cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Human capital, knowledge spillovers, and one kind of semi-endogenous regional economic growth

We study the implications of the interaction between human capital and knowledge spillovers for one kind of semi-endogenous economic growth in a region. We focus on two cases. In the first (second) case, there is no growth (growth) in the stock of human capital but knowledge spillovers are complete (incomplete). Our analysis leads to four findings for each of the above two cases. First, we describe the balanced growth path equilibrium. Second, we describe the possible existence of transitional dynamics. Third, we discuss the circumstances in which there exists a human capital induced scale effect. Fourth, we discuss the real world plausibility of each of the above two cases. We conclude with a brief discussion of how our single region model might be extended to study the case of \(I\ge 2\) regions.
Do Acceptance and Publication Times Differ Across Finance Journals

For articles eventually published in the top twenty academic finance journals and top-tier academic business journals, I examine the acceptance time (the time from first-round submission to final-round acceptance) and online/print publication times (the time from first-round submission to online/print publication). I find that the median acceptance times of the top five general-interest finance journals are: Journal of Financial Economics (9.9 months), Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (10.6 months), Review of Finance (11.7 months), Review of Financial Studies (15.5 months), and Journal of Finance (19.8 months). The three fastest in finance are Review of Corporate Finance Studies, Review of Asset Pricing Studies, and Financial Management. Journal of Finance is one of the slowest top-tier business journals. Large and significant time differences support the editorial differences hypothesis.
"Getting the government out of marriage" post Obergefell: The ill-considered consequences of transforming the state's relationship to marriage

To say after U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision extending the right to marry to same-sex couples in Obergefell v. Hodges that the simmering dispute over marriage turned into a “raging inferno” would be an understatement. Collisions over same-sex marriage erupted almost immediately around the country — captured most famously by Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, who shut down marriage to heterosexual and same-sex couples alike, rather than “violate [her] conscience.” Despite the possibility of muting the impact on religious dissenters with well-drawn statutory protections, a dangerous idea has taken hold: namely, that it is far better to “get the government out of the marriage business” entirely rather than enacting piecemeal “fixes” to permit those deeply opposed to same-sex marriage to step aside. This Essay unpacks competing visions advanced by legislators, social conservatives, and others for “getting the government out of marriage” — from the idea that society should simply redub civil marriages as civil unions to the proposed legislation to eliminate the status of marriage in favor of enforcing parties’ contractual agreements.This Essay argues that each proposal fails to preserve vital benefits and features of marriage as we currently understand it. First, radically transforming the state’s relationship to marriage, whatever form that may take, risks disturbing the delicate web of norms around marriage. Marriage signifies faithfulness, permanence, emotional and financial interdependence, and physical security — norms that are propped up by continued inclusion of religious couples in the civil institution now known as “marriage.” Transforming the state’s relationship to marriage carries the risk that by cleaving apart what has always been two intertwined aspects of marriage — civil and religious — society over time will come to see the institutions as wholly separate, leading to an unwinding of the norms.Second, each proposal glosses over a tangle of practical problems: What happens to the millions of Americans who have relied upon the state’s existing structure? Further, how will couples who “contract” rather than “marry” secure the myriad social benefits attached to marital status, like entitlement to spousal benefits from employers or Social Security? Will contracting couples have the foresight, discipline, and, most significantly, roughly equal bargaining power to arrive at fair agreements governing the financial and domestic aspects of their relationship?Finally, the Essay returns to the fork in the road facing state legislators: “end marriage” or enact commonsense accommodations for those who cannot, consistent with their faith, facilitate any marriage. This Essay concludes it is far wiser to enact specific protections for religious objectors post-Obergefell than to radically deconstruct marriage. Ultimately, society should be loath to unwind the religious and civil dimensions of marriage since the consequences may be so profound.
REAL AND DISTRIBUTIVE EFFECTS OF PETROLEUM PRICE LIBERALIZATION: THE CASE OF INDONESIA

The effect of higher petroleum prices on the aggregate price level, real growth, and income distribution is appraised within a multisector computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. A reduction in the government subsidy raises petroleum prices and production costs throughout the economy. Consumer demand, production, and income decline as output prices increase and consumer purchasing power decreases. The model is applied to and calibrated for Indonesia. The simulated results predict a slight increase in the price level and a slight decrease in output. An important result is that urban household groups will be the most significantly affected by the subsidy reduction.
Exchange Rate Pass-through in South Africa: Panel Evidence from Individual Goods and Services

