cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Guardians of the galaxy: public accounting and the public interest

Many profession-changing events have occurred in the 25 years since Sikka, Willmott and Lowe published Guardians of Knowledge and Public Interest, among them the collapse of Enron and other international corporate frauds and failures, the demise of Arthur Anderson; the creation of the PCAOB; and the creation of the PIOB. This paper extends their work by examining who, or what, is entrusted as guardians of accounting knowledge and the public interest by comparing claims of serving the public interest of UK, USA, and international professional accounting agencies and organisations. Adopting the method of Sikka, Willmott and Lowe of examining their internal documents and public records, this paper finds that claims of advancing accounting and auditing knowledge and serving the public interest are inconsistent and contradictory. It further finds that protecting the public interest is compromised as a result of conflicting claims of what interest is protected and served.
Retroactivity at the Federal Circuit

A substantial subset of patent opinions from the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals functions in a wholly different manner from ordinary judicial opinions: they have strong retroactive effects with weak prospective effects. All Federal Circuit opinions have strong retroactive effects because issued patents and pending applications rarely can be modified. The Federal Circuit decisions apply in full to these patents and applications, even though they were prepared without the benefit of the rulings. In contrast, many of these opinions have almost no prospective effects. Patent law provides tremendous linguistic flexibility to patent drafters, which can be used to avoid the holdings of many (but not all) opinions. Patent drafters can freely choose any words to describe and claim the invention in the patent application. Patentees carefully draft new applications, aware of the decisions, to avoid their holdings. If the Federal Circuit holds that a certain phrase necessitates a bad result, patent lawyers substitute equivalent uncontaminated language in its place in future applications. The prospective effects of these opinions are muted because of the linguistic flexibility in drafting applications. Issued patents cannot be effectively modified; consequently, they are strongly affected by Federal Circuit decisions. There are substantial costs to the Federal Circuit’s actions. First, patent prosecutors are excessively cautious and spend extra time drafting claims and patent specifications to lower the risk of future changes in the law. This increases costs while still not substantially eliminating the problem. More troubling, the retroactive opinions weaken the incentive to innovate because the added uncertainty in the procurement process makes patent rights insecure. It thereby diminishes the value of patents. As their value decreases, patents cannot fully advance technological progress, as the Constitution urges. A counterintuitive solution—reducing the use of precedential opinions—can mitigate the retroactivity problem.
Has the Quality of Accounting Education Declined

ABSTRACT: For decades, prominent members of the accounting community have argued that the quality of accounting education is falling. Support for this claim is limited because of a scarcity of data characterizing the constructs of interest. This study is a comparative evaluation of the quality of accounting education from the 1970s to the 2000s using unique data to quantify education quality for accounting and many comparison disciplines. I find that, compared to most other types of college education, accounting education quality has been steady or increasing over the sample period. However, relative to other business degree programs, the evidence is mixed. The quality of students self-selecting non-accounting business degrees has increased while the quality of accounting students has not. The disparity in student quality is not reflected in the pay received by accounting graduates, which has remained stable relative to the pay received by graduates with other business degrees, although this result is lik...
Productivity, wages, and prices inside and outside of manufacturing in the U.S., Japan, and Europe☆

This paper studies the dynamic behavior of changes in productivity, wages, and prices. Results are based on a new data set that allows a consistent analysis of the aggregate economy, the manufacturing sector, and the nonmanufacturing sector. Results are presented for the U. S., Japan, and an aggregate called "Europe" consisting of eleven European economies. The primary theme of the paper is that differences between Europe and the U. S. have been substantially exaggerated in recent work. Europe has neither greater nominal wage flexibility nor more rigid real wages than the U. S. Evidence that the U. S. exhibits more nominal rigidity is confined to manufacturing, while the U. S. aggregate and nonmanufacturing sectors display as much nominal wage flexibility as Europe, and similar "output sacrifice ratios" as well. These results undermine the case frequently made against demand expansion in Europe on the ground that such a demand expansion would cause only extra inflation with no bonus of extra output as a result of a uniquely vertical European aggregate supply curve. The analysis of real wages also yields new results. A consistent treatment of the income of the self-employed almost completely eliminates the secular uptrend in previously developed wage gap indexes for Japan and Europe between the 1960s and 1980s. If anything real wages in Europe and Japan were too flexible rather than too rigid, in the sense that much of the increase in wage gap indexes in Europe during 1968-70 and in Japan in 1973-74 can be interpreted as autonomous wage push. The component of increases in wage gap indexes to be attributed to a failure of real wages to respond to the post-1972 productivity growth slowdown is relatively minor. The paper's analysis of productivity change confirms the real-wage elasticity of labor input emphasized previously, but shows that the response of productivity to changes in the real wage, and to cyclical output fluctuations, is roughly the sa(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
Rapid micro fluorescence in situ hybridization in tissue sections.

