cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Portfolio Execution

We analyze the optimal execution problem of a portfolio manager trading multiple assets. In addition to the liquidity and risk of each individual asset, we consider cross-asset interactions in these two dimensions, which substantially enriches the nature of the problem. Focusing on the market microstructure, we develop a tractable order book model to capture liquidity supply/demand dynamics in a multi-asset setting, which allows us to formulate and solve the optimal portfolio execution problem. We find that cross-asset risk and liquidity considerations are of critical importance in constructing the optimal execution policy. We show that even when the goal is to trade a single asset, its optimal execution may involve transitory trades in other assets. In general, optimally managing the risk of the portfolio during the execution process affects the time synchronization of trading in different assets. Moreover, links in the liquidity across assets lead to complex patterns in the optimal execution policy. In particular, we highlight cases where aggregate costs can be reduced by temporarily overshooting one’s target portfolio.
A Voice for the Fish? Climate Change Litigation and Potential Causes of Action for Impacts under the United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement

The seas—all the seas—cry for regulation as a veritable res communis omnium. 2 Louis Henkin, Arctic Anti-Pollution: Does Canada Make—or Break—International Law? 65 AJIL 131, 136 (1971).
The largest Last Supper: depictions of food portions and plate size increased over the millennium

Portion sizes of foods have been noticably increasing in recent years, but when did this trend begin? If art imitates life and if food portions have been generally increasing with time, we might expect this trend to be reflected in paintings that depict food. Perhaps the most commonly painted meal has been that of Jesus Christ's Last Supper, chronicled in the New Testament of the Bible. A CAD-CAM analysis of the relative food-to-head ratio in 52 representative paintings of the Last Supper showed that the relative sizes of the main dish (entree) (r=0.52, P=0.002), bread (r=0.30, P=0.04), and plates (r=0.46, P=0.02) have linearly increased over the past millennium.
Do Strategic Reasoning and Brainstorming Help Auditors Change Their Standard Audit Procedures in Response to Fraud Risk

ABSTRACT: The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board recently reported that its inspections show that auditors fail to effectively modify their standard audit procedures in response to fraud ris...
On the Benefit (Or Cost) of Large-Scale Bundling

Simple selling mechanisms are very appealing in practice, yet they can limit the firm's ability to extract a large consumer surplus. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of a simple bundling mechanism in extracting the consumer surplus in the presence of non-negative marginal costs and correlated valuations. The main question we address is how to quantify the performance of a "general" large-scale bundling mechanism relative to other more complicated selling mechanisms. In this regard, we develop simple robust analytics that identify the main drivers for the effectiveness of the pure bundling mechanism and allow the sellers to easily quantify the potential profits of a large-scale bundling mechanism relative to more complicated selling mechanisms. Our numerical simulations show that these analytics provide high predictive power for the true performance of the bundling mechanism and are robust to different parametric assumptions even for relatively small bundles.
Do Institutional Investors Demand Public Disclosure

We examine the effect of institutional ownership on corporate disclosure policy using a regression discontinuity design. Using a novel dataset comprising every 8-K filing between 1996 and 2006, we find that positive shocks to institutional ownership around Russell index reconstitutions increase the quantity, form, and quality of disclosure. Compared with those at the bottom of the Russell 1000 index, firms at the top of the Russell 2000 index increase institutional ownership by 9.8%, and disclose 4.7% longer 8-K filings with 21.3% more embedded graphics. This incremental disclosure significantly increases the information content of 8-K filings for the market and for analysts.Received July 1, 2015; accepted May 19, 2016 by Editor David Denis.
Capital Structure and Interaction among Firms in Output Markets: Theory and Evidence*

I develop a simple model that examines the relations between the extent of competitive interaction among firms in output markets, their capital structures, and the aggressiveness of their operating strategies. A firm’s optimal leverage is related to the degree to which its operating strategy affects its rivals’ value functions and resulting optimal output market choices. This relation is positive, regardless of whether the competition in output markets is in strategic substitutes or in strategic complements. I test the model’s prediction using two proxies for the extent of competitive interaction among firms. The empirical evidence provides support for the model.
Share and Share Alike: Understanding and Enforcing Open Source and Free Software Licenses

This paper describes the history and the commonly used software licensing terms of the free software and open source movements. It explains the GPL and discusses attempts to enforce the GPL. The GPL is a revolutionary copyright license that has allowed software developers to use existing law to copyright their work, while allowing licensees the freedoms to use, copy, modify, and distribute their work, but not to turn the work into a proprietary derivative. 2005 brought two notable efforts to enforce the license in court. A district court in Munich, Germany declared the GPL valid and enforceable. Meanwhile, litigation between The SCO Group (SCO) and International Business Machines (IBM) may clarify how U.S. courts will interpret the GPL.
How well did the new Sumitomo Electric project ranking method predict performance

