cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Investigating the Impact of a Small Business Consulting Course on Entrepreneurial Attitudes

This study uses the Entrepreneurial Attitudes Orientation (EAO) survey to determine whether students enrolled in a small business consulting course changed their attitude towards entrepreneurship. The EAO survey was used in a pre-test at the beginning of the semester and a post-test at the end of the semester, and four other key factors (age, intention to own a business, hours worked, and semesters as full-time students) are also used to search for an explanation of change in students’ attitude towards entrepreneurship. The EAO survey was administered to students in a small business consulting class as well as marketing classes, used as a control group, for seven consecutive semesters. No significant attitude change was found for the small business consulting course in the overall EAO. However, the EAO measure did find a significant change in attitude among students who aspired to own a business and who possessed a strong work ethic.
A model of dynamic compensation and capital structure

Abstract This paper studies the optimal compensation problem between shareholders and the agent in the Leland (1994) capital structure model, and finds that the debt-overhang effect on the endogenous managerial incentives lowers the optimal leverage. Consistent with data, our model delivers a negative relation between pay-performance sensitivity and firm size, and the interaction between debt-overhang and agency issue leads smaller firms to take less leverage relative to their larger peers. During financial distress, a firm's cash flow becomes more sensitive to underlying performance shocks due to debt-overhang. The implications on credit spreads and debt covenants are also considered.
On mechanical waves and Doppler shifts from moving boundaries

We investigate the propagation of infinitesimal harmonic mechanical waves emitted from a boundary with variable velocity and arriving at a stationary observer. In the classical Doppler effect, Xs(t)=vt is the location of the source with constant velocity v. In the present work, however, we consider a source co-located with a moving boundary x=Xs(t), where Xs(t) can have an arbitrary functional form. For ‘slowly moving’ boundaries (i.e., ones for which the timescale set by the mechanical motion is large in comparison to the inverse of the frequency of the emitted wave), we present a multiple-scale asymptotic analysis of the moving boundary problem for the linear wave equation. We obtain a closed-form leading-order (with respect to the latter small parameter) solution and show that the variable velocity of the boundary results not only in frequency modulation but also in amplitude modulation of the received signal. Consequently, our results extend the applicability of two basic tenets of the theory of a moving source on a stationary domain, specifically that (i) Xs for non-uniform boundary motion can be inserted in place of the constant velocity v in the classical Doppler formula and (ii) that the non-uniform boundary motion introduces variability in the amplitude of the wave. The specific examples of decelerating and oscillatory boundary motion are worked out and illustrated. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Oldfield Responds to Candler and Others Arguing Against His Proposal for Affirmative-Action Based on Socio-Economic Status in Public Administration Faculty Hires:

Academic public administration claims to be "cutting edge" and committed to egalitarian values. Prior publications have shown the field to be either a late arrival or no show on major equity issues, including gender, race, sexual orientation, and social class. The neglect of this last category has been especially glaring, particularly how the socioeconomic circumstances of birth affect significant life outcomes. While countless studies have shown that children born of poor or working class conditions are less likely than their middle and upper class counterparts to finish high school, attend college (and where), receive a diploma, or become a university professor, academic public administration has yet to include social class background among its diversity and affirmative action accreditation criteria. An article in an earlier Administration and Society challenged our discipline to prove it is avant garde by being the first to recruit and hire more professors who were raised in poverty or working class settings. This paper refutes arguments subsequently lodged against that idea.
LIFE INSURANCE HOLDINGS AND WELL‐BEING OF SURVIVING SPOUSES

Premature death of a breadwinner can have devastating financial consequences on surviving dependents. This study investigates the role of life insurance in mitigating the long-run financial consequences of spousal mortality. Using the Health and Retirement Study, we examine individuals whose spouses died during or soon after his or her peak earnings years. After controlling for socioeconomic status, we find that sizable lump-sum life insurance payouts do not significantly influence spousal well-being. (JEL D31, G22, I31, J32, J33, J38)
How much value can blockholders tunnel? Evidence from the Bulgarian mass privatization auctions

Abstract This study examines the emergence of the Bulgarian stock market and the role of controlling blockholders. A new approach using mass privatization auction data measures the premium for control and demonstrates that, in the absence of legal constraints, majority owners extract more than 85% of firm value as private benefits of control. Institutional investors form portfolios of predominantly controlling positions or participate in majority coalitions. Ownership stakes cluster at 51%. After the privatized companies begin trading on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange, majority-owned firms trade at 40–60% discounts. Overall, the results support the Fama and Jensen (J. law Ecorg 26 (1983) 301) view that majority-owned firms cannot persist as publicly traded corporations if the expropriating activities of controlling blockholders are not legally restricted.
The Apogee of the Commodity

