cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Economic Value of Online User Reviews with Ad Spending on Movie Box-Office Sales

Our objective in this paper is to assess the values of online user reviews for movies compared with the sales impact of post-release ad spending for movies. We use weekly box-office sales and ad spending data for 304 movies released in the U.S. along with online ratings and user characteristics from a social network site for movies. By exploiting the fixed-effects two-stage instrumental variable approach to account for movie heterogeneity and simultaneous relationships among user reviews, ad spending and sales, we found that improving the volume and valence of ratings can have the equivalent effect that ad spending can provide.
Hemispheres Apart, a Profession Connected

In recent years, a number of scholars have built upon the bifurcated nature of the legal profession with proposals to relax professional regulation in just one of the profession’s hemispheres. Some advocate a relaxation of unauthorized practice rules in the personal services hemisphere to increase competition, decrease prices, and make legal services more accessible to all segments of the population. Others propose a relaxation of particular client protections in the corporate hemisphere to honor client autonomy and choice. In this essay, I explore the unintended and problematic consequences of these proposals. I argue that although scholars advocating the two sets of changes have divergent goals and motivations, their proposals suffer from a common flaw — they fail to account for the extent and significance of linkages that connect the profession’s hemispheres. Focusing on these linkages, I argue that proposals to relax regulation along the profession’s existing structural contours threaten to exaggerate and entrench wealth and power disparities in the profession and in society at large.
Electronic commerce and free speech

For commercial purveyors of digital speech, information and entertainment, the biggest threat posed by the Internet isn‘t the threat of piracy, but the threat posed by free speech -- speech that doesn‘t cost any money. Free speech has the potential to squeeze out expensive speech. A glut of high quality free stuff has the potential to run companies in the business of selling speech out of business. We haven‘t had to worry about this before, because speaking in a meaningful way to a large audience was expensive, and people couldn‘t afford to do serious mass speaking for free for very long. The Internet has made it much cheaper. It doesn‘t take much to give out information to the whole world, every day, for free, for years. And people do. If we are trying to increase the abundant dissemination of information, free speech is good. If we are trying to increase commerce in information, free speech is arguably bad, in that it competes with pay speech. Information merchants would obviously prefer that the only speech in the marketplace be pay speech. In the past two years, commercial content owners have scored significant progress in herding free speakers off the Net. There‘s an important synergy between persuading the government to give your industry some friendly new laws or regulations, and using new and old legal tools to make life more difficult or expensive for inconvenient competitors who aren‘t necessarily doing anything illegal. Recently, businesses have been able to combine the two strategies to make the Internet a much safer place to sell speech, by making the Internet a less friendly, more dangerous place to give away speech for free.
The Third Way: Beyond Shareholder or Board Primacy

In this Article, I have both a descriptive and a normative claim about corporate governance. As a descriptive matter, I believe that we in the United States and, indeed, perhaps worldwide, find ourselves in an unusual and potentially pivotal moment in the intellectual history of corporate law theory and doctrine. As a normative matter, I believe we should use this moment to adjust corporate governance so as to situate corporations more dynamically within a broader social, political, and economic context. The descriptive claim is based on a judgment, shared by some others, that there is more openness to revisiting the core questions about what corporations are, to whom they owe obligations, and how best to conceptualize them and their regulation than at any time in a generation. This moment has been engendered because of the increasing skepticism the public is showing toward corporations and the people who manage them. The skepticism springs from shocks in the economic and political fields that revealed the risks of unbridled corporate power, shorttermism, managerial opportunism, and shareholder (read Wall Street) supremacy. To paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, one never wants such a moment to go to waste. 1 The question, of course, is what to do with such an oppor-
Intellectual Property in the Context of e‐Science

E-science promises to allow globally-distributed collaboration and access to scientific research via computer networks, but e-science development is already encountering difficulty over the intellectual property rights associated with data and networked collaborative activity. The proprietary nature of intellectual property is generally problematic in the practice of science, but such difficulties are likely to be exacerbated in the context of e-science collaboration where the development and use of intellectual resources will likely be distributed among many researchers in a variety of physical locations, often spanning national boundaries. While a potential solution to such problems may reside in the mechanism of “open source” licenses, the organizational structure of scientific research may not map cleanly onto the open source model. Consequently, a firm understanding of not only the technical structure but of the social and communicative structure of e-science will be necessary in order to adapt licensing solutions to the practice of e-science.
Federalism, taxation, and economic growth

