cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Waves of Change Towards a More Unified Approach: Equitable Tolling and the Federal Tort Claims Act

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Irwin v. Department of Veteran’s Affairs sparked a shift in sovereign immunity jurisprudence. As a result, the canon of strict construction is no longer the preeminent tool for restricting the scope of sovereign immunity waivers. In a contemporaneous development, the Court began to approach procedural rules associated with waivers of sovereign immunity as less absolute, instead applying them similarly to those against private individuals. This juxtaposition suggests the need for a reexamination of certain statutes. Prior to these two developments, appellate courts and commentators rejected the argument that the Federal Tort Claims Act’s (“FTCA”) statute of limitation was subject to equitable tolling. The Ninth Circuit’s recent decision in Kwai Fun Wong v. Beebe embraced the Supreme Court’s new jurisdictional framework and rejected those earlier positions. Concurring and dissenting opinions refused to accept the Supreme Court’s sovereign immunity and procedural limitations zeitgeist. The discord suggests that these con-current shifts have yet to achieve an entire gestalt. This article aims to navigate the waters. Standing on the shoulders of the majority’s opinion while also placing the crux of the court’s argument in the context of the Supreme Court’s modern precedents, it attempts to shed light on the superiority of the argument that equitable tolling is entirely compatible with the FTCA. In so doing, it primarily extrapolates from the statute’s text meanwhile questioning the notion that the FTCA’s legislative and statutory history indicates a contrary intent.
Gender Differences In Students Ethical Impressions Of Questionable Marketing Practices

In this study, we test the theory that female business majors are more sensitive than male business majors to the ethical issues in advertising promotions. We also examine whether or not business majors are as sensitive as liberal arts majors. Our sample is made up of 218 students from the Northeast area of the US. To measure ethical sensitivity in marketing situations, the participants responded to six scenarios developed from actual news data. The results indicate that female students and female business majors were more sensitive to potentially unethical advertising than male students. We also found that liberal arts students were more sensitive to ethical issues than their counterparts in business schools.
Management Strategies for Conservation of Natural Resources in Agriculture

This paper suggests a holistic framework for assessment and improvement of management strategies for conservation of natural resources in agriculture. First, it incorporates an interdisciplinary approach (combining Economics, Organization, Law, Sociology, Ecology, Technology, Behavioural and Political Sciences) and presents a modern framework for assessing environmental management and strategies in agriculture including: specification of specific ‘managerial needs’ and spectrum of feasible governance modes (institutional environment; private, collective, market, and public modes) of natural resources conservation at different level of decision-making (individual, farm, eco-system, local, regional, national, transnational, and global); specification of critical socio-economic, natural, technological, behavioural etc. factors of managerial choice, and feasible spectrum of (private, collective, public, international) managerial strategies; assessment of efficiency of diverse management strategies in terms of their potential to protect diverse eco-rights and investments, assure socially desirable level of environmental protection and improvement, minimize overall (implementing, third-party, transaction etc.) costs, coordinate and stimulate eco-activities, meet preferences and reconcile conflicts of individuals etc. Second, it presents evolution and assesses the efficiency of diverse management forms and strategies for conservation of natural resources in Bulgarian agriculture during post-communist transformation and EU integration (institutional, market, private, and public), and evaluates the impacts of EU CAP on environmental sustainability of farms of different juridical type, size, specialization and location. Finally, it suggests recommendations for improvement of public policies, strategies and modes of intervention, and private and collective strategies and actions for effective environmental protection.
The effect of capital structure when expected agency costs are extreme

Abstract This paper conducts powerful new tests of whether debt can mitigate the effects of agency and information problems. We focus on emerging market firms for which pyramid ownership structures create potentially extreme managerial agency costs. Our tests incorporate both traditional financial statement data and new data on global debt contracts. Our analysis is mindful of the potential endogeneity between debt, ownership structure, and value, and it takes into account differences in the debt capacity of a firm's assets in place and future growth opportunities. The results indicate that the incremental benefit of debt is concentrated in firms with high expected managerial agency costs that are also most likely to have overinvestment problems resulting from high levels of assets in place or limited future growth opportunities. Subsequent internationally syndicated term loans are particularly effective at creating value for these firms. Our results support the recontracting hypothesis that equity holders value compliance with monitored covenants, particularly when firms are likely to overinvest.
Clusters of Entrepreneurship and Innovation

