cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Science and the Death Penalty: DNA, Innocence, and the Debate over Capital Punishment in the United States

The death penalty debate in the United States has recently undergone a fundamental shift. The possibility of executing the innocent has emerged as some abolitionists' most salient argument, displacing debates over such issues as fairness, deterrence, and cost. Innocence has managed to move to the fore of the debate in part because of the success of death penalty opponents in attaching epistemological certainty to one particular category of postconviction exonerations, those vouched for by the authority of DNA evidence. We suggest that such moves are primarily rhetorical because, while DNA evidence may be more accurate and reliable than other forensic science, it still fundamentally probabilistic in nature and is prone to uncertainties at all stages of its production. Yet, because of the certainty attached to DNA evidence in public discourse, it can be used as a lever with which to challenge law's claims to truth‐making authority, and to undermine public trust in the death penalty. A few abolitionists and other scholars have expressed misgivings about the abolitionist embrace of the innocence argument. We push this concern further, suggesting that both abolitionists and death penalty reformers, who seek to promote a “scientific” death penalty centered on DNA evidence, draw upon a mythologized notion of “science” as a producer of epistemic certainty.
Efficiency Pricing, Tenancy Rent Control and Monopolistic Landlords

This paper presents a model of ‘tenancy rent control’ where rent increases on, and evictions of, sitting tenants are prohibited but nominal rents for new tenants are unrestricted. If there is any inflation, landlords prefer to take short-staying tenants. If there is no way for landlords to tell a tenant's type, an adverse selection problem arises. If landlords have monoply power, then they may prefer not to raise the rent even when there is excess demand for housing. These ‘efficiency rents’ show that tenancy rent control can give rise to equilibria that look as if there were a flat ceiling on rents.
Equity Underwriting Spreads at Commercial Bank Holding Companies and Investment Banks

This paper offers a descriptive analysis of relative equity issue costs at commercial bank-affiliated and investment bank underwriters over the period 1995–1999. We estimate models for the gross spreads associated with IPOs, but disaggregate the sample by type of underwriter. We find that gross spreads of 7 percent for IPOs are more predominant for commercial-bank related underwriters than for investment banks. Our specifications are driven by theoretical arguments that bank-related underwriters could have certain competitive advantages over investment banks in securities underwriting. We find that different factors influence gross spreads on IPOs led by commercial banks and investment banks. When the issuing firm is well known, commercial bank-affiliated firms clearly have no competitive advantage.
Cash flow duration and the term structure of equity returns

Abstract The term structure of equity returns is downward-sloping: stocks with high cash flow duration earn 1.10% per month lower returns than short-duration stocks in the cross-section. I create a measure of cash flow duration at the firm level using balance sheet data to show this novel fact. Factor models can explain only 50% of the return differential, and the difference in returns is three times larger after periods of high investor sentiment. Analysts extrapolate from past earnings growth into the future and predict high returns for high-duration stocks following high-sentiment periods, contrary to ex-post realizations. I use institutional ownership as a proxy for short-sale constraints, and find the negative cross-sectional relationship between cash flow duration and returns is only contained within short-sale constrained stocks.
Protection of Minority Shareholder Interests, Cross-listings in the United States, and Subsequent Equity Offerings

Abstract This paper examines the hypothesis that non-US firms cross-list in the United States to increase protection of their minority shareholders. Cross-listing on the NYSE or Nasdaq subjects a non-US firm to a number of provisions of US securities law, and requires the firm to conform to US GAAP. It therefore increases the expected cost to managers of extracting private benefits, and commits the firm to protect minority shareholders’ interests. The expected relation between the quantity of cross-listings and shareholder protection in the home country is ambiguous, because managers will consider both expected private benefits and the public value of their shares. However, there are clear predictions about the relation between subsequent equity issues, shareholder protection, and cross-listings: (1) Equity issues increase following all cross-listings, regardless of shareholder protection. (2) The increase should be larger for cross-listings from countries with weak protection. (3) Equity issues following cross-listings in the US will tend to be in the US for firms from countries with strong protection and outside the US for firms from countries with weak protection. We find evidence consistent with each of these predictions. Overall, the desire to protect shareholder rights appears to be an important reason why some non-US firms cross-list in the United States.
A unified network performance measure with importance identification and the ranking of network components

