cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Credit Derivatives, Leverage, and Financial Regulation's Missing Macroeconomic Dimension

Of all OTC derivatives, credit derivatives pose particular concerns because of their ability to generate leverage that can increase liquidity - or the effective money supply - throughout the financial system. Credit derivatives and the leverage they create thus do much more than increase the fragility of financial institutions and increase counterparty risk. By increasing leverage and liquidity, credit derivatives can fuel rises in asset prices and even asset price bubbles. Rising asset prices can then mask mistakes in the pricing of credit derivatives and in assessments of overall leverage in the financial system. Furthermore, the use of credit derivatives by financial institutions can contribute to a cycle of leveraging and deleveraging in the economy.This Article argues for viewing many of the policy responses to credit derivatives, such as requirements that these derivatives be exchange traded, centrally cleared, or otherwise subject to collateral or 'margin' requirements, in a second, macroeconomic dimension. These rules have the potential to change – or at least better measure – the amount of liquidity and the supply of credit in financial markets and in the 'real' economy. By examining credit derivatives, this Article illustrates the need to see a wide array of financial regulations in a macroeconomic context. Understanding credit derivatives’ macroeconomic effects has implications for macroprudential regulatory design. First, regulations that address financial institution leverage offer central bankers new tools to dampen inflation in asset markets and to fight potential asset price bubbles. Second, even if these regulations are not used primarily as monetary or macroeconomic levers, changes in these regulations, including changes in the effectiveness of these regulations due to regulatory arbitrage, can have profound macroeconomic effects. Third, the macroeconomic dimension of credit derivative regulation and other financial regulation argues for greater coordination between prudential regulation and macroeconomic policy.
Symmetric Gapped Interfaces of SPT and SET States: Systematic Constructions

Symmetry-protected topological (SPT) states have boundary ’t Hooft anomalies that obstruct the effective boundary theory realized in its own dimension with UV completion and with an on-site G-symmetry. In this work, yet we show that a certain anomalous non-on-site G-symmetry along the boundary becomes on-site when viewed as an extended H-symmetry, via a suitable group extension 1→K→H→G→1. Namely, a nonperturbative global (gauge or gravitational) anomaly in G becomes anomaly free in H. This guides us to construct an exactly soluble lattice path integral and Hamiltonian of symmetric gapped boundaries applicable to any SPT state of any finite symmetry group, including on-site unitary and antiunitary time-reversal symmetries. The resulting symmetric gapped boundary can be described either by an H-symmetry extended boundary in any spacetime dimension or, more naturally, by a topological emergent K-gauge theory with a global symmetry G on a 3+1D bulk or above. The excitations on such a symmetric topologically ordered boundary can carry fractional quantum numbers of the symmetry G, described by representations of H. (Applying our approach to a 1+1D boundary of 2+1D bulk, we find that a deconfined gauge boundary indeed has spontaneous symmetry breaking with long-range order. The deconfined symmetry-breaking phase crosses over smoothly to a confined phase without a phase transition.) In contrast to known gapped boundaries or interfaces obtained via symmetry breaking (either global symmetry breaking or the Anderson-Higgs mechanism for gauge theory), our approach is based on symmetry extension. More generally, applying our approach to SPT states, topologically ordered gauge theories, and symmetry enriched topologically ordered (SET) states leads to generic boundaries or interfaces constructed with a mixture of symmetry breaking, symmetry extension, and dynamical gauging.
Socializing Law, Privatizing Law, Monopolizing Law, Accessing Law

Discussions about access to justice often focus on better representation for criminal defendants and on the restrictions placed on federally funded legal assistance programs. That focus ignores the structural choices made in the United States over the past 150 years, choices that have affected the poorest of our population's access to law enforcement institutions. The Article argues that the socialization of the criminal justice system has given the government a monopoly, which the government may not be operating responsibly. As one remedy, the Article suggests investing not only in additional criminal defense, but also in additional policing and prosecution. The essay also notes that the privatization of the civil justice system has led to financing systems that spread the costs and broaden plaintiffs' access to civil remedies. But these civil systems operate best where damages will be available. This leaves an enormous hole in the privatized system of access to law, particularly in divorce and custody adjudications. The essay argue argues that a different view of "access" would better serve the nation's poorest.
Does Rising Landlessness Signal Success or Failure for Vietnam’s Agrarian Transition?