Abstract We present a model of endogenous growth where government provides a productive public good financed by income and capital taxes. In equilibrium, a decentralized government chooses tax policy to maximize economic growth, while a centralized government does not do so. Furthermore, these conclusions hold regardless of whether governments are beholden to a median voter or are rent-maximizing Leviathans. However, a decentralized government will under-provide public goods which benefit citizens directly, while a central government beholden to the median voter will optimally invest in such public goods.
Blogging and the Transformation of Legal Scholarship

Does blogging have anything to do with legal scholarship? Could blogging transform the legal academy? This paper suggests that these are the wrong questions. Blogs have plenty to do with legal scholarship - that's obvious. But what blogs have to do with legal scholarship isn't driven by anything special about blogs qua weblogs, qua collections of web pages that share the form of a journal or log. The relationship between blogging and the future of legal scholarship is a product of other forces - the emergence of the short form, the obsolesce of exclusive rights, and the trend towards the disintermediation of legal scholarship. Those forces and their relationship to blogging will be the primary focus of this paper. The transition from the "long form" to the "short form" involves movement from very long law review articles and multivolume treatises to new forms of legal scholarship, including the blog post, the idea piece, and the use of collaborative online authoring environments such as wikis. The transition from exclusive rights to open source requires publication in formats that provide full text searchability and the use of copyright to insure that scholarship can be freely downloaded and duplicated. The trend toward disintermediation reflects the diminished role of traditional intermediaries such as student and peer editorial boards and the growing role of search engines such as Google. These trends are the result of technology change and the fundamental forces that drive legal scholarship. Each of the three trends, the short form, open access, and disintermediation reduces search costs and access costs to legal scholarship. Reducing costs has other important implications, including the facilitation of the globalization of legal scholarship and the reduction of lag times between the production and full-scale dissemination of new scholarship. Each of these important trends is facilitated by blogs and blogging, but the blog or weblog is only one form that these trends can take. Blogs express and facilitate the fundamental forces that are already transforming legal scholarship in fundamental ways.
CEO optimism and the board's choice of successor

Abstract Research suggests that boards of directors select CEOs using signals of ability. However, little is known about how boards determine the combination of attributes that constitute a ‘good’ CEO, especially attributes without an ex ante clear impact on managerial quality, such as CEO optimism. I argue that boards will learn the optimal level of such attributes more quickly from past success, and empirical results support this. Boards, particularly those with high reputation/independence, are significantly more likely to select a moderately optimistic (optimal) successor following a moderately optimistic CEO departure. Robustness checks rule out alternate explanations and support this conclusion.
Strategic Decisions of New Technology Adoption under Asymmetric Information: A Game‐Theoretic Model*

In this paper we explore strategic decision making in new technology adoption by using economic analysis. We show how asymmetric information affects firms' decisions to adopt the technology. We do so in a two-stage game-theoretic model where the first-stage investment results in the acquisition of a new technology that, in the second stage, may give the firm a competitive advantage in the product market. We compare two information structures under which two competing firms have asymmetric information about the future performance (i.e., postadoption costs) of the new technology. We find that equilibrium strategies under asymmetric information are quite different from those under symmetric information. Information asymmetry leads to different incentives and strategic behaviors in the technology adoption game. In contrast to conventional wisdom, our model shows that market uncertainty may actually induce firms to act more aggressively under certain conditions. We also show that having better information is not always a good thing. These results illustrate a key departure from established decision theory.
Idiosyncratic Risk Matters

This paper takes a new look at the predictability of stock market returns with risk measures. We ¢nd a signi¢cant positive relation between average stock variance (largely idiosyncratic) and the return on the market. In contrast, the variance of the market has no forecasting power for the market return. These relations persist after we control for macroeconomic variables known to forecast the stock market. The evidence is consistent with models of timevarying risk premia based on background risk and investor heterogeneity. Alternatively, our ¢ndings can be justi¢ed by the option value of equity in the capital structure of the ¢rms. MOSTASSET PRICING MODELS, starting with Merton’s (1973) ICAPM, suggest a positive relation between risk and return for the aggregate stock market. There is a long empirical literature that has tried to establish the existence of such a tradeoi between risk and return for stock market indices. 1 Unfortunately, the results have been inconclusive. Often the relation between risk and return has been found insigni¢cant, and sometimes even negative. The innovation in this paper is to look at average stock risk in addition to market risk.We measure average stock risk in each month similarly to Campbell et al. (2001; hereafter CLMX), as the cross-sectional average of the variances of all the stocks traded in that month.We then run predictive regressions of market returns on this variance measure as well as the variance of the market. Consistent with some previous studies, we ¢nd that market variance has no forecasting power for the market return. However, we do ¢nd a signi¢cant positive relation between average stock variance and the return on the market.
POLITICAL COMPETITION WITH CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS AND INFORMATIVE ADVERTISING