This paper describes a micro fluorescence in situ hybridization (μFISH)-based rapid detection of cytogenetic biomarkers on formalin-fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tissue sections. We demonstrated this method in the context of detecting human epidermal growth factor 2 (HER2) in breast tissue sections. This method uses a non-contact microfluidic scanning probe (MFP), which localizes FISH probes at the micrometer length-scale to selected cells of the tissue section. The scanning ability of the MFP allows for a versatile implementation of FISH on tissue sections. We demonstrated the use of oligonucleotide FISH probes in ethylene carbonate-based buffer enabling rapid hybridization within <1 min for chromosome enumeration and 10–15 min for assessment of the HER2 status in FFPE sections. We further demonstrated recycling of FISH probes for multiple sequential tests using a defined volume of probes by forming hierarchical hydrodynamic flow confinements. This microscale method is compatible with the standard FISH protocols and with the Instant Quality FISH assay and reduces the FISH probe consumption ∼100-fold and the hybridization time 4-fold, resulting in an assay turnaround time of <3 h. We believe that rapid μFISH has the potential of being used in pathology workflows as a standalone method or in combination with other molecular methods for diagnostic and prognostic analysis of FFPE sections.
Adolescent drug use and the deterrent effect of school-imposed penalties

Simple OLS estimates of the effect of school-imposed penalties for drug use on a student’s consumption of marijuana are biased if both are determined by unobservable school or individual attributes. The potential reverse causality is also a challenge to retrieving estimates of the causal relationship, as the severity of school sanctions may simply reflect the need for more-severe sanctions. I offer an instrumental-variables approach to retrieving an estimate of the causal response of marijuana use to sanctions and thereby demonstrate the efficacy of school-imposed penalties as a deterrent to adolescent drug use. This is the first evidence of such efficacy and, given what is known about the consequences of drug use, suggests that school sanctions may have important long-run benefits.
Do False Financial Statements Distort Peer Firms' Decisions?

ABSTRACT: Beatty, Liao, and Wu (2013) document that financial misreporting by prominent firms distorts peer firms' capital investment decisions. Using a large sample of firms subject to SEC and DOJ enforcement actions for accounting misstatements, I establish three important generalizations. First, the adverse effect of financial misstatements documented by Beatty et al. (2013) is not limited to high-profile scandals and can be generalized to a larger population. Second, the distortions are not confined to capital investments; they also extend to choices peer firms make with respect to R&D, advertising, and pricing policies—decisions with immediate bottom-line impact. Third, I document that the magnitude of the distortion varies predictably with peer firms' characteristics, the misstating firms' external information environment, and the industry-specific information environment within which the misstatement occurs. Specifically, I find smaller distortions for larger peers and peers managed by more able ma...
Homology and the origin of correspondence

Homology is a natural kind term and a precise account of what homology is has to come out of theories about the role of homologues in evolution and development. Definitions of homology are discussed with respect to the question as to whether they are able to give a non-circular account of the correspondence or sameness referred to by homology. It is argued that standard accounts tie homology to operational criteria or specific research projects, but are not yet able to oer a concept of homology that does not presuppose a version of homology or a comparable notion of sameness. This is the case for phylogenetic definitions that trace structures back to the common ancestor as well as for developmental approaches such as Wagner's biological homology concept. In contrast, molecular homology is able to oer a definition of homology in genes and proteins that explicates homology by reference to more basic notions. Molecular correspondence originates by means of specific features of causal processes. It is speculated that further understanding of morphogenesis might enable biologists to give a theoretically deeper definition of homology along similar lines: an account which makes reference to the concrete mechanisms that operate in organisms.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Appointment with Trouble

This article considers whether the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director’s appointment of the Bureau’s Deputy Director comports with the Appointments Clause. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act established the Bureau in July 2010, as well as the offices of the Bureau’s Director and Deputy Director, to coordinate the regulation and enforcement of federal consumer-financial-protection laws. Under that act, the
The Open Source Biotechnology Movement: Is It Patent Misuse?