In the wake of reforms to establish a free market in land-use rights, Vietnam is experiencing a pronounced rise in rural landlessness. To some observers this is a harmless by-product of a more efficient economy, while to others it signals the return of the pre-socialist class-structure, with the rural landless at the bottom of the economic ladder. The authors' theoretical model suggests that removing restrictions on land markets will increase landlessness among the poor, but that there will be both gainers and losers, with uncertain impacts on aggregate poverty. Empirically, they find that landlessness is less likely for the poor and that the observed rise in landlessness is poverty reducing on balance. However, there are marked regional differences, notably between the north and the south.
Limited arbitrage is necessary and sufficient for the existence of an equilibrium

Abstract In Chichilnisky (Working Paper No. 586, 1991), Chichilnisky (Working Paper No. 650, 1992) and Chichilnisky ( Economic Theory , 1995, 5, 79–108), I introduced the concept of a global cone and used it to define a condition on endowments and preferences, ‘limited arbitrage’, which I showed to be necessary and sufficient for the existence of a competitive equilibrium. In response to a comment (Monteiro et al., Journal of Mathematical Economics , 1997, 26, 000-000), I show here that the authors misunderstood my results by focussing on brief announcements which cover other areas, social choice (Chichilnisky, American Economic Review , 1994, 427–434 and algebraic topology (Chichilnisky, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society , 1993, 29, 189–207), rather than on the publication which contains may proofs on equilibrium. The comment's example is irrelevant to my results in Chichilnisky ( Economic Theory , 1995, 5, 79–108) because it starts from different conditions. Limited arbitrae is always necessary and sufficient for the existence of a competitive equilibrium, with or without short sales, with the global cones as I defined them, and exactly as proved in Chichilnisky ( Economic Theory , 1995, 5, 79–108).
SIMULTANEOUS DECISION‐MAKING IN COMPETITIVE AND COOPERATIVE ENVIRONMENTS

We experimentally investigate simultaneous decision-making in two contrasting environments: a competitive environment (a contest) and a cooperative environment (a voluntary contribution mechanism). We find that the cooperative nature of the voluntary contribution mechanism spills over to the contest, decreasing sub-optimal overbidding in the contest. However, contributions to the public good are not affected by simultaneous participation in the contest. There is a significant negative correlation between decisions made in competitive and cooperative environments, i.e. more cooperative subjects tend to be less competitive and vice versa. This correlation can be rationalized by heterogeneous social preferences towards inequality but not by bounded rationality theory.
Optimal Estimation of Dynamically Evolving Diffusivities

The augmented, iterated Kalman smoother is applied to system identification for inverse problems in evolutionary differential equations. In the augmented smoother, the unknown, time dependent coefficients are included in the state vector and have a stochastic component. At each step in the iteration, the estimate of the time evolution of the coefficients is linear. We update the slowly varying mean temperature and conductivity by averaging the estimates of the Kalman smoother. Applications include the estimation of anomalous diffusion coefficients in turbulent fluids and the plasma rotation velocity in plasma tomography.
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

Does America's pro-Israel lobby wield inappropriate control over US foreign policy? This book has created a storm of controversy by bringing out into the open America's relationship with the Israel lobby: a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape foreign policy in a way that is profoundly damaging both to the United States and Israel itself. Israel is an important, valued American ally, yet Mearsheimer and Walt show that, by encouraging unconditional US financial and diplomatic support for Israel and promoting the use of its power to remake the Middle East, the lobby has jeopardized America's and Israel's long-term security and put other countries - including Britain - at risk.
In search of a surrogate for touch: The effect of haptic imagery on perceived ownership

Abstract Previous research has shown that individuals value objects more highly if they own them, a finding commonly known as the endowment effect. In fact, simply touching an object can create a perception of ownership that produces the endowment effect. In this paper, we extend this line of research in several ways. First, we show that haptic imagery, or imagining touching an object, can have the same effect on perceived ownership as physical touch. We then demonstrate that haptic imagery can lead to perceptions of physical control, which in turn increase feelings of ownership. Moreover, the more vivid the haptic imagery, the greater the perception of control and the feeling of ownership. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Error in medicine: legal impediments to U.S. reform.

