cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Balancing Access to Health Data and Privacy: A Review of the Issues and Approaches for the Future

The health care reform agenda of restraining costs, improving quality, and enhancing population health will require data to guide decision making. The most useful data for health services research are microdata—collected on individuals or households; only microdata allow the estimation of the impact of different policies or clinical protocols on individuals with relatively rare conditions, specific demographic profiles, or who are subject to a unique delivery system. The dramatic increase in the types of microdata—from biological to geospatial—holds great promise for health services research. And there are new ways of combining data from different sources: information scientists have better technical ways of protecting data; statisticians have better statistical techniques; and social scientists have created virtual collaboratories to promote safe, secure access (Lane 2007). However, legislative efforts to protect individual privacy have reduced the flow of health care data for research purposes and increased costs and delays, affecting the quality of analysis. The Privacy Rule in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) both created new procedural requirements for the use of protected health information (PHI) and defined PHI more broadly than had been done in the past (American Statistical Association 2009). The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 directs the new National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to pay attention to both data access and data confidentiality. This paper provides an overview of the challenges raised by concerns about data confidentiality in the context of health services research, the current methodologies used to ensure data security, and a description of one successful approach to balancing access and privacy.
Health Reform, Health Insurance, and Selection: Estimating Selection into Health Insurance Using the Massachusetts Health Reform.

Approximately 49.9 million people in the United States lack health insurance (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor and Smith (2011)). One potential driver of uninsurance is asymmetric information on health risk between insurers and the insured. Asymmetric information can distort available insurance contracts, as in Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976), or it can raise premiums for the relatively healthy, as in Akerlof (1970). Both distortions result in in-efficiently low levels of insurance coverage. Predicated, at least in part, on concerns about adverse selection, the state of Massachusetts passed health reform in April 2006 aimed at achieving near-universal health insurance coverage. The Massachusetts approach is considered a model for national health reform, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), signed in March 2010. A central feature of both reforms is a mandate that individuals obtain health insurance or pay a penalty. The Massachusetts mandate allows us to examine whether there was adverse selection into health insurance before the reform. In contrast, existing literature generally examines adverse selection among employer-sponsored plans (e.g. Cutler and Reber (1998); Einav, Finkelstein and Cullen (2010)), which is less relevant for policy. Our simple empirical methodology is based on the observation that the direction of selection depends on the difference between the cost of the marginal enrollee and the cost of those who already have insurance. If the cost of the marginal enrollee is below the average cost of those who are already insured, selection is adverse; if the cost of the marginal enrollee is above the average cost of those who are already insured, selection is advantageous. Therefore, as demonstrated by Einav, Finkelstein and Cullen (2010), the sign of the slope of the average cost curve captures selection. We use the Massachusetts reform to provide an exogenous shift in coverage that identifies the slope of the average cost curve. We find that counties with larger increases in coverage over the reform period face the smallest increase in average hospital costs for the insured population, consistent with adverse selection into insurance before reform. Additional results that incorporate cross-state variation and data on health measures provide further evidence for adverse selection.
CEO Materialism and Corporate Social Responsibility

ABSTRACT We study the role of individual CEOs in explaining corporate social responsibility (CSR) scores. We find that CEO fixed effects explain 59 percent of the variation in CSR scores, whereas f...
Informal Risk Sharing in an Infinite-horizon Experiment

This paper presents the first laboratory study of risk-sharing without commitment. Our experiment captures the main features of a simple model of voluntary insurance between two agents. In the model, two individuals interact over a potential infinite horizon and suffer random income shocks. Risk-averse individuals have incentives to smooth consumption by making transfers to each other. These transfers being voluntary, only self-enforcing risk-sharing arrangements are possible: transfers can never be so large as to tempt individuals to renege on them. This constraint, when binding, has strong implications for the shape of the constrained optimal risk-sharing arrangement. In our experiment, participants are matched in pairs. Each period, one of them, randomly drawn, receives a given amount in addition to its regular income. After observing both incomes, each person in a pair chooses a non-negative transfer to make to the other person. Two features of the experimental design are crucial. First, it is common information that all pairs will be dissolved at the end of each period with a given probability. Participants are informed when this occurs and randomly re-matched. This replicates the effect of infinite-horizon and discounting in the model. Second, at the end of the experiment, a single period is randomly drawn to count for cash payment. This feature is essential for individuals to care about the utility outcome of each period. We find evidence generally consistent with risk sharing, with most transfers coming from individuals who received h in the period. Moreover, in support of the theory, transfers are much higher with a higher continuation probability and they also are highly correlated with the individual’s degree of risk aversion. However, while the model predicts an increase in transfers with ex ante inequality, we observe the opposite effect. This may reflect considerations of identity or group membership.
Post-Watergate: The Legal Profession and Respect for the Interests of Third Parties

