cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Towards a Public Health Legal Structure for Child Welfare

The present American child welfare system infringes upon the fundamental liberty interests of millions of children and parents, is adversarial and punitive, and fails to prevent child maltreatment or protect children adequately from its most severe forms. Many in the field now recognize that a public health model would more effectively support the parent–child relationship and protect children from maltreatment than the current paradigm. Despite much attention to such an approach, the field has yet to develop a clear vision for how the law could or should support a public health approach or shape the actions of individuals and institutions best suited to lead a public health response. This Article is the first to identify the core legal reforms necessary to shape a public health approach to child welfare. This Article identifies several legal pillars of the present parentalfault paradigm that impede a public health approach and conceptualizes new laws designed to foster a public health approach. First, mandatory reporting and mandatory investigation laws—requiring professionals to report and child protection agencies to investigate all instances of suspected neglect—inhibit a public health response by imposing a coercive legal regime on an overly broad category of cases and preventing professionals from making more effective interventions for millions of children. Second, state laws’ overly broad definitions of “abuse” and “neglect” expand the range of situations subject to mandatory reporting and mandatory investigations laws and permit coercive interventions to become the dominant means of responding to serious child welfare problems. Third, the law should separate provision of services to children and families from findings of fault by CPS agencies. In the aggregate, fam© Copyright held by the NEBRASKA LAW REVIEW * Assistant Professor, University of South Carolina School of Law. The author would like to thank Annette Appell, Matt Fraidin, Marsha Garrison, Cynthia Godsoe, Avni Gupta-Kagan, and Susan Vivian Mangold for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts.
THE ‘THICK MARKET’ EFFECT AND AGGLOMERATION IN HIGH-GROWTH INDUSTRIES

. This paper considers a simple model of geographical concentration of new high-technology industries that lack stable design standards. In the model, agglomerative effects result from positive feedback between competitive forces in the upstream and downstream segments of a high-technology industry, rather than as a result of traditional scale economies in the manufacturing of standardized products. The model assumes that firms in the upstream service supply industry have ex ante uncertain costs and compete in Bertrand fashion for the independent demands of downstream firms. This framework explains the mechanism of spatial clustering in industries with a high rate of innovation.
Economic Partnership Agreements Between Sub‐Saharan Africa and the EU: A Development Perspective

This paper draws on Hinkle and Schiff (2003). It analyses the planned Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the EU and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) from a development perspective. It does not take a position on whether SSA should enter into EPAs with the EU. Rather, it starts from the notion that the process of forming EPAs is unlikely to be reversed and examines the conditions that will maximise SSA's benefits from the EPAs. If this notion is correct, then the analysis presented in the paper applies. On the other hand, Pascal Lamy, the EU Trade Commissioner, made a proposal at the May 2004 G-90 summit in Dakar that might lead to a change in the EPA process. He proposed that the G-90, a group consisting of ACP and non-ACP LDC countries, should not have to make concessions at the WTO Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations, i.e., he proposed a ‘free round’ for the G-90. This proposal opens the door to the possibility that the same might apply to the ACP countries in the EU-ACP negotiations and that the EPA process might be reversed. The paper considers the key issues raised by the planned EPAs, their relationship to the WTO's Doha Round and the EU's Everything-but-Arms Initiative, the changes needed to make the EPAs internally consistent, the domestic reforms in SSA that would need to accompany trade liberalisation in both goods and services, and the potential effects of the EPAs on regional integration in SSA. The EPAs will pose a number of policy challenges for SSA countries, including: restructuring of indirect tax systems, reduction of MFN tariffs, liberalisation of service imports on an MFN basis and related regulatory reforms in the services sector, and liberalisation of trade in both goods and services within the regional trading blocs in SSA. The paper also finds that the EPAs provide an opportunity to accelerate regional and global trade integration in SSA. To realise the potential development benefits of the planned EPAs, two steps are essential. First, the EU must, as it has stated, truly treat the EPAs as instruments of development, subordinating its commercial interests in the agreements to the development needs of SSA. Second, the SSA countries need to implement a number of EPA-related trade policy reforms. However, the latter is far from certain, given the lack of reform momentum in SSA.
POLITICAL ASYMMETRY AND COMMON EXTERNAL TARIFFS IN A CUSTOMS UNION

