cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Fixing exchange rates A virtual quest for fundamentals

Abstract Fixed exchange rates are less volatile than floating rates. But the volatility of macroeconomic variables such as money and output does not change very much across exchange rate regimes. This suggests that exchange rate models based only on macroeconomic fundamentals are unlikely to be very successful. It also suggests that there is no clear tradeoff between reduced exchange rate volatility and macroeconomic stability.
The Paradox of Public Sector Labor Law

Although the percentage of employees represented in collective bargaining in the public sector is more than five times the percentage in the private sector, collective bargaining for public employees remains very controversial The two most powerful arguments against public employee collective bargaining is that it is antidemocratic and that it impedes effective government. Concern with the antidemocratic effects of public sector collective bargaining leads courts and labor boards to narrow the scope of what must be negotiated. Concerns with collective bargaining impeding effective government leads to backlash by the legislative and executive branches against public employee unions.This article contends that the narrowness of the scope of bargaining that results from concerns over the antidemocratic nature of public employee bargaining leads to public employee bargaining impeding effective government. The law of negotiability channels channels employees and their unions away from participation in and responsibility for decisions affecting the risks of the public sector enterprise and into negotiating contract provisions that protect them from those risks. Public employee unions have performed that role very effectively, so effectively that the results can impede effective government. The article examines numerous cases where, in spite of the law, public employers have involved employees and their unions in decisions affecting the risks of the enterprise with very positive results. The article urges that jurisdictions break away from the private sector model which classifies every subject as either one on which collective bargaining is mandated or which is left to the unilateral control of management and develop alternative vehicles of employee-union voice in public sector decision-making.
The importance of sample attrition in life cycle labor supply estimation

We examine the importance of possible nonrandom attrition to an econometric model of life cycle labor supply using both a Wald test comparing attriters to nonattriters and variable addition tests based on formal models of attrition. Estimates using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics show that nonrandom attrition is of little concern when estimating prime-age male labor supply because the effect of attrition is absorbed into fixed effects in labor supply. The wage measure and instrument set have much larger effects on the estimated labor supply function of prime-age men than how one adjusts for panel attrition.
An identity crisis? Examining IMF financial programming

Summary The IMF uses its well-known “financial programming” model to derive monetary and fiscal programs to achieve the desired macroeconomic targets in countries undergoing crises or receiving debt relief. This paper considers under what conditions financial programming would work best, and then tests those conditions in the data. The key restrictions of financial programming are assumptions about exogeneity of some components of identities with respect to others, and the assumption of stable and “reasonable” parameters for some very simple behavioral relationships. In at least the literal applications of the framework, financial programming does not do well in forecasting the target variables, even when some components of the identity are known with certainty.
Relocation of children after divorce and children's best interests: new evidence and legal considerations

Relocation cases, in which a divorced parent seeks to move away with the child, are among the knottiest problems facing family courts. The recent trend is to permit such moves, largely because of Wallerstein's (1995) controversial amica curiae brief, which a recent court (Baures v. Lewis, 2001) interpreted as supporting the conclusion that "in general, what is good for the custodial parent is good for the child" (p. 222). The current study provides the first direct evidence on relocation by dividing college students into groups on the basis of their divorced parents' move-away status. On most child outcomes, the ones whose parents moved are significantly disadvantaged. This suggests courts should give greater weight to the child's separate interests in deciding such cases.
The technical basis for spectrum rights: Policies to enhance market efficiency

This paper describes a conceptual framework to articulate clear rights of access to radio spectrum in a way that would foster an efficient market-based allocation of the resource. In this approach, regulators partition spectrum rights across the dimensions of space, time, frequency, and direction of propagation. They devolve each partition, called a licensed electrospace region (LER), to licensees who may buy, sell, aggregate, and subdivide their LERs at will. All signals outside an LER must have a power level of less than a regulated limit with de minimis exceptions. In addition, even within an LER, transmitter power or field strength must fall below a separate regulator-set level for the band. Licensees may deploy any devices and provide any services that do not violate these rules. In this framework, regulators establish a few core parameters for each band, manage a rights database, and enforce compliance with signal strength rules. This approach includes no protection of, or constraints on, receivers. Rather, the simple signal strength limits allow licensees to optimize their transmitter and receiver characteristics based on engineering and economic factors. Negotiated LER boundaries between adjacent LER owners can further balance the costs and benefits of interference protection to each.
The changing relevance of accounting information to debt holders over time