Abstract This study estimates pass-through for South Africa using samples of final goods and services, and homogenous imports. Estimated pass-through to consumer goods prices is low, roughly 16 per cent in the two years following an exchange rate change; surprisingly, it is somewhat higher for services. Deviations from long run PPP appear to disappear relatively quickly, with a half-life of about 16 months. For imports, pass-through estimates are much higher, averaging around 60 per cent, but with wide source-country variation. Finally, there is virtually no support for a simple linear trend change in either pass-through or in reversion to PPP during the sample.
The Rehnquist Court: A "By the Numbers" Retrospective

The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist presided over the U.S. Supreme Court for 19 years, longer than any other chief justice in the 20th century. Despite this longevity, however, there is little consensus on just what the legacy of the Rehnquist Court is. Was the Rehnquist Court a restrained court that embraced a limited, text-based reading of the Constitution? Or was it a much more aggressive court, responsible for a resurgence of conservative judicial activism? Is it best epitomized by the "swaggering confidence" that put a President in office, or the cautious minimalism that disappointed its conservative supporters by failing to reverse liberal precedents bequeathed to it by the Warren and Burger Courts? This paper attempts to shed light on these questions by examining the record of the Rehnquist Court "by the numbers". Specifically, how many times did the Court use its power of judicial review to invalidate federal legislation, how many times did it do so to invalidate state legislation, and how many times did it do so to overturn existing judicial precedent? Within each of these areas, I also identify the issue area in which the Court rendered its decision, the ideological direction of the decision, and the vote margin by which the decision was made, and compare the Rehnquist Court's record in these areas to the records of the Warren and Burger Courts. Finally, I use this numeric information to identify and discuss the issue areas in which Justice O'Connor's retirement is likely to most impact the Supreme Court's jurisprudence. By examining the legacy of the Rehnquist Court from this simple, empirical perspective, this paper contributes to a growing body of legal scholarship committed to shifting discussion about the Supreme Court away from contested theories of constitutional interpretation and toward a more factually grounded examination of the role the Supreme Court actually plays in our legal and political system. I also hope to illustrate the role that basic, easily accessible empirical information can play in that examination.
Adjustments in Different Government Systems

This paper develops a model in which agents have a conflict of interest over what instrument to use for policy adjustment in response to shocks. Three different government systems are analyzed: cabinet systems, in which one decision-maker has full control over adjustment policies; consensus systems, in which adjustment policies must be agreed upon by all agents; and checks-and-balances systems, in which one agent decides what instrument should be used for adjustment, but the remaining agents may veto its use. All three systems may lead to inefficient policies. The cabinet system adjusts too often. The other systems may fail to adjust when adjustment is optimal. The relative performance of the three systems depends on the degree of political fragmentation and the size distribution of shocks.
Fair Value Accounting and Stewardship

Current standards define fair value as the market price at which an asset could be sold or a liability could be settled in the normal course of business. Setting aside measurement issues, assessing the relevance of exit values has intensified in recent years as fair value becomes a pervasive component of accounting regulation. The current debate about accounting measurement is framed in terms of making a choice between fair value and historical cost. In this article I argue that this is not a correct framing of the issues; knowledge of fair value alone cannot help investors to evaluate stewardship, because they would not know how much resources the management had sacrificed to obtain that fair value. To properly evaluate stewardship, investors need both types of information, historical cost and fair value.Using this information, a rate-of-return-like index of stewardship quality is proposed. This commentary concludes with a statement about three significant drawbacks of relying solely on fair value accounting.
The Bush Regime from Elections to Detentions: A Moral Economy of Carl Schmitt and Human Rights

This essay, presented in Vienna at an international conference on the Bush Administration and America's Future and to be published in updated form, analyzes the Bush administration through two lenses: one developed by Marx in his analysis of the rise of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, and the other Hans Mommsen's analysis of the happenstantial construction of Hitler's dictatorship. The essay moves through a look at the coup of 22 November 2000 and then proceeds to look at the analogous dynamics of the Reichstagsbrand/Ermaechtigungsgesetz and 9/11-USA Patriot Act. Next, the essay examines the role of sovereignty in states of exception and the role of the decider, as developed from the Weimar Constitution's Art. 48 and Carl Schmitt to John Yoo. Finally, the essay touches upon the ironic and pernicious role of radical human rights discourses in abetting an imperialist agenda. The essay concludes by considering whether the legal, moral, political, and social construct of the West, which the US has shared with Europe for over half a century, has now come to an end in an era of unchallenged, if ineffective, American hegemony.
Do Patents Promote the Progress of Justice?: Reflections on Varied Visions of Justice

