cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Portfolio Diversification and International Corporate Bonds

This article examines the benefits of corporate bond diversification for U.S. investors. Analysis of a newly compiled bond-level data set for 2000–2010 finds that diversification with corporate bonds can significantly reduce volatility and increase risk-adjusted returns for U.S. investors. Unlike diversification with equities, corporate bonds offer significant out-of-sample risk reduction, particularly during the recent financial crisis. Risk-reduction gains are large even when the benchmark includes international equities or when longer samples of equities and sovereign bonds are used to inform corporate bond returns. Finally, significant risk-reduction gains remain after accounting for bond characteristics, liquidity, and informational costs.
External Debt, Capital Flight and Political Risk

Abstract This paper explains the simultaneous occurence of large external debts, private capital outflows and low domestic capital formation. We consider a general equilibrium model in which two government types with conflicting distributional goals randomly alternate in office. Uncertainty over the fiscal policies of future governments generates capital flight and small domestic investment, and induces the government to overaccumulate external debt. The model also predicts that left-wing governments are more inclined to restrict capital outflows than right-wing governments. Finally, we examine how political uncertainty affects the risk premium and how debt repudiation may occur after a regime change.
Does Dodd-Frank affect OTC transaction costs and liquidity? Evidence from real-time CDS trade reports ☆

This paper examines transaction costs and liquidity in the index CDS market by matching intraday quotes to real-time trade reports made available through the Dodd-Frank reforms. We find that the average relative effective spread is 0.27% of price level or 2.73% of CDS spread. Dodd-Frank does affect transaction costs and liquidity. Liquidity improves after the commencement of public dissemination of OTC derivatives trades. Moreover, cleared trades, trades executed on exchange-like venues, end-user trades, and bespoke trades exhibit lower trading costs, price impact, and price dispersion. These findings improve our understanding of the OTC derivatives market that is undergoing fundamental changes.
HOMOGENOUS RULES FOR HETEROGENEOUS FAMILIES: THE STANDARDIZATION OF FAMILY LAW WHEN THERE IS NO STANDARD FAMILY

This Article explores the ironies involved in the contemporary enforcement of family obligations. As forms of intimate partnership and parenthood become ever more varied, the law of family obligation—child support, property division, and alimony—has become increasingly routine and formulaic. As scholars increasingly call for more attention to the varied ways in which different individuals and communities structure their care networks and intimate lives, the law of family obligation has become less, not more attentive to context. This Article explains how the law’s rejection of context is an understandable reaction to the growing di versity of family forms. By unpacking contemporary family law rules, one sees that the baselines and value judgments informing the law of family obligation are usually contested, arbitrary, or both. They are accepted not because they represent consensus on what obligation should be, but because they clearly demarcate who is obligated and for how much. Predictability emerges as more important than context for almost everyone. Social acceptance of so many different family forms makes judicial attention to context extraordinarily invasive and expensive. In an area of law where very few of the parties have the resources or desire to debate the normative underpinnings of family obligation and where both the parties and the state have strong interests in minimizing contested issues, there are compelling reasons to establish a very rule and statusbased law of obligation, even if that system is rooted in a normative vision of family that, for most people, has ceased to exist. This Article thus argues that despite the profoundly limited way in which the current law identifies families, some reliance on restricted legal definitions of family will be necessary for any meaningful system of family
A Bayesian approach to ranking private companies based on predictive indicators

Private equity investors seek to rank potential investment opportunities in growth stage private companies within an industry sector. The sparsity of historical investment transaction data for many growth stage private companies' may present a major obstacle to using statistical methods to discern industry specific features associated with successful and failed companies.This paper describes a Bayesian ranking approach based on i extracting and selecting features; ii training support vector machine classifiers from feature pairs of labeled companies in an industry; iii non-parametric estimation of posterior probabilities of success and failure; and iv ranking unlabeled companies within a cohort based on scores derived from posterior probability estimates. We anticipate that this approach will not only be of interest to statisticians and machine learning specialists with an interest in venture capital and private equity but extend to a broader readership whose interests lie in classification methods where missing data is the primary obstacle.
Criminal Speech and the First Amendment