A number of studies have examined the change over time in the information content of accounting numbers to stockholders. However, the stockholders’ perspective is not necessarily identical to that of debt holders. The two groups face different risks and rewards, and thus their informational needs are not the same. We examine the change in the information content of accounting numbers over time from the debt holders’ perspective and hypothesize about the economic and reporting factors likely to affect this change. Using the association between accounting numbers and bond valuation and returns, we find that the information content to debt holders has increased over time. In contrast, but consistent with prior studies, we find that the information content to equity holders has declined. The results suggest that the increased information content to debt holders is related to changes in credit risk and to reporting factors such as the increase in reporting conservatism, the shift towards fair value accounting, and the increase in the frequency of losses. The findings contribute to the scant literature on the use of accounting information by debt holders and the extent to which financial reporting meets their unique needs.
Nowcasting US GDP: The role of ISM Business Surveys

Abstract We study the role of the well-known monthly diffusion indices produced by the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) in nowcasting current quarter US GDP growth. In contrast to the existing literature on ISM surveys, we investigate their marginal impact on these nowcasts when large unbalanced (jagged edge) macroeconomic data sets are used to generate them in real time. We find evidence that these ISM indices are helpful in improving the nowcasts when new ISM information becomes available at the beginning of the month, ahead of other monthly indicators. Furthermore, while the existing literature has focused almost exclusively on manufacturing information, here we establish the increasingly significant role of the recently created non-manufacturing ISM diffusion indices in such nowcasting contexts.
Will most of us be working for giant enterprises by 2028

Abstract Various economic theories yield quite opposite predictions about the changing size of enterprises and establishments and the purpose of this essay is to present some stylized facts to begin to resolve some of these theoretical confusions. The estimates for this purpose cover a period of almost four decades. They show that average establishment size has decreased since the late 1960s, that the number of establishments per enterprise has leveled off since the early 1980s, and that the average size of enterprises reveals an undulating pattern with a sharp upturn at the end of the century due to the impact of the merger wave. Considerable attention is paid to the causal factors underlying these changes, particular in reference to the conflicting theoretical evidence.
On Lionel McKenzie's 1957 intrusion into 20th‐century demand theory

In this essay, we read McKenzie's 17 paragraphs of 1957 on “Demand Theory Without a Utility Index” as an opening to the narrative of 20th-century demand theory and as a lever for the understanding of what has now reached culmination as the neoclassical theory of demand. In tracking the influence of these paragraphs on both theoretical and applied work, we also use them as a foothold for reflection on the process of theorizing to argue for the view that one cannot neglect the (changing) problematic that the theory is adduced to address, that the historical narrative behind a particular theorem is indispensable in understanding the theorem itself. This implicit theorizing of the process of theorizing then forces us to consider Stigler's distinction between textual and scientific exegesis and confront it to a second-order level of theorizing, and thereby bring out the continuity, possibly not quite seamless, between a theorem and its history.
The Politics of Takings Clauses

A long-standing consensus exists that the arbitrary or excessive expropriation of private property by a country hurts its economic growth. Although constitutions can play an important role in protecting private property, remarkably little is known about how they actually restrict the power of eminent domain and whether such restrictions are associated with reduced de facto expropriation risks. The main finding of this essay is that no observable relationship exists between de jure constitutional restrictions on the power of eminent domain and de facto expropriation risks. This finding suggests that the effectiveness of takings clauses might depend on the politics surrounding their adoption.
Picking the poor : indicators for geographic targeting in Peru

Geographic targeting is perhaps the most popular mechanism used to direct social programs to the poor in Latin America. The author empirically compares geographic targeting indicators available in Peru. He combines household-level information from the 1994 and 1997 Peru Living Standards Measurement Surveys and district-level information from the 1993 Peru Population and Housing Census. He then conducts a series of simulations that estimate leakage rates; concentration curves; the impact of transfers on poverty as measured by the headcount index, poverty gap, and [poverty] measures of the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke family; and nonparametric (kernal) densities when transfers are based on alternative indicators. He concludes that there is substantial potential for geographic targeting in Peru. The differences in outcomes across geographic targeting indicators are small and not statistically significant.
Financial intermediation costs in low income countries: The role of regulatory, institutional, and macroeconomic factors ☆

Abstract We analyze factors driving persistently higher financial intermediation costs in low-income countries (LICs) relative to emerging market (EM) country comparators. Using the net interest margin as a proxy for financial intermediation costs at the bank level, we find that within LICs a substantial part of the variation in interest margins can be explained by bank-specific factors: margins tend to increase with higher riskiness of credit portfolio, lower bank capitalization (or lower risk aversion), and smaller bank size. Overall, we find that concentrated market structures and lack of competition in LICs banking systems and institutional weaknesses constitute the key impediments preventing financial intermediation costs from declining. Our results provide strong evidence that policies aimed at fostering banking competition and strengthening institutional frameworks can reduce intermediation costs in LICs.
A Genetic Algorithm to Minimize the Total Tardiness for M-Machine Permutation Flowshop Problems