Do patents promote the progress of justice? The words “patents” and “justice” do not typically appear in the same sentence. Patents are often viewed as obscure things associated with technology, whereas justice is more frequently associated with core foundations of a democratic society. However, patents do have a place in the society envisioned by the founding fathers. In fact, the Constitution empowered Congress to create a system that enables the progress of science.1 Although patents have Constitutional grounding, whether they are consistent with the goals of justice is a more elusive question. The term “justice” usually is not explicitly articulated with respect to promoting or criticizing the patent system. Nonetheless, as this essay will discuss, there are perceptions of justice inherently tied to the present patent system. However, these perceptions reflect different visions, as opposed to a single coherent one.2 But before jumping into the heart of the discussion about how justice can or should be achieved in the patent system, some key terms of reference for this essay will first be further defined: patents and justice within the patent context.
Creation of Social Order in Ethnic Conflict

This article develops a model of random matching with costly monitoring to demonstrate that the threat of ethnic conflict can function to create an in-group policing mechanism which helps enforce inter-ethnic social order. Instead of regarding ethnic conflict as a form of collective penalty on an unidentified wrongdoer and his ethnic brethren (Fearon and Laitin, 1996), we argue that ethnic conflict is triggered by a wrongdoing because avengers seek to take advantage of in-group networks for detecting and punishing the culprit. Our theory predicts that the success of inter-ethnic cooperation hinges on the quality of in-group policing. As a consequence, a group with lower-quality policing tends to have more frequent and longer disputes with other groups.
Reentering the labor force after retirement

Data from the longitudinal Health and Retirement Study indicate that approximately 15 percent of older Americans with career jobs returned to the labor force after having retired; respondents were more likely to reenter the workforce if they were younger, were in better health, or had a defined-contribution pension plan.
Foster Children Awaiting Adoption Under the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997

(2006). Foster Children Awaiting Adoption Under the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. Adoption Quarterly: Vol. 9, No. 2-3, pp. 121-131.
TESTING RELATIVITY AT HIGH ENERGIES USING SPACEBORNE DETECTORS

The Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), to be launched in the fall of 2007, will measure the spectra of distant extragalactic sources of high energy γ-rays, particularly active galactic nuclei and γ-ray bursts. GLAST can look for energy-dependent γ-ray propagation effects from such sources as a signal of Lorentz invariance violation (LIV). These sources should also exhibit the high energy cutoffs predicted to be the result of intergalactic annihilation interactions with low energy photons having a flux level as determined by various astronomical observations. Such annihilations result in electron–positron pair production above a threshold energy given by 2me in the center-of-momentum frame of the system, assuming Lorentz invariance. If Lorentz invariance is violated, this threshold can be significantly raised, changing the predicted absorption turnover in the observed spectrum of the sources. Stecker and Glashow have shown that the existence of such absorption features in the spectra of extragalactic sources puts constraints on LIV. Such constraints have important implications for some quantum gravity and large extra dimension models. Future spaceborne detectors dedicated to measuring γ-ray polarization can look for birefringence effects as a possible signal of loop quantum gravity. As shown by Coleman and Glashow, a much smaller amount of LIV has potential implications for possibly suppressing the "GZK cutoff" predicted to be caused by the interactions of cosmic rays having multijoule energies with photons of the 2.7 K cosmic background radiation in intergalactic space. Owing to the rarity of such ultrahigh energy cosmic rays, their spectra are best studied by a UV-sensitive satellite detector which looks down on a large volume of the Earth's atmosphere to study the nitrogen fluorescence tracks of giant air showers produced by these ultrahigh energy cosmic rays. We discuss here, in particular, a two-satellite mission called OWL, which would be suited for making such studies.
Public Policy Considerations Concerning Forum Selection Clauses in Insurance Contracts

Forum selection clauses are present in many commercial contracts today. Since the 1972 decision of the United States Supreme Court in M/S Bremen v. Zapata, numerous courts throughout the country have decided on the issue of enforceability of forum selection clauses and the general question of enforceability has inspired a rich scholarly literature. Despite this rich literature, there is a gap in the recent law review literature concerning the enforceability of forum selection clauses in insurance contracts generally.This Article intends to bridge that gap in the literature with a comprehensive examination of the enforceability of forum selection clauses in insurance contracts. It proposes a new balancing test for courts to utilize in determining whether to enforce a forum selection clause in an insurance contract. Just as courts utilize insurance principles in examining other provisions in insurance contracts, the proposed balancing test incorporates principles of insurance law in analyzing forum selection clauses.
Ideological And Historical Challenges In Business Education

Business schools bear a central mission in our society and are responsible for training business managers who work in, lead, and indeed control our corporations and drive our economy’s wealth. Historical and ideological challenges have influenced business education and steered it off the expected path. Several theoretical frameworks such as academic capitalism explain what has occurred in this profession and how academic institutions were held hostage to the capitalistic and entrepreneurial organizations that are more concerned with shareholders’ wealth than stakeholders’ wellbeing and welfare.
The Academic Law Library in the Age of Affiliations: A Case Study of the University of New Hampshire Law Library