This paper reviews recent academic work on the spatial concentration of entrepreneurship and innovation in the United States. We discuss rationales for the agglomeration of these activities and the economic consequences of clusters. We identify and discuss policies that are being pursued in the United States to encourage local entrepreneurship and innovation. While arguments exist for and against policy support of entrepreneurial clusters, our understanding of what works and how it works is quite limited. The best path forward involves extensive experimentation and careful evaluation.
Clear as Mud: How the Uncertain Precedential Status of Unpublished Opinions Muddles Qualified Immunity Determinations

Follow this and additional works at: http://scholar.valpo.edu/law_fac_pubs Part of the Civil Procedure Commons, Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Constitutional Law Commons, Courts Commons, Judges Commons, Jurisprudence Commons, Law and Society Commons, Legal Education Commons, Legal History, Theory and Process Commons, Legal Profession Commons, and the State and Local Government Law Commons
The tournament model: an empirical investigation of the ATp Tour *

In the competitive labor markets, labor is hired and paid based on their value of marginal product. However, when we observe and compare wages between top level managers, difference in those wages are very large. High wage differentials are needed to induce the incentive to provide substantial effort from the start of their careers. Structure of the marginal payoffs in professional tennis tournaments does not correspond to tournament theory. Marginal payoffs increase, but at the decreasing rate, and in the final round, final marginal payoff drops. Percentage change in mar ginal payoff is larger in the semi-finals than in the finals. Along the same lines, top four finishers receive less than 50% of the total purse, around 40%. Finally, output from regressions on total purse and marginal payoff (spread) show mixed results. In some instances players’ effort is related to the purse instead of marginal payoff, which contradicts the theory. In other cases, players’ effort is dependent on both variables, purse and marginal payoff. Thus, results are rather inconclusive.
News from the Other Side: How Topic Relevance Limits the Prevalence of Partisan Selective Exposure

Prior research has demonstrated a preference among partisans for like-minded news outlets, a key mechanism through which the media may be polarizing Americans. But in order for source reputations to cause widespread selective exposure, individuals must prioritize them above other competing attributes of news content. Evaluating the relative influence of various contributors to media choice is therefore critical. This study pits two such factors, source reputation and topic relevance, against one another in conjoint survey experiments offering randomly paired news items to partisans. Making a news source’s reputation politically unfriendly lowers the probability that an individual chooses an item, but this negative effect is often eclipsed by the positive effect of making a news topic relevant to the individual. In many popular modern news consumption environments, where consumers encounter a diverse mixture of sources and topics, the ability of source reputations to contribute to polarization via partisan...
Was GRB 980329 at z ~ 5?

The optical transient (OT) associated with GRB 980329 was remarkably red. It has previously been concluded that this was the result of dust extinction in the host galaxy (Taylor et al.; Reichart et al.; Palazzi et al.). However, an extinction model can only agree with the data if the I-band observations, taken about 0.8 days after the outburst, are discounted (Klose, Meusinger, & Lehmann; Reichart et al.); the flux density ratio between the I and the R band of a factor ~7 is too great to be explained by extinction, given the relatively blue K-I color. Here it is shown that the entire observed optical/infrared spectrum is consistent with that which is expected from an unextincted OT at z~5. At this redshift, the light in the observer's R band is strongly suppressed by absorption in the Lyα forest—an effect that has been seen clearly in galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field (Weymann et al.; Spinrad et al.). In spite of its potentially high redshift, GRB 980329 was an unusually bright burst. If GRB 980329 was indeed at z~5, and its gamma rays were radiated isotropically, the implied energy of the burst would be 5 × 1054 ergs. Should GRB 980329 have a host galaxy, deep imaging could confirm or reject the conclusion that this burst was at z~5.
Prediction of tunable spin-orbit gapped materials for dark matter detection

Author(s): Inzani, K; Faghaninia, A; Griffin, SM | Abstract: New ideas for low-mass dark matter direct detection suggest that narrow band gap materials, such as Dirac semiconductors, are sensitive to the absorption of meV dark matter or the scattering of keV dark matter. Here we propose spin-orbit semiconductors - materials whose band gap arises due to spin-orbit coupling - as low-mass dark matter targets owing to their O(10 meV) band gaps. We present three material families that are predicted to be spin-orbit semiconductors using density functional theory (DFT), assess their electronic and topological features, and evaluate their use as low-mass dark matter targets. In particular, we find that the tin pnictide compounds are especially suitable having a tunable range of meV-scale band gaps with anisotropic Fermi velocities allowing directional detection. Finally, we address the pitfalls in the DFT methods that must be considered in the ab initio prediction of narrow-gapped materials, including those close to the topological critical point.
Earnings Announcements and Market Depth