The m-machine, n-job, permutation flowshop problem with the total tardiness objective is a common scheduling problem, known to be NP-hard. Branch and bound, the usual approach to finding an optimal solution, experiences difficulty when n exceeds 20. Here, we develop a genetic algorithm, GA, which can handle problems with larger n. We also undertake a numerical study comparing GA with an optimal branch and bound algorithm, and various heuristic algorithms including the well known NEH algorithm and a local search heuristic LH. Extensive computational experiments indicate that LH is an effective heuristic and GA can produce noticeable improvements over LH.
Private information revelation in common-value auctions

Abstract When a seller has information that could help bidders to estimate asset value, a dictum of auction theory has been that all such information should be publicly announced to bidders. The possibility of privately revealing this information to one or more bidders is introduced. Seller in some circumstances may attain higher expected revenue through revealing his information privately. Examples show that the role of private revelation is more complex than simply generating bidder asymmetry.
Local government broadband initiatives

Abstract A growing number of communities across the United States are adopting policies to promote advanced telecommunication services, including broadband access. This paper offers a taxonomy for classifying these local government initiatives and provides preliminary empirical results for a sample of communities with municipal electric utilities 1 that are in the forefront of efforts to deploy publicly owned communications infrastructure.
Federalism as a Constitutional Principle

This essay was given as the William Howard Taft Lecture in Constitutional Law in October, 2014. It addresses three questions: Why care about federalism? How does the Constitution protect federalism? and What does Federalism need to survive? I argue that federalism is worth caring about because it protects liberty and fosters pluralism. Observing that constitutional law has mostly shifted from a model of dual federalism to one of concurrent jurisdiction, I contend that the most effective protections for federalism focus on maintaining the political and procedural safeguards that limit national power. Finally, I conclude that although both judicial review and institutional checks powered by political opportunism are important in maintaining the federal system, that system is unlikely to survive and flourish unless Americans continue to feel a meaningful degree of loyalty to their states as distinctive political communities.
Expanding the Pathways to Gender Equality in the Legal Profession

(2014). Expanding the Pathways to Gender Equality in the Legal Profession. Legal Ethics: Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 261-280.
The Cross-Section of Foreign Currency Risk Premia and Consumption Growth Risk

Hanno Lustig and Adrien Verdelhan (2007) claim that aggregate consumption growth risk explains the excess returns to borrowing US dollars to finance lending in other currencies. They reach this conclusion after estimating a consumption-based asset pricing model using data on the returns of portfolios of short-term foreigncurrency denominated money market securities sorted according to their interest differential with the United States. Based on their evidence and additional US data, I argue that consumption risk explains none of the cross-sectional variation in the expected returns of their portfolios. Standard theory predicts that the expected excess return of an asset, E( R t ), is given by − cov ( R t , m t ), where m t denotes some proposed stochastic discount factor (SDF). Therefore, any risk-based explanation of the cross-section of returns relies on significant spread, across portfolios, in the covariance between the returns and the SDF. For the SDFs that Lustig and Verdelhan (henceforth, LV) calibrate and estimate in their 2007 article, it is impossible to reject that there is no spread in these covariances. In fact, it is impossible to reject that these covariances are all zero. LV’s SDF is linear in a vector of risk factors, so they implement a widely used two-pass procedure to estimate its parameters. The first pass is a series of time series regressions of each portfolio’s excess return on the risk factors. These regressions determine the factor betas, β. When there are n portfolios and k risk factors, β is an n × k matrix. In LV’s case n = 8 and k = 3. None of the individual elements of LV’s estimate,  β , is statistically different from zero. For each of the three factors, we also cannot reject the hypothesis that all eight of the relevant elements of  β are jointly zero. Confronted with this evidence, alone, it would be reasonable to conclude that LV’s model does not explain currency portfolios sorted on interest rates. The statistical insignificance of the factor betas implies that LV’s measure of the SDF is also uncorrelated with the excess returns that they study. To demonstrate this, I consider three calibrations of the parameters of the SDF in order to construct time series for m t : (i) the SDF parameters corresponding to LV’s two-pass estimates, (ii) LV’s Generalized Method of Moments (GMM, Lars P. Hansen 1982) estimates of the SDF parameters, and (iii) Motohiro Yogo’s (2006) estimates of the
Irreversible and Catastrophic