As a result of Watergate, disciplinary proceedings were brought against at least twenty-nine lawyers, which resulted in disciplinary action against at least eighteen of them.1 Their misconduct included aiding and abetting burglary, obstruction of justice, perjury, violation of campaign laws and conspiracy to violate citizens’ constitutional rights, among other charges.2 As a result of lawyers’ involvement in Watergate, the American Bar Association (ABA) worked to improve ethical standards for lawyers to rehabilitate the profession’s tarnished reputation. The ABA’s reform efforts included the enactment of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct (“Model Rules”) in 1983 and the adoption of a requirement that all ABA accredited law schools provide legal ethics education.3 Subsequent events involving lawyers, however, should cause the legal profession to question whether these reforms adequately help lawyers navigate their often competing roles while maintaining the trust and respect of the public that is necessary to sustain our legal system.
Constitutionalism, Legal Pluralism, and International Regimes

The international legal order, although pluralist in structure, is in the process of being constitutionalized. This article supports this claim in several different ways. In the Part I, I argue that most accepted understandings of "constitution" would readily apply to at least some international regimes. In Part II, I discuss different notions of "constitutional pluralism," and demonstrate that legal pluralism is not necessarily antithetical to constitutionalism. In fact, one finds a great deal of constitutional pluralism within national legal orders in Europe. Part III puts forward an argument that the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization are constitutional jurisdictions. In the Conclusion, I respond what I take to be the most important objections to these claims.
Teachers, Race and Student Achievement in a Randomized Experiment

Recommendations for the aggressive recruitment of minority teachers are based on hypothesized role-model effects for minority stu- dents as well as evidence of racial biases among nonminority teachers. However, prior empirical studies have found little or no association between exposure to an own-race teacher and student achievement. This paper presents new evidence on this question by examining the test score data from Tennessee's Project STAR class-size experiment, which ran- domly matched students and teachers within participating schools. Spec- ification checks confirm that the racial pairings of students and teachers in this experiment were unrelated to other student traits. Models of student achievement indicate that assignment to an own-race teacher significantly increased the math and reading achievement of both black and white students. HE economic literature on the policy determinants of student achievement has focused largely on the possible benefits of new educational resources that reduce class size and improve teacher salaries and training. However, the literature from other social sciences provides provocative evidence that several other contextual factors might also substantively influence the relationships between teachers, students, and student achievement. In particular, the con- ventional wisdom among educators is that minority students are more likely to excel educationally when matched with teachers who share their race or ethnicity. The frequent calls for aggressive recruitment of underrepresented minority
Electrifying Copyright Norms and Making Cyberspace More Like a Book

The first half of this Article charts the evolving but eminently ascertainable social norms of the use of analog copyrighted works by individuals, and characterizes these norms as "what is" in real space and "what ought to be" in cyberspace. The Author argues that while "what is" in the analog world may be imperfect, uncertain and unsatisfactory at times, it represents a discernible practical equilibrium upon which copyright holders' ability to control and extract income from their works is balanced against the rights of fair users. Authors, content distributors and users all make decisions within a familiar longstanding copyright framework, within which lots of small scale unauthorized copying occurs, but content creation and distribution is still adequately incentivized. Nevertheless, "what is" in terms of real space copyright use norms is not making the transition to cyberspace, and will not, absent legislative intervention. Instead, copyright owners are using the attributes of digitalization to realize their own normative view of "what ought to be," absolute control over copyrighted works that are embodied in electronic formats. Using the specific example of non-profit libraries, the second half of this Article explains how society will suffer if analog copyright use norms are not electrified and "what is" becomes dramatically altered in the digital domain: Individuals will lose traditional levels of access to informational works and be deprived of familiar ways and means of using copyrighted works. In consequence, their respect for copyrights is likely to erode as the distributive goals of the copyright system are correspondingly unfulfilled.
The Federal Inaction Commission