. This paper investigates how strategic trading around the time of earnings announcements affects market liquidity (e.g., bid-ask spreads). We model an investor with private information in advance of an earnings announcement (e.g., inside information). The investor trades before and after the earnings announcement in a market populated by liquidity-motivated traders who have some discretion over the timing of their trades. The main result of the analysis is that an earnings announcement that reduces an insider's private information may lead to a less liquid market in the postannouncement period.
Do White NBA Players Suffer from Reverse Discrimination

The National Basketball Association (NBA) has been fertile ground for the study of discrimination due to demographic and cultural shifts in not only the teams but also the fan populace. The early research found evidence of black-white wage differentials and customer discrimination (Kahn and Sherer, 1988). However, this effect has gone away as customers have become more accustomed to African-Americans in the NBA. Recent research has now shown that the pendulum has swung in the other direction and find the existence of reverse discrimination (Groothuis and Hill, 2013; Yang and Lin, 2010). In this paper, I test whether there exist reverse discrimination with White athletes in the NBA. Following Altonji and Pierret (2001), I use a statistical discrimination with employer learning framework to estimate the model. Unlike previous work, I incorporate advanced basketball metrics like Player Efficiency Rating (PER) and Win Shares (WS) to measure player productivity. The results find no evidence of reverse discrimination occurring.
Weighing the evidence on the relation between external corporate financing activities, accruals and stock returns

Abstract Bradshaw, Richardson, and Sloan (BRS) find a negative relation between their comprehensive measure of corporate financing activities and future stock returns and future profitability. Noticing that accounting accruals are increases in net operating assets on a company's balance sheet, we question whether it is possible to distinguish between the ‘external financing anomaly’ documented by BRS and the ‘accrual anomaly’ first documented by Sloan [1996. Do stock prices fully reflect information in accruals and cash flows about future earnings? The Accounting Review 71, 289–315]. We show that once controlling for total accruals, the relation between external financing activities and future stock returns is attenuated and not statistically significant. These findings are consistent with Richardson and Sloan [2003. External financing, capital investment and future stock returns. Working Paper, University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan].
Private Weighted Random Walk Stochastic Gradient Descent

We consider a decentralized learning setting in which data is distributed over nodes in a graph. The goal is to learn a global model on the distributed data without involving any central entity that needs to be trusted. While gossip-based stochastic gradient descent (SGD) can be used to achieve this learning objective, it incurs high communication and computation costs. To speed up the convergence, we propose instead to study random walk based SGD in which a global model is updated based on a random walk on the graph. We propose two algorithms based on two types of random walks that achieve, in a decentralized way, uniform sampling and importance sampling of the data. We provide a non-asymptotic analysis on the rate of convergence, taking into account the constants related to the data and the graph. Our numerical results show that the weighted random walk based algorithm has a better performance for high-variance data. Moreover, we propose a privacy-preserving random walk algorithm that achieves local differential privacy based on a Gamma noise mechanism that we propose. We also give numerical results on the convergence of this algorithm and show that it outperforms additive Laplace-based privacy mechanisms.
WikiLeaks and the Institutional Framework for National Security Disclosures

WikiLeaks’ successive disclosures of classified U.S. documents throughout 2010 and 2011 invite comparison to publishers’ decisions forty years ago to release portions of the Pentagon Papers, the classified analytic history of U.S. policy in Vietnam. The analogy is a powerful weapon for WikiLeaks’ defenders. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Pentagon Papers case signaled that the task of weighing whether to publicly disclose leaked national security information would fall to publishers, not the executive or the courts, at least in the absence of an exceedingly grave threat of harm. The lessons of the Pentagon Papers case for WikiLeaks, however, are more complicated than they may first appear. The Court’s per curiam opinion masks areas of substantial disagreement as well as a number of shared assumptions among the Court’s members. Specifically, the Pentagon Papers case reflects an institutional framework for downstream disclosure of leaked national security information, under which publishers within the reach of U.S. law would weigh the potential harms and benefits of disclosure against the backdrop of potential criminal penalties and recognized journalistic norms. The WikiLeaks disclosures show the instability of this framework by revealing new challenges for controlling the downstream disclosure of leaked information and the corresponding likelihood of “unintermediated” disclosure by an insider; the risks of non-media intermediaries attempting to curtail such disclosures, in response to government pressure or otherwise; and the pressing need to prevent and respond to leaks at the source. author. Professor of Law and Notre Dame Presidential Fellow, Notre Dame Law School. I thank A.J. Bellia, Rick Garnett, Nicole Garnett, Andrea Matwyshyn, John Nagle, and Mary-Rose Papandrea for thoughtful discussions and comments, and research librarian Christopher O’Byrne for expert research assistance. wikileaks and national security disclosures 1449 feature contents
Book‐to‐Market Components, Future Security Returns, and Errors in Expected Future Earnings