As many treaties and statutes emphasize, some risks are distinctive in the sense that they are potentially irreversible or catastrophic; for such risks, it is sensible to take extra precautions. When a harm is irreversible, and when regulators lack information about its magnitude and likelihood, they should purchase an “option” to prevent the harm at a later date—the Irreversible Harm Precautionary Principle. This principle brings standard option theory to bear on environmental law and risk regulation. And when catastrophic outcomes are possible, it makes sense to take special precautions against the worst-case scenarios—the Catastrophic Harm Precautionary Principle. This principle is based on three foundations: an emphasis on people’s occasional failure to appreciate the expected value of truly catastrophic losses; a recognition that political actors may engage in unjustifiable delay when the costs of precautions would be incurred immediately and when the benefits would not be enjoyed until the distant future; and an understanding of the distinction between risk and uncertainty. The normative arguments are illustrated throughout with reference to the problem of global warming; other applications include injunctions in environmental cases, genetic modification of food, protection of endangered species, and terrorism. Many losses are irreversible. Once a species is gone, it is gone forever. Transgenic crops can impose irreversible costs as a result of increasing pest resistance. Because some greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere for centuries, the problem of global warming may be irreversible, at least for all practical purposes. Global warming could be catastrophic as well, potentially endangering many millions of people. * Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence, University of Chicago, Law School and Department of Political Science. I am extremely grateful to Robert Goodin, Robert Hahn, Eric Posner, Richard Posner, Adrian Vermeule, and David Weisbach, and participants in a workshop at Columbia Law School for valuable comments; special thanks to Vermeule and Weisbach for many helpful discussions. 1 See Justus Wesseler, Resistance Economics of Transgenic Crops under Uncertainty: A Real Options Approach, in Battling Resistance to Antibiotics and Pesticides 214 (Rmanan Lazminarayan ed. 2003); to the same general effect, see Benoit Morel et al., Pesticide Resistance to Bt Corn: Real Option and Rational Option Approaches to Decisionmaking, in id. at 184. 2 See Richard Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response 43-58 (2004).
The End of Sustainability

It is time to move past the concept of sustainability. The realities of the Anthropocene warrant this conclusion. They include unprecedented and irreversible rates of human-induced biodiversity loss, exponential increases in per-capita resource consumption, and global climate change. These factors combine to create an increasing likelihood of rapid, nonlinear, social and ecological regime changes. The recent failure of the Rio + 20 provides an opportunity to collectively reexamine—and ultimately move past—the concept of sustainability as an environmental goal. We must face the impossibility of defining—let alone pursuing—a goal of “sustainability” in a world characterized by such extreme complexity, radical uncertainty and lack of stationarity. After briefly examining sustainability's failure, we propose resilience thinking as one possible new orientation and point to the challenges associated with translating resilience theory into policy application.
Medical Malpractice Reform and Physicians in High‐Risk Specialties

Abstract If medical malpractice reform affects the supply of physicians, the effects will be concentrated in specialties facing high liability exposure. Many doctors are likely to be indifferent regarding reform, because their likelihood of being sued is low. This difference can be exploited to isolate the causal effect of medical malpractice reform on the supply of doctors in high‐risk specialties, by using doctors in low‐risk specialties as a contemporaneous within‐state control group. Using this triple‐differences design to control for unobserved effects that correlate with the passage of medical malpractice reform, we show that only caps on noneconomic damages have a statistically significant effect on the per capita number of doctors and that this effect is concentrated among only those specialties that face the highest litigation exposure.
A Survey and Tutorial of EEG-Based Brain Monitoring for Driver State Analysis

The driver's cognitive and physiological states affect his/her ability to control the vehicle. Thus, these driver states are essential to the safety of automobiles. The design of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) or autonomous vehicles will depend on their ability to interact effectively with the driver. A deeper understanding of the driver state is, therefore, paramount. Electroencephalography (EEG) is proven to be one of the most effective methods for driver state monitoring and human error detection. This paper discusses EEG-based driver state detection systems and their corresponding analysis algorithms over the last three decades. First, the commonly used EEG system setup for driver state studies is introduced. Then, the EEG signal preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification algorithms for driver state detection are reviewed. Finally, EEG-based driver state monitoring research is reviewed in-depth, and its future development is discussed. It is concluded that the current EEG-based driver state monitoring algorithms are promising for safety applications. However, many improvements are still required in EEG artifact reduction, real-time processing, and between-subject classification accuracy.
Firm risk identification through topic analysis of textual financial disclosures

