cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Wheaton v. Greenleaf: A (Story) Tale of Three Reporters*

This article recounts some of the history of the early reporters of the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, including the efforts of Justice Joseph Story to cultivate the regular and widely available reporting of Supreme Court decisions, his close friendship with Henry Wheaton — the Court’s third reporter, and Story’s relationship with Simon Greenleaf, well-known Harvard law professor and reporter for the Supreme Court of Maine who narrowly missed out on becoming the Court’s fourth reporter in a situation that both Story and Greenleaf regretted. The article publishes a letter from Greenleaf to Story expressing interest in the position of Supreme Court reporter and seeking Story’s support, but the letter arrived too late, after Story already had promised his support to Richard Peters, Jr. The article also briefly recounts the Supreme Court case of Wheaton v. Peters, in which Wheaton and Peters battled over whether the Court’s reporters held copyright interests in the Supreme Court decisions they reported. The article notes that, but for the belated delivery of Greenleaf’s letter to Story, the case might instead have been styled Wheaton v. Greenleaf, or perhaps there would have been no case at all.
The Citizen and the Terrorist

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there have been more than one thousand incidents of hate violence reported in the United States. How do we understand the emergence of this violence in a context of national tragedy? What are the seeds of this violence, and how has the political climate following September 11 allowed them to grow? Of course, there are no easy answers to these questions. This Article suggests that September 11 facilitated the consolidation of a new identity category that groups together persons who appear "Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim." This consolidation reflects a racialization wherein members of this group are identified as terrorists and disidentified as citizens. The stereotype of the "Arab terrorist" is not an unfamiliar one. But the ferocity with which multiple communities have been interpellated as responsible for the events of September 11 suggests there are particular dimensions converging in this racialization. The Article examines three: the fact and legitimacy of racial profiling; the redeployment of Orientalist tropes; and the relationship between citizenship, nation and identity.
On derivatives markets and social welfare: A theory of empty voting and hidden ownership

In the past twenty-five years, derivatives markets have grown exponentially. Large, modern derivatives markets increasingly enable investors to hold economic interests in corporations without owning voting rights, and vice versa. This leads to both empty voters â investors whose voting rights in a corporation exceed their economic interests â and hidden owners â investors whose economic interests exceed their voting rights. We present formal models that show how, when financial markets are opaque, empty voting and hidden ownership can render financial markets unpredictable, unstable, and inefficient. By contrast, we show that when financial markets are transparent, empty voting and hidden ownership have dramatically different effects: they follow predictable patterns, encourage stable outcomes, and promote efficiency. Our analysis lends insight into the operation of securities markets in general and derivatives markets in particular. It also provides a new justification for a robust mandatory disclosure regime and facilitates analysis of proposed substantive securities regulations.
Limits to the Wisdom of the Crowd in Idea Selection

An emerging management trend is to use the “wisdom of the crowd” to make decisions traditionally made by the top management alone. Research on this phenomenon has focused mainly on the capacity of crowds to generate ideas, but much less is known about a crowd’s capacity to select ideas. To study crowd-based idea selection in firms, this chapter develops a mathematical model of a crowd that makes decisions by majority voting. The model takes into account contingencies that are of particular importance to firms, namely: the size of the population from which the crowd is drawn, the distribution of accuracy among members of the population, and the firm’s ability to recruit the population’s most accurate individuals. The results show that: (1) under relatively common conditions, increasing the size of the crowd may actually reduce performance; (2) near-optimal performance can usually be achieved by a much smaller crowd than the one required to achieve optimal performance; (3) determining the best crowd size depends critically on the firm’s ability to recruit “accurate” individuals; and (4) good performance does not require large crowds unless all population members exhibit low levels of accuracy.
On the linguistic design of multinational courts: The French capture

This article discusses the importance of language in the institutional design of European and international courts, which I refer to as “linguistic design.” What is at stake in the choice of a court’s official or working language? Picking a language has far-reaching consequences on a court’s composition and internal organizational culture, possibly going as far as influencing the substantive law produced. This is the case because language choices impact the screening of the staff and the manufacture of judicial opinions. Linguistic design imposes costs on non-native speakers forced to use a second (or third) language and confers a set of advantages on native speakers. It has profound implications on judgments as it imports a set of writing conventions that live on even as the institution becomes more cosmopolitan. Using the example of French at the Court of Justice of the European Union, the European Court of Human Rights, and the International Court of Justice, I argue that granting French the status of official language has led French lawyers and French judicial culture to disproportionately influence the courts’ inner workings. This is what I call the “French capture.”
When Shopbots Meet Emails: Implications for Price Competition on the Internet