This study investigates whether the ability of book-to-market to predict returns derives from systematic errors in the market’s expectation of future earnings. We extend Beaver and Ryan (1996, 2000) by decomposing book-to-market into a more persistent (bias) component and a delayed recognition (lag) component. We find that both components are related to analyst expectations of future earnings, but the lag component is the dominant factor across all forecast horizons. Similarly, we find that the lag component explains most of the inverse relation between book-to-market and future returns. Given that lag is constructed by regressing book-to-market ratios on lagged price changes, our results are consistent with the lag component capturing systematic stock price reversals. We find that the components have unique relations with subsequent earnings forecast revisions, and controlling for these relations substantially mitigates the components’ ability to predict returns. Our component-level analysis provides insight into how expected future earnings, summarized in book-to-market ratios help to explain this market anomaly.
Rights, patents, markets and the global AIDS pandemic.

In this article, I seek to contribute to the repertoire seeking to expand access to and increase the affordability of essential drugs to low-end consumers facing life threatening diseases such as HIV/AIDS. I do so in three ways. First, by critically examining how South Africa has used its social and economic rights protections to expand access to health services for indigent persons. Second, by using market-based justifications for construing intellectual property rights protections consistently with providing access to essential medicines. For example, I argue that antitrust objectives of competition law and policy counterbalance the danger of monopolistic protection of intellectual property rights. If adopted in the interpretation of the WTO's TRIPS Agreement, such an understanding has the potential to carefully balance between protecting patents for essential medicines, on the one hand, and their accessibility for those who might not otherwise be able to afford them, on the other. Such a perspective would also mediate the tension between patents as market commodities that deserve strong legal protections, on the one hand, and patents as a public delegation of a private property right, on the other. Third, I demonstrate that though well-intentioned, the FDA's regulatory framework for drug safety and efficacy embodied in pre-market testing and approval imposes high cost barriers to new entrants into the pharmaceutical industry which in turn limits expeditious access to affordable drugs for life threatening illnesses. I thus advocate a consumer-driven, anti-cartelist strategy to counterbalance pharmaceutical industry concentration that invariably results from the foregoing regulatory framework. Perhaps a less concentrated pharmaceutical industry that was also more competitive would offer consumers affordable choices.
Can Simple Mechanism Design Results be Used to Implement the Proportionality Standard in Discovery

I point out that the Coase theorem suggests there should not be wasteful discovery, in the sense that the value to the requester is less than the cost to the responder. I use a toy model to show that a sufficiently informed court could design a mechanism under which the Coasean prediction is borne out. I then suggest that the actual information available to courts is too little to effect this mechanism, and I consider alternatives. In discussing mechanisms intended to avoid wasteful discovery where courts have limited information, I emphasize the role of normative considerations.
An Introduction to Influence Theory: Kinematics and Dynamics

Influence theory is a foundational theory of physics that is not based on traditional empirically defined concepts, such as positions in space and time, mass, energy, or momentum. Instead, the aim is to derive these concepts, and their empirically determined relationships, from a more primitive model. It is postulated that there exist things, which we call particles, that influence one another in a discrete and directed fashion resulting in a partially ordered set of influence events. We consider the problem of consistent quantification of the influence events. Observers are modeled as particle chains (observer chains) as if an observer were able to track a particle and quantify the influence events that the particle experiences. From these quantified influence events, we study consistent quantification of the universe of events based on the observer chains. In this paper, we both review and further develop the kinematics and dynamics of particles from the perspective of influence theory.
The Relative Performance Puzzle

The accepted theoretical models of executive compensation contracts all seem to imply that optimal remuneration packages should contain a relative performance element. The puzzle is that the empirical literature has found remarkably little relative performance evaluation. This paper aims at resolving this puzzle by introducing the notion that the manager can trade on assets other than her own company’s stock. Then the manager’s portfolio strategy always adjusts for the risks of her compensation contract and she replaces the firm’s benchmark with a “home-made” benchmark. She chooses exactly the weights and the compensation of the benchmark that would otherwise be chosen in an optimal contract. In many cases this is possible without short selling any assets. To the extent that performance benchmarks are correlated with traded assets they are redundant for the optimal contract. Accounting benchmarks are exempt from this verdict since they may help to insure the manager against risks that are not related to traded assets. This may help to understand the presence of relative performance elements in annual bonus plans.
"Love's Congruence": A Theological Account of Wisdom for Judges