This Article proposes the establishment of a "Federal Inaction Commission" (FIC). This new, independent agency would be charged with investigating and reviewing the inaction of Executive Branch agencies and reporting its findings and recommendations to elected officials and the public. The FIC would provide many of the same benefits that would result from increasing the availability ofjudicial review of non-enforcement decisions and other regulatory inaction. At the same time, the FIC would be in a position to minimize the practical disadvantages that have been identified with judicial review of such decisions. Not only would the establishment of the FIC therefore provide a more workable solution to the problem of agency inaction than other commentators have offered, but the agency would also provide a political solution to what the staunchest defenders of the status quo have maintained is solely a "political" problem. SA.J. Thomas Faculty Scholar, Associate Dean for Research, and Associate Professor of Law, Michigan State University College of Law. Thanks to the organizers and sponsors of the 28th Annual Thrower Symposium, as well as to my co-panelists, Bill Buzbee, Michael Herz, and Gillian Metzger. This Article benefitted from comments and suggestions that I received when I presented the project at Emory University School of Law, the 2009 annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, and two workshops at Michigan State University College of Law. I am especially grateful for thoughtful comments on earlier drafts from Kristi Bowman, Evan Criddle, Brian Kalt, and Vibeke Lehmann Nielsen. Finally, I would like to thank Luke Hennings for excellent research assistance. HeinOnline -59 Emory L.J. 369 2009-2010
Stabilization Policies in Developing Countries with a Parallel Market for Foreign Exchange; A Formal Framework

The paper develops and tests a model of a developing economy that incorporates trade and capital restrictions, illegal transactions, a parallel foreign exchange market, currency substitution features, and forward-looking rational expectations. Temporary expansionary demand policies are associated with an increase in output and prices, a fall in the stock of net foreign assets, and a depreciation of the parallel exchange rate. The speed of adjustment is inversely related to the degree of rationing in the official foreign currency market. A once-for–all devaluation of the official exchange rate has no long-term effect on the premium.
Aggressive Corporate Finance: A Close Look at the Procter & Gamble-Bankers Trust Leveraged Swap

The leveraged interest rate swap transacted between Procter & Gamble and Bankers Trust in November 1993 is one of the infamous "derivatives debacles" of 1994. This article examines that transaction in detail, demonstrating that P&G in the swap was effectively writing embedded options on Treasury securities in order to lower its anticipated cost of borrowed funds. While the premium and the payout on the options are expressed in a complex formula that set the terms of the swap, P&G's market risk on the transaction is not difficult to estimate - and was not difficult at the time. It appears that, for the risk it took on in writing the embedded options, P&G received only about one-third what it could have collected if the options were instead sold on Treasury futures contracts at the Chicago Board of Trade. The author suggests that the difference between the anticipated accounting treatment on a leveraged swap and on traded options is a key factor in understanding why P&G entered the leveraged swap.
The Effect of Density and Trip-Chaining on the Interaction between Urban Form and Transit Demand

It is unclear whether policies designed to reduce auto and increase transit usage achieve their objective. Evidence is mixed because most empirical research on these policies use ad hoc specifications, whereas the authors' models are drawn from economic theory. Three models of increasing generality show how endogenizing relevant variables changes results obtained by others. The theoretical hypotheses are empirically tested using a dataset that integrates travel and land use. The main findings are (1) population density has a small impact on transit demand, which decreases when residential location is endogenous; (2) households living farther from work use less transit, a result of trip-chaining; and (3) reducing the spatial allocation of non-work activities, improving transit accessibility at and around subcenters, and increasing the presence of retail locations in proximity to transit-oriented households would increase transit demand.
Intergenerational Decision Making: An Evolutionary Perspective

The dominant technique for balancing the interests of present and future generations is currently to discount to present value - in effect, to give the interests of the present maximum weight and the interests of future less and less weight the further into the future one looks. Faced with a choice between 1,000 years of pleasure followed by extinction, on the one hand, and indefinite survival with a more moderate life-style, on the other, discounting to present value will often choose extinction. This paper offers an alternative paradigm. From an evolutionary perspective, the present matters only because it makes the future possible. Discounting to present value may be appropriate with respect to factors subject to compound growth - information, for example. It is not appropriate, however, with respect to nonrenewable factors. Both cost/benefit analysis with discounting to present value and unconstrained reliance on free markets are therefore inappropriate with respect to such factors. The paper also explores the problem of normative allegiance in the face of evolving cultures and species. Our goal, it concludes, should be the survival, evolution, and integrative expansion of our We - that is, the set of entities to whom we owe reciprocal cooperative duties.
The Blue Moonlight remedy : formulating the voucher scheme into a new emergency housing remedy in South Africa

