cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Making Civil Immigration Detention “Civil,” and Examining the Emerging U.S. Civil Detention Paradigm

In 2009, the Obama Administration began to reform its sprawling immigration detention system by asking the question, "How do we make civil detention civil?" Five years later, after opening an explicitly-named "civil detention center" in Texas to public criticism from both sides, the Administration's efforts have stalled. But its reforms, even if fully implemented, would still resemble lower-security criminal jails. This symposium article is the first to comprehensively examine the Administration's efforts to implement "truly civil" immigration detention, through new standards, improved conditions, and greater oversight. It does so by undertaking the first descriptive comparison of the U.S.'s two largest civil detention systems-immigration detention and sex offender civil commitment-to ascertain the value of the "civil" label of detention reform. It finds the emerging civil detention paradigm to be an incarcerative model presuming round-the-clock confinement but with lower security, as well as increasing, near-criminal procedural protections. Thus, the "civil" label of reform has little meaning, either to the individual's deprivation of liberty or the expressive message communicated. More meaningful and more "civil" reform would be to implement a system that detains less, not American Immigration Council, Enforcement Fellow. J.D., Stanford Law School; B.A., Boston College. I thank Michael Cahill, Stacy Caplow, Maryellen Fullerton, Robert Koulish, Barbara Moses, John Pollock, Brian Soucek, Maunica Sthanki, and Robert Weisberg for their guidance. Additionally, I thank the members of the 2012 Immigration Law Teachers' Workshop at Hofstra University School of Law (particularly Farin Anello, Melynda Barnhart, Jason Cade, Linus Chan, Nora Demleitner, C6sar Cuauht6moc Garcia Hernfindez, Anil Kalhan, Maria Pab6n L6pez, Beth Lyon, Rebecca Sharpless, Juliet Stumpf, Margaret Taylor, and Elizabeth Young). Lastly, I thank Setenay Akdag, Leslie Bailey, Kelsey Bilodeau, Margaret Garrett, Julia Kahlig, Liz Komar, Becky McBride, August Pozgay, Tobias Schad, and Svetlana Turova for tireless research assistance. 1 : Making Civil Immigration Detention "Civil," and Examining the Eme Published by St. John's Law Scholarship Repository, 2014 534 JOURNAL OF CIVIL RIGHTS & ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT [Vol. 27:3 just better. Looking forward, I offer a prescriptive framework for a civil detention system-one that detains far less frequently, for shorter periods, and in non-secure facilities not constituting "detention" as traditionally
Divorce Rates, Marriage Rates, and the Problematic Persistence of Traditional Marital Roles

Recent legal developments have revived the debate over the impact of nofault divorce laws on divorce rates. The irony is that this debate occurs in the midst of a twenty-year decline in American divorce rates that is the most sustained decline since the government began collecting such data in 1860. Perhaps of greater concern should be the accompanying decline in American marriage rates, which over this same time period has been dramatic. Today, chi ldren living with only one parent are nearly as likely to have parents who never married, as they are to have parents who divorced. Part I of this paper briefly revisits the debate over divorce rates. It reviews earlier studies showing the law’s limited impact on divorce rates, notes that work on this question must take account of regional variations in divorce rates unrelated to the law, and presents new data suggesting that these regional variations arise in part from regional differences in population mobility. It also argues that cultural factors, such as changes in women’s employment, are more important than the law in explaining divorce trends. The rising ratio of women’s earnings to men’s has also been identified as a factor contributing to declining marriage rates. But the theoretical explanations for this connection assume a persistence in traditional gender roles in marriage. Part II, the main body of the paper, finds that both employment data and attitude surveys, domestic and international, in fact reveal a perhaps surprising persistence in this preference, thus supporting the inference that that improvement in women’s relative economic position may be one factor contributing to declining marriage rates, at least in the short term. Apart from its implication for marriage rates, the persistence of gender roles independently suggests that traditional divorce law remedies for financially dependent spouses will retain their importance. Finally, the possibility of a long-term decline in marriage rates, for whatever reason, suggests that the law’s treatment of nonmarital relationships will become increasingly important, and the likelihood that heterosexual cohabiting relationships will conform to traditional gender patterns suggests that financial remedies will be equally important at their dissolution. *Professor of Law and Faculty Fellow, Center for the Study of Law, Science and Technology, Arizona State University; Visiting Professor, University of California at Berkeley School of Law. I must thank Lynn Tobin for her invaluable assistance in analyzing some of the data presented in this paper. I owe Sharon Lohr thanks for so many things (including finding Lynn) that I cannot list them all. Her enormous patience in teaching me how to use numbers responsibly gives her a share of responsibility for anything useful in this article, but no blame for the errors she could not talk me out of. I also thank Kristin Luker for her careful review of the paper. I would probably have been better off to have taken more of her suggestions.
Comparing U.S. and European market volatility responses to interest rate policy announcements