This paper presents a theory of political competition with campaign contributions and informative political advertising. Policy-motivated parties compete by selecting candidates and interest groups provide contributions to enhance the electoral prospects of like-minded candidates. Contributions are used to finance advertising campaigns that provide voters with information about candidates' ideologies. Voters update their beliefs rationally given the information they have received. The paper uses the theory to analyze the welfare economics of contribution limits. Such limits are shown to redistribute welfare from ordinary citizens to members of interest groups. (JEL: D72, H40)
Fracking in Louisiana: The Missing Process/Land Use Distinction in State Preemption and Opportunities for Local Participation

In most major oil and gas producing states the boundary separating preempted state jurisdiction from permissible local regulation has been drawn between the process of drilling, completing, and operating a well, on the one hand, and land use, on the other hand. Even the recently adopted Texas and Oklahoma preemption statutes retain at least some local government authority to regulate the location of wells through commercially reasonable setbacks and zoning restrictions. The Louisiana oil and gas preemption statute is more restrictive. By its plain language it prohibits local governments from exercising virtually any authority over the location of wells through traditional zoning and land use powers. Opponents of oil and gas drilling argue that this lack of a boundary between process and land use leaves the local citizenry without a meaningful voice in the oil and gas drilling process and conflicts with Louisiana’s tradition of local home rule and zoning power. This article argues for a balance that vests ultimate siting authority in the state, but allows local governments a meaningful right to participate in the state regulatory permitting process. Granting a veto right to local government conflicts with the state’s interests and statutory mandate to prevent waste and protect correlative rights that is fulfilled in large part by controlling the location of wells. At the same time, a recent victory by a Louisiana town signals how the Louisiana Constitution might be applied to ensure more local participation in the issuance of permits without compromising final state decision-making authority.
The Function of Article V

What good is Article V? The Constitution’s amendment rule renders the text inflexible, countermajoritarian, and insensitive to important contemporary constituencies. Comparative empirical studies, moreover, show that textual rigidity is not only rare in other countries’ organic documents but highly correlated with constitutional failure. To promote our Constitution’s survival and to counteract Article V’s ‘dead hand’ effect, commentators argue, Americans have turned to informal amendment through the courts or ‘super’ statutes. Article V, the conventional wisdom goes, is a dead letter. Against this pervasive skepticism, I propose that Article V instead played an important but hitherto unrecognized function in the early Republic. Article V mitigated a ‘hold up’ dilemma that could have precluded ratification and undermined the new Constitution’s stability. By hindering strategic deployment of textual amendment, Article V-induced rigidity fostered a virtuous circle of investment in new institutions such as political parties and financial infrastructure. Recognition of Article V’s role in the early Republic leads to a more nuanced view of the Constitution’s amendatory regime. In effect, we have a two-speed Constitution— with Article V-induced rigidity at the inception supplemented gradually over time by informal judicial or statutory amendment protocols. * Assistant Professor of Law, University of Chicago. I am indebted to Anthony Casey, Ros Dixon, Michael Dorf, David Fontana, Tom Ginsburg, Mark Graber, David Law, Sanford Levinson, Miguel Schor, and Mila Versteeg for their terrific and thoughtful comments and criticisms, as well as to participants in workshops at the University of Wisconsin Law School and Drake Law School, who gave useful feedback. Mishan Wroe provided her usual terrfic research assistance, for which I am exceedingly grateful. I am also pleased to acknowledge the support of the Frank Cicero, Jr. Faculty Fund. All errors, textually entrenched and otherwise, are mine alone.
The Dynamics of Firm Lobbying