This paper examines the effect of political and economic asymmetries in the formation of common external tariffs (CETs) in a customs union (CU). We do so by introducing possible cross-border lobbying and by endogenizing tariff formation in a political economic model for the determination of CETs. The latter allows us to consider asymmetries among the member nations in their susceptibilities to lobbying. We also consider asymmetries in the influence of the member nations in CU-wide decision-making. A central finding of this paper is that, in the absence of economic asymmetry, the CET rises monotonically with the degree of asymmetry in country influences if the two countries are equally susceptible to lobbying. If influences are the same, the CET also rises monotonically with the degree of asymmetry in susceptibilities. These results hold irrespective of whether the lobby groups in the two member countries cooperate or work non-cooperatively.
Geometric phase for non-Hermitian Hamiltonian evolution as anholonomy of a parallel transport along a curve

We develop an interpretation of the geometric phase in evolution with a non-Hermitian real-valued Hamiltonian by relating it to the angle developed during the parallel transport along a closed curve by a unit vector triad in the 3D Minkovsky space. We also show that this geometric phase is responsible for the anholonomy effects in stochastic processes considered by Sinitsyn and Nemenman (2007 Europhys. Lett. 77 58001), and use it to derive the stochastic system response to periodic parameter variations.
Competition in Service Industries

We analyze a general market for an industry of competing service facilities. Firms differentiate themselves by their price levels and the waiting time their customers experience, as well as different attributes not determined directly through competition. Our model therefore assumes that the expected demand experienced by a given firm may depend on all of the industry's price levels as well as a (steady-state) waiting-time standard, which each of the firms announces and commits itself to by proper adjustment of its capacity level. We focus primarily on a separable specification, which in addition is linear in the prices. (Alternative nonseparable or nonlinear specifications are discussed in the concluding section.) We define a firm's service level as the difference between an upper-bound benchmark for the waiting-time standard (wI ) and the firm's actual waiting-time standard. Different types of competition and the resulting equilibrium behavior may arise, depending on the industry dynamics through which the firms select their strategic choices. In one case, firms may initially select their waiting-time standards, followed by a selection of their prices in a second stage (service-level first). Alternatively, the sequence of strategic choices may be reversed (price first) or, as a third alternative, the firms may make their choices simultaneously (simultaneous competition). We model each of the service facilities as a single-server M/M/1 queueing facility, which receives a given firm-specific price for each customer served. Each firm incurs a given cost per customer served as well as cost per unit of time proportional to its adopted capacity level.
Cross-National Variation in the Labour Market Participation of Married Women in Australia, Canada and the United States of America

This study examines cross-national variation in the labour force participation of married women in Australia, Canada and the USA. Initially, a basic model of labour force participation is presented using data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). In addition two applications of the estimates follow: a simulation and a decomposition of the differential. The results of these applications confirm that variation in the probability of participation for married women can be explained by both country-specific characteristics and the differences in the responses to those characteristics.
Values And Value: An Essay On Libel Reform

This article reviews the development of defamation law since New York Times v. Sullivan. In place of the extraordinarily complex structure that has emerged from the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, this article proposes a simplified and uniform fault requirement based on “professional negligence,” holding a professional disseminator of information to the standards of that profession. The purpose is to create a unitary, simplified litigation structure combining much of the heavy constitutional procedural burdens on the plaintiff with more comprehensible fault and damage rules by which a jury may be guided to provide effective compensation and redress for the defamation victim injured through the fault of the defamer.
Macroeconomic Relaxation: Adjustment Processes of Hierarchical Economic Structures

We show how time-dependent macroeconomic response follows from microeconomic dynamics using linear response theory and a time-correlation formalism. This theory provides a straightforward approach to time-dependent macroeconomic model construction that preserves the heterogeneity and complex dynamics of microeconomic agents. We illustrate this approach by examining the relationship between output and demand as mediated by changes in unemployment, or Okun’s law. We also demonstrate that time dependence implies overshooting and how this formalism leads to a natural definition of economic friction.
Maternity leave, early maternal employment and child health and development in the US*

This paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to explore links between mothers' returns to work within 12 weeks of giving birth and health and developmental outcomes for their children. OLS models and propensity score matching methods are utilised to account for selection bias. Considerable associations between early returns to work and children's outcomes are found suggesting causal relationships between early returns to work and reductions in breastfeeding and immunisations, as well as increases in externalising behaviour problems. These results are generally stronger for mothers who return to work full-time within 12 weeks of giving birth. New mothers in the US return to work very quickly by international standards. A third of new mothers in the US return to work within 3 months of giving birth (Klerman and Leibowitz, 1990, 1994, 1999; Smith and Bachu, 1999). These figures stand in sharp contrast to figures for other advanced industrialised nations. In Germany, Sweden and the UK, for instance, only about 5% of new mothers return to work so quickly (Gustafsson et al., 1996). The fact that US mothers return to work so quickly is a potential concern if early returns to work result in negative outcomes for their children. Staying home for at least 6 weeks after delivery (8 weeks if the delivery was by Caesarean section) allows new mothers time to recover from birth, facilitates breastfeeding and may help prevent some adverse health consequences for the mother and child. Indeed, in many countries, maternity leave laws specifically prohibit mothers from working until at least 6 weeks have elapsed. And, in most industrialised countries, maternity leave laws provide for an extended period ofjob-protected leave, at least a portion of which is paid. The situation in the US is very different. In the US, the primary source of maternity leave coverage has been employer policies, whether established voluntarily or as part of collective bargaining agreements. Under these employer policies, a new mother can typically stay home for up to 6 weeks, as long as she has the available leave time (e.g., through vacation, sick days, and/or temporary disability coverage) and obtains a doctor's note. In some instances, a longer period of leave is permitted but rarely with pay. Beginning in the early 1970s, some US states passed maternity leave laws requiring firms to provide job-protected leaves to at least some employees. The most generous of these laws provide 18 weeks of leave; the least generous, only 4 weeks of leave. US policy was somewhat formalised in 1993, with the passage of the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Although the FMLA is limited * Funding for this research was provided by the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Takings and Extortion

The Supreme Court has repeatedly employed an extortion narrative in deciding when governmental actions imposing exactions on development projects constitute takings under the Fifth Amendment. In that narrative, local officials act in ever-present bad faith by misusing their regulatory powers to coerce concessions by developers seeking land use approvals. While the extortion narrative has received little attention, it operates as an explanatory device for understanding the Court’s takings jurisprudence in the exactions field. The narrative has justified the expansion of exactions takings law beyond real property, substantially altered the deference normally accorded by the Court to local government actions, and allowed the Court to extend takings analysis into predecision bargaining. The concept may well lead the Court to further expand the scope of takings. This Article analyzes the extortion narrative and concludes that it cannot support these changes in takings law. Not only is the narrative based on assumed facts, the factual context of land use exactions does not fit within the legal concept of extortion. Furthermore, use of the term devalues the constitutional status of locally elected officials while altering the function of the Takings Clause from determining when compensation is required to prophylactically preventing local government abuses by monitoring local government decision-making processes. In doing so, this Article concludes, the Court’s decisions employing the extortion narrative have departed from the actual language of the Fifth Amendment and intruded into the protections provided by a separate constitutional provision, the Due Process Clause. INTRODUCTION 324 I. THE RISE OF THE EXTORTION NARRATIVE 326 A. Origins 327 B. Midpoint and Quiescence 329 C. Ascension and Triumph 331 * Fritz B. Burns Professor of Real Property Law, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. The author would like to thank Joe DiMento, John Echeverria, Karl Manheim, Yxta Murray, Andrew Schwartz, and Ken Stahl for their very helpful comments on this Article. He would also like to thank Serj Daniel for his excellent research assistance. ** © Daniel P. Selmi (2015). 1 Selmi: Takings and Extortion Published by UF Law Scholarship Repository, 2016 324 FLORIDA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 68 II. EXTORTION AS A TAKINGS NARRATIVE 333 A. The Narrative Concept in Law 334 B. The Contours of the Extortion Narrative 337 III. THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE EXTORTION NARRATIVE 342 A. Transcending Real Property 342 B. Prophylactic Protection 346 C. Deterrence and Non-deference 349 D. Effects on Planning and Bargaining 352 E. De-compartmentalizing Takings Law 355 IV. THE EXTORTION NARRATIVE AS A RATIONALIZING POSTULATE FOR TAKINGS DOCTRINE 358 A. The Literal Charge of Extortionate Behavior 358 B. Unconstitutional Conditions as an Empty Label 362 C. Devaluing the Status of State and Local Officials 367 D. Textual Failure and Structural Inconsistency 372 CONCLUSION 375
Smart Women, Stupid Shoes, and Cynical Employers: The Unlawfulness and Adverse Health Consequences of Sexually Discriminatory Workplace Footwear Requirements for Female Employees