First Amendment law contains an unresolved tension. On the one hand, it is black-letter law that the First Amendment prohibits governmental sanctioning of speech unless that speech incites 'imminent lawless action and is likely to incite . . . such action.' On the other hand, courts hold that crime receives no free speech protection merely because it is in the form of speech. These positions are not necessarily incompatible, but the distinction between speech and crime remains thinly reasoned and poorly understood. As a result, the scope of the freedom of speech is not governed by any consistent view of the nature of expression and is dangerously arbitrary. This Article proposes a more coherent theoretical regime for distinguishing speech and crime--an approach that cuts across the areas of criminal speech and symbolic speech. The aim is to incorporate well established law and scholarship concerning the distinction between conduct and expression into a broader theoretical framework. Within this framework, the threshold distinction between crime and speech can better be understood as a version of the familiar distinction that courts rely upon when seeking to identify whether conduct (such as marching or nude dancing) is sufficiently expressive so as to merit First Amendment protection. By framing the distinction between speech and crime in terms of the broad principles identified by courts and scholars in a context where similar First Amendment goals are at stake, this Article seeks to provide an approach to distinguishing speech and crime that is both intelligible and workable. To be clear, the aim is not simply to replace one set of formalistic categories with another, but to articulate a method of analysis. While the principles gleaned from the cases and scholarship addressing symbolic speech do not provide a mechanical test for identifying criminal speech, they do offer a general framework for analysis that can be refined. By engaging in such an analysis, courts will at least ensure that the outcome determinative decision of whether to apply the First Amendment is explained adequately, thus reducing the risk that the crime exception to the First Amendment will undermine the American commitment to freedom of speech.
LOSING BY LESS? IMPORT COMPETITION, UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE GENEROSITY, AND CRIME

Increased import competition from China has brought about a host of negative consequences for the most exposed industries and labor markets. Do social programs attenuate these harmful effects? We examine changes in import competition between 1990 and 2007, taking crime as our outcome of interest and unemployment insurance as our mitigating program. We find strong evidence that counties with access to more generous unemployment insurance experienced relatively smaller increases in trade‐induced property crime. This highlights a new and important positive externality of unemployment insurance. (JEL H00, R10)
The internationalization of American banking and finance: Structure, risk, and world interest rates

Abstract The transformation of American banking from the parochialism of 1960 to the internationally linked structure of the 1980s is analyzed and detailed quantitatively. While the liberalization of trade and the existence of and changes in financial regulations profoundly affected the pace and order of this transformation, it is argued that international banking is the historic norm. International banking on the one hand provides the opportunity to banks to diversify their portfolio, but may simultaneously expose them to increased systematic risk, especially with regards to movements in the US real interest rate. Deposit insurance provides an incentive for banks to take on such priced systematic risk with welfare costs which must be balanced against the welfare gains from the insurance. The paper closes with an exploration of the nature of the linkage of major movements in real interest rates and exhange rates. Futher research seems warranted on monetary-policy-regime changes and investment-demand shifts as a result of changes in tax, regulatory, and political climate.
BUBBLES AND MULTIPLE-FACTOR ASSET PRICING MODELS

This paper derives a multiple-factor asset pricing model with asset price bubbles in an arbitrage-free, competitive, and frictionless market. As such it generalizes existing asset pricing models, all of which implicitly assume asset price bubbles do not exist. This generalization leads to two new empirical implications. The first is that positive alphas can exist in an arbitrage-free market due to the existence of asset price bubbles. These positive alphas do not represent abnormal profit opportunities. The second is that bubble risk factors can exist with positive risk premiums. The testing of these new empirical implications awaits subsequent research.
The Long-Run Impact on Federal Tax Revenues and Capital Allocation of a Cut in the Capital Gains Tax Rate:

Model simulations are run to obtain a range of realistic estimates of the long-run revenue impact of a capital gains tax rate cut to a maximum of 15 percent. The basic vehicle for the simulations i...
Public Goods in Federal Systems

We study a political-economic model of federations with both federal and supplemental regional provision of a local (impure) public good with spillover effects. Regional differences in average income levels and externalities of provision induce differences in preferences over federal and regional levels of provision. Although the voters’ preferences are not single-peaked, we provide sufficient conditions for the existence of voting equilibria and characterize their properties under alternative federal institutional arrangements. We show that, under different conditions on parameters, the voting equilibria display markedly different patterns of federal vs. local provision, relying on different political coalitions for their support. We show that the inter-regional redistributive tensions present in federations lead to differences in regional support for different degrees of fiscal (de-)centralization: federation, confederation, and complete centralization. The present paper analyzes the political and economic incentives within federal structures with public good provision on both local and federal levels and spillover effects between regions — features that often characterize contemporary federal systems. Although such systems rarely have institutional provisions that explicitly authorize the duplication of services or public goods on the federal and the local levels, in practice, public goods provided at the two levels of government are often de facto substitutes, with fiscal federalism emerging less as a constitutional and juridical reality and more as a dynamic economic one. Sometimes the substitution effect is immediate and direct,
Governing Corporate Compliance

