cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Compute, Time and Energy Characterization of Encoder-Decoder Networks with Automatic Mixed Precision Training

Deep neural networks have shown great success in many diverse fields. The training of these networks can take significant amounts of time, compute and energy. As datasets get larger and models become more complex, the exploration of model architectures becomes prohibitive. In this paper we examine the compute, energy and time costs of training a U-Net based deep neural network for the problem of predicting short term weather forecasts (called precipitation Nowcasting). By leveraging a combination of data distributed and mixed-precision training, we explore the design space for this problem. We also show that larger models with better performance come at a potentially incremental cost if appropriate optimizations are used. We show that it is possible to achieve a significant improvement in training time by leveraging mixed-precision training without sacrificing model performance. Additionally, we find that a 1549% increase in the number of trainable parameters for a network comes at a relatively smaller 63.22% increase in energy usage for a UNet with 4 encoding layers.
Extremal and Ramsey results on graph blowups

Recently, Souza introduced blowup Ramsey numbers as a generalization of bipartite Ramsey numbers. For graphs $G$ and $H$, say $G\overset{r}{\longrightarrow} H$ if every $r$-edge-coloring of $G$ contains a monochromatic copy of $H$. Let $H[t]$ denote the $t$-blowup of $H$. Then the blowup Ramsey number of $G,H,r,$ and $t$ is defined as the minimum $n$ such that $G[n] \overset{r}{\longrightarrow} H[t]$. Souza proved upper and lower bounds on $n$ that are exponential in $t$, and conjectured that the exponential constant does not depend on $G$. We prove that the dependence on $G$ in the exponential constant is indeed unnecessary, but conjecture that some dependence on $G$ is unavoidable. An important step in both Souza's proof and ours is a theorem of Nikiforov, which says that if a graph contains a constant fraction of the possible copies of $H$, then it contains a blowup of $H$ of logarithmic size. We also provide a new proof of this theorem with a better quantitative dependence.
Fingerprint Spoof Detection: Temporal Analysis of Image Sequence

We utilize the dynamics involved in the imaging of a fingerprint on a touch-based fingerprint reader, such as perspiration, changes in skin color (blanching), and skin distortion, to differentiate real fingers from spoof (fake) fingers. Specifically, we utilize a deep learning-based architecture (CNN-LSTM) trained end-to-end using sequences of minutiae-centered local patches extracted from ten color frames captured on a COTS fingerprint reader. A time-distributed CNN (MobileNet-v1) extracts spatial features from each local patch, while a bi-directional LSTM layer learns the temporal relationship between the patches in the sequence. Experimental results on a database of 26, 650 live frames from 685 subjects (1,333 unique fingers), and 32,910 spoof frames of 7 spoof materials (with a total of 14 material variants), show that the proposed approach exceeds the state-of-the-art performance in both known-material and cross-material (generalization) scenarios. For instance, the proposed approach improves the state-of-the-art cross-material performance from TDR of 81.65% to 86.20% @ FDR = 0.2%.
Strongly perfect claw‐free graphs—A short proof

A graph is strongly perfect if every induced subgraph H has a stable set that meets every maximal clique of H. A graph is claw-free if no vertex has three pairwise non-adjacent neighbors. The characterization of claw-free graphs that are strongly perfect by a set of forbidden induced subgraphs was conjectured by Ravindra in 1990 and was proved by Wang in 2006. Here we give a shorter proof of this characterization.
Quantifying the total effect of edge interventions in discrete multistate networks

Abstract Developing efficient computational methods to assess the impact of external interventions on the dynamics of a network model is an important problem in systems biology. This paper focuses on quantifying the global changes that result from the application of an intervention to produce a desired effect, which we define as the total effect of the intervention. The type of mathematical models that we will consider are discrete dynamical systems which include the widely used Boolean networks and their generalizations. The potential interventions can be represented by a set of nodes and edges that can be manipulated to produce a desired effect on the system. We use a class of regulatory rules called nested canalizing functions that frequently appear in published models and were inspired by the concept of canalization in evolutionary biology. In this paper, we provide a polynomial normal form based on the canalizing properties of regulatory functions. Using this polynomial normal form, we give a set of formulas for counting the maximum number of transitions that will change in the state space upon an edge deletion in the wiring diagram. These formulas rely on the canalizing structure of the target function since the number of changed transitions depends on the canalizing layer that includes the input to be deleted. We also present computations on random networks to compare the exact number of changes with the upper bounds provided by our formulas. Finally, we provide statistics on the sharpness of these upper bounds in random networks.
Bush v. Gore: The Worst (or at least second-to-the-worst) Supreme Court Decision Ever