In this paper, we propose the first network performance measure that can be used to assess the efficiency of a network in the case of either fixed or elastic demands. Such a measure is needed for many different applications since only when the performance of a network can be quantifiably measured can the network be appropriately managed. Moreover, as we demonstrate, the proposed performance measure, which captures flow information and behavior, allows one to determine the criticality of various nodes (as well as links) through the identification of their importance and ranking. We present specific networks for which the performance/efficiency is computed along with the importance rankings of the nodes and links. The new measure can be applied to transportation networks, supply chains, financial networks, electric power generation and distribution networks as well as to the Internet and can be used to assess the vulnerability of a network to disruptions.
Democracy and health

Scholars of population and global health have grappled for decades with the complex relationship between health and its determinants. This growing literature has taught us much about proximal and distal health determinants, especially those in the socio-economic realm. Economics as it relates to health, in particular, has received considerable and recent investigation,1 but mounting evidence suggests that a country's economic status alone cannot entirely explain differences in health and health policy.2–8 Thus, societies with similar levels of economic development, such as Afghanistan and the Indian state of Kerala, can have radically different levels of health and health system development. It is therefore important to extend our analysis to broader structural factors, such as political institutions, to better understand global health inequalities. A country's political structure affects virtually every aspect of society, including health. There are few studies on the relationship between political institutions and health, at both theoretical and empirical levels9–11. One reason must certainly stem from the complexity of the health-politics nexus and the difficulty of identifying independent and interactive influences in both directions. The relationship can be defined in many ways, ranging from the study of political systems (e.g. democratic or authoritarian, legislative and executive governance, proportional or majoritarian electoral systems, constitutional structure); culture (e.g. political values); institutions (e.g. centralized or fragmented, presidential or parliamentary, responsiveness to citizenry, political parties); state capacity (technical and administrative capacity, level of corruption); and philosophy, to more nuts-and-bolts political process factors, such as personal politics (e.g. political leadership, powerful personalities, presidential tactics), political strategy and interest group representation (e.g. its strength or weakness in a political system). More recent influences on health policy include re-election incentives, financial contributions (e.g. in the US), and the depth and range of public opinion.12,,13 A recent issue of the …
Bid anticipation, information revelation, and merger gains

Abstract Because firms’ takeover motives are unobservable to investors, mergers are only partially anticipated and often appear as mixed blessings for acquirers. I construct and estimate a model to study the causes and consequences of bid anticipation and information revelation in mergers. Controlling for the market’s reassessment of the acquirer’s stand-alone value, I estimate that acquirers gain 4% from a typical merger. The total value of an active merger market averages 13% for acquirers, part of which is capitalized in their pre-merger market values. My model also explains the correlation between announcement returns and firm characteristics, as well as the low predictability of mergers.
Climate Change Policy and the Adoption of Methane Digesters on Livestock Operations

Methane digesters—biogas recovery systems that use methane from manure to generate electricity—have not been widely adopted in the United States because costs have exceeded benefits to operators. Burning methane in a digester reduces greenhouse gas emissions from manure management. A policy or program that pays producers for these emission reductions—through a carbon offset market or directly with payments—could increase the number of livestock producers who would profit from adopting a methane digester. We developed an economic model that illustrates how dairy and hog operation size, location, and manure management methods, along with electricity and carbon prices, could influence methane digester profits. The model shows that a relatively moderate increase in the price of carbon could induce significantly more dairy and hog operations, particularly large ones, to adopt a methane digester, thereby substantially lowering emissions of greenhouse gases.
Constitutional Adjudication and the ‘Dimensions’ of Judicial Activism: Comparative Legal and Institutional Heuristics

AbstractThe dominant approach to constitutional law, and even more so to constitutional theory, has historically been judicial review-centred. Constitutional scholarship has often seemed ‘strong on positions and weak on analysis’, based on ‘foundationalist'/organic theories of judicial review, trying to justify or to reject the practice in toto and dictating its parameters. Behind such strong positions, and behind the search for ‘first-best principles’ of legitimacy, one can see a series of latent and intractable tensions, inherent in traditional constitutional theories of interpretation and adjudication: these tensions are the consequences of the unavoidably creative function of the judicial role. A pragmatic, second-best inquiry must probe the degree of such creativity, focusing on the questions of mode, limits, level of acceptability of law-making through the courts, and issues of institutional performance and systemic effects of adjudication. In light of all this, the paper will provide a taxonomy of ...
Extended benefits and the duration of UI spells: evidence from the New Jersey extended benefit program