Difficult financial times have forced law schools to look for ways to restructure. One promising opportunity, especially for independent law schools, is affiliating with another law school or a university. How does this change impact the law library? This study of the University of New Hampshire Law Library seeks to provide a partial answer
A constructive critique of public health arguments for anti-obesity soda taxes and food taxes

This Article constructively critiques the two arguments that public health advocates have made in support of anti-obesity soda taxes or junk food taxes. Part II discusses and critiques the first argument, an economic externalities argument that government should tax soda or junk food to internalize the disproportionately high health care costs of obesity. Part II also explores alternative economic internalities argument for food or soda taxes, with a focus on incomplete information, bounded rationality, and bounded willpower. Part III discusses and critiques the second argument made by public health advocates, that government should adopt anti-obesity measures to improve population-wide health. This Part considers the appropriate scope of public health law interventions with respect to behavioral risk factors (for example, diet), comments on empirical evidence offered by public health advocates to support proposed soda taxes, and cautions public health advocates to consider possible unintended consequences of anti-obesity proposals.Obesity policy debates present a conflict of fundamental values, such as health, fairness, efficiency, and autonomy. Part IV attempts to reconcile these values and responds to the “personal responsibility” objection to soda taxes and food taxes. Part V considers various factors that would affect behavioral responses to proposed soda taxes and food taxes and addresses concerns that such taxes would be regressive and thus unfair to low-income consumers. This Part also explores the tax design implications of the literature on tax salience and on asymmetric paternalism and libertarian paternalism. Part VI suggests the way forward for public health advocates, including a proposal to enact a tax on nutritionally poor foods and drinks, paired with a salient benefit. In addition, this Part recommends enactment of a federal system of food classification, based on nutrient profiling methods, along with a federal system of front-of-package nutritional labeling.
Gambling, Commodity Speculation, and the "Victorian Compromise"

This Essay examines two major strands of nineteenth-century jurisprudence related to gambling: Southern cases defining public and private space for the purpose of state gambling statutes, and Northern cases applying the intent to deliver test to speculative contracts. The Essay argues that both lines of cases reflect what Lawrence Friedman has termed the Victorian compromise: A strong official stance against immoral behavior is conjoined with de facto acceptance of many questionable practices, provided that they are conducted in a manner acceptable to the elite. The Essay concludes that nineteenth-century judges sought to preserve the semblance of a strict prohibition against gambling while allowing more socially acceptable forms of speculation to pass muster.
The Privatization of Process: Requiem for and Celebration of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure at 75

The normative goals of the 1938 Federal Rules facilitated a reconceptualization of federal adjudication by welcoming into court a diverse array of persons who, as the century unfolded and equality mandates expanded, became rights-holders. As a consequence, courts came to serve as venues for democratic debates about rights and remedies. Seventy-five years later, that egalitarian project has contracted, and the Federal Rules have been refocused on management and judge-based settlement efforts. That privatizing of process inside courts, as well as the devolution to agencies and outsourcing to private providers, is promoted by official voices within the federal judiciary. These new procedural forms close off public access by siting dispute resolution outside the public sphere. Not only are potential claimants losing knowledge of alleged injuries and the modes of redress, but these privatizing procedures undermine rationales for public and private investments in the lower federal courts. In 1995, the federal judiciary’s Long Range Plan worried about the nightmare of ever-expanding filings and vanishing trials. By 2014, data on filings and investments showed flattening rates of filing, reductions in courthouse space, and tightening budgets. While the Long Range Plan’s aspirations to control growth may be coming to fruition, the planners’ hopes of preserving the federal courts as
The Dependent Poisson Race Model and Modeling Dependence in Conjoint Choice Experiments

Conjoint choice experiments are used widely in marketing to study consumer preferences amongst alternative products. We develop a class of choice models, belonging to the class of Poisson race models, that describe a ‘random utility’ which lends itself to a process-based description of choice. The models incorporate a dependence structure which captures the relationship between the attributes of the choice alternatives and which appropriately moderates the randomness inherent in the race. The new models are applied to conjoint choice data and are shown to have performance markedly superior to that of independent Poisson race models and of the multinomial logit model.
Prior Knowledge and Complacency in New Product Learning

Our research examines the role of prior knowledge in learning new product information. Three studies demonstrate that, compared to consumers with lower prior knowledge, those with higher prior knowledge learn less about a new product. Further, higher knowledge consumers are able to learn more but learn less due to motivational deficits; inferior learning of new product information by those with higher prior knowledge is caused by inattention at encoding rather than reconstructive errors at retrieval. These results hold both when prior knowledge is manipulated experimentally (studies 1 and 2) and when it is an individual difference factor (study 3).
Optimal Information Asymmetry