Abstract We examine the responses of U.S. (VIX) and German (VDAX) implied volatility indices to the announcement of interest rate policy decisions by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and the European Central Bank (ECB). We present new findings that indicate that VDAX declines on FOMC meeting days, a result that holds for nearly all announcement types. VDAX declines on ECB meeting days in which there is a negative rate surprise, or no surprise, and is unrelated to ECB meeting days otherwise. We confirm prior findings that VIX declines on FOMC meetings days regardless of the content of the meeting, but we also find that VIX is unrelated to ECB announcements. Results from our structural VAR analysis indicate that VIX (VDAX) responses to FOMC decisions are related to risk aversion (uncertainty). Taken collectively, our results indicate a prominent position for the FOMC in determining implied volatility levels worldwide.
The effectiveness of global currency hedging after the Asian crisis

Global equity portfolio managers employ a variety of approaches to currency hedging either hedging all of their currency risk, hedging only a portion of their currency risk, or simply not hedging at all. This paper considers a hypothetical US-based global portfolio invested in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the US and looks at how various passive hedging strategies would have performed over the post-Asian crisis period from 1999 to 2006, while also looking at individual currency hedges in isolation over a longer time period (from 1984 to 2006). Although it is well known that currency hedging reduces the volatility of dollar returns, some recent studies have argued that hedging is less important in emerging markets due to the negative correlation between currency returns and local equity returns. The Sharpe ratio of this hypothetical global portfolio is examined to determine which currency hedging approach did the best on a risk-adjusted basis from 1999 to 2006. Five hypothetical global portfolios are considered. The benchmark portfolio is market-capitalisation weighted, while the others are more European weighted, equal weighted among regions of the world, and with large investments in emerging markets, like Asia and Latin America. As in other studies, it is found that currency hedging reduces portfolio risk and improves the performance of most portfolios on a risk-adjusted basis for managers with exposures to single foreign countries. For global investment managers with exposure to many countries and using simple, yet very common hedging techniques, currency hedging did not improve the risk-adjusted returns of the portfolio in most cases compared to a policy of no currency hedging. This was primarily due to the consistent depreciation of the US dollar versus most currencies in the world during this period of time. Even though it did not improve the risk-adjusted returns of the portfolio, currency hedging reduced the overall volatility of the portfolio marginally compared to the unhedged case. As expected, the hedging return volatility matched more closely with the local equity return volatility. The only global portfolio for which hedging improved the risk-adjusted returns was for the global portfolio that was heavily invested in South American equities. The results of this paper also indicate that using a hedging strategy that employs only three optimally weighted currencies performed equally well when compared with a strategy using all currencies to hedge the global portfolio.
History and Interpretation

This piece is a contribution in a symposium: The Scholarship of Sanford V. Levinson. The article focuses on two of Levinson's works, the 1982 article, "Law as Literature" and the constitutional law casebook, "Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking: Cases and Materials". Both have influenced constitutional scholarship by providing a new approach -- historicism.
Long-Run Price Elasticities of Demand for Credit: Evidence from a Countrywide Field Experiment in Mexico

We use randomized interest rates, offered across eighty geographically distinct regions for twenty-nine months by Mexico’s largest microlender, to sketch the adjustment from a price change to a new equilibrium. Demand is elastic, and more so over the longer run; e.g. the dollars-borrowed elasticity increases from −1.1 in Year one to −2.9 in Year three. Credit bureau data do not show evidence of crowd-out, although this and other null results are imprecisely estimated. The lender’s profits increase, albeit noisily, starting in Year two. But competitors do not respond by reducing rates. These findings, together with other results, suggest that informational frictions are important, and that cutting rates furthered Compartamos Banco’s “double bottom line” of improving social welfare subject to a profitability constraint.
Spatial Dependence in Models of State Fiscal Policy Convergence