Abstract This paper examines the impact on the duration of unemployment insurance receipt of a politically motivated program that offered 13 weeks of ‘extended benefits’ for 6 months in 1996. Using state-level data and individual administrative records from before, during and after the program, we find that it raised the fraction of claimants who exhausted their regular benefits by 1–3 percentage points. Had the program run long enough to affect claimants from the first day of their spell, the fraction exhausting would have risen by 7 percentage points, and the average recipient would have collected regular benefits for one extra week.
Outlier Aversion in Evaluating Performance: Evidence from Figure Skating ∗

The quality of subjective performance evaluation is dependent on the incentive structures faced by evaluators, in particular on how they are monitored and themselves evaluated. Figure skating competitions provide a unique opportunity to study subjective evaluation. This paper develops and tests a simple model of what I call "outlier aversion bias" in which subjective evaluators avoid submitting outlying judgments. We find significant evidence for the existence of outlier aversion. Individual judges within a game manipulate scores to achieve a targeted level of agreement with the other judges. Furthermore, a natural experiment shows that the dispersion of scores across judges depends upon the type of judge-assessment system and its implication for outlier aversion. Agreement may not be a good criterion for the validity of an evaluation system, contradicting the industrial psychology and personnel management literature.
Ranking Law Schools with LSATs, Employment Outcomes, and Law Review Citations

This Article offers an alternative to the much-discussed U.S. News & World Report rankings. Where U.S. News rankings are affected by a wide variety of factors —some of which are criticized as irrelevant to what prospective students care about or should care about—this Article looks to three variables: the median LSAT score of entering students, which seeks to capture the quality of the student body; the percentage of the graduating students who are employed at nine months following graduation at full-time, permanent, JD-required jobs (a separate analysis excludes school-funded positions and solo practitioners from this variable); and the number of citations to each school’s main law review, which seeks to capture a school’s recent reputation. It rank-orders each of those variables, averages those ranks to obtain a new ranking, and then compares those new rankings to those of the 147 schools analyzed in U.S. News & World Report in March 2014. It identifies the schools that improve and decline the most with the new ranking. This Article provides ranks for all 194 American Bar Association accredited law schools that U.S. News included in its rankings released in 2014, including the forty-seven schools that U.S. News put in its “unranked” category.
Conditioning the President's Conditional Pardon Power

From the inception of this nation's history, presidents have offered pardons and commutations of sentences conditioned on a surprisingly wide array of conduct. Presidents have offered clemency on the condition that offenders refrain from alcohol, provide support for family members, leave the country, join the navy, drop claims against the United States, and restrict their travel or speech. By attaching conditions, presidents may protect the public or benefit it in other ways. Although such pardons may advantage society, imposing conditions may restrict the constitutional rights of offenders. In order to escape the harsh confines of prison, offenders may have little choice but to accept restraints on their exercise of constitutionally protected freedoms. Moreover, exercise of conditional pardons may permit presidents to accomplish objectives that they could not otherwise attain. As an example, presidents can commute sentences of a particular class of offenders conditioned on supervised release or parole even if Congress has rejected such penological alternatives. Nevertheless, this Article argues that exercise of the pardon power generally should remain vested in the president's discretion, checked only by the political process. Even though coercion is inherent in conditional offers, we should trust offenders to choose between complying with the conditions and staying in prison longer because they generally benefit from that choice. And, in light of the president's role under the pardon clause in making judgments about optimal punishment, presidents can alter the sentencing framework set by Congress. Oversight by Congress, the press, and subsequent presidents tempers presidential overreaching. This Article argues, however, that judges can play a critical role in helping check abuse of the conditional pardon power in two contexts. First, judges should negate a presidential condition in the rare case when the condition shocks society's conscience, such as requiring a prisoner to donate a kidney. Second, offenders should also be entitled to challenge any condition that violates constitutional restraints on the president's authority such as a First Amendment ban on providing support for particular religious expression. In short, although there should be no review of the process by which presidents reach the decision to pardon, the reasons for the decision, or the appropriateness of the condition selected, limited review of conditions that shock the conscience or violate constitutional restraints on presidential authority is warranted.
Creating a taxonomic tool for technocracy and applying it to Silicon Valley

Abstract Although much criticism has been leveled against technocracy, the multi-layered problem has been analyzed in piecemeal fashion and has yet to be subject to robust classification. Consequently, it can be difficult to determine when allegations of technocracy are true, and the extent to which new instances of technocracy perpetuate longstanding problems. To close this gap in scholarship, we have created a taxonomy of technocracy that identifies three things: 1) the central domains where technocracy emerges, 2) the basic means by which technocratic power is instantiated, and 3) the quintessential types of harms technocratic discipline engenders. To demonstrate the explanatory power of the taxonomy, we apply it to Silicon Valley and clarify how this contemporary example of technocracy relates to past instances.
Wage Gains Associated with Height as a Form of Health Human Capital