Slavery is death. The body of this death is white-over-black, white-over-black only, and that continually. The body of this death is eternal and therefore with us still. Slavery is white-over-black, segregation is white-over-black, neosegregation is white-over-black, and all of it is death. White-over-black is the death that it is the slave's calling to produce. The slave produces this death through its juridical prayers for equality of right. The slave perfects its own slavery in this manner. Rights cannot be equal. There are always ambiguities. The ambiguities are always available for a white-over-black reading. The fact of white-over-black, of the general habit of reading things in white-over-black ways, which is what prompts the slave to pray for equality of right in the first place, shows that whatever is granted will be read in the general way, white-over-black. The fact of white-over-black shows the way that we have been trained. We follow our training into our future and so rights are white-over-black, white-over-black only, and that continually. The dream of equal rights, so important to slaves, results only in the continued fact of white-over-black. If the dream is the disguise of the wish then the dream of equal rights is the disguise of the slave's own desire for white-over-black, for death. The slave's unacknowledgable death drive is the secret of the commodity and its fetish. Contra Marx, commodities do speak. Commodities speak of equality of right, equality of right only, and that continually.
Religion and Group Rights: Are Churches (Just) like the Boy Scouts?

What role do religious communities, groups, and associations play - and, what role should they play - in our thinking and conversations about religious freedom and church-state relations? These and related questions - that is, questions about the rights and responsibilities of religious institutions - are timely, difficult, and important. And yet, they are often neglected. It is not new to observe that American judicial decisions and public conversations about religious freedom tend to focus on matters of individuals' rights, beliefs, consciences, and practices. The special place, role, and freedoms of groups, associations, and institutions are often overlooked. However, if we want to understand well, and to appreciate, the content and implications of our constitutional commitment to religious liberty, we need to broaden our focus, and to ask, as Professors Lupu and Tuttle have put it, about the "distinctive place of religious entities in our constitutional order." Are religious institutions special? May and should they be treated specially? If so, how? Why?
Stability, Not Crisis: Medical Malpractice Claim Outcomes in Texas, 1988–2002

Using a comprehensive database of closed claims maintained by the Texas Department of Insurance since 1988, this study provides evidence on a range of issues involving medical malpractice litigation, including claim frequency, payout frequency, payment amounts, defense costs, and jury verdicts. The data present a picture of stability in most respects and moderate change in others. We do not find evidence in claim outcomes of the medical malpractice insurance crisis that produced headlines over the last several years and led to legal reform in Texas and other states. Controlling for population growth, the number of large paid claims (over $25,000 in real 1988 dollars) was roughly constant from 1990–2002. The number of smaller paid claims declined. Controlling for inflation, payout per large paid claim increased over 1988–2002 by an estimated 0.1 percent (insignificant) to 0.5 percent (marginally significant) per year, depending on the data set we use. Jury awards increased by an estimated 2.5 percent (insignificant) to 3.6 percent (marginally significant) per year, depending on the data set, but actual payouts in tried cases showed little or no time trend. Real defense costs per large paid claim rose by 4.2–4.5 percent per year. Real total cost per large paid claim, including defense costs, rose by 0.8–1.2 percent per year.
Financial reforms and technical efficiency in Indian commercial banking: A generalized stochastic frontier analysis

Abstract In this study we estimate technical efficiency of Indian commercial banks from 1989 to 2009, using a multiple-output generalized stochastic production frontier and analyze the effects of financial reforms on estimated efficiency. The generalized method estimates technical efficiency in the presence of multiple outputs, filling a gap in the existing literature. Our results show that Indian commercial banks were operating with 64% efficiency on average during the sample period. The initial phase of reform had a positive impact on while the later phase adversely affected technical efficiency of banks. Public sector banks show higher efficiency levels compared to private and foreign banks.
Experientialism, Materialism, and the Pursuit of Happiness:

Previous research indicates that materialistic aspirations are negatively associated with happiness and psychological health. Recent research extends these findings by demonstrating that allocating discretionary resources toward life experiences makes people happier than allocating discretionary resources toward material possessions. Respondents to various surveys have indicated that purchases made with the intention of acquiring life experiences make them happier than purchases made with the intention of acquiring material possessions. Thinking about experiential purchases has also been shown to produce more positive feelings than thinking about material purchases. Other studies suggest that experiential purchases make people happier because they are more open to positive reinterpretations, are more resistant to disadvantageous comparisons, and foster successful social relationships more than material purchases.
An Analysis of Jerzy Neyman’s Imaginary, Non Existent , Principle of Indifference, Urn Ball Example supposedly taken from J M Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability(1921)