In light of the financial meltdown of 2008, it is reasonable to question whether the prior decade's emphasis on corporate compliance—the internal programs that corporations adopt in order to educate employees, improve ethical norms, and detect and prevent violations of law—has been fruitful. This Article contends that the key problem with compliance is that we regulate it through an adversarial system that pits federal prosecutors against corporate defense counsel, fueling distrust between corporate entities and the government, and between the corporate employees and the internal monitors tasked with ensuring compliance. Despite this adversarial atmosphere, a number of scholars have suggested that corporate compliance is an example of a more collaborative regulatory approach known as "New Governance." This Article challenges that notion, arguing that the government's adversarial stance all but eliminates the experimental and collaborative approach championed by the New Governance movement. The Article further concludes that a New Governance model of compliance regulation is unlikely to take hold. Nevertheless, policyrnakers should consider New Governance's administrative stance in lieu of the more punitive, "war-driven" approach that adjudication usually encourages.
Free Will Paradigms

One of the iconic issues in American law and politics is the question of free will—sometimes known as agency, choice, or autonomy, or the absence of duress, coercion, and compulsion. In politics, whether one is liberal or conservative, we balk at government limitations on choice and fight those limitations with legal arguments about rights and political rhetoric about freedom. Liberals demand access to abortions, want the ability to purchase medical marijuana, and bristle at pat-down searches before boarding a plane. Conservatives dislike requirements to buy health insurance or pay taxes, rail against limits on gun ownership and school prayer, and decry government regulation of everything from food to the environment. Liberals and conservatives may disagree about the specifics of what they want to be free to choose, but both sides believe that choice is a good thing. In law, the notion of choice and free will is ubiquitous. For example, only contracts freely entered into are considered valid—if a contract is the result of duress, it is unenforceable. In tort law, some acts are torts because they infringe on the will of others—a fist to the nose is a tort if not consented to, and merely pugilism if it is. Rape is sexual intercourse without consent. Sexual harassment law prohibits sexual attention in the workplace that is unwanted and unconsentedto. Under the Fourth Amendment, courts admit evidence seized without a warrant if that evidence was found in the course of consensual searches. Under the Fifth Amendment, confessions of a criminal suspect are admissible if uncoerced. Under the First Amendment Free Speech Clause, a “fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” the government cannot force one to speak. Under the Free Exercise Clause, the government cannot require religious
Evaluating Portfolio Policies: A Duality Approach

The performance of a given portfolio policy can in principle be evaluated by comparing its expected utility with that of the optimal policy. Unfortunately, the optimal policy is usually not computable, in which case a direct comparison is impossible. In this paper, we solve this problem by using the given portfolio policy to construct an upper bound on the unknown maximum expected utility. This construction is based on a dual formulation of the portfolio optimization problem. When the upper bound is close to the expected utility achieved by the given portfolio policy, the potential utility loss of this policy is guaranteed to be small. Our algorithm can be used to evaluate portfolio policies in models with incomplete markets and position constraints. We illustrate our methodology by analyzing the static and myopic policies in markets with return predictability and constraints on short sales and borrowing.
Introduction: the Political Consequences of Non-state Social Welfare in the Global South

Throughout the Global South, diverse non-state actors have historically played critical roles in enabling populations to meet their basic needs, whether by providing or mediating access to social benefits and programs. To date, little research explores non-state social welfare, particularly in the Global South, and existing studies tend to focus on technical and administrative concerns while neglecting the potential political ramifications. This introductory essay aims to conceptualize and theorize the politics of non-state social welfare. We highlight three dimensions of the political consequences of non-state social welfare, including the implications for state capacity, equity of access to social welfare, and experiences of citizenship. Based on this framework as well as the findings of the empirical contributions to the special issue, the essay concludes that non-state provision may pose more political challenges than proponents recognize, but its effects are ultimately contingent on the types of relationships between state and non-state providers.
The Mass Tort Bankruptcy: A Pre-History