We apply spatial econometric techniques to models of state and local fiscal policy convergence. Total tax revenue and expenditures, as well as broad tax and expenditure categories, of state and local governments in each of the 48 contiguous U.S. states are examined. We extend work by Scully (1991) and Annala (2003) in much the same way that Rey and Montouri (1999) extended the literature dealing with income convergence among U.S. states. Our results indicate that most fiscal policies have been converging and exhibit spatial dependence. A more specific interpretation of our general spatial results is that the finding of spatial dependence indicates that the growth paths of state and local fiscal policies are not independent. In addition, we find that total expenditures have been converging faster than output, whereas total tax revenues have been converging slower that output. Our models further demonstrate that state expenditure growth is dependent upon expenditure growth in economically and demographically similar states, while output growth and revenue growth in a state are dependent on output growth and revenue growth, respectively, in contiguous states.
Financial market spillovers in transition economies

This paper examines financial market comovements across European transition economies and compares their experience to that of other regions. Correlations in monthly indices of exchange market pressures can partly be explained by direct trade linkages, but not by measures of other fundamentals. Higher-frequency data during three crisis periods reveals the presence of structural breaks in the relationship between exchange-, but not stock markets. While the reaction of markets during the Asian and Czech crises is muted, the pattern of high-frequency spillovers during the Russian crisis looks very similar to that observed in other regions during turbulent times. With greater financial market integration, the financial markets of the more advanced transition economies can be expected to behave more and more like their Asian and Latin American counterparts.
Coming Attractions: Opportunities and Challenges in Thwarting Global Movie Piracy

This paper considers the main forms of global movie piracy and discusses some of the typical players and distribution channels for pirated films. In response to these forms of piracy, the industry's efforts to lobby for tougher criminal sanctions and greater protections for DRM in the U.S. and worldwide are considered as well as their negative impact on consumer fair use rights. The failure of national laws and DRM to stymie movie piracy illustrates the need for the industry to consider new strategies that involve competing with the "business model" of piracy. In view of the key lessons learned from an analysis of piracy, this article makes recommendations on self-help remedies that the film industry can implement to reshape its own business model in a manner that deters global movie piracy without alienating its customer base or straining already limited international law enforcement resources.
On parallelizing dual decomposition in stochastic integer programming

Preprint ANL/MCS-P3037-0912 For stochastic mixed-integer programs, we revisit the dual decomposition algorithm of Care and Schultz from a computational perspective with the aim of its parallelization. We address an important bottleneck of parallel execution by identifying a formulation that permits the parallel solution of the master program by using structure-exploiting interior-point solvers. Our results demonstrate the potential for parallel speedup and the importance of regularization (stabilization) in the dual optimization. Load imbalance is identied as a remaining barrier to parallel scalability.
Investor Reactions to CEOs' Inside Debt Incentives

Pensions and deferred compensation represent substantial components of CEO incentives. Limited disclosure requirements hindered research into these widely used “inside debt” compensation contracts until SEC reforms in 2007 greatly increased their transparency. We study stockholder and bondholder reactions to companies’ initial reports of their CEOs’ inside debt positions. We find that bond prices rise, equity prices fall, and the volatility of both securities drops upon disclosures by firms whose CEOs have sizeable defined benefit pensions or deferred compensation. Similar changes occur for credit default swap spreads and exchange traded options. The results indicate a reduction in firm risk, a transfer of value from equity toward debt, and an overall destruction of enterprise value when a CEO’s deferred compensation holdings are large.
Direct imaging of radio-frequency modes via traveling wave magnetic resonance imaging

We demonstrate an experimental method for direct 2D and 3D imaging of magnetic radio-frequency (rf) field distribution in metal-dielectric structures based on traveling wave (TW) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at ultra-high field (>7 T). The typical apparatus would include an ultra-high field whole body or small bore MRI scanner, waveguide elements filled with MRI active dielectrics with predefined electric and magnetic properties, and TW rf transmit-receive probes. We validated the technique by obtaining TW MR images of the magnetic field distribution of the rf modes of circular waveguide filled with deionized water in a 16.4 T small-bore MRI scanner and compared the MR images with numerical simulations. Our MRI technique opens up a practical non-perturbed way of imaging of previously inaccessible rf field distribution of modes inside various shapes metal waveguides with inserted dielectric objects, including waveguide mode converters and transformers.
A Suggested Minor Refinement of Miller v. Alabama