Jerzy Neyman analyzed an imaginary, non existent, Urn ball problem that he thought was taken from J M Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability in his Lectures and Conferences on Mathematical Statistics and Probability (1952). Neyman apparently never read the book for himself. He apparently relied on some, other, unknown source to provide him with the problem that he thought came from J M Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability. The problem can be analyzed based on an “as if” approach to discover if Neyman realized that Keynes’s Principle of Indifference is a substantially different technique from Laplace’s concoction that, when applied, will lead to substantially different answers from those obtained by the use of Laplace’s Principle of Non –Sufficient Knowledge.
Markov switching and long memory: a Monte Carlo analysis

This article finds the close relationship between long memory and some forms of Markov-switching models. The simulation results suggest: (1) when the transition probabilities are closer to unity, it is more likely to generate long memory process; (2) magnitude of regime-switching plays an important role in generating long memory; and (3) process with switching in variance (disturbance) is much less likely to explain long-memory process than switching in mean (intercept) and autoregressive coefficient. Therefore, given the observed high persistence in financial volatility data, volatility modelling by switching in mean and AR coefficient is preferred to that by switching in variance.
Battle for the Disclosure Tort

Legal scholars guided the creation and development of privacy torts, including what would become known as the disclosure tort, for about seventy-five years (1890–1965), a period in which most states came to recognize a common law or statutory right to privacy. Since then, scholarly attempts to curb or modify the tort have yielded little. This article — beginning with the formalism-realism debate won by Brandeis, Pound, and Prosser and ending with modern experts — shows that notwithstanding enormous efforts by some of America’s most respected contemporary academics, would-be reformers of the disclosure tort have not budged it since Prosser’s Restatement (Second). The article presents both a lesson and a warning for modern scholars who seek to change privacy tort law.
The Arbitrators' Duty to Respect the Parties' Choice of Law in Commercial Arbitration

This article contributes to the debate regarding the extent to which parties ought to be free to choose the law applicable to their disputes by considering that debate in the context of commercial arbitration. While there are several articles discussing the pros and cons of allowing parties greater autonomy with respect to choice of law, few, if any, consider how the arguments may be different in the context of commercial arbitration. I argue that there is no valid reason for arbitrators to ignore the parties' choice of law in commercial arbitration. Arbitrators derive their authority from the arbitration agreement and are limited by it. Therefore, they do not have the power to disregard the parties' choice of law. Moreover, respect for the parties' choices encourages the use of arbitration. In making this argument, I analyze judicial choice of law rules and their implications for arbitration, including the new Uniform Commercial Code provision on choice of law, (about which very little has been written to date), and various state law rules. I also recognize that some scholars oppose giving parties so much autonomy because it may undermine a state's public policies and its attempts to protect its citizens. Finally, I consider the constitutional limitations on party autonomy. In response to these concerns, I suggest that arbitration is sufficiently different from litigation that these concerns are not as compelling in an arbitration context.
Targeting Legal Advice

The recent spate of misconduct in large, publicly-traded corporations has led to what can be viewed as a new form of overcriminalization: the targeting of legal advice as an obstacle to be removed by prosecutors in pursuing the investigation of corporate wrongdoing. This form of overcriminalization does not involve the adoption of new laws or an attempt to have courts adopt a new interpretation of an older statute to address changed circumstances. The payment of attorney's fees by a corporation is not a failure of cooperation unless one views the presence of an attorney for a corporate officer as an impediment to an investigation that should be removed. Certainly, an attorney is unlikely to recommend that a client who is the target of an investigation cooperate with a government investigation, at least not without the protection of an immunity agreement or plea bargain. That does not mean the attorney's advice is wrongful or designed to obstruct justice. It is certainly the case that defense attorneys representing individual officers can make it harder for the government to investigate corporate misconduct. That alone is hardly a justification for viewing the payment of attorney's fees or a joint defense agreement-both of which are completely legal and reasonable decisions by the attorney-as a sign that a corporation is not cooperating in an investigation.
Emergent mesoscale phenomena in magnetized accretion disc turbulence