Fledgling efforts exist to establish open-source projects in biotechnology. Following copyleft, participants agree that advances in the technology must remain as openly available as the original technology. Such agreements implicate patent misuse, which is defined as an impermissible attempt to expand the scope of the patent. Given that advancements were not part of the teachings of the original patent, restrictions on those advancements may constitute misuse. The proper test for patent misuse is unclear. Therefore, the article applies two possible tests: inconsistency with patent policy and violation of the antitrust rule of reason. The overall effect of open source is consistent with patent policy. Accelerating the moment at which knowledge is widely available to the public is consistent with patent policy's design to bring inventions into the public domain for the public benefit. In addition, although open source biotechnology may decrease some downstream economic rewards, it increases downstream non-economic rewards and increases downstream innovation by exploiting untapped innovation resources that traditional patenting cannot reach. Finally, open source reduces harms of the current patent system by reducing patent thickets and avoiding the short-term restriction of supply anticipated under traditional patent licensing. Similarly, from an antitrust perspective, open source effects are better characterized as increasing rather than reducing supply. The open source group is not trying to restrict the supply of biotech tools but rather increase the supply of such tools by ensuring that the tools remain openly available. Anticompetitive effects also are outweighed by the pro-competitive benefits.
Financial markets and genetic variation

Abstract We investigate the extent to which a country’s degree of genetic variation contributes to the observed variation in financial market activity across countries. We postulate that genetic variation can affect financial markets through its impact on aggregate investment behavior, innovation in the financial sector, and productivity. Our country-level, cross-sectional analysis reveals a significant hump-shaped relation between a country’s predicted genetic variation and the size of its financial markets. This result is consistent with the conjecture that at relatively intermediate degrees of genetic variation, the associated intermediate levels of trust and risk-taking within the country result in the largest investment flows into public financial markets. Our results are robust to different measres of financial market size, several regression specifications, and the inclusion of a broad range of controls such as legal origin, institutional characteristics, culture, natural endowment, and trade openness. Our main findings appear to be restricted specifically to equity markets (vs. debt markets) where there is relatively more uncertainty and, thus, trust and risk-taking are relatively more important. Additional analysis suggests that better overall country-level governance can moderate the role that genetic variation plays in shaping equity market size.
Could affirmative action be efficient in higher education

Abstract Many states are outlawing the use of affirmative action, which has lead to the use of inefficient measures as a substitute. I show that schools still use affirmative action in the application process because of a down-stream demand from employers.
Understanding Audit Quality: Insights from Audit Professionals and Investors

Projects seeking to define, measure, and evaluate audit quality are on the agendas of auditing standards setters as well as audit firms. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) currently provides information regarding audit quality through the release of inspection reports, and the Board intends to establish and report audit quality indicators. To provide additional perspective on audit quality, we obtain auditors' and investors' views, definitions, and indicators of audit quality. We find that investors' definitions of audit quality focus more on inputs to the audit process than do auditors', and that investors view the number of PCAOB deficiencies as an indicator of overall firm quality. We find a consensus that auditor characteristics may be the most important determinants of audit quality, and that restatements may be the most readily available signal of low audit quality. We relate responses to a general audit quality framework, provide support for archival audit research, and identify additional disclosures that participants suggest could signal audit quality. Taken together, we provide evidence regarding the construct of audit quality in the post-SOX environment, evaluate many of the audit quality indicators proposed by the PCAOB, and suggest avenues for future research.
Board Composition, Corporate Performance, and the Cadbury Committee Recommendation

During the 1990s and beyond, countries around the world witnessed calls and/or mandates for more outside directors on publicly traded companies' boards even though extant studies find no significant correlation between outside directors and corporate performance. We examine the connection between changes in board composition and corporate performance in the U.K. over the interval 1989-1996, a period that surrounds publication of the Cadbury Report, which calls for at least three outside directors for publicly traded corporations. We find that companies that add directors to conform with this standard exhibit a significant improvement in operating performance both in absolute terms and relative to various peer group benchmarks. We also find a statistically significant increase in stock prices around announcements that outside directors were added in conformance with this recommenda tion. We do not endorse mandated board structures, but the evidence appears to be that such a mandate is associated with an improvement in performance in U.K. companies.
Who Should Talk? What Counts as Employee Voice and Who Stands to Gain