Corporate risk disclosures as part of U.S. public companies' financial reports are mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) since 2005. It provides forward-looking information about companies' future business and potential risks. This study analyzes risk types revealed in these risk disclosures and examines their potential implications on stock returns. Using 16,110 risk disclosures submitted to the SEC from 2011 to 2015, we apply Sentence Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Sent-LDA) model to infer risk types and propose a novel algorithm to match new factors with existing risk types which generates 90% correct matches. We then quantify the impact of different risk factors on the distribution of stock returns using different time windows. We find that common risk factors, such as accounting risk and acquisition risk, have significant effects on both long-term and short-term stock returns. Some other factors only have short-term or long-term effects on stock returns. These findings provide evidence that the companies' self-disclosed risk factors have significant impacts on subsequent stock return volatility and such impacts can be used to predict potential stock change after the public release of the financial risk disclosures.
Federalism and predatory lending: Unmasking the deregulatory agenda

In the past two decades the American home mortgage lending market has seen the development of controversial loans which consumer advocates, federal regulators, as well as many lenders have come to call "predatory." Critics of these businesses complain that lenders make loans borrowers cannot repay in anticipation of foreclosing on the family home. Responding to the complaints of their constituents, dozens of state legislatures and local governments have passed statutes and ordinances attempting to prohibit unfair contractual terms. At the same time federal banking regulators have moved to preempt these state laws, placing state and federal leaders on a collision course. Moreover, Congress is actively considering the elimination of all state mortgage lending regulations. This article reviews predatory lending contractual terms; discusses current and past social policy focusing on the American tradition of combined federal and state regulation; and, explores potential unintended consequences from federal preemption of state law. Finally, it suggests current efforts to preempt state and local predatory lending law have more to do with a deregulatory agenda than with regulating commercial activity at the most efficient level of government.
Is Full Compliance Possible?: Conditions for Shirking with Imperfect Monitoring and Continuous Action Spaces

Games of public good provision, collective action, and collusion share concern for the free rider that shirks on its obligations. According to the folk theorem, the free rider problem can be resolv...
Athletic Voices and Academic Victories: African American Male Student-Athlete Experiences in the Pac-Ten

The purpose of this study was to explore participants’ academic experiences and confidence about their academic achievement. Participants (N = 27) consisted of high-achieving African American male student—athletes from four academically rigorous American universities in the Pac-Ten conference. Most of the participants competed in revenue-generating sports and were interviewed to obtain a deeper understanding of their successful academic experiences. Utilizing a phenomenological approach four major themes emerged: “I Had to Prove I’m Worthy,” “I’m a Perceived Threat to Society,” “It’s About Time Management,” and “It’s About Pride and Hard Work.” Stereotype threat and stereotype reactance are investigated in relation to findings. Recommendations for scholars and practitioners that work with student-athletes are also articulated.
Tradeoffs between Local Taxes and Government Spending as Determinants of Business Location

. This paper investigates the effects of local fiscal policy on the location decisions of 3,763 establishments that began operations in Maine between 1993 and 1995. Empirical results, estimated from Poisson and negative binomial regression models, indicate that businesses favor municipalities that spend high amounts on public goods and services, even when these expenditures are financed by an increase in local taxes. This suggests that a local fiscal policy of reduced government spending, to balance a tax cut, may attract fewer new businesses than a policy featuring additional spending and higher taxes.
Indicator Variables for Optimal Policy

The optimal weights on indicators in models with partial information about the state of the economy and forward-looking variables are derived and interpreted, both for equilibria under discretion and under commitment. An example of optimal monetary policy with a partially observable potential output and a forward-looking indicator is examined. The optimal response to the optimal estimate of potential output displays certainty equivalence, whereas the optimal response to the imperfect observation of output depends on the noise in this observation.
Pretrial and preventive detention of suspected terrorists: options and constraints under international law

This article analyzes the grounds, procedures and conditions required by International Human Rights Law, and International Humanitarian Law for pretrial detention of suspected terrorists for purposes of criminal law enforcement, and for their preventive detention for security and intelligence purposes. Recognizing the difficulties in securing sufficient admissible evidence to prosecute terrorists within the tight time limits imposed by international law, the Article nonetheless suggests that indefinite detention, solely or primarily for purposes of intelligence interrogation, is probably not lawful under U.S. or international law. Preventive detention for security purposes, on the other hand, is generally permitted by international law, provided that it is based on grounds and procedures previously established by law; is not arbitrary, discriminatory or disproportionate; is publicly registered and subject to fair and effective judicial review; and that the detainee is not mistreated and is compensated for any unlawful detention. In Europe, however, even with these safeguards, preventive detention for security purposes is generally not permitted, unless a State in time of national emergency,formally derogates from its obligation to respect the right to liberty under the European Convention on Human Rights. The Article concludes that if preventive detention of suspected terrorists for security purposes is to be allowed at all, its inherent danger to liberty must be appreciated, its use kept to an absolute minimum, and the European model should be followed, that is, such detention should be permitted only by formal derogation in time of national emergency, and then only to the extent and for the time strictly required.
Media Frenzies in Markets for Financial Information