“The presidential election process described by the original Constitution left it to each state to decide its electoral vote. No case, no precedent, no original understanding gave the Supreme Court the jurisdiction—the authority—to consider, much less condemn, the process that the Florida courts were following to decide Florida’s vote.” In the stiff competition for worst Supreme Court decision ever, two candidates stand heads above the others for the simple reason that they precipitated actual fighting wars in their times. By holding that slaves, as mere chattels, could not sue in court and could never be American citizens, and further invalidating the Missouri Compromise, which had prohibited slavery in new territories, Dred Scott v. Sandford charted the course to secession and Civil War four years later. By disenfranchising Florida voters and thereby appointing popularvote loser George W. Bush as President, Bush v. Gore set in motion events which would lead to two wars, neither of which is successfully concluded over a decade later, as well as an unregulated greed-fest on Wall Street that continues to unhinge our economic well-being. As Professor Laurence Tribe, one of
Learned Helplessness Among Newly Hired Salespeople and the Influence of Leadership

This article investigates the sales force socialization process, wherein newly hired salespeople often face failure-prone environments. Drawing from the learned helplessness paradigm, the authors hypothesize that cumulative periods of sales performance failure are associated with sales-oriented behavior intentions. In addition, the authors examine the influence of leadership, expecting core transformational leadership to have a diminishing effect as unmet sales goals accumulate. Study 1 finds support for these hypotheses using panel survey data from 221 new hires during six months of a furniture retailer's sales force socialization process. Then, aiming to uncover the underlying mechanism driving salesperson helplessness and a managerial approach that has a sustained impact, the authors conduct Study 2, a scenario-based experiment focused on the business-to-business insurance industry. The authors find that perceived task difficulty mediates the focal relationship and that error management enables core tr...
The Equity Premium and Structural Breaks

A long return history is useful in estimating the current equity premium even if the historical distribution has experienced structural breaks. The long series helps not only if the timing of breaks is uncertain but also if one believes that large shifts in the premium are unlikely or that the premium is associated, in part, with volatility. Our framework incorporates these features along with a belief that prices are likely to move opposite to contemporaneous shifts in the premium. The estimated premium since 1834 f luctuates between 4 and 6 percent and exhibits its sharpest drop in the last decade. ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT but elusive quantities in finance is the equity premium, the expected rate of return on the aggregate stock market in excess of the riskless interest rate ~the expected “excess return”!. It is well known that estimates of the equity premium based on historical data can vary widely, depending on the methodology and the sample period, and the imprecision in such estimates can figure prominently in inference and decision making. Pastor and Stambaugh ~1999! conclude, for example, that seven decades of data produce an equity premium estimate whose imprecision typically accounts for the largest fraction of uncertainty about a firm’s cost of equity. Long histories offer the prospect of increased precision, and researchers have constructed and analyzed series of U.S. equity returns and interest rates that begin early in the 19th century ~e.g., Schwert ~1990!, Siegel ~1992!, and Goetzmann and Ibbotson ~1994!!. Finance practitioners and academics often elect to rely on more recent data, however, motivated in part by concerns that the probability distribution of excess returns changes over time, experiencing shifts known as “structural breaks.” We incorporate various economic considerations in estimating the equity premium from a long series of returns whose distribution is subject to structural breaks. In standard approaches to models that admit structural breaks, estimates of current parameters rely on data only since the most recent estimated
Tiered Personhood and the Excluded Voter

The modern discourse critiquing vote denial policies in the United States has taken two distinct paths. The first and more recent path has been to critique the effects of legislation like voter identification laws, narrowed early voting opportunities, and similar enactments to hyper-regulate the voting process, effecting, as some argue, the ability for the poor, the elderly, and minorities to vote. The second strain of this voter suppression discourse relates to the express exclusion of persons who have been convicted of felonies from the exercise of the franchise. While both vote denial by effect or by express disenfranchisement have raised numerous civil rights concerns, few scholars have treated these issues in tandem or examined the ideological interconnections between these doctrinally distinct voter suppression doctrines. This essay will use the lens of “tiered personhood” to conceptualize the dual aspects of the voter denial problem as a unified phenomenon of political subordination intended to exclude certain persons from the political community. This essay argues that this voter suppression dynamic creates statuses as between persons based upon the ability to exercise complete or less than complete constitutional rights driven by an ideology of exclusion of those deemed “un-worthy” of full membership in the political community, thus excluding those persons from full citizenship. With the problem framed in this way, the essay will briefly use this lens to analyze the disparate treatment of convicted felons and the disparate impact of voter suppression legislation as parallel mechanisms that serve the same end — the maintenance of an American political underclass. The essay will then propose a sketch of a new model for subverting this underclass dynamic — a communitarian re-conception of American political community based on a premise of inclusion within that community rather than a dynamic of exclusion.
It'll only hurt a second? Microeconomic determinants of who gets flu shots.