The Internet has dramatically reduced search costs for customers by using such technologies as shopbots. Email based targeting is relatively inexpensive; the targeting itself can be more precise because firms can better track individual purchase behavior on the Internet. In this paper we address the question: How does the convergence of low search cost for consumers and better targeting ability for firms affect price competition on the Internet? Current theoretical research suggests that both (1) lower search costs and (2) better targeting ability generally lead to more intense price competition. Taken individually, these results would lead us to expect that there will be greater price competition on the Internet due to lower search costs and better targeting. In this paper, we argue that targeting ability increases as search costs fall. Falling search costs can lead to improvements in targeting ability in the form of greater “targeting reach” (the ability to individually address consumers) and “precision” (the ability to distinguish consumers on the basis of their loyalty). We show that the interaction between consumer search and targeting ability can reduce the intensity of competition and raise prices as consumer search and targeting become easier on the Internet.
Investor attention, psychological anchors, and stock return predictability

Abstract Motivated by psychological evidence on limited investor attention and anchoring, we propose two proxies for the degree to which traders under- and overreact to news, namely, the nearness to the Dow 52-week high and the nearness to the Dow historical high, respectively. We find that nearness to the 52-week high positively predicts future aggregate market returns, while nearness to the historical high negatively predicts future market returns. We further show that our proxies contain information about future market returns that is not captured by traditional macroeconomic variables and that our results are robust across G7 countries. Comprehensive Monte Carlo simulations and comparisons with the NYSE/Amex market cap index confirm the significance of these findings.
Child Pornography's Forgotten Victims

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that possession of child pornography is not a victimless crime. It will illustrate the problem and explain the harm suffered by its victims. It will then trace factors that may have contributed to the perception that possession of child pornography is a victimless offense. The first factor is the dual nature of the child pornography laws that addresses both actual and future harm. When this duality is applied to possessors, their link to actual harm appears attenuated because the possessor is not involved in the acts of sexual abuse inherent in producing the images. The second factor is that a number of scholars have criticized generally possession offenses as a tool for preemptive prosecutions, but they have not exempted child pornography from their condemnation. Finally, technology itself is a cause. The growth of the Internet and the ability to find images from the comfort of one's home further weakens the connection between the victim and the viewer; this distance is exacerbated by a general sense that nothing is real in cyberspace.
Weak States and Institutionalized Bargaining Power in International Organizations

When and how can weak states increase their bargaining leverage in international organizations? I argue that during phases of routine bargaining, distributional outcomes depend on the states’ political and economic leverage and less on the formal allocation rules, so they are unfavorable to weak states. This changes in phases of extraordinary bargaining, which are occasioned by significant reform such as enlargement. States that expect distributional conflict from enlargement can threaten to block accession negotiations and increase their membership benefits even if they are politically weak. Statistical and qualitative analyses of distributional bargaining in the European Union support the theoretical claims.
Spatial differentiation in the supermarket industry: The role of common information

In this paper, I investigate the geographic location decisions of supermarkets to infer their tradeoffs between locating close to favorable demand conditions and differentiating themselves geographically from rivals. The model is based on a discrete-choice game between two types of supermarkets, and incorporates firm uncertainty arising from firm- and location-level private information as well as researcher uncertainty arising from location-level common information. Thus the model addresses the concern that firms’ actions may be based on factors that are unobservable to the researcher, thus correlated conditional on observables. The estimates reflect a significant level of common information. Importantly, I find that ignoring unobserved location heterogeneity results in biased estimates of both the competitive effects and the effects of location-specific observables on profits. Counterfactual predictions are therefore misleading if unobserved location heterogeneity is unaccounted for.
Breastfeeding in Custody Proceedings: A Modern-Day Manifestation of Liberal and Conservative Family Traditions

This article explores the relationship between breastfeeding in custody proceedings and the supposedly discredited common law coverture and tender years doctrines. It argues that the case of custody disputes highlights the contradictory nature of family law through the relationship between parental autonomy, the privatization of dependency, and the judicially determined appropriateness of maternal relationships.
In the Book We have left out Nothing: The Ethical Problem of the Existence of Verse 4:34 in the Qur’an