Height is consulted as a latent indicator of early nutrition and lifetime health status. Height is observed to increase in recent decades in populations where per capita national income has increased and public health activities have grown. Height is determined by genetic make up and realized in part through satisfactory nutrition and health related care and conditions. Alternative instrumental variables (IV) are explored which proxy price and income constraints which are expected to influence the latter reproducible human capital investments in height. I report OLS and IV estimates of the partial effect of height on log hourly wages in recent national surveys from three countries: Ghana, Brazil and the United States. I conclude that the human capital productivity effect of height estimated by parent education IVs in the US and Ghana are many times larger than the OLS estimates, and in Ghana and Brazil the regional price IVs estimates also imply a substantially larger human capital wage effects of height compared with the OLS estimates. The OLS estimates of height effects on wages are dominated by the genetic variation in height, and appear to understate substantially the human capital returns to health and nutrition inputs which increase adult height.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
Optimal management of an ecosystem with an unknown threshold

Abstract We consider an ecosystem with two distinct equations of motion that are separated by a threshold value of the state variable. We find that increasing uncertainty (both uncertainty embedded in the natural system and uncertainty of the decisionmaker about the location of the threshold) can lead to nonmonotonic changes in precaution: a reduction in uncertainty can first increase and then decrease optimal precautionary activity. This nonmonotonicity can help to explain why regulators often give conflicting arguments about optimal abatement policies in the face of uncertainty. For example, some regulators argue for an immediate reduction in pollutant loading until uncertainty about the underlying process is reduced while others call for no costly reductions in pollutant loading until the same uncertainty is reduced. These statements can be consistent even if both sides agree on both economic objectives and the system dynamics, but have different priors on the uncertainty involved.
The Protection of Databases

In Parts I and II of this Paper, the author analyzes the legal protection of databases first in international treaties, in particular the Berne Convention and the WTO TRIPS Agreement, and second under national and regional copyright, sui generis, or other (e.g., tort) law in Europe (both the European Directive on the legal protection of databases of 1996, which was under review, and a number of relevant national laws), the United States, and a number of foreign jurisdictions (Australia, Canada, China, Nigeria, Russia, and Singapore). In Part III, the author provides a critical analysis of the effort to expand the legal protection of databases from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. In his conclusion, the author suggests three paths for the future evolution of the protection of databases at the international level.
Who Are You to Tell Me That?! The Moderating Effect of Performance Feedback Source and Psychological Entitlement on Individual Performance

ABSTRACT: As organizational structures have become more flat, firms are increasing the use of peer reviews as a performance monitoring tool. Research suggests that the effectiveness of performance feedback, particularly negative feedback, depends on the feedback source and the recipient's sense of psychological entitlement. We conduct an experiment wherein we manipulate the valence and source level of performance feedback and examine how psychological entitlement moderates the effect of feedback on subsequent performance. We find that when providing negative performance feedback, the effect of feedback source on performance is moderated by the level of psychological entitlement of the feedback recipient. Specifically, relative to peer feedback, the effectiveness of feedback from a superior increases with the feedback recipient's entitlement. We also find that psychological entitlement and source level do not affect responses to positive feedback. Our results suggest that companies should encourage supervi...
Trade adjustment assistance and Pareto gains from trade

Abstract In a model where all factors of production are imperfectly mobile, we argue that the Dixit-Norman scheme of commodity taxes may not lead to strict Pareto gains from trade. Rather, this scheme must be augmented by policies that give factors an incentive to move between industries: hence, the role for trade adjustment assistance. By offering an adjustment subsidy to all individuals wiling to move, and also using the Dixit-Norman pattern of commodity taxes, the government can implement Pareto gains from trade under the condition we identify.
Academic Journal Prices in a Digital Age: A Two-Sided Market Model

Digital-age technologies promise to revolutionize the market for academic journals as they have other media. We model journals as intermediaries linking authors with readers in a two-sided market. We use the model to study the division of fees between authors and readers under various market structures, ranging from monopoly to free entry. The results help explain why print journals traditionally obtained most of their revenue from subscription fees. The results raise the possibility that digitization may lead to a proliferation of online journals targeting various author types. The paper contributes to the literature on two-sided markets in its analysis of free-entry equilibrium and modeling of product-quality certification.
A Supply and Demand Framework for Two-Sided Matching Markets