Error in medicine is common and can lead to significant patient injury. Although successful systematic efforts to reduce human error have been applied in other complex systems, the field of medicine has just begun to make a broad-based effort in this regard. However, both research in and implementation of patient safety measures may not occur without considering important legal issues that may impede these health policy efforts. Tort and contract law may interact with the vagaries of managed care to limit participation in these error reduction efforts by health care providers as well as by managed care organizations. Thus, for patient safety research to be successful, all members of the health care enterprise must participate in a coordinated effort to identify and establish effective practices that may reduce human error in medicine. But beyond this understanding, it is imperative that legal impediments be recognized and addressed before the goal of a continuously improving, increasingly safe health care system can become a reality.
Evaluating the economic forecasts of FOMC members

Abstract This paper provides a detailed analysis of the forecasts of real GDP, inflation and unemployment made by individual members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) for the period 1992–2003. Despite a general tendency for the committee members to underpredict real GDP over the sample period, we find evidence suggesting that the FOMC has a considerable amount of information about output growth, beyond what is known by commercial forecasters. We also document a substantial level of variation in the members’ forecasts, which can be explained in part by the differences in economic conditions between Federal Reserve districts. The members’ heterogeneous forecasts for output growth and inflation contain useful information for explaining their preferred policy settings, beyond that in the Greenbook forecasts.
The Asian crisis and flow‐of‐funds analysis

This paper is an application of Flow-of-Funds analysis to the case of Thailand during the 1996–97 Asian crisis. It begins with a background historical sketch of the financial crisis in East Asia, emphasizing the central role of weak financial systems and foreign debt. The paper then presents a method of estimating quarterly Flow-of-Funds accounts using Thailand as an example. This simple method is available from data published by the I.M.F. for most of the countries of the world. The Thai data are then used in a Flow-of-Funds analysis of the crisis in Thailand. This analysis contrasts with the opening historical sketch in quantitatively tracing the significant financial flows and, particularly, the finances of the private sector. The paper closes by emphasizing the need for current reporting of data to facilitate such analyses.
COMMENTARY:RACIAL DISPARITIES IN HEALTH CARE

... Professor Watson has presented us with a provocative paper on the problem of racial disparities in health care.... Though Americans do not necessarily totally lack access to health care because they are uninsured, they do get health care later and less frequently than those who are insured, and suffer much greater mortality and morbidity. Uninsured women with breast cancer, for example, are thirty to fifty percent more likely to die than women with private health insurance, while uninsured patients with colorectal cancer face a fifty percent greater risk of death than insured patients.... African-American women who are insured are more likely than white women to be insured through Medicaid (eighteen percent versus five percent) and less likely to receive employment - based coverage (fifty-four percent versus seventy-three percent).... Most uninsured low-income women, about fifty-eight percent, are employed, but fewer than half of these (forty-nine percent) receive health insurance through their employment.... To the extent that people of color, and in particular women of color, have historically and in the present lacked access to equal education and equal employment, they continue to be also denied access to health care coverage, and thus to health care.
Cloud Computing: Architectural and Policy Implications

Cloud computing has emerged as perhaps the hottest development in information technology. Despite all of the attention it has garnered, existing analyses focus almost exclusively on the issues surrounding data privacy without exploring cloud computing’s architectural and policy implications. This Article offers an initial exploratory analysis in that direction. It begins by introducing key cloud computing concepts, such as service oriented architectures, thin clients, and virtualization, and discusses the leading delivery models and deployment strategies being pursued by cloud computing providers. It then analyzes the economics of cloud computing in terms of reducing costs, transforming capital expenditures into operating expenditures, aggregating demand, increasing reliability, and reducing latency. It then discusses the architectural implications of cloud computing for access networking (focusing on bandwidth, reliability, quality of service, and ubiquity) and data center interconnectivity (focusing on bandwidth, reliability, security and privacy, control over routing policies, standardization, and metering and payment). It closes by offering a few observations on the impact of cloud computing on the industry structure for data centers, server-related technologies, router-based technologies, and access networks, as well as its implications for regulation.
The coexistence of multiple distribution systems for financial services: the case of property-liability insurance

Property-liability insurance is distributed by independent agents, who represent several insurers, and exclusive agents, who represent only one insurer. The independent agency system is known to have higher costs than the exclusive agency system. The market imperfections hypothesis attributes the coexistence of the two systems to impediments to competition, while the product quality hypothesis holds that independent agents provide higher quality services. We measure both profit efficiency and cost efficiency for a sample of property-liability insurers and find strong support for the product quality hypothesis. The data are consistent with a higher quality of output for independent agency insurers that is rewarded with additional revenues.
The hot-growth companies: How well do analysts predict their performance?