Kecia Ali writes in her book Sexual Ethics and Islam that studies on the history and forms of gender injustice in Islam have yet to adequately address concomitant theological challenges concerning the nature of the divine justice and will. In response to this need, I would like to explore the problem posed by the mere existence of verse 4:34, otherwise known as “the beating verse,” in the Qur’an. This article is intended to be a primary theological and ethical response to the problem, rather than a secular academic analysis of historical approaches to the verse. My approach is grounded in the thought of Ibn al-`Arabi (d. 1240), arguably the most influential, systematically comprehensive, and prolific mystic and thinker of medieval Islam. Ibn al-`Arabi’s ontology, ethics, and hermeneutics of the Qur’an provide a useful frame and a possible resolution to the problem.
Designing a Clinic Model for a Restorative Community Justice Partnership

In this Article, we (Professors Brooks and Lopez) discuss our efforts to embrace the core characteristics of community lawyering clinics during the development of a new Community Lawyering Clinic at Drexel University, Thomas R. Kline School of Law. Specifically, the Article outlines how we have begun to tackle two central questions in designing our clinic: first, how we ensure that our work reflects and incorporates the diverse desires and demands of “the community”; and second, how we facilitate an environment that encourages a community partnership characterized by equality, respect, empathy, compassion, and integrity. As designers of a new community lawyering clinic, we are grateful for the groundbreaking work of the pioneers in this field, and also for the contributions of our contemporaries. At the same time we appreciate that the present conditions in society, including the ever widening justice gap and other changes in the legal landscape, call upon us to think creatively about innovative models of lawyering and new roles for lawyers. Deliberative Democracy and Beloved Community are approaches that inspire us to reflect deeply about our choices, to invest in relationship-building, and to embrace processes that often seem indeterminate. By sharing some of our early experiences as well as our thinking, we hope we are contributing useful ideas that will help advance the work of other clinical law teachers and community lawyers.
Dynamic Interpretation of Emerging Risks in the Financial Sector

We use computational linguistics to develop a dynamic, interpretable methodology that can detect emerging risks in the financial sector. Our model can predict heightened risk exposures as early as mid-2005, well in advance of the 2008 financial crisis. Risks related to real estate, prepayment, and commercial paper are elevated. Individual bank exposure strongly predicts returns, bank failures, and return volatility. We also document a rise in market instability since 2014 related to sources of funding and mergers and acquisitions. Overall, our model predicts the buildup of emerging risk in the financial system and bank-specific exposures in a timely fashion.Received March 1, 2018; editorial decision November 18, 2018 by Editor Itay Goldstein.
Dynamically estimating the distributional impacts of U.S. climate policy with NEMS: A case study of the Climate Protection Act of 2013

We present a new method that enables users of the federal government's flagship energy policy model (NEMS) to dynamically estimate the direct energy expenditure impacts of climate policy across U.S. household incomes and census regions. Our approach combines NEMS output with detailed household expenditure data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, improving on static methods that assess policy impacts by assuming household energy demand remains unchanged under emissions pricing scenarios. To illustrate our method, we evaluate a recent carbon fee-and-dividend proposal introduced in the U.S. Senate, the Climate Protection Act of 2013 (S. 332). Our analysis indicates this bill, if enacted, would have cut CO2 emissions from energy by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 at a gross cost of less than 0.5% of GDP, while offering rebates sufficient to offset increased direct energy expenditures for typical households making less than $120,000 per year and average households in all regions of the United States.
Lost in Transition: Life Satisfaction on the Road to Capitalism

Abstract In the 1990s transition from socialism to capitalism in Eastern Europe life satisfaction followed the collapse and recovery of GDP, but failed to recover commensurately. By 2005, with GDP averaging about 25 per cent above its early 1990s level, life satisfaction was typically back to its earlier level, but was arguably still below pre-transition values. Increased satisfaction with material living levels occurred at the expense of decreased satisfaction with work, health, and family life. In the decade of the 1990s, disparities in life satisfaction increased with those hardest hit being the less educated and persons over age 30; women and men suffered about equally.
A Note on a Planning Horizon Model of Cash Management

The problem of cash management, in its simplest form, is to formulate decision rules which control the level of a firm's cash balance to meet its demands for cash at minimum total discounted cost. Control is achieved by transacting securities for cash. The cost of control is the commission expense [13]. Optimality depends on balancing excess opportunity costs of holding balances which are too large and having excess buying and selling costs (to meet cash obligations) of balances which are too small.
Piracy Off the Coast of Somalia: The Argument for Pirate Prosecutions in the National Courts of Kenya, The Seychelles, and Mauritius