This paper develops a price-theoretic framework for matching markets with heterogeneous preferences. The model departs from the Gale and Shapley model by assuming that a finite number of agents on one side (colleges) are matched to a continuum of agents on the other side (students). We show that stable matchings correspond to solutions of supply and demand equations, with the selectivity of each college playing a role similar to that of prices. We apply the model to an analysis of how competition induced by school choice gives schools incentives to invest in quality and to asymptotics of school choice mechanisms.
Earnings Metrics, Information Processing, and Price Efficiency in Laboratory Markets

An enduring issue in financial reporting is whether and how salient summary measures of firm performance (“earnings metrics”) affect market price efficiency. In laboratory markets, we test the effects of salient earnings metrics, which vary in how they combine persistent and transitory elements, on investor information search, beliefs about value, offers to trade, and market price efficiency. We find that including transitory elements in salient earnings metrics causes traders to search unnecessarily for further information about these elements and to overestimate their effect on fundamental value relative to a rational benchmark. In contrast, separately displaying persistent elements in earnings increases the accuracy of traders’ value estimates. Prices generally reflect traders’ beliefs about value, and prices are most efficient when transitory elements are excluded from earnings metrics entirely. Our study contributes to research on salience effects in financial reporting by showing that including transitory elements in salient earnings metrics causes inefficient information search and biased beliefs about value that can aggregate to affect market prices. We also contribute to research in experimental markets by showing that redundant disclosure is not always beneficial; redundant disclosure of transitory earnings elements, in particular, appears to have negative consequences for investor behavior and market efficiency.
The constitutionality of DNA sampling on arrest.

INTRODUCTION 456 I. OF DATABANKS AND DATABASES 461 II. SELF INCRIMINATION 463 III. DUE PROCESS 465 A. Bodily Integrity 465 B. Informational Privacy 467 IV. SEARCH AND SEIZURE 472 A. DNA Sampling as a Search or Seizure 472 1. The Katz Standard 473 2. Public Exposure and Knowledge 473 3. Invasion of the Body 476 a. Blood Samples 476 b. Buccal Swabs and Oral Sampling 477 c. Saliva Samples 478 d. Skin Scrapings 480 4. Nature of the Information 481 B. The Reasonableness of DNA Sampling upon Arrest 482 1. The Framework for Analysis: Categorizing versus Balancing.......482 2. The “True Identity” Exception 485 3. The “Special Needs” Exception 489 4. The Trace Evidence Database Exception 498 5. The Importance of Safeguards 504 CONCLUSION 507
Dodd-Frank's Whistleblower Provision Fails to Go Far Enough: Making the Case for a Qui Tam Provision in a Revised Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

In the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, Congress enacted the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd–Frank). Included within Dodd–Frank is a whistleblower provision that some businesses believe has gone too far. While Dodd–Frank's reach is substantial, the whistleblower provision actually fails to go far enough as applied to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). In this article, I argue that there are several statutory roadblocks and administrative hindrances that will prevent Dodd-Frank's whistleblower provision from assisting in the enforcement of the FCPA. I then argue that the solution is for Congress to amend the FCPA to include a qui tam provision, modeled after the qui tam provision found in the False Claims Act. For reasons that I discuss, a qui tam provision not only makes sense in the FCPA, but will led to a better enforcement environment.The article contributes a novel idea to FCPA reform scholarship and highlights several problems that practitioners must be aware of when submitting FCPA tips under Dodd-Frank.
A Third Way: Regional Restructuring and the Societas Europaea

The Societas Europaea (SE) harmonized a minimum of company law and assigned employee representation to a supplementary negotiation process. Commentators predicted that it would introduce cross-border regulatory competition to the EU. Others suggested that companies would choose the SE over other national corporate forms, in order to moderate the requirements of mandatory employee representation. This paper reports case-study evidence to argue that companies are utilizing the form in a third, more significant way: to facilitate within-group restructurings that make regulation by a single supervisor possible. Their actions generate pressure for the unification of additional areas of law and the development of new regional regulatory systems. Empowering the SE would therefore lead to increased integration of corporate oversight within Europe.
Why is the Japanese Supreme Court so Conservative

