destroy investor value on the first day of trading. Second, I explore the determinants of market outcomes and find that management quality and the ICO profile are positively correlated with the funding amount and returns, whereas highly visionary projects have a negative effect. Among the 21% of all tokens that get delisted from a major exchange platform, highly visionary projects are more likely to fail, which investors anticipate. Third, I explore the sensitivity of the ICO market to adverse industry events such as China’s ban of ICOs, the hack of leading ledgers, and the marketing ban on FaceBook. I find that the ICO market is highly susceptible to such environmental shocks, resulting in substantial welfare losses for investors.
Implementing Cost-Benefit Analysis when Preferences are Distorted

Abstract Cost‐benefit analysis is routinely used by government agencies in order to evaluate projects, but it remains controversial among academics. This paper argues that cost‐benefit analysis is best understood as a welfarist decision procedure and that use of cost‐benefit analysis is more likely to maximize overall well‐being than is use of alternative decision procedures. The paper focuses on the problem of distorted preferences. A person's preferences are distorted when his or her satisfaction does not enhance that person's well‐being. Preferences typically thought to be distorted in this sense include disinterested preferences, uninformed preferences, adaptive preferences, and objectively bad preferences; further, preferences may be a poor guide to maximizing aggregate well‐being when wealth is unequally distributed. The paper describes conditions under which agencies should correct for distorted preferences, for example, by constructing informed or nonadaptive preferences, discounting objectively b...
Amending constitutional amendment rules

No part of a constitution is more important than the rules that govern its amendment. Given the important functions served by formal constitutional amendment rules, we might expect constitutional designers to entrench them against ordinary amendment, for instance by requiring a higher-than-usual quantum of agreement for their amendment or by making them altogether unamendable. Yet relatively few constitutional democracies set a higher threshold for formally amending formal amendment rules. In this article, I demonstrate that existing written and unwritten limits to formally amending formal amendment rules are unsatisfactory, and I offer modest textual entrenchment strategies to insulate formal amendment rules against ordinary formal amendment in constitutional democracies where the constitutional text exerts an appreciable constraint on political actors. I draw from historical, theoretical and comparative perspectives to suggest that two principles—intertemporality and relativity—should guide constitutional designers in designing formal amendment rules in constitutional democracies.
Hirudotherapy for neonatal limb ischemia during ECMO support: A word of caution

Introduction Disordered coagulation, clot formation and distal limb ischemia are complications of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) with significant morbidity and mortality. Medicinal leech therapy (hirudotherapy) has been attempted in plastic and orthopedic surgeries to improve venous congestion and salvage ischemic flaps. To our knowledge this has not been reported in pediatric cardiac surgery or during ECMO support. We present a complex neonate whose ECMO course was complicated by distal limb ischemia for whom leech therapy was attempted. Patient and intervention A 2-week-old 2.7 kg infant required ECMO support secondary to perioperative multiorgan system dysfunction following repair of critical coarctation and ventricular septal defect. Despite systemic anticoagulation, his clinical course was complicated by arterial thrombus, vasopressor-induced vascular spasm and bilateral distal limb ischemia. Medicinal leech therapy was tried after initially failing conventional measures. Result Following the third leech application, this patient developed significant hemorrhage from the web space adjacent to the left great toe. An estimated 450 ml of blood loss occurred and more than 300 ml of blood product transfusions were required. He ultimately progressed to irreversible systemic end organ dysfunction and comfort care was provided. Conclusion The use of medicinal leech therapy in pediatric cardiac surgery may be considered to minimize the consequences of advanced limb ischemia and venous congestion. However, this should be used with caution while patients are systemically anticoagulated during ECMO support. A directed review is presented here to assist in determining optimal application and potential course of therapy.
A Ternary Bi-Directional LSTM Classification for Brain Activation Pattern Recognition Using fNIRS

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a non-invasive, low-cost method used to study the brain's blood flow pattern. Such patterns can enable us to classify performed by a subject. In recent research, most classification systems use traditional machine learning algorithms for the classification of tasks. These methods, which are easier to implement, usually suffer from low accuracy. Further, a complex pre-processing phase is required for data preparation before implementing traditional machine learning methods. The proposed system uses a Bi-Directional LSTM based deep learning architecture for task classification, including mental arithmetic, motor imagery, and idle state using fNIRS data. Further, this system will require less pre-processing than the traditional approach, saving time and computational resources while obtaining an accuracy of 81.48%, which is considerably higher than the accuracy obtained using conventional machine learning algorithms for the same data set.