Emerging equity markets witness occasional surges in prices (frenzies) and cross-market price dispersion (herds), accompanied by abundant media coverage. An information market complementarity can explain these anomalies. Because information has high fixed costs, high volume makes it inexpensive. Low prices induce investors to buy information that others buy. Given two identical assets, investors learn about one; abundant information reduces its payoff risk and raises its price. Transitions between low-information/low-asset-price and high-information/high-asset-price equilibria resemble frenzies. Equity data and new panel data on news coverage support the model's predictions: Asset market movements generate news and news raises prices and price dispersion.
Religion, gambling attitudes and corporate innovation

We find that firms headquartered in areas with a taste for gambling tend to be more innovative, i.e. they spend more on R&D, and obtain more and better quality patents. These results are supported by several robustness checks, tests to mitigate identification concerns, and analyses of several secondary implications. Investment in innovation makes a stock more lottery-like, a feature desired by individuals with a taste for gambling. Gambling preferences of both local investors and managers appear to influence firms' innovative endeavors and facilitate transforming their industry growth opportunities into firm value.
Robots in American Law

This article closely examines a half century of case law involving robots—just in time for the technology itself to enter the mainstream. Most of the cases involving robots have never found their way into legal scholarship. And yet, taken collectively, these cases reveal much about the assumptions and limitations of our legal system. Robots blur the line between people and instrument, for instance, and faulty notions about robots lead jurists to questionable or contradictory results. The article generates in all nine case studies. The first set highlights the role of robots as the objects of American law. Among other issues, courts have had to decide whether robots represent something “animate” for purposes of import tariffs, whether robots can “perform” as that term is understood in the context of a state tax on performance halls, and whether a salvage team “possesses” a shipwreck it visits with an unmanned submarine.The second set of case studies focuses on robots as the subjects of judicial imagination. These examples explore the versatile, often pejorative role robots play in judicial reasoning itself. Judges need not be robots in court, for instance, or apply the law robotically. The robotic witness is not to be trusted. And people who commit crimes under the robotic control of another might avoid sanction. Together these case studies paint a nuanced picture of the way courts think about an increasingly important technology. Themes and questions emerge that illuminate the path of robotics law and test its central claims to date. The article concludes that jurists on the whole possess poor, increasingly outdated views about robots and hence will not be well positioned to address the novel challenges they continue to pose.
A Public Choice Theory of Criminal Procedure

We provide an additional justification for the pro-defendant bias in Anglo-American criminal procedure that supplements the most commonly forwarded justifications to date. The most commonly forwarded rationale for the prodefendant bias is that the costs of false convictions—specifically, the sanctioning and deterrence costs associated with the erroneous imposition of criminal sanctions—are greater than the costs of false acquittals. We argue that this rationale provides at best a partial justification for the extent of prodefendant procedural rules. Under our justification, prodefendant protections serve primarily as constraints on the costs associated with rent seeking in the law enforcement process. The theory developed here explains key institutional features of Anglo-American criminal procedure and provides a positive theory of the case law as well. The theory is also corroborated by empirical evidence on corruption from several countries.
Foreign‐Born Academic Scientists and Their Interactions with Industry: Implications for University Technology Commercialization and Corporate Innovation Management

This study examines and characterizes the way foreign-born academic scientists interact with private firms. Using status characteristics theory, this inquiry explores how foreign-born tenured and tenure-track academic scientists in the 150 most research-intensive U.S. universities interact with the private sector by means of six discrete interaction modes. The study further investigates whether foreign-born academic scientists’ interactions with private firms are more of a formal or informal nature vis-a-vis those of native-born scientists’. The empirical analysis indicates that foreign-born academic scientists have lower odds of having been approached by private firms to ask about their research activities, lower odds of having served as a paid consultant to firms, and lower odds of having been engaged in the joint transfer and commercialization of technologies with private firms relative to their U.S.-born counterparts. In contrast, foreignborn academic scientists have significantly higher odds of having coauthored scientific articles with private firms than their U.S.-born counterparts. The paper discusses the implications for university technology commercialization and innovation management in firms.
MIT’s Openness to Jewish Economists

MIT emerged from “nowhere” in the 1930s to its place as one of the three or four most important sites for economic research by the mid-1950s. A conference held at Duke University in April 2013 examined how this occurred. In this article the author argues that the immediate postwar period saw a collapse—in some places slower, in some places faster—of the barriers to the hiring of Jewish faculty in American colleges and universities. And more than any other elite private or public university, particularly Ivy League universities, MIT welcomed Jewish economists.
Profitability of Fertilizer: Experimental Evidence from Female Rice Farmers in Mali

Abstract We conducted an experiment providing fertilizer grants to female rice farmers in Mali. We found that women who received fertilizer used both more fertilizer and more complementary inputs s...
Is there a Possible Role for Regulatory Enforcement in the Effort to Value, Protect, and Restore Ecosystem Services?