While some heralded the recent United States Supreme Court’s Miller v. Alabama decision — forbidding mandatory life without parole (LWOP) sentences for juveniles — as a step in the right direction for protecting the interests of juveniles within the adult criminal justice system, the decision is also a step backwards for the ability states to sentence their criminals as they sees fit and a deviation from previous sentencing precedent. This, combined with the Court’s reliance on scientific data about the maturation process of adolescents, the integrity of which has been called into question, has led to some lower jurisdictions to circumvent the decision. The majority aimed to recognize the differences between those under and over eighteen, and to treat those under eighteen with more compassion. However, the decision ignored both the needs of society that are served by ensuring victims have peace of mind and that some crimes are so heinous the perpetrators do not deserve of leniency. This Comment argues the Court spoke too broadly applying its rule to all minors. This essay will first summarize the Supreme Court’s previous sentencing precedent, the cases that paved the way for the Miller decision — establishing that “children are different,” — and then the Miller decision. Next, it will highlight the troubles lower courts have faced in trying to implement the decision, the flaws in, and alternative interpretations of, the science relied upon, and then turn to the question of whether juveniles over the age of sixteen have reached sufficient maturity as to allow the system to hold them as accountable as adults for homicide crimes. In response to the likelihood that those sixteen and over are sufficiently mature, this Comment will propose a way to preserve deference to the various state legislatures’ sentencing decisions while addressing increasing concern that juveniles should be treated differently. The Miller pre-sentencing evaluation factors should only apply categorically to those under sixteen, and those sixteen and seventeen in cases where the juvenile offender is quite young or possesses what the Court calls twice-diminished culpability: where the system convicted the offender under an aiding and abetting or accomplice theory, or felony murder.
Is home-field advantage driven by the fans? Evidence from across the ocean

Some have claimed that referee and home-field bias in football (American soccer) have been impacted by the fans at the match. When fans are hostile, the threat referees feel to their health and well-being influences their ability to call a fair match. We analyse two leagues with differing fan types: one ‘hostile’ league (Germany’s Bundesliga) and one league perceived as ‘peaceful’ (America’s Major League Soccer). Although there is a strong home-field bias inherent in football, we find evidence that part of the bias is due to the prospect of fan violence.
Aspects of Creative Capital in a Regional Economy with Time Variant Schooling

We follow Batabyal and Beladi (2014, 2015) and theoretically study a regional economy that produces a final consumption good with physical and creative capital. However, in contrast with the approach taken in the above two papers, in our model, the means for obtaining acquired creative capital which is the number of years of schooling is not constant but growing over time. In this setting, we first derive an expression for the long run growth rate of output per raw creative capital unit. Next, we provide a numerical example to show how the above expression can be used to determine the proportion of overall regional growth that is due to increases in schooling. Finally, we discuss whether it is possible for the number of years of schooling in the region under study to grow indefinitely.
Reputation Repair After a Serious Restatement

ABSTRACT: How do firms repair their reputations after a serious accounting restatement? To answer this question, we review firms' press releases and identify 1,765 reputation-building actions taken by: (1) 94 restating firms in the periods before and after their restatement; and (2) a set of matched control firms during contemporaneous periods. We posit that firms have incentives to target multiple stakeholders in a reputation repair strategy—including capital providers, customers, employees, and geographic communities—and that actions targeting each group generate positive market returns as reputation capital is repaired. Consistent with our predictions, the frequency of, and stock returns to, reputation-building actions are greater for restating firms in the period after their restatement than for the control groups. In addition, firm characteristics predict the types of stakeholders targeted by firms. Finally, actions targeted at both capital providers and other stakeholders are associated with improve...
Circular Argument: What is Wrong, and Right, with the Circular 230 “Covered Opinion” Regulations

The covered opinion regulations set forth in Treasury Department Circular 230 impose a number of stringent requirements on the provision of written tax advice by attorneys, accountants and others admitted to practice before the Internal Revenue Service. Since they became effective in 2005, the covered opinion regulations have been disparaged by both practitioners and scholars as overly broad and unduly burdensome. The regulations were originally intended to govern advice concerning potentially abusive tax shelters; however, they are drafted so broadly that they actually apply to written opinions regarding virtually any tax matter—including routine and legitimate tax planning. On the occasion of their five-year anniversary, attorney Steven Z. Hodaszy examines the covered opinion regulations and analyzes whether their benefits justify their burdens. Hodaszy contends that, because of a continuing need to reign in unscrupulous opinion practices in the tax shelter area, some form of the regulations must remain in place. Yet he also maintains that the regulations should be reformed so that they clearly apply only to tax shelter advice (as they were meant to). To accomplish this, Hodaszy proposes a specific textual revision to the regulations’ definition of a “covered opinion.” In conjunction with that proposal, he argues for the repeal of rules that presently allow practitioners to opt out of compliance with the regulations under some circumstances. Similarly, he rejects calls to restrict application of the regulations to practitioners who “opt in” to compliance with them. Neither the current “opt-out” rules nor an alternative “opt-in” approach would be justifiable, once the covered opinion regulations are appropriately restricted to advice concerning tax shelters. Moreover, as Hodaszy explains, either maintaining the “opt-out” rules or replacing them with an “opt-in” regime could effectively vitiate the regulations altogether, in the advent of a new strict-liability accuracy-related penalty for transactions lacking economic substance. Hodaszy asserts that, with the changes he proposes, the covered opinion regulations can instead continue to function as an important tool to deter abusive tax shelters, but without imposing detrimentally on other areas of tax practice.
On the Use of the Inflation Tax when Non-Distortionary Taxes are Available