The development and implementation of a new R&D project scoring method (NS-method) within Sumitomo Electric Industries was introduced in a previous report. This paper evaluates the NS-method's effectiveness by comparing the information generated by application to 146 projects in 1997 with the project achievements in 2000. The test results revealed that the NS-method's evaluation scores were correlated to the performance indicators such as the gross profit and R&D productivity. It also showed that, when projects are classified into three groups (i.e., Top, Middle, Bottom) according to the forecast data generated by the NS-method, the projects in the Top category had higher actual productivity ratios and success rates than those in the Bottom category.
Globalization and the environment: Determinants of firm self-regulation in China

Critics assert that globalization is detrimental to the environment because it encourages location of polluting industries in countries with low environmental regulations. We suggest that globalization might also have positive environmental effects because global ties increase self-regulation pressures on firms in low-regulation countries. Using survey data from firms in China we find that multinational ownership, multinational customers, and exports to developed countries increase self-regulation of environmental performance.
ALCOHOL REGULATION AND CRIME

We provide a critical review of research in economics that has examined causal relationships between alcohol use and crime. We lay out several causal pathways through which alcohol regulation and alcohol consumption may affect crime, including: direct pharmacological effects on aggression, reaction time, and motor impairment; excuse motivations; venues and social interactions; and victimization risk. We focus our review on four main types of alcohol regulations: price/tax restrictions, age-based availability restrictions, spatial availability restrictions, and temporal availability restrictions. We conclude that there is strong evidence that tax- and age-based restrictions on alcohol availability reduce crime, and we discuss implications for policy and practice.
Mortgage Brokers, Origination Fees, Price Transparency and Competition

This article examines the dynamics between mortgage broker competition, origination fees and price transparency. A reverse first-price sealed-bid auction model is used to motivate broker pricing behavior. Confirming the model predictions, our empirical analysis shows that increased mortgage brokerage competition at the Metropolitan Statistical Area level leads to lower fees. The findings are robust to different measures of fees as well as different measures of competition. We also provide evidence that broker competition reduces mortgage origination fees on retail (nonbrokered) loans as well. In addition, our results indicate that pricing complexity is an important determinant of fees, and increased broker competition is associated with a higher probability of a loan being priced with transparency. Our results suggest that mortgage brokers increase competition and lower fees in the mortgage market.
Optimal growth and impatience: A phase diagram analysis

When the time preference exhibits decreasing marginal impatience, the rate at which the discount function decreases plays a central role in the stability analysis. This paper shows that if the discount function is strictly decreasing, strictly convex and has a uniform bound on its first derivative, then the continuous-time, one-sector optimal growth problem has a unique steady state that exhibits the saddle-point property. Moreover, the phase diagram analysis is geometrically similar to the case of a constant discount rate. The proposed bounded slope assumption is inspired by and in direct contrast with Magill and Nishimura's “division of countries” example.
Judges as Bad Reviewers: Fair Use and Epistemological Humility

AbstractThe future of fair use depends on whether judges act like bad reviewers, or whether they behave differently in interpreting challenged works than they do in almost every other aspect of judging. Ordinarily, judges are asked to produce definitive answers about the meanings of texts. But when it comes to literary judgments, the bad reviewer is the one who insists that a work has only one meaning, and announces the bottom line as if it were an absolute. A good reviewer explains the sources of her judgment, making room for other interpretations. This is also what is necessary to a good fair use analysis.Unfortunately, copyright fair use cases rarely acknowledge multiplicity of meaning. Through discussion of fan-made music videos, this short commentary shows how transformative uses routinely invite multiple interpretations, just as “original” works do. As a result, a fair use analysis that insists on reducing works to single meanings will predictably fail in the aim of protecting transformative works t...
Competitive Effects of Mass Customization

The existing theoretical literature on mass customization maintains that customization reduces product differentiation and intensifies price competition. In contrast, operations management studies argue that customization serves primarily to differentiate a company from its competitors. Interactive involvement of the customer in product design creates an affective relationship with the firm, relaxing price competition. This paper provides a model that incorporates consumer involvement to explain the phenomena described in the operations management literature.Two firms on the Hotelling line compete for a continuum of consumers with heterogeneous brand preferences. An exogenously given fraction of consumers is potentially interested in customization. Consumer benefits from customization are the rewards from a special shopping experience and the value of product customization (a better fitting product); these benefits are higher for consumers located closer to the customizing brand. When a consumer purchases a customized product, he/she incurs waiting costs. Each firm simultaneously decides whether to offer standard products, customized products, or both, and then engage in price competition. I show that customization increases product differentiation, leading to less intense price competition. Depending on the parameter values, in equilibrium either both firms offer customized products, one firm offers customized products and the other standard and customized products, or one firm offers customized products and the other standard products. I perform comparative statics analysis with respect to the fraction of consumers interested in customization, the waiting costs, and the fixed cost of customization.
Are Drivers Who Use Cell Phones Inherently Less Safe