The history of insolvency schemes as mass tort resolution devices is generally said to begin with the asbestos bankruptcies of the 1980s. This Article brings to light a much earlier example of the resolution of mass tort claims through another insolvency scheme—the equity receivership—that was a precursor to Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code. The Article recounts the creation of a receivership after a fire at the Ringling Brothers circus killed and injured hundreds of spectators. It also describes the maneuvers of the key actors in the case and the legal landscape that explained their resort to a receivership instead of traditional civil litigation. The Article presents the Ringling Brothers case as more than a piece of historical trivia. The case raises a number of puzzles, most notably its success. While modern mass tort bankruptcies are criticized for a variety of perceived flaws, the Ringling Brothers receivership was widely praised. The Article considers a model of mass tort insolvency schemes as public law litigation in order to explain the different fates of the Ringling Brothers receivership and the modern mass tort bankruptcy. *Corresponding author: Troy A. McKenzie, New York University School of Law, New York, NY, USA, E-mail: troy.mckenzie@nyu.edu
Income Differences and Prices of Tradables: Insights from an Online Retailer

I study the positive relationship between prices of tradable goods and per capita income. I develop a highly tractable general equilibrium model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and non-homothetic consumer preferences that positively links prices of tradables to consumer income. Guided by the model's testable prediction, I estimate the elasticity of price with respect to per capita income from a unique data set that I construct, which features prices of 245 identical goods sold in 29 European, Asian, and North American markets via the Internet by Spain's second largest apparel manufacturer—Mango. I find that doubling a destination's per capita income results in an 18% increase in the price of identical items sold there. Per capita income differences account for a third, whereas shipping cost differences can explain up to a third of the cross-country price variations of identical items purchased via the Internet by consumers who do not take advantage of quantity discounts. The price elasticity estimates compare favourably to estimates that I obtain from a standard data set that features prices across retail locations around the world, suggesting that variable mark-ups play a key role in accounting for observed cross-country differences in prices of tradables.
Moral Rights: Diagnosis and Rehabilitation

The United States offers some of the strongest intellectual property laws in the world. Why then does U.S. law grant such weak moral rights protection? The answer is not simply political apathy. Rather, it stems from a long-standing perception that moral rights conflict with fundamental American cultural, historical, and legal traditions. The first part of this manuscript presents a brief history of moral rights law. The next part examines the varying forces that have contributed to the poor reception of moral rights in the United States. After an examination of the limited protection of the Visual Artists Rights Act, the paper shows that moral rights are more compatible with American socio-legal theory than currently believed. This article concludes that the more harmoniously moral rights are viewed, the more likely courts will interpret them less restrictively and Congress will offer less resistance to expanding moral rights protections.
International Law and Global Public Goods in a Legal Pluralist World

The world faces multiple challenges in producing global public goods, such as climate change mitigation, financial stability, security from nuclear terror, knowledge production, and the eradication of infectious diseases. International law scholarship, in the meantime, takes a turn towards celebrating pluralism without sufficiently accounting for institutional variation to address different contexts. Those writing on global public goods challenges, at the same time, tend to come from disciplines other than law. So what is international law's role in the production of global public goods?. Where are greater international legal constraints and international institutions needed, and where should international law retain slack?. Three analytic frameworks (global constitutionalism, global administrative law, and legal pluralism) have been advanced to address international law's place in global governance, but these frameworks have not explicitly addressed the challenges of producing global public goods. This article breaks down different types of global public goods, and explores how these different frames apply to them. Grounded in pragmatism, the article shows why there is no single best approach. Rather, legal policy should be tailored to the type of global public good at stake in light of comparative, real world, institutional trade-offs.
Inference with Correlated Clusters

This paper introduces a method which permits valid inference given a finite number of heterogeneous, correlated clusters. Many inference methods assume clusters are asymptotically independent or model dependence across clusters as a function of a distance metric. With panel data, these restrictions are unnecessary. This paper relies on a test statistic using the mean of the cluster-specific scores normalized by the variance and simulating the distribution of this statistic. To account for cross-cluster dependence, the relationship between each cluster is estimated, permitting the independent component of each cluster to be isolated. The method is simple to implement, can be employed for linear and nonlinear estimators, places no restrictions on the strength of the correlations across clusters, and does not require prior knowledge of which clusters are correlated or even the existence of independent clusters. In simulations, the procedure rejects at the appropriate rate even in the presence of highly-correlated clusters.
The Foreign Amici Dilemma

The primary goal of this article is to go beyond the "rule of deference" theory and explore how and why the Court routinely rejects or ignores the interpretations offered by foreigners when their views conflict with those of the executive. By exposing the imbalance and unfairness of the Court's approach, perhaps this article will open the door for remedial measures. This article does not provide an exhaustive historical analysis of Supreme Court response to amici efforts, but rather sets out several historical spotlights which illuminate the futility of foreign amici. This illumination is accomplished by exploring three different types of amici "picketing": (1) purely domestic, (2) domestic-foreign, and (3) purely foreign. The term "amici picketing" refers both to formal brief submission as well as extra-judicial activities intended to influence the Court.
A Survey of Some Norm Inequalities