This symposium piece responds to an article by Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt titled "Promoting Employee Voice in the American Economy: A Call for Comprehensive Reform." Professor Schmidt argues in favor of increasing employee voice in corporate governance. In this reply, Professor Bagchi distinguishes between "hard voice," "soft voice" and information rights as three variants of employee voice. She casts doubt on the material benefits from Professor Dau-Schmidt's proposals, which focus on hard and soft voice, to either employees or corporate stakeholders more broadly. The present focus of corporate governance on the relationship between shareholders and managers, to the exclusion of employees, may have distributional outcomes that need to be redressed. But while strengthening unions may improve workers' share of firm revenue, it cannot be expected to consistently improve corporate performance. Mandatory rules that give workers direct representation in management have been successful in Europe but are likely to fare less well in the American institutional context. Without strong unions, representatives will either be ineffective or illegitimate. Although not without its own problems, giving workers rights to information about their employers and industries may be a more promising way for workers to exercise agency in the workplace. Information will help workers make good decisions about their own choices where they have limited opportunity to affect corporate policy.
Confidence and Investors' Reliance on Disciplined Trading Strategies

Researchers and practitioners in accounting and finance often investigate or advocate particular disciplined trading strategies, but little work investigates the determinants of individual investors' trading-strategy reliance. We report two experiments, which provide evidence that the dual-source model of overconfidence (Sniezek and Buckley [1991]) predicts the circumstances in which investors are more likely to rely on disciplined trading strategies. Our results indicate that reliance is more likely when investors trade portfolios of securities rather than trading on a case-by-case basis, particularly when investors have received feedback that their previous (unaided) trading decisions have been unprofitable. These results are driven by the number of shares that investors transact rather than by investors' directional agreement with the recommendations of the trading strategy, suggesting that the effects of a portfolio approach and trading experience occur by mitigating investors' overconfidence. The effects violate an aspect of economic rationality because our experiments ensure that investors in all conditions trade the same set of securities based on the same set of information.
PRIVATE MONEY, SETTLEMENT, AND DISCOUNT: A COMMENT

Temzelides and Williamson present a model of private currency issuance to study the effect of clearing arrangements on the prices at which private currencies trade, on the volume of exchange, and on welfare. Their findings hinge on three factors: the location of the issuers relative to the area in which their currencies circulate, whether there is an arrangement for clearing nonlocally issued currencies, and whether agents are fully informed about the quality of the currencies. This paper finds that the Temzelides-Williamson model provides valuable insights about historical experiences with private paper monies, but it raises more questions than it answers regarding electronic currencies. The model can, however, serve as a useful point of departure for further research.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
Discussion of ‘shareholder litigation and changes in disclosure behavior’

Abstract Rogers and VanBuskirk [2008. Shareholder litigation and changes in disclosure behavior. Journal of Accounting and Economics 40, 3–73] examine changes in sued firms’ disclosure policies between the pre-lawsuit and post-lawsuit periods. They find that these firms decrease the magnitude and precision of disclosures following the lawsuits. The authors conclude that managers of sued firms perceive disclosure to contribute to (rather than decrease) the probability of being sued. While the evidence showing that the magnitude and precision of disclosure decreases post-lawsuit appears to be robust, I raise some questions about what we learn from this finding.
Clinique ToGo: Changing Legal Practice in One African Nation in Six Days

With honour and humility I accepted an invitation from the U.S. State Department to participate as a technical advisor in a weeklong rule of law2 seminar in Togo, with attorneys, judges, law professors and students. My mission was to explain various models for delivery of free legal services and assist in developing proposals for establishing a bar association pro bono3 programme in conjunction with the nation’s principal law school. When the State Department first invited me to participate in its speaker specialist programme, I admit that for me it was all about having a glimpse of an otherwise inaccessible part of the world and the attendant cultural, professional and intellectual exchange. Only after my initial programme visit did I become familiar with the concept of “rule of law” (l’etat de droit), as well as the related concepts of access to justice and the law and development movement. This was to be the focus of my journey to Togo.
The Perfect Crime

This article argues that there is a 50-square-mile swath of Idaho in which one can commit felonies with impunity. This is because of the intersection of a poorly drafted statute with a clear but neglected constitutional provision: the Sixth Amendment's Vicinage Clause. Although lesser criminal charges and civil liability still loom, the remaining possibility of criminals going free over a needless technical failure by Congress is difficult to stomach. No criminal defendant has ever broached the subject, let alone faced the numerous (though unconvincing) counterarguments. This shows that vicinage is not taken seriously by lawyers or judges. Still, Congress should close the Idaho loophole, not pretend it does not exist.
Multifactor Models Do Not Explain Deviations from the CAPM