At the heart of decentralization lies the notion that tasks are delegated by owners to managers who possess superior local information. The extent of this information asymmetry is often an endogenous construct, as it is influenced by the owner's choice of internal accounting systems and the manager's investment in acquiring local expertise. In this paper, we explore how varying levels of pre‐contract, asymmetric information affect the owner‐manager relationship. We provide three main sets of insights. First, we find that the owner's payoffs are initially decreasing, and strictly convex everywhere, in the quality of the manager's private information. The owner thus prefers to deal with either a perfectly informed or a perfectly uninformed manager, and we characterize conditions for either to be the preferred choice. Second, in contrast to recent work, we demonstrate that when information can be communicated internally, the optimal strength of managerial incentives unambiguously decreases as the manager bec...
The Effect of Savings Accounts on Interpersonal Financial Relationships: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Rural Kenya

The welfare impact of expanding access to bank accounts depends on whether accounts crowd out pre-existing financial relationships, or whether private gains from accounts are shared within social networks. In this experiment, we provided free bank accounts to a random subset of 885 households. Across households, we document positive spillovers: treatment households become less reliant on grown children and siblings living outside their village, and become more supportive of neighbors and friends within their village. Within households, we randomized which spouse was offered an account and find no evidence of negative spillovers. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Search-based peer firms: Aggregating investor perceptions through internet co-searches.

Abstract Applying a “co-search” algorithm to Internet traffic at the SEC׳s EDGAR website, we develop a novel method for identifying economically related peer firms and for measuring their relative importance. Our results show that firms appearing in chronologically adjacent searches by the same individual (Search-Based Peers or SBPs) are fundamentally similar on multiple dimensions. In direct tests, SBPs dominate GICS6 industry peers in explaining cross-sectional variations in base firms׳ out-of-sample: (a) stock returns, (b) valuation multiples, (c) growth rates, (d) R&D expenditures, (e) leverage, and (f) profitability ratios. We show that SBPs are not constrained by standard industry classification, and are more dynamic, pliable, and concentrated. We also show that co-search intensity captures the degree of similarity between firms. Our results highlight the potential of the collective wisdom of investors — extracted from co-search patterns — in addressing long-standing benchmarking problems in finance.
Seigniorage in the Civil War South

Abstract During the U.S. Civil War, the Confederate Congress adopted three currency reforms that were intended to reduce the quantity of Treasury notes in circulation by inducing the money-holding public to exchange their notes for long-term bonds. In this paper, we examine the political factors that influenced the adoption of the reforms and their effect on the flow of seigniorage - revenue that the government derived by using the newly-printed Treasury notes to purchase the goods and services it required. We argue that the bifurcation of the Confederate Congress into two groups – those legislators that represented the Confederacy's interior and those from areas no longer under Confederate control – contributed to the adoption of the reforms. Our findings indicate that representing an area outside of the rebel government's control increased the likelihood that a legislator would support efforts to reform the currency by over 90 percent. In addition, our results indicate that the rate of monetary expansion in the South was below that which would have maximized the revenue from seigniorage. We find that the reforms reduced the flow of seigniorage by approximately 57 percent, depriving the Confederate government of much-needed revenue.
Optimal Long-Run Fiscal Policy: Constraints, Preferences and the Resolution of Uncertainty

We construct a computational dynamic stochastic overlapping generations general equilibrium model with uncertain lifetimes and explore the impact of policy stickiness (specifically, a major reform will preclude future reforms for a generation) on optimal long-run fiscal policy. Under such circumstances, entitlement reforms exhaust a valuable option to move in the future. We explore the conditions under which the gain to waiting is large enough to induce optimizing policymakers to delay reforming a suboptimal system. We also allow for the uncertainty to have ARCH characteristics and explore the impact of time-varying uncertainty on the optimality of delayed policy action.
The Road to Transparency: Abolishing Black-Box Verdicts on Patent Obviousness