This article explores what a theological account of wisdom offers to a judge whose faith informs both the fulfillment of obligations within the judicial role (conceived in terms of vocation) and the attempt to meaningfully integrate work with life off the bench. The day-to-day work of the judge is to a great extent about discernment, about seeking not just correct doctrinal answers, but the application of practical wisdom in context. Access to the resource of a theological account of wisdom offers the judge, among other things, a model of wisdom that the judge can seek to emulate. This turns out to be much more about how a judge can be wise in the role than about reaching specific wise outcomes. Access to such an account of wisdom may ultimately promote a greater flourishing of the judge in his or her vocation, as it not only provides constructive content in the model, but a point of congruence between personal and professional. And love, as it comes to the fore as a theme in the construction of these various theological accounts of wisdom, provides this helpful point of congruence for the seeking of wisdom and the doing of justice.
Do Control Effectiveness Disclosures Require SOX 404(b) Internal Control Audits? A Natural Experiment with Small U.S. Public Companies

We use incremental and joint implementation of multiple SOX-based control effectiveness disclosure and audit mandates to assess relative performance of alternatives for small U.S. public companies. Using data from several low- and high-effort management disclosure and audit regimes implemented from 2003 to 2008, we find substantial and statistically significant increases in material weakness disclosure rates for small firms undergoing initial SOX 404(b) internal control audits, but find quantitatively and statistically similar increases for initial management reports of small firms exempt from such audits. As to audit cost, fees more than double for initial 404(b) audits in 2004 and remain high, while 404(b)-exempt firms’ fees grow about 10% annually. Our results support the view that, for small firms, management internal control reports and traditional financial audits may be a cost effective disclosure alternative to full application of SOX 404(b). Also, our results suggest that, even without management reports on internal control, analysis of the cause of known accounting mistakes may yield substantial material weakness disclosures.
The Stock Market and Capital Accumulation

The value of a firm's securities measures the value of the firm's productive assets. If the assets include only capital goods and not a permanent monopoly franchise, the value of the securities measures the value of the capital. Finally, if the price of the capital can be measured or inferred, the quantity of capital is the value divided by the price. A standard model of adjustment costs enables the inference of the price of installed capital. Data from U.S. corporations over the past 50 years imply that corporations have formed large amounts of intangible capital, especially in the past decade.
Tax farming and the origins of state capacity in England and France

Abstract How did modern and centralized fiscal institutions emerge? We develop a model that explains (i) why pre-industrial states relied on private individuals to collect taxes; (ii) why after 1600 both England and France moved from competitive methods for collecting revenues to allocating the right to collect taxes to a small group of financiers—an intermediate institution that we call cabal tax farming—and (iii) why this centralization led to investments in fiscal capacity and increased fiscal standardization. We provide detailed historical evidence that supports our prediction that rulers abandoned the competitive allocation of tax rights in favor of cabal tax farming in order to gain access to inside credit, and that this transition was accompanied by investments in standardization. Finally (iv) we show why this intermediate institution proved to be self-undermining in England, where it was quickly replaced by direct collection, but lasted in France until the French Revolution.
Government spending, rights, and civil liberties

Abstract The government plays a critical role in protecting and enforcing rights and civil liberties. Empirical evidence provided for a sample of industrial and developing countries shows that government spending on defense, law and order, social security, education, and health care are associated with three rights indicators—property rights, equality of citizens before the law, and economic freedom. In particular, an increase in expenditures on law and order seems to improve the indicators of rights and civil liberties. Sound fiscal policies (i.e., lower budget deficits) seem to improve property rights and equality before the law. Of great importance is the finding that corruption deteriorates rights indicators. The empirical evidence reported in the paper casts doubt over the negative–positive rights dichotomy (negative rights do not entail public costs), which has become conventional in the literature.
Market Structure, Tariff Lobbying and the Free-Rider Problem

The effect of changes in industry structure on the ability tomaintain a cooperative level of tariff lobbying are analyzed in arepeated game setting in which a simple trigger strategy is theenforcement mechanism. The difficulty of maintaining cooperation isidentified with the minimum discount factor necessary for themaintenance of cooperation. Factors which increase this criticalvalue of the discount parameter are said to make cooperation moredifficult. Some changes in industry structure which reduce measuredconcentration have ambiguous effects, while others may makecooperation among a given group of firms more likely.
On Non-existence of Markov Equilibria in Competitive-Market Economies☆

Abstract This paper presents some examples of regular dynamic economies with externalities and taxes that either lack existence of a Markov equilibrium or such equilibrium is not continuous. These examples pose further challenges for the analysis and computation of these economies. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C10, C62.
Deciding Against Conciliation: The Nineteenth-Century Rejection of a European Transplant and the Rise of a Distinctively American Ideal of Adversarial Adjudication