Appreciating how the propensity to be immunized against the flu depends on individual characteristics and environments is essential for policies regarding influenza control to be formulated sensibly. To this point, the literature has offered little documentation on the determinants of influenza immunization. Beyond epidemiology, there are important economic issues that must be addressed to understand this form of preventive care. One concerns the relationship between labour supply and immunization propensity: While it is relatively costly (in terms of time costs) for workers to obtain immunizations, workers also have relatively more to lose from being ill with the flu. Another concern not generally appreciated is the extent to which individuals’ perceived risks of infection may affect their propensities to be immunized. The paper also attempts to shed light on these issues. The analysis uses data from the 1991 National Health Interview Survey. Immunization propensity displays expected patterns by age and health status, while the results with respect to race, household structure, income and insurance are somewhat more surprising and/or novel. The estimated labour supply and perceived risk effects suggest that some aspects of the economics of preventive care generally not considered in empirical work are important and merit further consideration. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
On RO(G)–graded equivariant “ordinary” cohomology where G is a power of Z/2

We compute the complete RO(G)–graded coefficients of “ordinary” cohomology with coefficients in ℤ∕2 for G = (ℤ∕2)n. As an important intermediate step, we identify the ring of coefficients of the corresponding geometric fixed point spectrum, revealing some interesting algebra. This is a first computation of its kind for groups which are not cyclic p–groups.
Romancing the Court

Problem-solving courts, created at the end of the twentieth century, make court-based solutions central to addressing significant societal problems, such as substance abuse and its impact on criminal activity and family functioning. Yet, lessons gleaned from over 100 years of family court history suggest that court-based solutions to intractable social problems have rarely been effective. This article asks three questions of the problem-solving court movement: What problem are we trying to solve? Is the court the best place to solve the problem? What are the consequences of giving authority to a court for solving the problem? Answering those questions through the lens of specific examples from family court—the original problem-solving court—leads to the conclusion that neither the structural issues that courts face, such as overwhelming numbers of cases, nor the momentous societal issues that problem-solving courts have recently begun to shoulder can be adequately addressed through court-based solutions. The factors that allegedly distinguish new problem-solving courts from earlier exemplars, especially the family court, are both less unique and less successful than they have been portrayed by problem-solving court enthusiasts. These factors alone fail to justify the expansion of problem-solving courts without further evidence of their effectiveness. Moreover, the potential dangers inherent in problem-solving courts are not theoretical. By examining illustrative examples from the history of the family court, the dangers become clearly apparent.
Techniques to Teach Substance and Skill in Contract Drafting: In-Office Meetings and Analytical Memos

This short article is based on a talk at Emory Law School on Transactional Lawyering. One overall pedagogical aim of a transactional course (or any business contract drafting course) is to link skills training with insistence on in-depth substantive learning about law and business. In this way, skills training – although acknowledged to be practical – also can be recognized as intellectually demanding, a point not always appreciated by proponents of more traditional law teaching. Two techniques for making the connection – in-office meetings and detailed “companion” analytical memos – are described.
Does "Grease Money" Speed Up the Wheels of Commerce?

In an environment in which bureaucratic burden and delay are exogenous, an individual firm may find bribes helpful to reduce the effective red tape it faces. The “efficient grease” hypothesis asserts therefore that corruption can improve economic efficiency and that fighting bribery would be counter-productive. This need not be the case. In a general equilibrium in which regulatory burden and delay can be endogenously chosen by rentseeking bureaucrats, the effective (not just nominal) red tape and bribery may be positively correlated across firms. Using data from three worldwide firm-level surveys, we examine the relationship between bribe payment, management time wasted with bureaucrats, and cost of capital. Contrary to the “efficient grease” theory, we find that firms that pay more bribes are also likely to spend more, not less, management time with bureaucrats negotiating regulations, and face higher, not lower, cost of capital.
The Questionable Empirical Basis of Article 2's Incorporation Strategy: A Preliminary Study

Note available Copyright Information: All rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. Contact the author or original publisher for any necessary permissions. eScholarship is not the copyright owner for deposited works. Learn more at http://www.escholarship.org/help_copyright.html#reuse Galley Proofs, 04/20/99 2:43:27 PM 1 The Questionable Empirical Basis of Article 2’s Incorporation Strategy: A Preliminary Study
Alliance Portfolio Resource Diversity and Firm Innovation