555 556 III. A MORE DETAILED LOOK AT PENALTY CALCULATIONS... A. Authority and Key Factors to Impose Penalties ........ B. Theoretical Issues C. Implementation 560 561 566 570 IV. INJUNCTIVE RELIEF 572 V. SEPS A. Definitions: What are SEPs? B. Additional Requirements for and Features of SEPs 1. Legal Guidelines 2. Specific Categories of Projects 3. SEPs’ Penalty Mitigation Potential 4. Additional Implementation and Other Criteria ... C. Challenges and Possible Opportunities 574 577
The organizational impact of technological change: a comparative theory of national institutional factors

This paper offers a parsimonious theory of national institutional factors that promote or inhibit the formation of start-up firms in the USA and Japan. Three factors are proposed: the technical labor market, the venture capital market and the structure of buyer-supplier ties. Complementarities between these factors cause them to work as a system, while their differences elevate or reduce the level of incentive constraints and appropriability constraints acting on incumbent and start-up firms respectively. As a result, incumbents might be displaced in an industry in one country while incumbent firms in the same industry in another country might persevere, due to the presence or absence of start-up firms. This suggests that there may be no single best way to organize for innovation in different institutional settings; rather, firms must seek to exploit the virtues of their environment, even as they act to mitigate the hazards it poses. Copyright 1999 by Oxford University Press.
Balance Sheet Effects, Bailout Guarantees and Financial Crises

This paper provides a model of boom-bust episodes in middle-income countries. It is based on sectoral differences in corporate finance: the nontradables sector is special in that it faces a contract enforceability problem and enjoys bailout guarantees. As a result, currency mismatch and borrowing constraints arise endogenously in that sector. This sectoral asymmetry allows the model to replicate the main features of observed boom-bust episodes. In particular, episodes begin with a lending boom and a real appreciation, peak in a self-fulfilling crisis during which a real depreciation coincides with widespread bankruptcies, and end in a recession and credit crunch. The nontradables sector accounts for most of the volatility in output and credit. In the last two decades, many middle-income countries have experienced boom-bust episodes centred around balance-of-payments crises. There is now a well known set of stylized facts. The typical episode began with a lending boom and an appreciation of the real exchange rate. In the crisis that eventually ended the boom, a real depreciation coincided with widespread defaults by the domestic private sector on unhedged foreign-currency-denominated debt. The typical crisis came as a surprise to financial markets, and with hindsight it is not possible to pinpoint a large "fundamental" shock as an obvious trigger. After the crisis, foreign lenders were often bailed out. However, domestic credit fell dramatically and recovered much more slowly than output. This paper proposes a theory of boom-bust episodes that emphasizes sectoral asymmetries in corporate finance. It is motivated by an additional set of facts that has received little attention in the literature: the tradables (T-) and nontradables (N-) sectors fared quite differently in most boom-bust episodes. While the N-sector was typically growing faster than the T-sector during a boom, it fell harder during the crisis and took longer to recover afterwards. Moreover, most of the guaranteed credit extended during the boom went to the N-sector, and most bad debt later surfaced there. Our analysis is based on two key assumptions that are motivated by the institutional environment of middle-income countries. First, N-sector firms are run by managers who issue debt, but cannot commit to repay. In contrast, T-sector firms have access to perfect financial markets. Second, there are systemic bailout guarantees: lenders are bailed out if a critical mass of borrowers defaults. The first part of this paper derives optimal investment and financing choices for the N-sector when these imperfections are present. We show that both borrowing constraints and a risky currency mismatch of assets and liabilities arise in equilibrium. Moreover, even in a world with no exogenous shocks, self-fulfilling crises can occur. The second part of this paper
Understanding and benchmarking the impact of GDPR on database systems