We survey some classical norm inequalities of Hardy, Kallman, Kato, Kolmogorov, Landau, Littlewood, and Rota of the type $$\begin{aligned} \Vert A f\Vert _{{{\mathcal {X}}}}^2 \le C \Vert f\Vert _{{{\mathcal {X}}}} \big \Vert A^2 f\big \Vert _{{{\mathcal {X}}}}, \quad f \in {{\,\mathrm{dom}\,}}\big (A^2\big ), \end{aligned}$$ and recall that under exceedingly stronger hypotheses on the operator A and/or the Banach space $${{\mathcal {X}}}$$ , the optimal constant C in these inequalities diminishes from 4 (e.g., when A is the generator of a $$C_0$$ contraction semigroup on a Banach space $${{\mathcal {X}}}$$ ) all the way down to 1 (e.g., when A is a symmetric operator on a Hilbert space $${{\mathcal {H}}}$$ ). We also survey some results in connection with an extension of the Hardy–Littlewood inequality involving quadratic forms as initiated by Everitt.
Budgeting in Ghana: Innovations, Problems, and Prospects

Systematic development has been a high priority of Ghanaian leaders, particularly since Independence. The impetus for this national objective has been recent budgetary innovations aimed at far-reaching implications for a healthy national economy, including meaningful development. This article evaluates these innovations with a view to finding out the extent to which such forces of innovation have improved overall public financial administration, as well as the masses' living conditions via development. Finally, the results of these innovations and the lessons learned are summarized.
The effect of joint and several liability under superfund on brownfields

To encourage redevelopment of potentially contaminated sites (or “brownfields”), various programs protect purchasers of such sites from Superfund liability. This protection may be unwarranted, however, if sellers can reduce property prices to compensate buyers for this liability. We identify four previously overlooked effects of joint and several liability under Superfund that may discourage sales. Thus, the brownfields problem may be more widespread than the prior literature suggests. Furthermore, the effects we identify may distort any decision of anyone subject to any joint and several liability if that decision may affect the number of other parties liable for the same harm.
Jail Strip-Search Cases: Patterns and Participants

The interested parties—plaintiffs, defendants, and their counsel—are key, Galanter suggests. Indeed, this is one of the recurring themes of his work. If we wish to understand legal change, he warns us not to “exclude[] or marginalize[]” “[s]ources of legal change other than changes in the rules . . . (for example, changes in the number, organization, or style of lawyers and changes in the expectations, organization, or capabilities of litigants).” Differences among litigants and lawyers mean that “the same rule change may bring about quite
International Risk Sharing and the Choice of Exchange-Rate Regime

Abstract This paper examines the argument that the fixed exchange-rate regime should be preferred to the flexible rate regime because the former allows risk sharing across countries while the latter does not. The analysis is performed in a two-country overlapping generations model, where markets are incomplete under all exchange regimes. It is shown that risks are pooled across countries when the equilibrium exchange rate is constant across states of nature, which arises under the fixed rate regime with or without capital restriction, and under the flexible rate regime without capital restriction. Risks are not pooled across countries when the equilibrium exchange rate is different across states of nature, which arises under the flexible rate regime with capital restriction. But in a model with incomplete markets, the ability to share risk across countries in the regimes with constant exchange rates does not necessarily lead to higher welfare than the inability to share risk in the regime with random exchange rates.
SUING GOVERNMENT LAWYERS FOR GIVING DUBIOUS LEGAL ADVICE IN A NATIONAL SECURITY CRISIS: NOTES ON HOW (NOT) TO BECOME A BANANA REPUBLIC

Given as a keynote address to a conference on "Official Wrongdoing and the Civil Liability of the Federal Government and Officers" convened by St. Thomas University Law School, this short paper discusses the public interest in vigorous affirmative decisionmaking by government officials, especially "street-level bureaucrats," an interest protected by official immunity doctrine. I first explain the different incentive effects that liability rules tend to create for public and private actors, and then argue that the post-9/11 environment has increased the risk that public officials operating in the national security area will be over-deterred in ways that may jeopardize the public interest. I then explore these issues, and the law of official immunity, in the specific context of the pending Bivens action brought by terrorist Jose Padilla against John Yoo, an author of the so-called "torture" memos. I conclude that the district judge wrongly denied Yoo the immunity, that the Ninth Circuit should reverse that decision, that personal liability is a perverse method for seeking to hold public officials in Yoo's situation accountable for erroneous legal advice (if that's what it was), and that the existing official immunity, properly understood and applied, should prevent courts from being used to exact political vengeance for unpopular legal interpretations in areas of legal uncertainty.
The Private is Public: The Relevance of Private Actors in Defining the Fourth Amendment