Abstract As interfirm collaboration plays an increasingly important role in firm innovation, many firms are engaged in multiple partnerships, forming portfolios of alliances. Research in marketing has predominantly focused on dyadic relationships without considering the important interdependencies among different alliances. This study takes a portfolio approach to examine the resource diversity of multiple alliance partners and its contribution to firm innovation. The authors argue that resource diversity in an alliance portfolio can only benefit innovation when resources and information are shared across alliances. They examine factors that may facilitate or inhibit information and resource sharing across alliances and thus influence the realization of any benefit of portfolio resource diversity. The model identifies various factors along three dimensions, including the composition of an alliance portfolio, alliance management, and the market environment, that moderate the relationship between alliance p...
Delaying Change: Examining How Industry and Managerial Turbulence Impact Structural Realignment

This paper examines when firms pursue structural realignment through business unit reconfiguration, specifically by recombining business units. Our results refine and extend contingency theory and ...
Why Errors in Alibis Are Not Necessarily Evidence of Guilt

Laypeople, police, and prosecutors tend to believe that a suspect’s alibi, if truthful, should remain consistent over time (see Burke, Turtle, & Olson, 2007; Culhane & Hosch 2012; Dysart & Strange, 2012). However, there is no empirical evidence to support this assumption. We investigated (a) whether some features of an alibi – such as what was happening, who with, where, and for how long – are more likely to produce errors than others; and (b) whether consistency in alibi stories is correlated with particular phenomenological characteristics of the alibi such as a person’s confidence and sense of reliving the event. We asked participants to imagine they were suspected of a crime and to provide their truthful alibi for an afternoon 3 weeks prior and to complete questions regarding the phenomenological characteristics of their memory. We also asked participants to locate evidence of their actual whereabouts for the critical period. Participants returned a week later, presented their evidence, re-told their ...
Innovation's Effect on Firm Value and Risk: Insights from Consumer Packaged Goods

Abstract What is the relationship between innovation and firm value? Does the type of innovation make a difference? To answer these questions, the authors examine how breakthrough and incremental innovations affect three different facets of firm performance: normal profits, economic rents, and total firm risk.They argue that each of these metrics is of independent interest to shareholders and managers and that examining one without the others results in an incomplete picture of the true financial value of innovation. Using data on more than 20,000 new products from consumer packaged goods industries, the authors find that breakthrough innovation is associated with increases in both normal profits and economic rents and that, on average, each breakthrough innovation in the sample is associated with an increase in firm value of $4.2 million. Breakthrough innovation is also associated with increases in the risk of the innovating firm, but this higher risk is offset by above-normal stock returns. In contrast,...
Corporate Control Activism

This paper studies the role of activist investors in the market for corporate con- trol. We show that activists have higher credibility than bidders when campaigning against entrenched incumbents, and hence, are more eective in relaxing their resistance to takeovers. This result holds although bidders and activists can use similar techniques to challenge the resistance of corporate boards (i.e., proxy …ghts) and have similar gov- ernance expertise. Since activists have a relative advantage in "putting companies into play", there is strategic complementarity between the search of activists for …rms that are likely to receive a takeover bid and the search of bidders for targets with which they can create synergies and that are available for sale. The analysis sheds light on the in- teraction between M&A and shareholder activism and provides a framework to identify the treatment and the selection eects of shareholder activism.
Organizational Liability and the Tension Between Corporate and Criminal Law

On February 5, 2010, Brooklyn Law School brought together a group of psychologists, philosophers, and corporate criminal law experts to explore the implications of blaming corporate groups. During the afternoon session, I had the pleasure of moderating a roundtable discussion that included Professors James Fanto, Peter Henning, and Leonard Orland. The essays that follow are our reactions to the wide range of topics we covered with regard to organizational criminal liability. As the Symposium itself demonstrated, corporate criminal liability continues to be an important and complex topic in public discourse. Our preoccupation reflects our intuition that wrongdoers ought to be punished, and our uneasy relationship with large, powerful corporate organizations. We fear both the harms that corporate organizations can produce (British Petroleum’s massive oil spill being the most recent example), and the agglomeration of economic power that they represent. These fears have led us to
Trade liberalization, unemployment and adjustment: evidence from NAFTA using state level data

This article specifies a supply and demand model of the labour market to examine the effects of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on the US labour market. Regression results suggest that NAFTA decreased yearly unemployment growth by 4.4%. Equivalently, NAFTA brought a structural break to the US state level unemployment. The second finding is that the labour market began feeling the impact of NAFTA immediately after its implementation and the labour market has continued to feel its effects probably through 2001.
NIT picking: The macroeconomic effects of a Negative Income Tax