If a insation tax base has been created via a Þxed reserve requirement, will a benevolent government use the insation tax as a (partial) source of revenue even though a non-distortionary revenue source is available? Using a simple overlapping generations model with return dominated money, we show that the answer can be yes. ∗ An earlier version of the paper circulated as “Central Bank Responsibility, Seigniorage, and Welfare”. We thank Subir Bose, Scott Freeman, Greg Huffmann, Maxim Nikitin, Rob Reed, Warren Weber, and participants at the 2000 Midwest Macro meetings in Iowa City, for helpful conversations, and two anonymous referees for their insightful remarks and advice. We especially acknowledge our debt to Steve Russell for detailed comments, and help with clearing some of our muddled thinking. The usual caveat applies. We gratefully acknowledge Þnancial support from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent those of the Federal Reserve System nor the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Parlaying Value Capital in and Beyond Virtual Worlds

Recent scholarship has made it clear that people within synthetic worlds (otherwise known as virtual worlds or MMORPGs) produce commodities and currencies with market value, whereas other work has ...
Consumer Negative Voice and Firm-Idiosyncratic Stock Returns

Abstract Prior research has largely focused on the positive side of customer experience, such as satisfaction. In contrast, this study investigates the negative side of customer experience and tests the harmful impact of consumer negative voice on firms' stock returns. Based on a longitudinal real-world data set that matches consumer negative voice (complaint records) in the airline industry with firm stock prices, this article finds that higher levels of current consumer negative voice harm firms' future idiosyncratic stock returns. In addition, this harmful impact is robust (albeit different across airline companies) after latent heterogeneity and traditional finance fundamentals are considered. These findings enable marketers and corporate financers to be more confident with customer equity theory and customer relationship management. In addition, armed with “hard” data (record-based, longitudinal), this research helps relieve criticisms against prior studies that are based on “soft” data (survey-based...
Creating a satisfying internet shopping experience via atmospheric variables

The purpose of this research was to identify the atmospheric variables that contributed to satisfaction for internet consumers with different orientations toward shopping. Atmospheric categories that were proposed for studying internet environments included external and internal variables, layout and design, point-of-purchase, and customer services. Some consumers had a convenience orientation toward shopping on the internet, while others were apprehensive, apathetic, and highly involved in internet shopping. A segment of internet consumers also exhibited positive orientations toward store shopping. Results showed that some atmospheric variables influenced satisfaction for all consumers, regardless of their shopping orientation; however, some variables were contributors of satisfaction for specific shopping segments.
Has Booker Restored Balance? A Look at Data on Plea Bargaining and Sentencing

326 Federal Sentencing Reporter, Vol. 23, No. 5, pp. 326–332, ISSN 1053-9867 electronic ISSN 1533-8363. ©2011 Vera Institute of Justice. All rights reserved. Please direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/fsr.2011.23.5.326. Has Booker Restored Balance? A Look at Data on Plea Bargaining and Sentencing
Economic Growth and Business Cycles: The Labor Supply Decision with Two Types of Technological Progress

An informal model is described that leads to multiple macroeconomic equilibria as a consequence of random variation in the relative amounts of technological change for new and existing goods. The novel observation is that the rate of introduction and market penetration of new goods (sometimes called product innovation) vis-a-vis technological advance for existing goods (sometimes called process innovation) importantly affects the labor supply decision. A relatively rapid influx of new goods will generally increase labor supply, while relatively more technological advance for existing goods will reduce labor supply to the market. These impacts are seen to provide insights into Rostow’s stages of growth. Short run variations in the relative importance of the two types of technological change are seen to imply unpredictable business cycle behavior of the type we observe. The welfare implications of national income accounting that fails to consider changes in leisure are discussed.
Investor Flows and the 2008 Boom/Bust in Oil Prices