In City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality v Blue Moonlight Properties 39 (Pty) Ltd & another the Constitutional Court unanimously affirmed the Supreme Court of Appeal's earlier decision in the matter and held the City of Johannesburg's Emergency Housing Programme to be unconstitutional. This finding of unconstitutionality rested on the failure of the state to assist persons facing homelessness as a result of an eviction at the instance of a private landowner. As a result, the court indicated that '[a] remedy must be formulated'. This article suggests that the unusual cash assistance and ratepayer remedy, as proposed by the High Court but set aside on appeal, is akin to the voucher scheme in the United States and is worthy of consideration as a remedy. The article considers whether the US voucher scheme could provide direction to policymakers as an addition to the existing project-based shelter scheme under the Emergency Housing Programme. The article also considers whether the introduction of the voucher scheme as an additional policy - the Blue Moonlight remedy - could alleviate the anticipated budgetary constraint on municipalities and better assist beneficiaries to graduate to permanent housing.
India Transformed: Insights from the Firm Level 1988-2005

Using firm-level data this paper analyzes, the transformation of India's economic structure following the implementation of economic reforms. The focus of the study is on publicly-listed and unlisted firms from across a wide spectrum of manufacturing and services industries and ownership structures such as state-owned firms, business groups, private and foreign firms. Detailed balance sheet and ownership information permit an investigation of a range of variables such as sales, profitability, and assets. Here we analyze firm characteristics shown by industry before and after liberalization and investigate how industrial concentration, the number, and size of firms of the ownership type evolved between 1988 and 2005. We find great dynamism displayed by foreign and private firms as reflected in the growth in their numbers, assets, sales and profits. Yet, closer scrutiny reveals no dramatic transformation in the wake of liberalization. The story rather is one of an economy still dominated by the incumbents (state-owned firms) and to a lesser extent, traditional private firms (firms incorporated before 1985). Sectors dominated by state-owned and traditional private firms before 1988-1990, with assets, sales and profits representing shares higher than 50%, generally remained so in 2005. The exception to this broad pattern is the growing importance of new and large private firms in the services sector. Rates of return also have remained stable over time and show low dispersion across sectors and across ownership groups within sectors.
CONSOLIDATING THE PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION HEARING AND TRIAL: CHANGING THE RULES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GAME

In this Article the Author addresses the issues surrounding consolidation, the situation that arises when a court decides the merits of a dispute based solely on the record produced at a hearing on motion for a preliminary injunction. The Author identifies some of the more flagrant abuses that trial and appellate courts have committed in reaching the merits after only a hearing on a motion for preliminary relief. The proposed amendments discussed in the Article would serve both courts and parties. They would prevent the kind of abuses discussed in this article by requiring that the parties be informed of the procedural setting in which the court intends to operate. They would also afford the parties the opportunity to object to a consolidation order in much the same way as parties do when faced with a summary judgment motion. The provisions would insure that due process is provided and that parties have the chance to present all the evidence they plan to introduce. The proposed amendments are also designed to avoid tying the hands of the courts. While the judges may still play an active role in litigation, the proposed changes clarify what that role should be by adding specific procedures to govern a disposition on the merits after only a hearing on a motion for a preliminary injunction.
Learning from success, learning from failure: South Africa, Hungary, Turkey and Egypt

The article has several theses. First we propose that there is a new method of constitution-making today, the two-stage, post-sovereign one perfected in South Africa. Second, we admit the path-dependent nature, and difficult pre-conditions, of this method. Third, we maintain that even when the full method is unlikely in a given context, its legitimating principles nevertheless can play a role through international dissemination. We explore that possibility in the context of the projected comprehensive reform of Turkey, and the constitutional revolution in Egypt. It is our belief that in these contexts one can learn both from successes of the new method and also from its failures typified by the Hungarian case that we briefly present. We are unfortunately not optimistic about the success of the new method especially where actors maintain their strong belief in the constituent power of the popular sovereign. This is likely to be the case in revolutions, but can happen in reform or even during the last state...
The Long‐Run Performance of Sponsored and Conventional Spin‐Offs

A sponsored spin-off takes place when an equity stake in a subsidiary is sold to an outside investor before going public. The stock return performance of a sample of 57 sponsored spin-offs from 1994 to 2005 is significantly negative over a three-year period following the spin-off date. The parent firms' stock performance for the year preceding (following) the spin-off date are below average (average) suggesting that their earlier performances were adversely affected by their subsidiaries and motivated the parents to spin them off. We also find that parent firms underinvest in the subsidiary prior to the spin-off, which could have motivated the subsidiary to seek outside funding sources before going public.
Why Should the Boss Own the Assets