I study a revenue-neutral reform of the U.S. income tax and welfare system that involves the adoption of a Negative Income Tax (NIT). The reform is undertaken in a life-cycle economy with individual heterogeneity and uninsurable idiosyncratic labor risk. The optimal NIT consists of a 22% rate and a transfer equivalent to 11% of per-capita GDP. The ex-ante average welfare gain is a 2.1% annual increase of individual consumption. I show that a NIT outperforms a flat tax reform (income tax plus deduction) by a considerable margin. The key consequence of the reform is that high-productivity agents increase their relative importance in the labor supply at the expense of low-productivity agents.
Bank capital and uncertainty

Abstract Financial frictions in raising external finance can induce banks to self-insure against future shocks through holding more bank capital. As uncertainty about future losses increases, the above reasoning implies that they would choose to increase their capital position. This paper tests this hypothesis in a dataset with U.S. Commercial Banks by exploiting a cross-sectional variation in uncertainty to explain the distribution of bank capital ratios. I find statistically significant and robust evidence in support of a self-insurance mechanism. A counterfactual experiment suggests that a decline in uncertainty to its lowest level generates an average reduction in bank capital ratios of up to 2 percentage points. Furthermore, uncertainty explains, on average, about half of banks regulatory capital buffers.
Drone Federalism: Civilian Drones and the Things They Carry

Civilian drones are scheduled to be permitted in the national airspace as early as 2015. Many think Congress should establish the necessary nationwide regulations to govern both law enforcement and civilian drone use. That thinking, however, is wrong. This Essay suggests drone federalism instead: a state-based approach to privacy regulation that governs drone use by civilians, drawing on states’ experience regulating other forms of civilian-oncivilian surveillance. This approach will allow necessary experimentation in how to best balance privacy concerns against First Amendment rights in the imminent era of drone-use democratization. This Essay closes by providing some guidance to states as to the potential axes of dronerelated privacy regulations.
Sieve Quasi Likelihood Ratio Inference on Semi/nonparametric Conditional Moment Models

This paper considers inference on functionals of semi/nonparametric conditional moment restrictions with possibly nonsmooth generalized residuals. These models belong to the difficult (nonlinear) ill-posed inverse problems with unknown operators, and include all of the (nonlinear) nonparametric instrumental variables (IV) as special cases. For these models it is generally difficult to verify whether a functional is regular (i.e., root-n estimable) or irregular (i.e., slower than root-n estimable). In this paper we provide computationally simple, unified inference procedures that are asymptotically valid regardless of whether a functional is regular or irregular. We establish the following new results: (1) the asymptotic normality of the plug-in penalized sieve minimum distance (PSMD) estimators of the (possibly irregular) functionals; (2) the consistency of sieve variance estimators of the plug-in PSMD estimators; (3) the asymptotic chi-square distribution of an optimally weighted sieve quasi likelihood ratio (SQLR) statistic; (4) the asymptotic tight distribution of a possibly non-optimally weighted SQLR statistic; (5) the consistency of the nonparametric bootstrap and the weighted bootstrap (possibly non-optimally weighted) SQLR and sieve Wald statistics, which are proved under virtually the same conditions as those for the original-sample statistics. Small simulation studies and an empirical illustration of a nonparametric quantile IV regression are presented.
Strategic Alliances and the Boundaries of the Firm

Strategic alliances are long-term contracts between legally distinct organizations that provide for sharing the costs and benefits of a mutually beneficial activity. In this paper, I develop and test a model that helps explain why firms sometimes prefer alliances over internally organized projects. I introduce managerial effort into a model of internal capital markets and show how strategic alliances help overcome incentive problems that arise when headquarters cannot pre-commit to particular capital allocations. The model generates a number of implications, which I test using a large sample of alliance transactions in conjunction with Compustat data.
Emerging critical behavior at a first-order phase transition rounded by disorder

We investigate the two-dimensional four-color Ashkin-Teller model by means of large-scale Monte-Carlo simulations. We demonstrate that the first-order phase transition of the clean system is destroyed by random disorder introduced via site dilution. The critical behavior of the emerging continuous transition belongs to the clean two-dimensional Ising universality class, apart from logarithmic corrections. These results confirm perturbative renormalization-group predictions; they also agree with recent findings for the three-color case, indicating that the critical behavior is universal.
Role Reversal in Global Finance