Mobile phone usage while driving is increasing throughout the world. In this paper, we use survey data from 7,268 U.S. drivers to estimate the relationship between mobile phone use while driving and accidents. We hypothesize that drivers who use mobile phones while driving may be more likely to get into accidents than drivers who do not, even when they are not using the phone. We find evidence for the endogeneity of mobile phone and hands-free device usage, and our analysis suggests that individuals who are more likely to use hands-free devices are more careful drivers even without them. Once we correct for the endogeneity of usage, our models predict no statistically significant increase in accidents from mobile phone usage, whether hand-held or hands-free. Our results call into question previous cost-benefit analyses of bans on mobile phone usage while driving, which typically assume that such bans will have a salutary effect. AEI-Brookings Joint Center Working Paper No. 07-10 http://ssrn.com/abstract=989808
Financial Markets and the Real Economy

Abstract I survey work on the intersection between macroeconomics and finance. The challenge is to find the right measure of “bad times,” rises in the marginal value of wealth, so that we can understand high average returns or low prices as compensation for assets' tendency to pay off poorly in “bad times.” I cover the time-series and cross-sectional facts, the equity premium, consumption-based models, general equilibrium models, and labor income/idiosyncratic risk approaches.
The effect of late-life debt use on retirement decisions

Abstract This paper examines parallel shifts in late life debt use and retirement behaviors. After discussing the conceptual linkages between credit and labor markets, I use data from the 1992 to 2008 waves of the Health and Retirement Study to examine the temporal patterning of retirement and debt behaviors. I rely on the longitudinal structure of the data to estimate the effects of debt accumulation on retirement behaviors, using alternative specifications to identify treatment and control groups. The findings suggest that debt accumulation in later life has a significant effect on decisions to remain in the workforce in later years.
High School Clubs Participation and Future Supervisory Status

This article examines the relationship between high school clubs participation and the probability that a worker will become a supervisor and the types of responsibility she will have, using the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth 1979 dataset. While other articles have tried to explain what affects a worker's probability of being a supervisor, this article focuses on the impact of participation in extracurricular activities during high school. Both probit and household fixed effects estimates show that clubs participation raises the probability that an individual will be a supervisor and have high-level supervisory responsibilities.
What if Alexander Hamilton had been Argentinean? A comparison of the early monetary experiences of Argentina and the United States

Abstract The contrast between the early nineteenth century Argentinean experience of high inflation and the American experience of low inflation is interpreted in terms of an optimal taxation model. It is argued that the two countries’ experiences diverged because of the different constraints they faced in financing wartime government expenditures. In the presence of frequent wars, ever-tightening access to foreign capital, and an inadequate tax base, Argentina's use of the inflation tax may be viewed as an optimal solution to its wartime problems. By contrast, with the exception of the Revolutionary War, the absence of such constraints in the United States required full-tax smoothing, with only a temporary use of the inflation tax during wartime. Such policies were embodied in Alexander Hamilton's fiscal package of 1790, which allowed the United States to bond-finance most subsequent wartime expenditures.
Ending Blind Spot Justice: Broadening the Transparency Trend in International Arbitration

The debate regarding the importance of transparency versus privacy and confidentiality in international arbitration is at a crossroads. On April 1, 2014, UNCITRAL's "ground-breaking" Rules on Transparency in Treaty-Based Investor-State Arbitration ("Transparency Rules") took effect. But the limited scope of the Transparency Rules leaves international commercial arbitration in the dark.Commentators and organizational proponents of the Transparency Rules, such as the Center for International Environmental Law ("CIEL"), suggest that there is a "public interest difference" between the system of investor-state arbitration (i.e. investment arbitration) and the system of international commercial arbitration. This difference is used to justify limiting the transparency trend in international arbitration to the system of investor-state arbitration because it involves disputes in which a state or state-owned-entity is a party. This paper challenges the legitimacy and sufficiency of the "public interest difference" as a rationale to determine that greater transparency is not required in the system of international commercial arbitration and it calls for the publication of non-sanitized arbitral awards. It also examines the privacy implications and, in hindsight, misguided rationale of the 1985 landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Mitsubishi Motors Corp. v. Soler Chrysler-Plymouth, Inc.
Hume's Standard of Taste and the De Gustibus Sceptic

In ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ Hume aspires to silence the ‘extravagant’ cavils of the anything-goes de gustibus sceptic by developing a programme of aesthetic education that would lead all properly-trained individuals to a set of agreed-upon aesthetic judgements. But I argue that if we read Hume's essay as an attempted direct theoretical refutation of de gustibus scepticism, Hume fails to achieve his aim. Moreover, although some recent commentators have read the essay as aiming at a less ambitious ‘sceptical solution’ to the de gustibus challenge, I argue that this ‘sceptical solution’ reading also fails to save Hume's project. Thus the anything-goes de gustibus sceptic remains unvanquished.
Propagation of Individual Bias through Group Judgment: Error in the Treatment of Asymmetrically Informative Signals

Group decision making is commonly used in juries, businesses, and in politics to increase the informational basis for a decision and to improve judgment accuracy. Recent work on generalizing Condercet's jury theorem provides a compelling justification for using groups in this manner. But these theories rely on a model of the individual as an optimal Bayesian decision maker. Do groups effectively aggregate information when the individuals are the flawed, non-Bayesian decision makers that actually populate acting groups? We first survey the evidence that individuals systematically violate Bayes' theorem under certain conditions. We then report two experiments designed to test whether individuals follow Bayesian reasoning and whether groups are able to overcome biased individual information processing. The experiments show that under certain conditions, with extreme probabilities and with signals that vary in diagnositicity, that individual accuracy actually deteriorates as information increases. For certain problems, majority rule effectively aggregates individual information. For the most difficult problems, majority rule fails to attenuate individual bias. The implications of these findings for research on individual and group judgment are discussed.
Robust causal inference under covariate shift via worst-case subpopulation treatment effects.

We propose the worst-case treatment effect (WTE) across all subpopulations of a given size, a conservative notion of topline treatment effect. Compared to the average treatment effect (ATE), whose validity relies on the covariate distribution of collected data, WTE is robust to unanticipated covariate shifts, and positive findings guarantee uniformly valid treatment effects over subpopulations. We develop a semiparametrically efficient estimator for the WTE, leveraging machine learning-based estimates of the heterogeneous treatment effect and propensity score. By virtue of satisfying a key (Neyman) orthogonality property, our estimator enjoys central limit behavior---oracle rates with true nuisance parameters---even when estimates of nuisance parameters converge at slower rates. For both randomized trials and observational studies, we establish a semiparametric efficiency bound, proving that our estimator achieves the optimal asymptotic variance. On real datasets where robustness to covariate shift is of core concern, we illustrate the non-robustness of ATE under even mild distributional shift, and demonstrate that the WTE guards against brittle findings that are invalidated by unanticipated covariate shifts.
The Supreme Court’s Last 30 Years of Federal Indian Law: Looking for Equilibrium or Supremacy?

For 187 years, Indian nations status in the United States has not been fully developed or consistently approached within the law. They are viewed as Domestic Dependent Nations located within the geographical boundaries of the United States. Although Chief Justice John Marshall acknowledged that Indian nations had a certain amount of sovereignty, the exact extent of such sovereignty as well as the place of tribes within the federal system has remained illdefined. This Article examines what has been the role of the Supreme Court in integrating Indian nations as the third Sovereign within our federalist system. The Article accomplishes this task by examining the Court’s Indian law record in the last 30 years. The comprehensive survey of Indian law decisions indicates that while the tribal win-loss record at the Supreme Court is improving, the Court has had difficulties upholding the federal policy of respecting tribal sovereignty and encouraging tribal self-government. After categorizing the cases between victories and losses, the Article divides the cases into categories for analytical purposes. The Second half of the Article focuses on the interaction between the Court and Congress concerning the incorporation of tribes as the third sovereign within the federalist system, and ends by arguing that through its disproportionate use of federal common law in its Indian law decisions, the Court has not attempted to reach a consensus with Congress about the place of Indian nations within our federalism.
A Fourth Amendment Framework for the Free Exercise Clause