In the context of an employment relationship, I present an argument suggesting that it is more efficient for the boss to own the productive assets. The idea is that a conflict between productivity and depreciation is internalized if the player deciding what an asset is used for also has residual claims. An empirical test finds evidence consistent with this. By asking whether the boss should own the assets, the paper reverses the reasoning from the literature in which it is argued that the owner has power and thus is the boss.
Rational Inattention in Hiring Decisions

We provide an information-based theory of matching efficiency fluctuations. Rationally inattentive firms have limited capacity to process information and cannot perfectly identify suitable applicants. During recessions, higher losses from hiring unsuitable workers cause firms to be more selective in hiring. When firms cannot obtain sufficient information about applicants, they err on the side of caution and accept fewer applicants to minimize losses from hiring unsuitable workers. Pro-cyclical acceptance rates drive a wedge between meeting and hiring rates, explaining fluctuations in matching efficiency. Quantitatively, our model replicates the joint behavior of unemployment rates and matching efficiency observed since the Great Recession.
Takeover Regulation in the United States and Europe: An Institutional Approach

While convergence may be the word of the day in corporate governance, it is noticeably absent in takeover regulation. The United States and Europe have adopted strongly dissimilar laws governing the process and substance of hostile tender offers, and their respective paths seem to be diverging rather than converging. This paper argues that much of this difference can be explained by process and institutional competency: courts have played the primary role in the development of American law, while political actors dominated the E.U. adoption of the Takeover Directive.
Military electoral authoritarianism in Egypt

Abstract This article argues that the current regime under President Abdel Fatah Sisi has established a military electoral authoritarian state with a non-dominant party electoral system. Coupled with Egypt's long tradition of nepotism, cronyism, and patronage networks, the new election laws perpetuate a fragmented, depoliticized parliament wherein no mobilized opposition can take shape to challenge the military state. The cause of Egypt's current depoliticization, however, is not a weak central party beholden to the presidency—as was the case under Sadat and Mubarak—but rather hundreds of rent-seeking parliamentarians with no party affiliation. Sisi intentionally structured the parliament to consist of over 400 individual, self-interested actors vulnerable to bribery or coercion to keep them depoliticized and compliant. This strategy facilitates purging any parliamentary figures who emerge to challenge executive power.
Market signaling with grades

Abstract We consider a signaling model in which receivers observe both the sender's costly signal as well as a stochastic grade that is correlated with the sender's type. In equilibrium, the sender resolves the trade-off between using the costly signal versus relying on the noisy grade to distinguish himself. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition—loosely, that the grade is sufficiently informative relative to the dispersion of (marginal) signaling costs across types—under which the presence of grades substantively alters the equilibrium predictions. Specifically, separating equilibria do not survive stability-based refinements. Instead, the prediction depends on the prior distribution over the sender's type. For example, with two types it involves full pooling when the distribution places sufficient weight on the high type and partial pooling otherwise. Finally, the equilibrium converges to the complete-information outcome as the distribution tends to a degenerate one—resolving a long-standing paradox within the signaling literature.
Evolutionary stability in asymmetric games

We examine dynamic models of evolutionary selection processes on asymmetric two-player games. Conditions are established under which dynamic selection processes will yield outcomes that respect iterated strict dominance. The addition of a stability requirement ensures that outcomes will be Nash equilibria. However, we find that stable outcomes need not respect weak dominance, and hence need not yield perfect equilibria. We conclude that evolutionary arguments readily motivate such equilibrium oncepts as rationalizability and Nash equilibrium, but appear to provide little basis for even such simple refinements of Nash equilibrium as the recommendation that dominated strategies not be played.
The effect of pressure fluctuations on the shapes of thinning liquid curtains

We consider the time-dependent response of a gravitationally thinning inviscid liquid sheet (a coating curtain) leaving a vertical slot to sinusoidal ambient pressure disturbances. The theoretical investigation employs the hyperbolic partial differential equation developed by Weinstein et al. (Phys. Fluids, vol. 9, issue 12, 1997, pp. 3625–3636). The response of the curtain is characterized by the slot Weber number, to deduce whether there is a substantial change in the overall shape and magnitude of the curtain responses. Despite the local differences in the curtain solution near the slot, we find that subcritical and supercritical curtains have similar responses for all imposed sinusoidal frequencies.
The Politics of Selecting the Bench from the Bar: The Legal Profession and Partisan Incentives to Politicize the Judiciary