How is economic policy made? In this paper we study a key determinant of the answer to the question: lobbying by firms. Estimating a binary choice model of firm behavior, we find significant evidence for the idea that barriers to entry induce persistence in lobbying. The existence of these costs is further confirmed in studying how firms responded to a particular policy change: the expiration of legislation relating to the H-1B visa. Due to its influence on firm behavior, we argue that this persistence fundamentally changes the environment in which legislation is made. (JEL D22, D72, D78, L21) L obbying is a primary avenue through which firms attempt to change economic policy in the United States, with total expenditures far outnumbering contributions to political action committees (PACs ). While lobbying by businesses is a frequently debated issue in popular discourse, there is little systematic empirical evidence on these behaviors at the firm level. Estimating a model of firm behavior on a newly constructed dataset on firms’ lobbying expenditures and operations, we find evidence that barriers to entry induce persistence in lobbying across a number of different econometric approaches. These findings are further confirmed in studying firms’ behavior in response to the decline in H-1B visas that occurred in 2004. We hope that our findings will help guide future work in political economy and inform debates over the role of large corporations in influencing policy decisions. Prior empirical work on firm participation in the policy making process has suffered significantly from data constraints. Most of the available evidence that we do have comes from data on campaign contributions. 1 These contributions often come from PACs, which can be set up and organized by firms but which must raise money
Applying Apprendi to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines: You Say You Want a Revolution?

In Apprendi v. New Jersey, the Supreme Court held that any fact, other than a prior conviction, that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the prescribed statutory maximum must be found by a jury and by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The Court therefore reversed Apprendi's sentence, which had been enhanced during the sentencing phase when the judge found him guilty of a hate crime. This article explores the Court's formalistic attempt to limit its holding only to situations where the enhanced sentence is "above the statutory maximum," as opposed to Justice Thomas's view that the theory should more generally require jury decisions about aggravating facts. In particular, the article analyzes arguments for applying the rationale of Apprendi to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which generally operate within a statutory maximum but share many of the problems Apprendi addresses. The Guidelines commit a wide range of factual decisions that may increase sentences dramatically to the sentencing phase, where these facts are decided by a judge under a less demanding standard of proof than proof beyond reasonable doubt. Using Apprendi as a microcosm of issues that have preoccupied the Court in recent debates over constitutional interpretation, the article comments on the Court's use of history in Apprendi, and then discusses the history of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. The author, who has previously criticized the Court's positivistic approach to deciding when people convicted of crimes may claim procedural protection attaching to decisions about how long they will be incarcerated, applies that critique here, criticizing the Court's formulation of the right in question, which allows the scope of rights to be determined by legislative drafting decisions. Finally, the article explores what an alternative functional approach to the right to jury trial might look like. Using the Federal Sentencing Guidelines as a focal point, the article discusses the questions Apprendi raises about the extent to which the jury will function as a second locus of democratic input into the criminal justice system. A majority of the Court in Apprendi embraced a potentially revolutionary, idealistic view of the jury, while Justice Breyer in dissent, argued for a pragmatic approach to the criminal justice system, relying on the judgments of professional decision-makers who are not politically or democratically accountable: the professionals of the Sentencing Commission, and career sentencing judges as opposed to lay juries. The future scope of Apprendi will depend on how seriously the Court wishes to champion the role of the jury. Apprendi has already led to thousands of lower court cases trying to determine its scope, virtually none of which has found the theory of Apprendi to apply to the Guidelines. If the Court does decide to apply the theory of Apprendi to the Guidelines, that decision will be revolutionary; if not, Apprendi's theory can be easily avoided by legislatures in drafting their statutes and the purported revolution will fizzle.
U.S. interest rates and the exchange value of the dollar: A test of causality

This study examines the causal relationship between interset rates and the exchange value of the dollar using Granger causality tests. Cointegration tests show that error correction models are not necessary in this case. The results suggest that the combination of short- and long-term U.S. interest rates, in nominal or real terms, Granger cause the exchange value of the dollar, and that the difference between nominal domestic and foreign rates does not Granger cause the exchange value of the dollar. This result supports the proposition that budget deficits contribute to trade deficits.
Why Power Companies Build Nuclear Reactors on Fault Lines: The Case of Japan

On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and thirty-eight-meter high tsunami destroyed Tokyo Electric’s Fukushima nuclear power complex. The disaster was not a high-damage, low-probability event. It was a high-damage, high-probability event. Massive earthquakes and tsunamis assault the coast every century. Tokyo Electric built its reactors as it did because it would not pay the full cost of a meltdown anyway. Given the limited liability at the heart of corporate law, it could externalize the cost of running reactors. In most industries, firms rarely risk tort damages so enormous they cannot pay them. In nuclear power, “unpayable” potential liability is routine. Privately owned companies bear the costs of an accident only up to the fire-sale value of their net assets. Beyond that, they pay nothing — and the damages from a nuclear disaster easily soar past that point. Government ownership could eliminate this moral hazard — but it would replace it with problems of its own. Unfortunately, the electoral dynamics in wealthy modern democracies combine to replicate nearly perfectly the moral hazard inherent in private ownership. Private firms will build reactors on fault lines — but so will governments.
Bank involvement with SMEs : beyond relationship lending