We study how the structure and variability of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence in accretion discs converge with domain size. Our results are based on a series of vertically stratified local simulations, computed using the athena MHD code, that have fixed spatial resolution, but varying radial and azimuthal extent (from ΔR= 0.5H to 16H, where H is the vertical scale height). We show that elementary local diagnostics of the turbulence, including the Shakura–Sunyaev α parameter, the ratio of Maxwell stress to magnetic energy and the ratio of magnetic to fluid stresses, converge to within the precision of our measurements for spatial domains of radial size Lx≥ 2H. We obtain α≃ 0.02–0.03, consistent with other recent determinations. Very small domains (Lx= 0.5H) return anomalous results, independent of spatial resolution. This convergence with domain size, however, is only valid for a limited set of diagnostics: larger spatial domains admit the emergence of dynamically important mesoscale structures. In our largest simulations, the Maxwell stress shows a significant large-scale non-local component, while the density develops long-lived axisymmetric perturbations (‘zonal flows’) at the 20 per cent level. Most strikingly, the variability of the disc in fixed-sized patches decreases strongly as the simulation volume increases, while variability in the magnetically dominated corona remains constant. Comparing our largest local simulations to global simulations with comparable spatial resolution, we find generally good agreement. There is no direct evidence that the presence of curvature terms or radial gradients in global calculations materially affect the turbulence, except to perhaps introduce an outer radial scale for mesoscale structures. The demonstrated importance of mean magnetic fields – seen in both large local and global simulations – implies, however, that the growth and saturation of these fields is likely of critical importance for the evolution of accretion discs.
Behavioral Public Finance: Tax Design as Price Presentation

In this essay we review the evidence from marketing research about price presentation of consumer products and discuss how these lessons have been applied—consciously or unconsciously—in the design of the U.S. tax system. Our perspective is that, in most situations, the designers of the tax system attempt to minimize the perceived burden of any given amount of tax collections. We allow, though, that in certain situations an additional goal is to maximize the perceived burden of others. We also investigate how, when the objective is to encourage a particular activity, price presentation may enhance the achievement of that goal for a given amount of tax subsidy. We conclude by addressing the ethical and normative implications of price presentation in the tax system.
NEVER, NEVER, NEVER GIVE IN? UNDERSTANDING THE ENTREPRENEUR'S DECISION TO PERSIST IN THE FACE OF ADVERSITY

Entrepreneurial persistence is the decision to remain steadfast in the new venture regardless of counterinfluences, adversity, or enticing alternatives. An entrepreneur chooses to persist by considering the appeal of the perceived outcomes of continuing with the venture (valences) and by determining a relative probability of actually achieving those outcomes (expectancy). These judgments are influenced by personal characteristics and environmental feedback. Using a conjoint experiment, I explore how adversity and values impact the weight placed on expectancy and valences in the persistence decision policies of 105 entrepreneurs. The findings suggest that the persistence decision policies are heterogeneous depending on the level of adversity experienced and the individual values held by the entrepreneurs. The results provide interesting insights into why and how entrepreneurs choose to persist.
Testable implications of affine term structure models

Affine term structure models have been used to address a wide range of questions in macroeconomics and finance. This paper investigates a number of their testable implications which have not previously been explored. We show that the assumption that certain specified yields are priced without error is testable, and find that the implied measurement or specification error exhibits serial correlation in all of the possible formulations investigated here. We further find that the predictions of these models for the average levels of different interest rates are inconsistent with the observed data, and propose a more general specification that is not rejected by the data.
Theory-Based Illiquidity and Asset Pricing

Many proxies of illiquidity have been used in the literature that relates illiquidity to asset prices. These proxies have been motivated from an empirical standpoint. In this study, we approach liquidity estimation from a theoretical perspective. Our method explicitly recognizes the analytic dependence of illiquidity on more primitive drivers such as trading activity and information asymmetry. More specifically, we estimate illiquidity using structural formulae in line with Kyle's (1985) lambda for a comprehensive sample of stocks. The empirical results provide evidence that theory-based estimates of illiquidity are priced in the cross-section of expected stock returns, even after accounting for risk factors, firm characteristics known to influence returns, and other illiquidity proxies prevalent in the literature. The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.
Debt renegotiation and debt overhang: Evidence from lender mergers

This paper studies whether debt renegotiation mitigates debt overhang and improves investment efficiency. Using mergers between lenders participated in the same syndicated loans as natural experiments that exogenously reduce the number of lenders and thus make renegotiation easier, I find that firms affected by the mergers experience more loan renegotiations and increase capital expenditure investment. I also find that the effect is stronger for firms with higher Q, suggesting improved investment efficiency. Further evidence suggests that the effect concentrates on loans without performance pricing provisions and unsecured loans, providing further support that lender mergers improves investment efficiency for firms suffering from debt overhang ex ante.
What do Chinese Macro Announcements Tell Us About the World Economy