The article raises a critical but curiously neglected medical and legal issue for working women: do they have the right to wear whatever shoes are best for their health at work? No published clinical studies yet have focused on the subset of foot problems caused by dress-code policies that employers discriminatorily impose as conditions of employment on female employees. This Article takes up the challenge by surveying a high-profile occupational group, female flight attendants, who have long been subject to strict employer policies requiring them to wear certain kinds of shoes. As a result, these women have faced a Hobson’s choice between getting or keeping a job and their continued ability to walk unimpaired.The article first examines the history of the medical establishment’s reaction to high-heeled footwear in Part II and then in Part III then presents a unique set of data on the footwear rules that U.S. airlines unilaterally prescribe for female flight attendants. Parts IV and V analyze the right that flight attendants and other female workers have under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 not to be required to wear unhealthful shoes as a condition of employment. Finally, Part VI turns to the applicability of other statutory regimes. A dress code might seem to some a petty complaint, yet the total lack of justification for imposing a proven health-hazard on employees sheds uncommon light on one segment of the seamless web of the undemocratic workplace.
Evolution of heterogeneous beliefs and asset overvaluation

Abstract I analyze a model in which different agents have different non-rational expectations about the future price and cash flows of a risky asset. The beliefs in the society evolve according to a very general class of evolution functions that are monotone; that is if one type has increased its share in the population then all types with higher profit should also have increased their shares. I show that the price of the risky asset converges to the risk-neutral fundamental price even though all agents in the economy are risk-averse. The risky asset thus becomes overvalued as compared to the equilibrium with rational expectations. The overvaluation is a result of the evolution of beliefs and does not rely on such asymmetric assumptions as short-sale constraints or optimistic bias.
Can Democracy Emancipate Itself From Political Theology? Habermas and Lefort on the Permanence of the Theologico-Political

Political theology seems hard to get around. Ever since Carl Schmitt famously asserted at the beginning of the 1920s that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” political theorists have been grappling with the multiple and often uncanny ways in which essentially theological structures appear to re-emerge within contemporary political formations.
Should Venture Capitalists Put All Their Eggs in One Basket? Diversification versus Pure-Play Strategies in Venture Capital

Managing the different companies in which they invest while at the same time performing portfolio optimization for themselves, venture capitalists position themselves as a pure-play or diversified conglomerate through their cumulative portfolios. I examine the effects of two investment strategies of venture capitalists: 1) a specialist “pure-play” strategy that maximizes venture capital involvement and 2) a more generalist strategy of diversification at the “firm” level that minimizes portfolio risk. I find that neither strategy optimizes both venture capital growth and time to entrepreneurial exit, which highlights a need for institutional investors to clarify fund objectives at the time a fund is established.
Ethical issues in being an expert witness

This Bayesian speaker addresses the question of how to handle the variety of ways of doing statistics in the context of the responsibilities of a statistical expert witness. An expert witness is typically hired and paid by one of the sides in a legal dispute, but the fundamental responsibilities of the expert are to the court. The expert is sworn ‘to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’, not ‘only those truths that help my client’. Experts may not be paid on a contingency basis (i.e. with compensation dependent on the outcome of the case). This talk addresses how the resulting tensions may be balanced.
Does the Standardization Process Matter? A Study of Cost Effectiveness in Hospital Drug Formularies

While research on the cost effectiveness of standardization to date has focused on the impact of different degrees of standardization, it has paid insufficient attention to the process an organization uses to formulate and implement standardized procedures. Drawing on the organizational decision-making literature and procedural fairness literature, this study identifies a number of key process features in standardization and argues that variations in these process features across organizations help account for the varying success of standardization in achieving cost effectiveness. Using hospital drug standardization for coronary artery and pneumonia cases to ground much of the argument, I analyzed inpatient discharge data from Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas, combined with an original survey of 243 hospital pharmacy directors. The results indicated that an increasing degree of standardization was associated with cost effectiveness when the level of formal objectivity in creating the standardized procedure was high and when there was due process in resolving disputes about the standardized procedure. This finding broadly supports the argument that the cost effectiveness of standardization depends not just on the degree of standardization but also on the process by which the standardized procedures are created and implemented.
Segmented risk sharing in a continuous-time setting*

The economy we study is comprised of a continuum of individuals. Each has a stochastic endowment that evolves continuously and independently of all other individuals' endowment processes. Individuals are risk averse and would therefore like to insure their endowment processes. The mutual independence of their endowment processes makes it feasible for them to obtain this insurance by pooling their endowments. We investigate whether such a scheme would survive as an equilibrium in a noncooperative setting.
Disequilibrium in the Labor Market in South Africa