We assess several aspects of analysts’ forecasting performance for stocks included in Business Week's annual list of 100 “hot-growth” companies. We find that analysts underestimate earnings before stocks are included in the list, and they tend to overestimate them afterward. However, analysts revise their earnings estimates downward after stocks are included in the list, and the largest downward revisions are followed by significant negative stock returns. We conclude that analysts correctly assess the diminished prospects of stocks designated as “hot-growth” companies and that their forecast revisions have significant predictive power and value.
LEAF: A Learnable Frontend for Audio Classification

Mel-filterbanks are fixed, engineered audio features which emulate human perception and have been used through the history of audio understanding up to today. However, their undeniable qualities are counterbalanced by the fundamental limitations of handmade representations. In this work we show that we can train a single learnable frontend that outperforms mel-filterbanks on a wide range of audio signals, including speech, music, audio events and animal sounds, providing a general-purpose learned frontend for audio classification. To do so, we introduce a new principled, lightweight, fully learnable architecture that can be used as a drop-in replacement of mel-filterbanks. Our system learns all operations of audio features extraction, from filtering to pooling, compression and normalization, and can be integrated into any neural network at a negligible parameter cost. We perform multi-task training on eight diverse audio classification tasks, and show consistent improvements of our model over mel-filterbanks and previous learnable alternatives. Moreover, our system outperforms the current state-of-the-art learnable frontend on Audioset, with orders of magnitude fewer parameters.
Changes in the provision of correspondent-banking services and the role of Federal Reserve Banks under the DIDMC Act

This paper focuses on microeconomic incentives set in motion by Federal Reserve decisions about how to implement the reserve-requirement and pricing-of-service provisions of the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 (the DIDMC Act). These incentives promise to reshape the production and character of correspondent-banking services, the margin of jurisdictional competition between state banking regulators and the Federal Reserve System, and ultimately the regional structure of the Federal Reserve itself.
Improving utility of brain tumor confocal laser endomicroscopy: objective value assessment and diagnostic frame detection with convolutional neural networks

Confocal laser endomicroscopy (CLE), although capable of obtaining images at cellular resolution during surgery of brain tumors in real time, creates as many non-diagnostic as diagnostic images. Non-useful images are often distorted due to relative motion between probe and brain or blood artifacts. Many images, however, simply lack diagnostic features immediately informative to the physician. Examining all the hundreds or thousands of images from a single case to discriminate diagnostic images from nondiagnostic ones can be tedious. Providing a real time diagnostic value assessment of images (fast enough to be used during the surgical acquisition process and accurate enough for the pathologist to rely on) to automatically detect diagnostic frames would streamline the analysis of images and filter useful images for the pathologist/surgeon. We sought to automatically classify images as diagnostic or non-diagnostic. AlexNet, a deep-learning architecture, was used in a 4-fold cross validation manner. Our dataset includes 16,795 images (8572 nondiagnostic and 8223 diagnostic) from 74 CLE-aided brain tumor surgery patients. The ground truth for all the images is provided by the pathologist. Average model accuracy on test data was 91% overall (90.79 % accuracy, 90.94 % sensitivity and 90.87 % specificity). To evaluate the model reliability we also performed receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis yielding 0.958 average for area under ROC curve (AUC). These results demonstrate that a deeply trained AlexNet network can achieve a model that reliably and quickly recognizes diagnostic CLE images.
Much Ado About Little? Directors' Fiduciary Duties in the Vicinity of Insolvency

Where the contract between a corporation and one of its creditors is silent on some question, should the law invoke fiduciary duties or other extracontractual rights as a gap filler? In general, the law has declined to do so. There is some precedent, however, for the proposition that directors of a corporation owe fiduciary duties to bondholders and other creditors once the firm is in the vicinity of insolvency. Courts embracing the zone of insolvency doctrine have characterized the duties of directors as running to the corporate entity rather than any individual constituency. This approach is incoherent in practice and unsupportable in theory. Courts should focus on whether the board has an obligation to give sole concern to the interests of a specific constituency of the corporation. The leading argument for imposing a duty on the board running to creditors when the corporation is in the vicinity of insolvency is the claim that shareholders will gamble with the creditor’ money. This Article demonstrates that this argument is unpersuasive. It is director and manager opportunism, rather than strategic behavior by shareholders that is the real concern. Because bondholders and other creditors are better able to protect themselves against that risk than are creditors, there is no justification for imposing such a duty. This article also argues that the zone debate is much ado about very little. The only cases in which the zone of insolvency debate matters are those to which the business judgment rule does not apply, shareholder and creditor interests conflict, and a recovery could go to directly to those who have standing to sue. In those cases, as this Article explains, there is a strong policy argument that creditors should be limited to whatever rights the contract provides or might be inferred from the implied covenant of good faith.
Recordkeeping and Human Evolution