The criteria of novelty, utility, and non-obviousness are considered the gatekeepers of the modern patent system. The non-obviousness criterion is complicated for two reasons. First, non-obviousness attempts to measure technical accomplishment or non-triviality – a more abstract inquiry than either novelty or utility. Second, when the non-obviousness of a patented invention is challenged in the context of patent litigation, lay persons (juries or judges) are called upon to measure the level of technical accomplishment even though they are usually unfamiliar with the technology involved.So, it might not be surprising that litigants care about the format of jury verdicts on patent obviousness; the format determines the amount of information disclosed regarding the factual findings underlying the verdict. In a recent case, Wyers v. Master Lock Co., the Federal Circuit reviewed a jury’s general verdict on patent obviousness. In his concurring opinion, Judge Linn noted that the Federal Circuit had repeatedly encouraged trial courts to provide juries with special interrogatories on obviousness in order to facilitate review and to “reveal more clearly the jury’s underlying factual findings.” However, Judge Linn also noted that the Federal Circuit had not adopted a “hard and fast rule” regarding special interrogatories on obviousness, leaving the form of the jury verdict to the “sound discretion of the trial court.This Note argues that mandating special interrogatories on obviousness is preferable to the status quo. The Note first outlines the basic law on patent obviousness and the Seventh Amendment right to jury trials as it relates to obviousness. Second, the Note argues that the Federal Circuit has the legal authority to mandate special interrogatories on patent obviousness. Third, the Note discusses the risk posed by four extralegal factors that might influence jury verdicts on obviousness. Fourth, the Note reviews the arguments for and against mandating special interrogatories. Finally, the Note suggests measures that may enhance jurors’ understanding of patented technology and thereby minimize problems involving conflicting responses to special interrogatory questions.
Power Posing: P-Curving the Evidence

In a well-known article, Carney, Cuddy, and Yap (2010) documented the benefits of “power posing”. In their study, participants (N=42) who were randomly assigned to briefly adopt expansive, powerful postures sought more risk, had higher testosterone levels, and had lower cortisol levels than those assigned to adopt contractive, powerless postures. In their response to a failed replication by Ranehill et al. (2015), Carney, Cuddy, and Yap (2015) reviewed 33 successful studies investigating the effects of expansive vs. contractive posing, focusing on differences between these studies and the failed replication, to identify possible moderators that future studies could explore. But before spending valuable resources on that, it is useful to establish whether the literature that Carney et al. (2015) cited actually suggests that power posing is effective. In this paper we rely on p-curve analysis to answer the following question: Does the literature reviewed by Carney et al. (2015) suggest the existence of an effect once we account for selective reporting? We conclude not. The distribution of p-values from those 33 studies is indistinguishable from what is expected if (1) the average effect size were zero, and (2) selective reporting (of studies and/or analyses) were solely responsible for the significant effects that are published. Although more highly powered future research may find replicable evidence for the purported benefits of power posing (or unexpected detriments), the existing evidence is too weak to justify a search for moderators or to advocate for people to engage in power posing to better their lives.
Identities as Lenses: How Organizational Identity Affects Audiences' Evaluation of Organizational Performance

This study calls into question the completeness of the argument that economic actors who fail to conform to certain identity-based logics—such as the categorical structure of markets—garner less at...
Intellectual Property Doctrine and Midlevel Principles

Recent scholarship on intellectual property (“IP”) law argues that doctrinal and theoretical sophistication in IP requires an understanding of “midlevel” principles, purportedly constitutive of IP’s positive law. Proponents of this line of scholarship claim these principles serve as a bridge, connecting IP doctrine and practice with deeper foundational philosophical principles. They assert that such midlevel principles—the principles of proportionality, nonremoval, dignity, and efficiency, for instance—explain, predict, and justify IP cases. According to this scholarship, IP doctrine, case outcomes, and statutes are suffused with midlevel principles. In turn, the scholarship treats midlevel principles as consistent with broadly conflicting foundational accounts of property entitlement, from Lockean liberalism on the economic right, to Rawlsian egalitarianism on the left. The result is an account of IP law that unifies practice and the positive law with facially conflicting accounts of foundational property theories. This Essay argues that such claims to IP unification—however revolutionary—are untenable. Drawing from prominent IP cases, including cases addressing the patentability of DNA, this Essay demonstrates that midlevel principles are not rigorously embodied in the positive law of
Do Patents Have Gender

DO PATENTS HAVE GENDER? D AN L. B URK † I. Introduction 882 II. In Search of the Gendered Patent 884 A. Gendered Effects 886 III. Objectivity and Objectification 889 A. The PHOSITA Standard 890 B. The Reasonably Prudent Person 893 C. Objectivity in Law 896 D. Objectivity in Science 899 IV. Patents Reconsidered 903 A. The Range of Possibilities 904 B. Implementing Insights 907 1. Situating the PHOSITA 907 2. Inventive Community 909 3. The Nature of Products 912 4. Patent Responsibility 916 5. Progress of the Useful Arts 918 V. Conclusion 919 Copyright 2011 by Dan L. Burk. Chancellor’s Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine. My thanks to Kif Augustine-Adams and to participants in the 2007 American University College of Law 4th Annual Symposium on IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections, the 2007 Thomas Jerfferson School of Law Seventh Annual Conference on Women and the Law, and the 2010 Loyola of Los Angeles Intellectual Property Seminar for their comments on previous versions of this work.
Corporate Hedging in the Insurance Industry: The Use of Financial Derivatives by U.S. Insurers