I document that emerging markets have cast off their “original sin” – their external liabilities are no longer dominated by foreign-currency debt and have instead shifted sharply towards direct investment and portfolio equity. Their external assets are increasingly concentrated in foreign exchange reserves held in advanced economy government bonds. Given the enormous and rising public debt burdens of reserve currency economies, this means that the long-term risk on emerging markets’ external balance sheets is shifting to the asset side. However, emerging markets continue to look for more insurance against balance of payments crises, even as self-insurance through reserve accumulation itself becomes riskier. I propose a mechanism for global liquidity insurance that would meet emerging markets’ demand for insurance with fewer domestic policy distortions while facilitating a quicker adjustment of global imbalances. I also argue that emerging markets have become less dependent on foreign finance and more resilient to capital flow volatility. The main risk that increasing financial openness poses for these economies is that capital flows exacerbate vulnerabilities arising from weak domestic policies and institutions.
Learning by not doing: an experimental investigation of observational learning

Abstract We present experimental evidence suggesting that observational learning (i.e., learning-by-not-doing but by observing) may outperform learning-by-doing.
Popular protest and elite coordination in a coup d'état

Elites face a daunting coordination problem when contemplating a coup. Citizens, who desire political reform, face a similar coordination problem when contemplating protest. Since elites and citizens interact with the same leadership, these coordination problems are invariably linked. We develop a model which exploits this link to isolate an informational mechanism connecting popular protests and coups. Protests aggregate citizen information and provide elites with a public signal which helps them coordinate in a coup. We show that elites “overreact” to protest as a consequence of its publicity, and we provide a microfounded explanation as to why elites use protests to facilitate coordination. Our model also suggests that protests in countries with media freedom better facilitate elite coordination. To test this, we examine how media freedom affects the relationship between protests and coups. The empirical analysis shows the effect of protests on coups is exacerbated in countries where media is free.
Expectation and duration at the effective lower bound

Abstract With risk-averse arbitrageurs and an effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal rates, nonlinear interactions among short-rate expectations, bond supply, and term premia emerge in equilibrium. These interactions, which are absent from affine models, help explain the observed behavior of the yield curve near the ELB, including evidence about unconventional monetary policy. The impact of both short-rate expectations and bond supply are attenuated at the ELB. However, in simulations of the post-crisis experience in the U.S., shocks to investors’ duration-risk exposures have much smaller effects than shocks to the anticipated path of short rates. The latter shocks matter, in part, because of the reduction in interest-rate volatility associated with a longer expected stay at the ELB—a novel channel of unconventional policy.
Post-Booker Leniency in Child Pornography Sentencing

As a number of commentators and courts have noted, the Guideline sentences for possession of child pornography are quite harsh. A number of district courts have used their post- Booker discretion to impose below-Guideline sentences on those who possess child pornography. This short commentary explains how the state of federal sentencing after Booker is particularly hospitable to arguments for sentencing leniency for defendants convicted of possessing child pornography. One argument calls on a district court to use its sentencing policy discretion under Kimbrough v. United States to impose a lower sentence. Another argument rests on a distinct-facts-and-circumstances argument under Gall v. United States . Finally, on an appeal of a within-Guideline sentence, there is an argument that, drawing on the analysis in Rita v. United States , a presumption of reasonableness ought not apply to within-Guideline sentences for those who possess child pornography.
From the Punitive City to the Gated Community: Security and Segregation across the Social and Penal Landscape

Just over 20 years ago, criminologist Stanley Cohen put forth his vision of a newly evolving penal world which he called, “The Punitive City." He formulated his imagined punitive city based what appeared to him at the time to be emerging patterns of a novel form of social control that were distinguished by, among other things, the dispersal and penetration of control beyond prison walls, the blurring of spatial boundaries which mark the differences between inside and outside, freedom and captivity, imprisoned and released, and guilty and innocent, the emergence of corrections a continuum where intervention and control is finely graded to fit individual "need", and the widening of the controllable population resulting from fuzzier definitions of deviancy and normalcy. Yet the movement Cohen idenitifed in no way lessened the reliance on prison as a central form of social control. Indeed, the explosion in the sheer numbers of people being imprisoned in this country, and in the rate at which people are imprisoned actually began its upswing right around the time Cohen's piece on the Punitive City was published and the prison’s credibility was being so overtly challenged. In this paper, I explore a potential (if partial) explanation for this somewhat ironic prison explosion by looking beyond the machinery of criminal justice, and analytically resituating the prison as a social institution within the broader socio-cultural landscape.
Institutions and Deposit Insurance: Empirical Evidence