Unemployment in South Africa is decomposed into a cyclical and a structural component. The estimates suggest that unemployment is largely structural. Alternative explanations for the persistence of deviations of market wages from full-employment levels are examined. Three models that are empirically capable of generating the observed wage and employment gaps are presented. The predictions of the models for wages and employment are discussed in light of recent and prospective developments in South Africa.
Dielectric properties of polymer nanocomposite interphases from electrostatic force microscopy using machine learning

Abstract Interphase regions in polymer nanocomposite materials are difficult to characterize due to their nano-scale dimensions. Electrostatic force microscopy (EFM) provides a pathway to local dielectric property measurements, but extracting local dielectric permittivity in complex interphase geometries from EFM measurements remains a challenge. We demonstrate the efficacy of machine learning (ML) models to extract interphase permittivity using a data set of synthetic EFM force gradient scans generated by finite element simulations. We show that both support vector regression (SVR) and random forest (RF) algorithms are able to ‘invert’ the force gradient scan to predict the permittivity with high accuracy. Feature reduction by principal component analysis (PCA) improves the model's performance and reveals force gradient contrast to be the most important feature in permittivity detection. We find that these ML models perform better than analytical approaches by capturing significant geometric complexity of EFM measurements.
Who’s the cleanest of them all? Sanitation scores in Indian cities

Urban India is struggling to provide adequate water and sanitation services to its citizens. Open defecation, insufficient wastewater treatment, and mixing of untreated wastewater with stormwater and drinking water supplies are contributing to a severe health and economic crisis. Recent government measures such as the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission and National Urban Sanitation Policy (NUSP) are steps in the right direction. We draw on sanitation scores awarded to 421 cities under NUSP to identify factors that explain the heterogeneity in city-level scores. Our estimates suggest the higher scores are partly a result of city location. Population is non-linearly associated with sanitation score. Consistent with recent literature, we show that increased presence of household toilets does not impact city-level sanitation outcomes. Further, smaller cities perform differently than medium and large cities, pointing to a need for customized policy prescriptions for different classes of cities, pr...
Silicon Ceilings: Information Technology Equity, the Digital Divide and the Gender Gap among Information Technology Professionals

This article calls for the revitalization of the legislative, social policy and academic discourse regarding the causes and appropriate remedies for the gender gap among information technology professionals, with two critical differences. First, this article theoretically reframes the issue of women's under-representation among information technology professionals by presenting it as primarily a technology equity issue to be discussed in the policy context of the digital divide discourse - a gendered digital production divide. Second, this article argues for refocusing legislative and educational efforts from more traditional educational approaches to curricular experimentation and technology mentorship initiatives on the junior-high and high school levels.
Fourier optics in the classroom

Borrowing methods and formulas from Prof. Goodman’s classic Introduction to Fourier Optics textbook1, I have developed a software package2 that has been used in both industrial research and classroom teaching.3 This paper briefly describes a few optical system simulations that have been used over the past 30 years to convey the power and the beauty of Fourier Optics to our students at the University of Arizona’s College of Optical Sciences.
Regional Occupational Employment Projections: Modeling Supply Constraints in the Direct‐Requirements Approach*

Detailed industry-occupation employment forecasts are an important class of regional labor market information produced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In theory, the forecasts should improve the national, interregional, and intertemporal matching efficiency of labor markets. But the efficiency argument is dependent on the quality of the forecasts. The methodology used to produce the projections is still fundamentally a demand-requirements approach that implicitly assumes that labor supply is infinitely elastic for every occupation. This paper examines the validity of that assumption and evaluates a demographically based labor supply module as an adjunct to the current methodology.
Sovereign debt maturity structure under asymmetric information

Abstract This paper studies the optimal choice of sovereign debt maturity when investors are unaware of the government's willingness to repay. Under a pooling equilibrium there is a wedge between the borrower's true default risk and the default risk priced in debt, and its size differs with the maturity of debt. Safe borrowers tilt their debt maturity towards short-term – relative to the optimal choice under perfect information – since long-term debt pools more default risk that is not inherent to them. Risky borrowers mimic their behavior of safe borrowers to preclude the market from identifying their type. In times of financial distress, spreads increase and the default risk wedge of long-term debt relative to short-term debt increases, which makes borrowers shorten their debt maturity. Data on bond issuances for a panel of countries show that, consistent with the model, maturities co-vary negatively with spreads and that this co-movement is stronger in those situations in which informational asymmetries are larger.
Investor-State Dispute Settlement between Developed Countries: Reflections on the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement

Free Trade Agreements between developed countries now frequently contain provisions on investor protection, but the resolution of disputes remains problematic. Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) allows investors to bring direct claims against a host State before an international tribunal without exhausting domestic remedies. This has resulted in a number of claims against the United States by Canadian investors and against Canada by U.S. investors. Chapter 11 of the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) does not permit direct claims, relying instead on a State-to-State dispute resolution mechanism. This paper reviews the evolution of investment-dispute resolution from diplomatic protection to NAFTA and AUSFTA. It suggests that because developed countries have developed legal systems capable of resolving investment disputes expeditiously and without bias, it should be possible to marry the advantages of direct claims with those of the local remedies rule, allowing investors to enforce their own rights under a treaty but requiring them to do so in domestic courts first.
Evaluating Trading Strategies

In this article, the authors provide some new tools to evaluate trading strategies. When it is known that many strategies and combinations of strategies have been tried, it is necessary to adjust our evaluation method for these multiple tests. Sharpe Ratios and other statistics will be overstated. The methods provided by the authors in this article are simple to implement and allow for the real-time evaluation of candidate trading strategies.
H.L.A. HART AND THE PRACTICAL DIFFERENCE THESIS

In H.L.A. Hart’s now famous Postscript to The Concept of Law,H.L.A. Hart, THE CONCEPT OF LAW 185–86 (2nd ed., 1994). Hereinafter referred to as CL. he embraced the Incorporation Thesis, according to which it is possible for a legal system to have a rule of recognition that incorporates moral criteria of validity.Nevertheless, Hart had some reservations about the Incorporation Thesis. Hart, a skeptic about moral objectivism, believed that the Incorporation Thesis presupposes that moral norms have an objective status and hence conditioned his acceptance of the Incorporation Thesis on the truth of moral objectivism. See Kenneth Einar Himma, Incorporationism and the Objectivity of Moral Norms, 5 LEGAL THEORY 415 (1999), for a discussion of Hart’s worries on this count. In such legal systems, a norm must satisfy certain moral conditions as either a necessary or a sufficient condition for it to be legally valid. According to the Incorporation Thesis, then, the criteria of validity need not consist exclusively of standards that define validity in terms of a norm’s source or pedigree.
Transnational Perspectives on the U.S. Transnational Law Controversy

This Symposium celebrates the extraordinary career of Aharon Barak, with particular emphasis on his delineation of a constitutional jurisprudence of rights. In the United States, high praise for President Barak has prompted intemperate critique. Why are the critics so alarmed that Americans might be interested in Barak’s constitutional thinking? Perhaps they realize that after decades of effort, and considerable tinkering, the proponents of originalism have failed to demonstrate the wisdom and institutional legitimacy of their constitutional paradigm. Their views prevail only because their interlocutors, the advocates of a living constitution, despite having produced withering criticism of originalism, have similarly failed to demonstrate the superiority of their paradigm. The originalists claim victory, saying that they alone have a theory. They have a point, but only within domestic circles. It is time to open up the originalist critique of judicial activism, and the related debate of judicial recourse to transnational legal resources, to transnational perspectives. The study of President Barak’s approach to constitutional law and adjudication provides an excellent first step on a journey that should include study of other great rights-protecting justices and sophisticated legal systems that endorse rights-based democracy, the juridical embodiment and theoretical exemplification of the post-World War II “rights revolution.” Such study will generate many insights, including the good news that the Warren Court’s distinctive mode of rights adjudication, premised upon a living constitutional paradigm, has enjoyed an intense and flourishing afterlife on the world stage. This essay has five parts. Part II examines the constitutional paradigms that frame the current U.S. debate on many constitutional questions, including judicial activism and judicial recourse to transnational legal materials. Part III analyzes three assessments of President Barak’s work by leading U.S. commentators to demonstrate that their strong desire to dismiss him an activist undermines, distorts, and obscures legal analysis generally and the debate on transnational law specifically. Part IV presents what Barak’s critics have labored to obscure: his sophisticated understanding of constitutional law and adjudication in respect to rights protection, especially its emphasis on the rationality of proportionality analysis. Part V delineates the larger dimensions of post-WWII constitutional thought, to which President Barak has made an invaluable contribution. Part VI concludes by inviting transnational study to deepen understanding of U.S. constitutional theory, history, and institutional roles generally and the current debates on transnational legal resources in particular.
Payout Policy Pedagogy: What Matters and Why