We examine the effect of scheduled macroeconomic announcements made by China on world financial and commodity futures markets. All announcements related to Chinese manufacturing and industrial output move stock markets, energy and industrial commodities as well as commodity currencies. News about Chinese domestic consumption leaves most markets unaffected, suggesting that market participants view the announcements primarily as a signal of the state of the global economy rather than merely of China’s domestic demand. The market response to unexpectedly strong output announcements is not consistent with investors being concerned about tightening of Chinese macroeconomic policy; instead, the world markets view strong Chinese output as a rising tide that lifts all boats. JEL classification: E44; G14; G15
A First Amendment-Inspired Approach to Heller’s “Schools” and “Government Buildings”

Although the Supreme Court in Heller strongly suggested that the Second Amendment protects a right to armed self-defense outside the home, it carved out an enigmatic exception to this right: the government may prohibit weapons in "sensitive places such as schools and government buildings." This Article focuses on Heller’s enumerated sensitive places — schools and government buildings — and begins with the premise that these terms allow some room for interpretation. By its mention of "schools," did the Supreme Court mean to leave undisturbed gun bans in primary and secondary schools only, or also on university campuses? In its reference to "government buildings," did the Court mean to suggest that the government may act with impunity whenever it bans armed self-defense on its property, or are there some types of public property — particularly national parks and remote lands home to dangerous wildlife — where a combination of low security risks and historical practices limits the government’s authority as property owner? Building on a growing body of scholarship that has looked to the First Amendment as a guidepost for mapping out the boundaries of the post-Heller Second Amendment, this Article demonstrates how the Court's public-forum and student-speech doctrines caution against an expansive reading of Heller’s enumerated sensitive places. The Supreme Court has held that students do not forfeit the First Amendment's core protections when they step onto campus, and it has also suggested that adult college students enjoy broader free speech rights than do students in primary and secondary schools. The Supreme Court also has held that the government's ownership of property does not automatically entail the power to prohibit free speech activities, and on certain types of public property historically open for speech and expression, the public enjoys broad First Amendment rights. Moreover, even in nonpublic forums where the government enjoys broad discretion to curtail speech, it cannot engage in viewpoint discrimination. These First Amendment principles suggest that the Second Amendment's core right to armed self-defense, in some form, might be available to adult students at public universities and to the general public on certain types of public property where armed self-defense historically has been permitted, such as national parks and remote lands that are home to dangerous wildlife.
The Potential for State Labor Law: The New York Greengrocer Code of Conduct

Recent labor law scholarship has acknowledged the “ossification” of federal labor law. The decline in private sector unionism, coupled with the relatively stagnant body of law surrounding the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), has led to a feeling in the field that there is little new under the collective-bargaining sun. Certainly, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has made important changes over the last decade, such as the recognition of graduate students as “employees” for NLRA purposes. However, so much has remained the same—and seems likely to remain for the foreseeable future—that labor law academics often seem gloomy for their discipline’s prospects.
Do corporations award CEO stock options effectively

Abstract This paper analyzes stock option awards to CEOs of 792 U.S. public corporations between 1984 and 1991. Using a Black-Scholes approach, I test whether stock options' performance incentives have significant associations with explanatory variables related to agency cost reduction. Further tests examine whether the mix of compensation between stock options and cash pay can be explained by corporate liquidity, tax status, or earnings management. Results indicate that few agency or financial contracting theories have explanatory power for patterns of CEO stock option awards.
The Implicit Teaching of Utopian Speculations: Rousseau's Contribution to the Natural Law Tradition

This article examines the evolution of natural law theory and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's contribution to it. The thesis that emerges from that examination asserts that the tension between law in its natural and positive forms is endemic to the human condition. If any common ground is to be found between theories of positivistic and natural law, it lies in the realization that natural law doctrine is not gratuitous and subjective optimism nor idealism pure and simple. The fact that natural law doctrine can serve but a role of general guidance, that it is alien to the concrete, positivistic manifestations of law, constitutes an implicit statement of man's metaphysical dilemma – his inability to fuse the ideal and the real. Rousseau's contribution to natural law speculation lies precisely at this juncture. Unlike his mentors who provided him with the classical natural rights framework in which to build his political theory, Rousseau, as a literary writer and artist, had a particularly acute sense of the dichotomy between the real and the ideal and of the corrosive effects that the intransigent character of reality could have upon the intrinsic aspirations of the individual. His shifting of the classical political discourse to a literary modality reveals in a unique way the ultimate significance of natural law as a theory about law and man.
Pressure Cooker Politics: Partisanship and Symbolism in State Certification of Federal Stimulus Funds