Abstract The “conventional wisdom” in academic and policy circles argues that, while large and foreign banks are generally not interested in serving SMEs, small and niche banks have an advantage because they can overcome SME opaqueness through relationship lending. This paper shows that there is a gap between this view and what banks actually do. Banks perceive SMEs as a core and strategic business and seem well-positioned to expand their links with SMEs. The intensification of bank involvement with SMEs in various emerging markets is neither led by small or niche banks nor highly dependent on relationship lending. Moreover, it has not been derailed by the 2007–2009 crisis. Rather, all types of banks are catering to SMEs and large, multiple-service banks have a comparative advantage in offering a wide range of products and services on a large scale, through the use of new technologies, business models, and risk management systems.
Inventory-based versus Prior-based Options Trading Agents

Options are a basic, widely-traded form of financial derivative that offer payouts based on the future price of an underlying asset. The finance literature gives us option-trading algorithms that take into consideration information about how prices move over time but do not explicitly involve the trades the agent made in the past. In contrast, the prediction market literature gives us automated market-making agents (like the popular LMSR) that are event-independent and price trades based only on the inventories the agent holds. We simulate the performance of five trading agents inspired by these literatures on a large database of recent historical option prices. We find that a combination of the two approaches produced the best results in our experiments: a trading agent that keeps track of previously-made trades combined with a good prior distribution on how prices move over time. The experimental success of this synthesized trader has implications for agent design in both financial and prediction markets.
Bilateral Oligopoly, Private Information, and Pollution Permit Markets

We analyze the effects of strategic behavior and private information in pollution permit markets in which all firms have market power. The market is characterized by supply-function equilibria. Firms submit net supplies for permits and a market maker determines the market-clearing price. Net supplies depend on abatement cost functions, which in turn depend on private information parameters. We calculate the increase in aggregate abatement costs due to strategic behavior and private information and show that private information attenuates the effects of strategic behavior.
How streetcars shaped suburbanization: a Granger causality analysis of land use and transit in the Twin Cities

This article presents a Granger causality analysis of the coupled development of population and streetcars in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul Historic residence and network data were assembled for 1900‐1930, and linear crosssectional time-series models were estimated at both a tract and block level using these data. It is found that, in contrast with transportation systems that were expanded in response to increased demand, the rapid expansion of the streetcar system during the electric era has been driven by other forces and to a large extent led land development in the Twin Cities. The main forces that have driven this process include technological superiority, monopoly, close connections with real estate business and people’s reliance on the streetcar for mobility. Proximity to the streetcar is found to be a crucial factor that determines the distribution and development of residences: it is observed that residential density declines with the distance from streetcar lines, and significantly drops beyond a walkable distance; it is also observed that gaining a closer access to streetcar lines within 800m (about a half mile) predicts the increase in residential density to a significant extent.
Pivotal Buyers and Bargaining Position

Securing sales to a large buyer can be pivotal to a supplier's decision to produce. While conventional wisdom suggests that being pivotal improves a buyer's bargaining position, the opposite is shown in a multilateral bargaining model. If other buyers' payments fall short of costs, a pivotal buyer must cover the shortfall or forfeit consumption. This affords leverage that the supplier lacks when bargaining with non-pivotal buyers. The analysis illuminates contracting in markets with high fixed costs, such as cable television programming, motion pictures, and large-scale project finance, and has implications for the FCC's horizontal ownership limits on cable system operators.
Policy risk, corporate political strategies, and the cost of debt

Abstract We examine how political geography affects firms' cost of debt. Local policy risk, measured by proximity to political power reflected in firms' position in the country's political map, is positively related to firms' cost of debt. Employing a difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD) estimation around presidential elections, we find that firms headquartered in states that become more aligned with the president after elections are exposed to more policy risk and thus incur higher yield spreads. Firms can manage policy risk by engaging in corporate political strategies. Consistent with the view that such political strategies protect firms against uncertainty about future policies, we find policy risk has less of an impact on a firm's cost of debt when the firm makes more PAC contributions or spends more money on lobbying.
Capital markets valuation and accounting performance of Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise (MAKE) award winners