The American judiciary has increasingly come under attack as polarized and politicized. Using a newly collected dataset that captures the ideological positioning of nearly half a million judges and lawyers who have made campaign contributions, we present empirical evidence showing politicization through various tiers of the judicial hierarchy. We show that the higher the court, the more conservative and more polarized it becomes, in contrast with the broader population of attorneys, who tend to be liberal. We also find that judicial selection systems relying on gubernatorial or legislative appointments are the most politicized. These findings suggest that political actors take opportunities to use ideology in the selection of judges, but that they strategically prioritize higher courts. To our knowledge, our study is the first to provide a direct ideological comparison across tiers of the judiciary and between judges and lawyers, and also the first to document how—and why—American courts are politicized. ∗ Comments and suggestions welcome. Many thanks to Matt Baum, Matt Blackwell, Tom Clark, Brian Fitzpatrick, Justin Grimmer, Jonathan Nash, Alexandra Pagano, Michael Peress, Jenny Shen, and Arthur Spirling for helpful feedback. We are also grateful to conference or seminar participants at UC-Berkeley Law, NYU, Princeton, Rochester, and Stanford. † Assistant Professor, 308 Encina West, Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305 (bonica@stanford.edu, http://web.stanford.edu/~bonica). ‡ Assistant Professor, 79 John F. Kennedy St., Harvard University, Cambridge MA 02138 (maya_sen@hks.harvard.edu, http://scholar.harvard.edu/msen).
Yates v. United States: A Case Study in Overcriminalization

Yates v. United States is textbook example of overcriminalization run amuck. Although Congress generally is responsible for overcriminalization because it enacts needless penal statutes, oftentimes criminalizing morally blameless conduct or allowing disproportionately severe penalties, Yates demonstrates that the federal courts are also to blame for the resulting injustices. Courts often extend criminal laws past any reasonable boundary, essentially creating the very common law crimes the federal courts have long been forbidden to fashion. The Supreme Court should use Yates as an opportunity to set an example for the lower federal courts of how the courts should counteract overcriminalization through statutory construction. The way to do this is for courts to resist the allure of specious “plain meaning” arguments and, in the many cases of textual ambiguity, to exercise informed judicial discretion in light of the myriad potential dangers of expansive interpretations of criminal statutes. Unless the Supreme Court leads by example, prosecutors will continue to exploit poorly defined federal crimes to produce miscarriages of justice of the kind which occurred in Yates.
Are Recessions Good For Your Health

This study investigates the relationship between economic conditions and health. Total mortality and eight of the ten sources of fatalities examined are shown to exhibit a procyclical fluctuation, with suicides representing an important exception. The variations are largest for those causes and age groups where behavioral responses are most plausible, and there is some evidence that the unfavorable health effects of temporary upturns are partially or fully offset if the economic growth is long-lasting. An accompanying analysis of microdata indicates that smoking and obesity increase when the economy strengthens, whereas physical activity is reduced and diet becomes less healthy.
Political Influence and the Renegotiation of Government Contracts

This paper provides novel evidence that corporate political influence operates through renegotiations of existing government contracts. Using detailed data on contractual terms and renegotiations around sudden deaths and resignations of local politicians, the estimates show that politically connected firms initially bid low and successfully renegotiate contract amounts, deadlines, and incentives. The effects hold across different industries and contract types, enhance firm value, and persist around the exogenous increase in contract supply due to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Overall, this paper establishes an unexplored link between political influence, ex post renegotiations, and ex ante bidding of government contracts.
Motivation Predictors of College Student Academic Performance and Retention.

College student retention and performance in higher education are important issues for educational institutions, educators, and students. The purpose of this study was to determine if student needs for achievement, affiliation, autonomy, and dominance measured by the Needs Assessment Questionnaire (Heckert et al., 2000) could predict academic performance and retention beyond traditional measures (high school grade point average and Scholastic Aptitude Test scores) to predict college student academic performance and retention. After controlling for demographics, high school grade point average, and SAT scores, students' needs for achievement and autonomy at the start of college significantly predicted cumulative GPA at the end of their first year. Students' high school grade point average, SAT scores, or motivation did not predict retention after 1 year. Study implications are discussed with a focus on improving the prediction of positive college student outcomes.
Back to the future? Legal scholarship in the progressive era and today

It is a great honor to have the opportunity to introduce Volume 100 of the Minnesota Law Review. One time-tested approach on such occasions is to pontificate about the current state of legal scholarship. Another is to prognosticate about the future of legal scholarship. With depressing regularity, it turns out that the future of legal scholarship is very much like the prognosticator’s own work. Taking a different tack, I decided to look back at the very first issue of the Review, to get a better sense of where it started in comparison to where it and other law reviews are today. It turned out to be an unexpectedly interesting exercise. Origins are often illuminating, and in the case of the Minnesota Law Review, there is much to be learned from the Review’s first issue in 1917.
European and international asymmetry in the volatility transmission mechanism: the ¿German Dominance Hypothesis¿ revisited