To access funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, state governors had to formally certify their intent to do so within 45 days of the law’s enactment. All governors eventually certified, but with considerable variation in celerity. This study employs event history techniques to model the probability of certifying the ARRA. It argues that the statute’s design combined with economic distress within the states rendered manifest rejection of the law politically infeasible but, for state officials with certain partisan commitments, left open the possibility of symbolic resistance or support in the form of time to certification. State leaders relied on party identification to guide their decisions, resulting in markedly different propensities toward certification for Republican and Democratic governors. Results lend credence to this thesis: States with Republican governors were nearly 60% less likely to certify the ARRA on a given day than states with Democratic governors. This fin...
PLANNING CHINESE CITIES: THE LIMITS OF TRANSITIONAL INSTITUTIONS

China's economic reform is a gradual and exploratory process, which has stimulated the dramatic growth and restructuring of the Chinese cities, but has also made urban master plans quickly outdated and unable to function effectively to guide the development of cities. Through a case study of Hangzhou, the paper argues that the gradual and exploratory nature of China's reform is incompatible with the nature of the urban master plan, which requires a blueprint and the ability to project the future. Rather than guiding development and policies, urban master plans often lag behind reforms initiated at the national and local levels, and have to be revised constantly to follow the new direction of the reforms. Consequently, Chinese cities are in chaos, and much development and new construction lacks proper planning guidance. The paper argues that problems with Chinese cities and planning are related to the incompatible relationship between the nature of urban planning and that of transitional institutions. This...
Moral Diversity and Efficient Breach

Most people think it is morally wrong to breach a contract. But sophisticated commercial parties, like large corporations, have no objection to breaching contracts and paying the price in damages when doing so is in their self-interest. The literature has ignored the profound legal, economic, and normative implications of that asymmetry between individuals’ and firms’ approaches to breach. To individuals, a contract is a promise that cannot be broken regardless of the financial stakes. For example, millions of homeowners refused to breach their mortgage contracts in the aftermath of the housing crisis even though doing so could have saved them tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Their moral beliefs led homeowners to forgo opportunities for efficient breach that firms would have seized, thus exacerbating already swelling wealth inequalities. This Article explains this phenomenon, identifies its consequences and examines strategies to address it. Neither ex post judicial interventions (such as adjusting the remedies for breach) nor traditional ex ante regulatory interventions (such as disclosure requirements) will effectively address the problem. Instead, the most promising approach is a novel solution based on the framework of choice architecture: requiring contracts to include an express term creating an option to exit the contract and pay a fee equivalent to expectation damages. An express exit term elevates an implicit legal option into an explicit contractual option, reframing the moral choice so individuals would perceive exiting the contract as a morally permissible performance of their promise rather than a morally forbidden breaking of it. The presence of that exit term thereby aligns individuals’ perceptions of their moral obligations under the contract with sophisticated firms’ approaches to breach. The Article concludes with new empirical evidence that demonstrates the practical impact of an exit clause. It presents the results of two experimental studies I performed that demonstrate the effectiveness of a mandatory exit clause in reducing the effects of the asymmetry between individuals and firms. Those results show that exit clauses could have substantial practical implications for the regulation of contracts in contexts like consumer and mortgage contracts.
Sovereignty, the Corporate Religious, and Jurisdictional/Political Pluralism

We typically associate sovereignty with the modern state and presuppose the coincidence of political rule, public power, government, legitimacy and jurisdiction with territorially delimited states. We are also used to referencing liberal principles of justice, egalitarian ideals of fairness, republican conceptions of non-domination and separation of powers, and democratic ideas of popular sovereignty (democratic constitutionalism), for the standards that should constitute, guide, limit and legitimate the exercise of sovereign power. This Article addresses an important challenge to these principles: the reemergence of theories and claims to jurisdictional/political pluralism on behalf of non-state “nomos groups” within well-established liberal-democratic polities. Theories of jurisdictional political pluralism purport to account for the independent sovereign authority of the corporate religious, while providing a “postmodern,” “permeable,” “pluralist” conception of sovereignty allegedly more appropriate descriptively to twenty-first century reality and more attractive normatively, than the modern statist version. This Article analyzes and assesses these claims. It criticizes the disassociation of the sovereignty concept from publicly accountable power, challenges the displacement of rights-holders from individuals to corporate groups, and offers a different, federal alternative to anachronistic or normatively flawed modern monistic statist conceptions. My purpose is to preserve the key achievements of democratic constitutionalism and to apply them to every level on which government, power, rule, and/or domination is exercised.
Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation through Physical Design of the Built Environment