Researchers have used the stock price reaction to firms' disclosures of investment in information technology to investigate the value of those investments. This paper extends that research to include knowledge management (KM). In particular, we test whether and how KM is valued by market participants by examining the stock market reaction and future performance of companies receiving the "Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise" (MAKE) award, which recognizes companies that excel at KM. MAKE awards are generated based on opinions gathered from experts using the Delphi method, a well-known group decision support tool. We find that MAKE winners: (1) experience positive abnormal returns around the award announcement, (2) report superior operating performance relative to their peers subsequent to the receipt of the award, (3) receive upward analyst forecast revisions following the award, (4) experience a positive upward stock price drift following the award, and (5) that the market has taken time to learn how to process and interpret information useful in valuing KM. Thus, our findings contribute to the literature by finding that market participants value KM and KM apparently positively influences accounting performance indicators. In addition, a unique feature of our study is that we investigate the market's response to information gathered using the Delphi method, an information source not previously investigated in stock price reaction literature. Examines stock market reaction/future performance of MAKE Award winning companiesEvent study test finds significant mean abnormal returns.MAKE winners outperform peers during the year following the receipt of the award.Abnormal returns continue to be positive for MAKE winners over following year.MAKE-based Delphi method creates knowledge for the markets.
Twenty-First-Century Loving: Nationality, Gender, and Religion in the Muslim World

It scarcely seems possible that the Loving v. Virginia decision is now forty years old.1 In that case, decided more than ten years after the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision,2 Virginia was one of many states that forbade intermarriage between whites and blacks. It took the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a racist law and continue the legacy of Brown in the area of intimate relations. Whole generations have grown up in a United States where black-white marriage is legal, and such intermarriage is growing in frequency. As an African American, I can relate to the Loving decision on a personal level since my family includes interracial couples. One brother-in-law has been married to a white Jewish woman for over thirty years. My oldest son, who is himself biracial, has been with his white wife for fifteen years. A number of my other sons have dated interracially and view that issue through a more accepting lens than my boomer generation did. As young black men, my sons have the ability to date white women to a degree unprecedented historically. While the reception for interracial couples is not unanimously welcome in all quarters, black men do not fear lynching for daring even to look at a white woman. Who could have imagined in the era of Loving that a biracial black man, Barack Obama, with an African father and a white American mother, could seriously run for President of the United States? In 1903, famous black scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois said that the question of the twentieth century would be the color line, and he was prophetically right within the U.S. context. The ongoing global war on terror has raised the issue of whether the question of the twenty-first century will be religious lines. Some prominent scholars, such as Samuel
Informed Consent as Compelled Professional Speech: Fictions, Facts, and Open Questions

This Article’s purpose is to clarify the boundaries of physicians’ First Amendment rights when communicating with patients. More specifically, this Article seeks to identify the most doctrinally consistent reading of Supreme Court free speech jurisprudence to understand what limits the First Amendment’s protection against compelled speech imposes in the context of state informed consent mandates. While the primary context in which this question has arisen is that of abortion-specific informed consent mandates, this inquiry has broader implications for informed consent law as a whole. If the First Amendment imposes substantial limits on the type of physician speech that states can compel, then every state informed consent law – from the most benign to the most controversial – is potentially at risk. This Article’s point-by-point explanation of the facts, fictions, and open questions relating to this issue will provide readers with an accessible guide to First Amendment doctrine in the context of compelled physician speech.
Teaching legal history at a small law school

In this short piece, written for a symposium in the American Journal of Legal History, Professor Larson describes his experiences teaching legal history at the UC Davis Law School.
Western Europe: Last Holdout in the Worldwide Acceptance of Clinical Legal Education

I have come to believe, over the last two decades of my consulting work outside of the United States, that the origins, growth and acceptance of clinical legal education throughout the world is the greatest single innovation in law school pedagogy – and certainly in student learning – since the “science” of the Socratic, case method was brought to Harvard by Christopher Columbus Langdell. I remember distinctly when I came to this conclusion. It was around the time of a conference held at beautiful Arrowhead Lake, in California, hosted by UCLA Law School and the University of London at the university's conference facility in the mountains of San Bernardino County, startlingly close to Los Angeles. The event was the Sixth International Clinical Conference, held in October of 2005, and it was the first truly international event in that series. Yes, it was an “international” clinical conference, and prior events had provided participants with something of an international flavor, and the event was sponsored by British and American law schools. This, however, was something new, something different.
Data Mining and the Security-Liberty Debate