Abstract In this paper we investigate the extent to which insurance companies utilize financial derivatives contracts in the management of risks The data set we employ allows us to observe the universe of individual insurer transactions for a class of contracts, namely, those normally thought of as off-balance-sheet (OBS) We provide information on the number of insurers using various types of derivatives contracts and the volume of transactions in terms of notional amounts and the number of counterparties. Life insurers are most active in interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives, while property/casualty insurers tend to be active in trading equity option and foreign exchange contracts Using a multivariate probtt analysis, we explore the factors that potentially influence the existence of OBS activities. We also investigate questions relating to whether certain subsets of OBS transactions (for example, exchange traded) are related to such things as interest rate risk measures, organizational form and...
Archives Beyond the Pale: Negotiating Legal and Ethical Entanglements after the Belfast Project

With a subpoena in one hand and a donor agreement in the other, what choice should an ethical archivist make? Since the legal battle over the Belfast Project—an oral history collection of Northern ...
Remittances and the informal economy

Abstract Many developing countries are characterized by a large informal sector, and are also often heavily dependent on remittance inflows from abroad. We develop a general equilibrium framework to understand better the dynamic absorption of remittances in a two-sector small open economy, by incorporating many of the stylized features of the informal sector. Calibrating the model to yield a long-run equilibrium consistent with sample averages for 56 developing countries for the period 1990–2014, we show that the effect of remittances depends critically on how they impinge on the recipient economy, i.e., whether these inflows are (i) permanent or temporary, (ii) associated with a collateral effect to securitize borrowing, and (iii) exogenous or countercyclical. We also identify the conditions under which remittances are associated with an expansion of the informal sector, as well as the Dutch Disease effect.
Obscured Visions: Policy, Power, and Discretion in Transnational Discovery

This Essay addresses issues involving the discovery of information located outside the United States. Specifically, it deals with some of the problems created by the lack of appropriate limits on United States discovery procedures. I first analyze the extent of judicial discretion in the United States in matters concerning extraterritorial discovery. The analysis encompasses the underlying legal bases for the exercise of discretion as well as the political and institutional factors that influence the uses of discretion.Next, the Essay focuses on the international consequences of the virtually unlimited discretion courts in the United States exercise in discovery matter. The analysis indicates that domestic justifications for unlimited discretion in discovery have little relevance in the extraterritorial discovery context. Further, unregulated transnational discovery can result in potentially serious and generally unrecognized harms.I conclude that while a significant measure of judicial discretion is necessary in making discovery decisions, transnational discovery requires a framework of analysis that differs in important respects from the analysis applicable in domestic discovery. I view conceptual guidance in this area as a necessity, both to limit adverse international legal, economic, and political consequences and to provide fair and efficient discovery procedures.
Composite Dirac Liquids: Parent States for Symmetric Surface Topological Order

We introduce exotic gapless states—“composite Dirac liquids”—that can appear at a strongly interacting surface of a three-dimensional electronic topological insulator. Composite Dirac liquids exhibit a gap to all charge excitations but nevertheless feature a single massless Dirac cone built from emergent electrically neutral fermions. These states thus comprise electrical insulators that, interestingly, retain thermal properties similar to those of the noninteracting topological insulator surface. A variety of novel fully gapped phases naturally descend from composite Dirac liquids. Most remarkably, we show that gapping the neutral fermions via Cooper pairing—which crucially does not violate charge conservation—yields symmetric non-Abelian topologically ordered surface phases captured in several recent works. Other (Abelian) topological orders emerge upon alternatively gapping the neutral Dirac cone with magnetism. We establish a hierarchical relationship between these descendant phases and expose an appealing connection to paired states of composite Fermi liquids arising in the half filled Landau level of two-dimensional electron gases. To controllably access these states we exploit a quasi-1D deformation of the original electronic Dirac cone that enables us to analytically address the fate of the strongly interacting surface. The algorithm we develop applies quite broadly and further allows the construction of symmetric surface topological orders for recently introduced bosonic topological insulators.
A database architecture for supporting business transactions

Abstract:The central hypothesis of this paper is that database design and systems design in general can be simplified considerably by tailoring the design methods to a suitable range of applications. Domain-specific knowledge can be incorporated into a specialized database architecture that leaves the designer only with the task of specifying the application-specific parts. Based on an analysis of business constraints, we propose such an architecture for the domain of business transaction processing.The architecture offers several data and transaction management services, special-purpose subdatabases, and design-checking rules to be used by the application designer. Two services, input management and audit and control services, are described in more detail.
The New Economic Case for Migration Restrictions: An Assessment