Because the Fourth Amendment regulates only governmental conduct, the behavior of private actors is almost wholly absent from academic Fourth Amendment literature. This Article argues that this exclusive focus on official conduct is myopic. Because the U.S. Supreme Court often looks to the conduct of private actors to determine the scope of permissible government conduct, a Fourth Amendment approach that ignores the invasions engaged in by these private actors is likely to concede questions regarding important civil liberties before the government even acts. This Article traces the development of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, explaining the origins of the Court's current focus on private conduct. It then describes the current state of private intrusions upon privacy, arguing that emerging technologies have facilitated an exponential growth in the capacity of private actors to obtain and process private information. This expansion in private searching will likely lead courts to uphold similar invasions of privacy when government agents engage in the same kind of conduct. Finally, this Article proposes legal, legislative, and practical solutions to the current privacy crisis, and reluctantly concludes that only individual, practical steps are likely to produce effective privacy expansions in the near term.
Information, Technology, and Information Worker Productivity

We econometrically evaluate information worker productivity at a midsize executive recruiting firm and assess whether the knowledge that workers accessed through their electronic communication networks enabled them to multitask more productively. We estimate dynamic panel data models of multitasking, knowledge networks, and productivity using several types of micro-level data: (a) direct observation of more than 125,000 email messages over a period of 10 months; (b) detailed accounting data on individuals' project output and team membership for more than 1,300 projects spanning five years; and (c) survey and interview data about the same workers' IT skills, IT use, and information sharing. We find that (1) more multitasking is associated with more project output, but diminishing marginal returns, and (2) recruiters whose network contacts have heterogeneous knowledge---an even distribution of expertise over many project types---are less productive on average but more productive when juggling diverse multitasking portfolios. These results show how multitasking affects productivity and how knowledge networks, enabled by IT, can improve worker performance. The methods developed can be replicated in other settings, opening new frontiers for research on social networks and IT value.
THE CASE FOR CONTRIBUTION IN PATENT LAW

Under tort law’s theory of contribution, when one party is sued, it can implead other parties that may be jointly and severally liable and ask that they pay their fair share of any judgment. Although contribution theory has spread to numerous wide-ranging areas of the law, patent law is not among them. Thus, when a manufacturer is sued for patent infringement, it cannot seek contribution from the component supplier that included the patented technology in its component. This omission from patent law has generated surprisingly little commentary. In the few instances where an accused infringer has sought a right of contribution, the district courts have concluded that contribution is somehow preempted by 35 U.S.C. 271(c), which governs contributory infringement. This article explains how these decisions have incorrectly conflated the two doctrines. Contribution determines how to apportion damages between different liable parties while contributory infringement helps identify which parties are liable. Once the courts appreciate this distinction, they can and should adopt contribution in patent law. Contribution is typically thought of as a mechanism that equitably spreads liability among different responsible parties. However, because of the availability of indemnification agreements, contribution performs a more limited version of that role in patent law. However, this article identifies a much less expected benefit unique to patent law. Contribution should lower royalty awards in component patent cases, an area where awards have been shown to be excessive. Relying on the behavioral economics concepts of “anchoring” and “coherence,” this article compares how juries act under the current system with how they would behave under a patent system applying contribution theory. The article suggests that applying contribution will lead to lower royalty awards that are based on the value of the component.
How Dispute Resolution System Design Matters: An Organizational Analysis of Dispute Resolution Structures and Consumer Lemon Laws†

This study demonstrates how the structure of dispute resolution shapes the extent to which managerial and business values influence the meaning and implementation of consumer protection law, and consequently, the extent to which repeat players are advantaged. My analysis draws from, links, and contributes to two literatures that examine the relationship between organizational governance structures and law: neo-institutional studies of law and organizations and socio-legal studies of repeat players' advantages in disputing. Specifically, I compare an instance where powerful state consumer protection laws are resolved in private dispute resolution forums funded by automobile manufacturers but operated by independent third-party organizations (California) with one where consumer disputes are resolved in public alternative dispute resolution processes run and administered by the state (Vermont). Through in-depth interviews and participant observation in the training programs that dispute resolution arbitrators undergo in each state, I show how different dispute resolution structures operating in California and Vermont give different meanings to substantially similar lemon laws. Although my data do not allow me to establish a causal relationship, they strongly suggest that the form of the dispute resolution structure, and how business and state actors construct the meaning of lemon laws through these structures, have critical implications for the effectiveness of consumer protection laws for consumers.
Experimental Estimates of the Student Attendance Production Function