This Article will argue that, in order to combat the rise of Somali piracy, major maritime nations should rely on national prosecutions of Somali pirates in the courts of stable regional partners, such as Kenya, the Seychelles, and Mauritius. A systematic transfer program and prosecutions in the national courts of several regional partners would preclude the possibility of pirate catch-and-release, and could ultimately provide enough deterrence to seriously dissuade young Somali men from engaging in piracy. The Somali pirates, enemies of all mankind, may find potent foes in the form of Kenyan, Seychellois, and Mauritian prosecutors, who will subject pirates to prosecutions on behalf of all mankind.
Public goods and the distribution of income

Abstract This article addresses conceptual issues concerning the distributive incidence of public goods. Solutions depend on the specific purposes for asking the question of distributive incidence—notably, assessing the extent to which various public goods should be provided, determining how the provision of public goods affects the desirability of income redistribution, and providing a meaningful description of the distribution of well-being. In the course of the analysis, a simple and intuitive version of the benefit principle of taxation (qualitatively different from those commonly advanced in pertinent literatures) is presented, and some of the problems confronting empirical attempts to measure the distributive incidence of public goods are resolved.
Working on the puzzle: health care coverage for low-wage workers.

The article proposes that an "incremental" state-based/public-private approach to expanding access for health care coverage is underway. Two major shifts are encouraging this approach: the movement down of public programs through devolution to the states, and movement out toward increased reliance on private institutions to satisfy public needs. Wisconsin's BadgerCare, a program to cover working low-income families, is used as an example of how the interaction of welfare reform with workplace health coverage gaps created a state impetus towards expanded coverage. That impetus combined with the flexible use SCHIP funding has allowed states to pursue a viable strategy of expanded coverage. The move to public-private coordination has allowed states to develop private-public systems to provide the coverage. These systems employ mechanisms that not only provide coverage but also link across states through intermeshing a knowledge base and actors. The mechanisms include local collaborations, community-based delivery systems, networks, and outcomes processes. The article concludes with a discussion of three challenges to the incremental approach: linking public and private plans, meeting workplace and workforce needs. and integrating the safety net into the mainstream health care financing system.
ON PRACTICES AND THE LAW

In a recent paper, “How Facts Make Law,” I launch an attack on a fundamental doctrine of legal positivism. I argue that nonnormative facts cannot themselves constitutively determine the content of the law. In a response published in this journal, Ram Neta defends the view that nonnormative social facts are sufficient to determine normative facts, including both moral and legal facts. Neta's paper provides a useful opportunity to address a spelled-out version of this view, which in various forms is widely held in philosophy of law and other areas of philosophy. I begin by addressing Neta's attempts to show that descriptive facts can alone determine moral and legal facts. First, Neta's account of why it is wrong to break promises fails. In addition to other problems, it begs the question by taking for granted that a person's desires or other motivational states necessarily justify the actions that they motivate. Next, I turn to Neta's attempt to provide a counterexample to my view about law. In my original paper, I claim that the nature of the constitutive determination relation in the legal domain is what I call rational determination. Roughly speaking, a full constitutive account of the legal facts must include reasons that explain the relation between the determining facts and the legal facts. The facts on which Neta's putative counterexample depends cannot be reasons of the required sort because they take for granted what they are supposed to explain—the way in which nonnormative social facts contribute to the content of the law. Finally, I address the larger issue of how far my argument applies to other domains. I consider and reject Neta's argument that purports to show that all normative domains have the relevant features of the legal domain. I then sketch a competing picture of some normative domains.
The Optimal Penalty for Sexually Transmitting HIV

We develop an endogenous signaling model of sexual behavior and testing under risk of HIV infection to determine whether current criminal laws against exposure to HIV are efficient and to identify the socially optimal law. We consider a law to be socially optimal if it induces information revelation, so that non-fully-informed HIV transmission does not occur. We find that current HIV-specific criminal laws in the United States, which stipulate a single penalty for knowingly exposing another individual to risk of HIV infection, are not generally optimal. The optimal law stipulates a single penalty for knowingly or unknowingly transmitting HIV, and no penalty for exposing another individual to risk of infection without transmitting the virus. The optimal expected penalty is estimated to be approximately 1�2 years of prison.
Religious and Political Virtues and Values in Congruence or Conflict?: On Smith, Bob Jones University, and Christian Legal Society