Ever since the horrific images of September 11 were seared into the public consciousness, the longstanding clash between security and liberty has been at the forefront of law and politics. Generally, law enforcement is primarily investigative, focusing on apprehending per petrators of past crimes. When it comes to terrorism, law enforcement shifts to being more preventative, seeking to identify terrorists before they act. To this end, the government has become interested in data mining?a new technological tool to pinpoint the terrorists burrowed in among us. Data mining involves creating profiles by collecting and combining personal data, and analyzing it for particular patterns of behavior deemed to be suspicious.1 In this way, data mining helps pre dict who might be likely to conduct a future terrorist attack. In 2002, the Department of Defense, under the guidance of Ad miral John Poindexter, began developing a data mining project called Total Information Awareness (TIA). Under the TIA program, the government would assemble a massive database consisting of finan cial, educational, health, and other information on US citizens, which would later be analyzed to single out people matching a terrorist pro file. According to Poindexter, "[t]he only way to detect [ ] terrorists is to look for patterns of activity that are based on observations from past terrorist attacks as well as estimates about how terrorists will adapt to our measures to avoid detection."2 The program sparked public outrage, and the Senate denied it funding. But TIA did not die; instead, it exists in various projects with obscure names such as Bas ketball, Genoa II, and Topsail. Unlike TIA, which had its own website, these projects are significantly more clandestine/
Optimal tariffs in consistent conjectural variations equilibrium

Abstract This paper analyzes the determination of the optimal tariff under the assumption of consistent conjectural variations (CCV). A general characterization of the CCV equilibrium is given. We show that (i) there are, in general, a multiplicity of each equilibria, and (ii) under certain restrictions, the Cournot equilibrium, which is based on the assumption of no retaliation, can also be a CCV equilibrium. By contrast, free trade is never a CCV equilibrium. Finally, the CCV equilibrium is solved explicitly in a simple example.
Rethinking the shield of immunity: should ethics committees be accountable for their mistakes?

This article focuses on the role of healthcare ethics committees in resolving difficult ethical questions in patient care and the repercussion of shielding their actions from society's view. Although the societal importance of ethics committees actions seem obvious, in many jurisdictions the records of committee proceedings are privileged and hence undiscoverable. In addition, several state statutes afford ethics committees and their members immunity for certain acts. While many in the bioethics community personally laud the insulation such statutes provide, the effect of this legislation is to sever the historical inter-relationship between the courts and ethics committees, in which a court ultimately could review committee actions. This article argues that ethics committees, while preferable to time-consuming, adversarial procedures, should properly function as adjuncts to the courts, providing case consultation reviewable by the judiciary. It begins by showing how immunity and privilege statutes shield some committee actions from judicial review, and then considers and rejects several justifications for providing immunity to ethics committees and their members. This article finally concludes that courts should bear the final authority for patient care decisions until the value of ethics committees has been more convincingly demonstrated.
The administrative foundation of the rule of law

This article builds upon the observation that political rulers have to rely upon administrators to implement their policy decisions to uncover two mechanisms by which legal limits, understood in terms of fundamental human rights, can be self-enforcing. We show how the effectiveness of such legal limits depends on administrators’ expectation that rights violations might be costly in the future, when the current ruler’s grip on power ends. We also show how the effectiveness of legal limits depends on administrators’ expectation about each others’ actions when asked to execute an illegal policy, which allows for the possibility that human rights laws might induce compliance by making a particular behavior salient. The analysis contributes to a general understanding of the mechanisms by which law can effectively limit the arbitrary power of the government.
Supplier competition and its impact on firm׳s sourcing strategy