This paper explores the impact of investor flows and financial market conditions on returns in crude oil futures markets. I argue that informational frictions and the associated speculative activity may induce prices to drift away from “fundamental” values, and may result in price booms and busts. Particular attention is given to the interplay between imperfect information about real economic activity, including supply, demand, and inventory accumulation, and speculative activity in oil markets. Furthermore, I present new evidence that there were economically and statistically significant effects of investor flows on futures prices, after controlling for returns in the United States and emerging-economy stock markets, a measure of the balance sheet flexibility of large financial institutions, open interest, the futures/spot basis, and lagged returns on oil futures. The largest impacts on futures prices were from intermediate-term growth rates of index positions and managed-money spread positions. Moreover, my findings suggest that these effects were through risk or informational channels distinct from changes in convenience yield. Finally, the evidence suggests that hedge fund trading in spread positions in futures impacted the shape of term structure of oil futures prices. This paper was accepted by Wei Xiong, finance.
Materiality Guidance in the Context of Insider Trading: A Call to Action

This article reflects upon certain negative effects associated with the ambiguity of the current legal standard for materiality in the insider trading context and suggests and demonstrates an approach to mitigating these negative effects. Specifically, after describing and illustrating the concept of materiality and its application in the insider trading context, this article identifies and assesses applicable regulatory policies, showing that these policies do not dictate an imprecise definition of materiality. Next, the article explains certain negative impacts on stockholder value emanating from the lack of predictability and certainty in interpreting and applying the existing materiality standard, including negative impacts created by continued speculative and abusive class action litigation. The article then suggests and illustrates an approach for fashioning materiality guidance, consistent with applicable policy and existing regulatory principles. The suggested approach is designed to enhance predictability and certainty in interpreting and applying the concept of materiality in insider trading regulation.
Factors Affecting the Probability of Choosing a Risky Diet

Eating a poor diet is risky behavior. Inadequate nutrition compromises health and can increase the probability of premature death and/or reduced life quality. This paper uses a cost-benefit analysis from a health economic perspective to assess impact of costs and benefits associated with the odds of choosing a risky diet. Results indicate that time preference as measured through education, smoking, exercise, nutrition panel use, and motivation for nutrition knowledge significantly affect the odds of choosing a risky diet. In addition, variables hypothesized to influence the associated costs of tradeoff between present and future utility—location (both region and urbanization), income, race, gender, and age—are found to have an impact on the likelihood of choosing a risky diet.
Capital Investment and Privatization: Public Opinion on Issues Related to Water and Wastewater Infrastructure

Water and wastewater infrastructure (W&WI) in the United States is in need of immediate capital investments. Support from the federal government has declined significantly in the past two decades, ...
Bypassing Congress on Federal Debt: Executive Branch Options to Avoid Default

Even a “technical” default by the United States on its debt, such as a delay in paying principal or interest due to Congress’s failure to raise the federal debt ceiling, could have serious systemic consequences, destroying financial markets and undermining job creation, consumer spending, and economic growth. The ongoing political gamesmanship between Congress and the Executive Branch has been threatening — and even if temporarily resolved, almost certainly will continue to threaten — such a default. The various options discussed in the media for averting a default have not been legally and pragmatically viable.This article proposes new options for avoiding default, arguing that although the Executive Branch lacks authority to directly issue Treasury securities above the debt ceiling, it has the power to raise financing by monetizing future tax revenues. In each of the proposed options, a non-governmental special-purpose entity (SPE) would issue securities in amounts needed to repay maturing federal debt. Depending on the option, the SPE would either on-lend the proceeds of its issued securities to the Treasury Department on a non-recourse basis, secured by future tax revenues; or the SPE would use the proceeds of its issued securities to purchase rights to future tax revenues from the Treasury Department. In each case, therefore, future tax revenues would form the basis of repayment to investors.These options should be legally valid and constitutional, notwithstanding the debt ceiling: neither involves the issuance of general-obligation or full-faith-and-credit government debt, and indeed the second option doesn’t involve the issuance of any government debt. Furthermore, based on the similarities of these options to successful financing transactions that are widely used in the United States and abroad, the securities issued there under should receive high credit ratings and also be attractive to investors. Because of provisions in foreign treaties, those securities should be especially attractive to foreign investors — who already purchase half of all Treasury securities.These options are not intended to be standard financing structures. Being riskier than full-faith-and-credit Treasury securities, the securities issued under these options would almost certainly have to pay a higher interest rate than Treasury securities. The options should therefore be viewed, and this article presents them, as viable emergency measures, if needed, to avoid a U.S. debt default.
Incentives and teacher effort : further evidence from a developing country