This article proposes a paradigm for resolving disputes under the free exercise clause that is analogous to the framework used by the court under the fourth amendment when balancing privacy rights against investigatory powers of law enforcement. In its Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, the Court provides varying degrees of protection to privacy – and imposes different evidentiary requirements on law enforcement – depending on the context in which privacy is affected, the intrusiveness of a particular search, and the asserted governmental interests. For example, privacy receives the strongest protections in areas such as the home, thus requiring law enforcement to have probable cause and a warrant before conducting a search (unless an exception to the warrant requirement applies). In quasi-public spaces, such as a motor vehicle or a place of business, individuals have a reduced expectation of privacy that permits searches based on reasonable suspicion of unlawful conduct. In public spaces, such as open fields or sidewalks, citizens have little, if any, expectation of privacy, and law enforcement typically needs no suspicion whatsoever to observe objects that are placed in public view. The Court should adopt a similar framework such that the strength of a free exercise claim could vary depending on where, when, and how it is exercised. Specifically, the validity of a law interfering with religious liberty would depend on whether it:• Affects religious practices or beliefs;• Prohibits or compels conduct;• Directly or indirectly targets religious practices or beliefs;• Applies in the public or private arena; and • Advances valid and secular governmental interests.The tiered framework used in the Fourth Amendment context to balance privacy rights against the needs of law enforcement should be adopted to determine the strength of a free exercise claim in light of countervailing governmental interests. This approach would result in protections for religious liberty that are categorical in some instances and context-specific in others.
Electoral Verdicts Incumbent Defeats in State Supreme Court Elections

The election of judges has been an enduring, though controversial, institution. Although there have been many popular accounts of howthese elections are decided by factors irrelevant to a fair and impartial judiciary, recent scholarship has shown that electoral competition in races for the state high court bench can be understood in systematic ways. Yet, although we know the factors that can make races more or less competitive, we lack understanding of the factors that contribute to the electoral defeat of sitting justices. In this article, I examine the determinants of electoral defeat for all incumbent state supreme court justices who ran for reelection between 1990 and 2000. Contrary to the arguments of those who claim that judicial elections are decided in a random, nonsystematic manner, I find that the probability of an incumbent’s being defeated is based on characteristics of the candidates, the state and electoral context, and institutional arrangements.
Economic Factors Affecting Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Reporting

The release of the 2004-2005 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data raised a number of questions given the increase in the number and percentage of higher-priced home mortgage loans and continued differ...
Tailspotting: Identifying and profiting from CEO vacation trips

Abstract This paper shows connections between chief executive officers׳ (CEOs׳) absences from headquarters and corporate news disclosures. I identify CEO absences by merging records of corporate jet flights and CEOs׳ property ownership near leisure destinations. CEOs travel to their vacation homes just after companies report favorable news, and CEOs return to headquarters right before subsequent news releases. When CEOs are away, companies announce less news, mandatory disclosures occur later, and stock volatility falls sharply. Volatility increases when CEOs return to work. CEOs spend fewer days out of the office when ownership is high and when weather is bad at their vacation homes.
WHAT DO WE REALLY KNOW ABOUT EXPORT CARTELS AND WHAT IS THE APPROPRIATE SOLUTION

This article responds to Florian Becker's article in this journal, "The Case of Export Cartel Exemptions: Between Competition and Protectionism." Professor Becker provides a number of insights into various approaches that battling export cartels may take. I take issue with three of Becker's main themes. First, Becker underplays the importance of political economy issues in the creation and perpetuation of export cartel exceptions from antitrust. A public choice understanding of export cartels is critical to formulating any effective remedy for export cartels. Second, Becker assumes that export cartels are hard-core cartels and that they are a serious problem in international antitrust. In fact, there is very little empirical data on export cartels and nearly all of it comes from the United States. Therefore, it is difficult to say with any great certainty whether export cartels are a problem and how serious a problem they are. Third, Becker ignores the role that international organizations such as the OECD and ICN can play to reduce the effects of export cartels. After surveying different possible solutions, I propose a WTO transparency regime to address export cartels more effectively.
The First Sale Doctrine and the Economics of Post-Sale Restraints