Abstract A number of studies have presented evidence rejecting the validity of the Sharpe-Lintner capital asset pricing model (CAPM). Possible alternatives include risk-based models, such as multifactor asset pricing models, or nonrisk-based models which address biases in empirical methodology, the existence of market frictions, or the presence of irrational investors. Distinguishing between the alternatives is important for applications such as cost of capital estimation. This paper develops a framework which shows that, ex ante, CAPM deviations due to missing risk factors will be very difficult to detect empirically, whereas deviations resulting from nonrisk-based sources are easily detectable. The results suggest that multifactor pricing models alone do not entirely resolve CAPM deviations.
Welcome Home: Innovating the Forward Supply Chain

Most retailers have moved relentlessly towards the low price, low customer contact, big box experience over the past three decades. But, as Kenneth K Boyer and G Tomas M Hult show, good service is coming back into style. Reinventing home shopping, as part of a new forward supply chain mindset, could make the retail shopping experience more enjoyable and more convenient. Customers will value it — and pay for it.
Project design with limited commitment and teams

We study the interaction between a group of agents who exert effort to complete a project and a manager who chooses its objectives. The manager has limited commitment power so that she can commit to the objectives only when the project is sufficiently close to completion. We show that the manager has incentives to extend the project as it progresses. This result has two implications. First, the manager will choose a larger project if she has less commitment power. Second, the manager should delegate the decision rights over the project size to the agents unless she has sufficient commitment power.
Law Wars: Australian Contract Law Reform vs. CISG vs. CESL

This paper presents the current Australian as to whether or not to review its domestic contract law. It considers the background to the current discussion paper, and outlines the legal cultural landscape that awaits any proposed changes. The paper then looks to the potential models for such a reform, should Australia decide to engage in a modernization and/or internationalisation program. In this light, it considers the framework of the CISG, UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Law, draft Common European Sales Law, and then discusses the potential impact of the Swiss Proposal on future work on harmonized international contract law.
Savings Gluts and Financial Fragility

We investigate the effects of a sustained increase in liquidity (a savings glut) on the incentives to originate high quality assets and on the fragility of the financial sector. Originators incur private costs when originating high quality assets. Assets are subsequently distributed in two markets by the financial sector: A private market where informed intermediaries operate and an exchange where uninformed liquidity trades. Uninformed liquidity pays the same price irrespective of the quality of the assets, which discourages good origination. Informed liquidity instead creams skims the best assets paying a premium over the uninformed price, which encourages originators to supply good assets. We show that the positive origination effects of an increase in liquidity matter when the overall level of liquidity is low whereas the opposite is true when liquidity is abundant. Thus an increase in the overall level of liquidity has a non-monotone effect on the incentives to originate high quality assets. Instead leverage increases monotonically with liquidity and is highest precisely when incentives for good asset origination are at their lowest. As a result plentiful liquidity leads to fragile balance sheets: On the asset side there are more low quality assets and on the liability side more of those assets are funded with debt. We relate our findings to some of the stylized facts observed in financial markets in the lead up to the Great Recession and draw policy conclusions from the model.
A War of (Mis)Information: The Political Effects of Rumors and Rumor Rebuttals in an Authoritarian Country

Despite the prevalence of anti-government rumors in authoritarian countries, little is currently known about their effects on citizens’ attitudes toward the government, and whether the authorities can effectively combat rumors. With an experimental procedure embedded in two surveys about Chinese internet users’ information exposure, this study finds that rumors decrease citizens’ trust in the government and support of the regime. Moreover, individuals from diverse socio-economic and political backgrounds are similarly susceptible to thinly evidenced rumors. Rebuttals generally reduce people’s belief in the specific content of rumors, but often do not recover political trust unless the government brings forth solid and vivid evidence to back its refutation or win the endorsement of public figures broadly perceived to be independent. But because such high-quality and strong rebuttals are hard to come by, rumors will erode political support in an authoritarian state. These findings have rich implications for studies of rumors and misinformation in general, and authoritarian information politics in particular.
A Method to Translate Order-Sorted Algebras to Many-Sorted Algebras