Abstract Migration barriers tend to reduce global production by impeding efficient spatial reallocation of labor. Recent research argues for a countervailing effect of barriers, tending to raise global production by preventing the spread of impoverishing institutions from poor to rich countries. While evidence of this mechanism is scarce, it is theoretically plausible at high migration rates. We propose and calibrate a simple model of dynamically efficient migration when migrants spread economic institutions between countries. The net effect of migration depends on three parameters: transmission, the degree to which origin-country total factor productivity is embodied in migrants; assimilation, the degree to which migrants' productivity determinants become like natives' over time in the host country; and congestion, the degree to which transmission and assimilation change at higher migrant stocks. On current evidence about the magnitudes of these parameters, dynamically efficient policy would not imply open borders but would imply relaxation of current restrictions.
Grassland Governance and Common-Interest Communities

In the United States, today’s ranches are engaging in small-scale nature-based endeavors to diversify their income base. But the geographic boundary of the land they own creates a relatively small area within which to operate, and fragmented ownership diminishes the ability of any single landowner to produce nature-based income. Collective action among nearby landowners can produce a set of resources from which all members of the group can profit. Such action can enhance the economic, social, and environmental sustainability of grasslands and the populations that use them. This article shows that common-interest communities can be used to provide and allocate wildlife and other resources on ranchlands, enabling individual landowners to generate more income from selling nature-based experiences to customers. Common-interest communities are familiar in urban settings but they have not yet been used in this setting. Thus, the article proposes a new approach to ranchland management based upon a familiar set of largely private legal arrangements. More broadly, the article illustrates the relevance of private law and private property to sustainable development by explaining how property owners can use private law to engage in environmentally beneficial and economically profitable enterprises on the vast privately owned landscape of the U.S. Great Plains.
Disposing of Children: The Eighth Amendment and Juvenile Life Without Parole After Roper

In most states, juveniles may receive the sentence of life without the possibility of parole when convicted in adult court. Scientific research has shown, however, that the brains of juveniles are different from those of adults. Citing this research, the U.S. Supreme Court held in the 2005 case of Raper v. Simmons that sentencing juveniles to the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment due to their reduced culpability. Applying the reasoning of Raper, this Note argues that sentencing juveniles to life without parole violates the Eighth Amendment on its face. In the alternative, it argues that the sentence violates the Eighth Amendment as applied in certain cases. In addition, this Note presents policy arguments for the abolition of the sentence by state and federal
Private School Vouchers and Student Achievement: An Evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program

In 1990 Wisconsin began providing vouchers to a small number of low-income students to attend nonsectarian private schools. Controlling for individual fixed-effects, I compare the test scores of students selected to attend a participating private school with those of unsuccessful applicants and other students from the Milwaukee public schools. I find that students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program had faster math score gains than, but similar reading score gains to, the comparison groups. The results appear robust to data imputations and sample attrition, although these deficiencies of the data should be kept in mind when interpreting the results.
Multiscale Intensity Models and Name Grouping for Valuation of Multi-Name Credit Derivatives

Abstract The pricing of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and other basket credit derivatives is contingent upon (i) a realistic modelling of the firms' default times and the correlation between them, and (ii) efficient computational methods for computing the portfolio loss distribution from the individual firms' default time distributions. Factor models, a widely used class of pricing models, are computationally tractable despite the large dimension of the pricing problem, thus satisfying issue (ii), but to have any hope of calibrating CDO data, numerically intense versions of these models are required. We revisit the intensity-based modelling setup for basket credit derivatives and, with the aforementioned issues in mind, we propose improvements (a) via incorporating fast mean-reverting stochastic volatility in the default intensity processes, and (b) by considering homogeneous groups within the original set of firms. This can be thought of as a hybrid of top-down and bottom-up approaches. We prese...
Mitigating incentive conflicts in inter-firm relationships: Evidence from long-term supply contracts

Using a sample of long-term supply contracts collected from SEC filings, I show that hold-up concerns and information asymmetry are important determinants of contract design. Asymmetric information between buyers and suppliers leads to shorter term contracts. However, when longer duration contracts facilitate the exchange of relationship specific assets, the parties substitute short-term contracts with financial covenants in order to reduce moral hazard. Covenant restrictions are more prevalent when direct monitoring is costly and the products exchanged are highly specific. Finally, I find that buyers and suppliers are less likely to rely on financial covenants when financial statement reliability is low.