This paper argues that we should abandonMM (1961)irrelevance as the foundation for teaching payout policy, and instead emphasise the need to distribute the full value generated by investment policy (‘full payout’). Because MM's assumptions restrict payouts to an optimum, their irrelevance theorem does not provide the appropriate prescription for managerial behaviour. A simple example clarifies why the correct prescription is ‘full payout’, and why both payout and investment policy matter even absent agency costs (DeAngelo and DeAngelo, 2006). A simple life-cycle generalisation explains the main stylised facts about the payout policies of US and European firms.
Advancing the Language of Human Rights in a Global Economic Order: An Analysis of a Discourse

Human rights language is particularly attuned to setting out the goals of protecting the world's least protected people. As human rights advocates have entered negotiations with international economic institutions and transnational corporations (TNCs), such negotiations have often resulted in an alternative language to describe the necessity of protecting and promoting human rights. After describing the progressive inclusion of human rights ideas by TNCs, the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO, this Article argues that, while such inclusion is a benefit to the human rights movement, the creation of an alternative language to describe human rights goals is potentially detrimental. The language of human rights, in order to be understood by those it aims to protect, must, above all, be intelligible and accessible to them. At this early stage of interactions between human rights advocates and international economic actors, human rights advocates should retain and advance the compelling and utopian language of rights. Commerce, however necessary, however lucrative, as it depraves the manners, corrupts the language; they that have frequent intercourse with strangers, to whom they endeavor to accommodate themselves, must in time learn a mingled dialect.... This will not always be confined to the exchange, the warehouse, or the port, but will be communicated by degrees to other ranks of the people, and be at last incorporated with the current
Presidential Control of Administrative Agencies: A Debate over Law or Politics?

In their recent book documenting presidential assertions of authority, The Unitary Executive: Presidential Power from Washington to Bush, Professors Steven Calabresi and Christopher Yoo argue that presidential practice throughout American history supports the view that the “Constitution gives presidents the power to control their subordinates.” Published in the closing year of the administration of George W. Bush, The Unitary Executive appeared at a time of considerable scholarly and political criticism of President Bush for his efforts to direct the actions of federal administrative agencies. To some, Bush’s efforts to influence the decisions of political appointees heading executive branch agencies “crossed the line” between permissible and impermissible efforts to control agency officials exercising authority delegated directly to them rather than to the President. Calabresi and Yoo show that the kinds of actions Bush took, as well as the kinds of criticisms he received, are far from new in American history. To the contrary, they assert that the debate over presidential authority of the executive branch is the “oldest . . . debate[] in constitutional law.” From the vantage point of President Obama’s first year in office, we can safely conclude that this debate did not end with the departure of President Bush. Despite the current President’s efforts to distance his administration’s style and rhetoric from that of his predecessor’s, Obama has nevertheless taken steps much like his predecessors’ to ensure that executive branch agencies act in ways consistent with his priorities. Given the longstanding historical prac-
When does the peer information environment matter

Abstract This paper examines whether and when the information environment of peer firms in an industry affects the cost of capital for other firms in the industry. We predict and find that the peer information environment is negatively associated with a firm's cost of capital when there is less publicly available firm-specific information and this negative association shrinks as the amount of firm-specific information increases. This paper provides evidence that information about peer-firms has externalities on the cost of capital for related firms and that these externalities are time-varying.
Endogenous property rights regimes, common-pool resources and trade

A model is developed where opening to trade affects a dynamic common-pool resource stock and welfare through a community's voting decision to institute a property rights regime regulating the stock. The model finds that resource stock levels can decline even when a Markov perfect equilibrium path for labor and property rights regimes are chosen to maximize welfare. Thus, opening to trade can be welfare maximizing even when resource stock declines. Experimental results show that under certain conditions, subjects briefly follow a Markov perfect equilibrium path for property rights regime choice but labor allocations are myopically chosen indicating that some resource dynamics may be considered by subjects.
Integration, organizational processes, and allocation of resources ☆

Abstract Does the level of integration of a firm affect the quality of information available to its top decision makers responsible for allocating resources? Motivated by the pervasiveness of specific knowledge in large multi-division firms, I develop a model of internal competition for corporate resources among specialist managers and show that: (i) managers of integrated firms exaggerate the payoffs of their projects to obtain resources despite potentially adverse career consequences, and (ii) the exaggeration problem worsens with increased integration and reduces the allocative efficiency of an integrated firm. Control rights based on asset ownership enable the firm to set “the rules of the game” and improve managerial behavior through organizational processes such as rigid capital budgets, job rotation, centralization and hierarchies.
Disciplining the Americans with Disabilities Act's Direct Threat Defense