The built environment is characterized by man-made physical features that make it difficult for certain individuals—often poor people and people of color—to access certain places. Bridges were designed to be so low that buses could not pass under them in order to prevent people of color from accessing a public beach. Walls, fences, and highways separate historically white neighborhoods from historically black ones. Wealthy communities have declined to be served by public transit so as to make it difficult for individuals from poorer areas to access their neighborhoods. Although the law has addressed the exclusionary impacts of racially restrictive covenants and zoning ordinances, most legal scholars, courts, and legislatures have given little attention to the use of these less obvious exclusionary urban design tactics. Street grid layouts, one-way streets, the absence of sidewalks and crosswalks, and other design elements can shape the demographics of a city and isolate a neighborhood from those surrounding it. In this way, the exclusionary built environment—the architecture of a place—functions as a form of regulation; it constrains the behavior of those who interact with it, often without their even realizing it. This Article suggests that there are two primary reasons that we fail to consider discriminatory exclusion through architecture in the same way that we consider functionally similar exclusion through law. First, potential challengers, courts, and lawmakers often fail to recognize architecture as a form of regulation at all, viewing it instead as functional, innocuous, and prepolitical. Second, even if decision makers and those who are excluded recognize architecture’s regulatory power, existing jurisprudence is insufficient to address its harms. author. Associate Professor of Law, University of Maine School of Law. This Article has benefitted greatly from the feedback received at the Sabin Colloquium on Innovative Environmental Law Scholarship at Columbia Law School, the annual meeting of the Association for Law, Property, and Society, and the junior faculty works in progress workshop at American University’s Washington College of Law. I am grateful to Dmitry Bam, Justin Steil, Dave Owen, Florence Wagman Roisman, Robin Malloy, Zach Heiden, Anna Welch, Aaron Perzanowski, and Jim Kelly for their helpful comments. Special thanks to Patrick Lyons and Anthony Aloisio for excellent research assistance.
Scraped Data and Sticky Prices

I use daily prices collected from online retailers in five countries to study the impact of measurement bias on three common price stickiness statistics. Relative to previous results, I find that o...
Strong Wills, Weak Locks: Consumer Expectations and the DMCA Anticircumvention Regime

The anticircumvention regime of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which operates in the background of our everyday interactions with the technologies used to distribute copyrighted works, relies on a combination of digital rights management systems that restrict certain interactions and capabilities, and legal rules that impose liability for defeating these protections. Because the DMCA’s anticircumvention regime relies on a combination of complex law and porous technology that fails to reflect consumer expectations, there is good reason to believe that it is ineffectual. Rather than actively complying with the DMCA’s abstruse provisions or passively accepting the narrow range of interactions that DRM technologies typically allow, many copyright consumers seem to have a different lodestar—their own beliefs and intuitions about the kinds of interactions with copyrighted works that are desirable, appropriate, or natural. Following these intuitions, users do with works as they see fit. They may copy for personal use, to remix and criticize, to share with others, or to avoid paying a price. Should a DRM barrier stand in their way, they may very well circumvent it or they may not, but neither law nor technology seems to bear heavily on the choice. This paper argues that such intuitions or norms may play a greater role than many suspect in governing copyright consumers’ behavior; that they may undermine the efficacy of both legal and technological restraints; and that market participants and lawmakers alike would do well to take them seriously.
Weyerhaeuser: An Epilogue

Weyerhaeuser Co. v. Ross-Simmons Hardwood Lumber Co. could have been influential in three ways. First, the Court directly addressed the standard for predatory buying and, consequently, could have i...
Integrated variance forecasting: Model based vs. reduced form

Abstract This paper compares model-based and reduced-form forecasts of financial volatility when high-frequency return data are available. We derived exact formulas for the forecast errors and analyzed the contribution of the “wrong” data modeling and errors in forecast inputs. The comparison is made for “feasible” forecasts, i.e., we assumed that the true data generating process, latent states and parameters are unknown. As an illustration, the same comparison is carried out empirically for spot 5 min returns of DM/USD exchange rates. It is shown that the comparison between feasible reduced-form and model-based forecasts is not always in favor of the latter in contrast to their infeasible versions. The reduced-form approach is generally better for long-horizon forecasting and for short-horizon forecasting in the presence of microstructure noise.
The Benefits of Competitive Upward Channel Decentralization

Upward channel decentralization occurs when firms choose to not manufacture products by themselves and procure products from upstream suppliers. Current voices from marketing scholars and practitioners have predominantly focused on the cost benefits when production is outsourced to lower-cost upstream suppliers. In this paper, we study the effects of upward channel decentralization where competing firms can outsource their production to upstream suppliers who do not have any advantages on production costs. We show how downstream firms can still benefit from upward channel decentralization provided their product positioning is endogenous. Thus, we provide a new theory on the strategic benefits of upward channel decentralization. We also use this framework to show a new benefit to manufacturers selling through downstream retailers rather than directly. We examine the implications of our theory for consumer and social welfare, and also draw managerial implications. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.
THE ADAM KLUG MEMORIAL LECTURE: HABERLER VERSUS NURKSE: THE CASE FOR FLOATING EXCHANGE RATES AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO BRETTON WOODS?