A sizeable body of literature suggests that informal methods of dispute resolution — and, in particular, conciliation — flourish only in societies marked by extensive social hierarchy. Given this literature, it is quite surprising to discover that in the mid-nineteenth century, the United States embarked on an extensive debate regarding whether to adopt "conciliation courts," whose primary function was to reconcile the disputants by persuading them to embrace an equitable compromise. First created by the French Revolutionaries in 1790, conciliation courts were widely established throughout continental Europe. Observing this development, leading American lawyers and politicians pondered seriously whether the United states ought to follow suit. Debate over whether to embrace such institutions occurred at the very highest of levels, and a series of states enacted constitutional provisions authorizing their legislatures to create conciliation courts. Ultimately, however, despite the widespread interest in such institutions, these were never established — except in the notable case of the Freedmen’s Bureau courts of the Reconstruction South. This Article explores this largely forgotten episode in American legal history. It examines why a nation that was radically egalitarian by standards of the time would seriously consider embracing an institution that we tend more commonly to associate with inegalitarian, strongly hierarchical societies — and why, after coming so close to adopting conciliation courts, it ultimately failed to do so. In the process, by situating the debate over conciliation courts in a broader social and legal context, the Article also excavates the origins of the modern, quintessentially American commitment to the virtues of formal, adversarial process.
Change of control and the success of China's share-issue privatization

Abstract Using two newly available datasets of exchange-listed firms in China covering the period from 1994 to 2003, we test if share-issue privatization, defined here as a change of corporate control from the State to private owners rather than the IPO event used in earlier studies, improved firm performance. Our econometric analysis shows that privatization, when accompanied by a change of control, has had positive effects on profitability and the productivity of labor that are both statistically and economically significant.
Efficient Transformers in Reinforcement Learning using Actor-Learner Distillation

Many real-world applications such as robotics provide hard constraints on power and compute that limit the viable model complexity of Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents. Similarly, in many distributed RL settings, acting is done on un-accelerated hardware such as CPUs, which likewise restricts model size to prevent intractable experiment run times. These "actor-latency" constrained settings present a major obstruction to the scaling up of model complexity that has recently been extremely successful in supervised learning. To be able to utilize large model capacity while still operating within the limits imposed by the system during acting, we develop an "Actor-Learner Distillation" (ALD) procedure that leverages a continual form of distillation that transfers learning progress from a large capacity learner model to a small capacity actor model. As a case study, we develop this procedure in the context of partially-observable environments, where transformer models have had large improvements over LSTMs recently, at the cost of significantly higher computational complexity. With transformer models as the learner and LSTMs as the actor, we demonstrate in several challenging memory environments that using Actor-Learner Distillation largely recovers the clear sample-efficiency gains of the transformer learner model while maintaining the fast inference and reduced total training time of the LSTM actor model.
Crowdsourcing Land Use

Land use conflicts arise from information shortfalls, and avoiding them requires obtaining and using information. Yet traditional forms of land use control operate in relative ignorance about landowner intentions, about preferences for patterns of land use that do not presently exist, and, more fundamentally, about land use impacts as they are experienced on the ground. Because information is expensive to gather and use, this ignorance may be rational. New technological and theoretical advances, however, offer powerful ways to harness and deploy information that lies dispersed in the hands of the public. In this symposium essay, I assess the prospects for an increased role for crowdsourcing in managing land use, as well as the limits on this approach. Governments must do more than elicit, aggregate, coordinate, and channel the preferences, intentions, and experiences of current and potential land users; they must also set normative side constraints, manage agendas, and construct appropriately scaled platforms for compiling and using information.
Effective nonparametric estimation in the case of severely discretized data

Often economic data are discretized or rounded to some extent. This paper proposes a regression and a density estimator that work especially well when discretization causes conventional kernel-based estimators to behave poorly. The estimator proposed here is a weighted average of neighboring frequency estimators, and the weights are composed of cubic B-splines. Interestingly, we show that this estimator can have both a smaller bias and variance than frequency estimators. As a means to obtain asymptotic normality and rates of convergence, we assume that the discreteness becomes finer as the sample size increases.
Consumer and competitor reactions: Evidence from a field experiment

Abstract In response to a price change by a single seller, it is common for the density of sellers in the market to influence both the quantity response of consumers and the price response of other sellers. Using field experiment data collected around a series of exogenously imposed price changes we find that an individual retailer with a larger number of competitors faces a more-responsive demand. This finding is fundamental to a predicted inverse relationship between market prices and the number of competitors. We also examine the reaction of rival stations to exogenous price changes, and find that the magnitude of a competitor's response is inversely related to the density of stations in the market.
Reforming Divorce: What's Needed and What's Not