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides new rights and protections to European people concerning their personal data. We analyze GDPR from a systems perspective, translating its legal articles into a set of capabilities and characteristics that compliant systems must support. Our analysis reveals the phenomenon of metadata explosion, wherein large quantities of metadata needs to be stored along with the personal data to satisfy the GDPR requirements. Our analysis also helps us identify new workloads that must be supported under GDPR. We design and implement an open-source benchmark called GDPRbench that consists of workloads and metrics needed to understand and assess personal-data processing database systems. To gauge the readiness of modern database systems for GDPR, we follow best practices and developer recommendations to modify Redis, PostgreSQL, and a commercial database system to be GDPR compliant. Our experiments demonstrate that the resulting GDPR-compliant systems achieve poor performance on GPDR workloads, and that performance scales poorly as the volume of personal data increases. We discuss the real-world implications of these .ndings, and identify research challenges towards making GDPR-compliance efficient in production environments. We release all of our so.ware artifacts and datasets at h.p://www:gdprbench:org
International innovation and diffusion of air pollution control technologies: the effects of NOX and SO2 regulation in the US, Japan, and Germany

Using patent data from the United States, Japan, and Germany, this paper examines both innovation and diffusion of air pollution control equipment. Whereas the United States was an early adopter of stringent sulfur dioxide (SO2) standards, both Japan and Germany introduced stringent nitrogen dioxide (NOX) standards much earlier than the US. Nonetheless, in both cases, tightened standards in the US led to more domestic patenting, but not more foreign patenting. Overall, the data suggest that inventors respond to environmental regulatory pressure in their own country, but not to foreign environmental regulations. Moreover, any technology transfer that occurs appears to be indirect. Domestic innovation occurs even for technologies that have already experienced significant innovative activity abroad and utilities purchase pollution abatement equipment from domestic firms. However, patent citation data from the US do show that earlier foreign patents are an important building block for NOX pollution control innovations in the US.
Estimators for Persistent and Possibly Non-Stationary Data with Classical Properties

This paper considers a moments-based nonlinear estimator that is -consistent and uniformly asymptotically normal irrespective of the degree of persistence of the forcing process. These properties hold for linear autoregressive models, linear predictive regressions, and certain nonlinear dynamic models. Asymptotic normality is obtained because the moments are chosen so that the objective function is uniformly bounded in probability and so that a central limit theorem can be applied. Critical values from the normal distribution can be used irrespective of the treatment of the deterministic terms. Simulations show that the estimates are precise and the t-test has good size in the parameter region where the least squares estimates usually yield distorted inference.
Old Rules and New Realities: Corporate Tax Policy in a Global Setting

This paper reassesses the burden of the current U.S. international tax regime and reconsiders well-known welfare benchmarks used to guide international tax reform. Reinventing corporate tax policy ...
Non-GAAP earnings and board independence

We examine the association between board independence and the characteristics of non-GAAP earnings. Our results suggest that companies with less independent boards are more likely to opportunistically exclude recurring items from non-GAAP earnings. Specifically, we find that exclusions from non-GAAP earnings have a greater association with future GAAP earnings and operating earnings when boards contain proportionally fewer independent directors. Consistent with the association between board independence and the permanence of non-GAAP exclusions reflecting opportunism rather than the economics of the firm, we find that the association declines following Regulation G and that managers appear to use exclusions to meet earnings targets prior to selling their shares more often in firms with fewer independent board members. Overall, our results suggest that board independence is positively associated with the quality of non-GAAP earnings.
Effect of isotope disorder on the Raman spectra of cubic boron arsenide

Boron arsenide $(c\text{\ensuremath{-}}\mathrm{BAs})$ is at the forefront of research on ultrahigh thermal conductivity materials. We present a Raman scattering study of isotopically tailored cubic boron arsenide single crystals for 11 isotopic compositions spanning the range from nearly pure $c\text{\ensuremath{-}}^{10}\mathrm{BAs}$ to nearly pure $c\text{\ensuremath{-}}^{11}\mathrm{BAs}$. Our results provide insights on the effects of strong mass disorder on optical phonons and the appearance of two-mode behavior in the Raman spectra of mixed crystals. Strong isotope disorder also relaxes the one-phonon Raman selection rules, resulting in disorder-activated Raman scattering by acoustic phonons.
Entry, Exit, Firm Dynamics, and Aggregate Fluctuations

Abstract Firm entry and exit amplify and propagate the effects of aggregate shocks, leading to greater persistence and unconditional variation of aggregate quantities. Following a positive aggregate shock, entry rises. As in the data, entrants are small and their initial impact on aggregate dynamics is negligible. However, as the common productivity component reverts to its unconditional mean, the youngsters that survive grow larger, generating a wider and longer expansion than in a scenario without entry or exit. The model also identifies a causal link between the drop in establishments at the outset of the Great Recession and the subsequent slow recovery. (JEL D21, D92, E22, E24, E32, G31, L11)