Do banks’ responses to changes in deposit insurance vary across countries even if the countries have comparable institutions? If so, by how much? Using data on the financial performance of large banks in 15 financially and economically developed countries, we find that where deposit insurance has an effect, it is large and varies depending on the level of economic freedom, rule of law and corruption in the bank’s home country. As in prior papers, we show that during stable economic periods, increases in deposit insurance are associated with higher bank risk, both problem loans and leverage. In most, but not all, cases stronger institutions temper these effects. The institutions’ effects are substantial. For example, average changes in the rule of law double the impact of a change in deposit insurance on bank leverage. We contribute to the substantial literature in this area by showing that the institutional effects are significant even across a set of countries with comparable institutions; by conducting a careful calibration of the economic significance of the effects; by providing evidence that during stable periods changes in deposit insurance only affect bank risk and not other measures of performance; and finally by showing that the effects of both deposit insurance and institutions vary across stable and crisis economic periods. The stable period results are consistent with the moral hazard effects of deposit insurance, while the crisis period results are consistent with endogeneity concerns that poor bank performance could drive changes in regulations.
Fiscal policymaking and the central bank institutional constraint Una Vez Más: New Latin American evidence

Evidence on the degree to which central bank independence can constrain government budget deficits remains surprisingly scarce. This paper finds empirical support for the importance of the central institutional constraint for a 14-country sample of Latin American countries over 1990–2012. These results suggest that greater central bank autonomy has indeed helped reign in fiscal excesses in a region that has been plagued by inflationary deficit expansion for much of the post-war period. The ability to potentially discipline government policy adds to an independent central bank’s inherent role in adding to the checks and balances essential to a well-functioning democracy.
Insurance in Sociolegal Research

Insurance has a long history in sociolegal research, most prominently as a window on accident compensation and related tort law in action. Recent work has extended that research, with the result that tort law in action may be the best mapped of any legal field outside criminal law. Sociological research has begun to explore insurance as a form of governance, with effects in many legal fields and across the economy. This article reviews developments in both bodies of work. It examines the relationship between liability insurance and tort law in action using the metaphors of window and frame, as well as reviews research on insurance as governance. The conclusion returns to insurance as governance in the context of liability insurance, arguing that this is an especially promising field for sociolegal research.
Economic Foundations of the Law of the Sea

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea demonstrates plausible economic logic by assigning jurisdiction over portions of the ocean to the states that value them the most and can regulate them most cheaply, while respecting other states' interests in navigation and additional uses of the seas. For the vast oceanic areas that no state can regulate, the Convention provides for an open access regime subject to simple rules, mostly self-enforcing, to limit conflict over resources.
Promoting Recycling: Private Values, Social Norms, and Economic Incentives

Individual behaviors that benefit the environment are potentially influenced by personal values of environmental quality, social norms that encourage proenvironmental actions, and economic incentives. Economic incentives often loom particularly large, including those that result from environmental policies. Less well understood are the respective roles of private values and social norms. Do people undertake proenvironmental actions more out of their per sonal valuations of the environment that might be characterized as warm glow effects or from the social norms that reinforce proenvironmental behaviors? The least explored component of these deter minants of proenvironmental behavior is that of social norms. We characterize social norms in terms of what is normatively appropriate rather than what is the conventional mode of behavior. There is a burgeoning economics literature modeling social norms, but not a commensurate empirical investigation of their practical impor tance. If norms do matter, what is the respective role of personal norms that a person imposes on others compared with the external norms that people perceive are imposed on them by others? To what extent are these social norms the result of legal regimes and regulatory policies that establish standards for behavior? Our empirical analysis estimates the role of these influences. The empirical case study for this article is based on an analysis of recycling of plastic water bottles. Recycling policies are becoming
The Dynamics of Borrower Reputation Following Financial Misreporting

We study the dynamics of borrower reputation in bank loan markets following revelations of financial misreporting by the borrower. Misreporting firms pay greater loan spreads than matched firms for at least six years following revelation of the misreporting, and there is no evidence of a downward trend in the misreporting premium. Following revelation, misreporting firms are more likely to engage in various actions to potentially rebuild their reputations, but even firms that engage in multiple actions continue to pay greater loan spreads for at least six years. Our results suggest that misreporting causes long-lasting and costly reputation losses that firms find very difficult or prohibitively costly to restore. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2739 . This paper was accepted by Wei Jiang, finance.
Asset Ownership by Black and White Families

The likelihood of owning homes, investment accounts, and retirement accounts by Black and White families was analyzed using data from the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances. Education, income, and contact with more financial institutions were almost always influential in the likelihood of owning assets and the value of assets. White families were less likely to be homeowners if they had been denied credit, whereas Black families had less equity in their homes if they had been denied credit. These and other results reinforce the need for financial counselors and planners and consumer educators to help consumers develop a good credit rating, become more risk tolerant, and develop longer horizons for saving and investing.
The degree of price resolution and equity trading costs