Order-sorted algebras and many sorted algebras exist in a long history with many different implementations and applications. A lot of language specifications have been defined in order-sorted algebra frameworks such as the language specifications in K (an order-sorted algebra framework). The biggest problem in a lot of the order-sorted algebra frameworks is that even if they might allow developers to write programs and language specifications easily, but they do not have a large set of tools to provide reasoning infrastructures to reason about the specifications built on the frameworks, which are very common in some many-sorted algebra framework such as Isabelle/HOL, Coq and FDR. This fact brings us the necessity to marry the worlds of order-sorted algebras and many sorted algebras. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to translate a strictly sensible order-sorted algebra to a many-sorted one in a restricted domain by requiring the order-sorted algebra to be strictly sensible. The key idea of the translation is to add an equivalence relation called core equality to the translated many-sorted algebras. By defining this relation, we reduce the complexity of translating a strictly sensible order-sorted algebra to a many-sorted one, make the translated many-sorted algebra equations only increasing by a very small amount of new equations, and keep the number of rewrite rules in the algebra in the same amount. We then prove the order-sorted algebra and its translated many-sorted algebra are bisimilar. To the best of our knowledge, our translation and bisimilar proof is the first attempt in translating and relating an order-sorted algebra with a many-sorted one in a way that keeps the size of the translated many-sorted algebra relatively small.
Assessing Consensus: The Promise and Performance of Negotiated Rulemaking

Over its thirteen year history, the negotiated rulemaking process has yielded only thirty-five final administrative rules. By comparison, the federal government publishes over 3,000 final rules each year through the ordinary notice-and- comment process. Why have federal agencies relied so little on negotiated rulemaking? I examine this question by assessing the impact of negotiating rulemaking on its two major purposes: (1) reducing rulemaking time; and (2) decreasing the amount of litigation over agency rules. My analysis suggests that the asserted problems used to justify negotiated rulemaking have been overstated and that the limitations of negotiated rulemaking have been understated. Negotiated rulemaking by all accounts consumes more resources for agencies and stakeholders than does notice-and-comment rulemaking, yet it fails to yield any significant impact on the levels of litigation or controversy which normal rulemaking occasionally engenders. Indeed, 6 out of the 12 negotiated rules adopted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have resulted in court challenges, a litigation rate higher than the overall rate for EPA rules. My findings draw into question the growing call among scholars and policymakers for reforming the regulatory process to rely more extensively on formal negotiated rulemaking, suggesting that formal negotiation can actually expand the range of potential conflicts in the regulatory process rather than reduce them.
Substantially Limited Justice?: The Possibilities and Limits of a New Rawlsian Analysis of Disability-Based Discrimination

In its recent terms, the Supreme Court has increasingly turned its attention toward the Americans with Disabilities Act, and specifically the questions of who should be protected under the ADA, and what such protection requires. In the wake of the Court's decisions, workers have found it increasingly difficult to assert and protect their right to be free of disability-based discrimination in the workplace. Given the widespread influence of John Rawls in contemporary discussions of social, political and economic justice, his recent and final formulation of his theory of distributive justice presents a significant and promising philosophical foundation for evaluation of Title I of the ADA and the cases interpreting it. In particular, the two parts of Rawls's second principle of justice - the Principle of Fair Opportunity and the Difference Principle - reflect and reinforce the ADA's prohibition of both irrational and rational disability-based discrimination. The Principle of Fair Opportunity shares strong links to the ADA's protection of people with disabilities where the disability is not relevant to job performance, including protection of workers regarded as disabled or workers with a history of disability. The Difference Principle raises the issue of people with disability as least advantaged in the Rawlsian sense, and shares strong links to the ADA's protections where the disability does affect job performance, including actually disabled workers and the reasonable accommodation requirement. Using Rawls's methodology to evaluate recent ADA jurisprudence in light of the structure and content of the ADA indicates that many of these cases are not correctly decided, and suggests a better approach informed by values of distributive justice as well as the language and stated purposes of the ADA. Although Rawls does not take us as far as we want to go, his theory has significant value for understanding and advancing the interests of workers with disabilities, and perhaps those without disabilities as well.
The Obama War Powers Legacy and the Internal Forces That Entrench Executive Power

As we contemplate the incoming presidential administration, we stare ahead into uncharted space. It may seem as though recent history leaves us unprepared for what lies ahead. What can a discussion of the Obama war powers legacy, and the transition from the Bush to Obama administration, tell us about a transition from Barack Obama to the next president, and beyond? Yet there are lessons here. Noone can predict precisely how the president-elect and the team that is installed will confront the rule of law or grapple with the bureaucratic norms that I discuss in this paper. But systemic forces exist inside the executive branch that influence presidential decision-making in each modern administration and, barring a total reimagining of the executive branch, will operate on administrations to come. These internal forces include mechanisms and norms that fall within two broad categories: (1) those that favor continuity and hinder presidents from effecting change, and (2) those that incrementally help ratchet up claims to executive power.
Why do Some Countries Produce So Much More Output Per Worker than Others