This article evaluates proposals made by the New York Matrimonial Commission aimed at reducing divorce trauma, delay, and expense. The article analyzes sources of divorce delay, expense, and litigation-induced pain and concludes that the most important are complex divorce procedures and highly discretionary entitlement rules which offer litigants very little capacity to predict their divorce entitlements or even to prepare the appropriate forms. The article concludes that the reforms proposed by the Commission - which do not attempt to improve predictability or reduce complexity - have little capacity to meet their stated goals.
Capital Share Risk and Shareholder Heterogeneity in U.S. Stock Pricing

Value and momentum portfolios exhibit strong opposite signed exposure to an aggregate risk factor based on low frequency fluctuations in the capital share. This strong opposite signed exposure helps explain why both strategies earn high average returns yet are negatively correlated. But the finding is puzzling from the perspective of canonical asset pricing theories. We show that opposite signed exposure to capital share risk coincides with opposite signed exposure of value and momentum to the income shares of households in the top 10 versus bottom 90 percent of the stock wealth distribution. We use a model of shareholder heterogeneity to explain why the capital share is likely to be an important cross-sectional risk factor, and show how the result can be explained if investors located in different percentiles of the wealth distribution exhibit a central tendency to pursue different investment strategies. Models with capital share risk explain up to 85% of the variation in average returns on size-book/market portfolios and up to 95% of momentum returns and the pricing errors on both sets of portfolios are lower than those of the Fama-French three- and four-factor models, the intermediary SDF model of Adrian, Etula, and Muir (2014), and models based on low frequency exposure to aggregate consumption risk. In a horse race where long-horizon capital share betas are included alongside betas for these other factors, the capital share beta remains strongly significant while the others are driven out.
Stock Market Prices Do Not Follow Random Walks: Evidence from a Simple Specification Test

In this article we test the random walk hypothesis for weekly stock market returns by comparing variance estimators derived from data sampled at different frequencies. The random walk model is strongly rejected for the entire sampleperiod (1962-1985) and for all subperiods for a variety of aggregate returns indexes and size-sorted porfolios. Although the rejections are due largely to the behavior of small stocks, they cannot be attributed completely to the effects of infrequent trading or timevarying volatilities. Moreover, the rejection of the random walk for weekly returns does not support a mean-reverting model of assetprices.
Investor Reaction to the Ambiguity and Mix of Positive and Negative Argumentation in Favorable Analyst Reports

This study experimentally tests the hypothesis that investor reaction to favorable investment ratings is influenced by attributes of analysts’ supporting arguments. Specifically, I argue that argument ambiguity and the mix of positive and negative argumentation interact to influence how investors process and, in turn, react to information contained in analysts’ arguments. When positive arguments are unambiguous, I predict and find that investors react to the content of the arguments because they perceive the arguments provide sufficient support for the rating. In this case, investors react more favorably when the report includes strictly positive argumentation (i.e., one-sided argumentation) than when it includes a mix of positive and negative argumentation (i.e., two-sided argumentation). In contrast, when positive arguments are ambiguous, two-sided argumentation acts as a credibility cue and leads to a higher likelihood of investment than one-sided argumentation. These results provide important insights about the conditions under which investors react to justifications in favorable analyst reports and shed light on how analysts can credibly convey favorable information.
Trade, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Institutions

The authors analyze the relationship between international trade and the quality of economic institutions such as contract enforcement, rule of law, or property rights. The literature on institutions has argued, both empirically and theoretically, that larger firms care less about good institutions and that higher inequality leads to worse institutions. Recent literature on international trade enables the authors to analyze economies with heterogeneous firms, and argue that trade opening leads to a reallocation of production in which large firms grow larger, while small firms become smaller or disappear. Combining these two strands of literature, the authors build a model that has two key features. First, preferences over institutional quality differ across firms and depend on firm size. Second, institutional quality is endogenously determined in a political economy framework. They show that trade opening can worsen institutions when it increases the political power of a small elite of large exporters that prefer to maintain bad institutions. The detrimental effect of trade on institutions is most likely to occur when a small country captures a sufficiently large share of world exports in sectors characterized by economic profits.
Argentina's post-2001 economy and the 2014 default

Abstract With two sovereign debt defaults within the last thirteen years, Argentina represents an interesting example of the causes and effects of defaults by sovereign states. Argentina has had a history of economic strife for the last one hundred years, largely due to political and economic instability. This paper discusses the economics of Argentina after the 2001 financial crisis that led to the default in 2014. The paper also explains the main legal aspects for the holdouts versus the Argentina trial over the pari passu controversy and discusses the different reactions to the trial and consequent default.
Informational cascades and software adoption on the internet: an empirical investigation