The Constitution of Japan, enacted on November 3, 1946, and effective as of May 3, 1947, gave the judicial power to the Supreme Court and the inferior courts established by the Diet, the national legislature, and gave the power of judicial review to the judiciary.Equipped with the power of judicial review, the Japanese Supreme Court was expected to perform a very significant political role in safeguarding the Constitution, especially its Bill of Rights, against infringement by the government. Yet, it has developed a very conservative constitutional jurisprudence ever since its establishment.This article examines why the Japanese Supreme Court has developed such a conservative constitutional jurisprudence. First, the power of judicial review and the system of judicial review in Japan in examined. Second, it points out how the Japanese Supreme Court is reluctant to entertain constitutional litigation and how the Japanese Supreme Court is unwilling to apply close scrutiny or strike-down statutes. Finally, the historical, organizational, institutional, and strategic reasons for the conservative constitutional jurisprudence is explored. In conclusion, the author argues that the most fundamental reason lies in the reluctance of Japanese judges to view the Constitution as a source of positive law to be enforced by the judiciary.
Trade Shocks, Firm Hierarchies, and Wage Inequality

This paper shows robust effects of trade shocks on within-firm wage inequality through changes in firm hierarchies. It uses two distinct research designs—one considering firm-level shocks to foreig...
Pay for Regulator Performance

Few doubt that executive compensation arrangements encouraged the excessive risk taking by banks that led to the recent Financial Crisis. Accordingly, academics and lawmakers have called for the reform of banker pay practices. In this Article, we argue that regulator pay is to blame as well, and that fixing it may be easier and more effective than reforming banker pay. Regulatory failures during the Financial Crisis resulted at least in part from a lack ofsufficient incentives for examiners to act aggressively to prevent excessive risk. Bank regulators are rarely paid for performance, and in atypical cases involving performance bonus programs, the bonuses have been allocated in highly inefficient ways. We propose that regulators, specifically bank examiners, be compensated with a debt-heavy mix of phantom bank debt and equity, as well as a separate bonus linked to the timing of the decision to take over a bank. Our pay-forperformance approach for regulators would help reduce the incidence of future regulatory failures. * Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School (toddh@uchicago.edu). t Howard Zhang Faculty Research Scholar and Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law (fredtung@bu.edu). For helpful comments, we are grateful to Robert Bench, Eric Biber, Chris Brummer, Abe Cable, Anthony Casey, John Crawford, Aziz Huq, Saul Levmore, Anup Malani, Susan Morse, Eric Posner, Eric Rasmusen, Amanda Rose, Larry Ribstein, David Walker, and Charles Whitehead, as well as workshop participants at Boston College Law School, Pace University School of Law, University of Chicago Law School, and the 2011 Roger Traynor Summer Professorship Program at Hastings College of the Law. Osama Hamdy, University of Chicago Law School 2012, provided excellent research assistance.
International Mutual Funds, Capital Flow Volatility, and Contagion – A Survey

Gaining a better understanding of the behavior of international investors is the key for informing the debate about the optimal response to capital flows and about reforms to the international financial architecture. In this context, recent research on the behavior of international mutual funds at the micro level has expanded our knowledge about the drivers of portfolio flows and the mechanisms behind the transmission of financial shocks across countries. This paper provides a brief survey of this literature, with a focus on the empirical evidence for emerging markets. Overall, the behavior of international mutual funds is complex and overly simplistic characterizations are misleading. However, there is broad-based evidence for momentum trading among funds. Moreover, funds tend to avoid opaque markets and assets, and this behavior becomes more pronounced during volatile times. Portfolio rebalancing mechanisms are clearly important in explaining contagion patterns, even in the absence of common macroeconomic fundamentals. From a surveillance point of view, this implies that monitoring the exposures of large investors at a micro level is crucial to assess vulnerabilities.
Political Cycles in OECD Economies

This paper studies whether the dynamic behaviour of GNP growth, unemployment and inflation is systematically affected by the timing of elections and of changes of governments. The sample include the last three decades in 18 OECD economies. We explicitly test the implication of several models of political cycles, both of the "opportunistic" and of the "partisan" type. Also, we confront the implication of recent "rational" models with more traditional approaches. Our results can be summarized as follows: (a) The "political business cycle" hypothesis, as formulated in Nordhaus (1975) on output and unemployment is generally rejected by the data; (b) inflation tends to increase immediately after elections, perhaps as a result of pre-electoral expansionary monetary and fiscal policies; (c) we find evidence of temporary partisan differences in output and unemployment and of long-run partisan differences in the inflation rate as implied by the "rational partisan theory" by Alesina (1987); (d) we find virtually no evidence of permanent partisan differences in output growth and unemployment.
Humans display a ‘cooperative phenotype’ that is domain general and temporally stable