The first sale doctrine limits the exclusive rights that survive the initial authorized sale of an item protected by intellectual property (IP) rights, and therefore limits the ability of IP owners to impose post-sale restraints on the distribution or use of items embodying their IP. While the doctrine has deep common law and statutory roots, its exact rationale and scope have never been fully explored and articulated. As a result, the law remains somewhat unsettled, in particular with respect to the ability of IP owners to opt-out of the doctrine and with respect to the applicability of the doctrine to situations of parallel importation. This Article provides answers to these unsettled issues. By applying insights from the economics of post-sale restraints, the Article shows that the main benefits of postsale restraints involve situations of imperfect vertical integration between coproducing or collaborating firms, which occur during the production and distribution phases or shortly thereafter. In such situations, opting out of the first sale doctrine should be permitted. Beyond such limited circumstances, however, the first sale doctrine promotes important social and economic goals: it promotes efficient long-term use and preservation of goods embodying IP and * Associate Professor, Innovation Chair–Electronic Commerce, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. This Article is based on a paper given at the Exhaustion and First Sale in IP Symposium, High Tech Law Institute, Santa Clara Law School, Nov. 5, 2010, at the 2011 Intellectual Property Scholars Conference, and the 2012 Next Generation of Antitrust Scholarship Conference. I wish to thank Eric Goldman, Mark Lemley, Mark McKenna, Anne Layne-Farrar, Mark Patterson, Steven Edwards, and other symposium participants for their valuable comments and insights, as well as to thank Norman Siebrasse, and my colleagues Peggy Radin, Abraham Drassinower, Ed Iacobucci, and Michael Trebilcock for their advice. Special thanks go to Michael Laskey and Nicholas Van Exan for their superb research assistance. DO NOT DELETE 5/5/2014 3:43 PM BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW 2014 56 facilitates user-innovation. Therefore, contrary to some other views, I conclude that the economics of post-sale restraints confirm the validity and support the continued vitality of the first sale doctrine.
An examination of work-life balance perspectives of accountants

Finding the balance between career and personal life has always been a challenge for working people. Work-life balance refers to people spending sufficient time at their jobs while also spending adequate time on other pursuits, such as family, hobbies, and community involvement. This study addresses two research questions. The first examines the importance people place on work-life balance. The second considers whether gender differences are associated with work-life balance. Data for analysis was obtained via a survey of future accountants (students near graduation); results indicate that work-life balance is very important in career decisions. Findings reveal that a healthy work-life balance is associated with job satisfaction, job performance, and ethical decision-making. Maslow’s hierarchy theory and McClelland’s motivational needs theory provide theoretical support for understanding people’s motivation to achieve a healthy work-life balance. Gender theory and related research provide theoretical supp...
Does housing assistance perversely affect self-sufficiency? A review essay

Abstract This essay reviews the evidence on indirect effects of housing assistance in the US on the self-sufficiency of assisted families. The primary issue is whether housing assistance perversely undermines the upward mobility of families. I find the following: Housing assistance is not persuasively associated with any effect on employment. Evidence on human capital accumulation remains conflicting and fragmentary. However, a strong association with single-adult household formation exists. The project-basing of assistance distorts the neighborhood choice of at least 9 or 15% of households in high-poverty housing projects, depending on the counterfactual; early experimental results suggest significant adverse consequences for the lives of boys.
From social hostility to social media : religious pluralism, human rights and democratic reform in Africa

This article examines the new terrain of religious freedom and human rights in Africa, with particular attention to the role of social hostilities in restricting religions. In the current environment of 'post-secularism' and the global resurgence of religion, the relationship between government restrictions and social hostilities is particularly complex in Africa, in light of the high degree of religiosity and the notably-intertwined relationship of religion, culture, politics and law, in marked contrast to the secularist and separationist paradigms that prevail in Europe and North America. Paradoxically, though the restrictions on religious freedom in many African nations stem from or have been exacerbated by social hostilities, including pernicious and inflammatory uses of social media, solutions to social hostilities may depend a great deal on empowering religious and civil society groups in the creative and constructive use of social media to change the normative perceptions, attitudes and values that underlie successful constitutional and democratic reform. Indeed, some of these creative uses of social media are already happening, but are threatened by crackdowns on freedom of expression and social media by the state. This article examines uses of social media both to inflame and to reduce social hostilities in recent elections and constitutional referenda in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia and argues the need for a 'socio-legal' paradigm for understanding both perceptions of religious hostilities and religious human rights claims in their full social, political and cultural context.
What Drives Racial and Ethnic Differences in High-Cost Mortgages? The Role of High-Risk Lenders

This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in high-cost mortgage lending in seven diverse metropolitan areas from 2004 to 2007. Controlling for credit score and other risk factors, African American and Hispanic borrowers are 103% and 78% more likely to receive high-cost mortgages for home purchases. A large part of the increase is attributable to sorting across lenders (55%-65%), and this, in turn, can be largely accounted for by the lender’s ex post foreclosure risk. The remaining within-lender differences are also concentrated in high-risk lenders, revealing the central role of these institutions in explaining market-wide racial and ethnic differences. Received December, 17 2014; editorial decision January 20, 2017 by Editor Philip Strahan.
The Value Relevance of Revenue for Internet Firms: Does Reporting Grossed‐up or Barter Revenue Make a Difference?