“Laws,” we said, “are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. . . . Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.” —Justice Scalia, Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith1
Low-Intensity Conflict in the Peaceable Kingdom: The Attributes of International Terrorism in Canada, 1960-90

Although the earliest act of international terrorism in Canada was the assassination of Member of Parliament Thomas D'Arcy McGee by Fenian separatists in 1868, the country generally was spared this type of violence until almost a century later. Over the past three decades, however, Canada, like many Western countries, experienced a number of international terrorist events committed on its home soil. Most of these actions have been successful in capturing the attention of the Canadian public, the government, and the national security agencies. However, few academic studies of an empirical nature analyze political terrorism or any other type of political violence in Canada.
Shareholder litigation, management forecasts, and productive decisions during the initial public offerings

Abstract This paper develops a model to analyze the impact of shareholder litigation on managers’ voluntary disclosure strategies in equity offerings. The major findings are as follows. First, under different economic parameters, the entrepreneur has two possible equilibrium disclosure strategies: full and partial disclosure. Of particular interest is the latter equilibrium, in which shareholder litigation can give the entrepreneur incentives to partially disclose her private information. Second, production decisions might be distorted by the entrepreneur’s disclosure incentives. The full disclosure equilibrium is associated with underinvestment, while overinvestment exists in the partial disclosure equilibrium. The model is then used to examine the effect of regulatory polices on firms’ disclosure incentives. It shows that relaxing the legal liability can result in more information flow to the public. However, it also leads to a higher rate of lawsuits and an increase in deadweight litigation costs.
The Impact of a Marginal Cost Increase on Price and Quality: Theory and Evidence from Airline Market Strikes

This paper examines the impact of a marginal cost increase for one firm on price and quality in a duopoly market. The results are derived theoretically and then tested empirically. The marginal cost increase is interpreted as an increase in the wage one firm pays its workers. The predictions are tested with two United States airline strikes during the 1990's. Quality is proxied in three ways: (1) the number of flights per day, (2) the percentage of flights cancelled, and (3) the percentage of flights arriving late. The results show that the strike coefficients for the effects on quality are most consistent with theoretical predictions when quality is measured as the number of flights per day. These results are encouraging because of the three measures of quality, it seems that number of flights per day is the measure of quality that is most controllable by the .rm. The strike coefficients for the direct effect on price are most consistent with theoretical predictions when quality rankings are determined by the percentage of flights cancelled. The strike coefficients for the total effect on price are most consistent with theoretical predictions when quality rankings are determined by the percentage of flights arriving late.
Financial Statement Complexity and Meeting Analysts’ Expectations†

We examine whether firms with greater financial statement complexity are more likely to meet or beat analysts’ earnings expectations. We proxy for financial statement complexity using the firm's industry and year adjusted accounting policy disclosure length. Firms with more complex financial statements are more likely to just beat expectations than just miss expectations. Firms with complex financial statements appear to use expectations management to beat expectations, but do not use earnings management. Corroborating these findings, we find analysts rely more on management guidance for more complex firms. Firms with complex financial statements are also more likely to have analysts exclude items from actual “street earnings,” but tests suggest this strategy is not specifically used by complex firms to beat expectations. The effect we document is specific to analyst forecasts and not to other alternative benchmarks.
Information gatekeepers: theory and experimental evidence

We consider a model where two adversaries can spend resources in acquir- ing public information about the unknown state of the world in order to influence the choice of a decision maker. We characterize the sampling strategies of the adversaries in the equilibrium of the game. We show that as the cost of information acquisition for one adversary increases, that person collects less evidence whereas the other adver- sary collects more evidence. We then test the results in a controlled laboratory setting. The behavior of subjects is close to the theoretical predictions. Mistakes are relatively
Democracy, Governance, and Economic Growth: Theory and Evidence

The paper examines how democracy affects long-run growth by influencing the quality of governance. Empirical evidence is first presented showing that measures of the quality of governance are substantially higher in more democratic countries. A general-equilibrium, endogenous growth model is then built to show how a governance-improving democracy raises growth. In this model, stronger democratic institutions influence governance by constraining the actions of corrupt officials. Reducing corruption, in turn, stimulates technological change and spurs economic growth. Empirical evidence is presented showing that democracy is in fact a significant determinant of total factor productivity (TFP) growth between 1960 and 1990 in a cross-section of countries. But this contribution occurs only insofar as stronger democratic institutions are associated with greater quality of governance.
Censoring of outcomes and regressors due to survey nonresponse: Identification and estimation using weights and imputations