Abstract This paper re-examines the volatility transmission mechanism within the European Monetary System (EMS) and revisits the “German Dominance Hypothesis” using short-term interest rates. The results support German dominance within EMS, but not in a strict sense, since Germany’s short-term rates are also affected by its partners. When including the US interest rate, neither the German nor the US rate surface as predominant players in the volatility transmission mechanism. A final finding is absence of asymmetric behavior within EMS after Germany’s reunification due to the rapid convergence of the EMS countries as they prepared for monetary union.
The Difficulty of Constitutional Amendment in Canada

Scholars of comparative constitutional law would suggest that the United States Constitution is the world’s most difficult democratic constitution to change by formal amendment. This article suggests that the Constitution of Canada may be even harder to amend. Canadian constitutional politics have proven the textual requirements for major constitutional amendment so far impossible to satisfy. But the extraordinary difficulty of formal amendment in Canada derives equally from sources external to the text. Major constitutional amendment also requires conformity with extra-textual requirements imposed by Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Constitution of Canada, parliamentary and provincial as well as territorial statutes, and arguably also by constitutional conventions — additional rules that may well make major constitutional amendment impossible today in Canada. These as yet underappreciated extra-textual sources of formal amendment difficulty raise important questions for Canadian constitutionalism, namely whether in making the Constitution virtually impossible to amend they weaken democracy and undermine the purpose of writtenness.
Opening a Stock Exchange

Abstract A large body of theoretical and empirical literature has established a positive relationship between levels of stock market development and economic growth. However, previous empirical work has been based on samples of approximately 40 countries with the most highly developed financial systems. Since 1950, over 70 countries have opened their first national stock exchanges. Can such exchanges increase economic growth? I present a data set of my construction that describes the exchange openings that occurred between 1960 and 1998, and find that these exchanges have generated increases in growth during their first 5 years of existence, although the longer-term results are ambiguous.
Volatility of Development Aid: From the Frying Pan into the Fire?

Summary The paper, building on the authors’ previous analysis, examines the relative volatility of aid flows into developing countries and their domestic revenue, using new data, and three alternative measures of aid instability (relative volatility vis-a-vis fiscal revenue, unpredictability of aid disbursement relative to commitments, and failure of aid to smooth fluctuations in aggregate income). It finds that the volatility of aid flows is still much greater than that of domestic revenue and that this difference is not decreasing. Especially in very poor, aid-dependent countries, this high volatility of inflows makes the macroeconomy hard to manage. Further, the influence of aid has been procyclical and not countercyclical: aid has failed to act either as a stabilizing force or as an insurance mechanism. We argue that, to counter these unwelcome trends, donors need to be able to respond more speedily and effectively to large adverse shocks, and their conditionalities need to become more flexible—possibilities explicitly discussed elsewhere in this Special Section.
The Great Crash and the Onset of the Great Depression

This paper argues that the collapse of stock prices in October 1929 generated temporary uncertainty about future income which led consumers to forgo purchases of durable goods. That the Great Crash generated uncertainty is evidenced by the decline in surety expressed by contemporary forecasters. That this uncertainty affected consumer behavior is shown by the fact that spending on consumer durables declined drastically in late 1929, while spending on perishable goods rose slightly. This effect is confirmed by the fact that there is a significant negative relationship between stock market variability and the production of consumer durables in the prewar era.
The UBIT: Leveling an Uneven Playing Field or Tilting a Level One?

If you take a walk along the Upper West Side of Manhattan, you will see numerous restaurants, especially on the avenues. There is, however, a stretch of the west side of Broadway, between 60th and 65th Streets, where there are no restaurants open to the public. Occupying that land are two prominent New York institutions: the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and Fordham Law School. The difficult time that pedestrians walking past Lincoln Center and Fordham have finding a bagel or a latte will change when the remodeled Lincoln Center opens in 2010. The current renovation plans call for tearing down the wall that separates Lincoln Center from the pedestrian traffic along Broadway and opening the plaza, famous for its fountain, to the street. Like much contemporary urban architecture, the buildings at Lincoln Center seek to integrate that institution into its neighborhood by removing barriers that keep out pedestrians. Lincoln Center will also reach out to its neighbors by hosting several restaurants open to the public. The managers of Lincoln Center hope that those restaurants will attract not only individuals attending events at the center, but also passersby and neighborhood residents. By operating restaurants open to the general public, Lincoln Center will find itself in direct competition with numerous private restaurants in the area.1 However, unlike almost all of the establishments with which it will compete, the Lincoln Center restaurants will be owned and operated by a nonprofit organization. As a nonprofit under § 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, Lincoln Center is exempt from federal tax on its income from activities that are related to its exempt function. Almost all competing establishments—whether owned by individuals directly, through passthrough entities, or through corporations—are not tax exempt. That
Auditor Quality and Debt Covenants