Understanding human cooperation is of major interest across the natural and social sciences. But it is unclear to what extent cooperation is actually a general concept. Most research on cooperation has implicitly assumed that a person’s behaviour in one cooperative context is related to their behaviour in other settings, and at later times. However, there is little empirical evidence in support of this assumption. Here, we provide such evidence by collecting thousands of game decisions from over 1,400 individuals. A person’s decisions in different cooperation games are correlated, as are those decisions and both self-report and real-effort measures of cooperation in non-game contexts. Equally strong correlations exist between cooperative decisions made an average of 124 days apart. Importantly, we find that cooperation is not correlated with norm-enforcing punishment or non-competitiveness. We conclude that there is a domain-general and temporally stable inclination towards paying costs to benefit others, which we dub the ‘cooperative phenotype’.
Notes on a Geography of Knowledge

Law and knowledge jointly occupy a metaphorical landscape. Understanding that landscape is essential to understanding the full complexity of knowledge law. This Article identifies some landmarks in that landscape, which it identifies as forms of legal practice: several recent cases involving intellectual property licenses, including the recent patent law decision in Quanta v. LG Electronics and the open source licensing decision in Jacobsen v. Katzer. The Article offers a preliminary framework for exploring the territories of knowledge practice in which those legal landmarks appear.
Austrian theorizing: Recalling the foundations

It is a pleasure to reply to Caplan’s (1999) critique of Austrian economics. Unlike other such recent reactions this one shows evidence of great familiarity with the Austrian (praxeological) literature, and a deep interest in its analytical foundations. Thus, Caplan correctly identifies the works of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard as the core of what sets Austrian economics apart from the neoclassical mainstream. And he insightfully relegates the writings of F.A. Hayek and Israel M. Kirzner to an intermediate position between the praxeological and neoclassical approaches. We shall defend this core of Austrian economics against Caplan’s criticisms, and show that, just as in the case of these others, his arrows fall wide of their mark. It is nevertheless instructive to highlight his errors. The benefits are a better understanding of the Austrian School, and greater insight into neoclassical shortcomings. This article follows the outline of Caplan (1999) and is divided into the same four sections as his: first an introduction, second, consumer theory, third, welfare economics, and fourth, a conclusion.
Driving forces of technological change: The relation between population growth and technological innovation: Analysis of the optimal interaction across countries

Population growth is one of the major problems facing the world today because it affects the patterns of sustainable economic growth. The economic phenomenon to be explained in this study is the relation between population growth and technological outputs (patents), focusing on OECD countries, in order to analyze the range of population growth rates favorable to support higher technological output, ceteris paribus. The study seems to show the existence of an inverted-U shaped curve between population growth rate and patents, with an optimal intermediate area in which population growth rates tend to be associated to higher technological outputs. The public policy consequences of this vital relation are that, on average, it is difficult to support an optimal level of technological performance with both a low/negative and a high (higher than 1%) population growth rate-annual % in advanced nations. A main consequence is that the estimated relationship of technological outputs vs. population growth is likely to be affected by decreasing returns of technological innovation to population growth, because a higher population might decrease research productivity, which is sensitive to the relation between income per capita and population growth.
Equity, envy and efficiency under asymmetric information

Abstract Varian's (Varian, H., 1974. Equity, Envy and Efficiency. Journal of Economic Theory 9, 63–91) main results are not valid anymore if the agents are asymmetrically informed at the time of contracting: 1) envy-freeness and efficiency may be incompatible; 2) there may exist efficient allocation rules such that every agent envies another. Two weaker positive properties are formulated.
Courting Ignorance: Why We Know So Little About Our Most Important Courts

Most of the United States' judicial work takes place in the country's state trial courts. These tribunals preside over everything from traffic tickets to murder trials, from routine debt collection to massive environmental torts. Given their expansive role, the manner in which these courts function is of immense significance. But ultimately, we know very little about these institutions. Our ignorance flows both from trivial bureaucratic turf battles and from deeply rooted principles of local government, a phenomenon I have called “data federalism.” In the last few decades, we have begun to form a partial image of the activities of these organs of government; but we know almost nothing about their past, and the little we do know suggests the dangers of extrapolation. This essay explores the extent of our ignorance of state trial courts and the difficulties of overcoming it.
Like Mark Twain: The Death of Academic Law Libraries Is an Exaggeration