Student attendance is both a critical input and intermediate output of the education production function. However, the malleable classroom-level determinants of student attendance are poorly unders...
Exploring tax evasion in the context of political uncertainty

Abstract We present a model of agents facing the uncertainty of two future forms of government who are able to insure against this uncertainty by hiding funds from taxation. In order to choose whether or not to hide funds from taxation, agents need to know policy choices that each government would make should it come to power. But each government, before it could make its decision, would need to know the choices of the agents who would, for example, produce tax revenues. This informational tension is resolved endogenously. We derive the resulting level of tax evasion in society and the optimal choices made by the potential governments. We examine how changes in governmental structure would affect the level of tax evasion, and how that, in turn, would affect a particular form of capital flight.
A Demographic Threat? Proposed Reclassification of Arab Americans on the 2020 Census

The proposed reclassification of Arab American identity on the 2020 U.S. Census is not simply a moment of racial progress, but I argue, a mechanism that evidences the state’s interest in obtaining more accurate "macro and micro demographic data" about Arab Americans. By illuminating the causal state interests facilitating reform and reclassification, this Essay highlights how more precise and extensive demographic data – collected and compiled with a Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) American box on the U.S. Census form – expands the reach of federal and local anti-terror and counter-radicalization policing amid the fluid yet evermore fierce War on Terror.
Do Newspapers Serve the State? Incumbent Party Influence on the US Press, 1869-1928

Using data from 1869 to 1928, we estimate the effect of party control of state governments on the entry, exit, circulation, prices, number of pages, and content of Republican and Democratic daily newspapers. We exploit changes over time in party control of the governorship and state legislatures in a differences-in-differences design. We exploit close gubernatorial elections and state legislatures with small majorities in a parallel regression-discontinuity design. Neither method reveals evidence that the party in power affects the partisan composition of the press. Our confidence intervals rule out modest effects, and we find little evidence of incumbent party influence even in times and places with high political stakes or low commercial stakes. The one exception is the Reconstruction South, an episode that we discuss in detail. (JEL: D72, L82, N41)
The Use of Most-Favored-Nation Clauses in Settlement of Litigation

Author(s): Spier, Kathryn E. | Abstract: Many settlement agreements in lawsuits involving either multiple plaintiffs or multiple defendants include so-called "most-favored-nation" clauses. If a defendant facing multiple claims, for example, settles with some plaintiffs early and settles with additional plaintiffs later for a greater amount, then the early settlers will receive the more favorable terms as well. These MFN provisions have been prominent in the recent MP3.com case, as well as tobacco litigation, class actions, and many antitrust lawsuits. This paper considers a defendant who is facing a large group of heterogeneous plaintiffs. Each plaintiff has private information about the (expected) award that he or she will receive should the case go to trial. MFN clauses are valuable because they commit the defendant not to raise his offer over time. This has two important effects. First, holding overall settlement rate fixed, MFNs encourage earlier settlement. Second, depending upon the distribution of plaintiff types, MFNs can either increase or decrease the overall settlement rate. Social welfare implications are discussed, and alternative theories, including the strategic use of MFNs to extract value from future plaintiffs, are explored.
Forecast, Solution, and Rolling Horizons in Operations Management Problems: A Classified Bibliography

We present a classified bibliography of the literature in the area of forecast, solution, and rolling horizons primarily in operations management problems. Each one of over 200 selected papers is categorized on five dimensions that identify the horizon type, the model type (deterministic or stochastic), the sources of the horizon, the methods used to obtain horizon results, and the subject area of the paper. The majority of the papers treat dynamic problems in inventory management, production planning, capacity expansion, machine replacement, and warehousing. We discuss the relationship of the horizon results with the theory and practice of rolling-horizon procedures and future research directions.
Analyzing Avoidance: Judicial Strategy in Comparative Perspective