This study provides evidence on (a) the market’s response to revenue and revenue announcements, (b) the extent of the use of grossed-up and barter revenue by Internet firms, and (c) whether the value relevance of revenue differs when Internet firms report grossed-up or barter revenue. Results indicate that revenue announcements are highly associated with three-day market returns and provide information incremental to that contained in earnings announcements. The use of grossed-up and barter revenue is common for certain sectors of Internet firms, but not pervasive across sectors. Evidence suggests that the value relevance of revenue for firms reporting grossed-up and barter revenue declined subsequent to the “crash” in April 2000. Additional analyses explore the effect of active individual investors on the pricing of revenue for firms reporting grossed-up and barter revenue. Findings suggest higher pricing of revenue for firms reporting grossed-up or barter revenue with relatively greater individual investor following.
Adversarial No More: How Sua Sponte Assertion of Affirmative Defenses to Habeas Wreaks Havoc on the Rules of Civil Procedure

178 Introduction 179 I. Habeas Corpus: Substantively Unique, Procedurally Unremarkable 182 II. Affirmative Defenses: What They Are, and How They Are Pled 184 A. Affirmative Defenses Under the Federal Rules 184 B. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(c)’s Affirmative Defense Pleading Standard 186 C. Rule 8(c) Is A Waiver Rule With No Exceptions 187 III. Sua Sponte Action: When Courts Raise Claims and Defenses Normally Raised by the Parties 190 IV. The Special Concern of Habeas Cases: Raising Affirmative Defenses to Defeat a Petitioner’s Application to Be Freed 192 A. Granberry v. Greer: Appellate Courts May Raise Exhaustion Sua Sponte 193 B. Caspari v. Bohlen: Federal Courts May Raise Nonretroactivity Sua Sponte 196 * Assistant Corporation Counsel, Special Federal Litigation Division, New York City Law Department. I would like to thank the talented and patient editors of the Oregon Law Review for their careful work on this article. I would also like thank my wonderful husband Tom Nolan, who proofreads draft after draft, and finds something nice to say with each new read. Finally, many thanks to my mother-in-law Mary Beth Nolan for her unwavering support and love.
Can a workplace have an attitude problem? Workplace effects on employee attitudes and organizational performance

Abstract Using the employee opinion survey responses from several thousand employees working in 193 branches of a major U.S. bank, we consider whether there is a distinctive workplace component to employee attitudes despite the common set of corporate human resource management practices that cover all the branches. Several different empirical tests consistently point to the existence of a systematic branch-specific component to employee attitudes. “Branch effects” can also explain why a significant positive cross-sectional correlation between branch-level employee attitudes and branch sales performance is not observed in longitudinal fixed-effects sales models. The results of our empirical tests concerning the determinants of employee attitudes and the determinants of branch sales are consistent with an interpretation that workplace-specific factors lead to better outcomes for both employees and the bank, and that these factors are more likely to be some aspect of the branches' internal operations rather than some characteristic of the external market of the branch.
Government Spending, Interest Rates, Prices, and Budget Deficits in the United Kingdom, 1701-1918

Abstract The British data from the early 1700s through WWI provide an unmatched opportunity for studying temporary changes in government purchases. Temporary increases, which appeared mainly as wartime spending, raised long-term interest rates, but significantly increased the growth rates of money and prices only during suspensions of the gold standard (1797–1821 and 1914–1918). Temporary changes in military spending accounted for the bulk of budget deficits; over the sample of more than 200 years, I found only two major non-war deficits — one associated with compensation payments to slaveowners in 1835–1936 and the other with a dispute over the income tax in 1909–1910. Interest rates did not react much to these ‘exogenous’ deficits.
Value of public information in sender–receiver games

I find in two classes of sender–receiver games that the receiver’s equilibrium payoff is not increasing in the informativeness of a public signal because the sender may transmit less information when the public signal is more informative.
Affiliated mutual funds and the allocation of initial public offerings

Abstract We examine how investment banks use initial public offerings (IPOs) in relation to their affiliated mutual funds. The dumping ground hypothesis predicts that the lead underwriter allocates cold IPOs to its affiliated funds so that more deals can be completed when demand for these IPOs is weak. Affiliated funds could also receive more cold IPOs because the lead underwriter uses allocations of hot IPOs to unaffiliated funds to gain trading commission business. The nepotism hypothesis predicts that the lead underwriter allocates hot IPOs to its affiliated funds to boost their performance and thus attract more money. We find little evidence supporting the dumping ground hypothesis, although some evidence supports the nepotism hypothesis, especially during the internet bubble period of 1999–2000.
The Divergence of High- and Low-Frequency Estimation: Implications for Performance Measurement