Abstract Most research on firms׳ sourcing strategies assumes that wholesale prices and reliability of suppliers are exogenous. It is of our interest to study suppliers׳ competition on both wholesale price and reliability and firms׳ corresponding optimal sourcing strategy under complete information. In particular, we study a problem in which a firm procures a single product from two suppliers, taking into account suppliers׳ price and reliability differences. This motivates the suppliers to compete on these two factors. We investigate the equilibria of this supplier game and the firm׳s corresponding sourcing decisions. Our study shows that suppliers׳ reliability often plays a more important role than wholesale price in supplier competition and that maintaining high reliability and a high wholesale price is the ideal strategy for suppliers if multiple options exist. The conventional wisdom implies that low supply reliability and high demand uncertainty motivate dual-sourcing. We notice that when the suppliers׳ shared market/transportation network is often disrupted and demand uncertainty is high, suppliers׳ competition on both price and reliability may render the sole-sourcing strategy to be optimal in some cases that depend on the format of suppliers׳ cost functions. Moreover, numerical study shows that when the cost or vulnerability (to market disruptions) of one supplier increases, its profit and that of the firm may not necessarily decrease under supplier competition.
Consumer sorting of vertically differentiated goods

Abstract This paper shows the conditions for consumer sorting to be profitable. Sorting of low quality goods dampens their substitutability with high quality goods and can raise firm's profit even when sorting lowers profit from low quality sales considered alone.
Things That Go Bump in the Mind: How Behavioral Economics Could Invigorate Marketing

Abstract In their article, Ho, Lim, and Camerer (2006) lead by example. They identify principles from behavioral economics, and rather than simply exhort their readers to pay attention, they actually produce impressive demonstrations of how these principles can be applied to substantive marketing problems. It is easy to argue that these ideas are important, but it is more difficult to demonstrate that importance. Implicitly, Ho, Lim, and Camerer send a message of encouragement: Behaviorally realistic assumptions are not problems to be ignored; they are opportunities. Formal models can capture psychologically realistic concerns. Together, they should be the grist for the next generation of marketing mills.
Demographic and Socioeconomic Patterns of HIV/AIDS Prevalence in Africa

Understanding the demographic and socioeconomic patterns of the prevalence and incidence of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa is crucial for developing programs and policies to combat HIV/AIDS. This paper looks critically at the methods and analytical challenges to study the links between socioeconomic and demographic status and HIV/AIDS. Some of the misconceptions about the HIV/AIDS epidemic are discussed and unusual empirical evidence from the existing body of work is presented. Several important messages emerge from the results. First, the study of the link between socioeconomic status and HIV faces a range of challenges related to definitions, samples, and empirical methods. Second, given the large gaps in evidence and the changing nature of the epidemic, there is a need to continue to improve the evidence base on the link between demographic and socioeconomic status and the prevalence and incidence of HIV/AIDS. Finally, it is difficult to generalize results across countries. As the results presented here and in other studies based on Demographic and Health Survey datasets show, few consistent and significant patterns of prevalence by socioeconomic and demographic status are evident.
Navigating the Accounting Academic Job Market and Related Advice

Abstract Purpose To disseminate helpful advice to current and future candidates about the accounting academic job market. Methodology/approach Literature review, interviews with recently hired faculty members, insights from the author’s experiences as both job candidates and search committee members, and discussions with colleagues. Findings In this chapter, we discuss the current state of the job market for accounting professors and offer our insights as well as those from a group of recent graduates. It is our recent experience that many rookie candidates pursue initial faculty positions with an incomplete understanding of many aspects of the market, including how the market clears, job expectations, and other issues that we believe are important. While others have adequately addressed the importance of research in the profession and alluded to some aspects of the market, we provide additional useful information about the market and other career aspects in order to assist new graduates in their quests to find fulfilling appointments. Our chapter complements existing literature to form an updated and more complete picture of the market and profession. Practical implications This chapter helps prepare candidates for the job market by providing information and advice that complements advice given in Ph.D. programs and the existing literature. Social implications Candidates entering the job market will better understand the nuances of the market and can make more informed decisions about the institutions that best meet their needs. Originality/value The chapter provides important practical advice for job seekers about the accounting academic job market not available elsewhere.
The Mugshot Industry: Freedom of Speech, Rights of Publicity, and the Controversy Sparked by an Unusual New Type of Business

Many companies profit from the dissemination of mugshot photos, whether online or in print. This new type of business arouses strong feelings , with critics charging that it amounts to a form of blackmail, while the mugshot companies contend that they provide a beneficial public service protected by freedom of speech. In this article, I begin the process of exploring the difficult legal questions surrounding mugshot businesses. In my view, people targeted by businesses like BlabberMouth have a viable theory under which to seek legal relief, but a line must be carefully drawn between businesses that merely profit by reproducing mugshot photos and those that take the further step of agreeing not to publicize a mugshot or other arrest information in exchange for payment of a fee.