Courts sometimes avoid deciding contentious issues. One prominent justification for this practice is that, by employing avoidance strategically, a court can postpone reaching decisions that might threaten its institutional viability. Avoidance creates delay, which can allow for productive dialogue with and among the political branches. That dialogue, in turn, may result in the democratic resolution of — or the evolution of popular societal consensus around — a contested question, relieving the court of its duty. Many scholars and judges assume that, by creating and deferring to this dialogue, a court can safeguard its institutional legitimacy and security.Accepting this assumption arguendo, this Article seeks to evaluate avoidance as it relates to dialogue. It identifies two key factors in the avoidance decision that might affect dialogue with the political branches: first, the timing of avoidance (i.e., when in the life cycle of a case does a high court choose to avoid); and, second, a court’s candor about the decision (i.e., to what degree does a court openly acknowledge its choice to avoid). The Article draws on a series of avoidance strategies from apex courts around the world to tease out the relationships among timing, candor, and dialogue. As the first study to analyze avoidance from a comparative perspective, the Article generates a new framework for assessing avoidance by highlighting the impact of timing on the quality of dialogue, the possible unintended consequences of candor, and the critical trade-offs between avoidance and power.
Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word: The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, Crack, and Methamphetamine

This Essay considers the circumstances that led to the enactment of the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which increased the quantities of crack cocaine necessary to implicate mandatory minimum prison sentences for federal drug trafficking crimes, and considers whether the Act might facilitate re-evaluation of the penalty scheme applicable to methamphetamine.
Special Kähler Manifolds

We give an intrinsic definition of the special geometry which arises in global N= 2 supersymmetry in four dimensions. The base of an algebraic integrable system exhibits this geometry, and with an integrality hypothesis any special Kahler manifold is so related to an integrable system. The cotangent bundle of a special Kahler manifold carries a hyperkahler metric. We also define special geometry in supergravity in terms of the special geometry in global supersymmetry.
An analysis of the changing social bases of America's political parties: 1952–2008

In this article I address two interrelated questions: have the group bases of the American political parties changed over time and what factors have lead to the observed changes? I determine social group memberships significantly influence individual partisanship with a multivariate analysis using 56 years of ANES data. I then measure how many votes each politically relevant social group contributed to the party coalitions in each presidential election from 1952 to 2008. I discuss how group contributions have changed over time and establish the demographic and behavioral causes of group contribution change. I find that the party coalitions have been restructured as a result of groups' changing voting behavior and the changing ratio of groups in the electorate.
The Optimal Collection of Seigniorage: Theory and Evidence

Abstract This paper presents and tests a positive theory of monetary and fiscal policy. The government chooses the rates of taxation and inflation to minimize the present value of the social cost of raising revenue given exogenous expenditure and an intertemporal budget constraint. The theory implies that nominal interest rates and inflation are random walks. It also implies that nominal interest rates and inflation move together with tax rates. United States data from 1952 to 1985 provide some support for the theory.
Financial property rights under colonialism: some counterfactual possibilities

This article seeks to explain the lack of the development of contemporaneously ‘modern’ money and credit markets in the 18th to 19th century economy of India. Borrowing from the literature on property rights, it demonstrates that the emergence of ‘modern’, and state-connected money markets was the result of a certain kind of power relationship between rulers and financial capital holders where the two were forced to mutually cooperate; financial systems represented the institutionalization of this mutual cooperation. Specific kinds of ‘colonialism’ represent just one special case of a relationship where the latter did not obtain. The article thus proposes a mechanism though which the spread of European capital could have retarded financial market formation in now-developing areas with otherwise considerable concentration of ‘native’ mercantile capital.
Incentives for Prosocial Behavior: The Role of Reputations

Do monetary incentives encourage volunteering? Or, do they introduce concerns about appearing greedy and crowd out the motivation to volunteer? Since the importance of such image concerns is normal...
A Hausman test for the presence of market microstructure noise in high frequency data

Abstract We develop tests that help assess whether a high frequency data sample can be treated as reasonably free of market microstructure noise at a given sampling frequency for the purpose of implementing high frequency volatility and other estimators. The tests are based on the Hausman principle of comparing two estimators, one that is efficient but not robust to the deviation being tested, and one that is robust but not as efficient. We investigate the asymptotic properties of the test statistic in a general nonparametric setting, and compare it with several alternatives that are also developed in the paper. Empirically, we find that improvements in stock market liquidity over the past decade have increased the frequency at which simple, uncorrected, volatility estimators can be safely employed.
Orwell Versus Huxley: Economics, Technology, Privacy, and Satire

L'A. entreprend une comparaison de «1984» de G. Orwell et du «Meilleur des mondes» d'A. Huxley, dans la double perspective de l'economie et du modernisme technologique, d'une part, et de la critique litteraire et du genre starique, d'autre part. Prevenant les dangers du totalitarisme pour la sphere privee et la liberte, les deux ouvrages developpent une critique commune de la modernite technocratique inspiree de la these du desenchantement du monde de Weber, mais conservent aussi leurs caracteristiques litteraires qui, heritees du romantisme, garantissent leur interet philosophique et historique.