Few would contest that teachers are a very important determinant of whether students learn in school and how to improve teacher performance has been the focus of much policy debate in rich and poor countries. This paper examines how incentives, both pecuniary and non-pecuniary, correlate with teacher effort. Using school survey data from Lao PDR, we estimate new measures of teacher effort including the number of hours that teachers spend preparing for classes and teacher provision of private tutoring classes outside of class hours. Estimation results indicate that higher teacher effort is associated with non-pecuniary incentives such as greater teacher autonomy over teaching materials, and monitoring mechanism such as the existence of an active parent-teacher association and ability of school principals to dismiss teachers. Methodologically, this paper provides a detailed derivation of a simultaneous OLS-probit model with school random effects that can jointly estimate teacher work hours and tutoring provision.
Evolution of the Standard Genetic Code

A near-universal Standard Genetic Code (SGC) implies a single origin for present Earth life. To study this unique event, I compute paths to the SGC, comparing different plausible histories. Notably, SGC-like coding emerges from traditional evolutionary mechanisms, and a superior route can be identified. To objectively measure evolution, progress values from 0 (random coding) to 1 (SGC-like) are defined: these measure fractions of random-code-to-SGC distance. Progress types are spacing/distance/delta Polar Requirement, detecting space between identical assignments/mutational distance to the SGC/chemical order, respectively. The coding system is based on selected RNAs performing aminoacyl-RNA synthetase reactions. Acceptor RNAs exhibit SGC-like Crick wobble; alternatively, non-wobbling triplets uniquely encode 20 amino acids/start/stop. Triplets acquire 22 functions by stereochemistry, selection, coevolution, or at random. Assignments also propagate to an assigned triplet's neighborhood via single mutations, but can also decay. A vast code universe makes futile evolutionary paths plentiful. Thus, SGC evolution is critically sensitive to disorder from random assignments. Evolution also inevitably slows near coding completion. The SGC likely avoided these difficulties, and two suitable paths are compared. In late wobble, a majority of non-wobble assignments are made before wobble is adopted. In continuous wobble, a uniquely advantageous early intermediate yields an ordered SGC. Revised coding evolution (limited randomness, late wobble, concentration on amino acid encoding, chemically conservative coevolution with a chemically ordered elite) produces varied full codes with excellent joint progress values. A population of only 600 independent coding tables includes SGC-like members; a Bayesian path toward more accurate SGC evolution is available.
Reflections on the 40th Anniversary of Hurst's Growth of American Law

It is well known that James Willard Hurst's The Growth of American Law "represented something new" and that it "dissolved constraints" and helped start Hurst's successful effort to expose "the hitherto invisible ways in which the apparently most commonplace incidents of a legal order illuminate social values." In the early 1950s, reviewers recognized the book as a pioneering effort. Time has enhanced Hurst's achievement. He is the legal historian who broke out of the limits of traditional legal history. His work made him "the leading exponent and practitioner of an external historiography." Although the legal process approach began to supersede legal realism in American law schools in the wake of World War II, Hurst's book actually was the first sustained example of legal realist history.
Does Abolishing User Fees Lead to Improved Health Status? Evidence from Post-apartheid South Africa

Whether user fees for health services should be charged or abolished for the poor has recently been debated. This study examines the impact on child health status of removing user fees in South Africa. Our main innovation is to exploit plausibly exogenous variation in access to free health care, due to the fact that black Africans under apartheid could exercise little political power and residential choice. We find substantial improvements in weight-for-age z-scores among ex ante similar childr en. Falsification exercises confirm no preexisting trend in the pre-reform period or no treatment effect among noneligible children in the post-reform period. (JEL H51, I12, I18, I38, J13, O15, O17)
Sentencing Antitrust Offenders: Reconciling Economic Theory with Legal Theory

This Article evaluates two different economic models of criminal law as applied to the enforcement of antitrust laws. The author argues that economic models which propose antitrust punishment be limited to fines and then to fines that are levied against only business entities, are deficient because they account for only the general deterrent effect of punishment and include a value of criminal benefit for the offender, a value not shared by society. He presents, as an alternative, a model that accounts for benefits afforded by incarceration such as the signaling of what is a criminal offense, changes in the criminal's taste for crime, and venting society's desire for retribution. He concludes that incarceration of individual antitrust offenders serves a valuable societal function.
Empty voting and hidden (morphable) ownership: Taxonomy, implications, and reforms