Output per worker varies enormously across countries. Why? On an accounting basis our analysis shows that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker—we find a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow residual across countries. At a deeper level, we document that the differences in capital accumulation, productivity, and therefore output per worker are driven by differences in institutions and government policies, which we call social infrastructure. We treat social infrastructure as endogenous, determined historically by location and other factors captured in part by language. In 1988 output per worker in the United States was more than 35 times higher than output per worker in Niger. In just over ten days the average worker in the United States produced as much as an average worker in Niger produced in an entire year. Explaining such vast differences in economic performance is one of the fundamental challenges of economics. Analysis based on an aggregate production function provides some insight into these differences, an approach taken by Mankiw, Romer, and Weil [1992] and Dougherty and Jorgenson [1996], among others. Differences among countries can be attributed to differences in human capital, physical capital, and productivity. Building on their analysis, our results suggest that differences in each element of the production function are important. In particular, however, our results emphasize the key role played by productivity. For example, consider the 35-fold difference in output per worker between the United States and Niger. Different capital intensities in the two countries contributed a factor of 1.5 to the income differences, while different levels of educational attainment contributed a factor of 3.1. The remaining difference—a factor of 7.7—remains as the productivity residual. * A previous version of this paper was circulated under the title ‘‘The Productivity of Nations.’’ This research was supported by the Center for Economic Policy Research at Stanford and by the National Science Foundation under grants SBR-9410039 (Hall) and SBR-9510916 (Jones) and is part of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s program on Economic Fluctuations and Growth. We thank Bobby Sinclair for excellent research assistance and colleagues too numerous to list for an outpouring of helpful commentary. Data used in the paper are available online from http://www.stanford.edu/,chadj.
Rolling Mental Accounts

When investors sell one asset and quickly buy another (“reinvestment days”), their trades suggest the original mental account is not closed, but is instead rolled into the new asset. Retail investors trading on their own accounts display a rolled disposition effect, selling the new position when its value exceeds the initial investment in the original position. On reinvestment days, these investors display no disposition effect (consistent with no disutility from realizing a loss) and make better selling decisions. Using a laboratory experiment, we show that reinvestment causally reduces the disposition effect and improves trading. Received April 10, 2016; editorial decision January 28, 2017 by Editor Andrew Karolyi.
Ca3Ru2O7: A NEW PARADIGM FOR SPINTRONICS

Ca3Ru2O7, the bilayered member of the Ruddlesden–Popper (RP) series of Ca-ruthenates, displays a vast variety of physical properties that not only span almost every ordered state (except for superconductivity) known in condensed matter physics, but includes exotic phenomena not found in other materials. In this review article, we first present a brief introduction of the layered ruthenates and then discuss transport and thermodynamic properties of Ca3Ru2O7 with a focus on the following intriguing issues: (i) Colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) via suppression of a ferromagnetic (FM) state, (ii) Strong spin valve effect in bulk single crystals, (iii) Quantum oscillations in the non-metallic state, and (iv) Oscillatory magnetoresistance periodic in B (rather than 1/B). It has become increasingly clear that the orbital degrees of freedom of the Ru-ions drive the complex phase diagram via couplings of these orbital degrees of freedom to the spin (spin-orbit interaction) and the lattice (Jahn–Teller effect). The novel and surprising properties of the ruthenates is ultimately defined by these couplings.
Lapdogs, Watchdogs, and Scapegoats: The Press and National Security Information

In the United States, the Executive branch possesses virtually unbridled classification authority to keep information from the public. Although the Freedom of Information Act and whistleblower protection laws serve as some check on the Executive's power over national security information, these tools remain largely ineffectual. Because the desire for tight information control competes with the demands of newsgathering, a "game of leaks" has developed among government officials and reporters in which the press alternatively serves as lapdogs, watchdogs, and scapegoats for the Executive branch. This Article demonstrates that although leaks of classified information have been a quasi-official method by which the government communicates information to the public through the press ever since the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt, legal developments in the current climate, including the on-going prosecution of two lobbyists for violations of the Espionage Act in the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee case, have the potential to establish precedents that could pose dire consequences for the press. This Article scrutinizes the constitutionality of prosecuting the press for the publication of classified information by examining the long and complicated history of the relationship between the press and the Executive branch and the role leaks play in the dissemination of classified information to the public today. After examining the relationship between the press and the Executive branch as well as tracing the development of the reasoning behind the applicable First Amendment doctrine, this Article argues that in any prosecution concerning the communication of classified national security information, the government should be required to show that the offender either intended the disclosure to harm the United States or help a foreign nation, or that the offender was recklessly indifferent to the harm that the disclosure would cause. This standard is derived from the actual malice standard the Supreme Court set forth in New York Times v. Sullivan. This Article argues that adoption of this clearer standard will encourage the government and the press to continue their historical cooperation when the publication of certain information poses a possible threat to national security interests. It will create an incentive for the government officials to explain their national security concerns to the press, and will simultaneously hold the press accountable for any reckless disregard shown to genuine threats. This approach seeks to strike the proper balance between the Executive's vast ability to control the dissemination of national security information to the public - often through calculated leaks - and the need to maintain the secrecy of information that is truly sensitive.
Litigation Funding versus Liability Insurance: What's the Difference?