We seek to characterize the evolutionary role played by the transactional record that is the foundation of modern accounting. We theorize that systematic recordkeeping crystallizes memory and, along with other institutions (e.g., law, weights, and measures), promotes the trust necessary for large‐scale human cooperation. Our theory yields two predictions: (1) permanent records emerge to supplement memory when complex intertemporal exchange between strangers becomes more common and (2) systematic records and other exchange‐supporting institutions co‐evolve and feed back to increase gains from economic coordination and division of labor. Many aspects of ancient Mesopotamian recordkeeping are consistent with these hypotheses, suggesting that our evolutionary theory is plausible. We outline ways to directly test our predictions with experiments, ethnographies, and agent‐based models, and describe other techniques that can be used to explore the co‐evolution of accounting with the human brain, language, and law.
Controlling the cost of minimum benefit guarantees in public pension conversions

Reformed public DC plans typically contain a minimum benefit guarantee (DC-MB). This paper explores risk management techniques to control the cost of these guarantees in DC systems with minimum benefit guarantees (DC-MB). The paper finds two approaches are particularly useful. The first approach borrows an idea from the recent catastrophic insurance literature. The guarantee is placed over a ‘standardized’ portfolio, requiring agents to accept any ‘basis risk’ if they chose a non-standard portfolio. However, for large conversions from DB to DC-MB plans, in which there is little or no DB benefit remaining, the government must still worry about any ‘implicit guarantee’ that might extend beyond the standardized portfolio which might entice agents to accept a lot of basis risk (a ‘Samaritan’s Dilemma’) . The second method, therefore, uses a more brute force approach: private portfolio returns in the good states of the world are taxed while returns in the bad states are subsidized. Both options are very eective at controlling guarantee costs, and they can be used separately or together. Calculations demonstrate that all of the unfunded liabilities associated with modern pay-asyou-go public pension programs can be eliminated under both approaches even at a modest contribution rate.
Against Game Theory

People make choices. Often, the outcome depends on choices other people make. What mental steps do people go through when making such choices? Game theory, the most influential model of choice in economics and the social sciences, offers an answer, one based on games of strategy such as chess and checkers: the chooser considers the choices that others will make and makes a choice that will lead to a better outcome for the chooser, given all those choices by other people. It is universally established in the social sciences that classical game theory (even when heavily modified) is bad at predicting behavior. But instead of abandoning classical game theory, those in the social sciences have mounted a rescue operation under the name of “behavioral game theory.” Its main tool is to propose systematic deviations from the predictions of game theory, deviations that arise from character type, for example. Other deviations purportedly come from cognitive overload or limitations. The fundamental idea of behavioral game theory is that, if we know the deviations, then we can correct our predictions accordingly, and so get it right. There are two problems with this rescue operation, each of them is fatal. (i) For a chooser, contemplating the range of possible deviations, as there are many dozens, actually makes it exponentially harder to figure out a path to an outcome. This makes the theoretical models useless for modeling human thought or human behavior in general. (ii) Modeling deviations are helpful only if the deviations are consistent, so that scientists (and indeed decision makers) can make predictions about future choices on the basis of past choices. But the deviations are not consistent. In general, deviations from classical models are not consistent for any individual from one task to the next or between individuals for the same task. In addition, people's beliefs are in general not consistent with their choices. Accordingly, all hope is hollow that we can construct a general behavioral game theory. What can replace it? We survey some of the emerging candidates. Keywords: biases; game theory; general equilibrium theory; behavioral game theory; social dilemmas; experimental economics; heuristics; bounded rationality; learning in games
Are Analysts' Forecasts Informative to the General Public?

Contrary to the common view that analysts are important information agents, intraday returns evidence shows that announcements of analysts’ forecast revisions release little new information, on average. Further cross-sectional evidence from returns around the announcements confirms that revisions are virtually information free. Daily announcement returns used in the literature appear to overstate the analyst’s role as information agent, because forecast announcements are often issued directly after reports of significant news about the followed firm. The evidence reveals a sequential relationship between events and news and forecast revisions indicative of analyst piggybacking, not prophecy. These new findings about the most sought-after analyst reports broaden significantly the evidence indicating that price reactions to analysts’ reports reveal little new information.
LIFE'S WORK