At the 2013 CALI Conference on Law School Computing, James Milles posited that academic law libraries are doomed, and the author presented the contrasting viewpoints on which this article is based. While the author agrees with Professor Milles’s underlying observations, he envisions a scenario where law libraries, and more importantly librarians, remain essential parts of law school life
Do stock prices influence corporate decisions? Evidence from the technology bubble

Abstract We study the capital investment, stock issuance, and cash savings behavior of non-tech manufacturers (old economy firms) during the 1990s technology bubble. Our empirical results show that high stock prices affect corporate policies because they relax financing constraints. During the tech bubble, constrained non-tech firms' investment responded strongly to “high stock prices” (specifically, the component of price that is not captured by fundamentals). They also issued stock in response to that overvaluation effect, saving part of the proceeds in their cash accounts. We find no such patterns for unconstrained non-tech firms, nor for tech firms. Our findings are not consistent with the notion that managers systematically issue overvalued stocks and invest in ways that transfer wealth from new to old shareholders. More broadly, they suggest that what appears to be overvaluation in one sector of the economy may have positive externalities for other sectors.
Culture, institutions and democratization*

We construct a model of revolution and transition to democracy under individualistic and collectivist cultures. The main result is that, despite facing potentially more challenging collective action problems, countries with individualistic cultures are more likely to end up adopting democracy earlier than countries with collectivist cultures. Our empirical analysis suggests a strong and robust association between individualistic cultures and average polity scores and durations of democracy, even after controlling for other determinants of democracy emphasized in the literature. We provide evidence that countries with collectivist cultures also are more likely to experience autocratic breakdowns and transitions from autocracy to autocracy.
State Constitutionalism and the Right to Health Care

This Article examines state constitutions and health care rights. Notably, close to a third of states’ constitutions recognize health while the U.S. Constitution contains no reference. Ample scholarly commentary exists on the absence of a right to health care under the U.S. Constitution but little attention has been paid to state constitutional law. This Article begins by explaining the absence of a federal right and the rationale for looking to state constitutional protections for health. The Article then provides a comprehensive survey of state constitutional provisions and judicial decisions enforcing or interpreting them. The survey reveals certain common themes and limits, which the Article catalogues and analyzes. The conclusion is that state constitutions, although providing stronger textual support for health than the U.S. Constitution, do not, when applied, provide significantly greater guarantees. Nevertheless, state constitutional recognition of health, as well as proposed state constitutional amendments that would expressly recognize health rights, serve as important catalysts for federal and state legislation.
Cross-border opportunity sets: An international empirical study based on ownership types

Abstract This paper is the first, to our knowledge, to make the distinction between the investment opportunity set of real assets versus portfolio securities. We perform a large scale formal investigation of the investment opportunity set in global acquisitions based on ownership type over the period of 1985–2012. Compared to private acquirers, government acquirers have a much reduced investment opportunity set. Government acquirers invest in fewer target nations and industries, settle for smaller stakes, invest in countries with lower quality legal institutions and in nations with which political relations are more positive and see a 50% higher deal failure rate.
Combining Earnings and Book Value in Equity Valuation

It is common to apply multipliers to earnings and book value to calculate approximate equity values. However, applying a price-earnings multiple or a price-to-book multiple typically produces two valuations and the analyst is left with the question of how to combine these into one valuation. This paper calculates weights that do this. It shows that these weights differ over the difference between earnings and book value and systematically so over time: when earnings are small compared to book value the weights are different from when earnings are large relative to book value, and they vary in a non-linear way over the difference between the two. The weights have the interpretation of combining forecasts of future earnings based on earnings and book value separately into one composite forecast that uses both pieces of information together. So the paper calculates a second set of weights to ascertain how the two numbers are combined to forecast one-year-ahead earnings and three-years-ahead earnings. The calculated weights are applied out of sample to ascertain their predictive ability against other benchmarks.
Asset Returns and the Listing Choice of Firms

We propose a mechanism that relates asset returns to the firm's optimal listing choice. We use a theoretical model to show that a stock will be more liquid when it is listed on a market where "similar" securities are traded. We empirically examine the implications of our model using New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Nasdaq securities. We find that the return patterns of stocks that switch markets become more similar to the return patterns of securities listed on the new market prior to the switch. Stocks that are eligible to switch but stay put are more similar to securities listed on their market than to securities listed on the other market. Our results suggest that managers make listing decisions that enhance the liquidity of their firms' stocks. The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org., Oxford University Press.