This study examines the impact of auditor quality on financial covenants in debt contracts. We conjecture that high-quality auditors have two related effects on these debt covenants: (i) they encourage fewer and less restrictive covenants by providing assurance to lenders at contract inception and, consequently, (ii) they ensure a lower probability of eventual covenant violations. Consistent with the conjectures, we find that auditor quality is negatively associated with the intensity and tightness of financial covenants. Specifically, high-quality auditors are associated with fewer covenants (especially performance covenants) and less binding covenants. Additionally, we find that auditor quality is negatively associated with the likelihood of covenant violations. In an ancillary test, we provide evidence that high-quality auditors mitigate the detrimental effect of covenant violations on the cost of borrowing. Together, these findings highlight the important role of auditors in debt contracting.
ELECTRONIC REAL ESTATE DOCUMENTS: CONTEXT, UNRESOLVED COST-BENEFIT ISSUES AND A RECOMMENDED DECISIONAL PROCESS

This essay begins with a prediction: that electronic real estate documents will soon begin to replace paper documents in many, if not all, phases of residential real estate transactions. It describes the costs and benefits of electronic documents, and the many forces supporting and impeding their widespread adoption. It concludes by urging all those participating in the process to use their best efforts to address the obstacles and to work towards a successful transition to a world of electronic real estate transactions and electronic recording.
Information Asymmetry and Earnings Management: Some Evidence

This paper conducts an empirical investigation of the relationship between information asymmetry and earnings management predicted by Dye (1988) and Trueman and Titman (1988). When information asymmetry is high, stakeholders do not have sufficient resources, incentives, or access to relevant information to monitor manager's actions, which gives rise to the practice of earnings management (Schipper, 1989; Warfield et al., 1995). Empirical results suggest a systematic relationship between the magnitude of information asymmetry and the level of earnings management in two different settings.
The value of a statistical life: A critical review of market estimates throughout the world

A substantial literature over the past thirty years has evaluated tradeoffs between money and fatality risks. These values in turn serve as estimates of the value of a statistical life. This article reviews more than 60 studies of mortality risk premiums from ten countries and approximately 40 studies that present estimates of injury risk premiums. This critical review examines a variety of econometric issues, the role of unionization in risk premiums, and the effects of age on the value of a statistical life. Our meta-analysis indicates an income elasticity of the value of a statistical life from about 0.5 to 0.6. The paper also presents a detailed discussion of policy applications of these value of a statistical life estimates and related issues, including risk-risk analysis.
Earnings Quality and the Equity Risk Premium: A Benchmark Model*

This paper solves a model that links earnings quality to the equity risk premium in an infinite-horizon consumption capital asset pricing model (CAPM) economy. In the model, risk-averse traders hold diversified portfolios consisting of risk-free bonds and shares of many risky firms. When constructing their portfolios, traders rely on noisy reported earnings and dividend payments for information about the risky firms. The main new element of the model is an explicit representation of earnings quality that includes hidden accrual errors that reverse in subsequent periods. The model demonstrates that earnings quality magnifies fundamental risk. Absent fundamental risk, poor earnings quality cannot affect the equity risk premium. Moreover, only the systematic (undiversified) component of earnings-quality risk contributes to the equity risk premium. In contrast, all components of earnings-quality risk affect earnings capitalization factors. The model ties together consumption CAPM and accounting-based valuation research into one price formula linking earnings quality to the equity risk premium and earnings capitalization factors.
A formalized, integrated and visual approach to stress testing

In this paper, we will give for the first time a formal mathematical language to the steps used currently by financial institutions when calculating the impact of a stress scenario on a balance sheet that depends on more granular or different factors than those provided in the scenario. We will introduce the language of Probabilistic Graphical Models – a technique rooted in machine learning – to show how the different models used at each step can be put together in a coherent picture, thus giving a holistic view of the entire model setup. This will give us a solid basis to discuss some weaknesses and problems with the stress-testing exercises run by the industry as of today. We will show empirical analyses to substantiate better some of our claims.