One defense to alleged discrimination under the ADA is that the plaintiff would pose a "direct threat" to the health or safety of others. The ADA defines a direct threat as a "significant risk." Current direct threat determinations, attempting to operationalize significant risk, are both inconsistent and inaccurate. The result is that some disabled individuals are wrongfully excluded from the workplace and that others are mistakenly permitted to work. Numerical benchmarks would improve the consistency and accuracy of direct threat determinations. Decision makers should make significance determinations aided by statistics that provide a modulus by which to measure whether a risk is clearly significant, clearly insignificant, or somewhere in between. The EEOC should adopt explicit benchmarks, looking to the statistical benchmarks used by OSHA to serve as a guide for when a risk is sufficiently large to be considered "significant." These benchmarks would result in more consistent and accurate determinations under the ADA which, in turn, would advance the statute's antidiscriminatory purpose.
Mothers who kill: cross-cultural patterns in and perspectives on contemporary maternal filicide.

This article presents a brief cross-cultural review of maternal filicide, focusing specifically on the varying circumstances that surround the mothers who commit this crime. My goal is not to provide a comprehensive map of contemporary maternal filicide, but rather, to illustrate the manner in which a society’s structure of motherhood and women’s status contributes to maternal filicide. Special attention will be paid to the unwritten norms that govern women and motherhood, as well as to the manner in which distinct societies understand, rationalize, and punish maternal filicide.
Using an attribute-based decision support system for user-customized products online: an experimental investigation

In the decision support systems literature, most studies have concentrated on the direct effects of DSS use and design on decision outcomes and user performance in the workplace. Fewer DSS studies have integrated decision process variables, such as user beliefs and attitudes, in their models. In this paper, we examine the mediating role of decision process variables in the use of an online customer DSS. We do so through an experimental study of an alternative-based and an attribute-based DSS for product customization by online customers. Using cognitive fit and flow theories, we develop a theoretical model with four mediating decision process variables (perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived enjoyment, and perceived control) and two of their antecedents: interface design (attribute-based versus alternative-based) and task complexity (choice set size). Our results show that the impact of DSS interface design on behavioral intentions is fully mediated by perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment, although not by perceived control. Specifically, we verify that users of an attribute-based DSS express higher perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment than users of an alternative-based one. In addition, we find that task complexity has an interesting relationship with usefulness and enjoyment, both of which follow an inverted U-shaped curve as choice set size increases. Finally, we find that for users of the alternative-based DSS, perceived ease of use and perceived control decrease as task complexity increases. However, the attribute-based DSS alleviates that decline for both variables. Among other contributions, our results indicate the importance of including decision process variables when studying DSS as well as the complex effect of task complexity on those variables. Our study also provides some important guidelines for online companies that provide customer DSS on their websites, especially the danger of providing too many product choice options that can overwhelm customers and harm their shopping experience.
Protecting people, protecting places: What environmental litigation conceals and reveals about rurality

Abstract This paper considers how conservation litigation seeking to protect wilderness from degradation can overlook those living nearby or within it, even though the degradation also threatens residents. We use as a case study the controversial siting of a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) in a chronically impoverished, all-white community in the remote Arkansas Ozarks of the United States. Because the CAFO is at the cusp of federally protected wilderness, it attracted the attention of national conservation interests, who sued seeking the CAFO's closure. These events provide a basis for illustrating how and theorizing why the community was disserved by its rurality and its whiteness. We suggest that widely held rural associations with the pastoral and bucolic—imaginaries that are at least implicitly white—may have blinded those strategizing the litigation to the place's deep and entrenched poverty and therefore to the residents' vulnerability. Alternatively, the conservation-oriented plaintiffs and attorneys may have viewed these poor white residents as transgressing wilderness—as having trashed pristine nature by their very presence—and thus as unworthy of advocacy. Either way, the plaintiffs did not bolster their conservationist claims with environmental justice advocacy, presumably because of the absence of a clear optical trigger for the latter. Finally, we consider these events through three lenses typically associated with environmental law: conservationist, economic, and social (environmental justice). Finding each of these lacking, we illustrate how the robust and multi-dimensional concept of rurality can synthesize these individual frames while surfacing voices and issues not otherwise heard. Turning a rural lens on these events also reveals socio-spatial obstacles to environmental justice, explaining, for example, why multigenerational residents are unwilling to assert their legal rights. The result is essentially a meta-narrative of rurality.