This Essay develops a vision of social justice grounded in the redistribution and restructuring of paid work. Work is a site of deep self-formation offering rich opportunities for human flourishing or devastation. In the United States, paid work has been central to citizenship, community, and personal identity: It is largely through the work we do for a living that most of us develop into the men and women we see ourselves (and others see us) as being. Although family-wage thinking has blinded society to the fact that this is true for women, research shows that paid work is vital to women (as it is to men); women who work for a living are better off than other women on a variety of dimensions, despite the fact that women still experience sex discrimination at work. Currently, however, transformations in the structure of work are increasing insecurity and deepening inequality for all but those at the top; many once privileged workers now face conditions akin to those that women and disadvantaged men have long confronted. These trends present deep challenges, but they also provide us with the opportunity to reshape social life by democratizing work. Schultz argues that employment discrimination alone is not capable of generating the needed reforms. Instead, we must remake our laws and culture to create a world in which everyone has the right to participate meaningfully in life-sustaining work, with the social support necessary to do so. She elaborates on the concept of a life's work to describe the central elements of a utopian vision in which women and men from all walks of life can work alongside each other as equals, pursuing common projects and forging connected lives. She calls upon feminists to forego a narrow identity politics in favor of joining with a broad array of other groups to fashion a social order in which work provides a foundation for egalitarian conceptions of citizenship and care. This approach demands that we consider seriously such measures as job creation programs, wage subsidies for workers, universal child care and health care programs, enhanced forms of employee representation, periodic sabbaticals and a reduced workweek for everyone.
Prohibited Risks and Culpable Disregard or Inattentiveness: Challenge and Confusion in the Formulation of Risk-Creation Offenses

Because they track the Model Penal Code, current criminal law formulations of risk offenses typically fail to distinguish the rule of conduct question—What risks does the criminal law prohibit?—from the adjudication question — When is a particular violator’s conscious disregard of, or his inattentiveness to, a risk in a particular situation sufficiently condemnable to deserve criminal liability? Instead, the formulations address only the second question — through their definition of reckless and negligent culpability — and fail to provide a rule of conduct provision to define a prohibited risk. This reliance upon culpability definitions as the core of risk-creation offense definitions is problematic because it fails to announce a useable conduct rule that describes those risks the law prohibits. Instead, this approach subjectivizes the definition of prohibited risks. What may be held "reckless" or "negligent" for one person may not be "reckless" or "negligent" for another person in the identical situation — an effect that strips case adjudications of their value in educating the community as to risks that the rules of conduct prohibit. Current risk-creation offenses also are problematic because they make results — including the creation of a prohibited risk — irrelevant to criminal liability. While this is consistent with the Model Code’s view that resulting harm is insignificant, that only culpable state of mind ought to affect liability, it is inconsistent with the view of most state code drafters. Thus, while the Model Code grades offenses without regard to whether a prohibited risk in fact is created, most state codes logically would want to grade lower in the absence of a prohibited risk. These two fundamental problems—the failure to distinguish conduct rules and adjudication rules and the confusion over the significance of results — are related. The Model Penal Code’s general failure to distinguish conduct and adjudication rules made it less likely that state code drafters would notice what they would have seen as the Code’s inappropriate subjectivization of risk and risk offenses. If the Model Code had systematically segregated conduct and adjudication rules, it would have been more obvious to state code drafters that the Code’s formulation of risk-creation offenses was one that they could not accept.
Criminal Procedure Within the Firm

It seems improbable that the theoretical and doctrinal framework of criminal procedure, developed mostly through a binary model of the individual and the state, would fit without modification in the tripartite model of the state, the firm, and the individual that characterizes the investigation and sanctioning of criminal conduct within legal entities. This intuition - which has been underexplored in spite of heated public debate about the state's practices in this area - proves correct. I develop some components of a framework for understanding procedure for individual cases of criminal wrongdoing within firms and generating insights to guide reform. The process of pursuing individual cases within firms (as opposed to firm cases against firms) is distinctive for at least three reasons: in terms of causation and incentives, the presence of an organization materially alters the incidence of individual misconduct ex ante and the efficiency and efficacy of investigating and prosecuting that conduct ex post; the nature of the applicable substantive criminal violations (white collar crimes) causes such cases to ripen into criminal cases more slowly than those outside business firms; and lawyers have multiple roles in such cases not only ex post but also ex ante. I evaluate two current practices in light of these structural differences: state use of the fruits of employer coercion of employees' waivers of the right to silence; and state negotiation with firms over the scope of firms' indemnification of their agents for litigation costs. I conclude that some reforms of current practices in these areas would be beneficial but that calls for abolition of those practices are misguided.
Bioethical objections to DNA databases for law enforcement: questions and answers.