Online users often need to make adoption decisions without accurate information about the product values. An informational cascade occurs when it is optimal for an online user, having observed others' actions, to follow the adoption decision of the preceding individual without regard to his own information. Informational cascades are often rational for individual decision making; however, it may lead to adoption of inferior products. With easy availability of information about other users' choices, the Internet offers an ideal environment for informational cascades. In this paper, we empirically examine informational cascades in the context of online software adoption. We find user behavior in adopting software products is consistent with the predictions of the informational cascades literature. Our results demonstrate that online users' choices of software products exhibit distinct jumps and drops with changes in download ranking, as predicted by informational cascades theory. Furthermore, we find that user reviews have no impact on user adoption of the most popular product, while having an increasingly positive impact on the adoption of lower ranking products. The phenomenon persists after controlling for alternative explanations such as network effects, word-of-mouth effects, and product diffusion. Our results validate informational cascades as an important driver for decision making on the Internet. The finding also offers an explanation for the mixed results reported in prior studies with regard to the influence of online user reviews on product sales. We show that the mixed results could be due to the moderating effect of informational cascades.
Fault at the Contract-Tort Interface

The formative period in the history of contract and tort (in the second half of the nineteenth century) may be characterized by the cleavage of contract and tort around the concept of fault: tort modernized by moving from strict liability to a regime of “no liability without fault,” while contract moved toward strict liability. The opposing attitudes toward fault are puzzling at first glance. Nineteenth-century scholars of private law offered explanations for the opposition, reasoning that alternative ideas about fault account for the different character of state involvement in enforcing private law rights: tort law governs liabilities imposed by law on nonconsenting members of society (and thus, it should limit itself to faultbased conduct), while contract law governs bargained-for duties and liabilities of parties who exercise freedom of contract (and thus, liability voluntarily undertaken need not consider fault). These theories are problematic, especially because they cannot offer a complete account of contract or tort. Tort retains too much strict liability to be thought of as a regime of no liability without fault, and contract has too many fault-based rules to be conceived of through strict liability. While these justifications for the distinction between contract and tort were questioned in ensuing generations, they still structure much of the debate over the current boundary between contract and tort.
Citizen Participation in Criminal Trials in Japan: The Saiban-in System and Victim Participation in Japan in International Perspectives

The International Society for Criminology held its 16th World Congress in Kobe, Japan, in August 2011. Setsuo Miyazawa organized an open symposium “Citizen Participation in Criminal Trials: The Saiban-in System and Victim Participation in International Perspectives.” Scholars from Japan, United States, Germany, and South Korea, as well as a Japanese journalist presented papers. This mini-symposium issue publishes papers by Japanese, US, and South Korean scholars, and this introduction provides background of the symposium, including outlines of the saiban-in (lay judge) system and the victim participation system, as well as the text of the presentations by the German scholar and the Japanese journalist in appendixes.
New Evidence and Perspectives on Mergers

As in previous decades, merger activity clusters by industry during the 1990s. One particular kind of industry shock, deregulation, becomes a dominant factor, accountings for nearly half of the merger activity since the late 1980s. In contrast to the 1980s, mergers in the 1990s are mostly stock swaps, and hostile takeovers virtually disappear. Over our 1973 to 1998 sample period, the announcement-period stock market response to mergers is positive for the combined merging parties, suggesting that mergers create value on behalf of shareholders. Consistent with that, we find evidence of improved operating performance following mergers, relative to industry peers.
Anticompetitive Overbuying by Power Buyers

Today there is a growing interest in buyer-side exclusionary conduct whether undertaken by a group of firms or a single firm with buyer-side market power. Anticompetitive "overbuying" conduct by power buyers involves increasing the purchases of a particular input with the purpose and effect of gaining (or maintaining) either monopsony power in the input market or market power in the output market, or both. Two types of single-firm overbuying are analyzed in this article. Predatory overbuying consists of overbuying inputs as a predatory strategy to cause buyer-side competitors in the input market to exit from the market or permanently shrink their capacity in order to gain monopsony power in the input market. Raising Rivals' Costs (RRC) overbuying consists of overbuying inputs as an exclusionary strategy to raise rivals' input costs and thereby gain market power in the output market. In most cases, the additional input purchases are used to produce output. However, in unusual cases a firm may engage in naked overbuying, that is, purchasing an input solely to deny it to rivals and then simply discarding the input.