Survey nonresponse makes identification of population parameters problematic. Except in special cases, identification is possible only if one makes untestable assumptions about the distribution of the missing data. However, nonresponse does not preclude identification of bounds on parameters. This paper shows how identified bounds on unidentified population parameters can be obtained under several forms of nonresponse. Organizations conducting major surveys commonly release public-use data files that provide nonresponse weights or imputations to be used for estimating population parameters. The paper shows how to bound the asymptotic bias of estimates using weights and imputations. The results are illustrated with empirical examples based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.
Critical Error: Courts' Refusal To Recognize Intentional Race Discrimination Findings as Constitutional Facts

Critical Error: Courts’ Refusal To Recognize Intentional Race Discrimination Findings as Constitutional Facts raises a novel double standard: while fact-specific trial court findings of actual malice are reviewed under the “independent judgment” standard (a wholesale re-weighting of the trial court record and decision) on appeal, intentional race discrimination findings are reviewed under the far more deferential Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 52 clear error standard. Both legal concepts are arrived at through assessing state-of-mind determinations; both directly trigger constitutional proscriptions. Only actual malice, however, is classified as a constitutional fact, thus taking it out of the more deferential standard of review. The Supreme Court has failed to clarify this important procedural exception to the clear error standard. More than this, the Court has failed to explain why it refuses to apply independent judgment to all constitutional facts. The results of the differential treatment of these two legal concepts are: 1) Rule 52, and the Supreme Court’s approach to its constitutional fact exception is another type of denial of structural due process, preventing the legal norming of intentional discrimination jurisprudence; 2) institutional interests of doctrinal coherence and decisional accuracy are minimized in favor of reducing direct costs to the judicial system; 3) whether working inside or outside the intentionalist framework of discrimination, it makes sense to apply the independent appellate judgment standard to intentional discrimination findings, and; 4) the persistent application of Rule 52’s clear error standard to findings of intentional discrimination is yet another example of the Supreme Court’s narrowed approach to Equal Protection violations.
Hysteresis in unemployment

Standard macroeconomic models make a sharp distinction between equilibrium and actual unemployment. Equilibrium unemployment is determined by labour market institutions, moves slowly and is unaffected by actual unemployment. Unexpected movements in demand and supply lead to deviations of actual unemployment from equilibriumj these deviations in turn trigger changes in the rate of inflation, which lead eventually to areturn to equilibrium unemployment.
The Asset Management Industry in Asia: Dynamics of Growth, Structure, and Performance

This chapter examines the industrial organisation and institutional development of the global asset management industry. Few industries have encountered as much ‘strategic turbulence’ in recent years as has the financial services sector in general and the asset management — the ‘buy-side’ of the capital markets — in particular. Indeed, there is ample evidence to suggest that the development of the asset management industry has much to do with capital allocation in national and global financial systems. That is, asset-gathering and deployment of savings affect the pace of capital formation and the economic growth process more broadly.
On portfolio optimization: How and when do we benefit from high‐frequency data?

We examine how the use of high-frequency data impacts the portfolio optimization decision. Prior research has documented that an estimate of realized volatility is more precise when based upon intraday returns rather than daily returns. Using the framework of a professional investment manager who wishes to track the S&P 500 with the 30 Dow Jones Industrial Average stocks, we find that the benefits of using high-frequency data depend upon the rebalancing frequency and estimation horizon. If the portfolio is rebalanced monthly and the manager has access to at least the previous 12 months of data, daily data have the potential to perform as well as high-frequency data. However, substantial improvements in the portfolio optimization decision from high-frequency data are realized if the manager rebalances daily or has less than a 6-month estimation window. These findings are robust to transaction costs. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Violence and Migration on the Arizona-Sonora Border

2010 was a significant year for immigration issues along the United States-Mexico border. In April, Arizona signed the most extreme law against undocumented immigrants. In August, 72 hopeful migrants were massacred in Tamaulipas by alleged drug traffickers, and the Arizona desert claimed a record 252 lives in fiscal year 2010. These events were part of the trend that began with border militarization in the mid-1990s and escalated in the wake of 9/11, resulting in the extremely violent character of the undocumented border crossing experience. This is manifest, not only in the frequent reports of abuses by various actors along the border, but also in the consolidation of undocumented migration with the trafficking of narcotics. The authors have documented many cases of robbery, kidnapping, physical abuse, rape, and manipulation by drug traffickers. In this article, we discuss these different manifestations of violence by understanding both the structural constraints that create and characterize violence, as...
The VIX Futures Basis: Evidence and Trading Strategies