The Sharpe ratio is the most widely used metric for comparing performance across investment managers and strategies, and the information ratio is as commonly used to evaluate performance relative to a benchmark. Although it is widely recognized that non-linearities arising from the inclusion of options or the deployment of dynamic trading rules may distort these performance metrics, most analysts are unaware of another, perhaps more serious source of distortion. Most analysts, either consciously or unthinkingly, assume that standard deviations scale with the square root of time and correlations are invariant to estimation intervals. These assumptions are not supported by evidence. Instead, non-zero lagged auto- and cross-correlations render these performance metrics highly sensitive to the return intervals used to estimate them. As a consequence, an investment manager who appears in the top quartile based on performance metrics estimated from monthly returns may appear in the bottom quartile within the same measurement period and universe based on the same performance metrics estimated from longer-horizon returns. Of particular note, the popular investment strategy known as risk parity, contrary to prior evidence, is shown to have significantly underperformed a 60/40 stock and bond portfolio when accounting for lagged auto- and cross-correlations. Finally, evidence reported in the article suggest that high-frequency variability arises from changes in discount rates, whereas low-frequency variability is related to differences in cash flows.
IMPLEMENTATION OF MONETARY POLICY: HOW DO CENTRAL BANKS SET INTEREST RATES?

Abstract Central banks no longer set the short-term interest rates that they use for monetary policy purposes by manipulating the supply of banking system reserves, as in conventional economics textbooks; this process normally involves little or no variation in the supply of central bank liabilities. In effect, the announcement effect has displaced the liquidity effect as the fulcrum of monetary policy implementation. The chapter begins with an exposition of the traditional view of the implementation of monetary policy, and an assessment of the relationship between the quantity of reserves, appropriately defined, and the level of short-term interest rates. Event studies show no relationship between the two for the United States, the Euro-system, or Japan. Structural estimates of banks' reserve demand, at a frequency corresponding to the required reserve maintenance period, show no interest elasticity for the U.S. or the Euro-system (but some elasticity for Japan). The chapter next develops a model of the overnight interest rate setting process incorporating several key features of current monetary policy practice, including in particular reserve averaging procedures and a commitment, either explicit or implicit, by the central bank to lend or absorb reserves in response to differences between the policy interest rate and the corresponding target. A key implication is that if reserve demand depends on the difference between current and expected future interest rates, but not on the current level per se, then the central bank can alter the market-clearing interest rate with no change in reserve supply. This implication is borne out in structural estimates of daily reserve demand and supply in the U.S.: expected future interest rates shift banks' reserve demand, while changes in the interest rate target are associated with no discernable change in reserve supply. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implementation of monetary policy during the recent financial crisis, and the conditions under which the interest rate and the size of the central bank's balance sheet could function as two independent policy instruments.
A Comparative Study of the Forecasting Performance of Three International Organizations

This article evaluates and compares the forecasting performance of three international organizations: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The annual forecasts made by the United Nations in the period of 1981-2011 are found to be fairly robust, in terms of bias and efficiency. In comparison, the forecasting performance of the United Nations is found to be marginally better than the other two organizations during the period of 2000-2012. However, the forecasts of all these organizations missed the Great Recession of 2009 by a large margin.
Frozen in Time: The State Action Doctrine's Application to Amateur Sports

The state action doctrine has as its central goal the preservation of liberty by limiting the intrusion of the government into the "private" sphere. It achieves this by applying the Constitution only to government, and not private, action. Traditionally, amateur sports regulators such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) have been viewed by courts as private. As a result, this article explains that courts generally give great deference to amateur sports organizations such as the NCAA and USOC to regulate sports with little judicial interference, including in the area of constitutional litigation. This deference is manifest in the Supreme Court's decisions, during the late 1980's, that the NCAA and the USOC are private, and not state, actors. This article makes the claim that these decisions have had important and un-intended consequences that warrant a re-examination of the application of the state action doctrine in the amateur sports context. The most significant consequence is that a static conception of the nature of the NCAA and the USOC, and the government's relationship to them, has developed, so that the NCAA and the USOC are thought to be private actors as a matter of law. As a result, these decisions have produced the paradoxical result whereby the government has been virtually invited to exercise far more state power in what was traditionally a private area. This exercise of state power goes largely unchecked, and I argue this is to the detriment of amateur athletes, a significant number of whom are African-American. Moreover, this static conception of the NCAA and USOC, and the government power exercised through them, has chilled litigation on the issue and perpetuated the perception that the NCAA and the USOC exploit amateur athletes. This article argues that because of these consequences, the Supreme Court should no longer give deference to amateur athletic regulators on the state action issue, as there is a strong case that state power, now more than ever, is exercised through our most important amateur sports institutions.