From the perspective of the late 1930s and 1940s, the dominant view was that the interwar experience was a financial disaster. This view is perfectly encapsulated in the League of Nations’ publication The Interwar Currency Experience, the bulk of which was written by Ragnar Nurkse, published in 1944 and in the League ’s parallel 1945 publication, Economic Stability in the Post-War World. It also was the view behind the Keynes and White plans for international monetary reform, which culminated in the Bretton Woods conference.
An Essay on the Need for Subsidized Mandatory Long-Term Care Insurance

Imagine yourself in a room with 100 persons, all age sixty. Of the group, fifty-three are women and forty-seven are men. Racially and ethnically they mirror the population of Americans age sixty. Now answer the question: "Before the 100 die, how many will require long-term care and, on the average, for how many days and at what cost?" Give up? So do I. While it is common knowledge that many of us will need long-term care, no one seems to know how many will need such care or for how long. And some of you will ask, 'What do you mean by 'long-term care?'" Here again, there is no consistent answer. Certainly, care provided in a nursing home and probably in an assisted living facility qualifies as long-term care, but are all residents of board and care homes receiving long-term care?And what of those receiving assistance from a spouse? How much assistance is needed to be considered long-term care? What of the elderly who live with a child or a relative? Surely some do so because of the need for care, but not all. We have no knowledge of how many elderly who live with another do so primarily to receive assistance or care. Other elderly live alone and contract for care in their home, but here too we have no idea of the number. Other forms of care may or may not qualify as providing long-term care. For example, is adult day care long-term care? Are the elderly, who spend some or all of the day at a senior services center, recipients of long-term care or just lonely individuals in search of companionship and a good meal?There they are, those 100 persons, without a clue as to whether they need long-term care or how much it might cost them. All they know for certain is that they face a potential risk that could bankrupt many of them. In this essay I address the dire need for and obvious advantages of subsidized, mandatory long-term care insurance as a solution for their dilemma - and for yours and mine.
Pricing the term structure with linear regressions

Abstract We show how to price the time series and cross section of the term structure of interest rates using a three-step linear regression approach. Our method allows computationally fast estimation of term structure models with a large number of pricing factors. We present specification tests favoring a model using five principal components of yields as factors. We demonstrate that this model outperforms the Cochrane and Piazzesi (2008) four-factor specification in out-of-sample exercises but generates similar in-sample term premium dynamics. Our regression approach can also incorporate unspanned factors and allows estimation of term structure models without observing a zero-coupon yield curve.
Harris–Viehmann conjecture for Hodge–Newton reducible Rapoport–Zink spaces

Rapoport–Zink spaces, or more generally local Shimura varieties, are expected to provide geometric realization of the local Langlands correspondence via their l‐adic cohomology. Along this line is a conjecture by Harris and Viehmann, which roughly says that when the underlying local Shimura datum is not basic, the l‐adic cohomology of the local Shimura variety is parabolically induced. We verify this conjecture for Rapoport–Zink spaces which are Hodge type and Hodge–Newton reducible. The main strategy is to embed such a Rapoport–Zink space into an appropriate space of EL type, for which the conjecture is already known to hold by the work of Mantovan.
Advances in Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Health Interventions

Abstract Recent work has clarified the welfare implications of the application of cost-effectiveness analysis to the allocation of health care. Although cost-effectiveness analysis shares many similarities with cost-benefit analysis, it did not develop as an outgrowth of neoclassical welfare economics. Consequently, even though the welfare implications of public decisionmaking based on cost-benefit analysis have long been understood, until recently the conditions under which decisions made on the basis of cost-effectiveness criteria lead to potential Pareto improvement had received little attention. This chapter describes the welfare economic foundations of cost-effectiveness analysis and how such foundations can be applied to resolve controversies in the application of the technique. It also discusses procedures for applying the technique, the circumstances under which decision rules based on cost-effectiveness analysis have desirable welfare economic properties, the appropriate perspective for the analysis, and issues in measuring outcomes. Even when standard welfare economic assumptions are not fully accurate descriptions of the markets and conditions in which health care is delivered, cost-effectiveness analysis can be a useful guide to allocation decisions.