Having studied insurance defense arrangements for years, I was mystified by the strenuous opposition mounted in certain quarters to third party litigation funding. For it seemed to me that liability insurance, which ordinarily requires insurers to bear both the cost of defending claims and the burden of paying them, is subject to every complaint lodged against third party funding. Both encourage lawsuits, influence settlements terms, have payers intermeddling in litigation, etc. Yet, in the United States, insurers have covered litigation risks for over a century, and no one proposes getting rid of them. To the contrary, some writers, including me, worry that certain actors have too little insurance and should perhaps be required to purchase more. Yet, if liability insurance and third party funding are objectionable on the same grounds, why should one want more of one and less of the other? In this Essay, I will make good on the claim that the major objections to third party funding have analogues applicable to liability coverage. I will also explain why the analogues have not led us to prohibit carriers from selling insurance, and why third party funding should survive them as well. When carrying out this project, I will focus on contracts between funders and claimants, rather than between funders and lawyers. The former resemble liability insurance arrangements more nearly than the latter, which are substitutes for accumulated wealth, bank loans, and other sources lawyers have traditionally used to finance cases.
The Strategic Use of Tying to Preserve and Create Market Power in Evolving Industries

This article investigates how the tying of complementary products can be used to preserve and create monopoly positions. We first show how a monopolist of a product in the current period can use tying to preserve its monopoly in the future. We then show how a monopolist in one market can employ tying to extend its monopoly into a newly emerging market. Our analysis explains how a dominant firm can use tying to remain dominant in an industry undergoing rapid technological change. The analysis focuses on entry costs and network externalities. We also relate our analysis to the Microsoft case.
The Educational Autonomy of Perfectionist Religious Groups in a Liberal State

This Article draws upon, but reworks, John Rawls’ framework from Political Liberalism to determine the degree of educational autonomy that illiberal perfectionist religious groups ought to enjoy in a liberal state. I start by arguing that Rawls mistakenly concludes that political liberalism flatly cannot accommodate Perfectionists, and that his misstep is attributable to two errors: (1) Rawls utilizes an overly restrictive “political conception of the person” in determining who participates in the original position, and (2) Rawls overlooks the possibility of a “federalist” basic political structure that can afford significant political autonomy to different groups within a single country. With these insights, I argue that some, though not all, religious Perfectionists are consistent with a stable liberal polity, and explain why foundational Rawlsian premises require that Perfectionists be accommodated to the extent possible. My ultimate conclusions are that liberal polities ought to grant significant autonomy to those illiberal groups that satisfy specified conditions, and that the autonomy of such “eligible” illiberal groups is subject to two further constraints, which I call “well-orderedness” and “opt-out.” The autonomy to which eligible Perfections are entitled includes the authority to educate their children in a way that provides a fair opportunity for the groups to perpetuate themselves. The constraint of well-orderedness, however, permits the State to impose educational requirements that facilitate peace and political stability. Accommodating eligible illiberal groups, subject to these constraints, is an instantiation of liberal commitments, not a compromise of liberal values.
Mergers, Innovation, and Entry-Exit Dynamics: Consolidation of the Hard Disk Drive Industry, 1996–2016

How far should an industry be allowed to consolidate when competition and innovation are endogenous? We develop a stochastically alternating-move game of dynamic oligopoly and estimate it using data from the hard disk drive industry, in which a dozen global players consolidated into only three in the last 20 years. We find plateau-shaped equilibrium relationships between competition and innovation, with heterogeneity across time and productivity. Our counterfactual simulations suggest the current rule-of-thumb policy, which stops mergers when three or fewer firms exist, strikes approximately the right balance between pro-competitive effects and value-destruction side effects in this dynamic welfare trade-off.