The VIX index, based on the volatility implied by options on the S&P 500 index, is one of the most watched market indicators. Futures and options written on the VIX are among the most actively traded derivative contracts. But the VIX is quite different from other derivatives underliers. One can’t buy and hold implied volatility, so the cost-of-carry model followed by nearly all futures contracts on financial instruments and storable commodities does not work for the VIX. For nonstorable underlyings, the futures price is not constrained by arbitrage against the cash market and is mostly determined by the market’s forecast of the spot price at futures maturity. If the VIX futures price is the market’s expectation about implied volatility at contract maturity, the futures basis may contain information about which way the VIX is going to move next to close the gap. On the other hand, if VIX futures prices contain a volatility risk premium, the future should lie above the spot VIX on average and is expected to converge toward the spot VIX over time, rather than the reverse. This risk premium can be captured on average by shorting the nearby VIX contract, but the position is exposed to risk that VIX may spike upward if the stock market falls sharply. This risk can be partly hedged using long contracts in the S&P index future. The authors examine these issues and find, as previous researchers have, that the VIX futures basis does not predict the change in the VIX. However, a hedged trade to capture the volatility risk premium can be highly profitable.
The transience of constructed preferences

A large body of research suggests that preferences are constructed rather than merely accessed in the course of making decisions. The current research examines the stability of constructed preferences over time. Preferences for various factors relevant to a job choice were measured prior to presentation of the job-choice task, at the point of decision, and again following a delay. It was found that relative to baseline pre-decision levels, preferences shifted to provide stronger support for the emerging decision. Preference changes proved to be transient, receding to baseline after 1 week (Experiment 1), and even within 15 minutes (Experiment 2). These findings, which can be interpreted in terms of decision-making by constraint satisfaction, suggest that preferences are constructed to serve the decision at hand, without constraining the decision maker in future decisions. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
More Machines, Better Machines…or Better Workers?

How much of the rapid growth in output per man-hour in nineteenth-century cotton weaving arose from technical change and how much arose from price-driven substitution of capital for labor? Using an engineering production function, I find that factor price changes account for little of the growth in output per man-hour. However, much of the growth and most of the apparent labor-saving bias arose not from inventions, but from improved labor quality—better workers spent less time monitoring the looms. Labor quality played a critical role in the persistent association between economic growth and capital deepening in this important sector.
Adaptive Management in the Courts

Adaptive management has become the tonic of natural resources policy. With its core idea of “learning while doing,”1 adaptive management has breathed life and hope into a policy realm beset by controversy, uncertainty, and complexity. It offers what many believe is needed most in a world bombarded by ecological deterioration of massive scales—expert agencies exercising professional judgment through an iterative decisionmaking process emphasizing definition of goals, description of policy decision models, active experimentation with monitoring of conditions, and adjustment of implementation decisions as suggested by performance results. This ideal has become infused into the natural resources policy world to the point of ubiquity, surfacing in everything from mundane agency per-
Virtual worlds: multi-disciplinary research opportunities

Virtual worlds are now a reality, representing intriguing environments for researchers from multiple fields to pursue collaborative investigations. To provide a background, we first highlight the basic business and sociological phenomena occurring in virtual worlds. Real world institutions, ranging from business to governmental organizations, are already experiencing the effects of increased growth in the number of individuals participating in these virtual world environments. We consider research paths from four representative perspectives: (1) information systems, (2) neurobiology, (3) political science, and (4) organizational governance research. Virtual world environments offer significant opportunities for research in many fields for study, including demonstration and examination of intra-world and inter-world practice and behavior.
Leveling the playing field: Dishonesty in the face of threat

Abstract We examined the effects of framing and perceived vulnerability on dishonest behavior in competitive environments. Participants were randomly matched into pairs and took a short multiple-choice test, the relative score of which determined their merit-based payoffs. After learning about the test scores, participants were asked to report them, thus affecting the final payoffs. Framing was varied as participants could either report their own scores or the scores of their counterparts. The presence of threat, or vulnerability to other players’ dishonesty, was varied as either one or both players in a pair could misreport scores. Participants who reported their counterparts’ scores were more likely to report honestly than participants who entered their own score. Participants, whose payoffs were threatened by their opponents’ misreporting, were more likely to cheat to the fullest extent. Furthermore, we found that framing significantly reduced misreporting in the absence, but not in the presence of threat. Results suggest that when actors feel vulnerable to other people’s dishonesty they would often cheat as much as they can in order to “level the playing field”, even when they strongly disapprove of the behavior.
Endangered Species in the Oil Patch: Challenges and Opportunities for the Oil and Gas Industry