Abstract This paper investigates relations between trade execution costs and price-rounding practices for NYSE- and Nasdaq-listed firms. Execution costs on each exchange vary positively with the proportion of transaction prices and quotations rounded to eveneights of a dollar, both cross-sectionally and intertemporally. After allowing for variation in market-making costs attributable to the private information content of trades, there is a strong positive relation between execution costs and price-rounding frequencies for Nasdaq issues but not for NYSE issues. These findings are consistent with the assertion that price-rounding conventions effectively increase trade execution costs on Nasdaq.
The Visual in Law: Some Problems for Legal Theory:

Digital visual displays construct legal knowledge in new ways and reconstitute our notions of community both inside and outside of law. This article describes three problems that the proliferation ...
CODIFICATION OF SUPPLEMENTAL JURISDICTION: ANATOMY OF A LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL

The historic nature of congressional action in codifying supplemental jurisdiction in section 1367 calls for a close examination of the legislative process and product. Section I of this Article presents a brief survey of the development of supplemental jurisdiction. Section II examines the history of the legislative process that produced section 1367. Section III contains a preliminary review of judicial decisions under the new supplemental jurisdiction statute. The Article concludes with some editorial remarks regarding the statute and the process by which it became public law.
The “Reformation of Administrative Law” Revisited

The archetype of the New Deal agency, exercising neutral, technocratic expertise, is no longer tenable. As Richard Stewart (1975. "Reformation of Administrative Law," 88 Harvard Law Review 1667–813) noted 35 years ago, administrative law "is undergoing a fundamental transformation." Following Stewart, the modern explanation in legal scholarship of the transformation is that federal judges came to the rescue of the administrative state, actively intervening in the regulatory process in order to preserve key values which had been threatened by an admixture of internal pathologies and external (read: "political") threats. We argue that the traditional explanation neglects a central aspect of the major transformations in American regulatory politics during the past half century—the critical role of Congress and the President in the reformation of both the American regulatory state and administrative law. The traditional explanation in legal scholarship, that courts implemented values and agendas separate from legislative aims, and hence separate from politics, is flawed because it neglects the larger transformations, beginning in the 1960s and continuing over the next two decades, in American national politics. During this period, a wide range of new constituencies arose, including the environmentalists, consumerists. The courts’ role in the reformation must be seen in this broader political transformation of the 1960s and 1970s rather than in a court-centric perspective in isolation from the rest of the political system. We illustrate our thesis with nuclear power regulation, which demonstrates the critical, joint roles of entrepreneurs in Congress and the courts.
Animal Cruelty Laws and Factory Farming

Should laws criminalizing animal abuse apply to animals raised for food? The answer is yes, and yes especially because farm animals are generally now under the control of business corporations. State and federal criminal law have proved critical in modifying corporate policy and practice in other areas, a current example being worker safety. Criminal liability today would include criminal liability of the corporate entity itself, and would thus also introduce the most effective regulation of individual handling of farm animals - regulation by the corporation, which has methods and resources public agencies cannot match.
A Series of Unfortunate Events in Rio, or What I Did on My Summer Vacation

By way of background and for some context, I lived and worked in Brazil before I joined the faculty of the University of Tennessee College of Law, so I am a total Brazilophile, and I try to get back as often as I can. I was incredibly fortunate, then, when I had the opportunity to participate in the Study Space V workshop on cultural diversity, property rights, and sustainable development. It is a very timely topic for Brazil. Rio has grown dramatically in recent years, and it faces many challenges as it prepares to host the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. The Study Space workshop explored how these challenges may threaten Rio’s unique physical environment. We also considered how all levels of government will manage these challenges while attending to environmental justice concerns. A fantastic and very diverse group participated in the workshop, including legal academics, anthropologists, geographers, and political scientists from all over the world, and even some very talented graduate students. It was a very good thing that everyone was collegial because we spent virtually every waking hour together for seven days—it was intense. Our mornings were spent with speakers and panels on particular topics; we then would go on field trips in the afternoons to explore the topics in situ. In the evening, we would discuss our daily activities and review the voluminous readings we had been assigned. Our morning and evening sessions were held at one of our
Antitakeover Provisions and Shareholder Wealth: A Survey of the Literature

We survey theoretical and empirical research on antitakeover provisions, focusing on the relation between antitakeover provisions and shareholder value. We divide the empirical studies based upon the evidence that they provide: short-term event studies, studies on performance and policy changes around adopting antitakeover provisions or passing state antitakeover laws, studies on the impact of antitakeover provisions on takeovers, studies on the relation between antitakeover provisions and firm characteristics, and long-term studies on the relation between antitakeover provisions and firm performance or policies. We also discuss the place of antitakeover provisions in the current debate about “good governance” practices.