This paper briefly responds to eight objections to or concerns voiced about DNA databases for law enforcement. It is based on remarks delivered at a program organized by the AALS Section Law and Medicine.
Can sticky prices account for the variations and persistence in real exchange rates

Abstract This paper provides an empirical assessment of the importance of sticky prices in accounting for the variations and the persistence in real exchange rates. Vector autoregressions with five variables from two countries that always include the United States are estimated. Restrictions are imposed to identify a global shock, and two sets of country specific output shocks. One set of shocks is associated with instantaneous price adjustments, while the other has delayed effects on prices. Data from the G7 countries reveal that US sticky price shocks are the dominant source of real exchange rate variations. But these shocks have reasonably short half-lives and cannot account for the observed real exchange rate persistence. Non-sticky price shocks can induce very persistent real exchange rate dynamics, even though they account for little of the historical real exchange rate variations.
Citizens United and the Roberts Court's War on Democracy

This article, published as part of the Georgia State Law Review symposium on the much-noted Citizens United case, argues enthusiastically that the Roberts Court’s bold recognition of a constitutional right to corporate electioneering is unjustified by the text, history, purpose or traditions of the First Amendment. The ruling radically and illicitly trumps democratic processes to favor the political interests of the already economically privileged. It purposely renders all campaign finance regulation silly and useless. It says, further, that there is something about our Constitution that renders us flatly powerless to deal with the scourge of purchased politics. This cannot be so. It is dangerous and demeaning to the world’s strongest democracy to suggest otherwise.
Assessing financial reporting quality of family firms: The auditors׳ perspective ☆

Abstract We analyze audit fees and audit risk to extract auditors׳ assessment of family-firm׳s financial reporting quality. Relative to non-family firms, we find that auditors charge family firms significantly less, and the fee difference shrinks in magnitude when family firms have high audit risk. Using constructs for audit risk and audit effort, we show that family firms have lower audit risk, and that their auditors work less to provide assurance. Our findings suggest that superior reporting quality lowers audit risk and the need for greater audit investments, which is why auditors charge family firms less.
How costly are debt crises

The aim of this paper is to assess the short and medium-term impact of debt crises on GDP. Using an unbalanced panel of 154 countries from 1970 to 2008, the paper shows that debt crises produce significant and long-lasting output losses, reducing output by about 10 percent after 8 years. The results also suggest that debt crises tend to be more detrimental than banking and currency crises. The significance of the results is robust to different specifications, identification and endogeneity checks, and datasets.
Big data proxies and health privacy exceptionalism.

This article argues that, while “small data” rules protect conventional health care data (doing so exceptionally, if not exceptionally well), big data facilitates the creation of health data proxies that are relatively unprotected. As a result, the carefully constructed, appropriate, and necessary model of health data privacy will be eroded. Proxy data created outside the traditional space protected by extant health privacy models will end exceptionalism, reducing data protection to the very low levels applied to most other types of data. The article examines big data and its relationship with health care, including the data pools in play, and pays particular attention to three types of big data that lead to health proxies: “laundered” HIPAA data, patient-curated data, and medically-inflected data. It then reexamines health privacy exceptionalism across legislative and regulatory domains seeking to understand its level of “stickiness” when faced with big data. Finally the article examines how health privacy exceptionalism maps to the currently accepted rationales for health privacy and discusses the relative strengths of upstream and downstream data models in curbing what is viewed as big data’s assault of health privacy.
What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers

We construct a new index of media slant that measures the similarity of a news outlet's language to that of a congressional Republican or Democrat. We estimate a model of newspaper demand that incorporates slant explicitly, estimate the slant that would be chosen if newspapers independently maximized their own profits, and compare these profit-maximizing points with firms' actual choices. We find that readers have an economically significant preference for like-minded news. Firms respond strongly to consumer preferences, which account for roughly 20 percent of the variation in measured slant in our sample. By contrast, the identity of a newspaper's owner explains far less of the variation in slant.
Does geographic dispersion affect firm valuation

Abstract We find that the geographic dispersion of a corporation affects its firm valuation. Firms with subsidiaries located in different regions of the United States experience a valuation discount of 6.2% after controlling for the impact of both global and industrial diversifications. The valuation discount increases as firms expand their operations to different regions nationwide. Results show that firms with more anti-takeover provisions are more likely to be geographically diverse, and that these firms experience greater value discounts compared with their counterparts with fewer such provisions. Our overall evidence suggests that the geographic location of corporate activities is an essential component of corporate policies and has important market valuation implications.
A Simple Adjustment for Bandwidth Snooping