This Paper proffers the notion that where concerns over the survival of a species may impede oil and gas activities, proactive cooperation, planning, and compromise within the ESA process can present both industry and environmentalists with a winning outcome. The Paper first provides background information on the ESA and describes its chief statutory mechanics. Next, the Paper discusses recent ESA developments that are particularly relevant to the oil and gas industry and focuses on the cooperative effort related to the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard and pursued by the oil and gas industry, private landowners, state officials in Texas and New Mexico, and environmental organizations. Finally, the Paper reviews pending ESA issues and offers recommendations for private and public stakeholders facing ESA challenges.
Education, Job Search, and Migration

Job-search and migration behavior differ across educational groups. In this paper, I explore several differences between the migration and search behavior of workers with different levels of education, both theoretically and empirically. I start with two stylized facts. First, the propensity to migrate increases with education. Second, conditional on migration, the probability that a worker moves with a job in hand (rather than moving to search for a job in the new location) also increases with education. I present a simple model that captures these facts and generates a number of predictions about differential sensitivity of migration to observed variables by education. Predictions include a non-monotonicity of migration elasticities with respect to business-cycle conditions by educational group, and less-educated groups' higher sensitivity to local economic conditions in the migration decision. These predictions are verified using CPS data.
Leveling Up After DOMA

So let’s say three soldiers are injured and they are all in same-sex relationships, and in each instance the other partner in this relationship wants to visit the soldier in—in a hospital. The first is a spouse in a State that allows same-sex marriage, the second is a domestic partner in a State that an [sic] allows that, but not same-sex marriage, the third is in an equally committed loving relationship in a State that doesn’t involve either. Now, your argument is that, under Federal law, the first would be admitted—should be admitted, but the other two would be kept out?
The measurement of user information satisfaction

This paper critically reviews measures of user information satisfaction and selects one for replication and extension. A survey of production managers is used to provide additional support for the instrument, eliminate scales that are psychometrically unsound, and develop a standard short form for use when only an overall assessment of information satisfaction is required and survey time is limited.
The Continuing Influence of the New Haven School

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship at Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. Ithas been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship Series by an authorized administrator of Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. Formore information, please contact cesar.zapata@yale.edu.
The Original Intent of Uniformity in Federal Sentencing

This Article recounts the rise and evolution of the uniformity ideal in federal sentencing, that is, the notion that similarly situated offenders should be treated similarly, and differently situated offenders differently. The uniformity ideal was championed by many critics of rehabilitative approaches in the 1970s and strongly influenced the adoption of federal sentencing guidelines in the 1980s. However, uniformity has been an unstable concept, with proponents articulating quite different views as to why uniformity is desirable and how it should be implemented. Much of the difficulty stems from the tension between two distinct approaches to uniformity, which are described here as the predictability and purposes paradigms. Under the predictability paradigm, offenders should be distinguished only in ways that can be anticipated well in advance of sentencing. Under the purposes paradigm, sentencing factors are deemed relevant based on their contribution to recognized objectives of sentencing, such as just deserts and rehabilitation. Prior to the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in United States v. Booker, trends in federal sentencing law favored predictability. Booker marks a return to the purposes approach. Additionally, Booker has reinvigorated an important, but much-neglected, aspect of the thinking of uniformity advocates in the 1970s: the view that the sentencing process should embody respect for the dignity of defendants in a manner that is consistent with American ideals of individual liberty and status-equality. Legislative proposals to reverse Booker threaten to undermine this dignitary agenda by enhancing prosecutorial power over defendants.
Empirical properties of duality theory

This research examines selected empirical properties of duality relationships. Monte Carlo experiments indicate that Hessian matrices estimated from the normalised unrestricted profit, restricted profit and production functions yield conflicting results in the presence of measurement error and low relative price variability. In particular, small amounts of measurement error in quantity variables can translate into large errors in uncompensated estimates calculated via restricted and unrestricted profit and production functions. These results emphasise the need for high quality data when estimating empirical models in order to accurately determine dual relationships implied by economic theory.