Most American publicly held corporations have a one-share, one-vote structure, in which voting power is proportional to economic ownership. This gives shareholders economic incentives to exercise their voting power well and helps to legitimate managers' exercise of authority over property the managers do not own. Berle-Means' separation of ownership and control suggests that shareholders face large collective action problems in overseeing managers. Even so, mechanisms rooted in the shareholder vote, including proxy fights and takeover bids, constrain managers not to stray too far from shareholder wealth maximization. The derivatives revolution and other capital market developments threaten this familiar pattern. Both outside investors and insiders can now readily decouple economic ownership of shares from voting rights to those shares. This decoupling - which we call the new vote buying - is often hidden from public view and is largely untouched by current regulation. Hedge funds have been especially creative in decoupling voting rights from economic ownership. Sometimes they hold more votes than economic ownership, a pattern we call empty voting. That is, they may have substantial voting power while having limited, zero - or, indeed, negative - economic ownership. Sometimes they hold undisclosed economic ownership, a pattern we call hidden ownership. Often, the hidden owners also have morphable voting rights - the de facto ability to acquire the votes if needed. Insiders can also use empty voting techniques. This article analyzes the new vote buying and its corporate governance implications. We propose a taxonomy of the new vote buying that unpacks its functional elements. We discuss the implications of decoupling for control contests and other shareholder oversight. We also propose a disclosure-based regulatory response. Our disclosure proposal would integrate and simplify five existing, inconsistent share ownership disclosure regimes, and is worth considering independent of its value with respect to decoupling. In the longer term, substantive responses to empty voting may be needed; we sketch some possible responses. ** This article has two companion works, one directed at an academic legal audience and the second at a finance audience. For the former, see Hu & Black, The New Vote Buying: Empty Voting and Hidden (Morphable) Ownership, 79 Southern California Law Review 811-908 (2006), also available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=904004. For the latter, see Hu & Black, Hedge Funds, Insiders, and Empty Voting: Decoupling of Economic and Voting Ownership in Public Companies, Journal of Corporate Finance, vol. 13, pp. 343-367 (2007), nearly final version available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=874098. **
Some Thoughts About the Economics of Settlement

Owen Fiss’s piece Against Settlement was a response not only to the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) movement, but also more broadly to “the dispute-resolution story that underlies ADR.”1 When Fiss described that story, he attributed it to several canonical articles about the economics of civil procedure written by Richard Posner, George Priest, and Steven Shavell.2 Although everyone is familiar with Against Settlement, one might nonetheless lament that it has not been fully integrated into this economic literaturenot to mention that its warnings against the danger of vanishing trials have not been heeded in practice.3 I suspect that these disappointments can be traced to two related sources. One is the concern that if trial rather than settlement were promoted, the result would be so costly and time-consuming for courts as to render the civil justice system unworkable.4 The other is the view that Fiss and the economists are speaking different languages, one about justice and the other about utility, and cannot address one another on their own terms. Neither of these assumptions is self-evidently true, and a primary goal of this essay is to call attention to the need to question them. Those of us who agree with Fiss’s arguments must respond to the concerns about costs that seem to resonate so strongly with economists, judges, and policymakers. I will sketch some of these concerns and then consider the extent to which they might be answerable on their own terms. But the story should not end on those terms, because much has changed since 1984 in the literature on the economics of settlement. No longer do
Property Rights And Traditional Knowledge

For the past several decades, there has been a push to provide some sort of right akin to an intellectual property right in traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expression. This push has encountered staunch resistance from a number of different quarters. Many of the objections are practical. However, underlying these practical concerns is a core philosophical concern. A system of traditional knowledge rights, this argument suggests, simply does not satisfy the basic rationale for granting property rights in intangibles like inventions and expressive works. Intellectual property is meant to encourage innovation and creative activity. Most traditional knowledge, by contrast, is not innovative, at least in the same sense as the inventions and works that qualify for patents and copyrights. At present, the "anti-property" camp seems to have the better of the argument, as even the World Intellectual Property Organisation has abandoned the notion of true property rights.This article seeks to refute this philosophical objection to a property model for traditional knowledge. It argues that the classic philosophical argument justifying intellectual "property" namely, that property rights are justified only as a way to spur innovation and other creative activity is incorrect in two ways. First, the argument misstates the main goal of an intellectual property system. While intellectual property may serve as an incentive for innovation, society's primary concern is not the innovation per se, but instead the dissemination of knowledge. Second, there may be policy reasons other than the development of knowledge that can justify intellectual property-like rights.The article then applies these observations to the particular question of traditional knowledge and cultural expression. It demonstrates that a system of property rights could be useful in helping to encourage the dissemination of traditional knowledge, even if that knowledge is not "new" in the classic sense. Second, other important social concerns, especially the goal of ensuring accuracy in knowledge, may justify a system of property rights. While these arguments may not ultimately support a property rights system—after all, the practical concerns remain very real—they do help to refute the underlying philosophical objection.