Kernel-based estimators such as local polynomial estimators in regression discontinuity designs are often evaluated at multiple bandwidths as a form of sensitivity analysis. However, if in the reported results, a researcher selects the bandwidth based on this analysis, the associated confidence intervals (CIs) may not have correct coverage, even if the estimator is unbiased. This article proposes a simple adjustment that gives correct coverage in such situations: replace the normal quantile with a critical value that depends only on the kernel and ratio of the maximum and minimum bandwidths the researcher has entertained. We tabulate these critical values and quantify the loss in coverage for conventional CIs. For a range of relevant cases, a conventional 95% CI has coverage between 70% and 90%, and our adjustment amounts to replacing the conventional critical value 1.96 with a number between 2.2 and 2.8. Our results also apply to other settings involving trimmed data, such as trimming to ensure overlap in treatment effect estimation. We illustrate our approach with three empirical applications.
Should Public Pensions be Funded

This paper outlines some of the arguments for and against the funding of public pensions, with a view to establishing whether there is an economic basis for judging it to be superior to pay-as-you-go (PAYG). It is concluded that if funding has an edge over PAYG, it is not an overwhelming one. While funding may have a modest cost advantage over PAYG and have superior characteristics from the standpoint of intergenerational redistribution, its alleged superiority in handling demographic and economic risk, as well as in signalling future pension costs, is difficult to justify. While theoretical arguments tend to be consistent with the view that funding will be associated with higher saving than PAYG, convincing empirical support is missing. Nevertheless, the momentum for shifting from PAYG to funding remains. But if there is to be such a shift, there may also be a case for shifting from public to private pension provision.
Obama’s National Security Exceptionalism

This Article discusses how continued national security exceptionalism engenders a view of the United States as considering itself to be above international obligations to investigate and prosecute torturers and war criminals, and the view by the global community that the United States is willing to apply one standard for itself, and another for the rest of the world. Exceptionalism not only poses real challenges in terms of law, morality, and building useful relationships with allied nations, but acts as a step backward for the creation of enforceable international norms and standards, and in efforts to restore a balance in the rule of law when it comes to national security matters.
Choosing Environmental Instruments in a Transnational Context

This article analyzes the choice of instruments in international environmental agreements using a transnational legal process analysis. A transnational approach helps explain developing country opposition to international allowance trading and the difficulty experienced in reaching agreement on satisfactory ground rules for trading under international agreements. International allowance trading depends upon international transactions and therefore requires detailed international legal rules. Since these rules generally require the unanimous consent of all treaty parties, agreement to a well designed program on an international level will prove difficult. Because key countries may either oppose trading as inequitable or not agree to a set of good design criteria, international allowance trading may discourage effective participation in international agreements. An option of transnational pluralism, an approach that relies upon national compliance using nationally chosen methods, merits consideration as an alternative to international selection of environmental instruments.
The Influence of Incidental Affect on Consumers’ Food Intake:

Abstract Although incidental affect has been shown to influence both attitude and purchase behavior, it has not been extended to actual consumption. This research investigates whether specific affective states influence food consumption and whether this influence is moderated by factors such as information and the nature of the product (hedonic versus less hedonic). The authors show that an integrative mood management and mood evaluation framework accounts for this relationship more effectively than a self-regulation explanation. A preliminary test and two lab studies show that people eat larger amounts of hedonic foods (buttered popcorn and M&M's) when they are in a sad state than when they are in a happy state and that this effect is attenuated when nutritional information is present. In contrast, they tend to eat larger amounts of a less hedonic product (raisins) when they are in a happy state than when they are in a sad state. The authors discuss implications for responsible marketers, health professi...
WHAT GOOD IS WEALTH WITHOUT HEALTH? THE EFFECT OF HEALTH ON THE MARGINAL UTILITY OF CONSUMPTION

United States. Social Security Administration (National Bureau of Economic Research Grant 10-P-98363-1-05)
Analysts’ accrual-related over-optimism: do analyst characteristics play a role?

Bradshaw et al. (J Acc Res 39:45–74, 2001) find that analyst forecast over-optimism is greater for firms with high accruals. This “accrual-related over-optimism” is generally interpreted as evidence that analyst forecasts do not fully incorporate predictable earnings reversals associated with high accruals. We investigate whether analyst experience, access to resources (brokerage size), and portfolio complexity moderate the relation between over-optimistic forecasts and high accruals. We demonstrate the robustness of accrual-related over-optimism to controls for cash flow and prior forecast errors. We find that accrual-related over-optimism is lower for analysts with greater general experience and for analysts following fewer firms but find only limited evidence of lower accrual-related over-optimism for analysts from larger brokerages and for analysts following fewer industries.