cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
On selective indirect tax reform in developing countries

The current consensus on indirect tax reform in developing countries favors a reduction in trade taxes with an increase in VAT to raise revenue. The theoretical results on selective reform that underlie this consensus are, however, derived from partial models that ignore the existence of an informal economy. Once the incomplete coverage of VAT due to an informal economy is acknowledged, we show that, contrary to the current consensus, the standard revenue-neutral selective reform of trade taxes and VAT reduces welfare under plausible conditions. Moreover, a VAT base broadening with a revenue-neutralreductionintradetaxesmayalsoreducewelfare.Theresultsraiseseriousdoubtsabout the wisdom of the indirect tax reform policies pursued by a large number of developing countries. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Regulating Offensiveness: Snyder v. Phelps, Emotion, and the First Amendment

In its upcoming term, the Court will decide in Snyder v. Phelps whether Albert Snyder can sue the Reverend Fred Phelps and other members of the Westboro Baptist Church for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress for protesting near his son’s funeral. Those arguing in favor of tort liability claim that the Phelps’ speech during a time of mourning and vulnerability is especially outrageous and injurious and that the First Amendment allows such regulation. Their arguments, however, effectively rely on the offensiveness of the Phelps’ message rather than on any external indicia of harm, such as noisy or disruptive speech, or resulting violence. But the Court’s longstanding precedents do not allow regulation of speech solely based on its offensive content absent those objective indicia of harm. Psychological research on emotions validates the Court’s approach as it reveals that anger, the emotion most likely to be involved with offensive speech, is inextricably linked with censorship. Put simply, individuals are often angered by demeaning offenses to their personal or social identity, including speech that is critical of their values and beliefs. As a result, they are often stirred to responsive action. The availability of civil lawsuits based solely on emotional harm would thus provide offended plaintiffs with potential tools to censor speech with which they disagree. The Supreme Court has wisely steered clear of such an approach and should continue to do so in Snyder.
Sub-Regulating Elections

Agency deadlocks are a recurring feature of election-related administrative agencies. Such agencies are often designed by Congress with even-numbered bipartisan commissions with majoritarian voting rules. Using Arizona v. Intertribal Council as a springboard, this Article examines how courts should treat commissioner tie votes when they concern issues of statutory interpretation. In particular, it argues that courts should not defer to the blocking coalition, but rather apply an institutional understanding of Skidmore deference to interpretive documents prepared by politically insulated agency actors, when available. The proposal seeks to create greater incentives for internal agency independence in the presence of partisan deadlocks and the development of agency expertise through sub-regulatory guidance documents such as agency manuals and opinion letters. The analysis also reflects more broadly on the intersections between federal election administration and administrative law.
Forward buying by retailers

Abstract Conventional wisdom in marketing holds that (1) retailer forward buying is a consequence of manufacturer trade promotions and (2) stockpiling units helps the retailer but hurts the manufacturer. This article provides a deeper understanding of forward buying by analyzing it within the context of manufacturer trade promotions, competition, and demand uncertainty. The authors find that regardless of whether the manufacturer offers a trade promotion, allowing the retailer to forward buy and hold inventory for the future can, under certain conditions, be beneficial for both parties. Disallowing forward buying by the retailer may lead the manufacturer to lower merchandising requirements and change the depth of the promotion. In competitive environments, there are situations in which retailers engage in forward buying because of competitive pressures in a prisoner's-dilemma situation. Finally, when the authors consider the case of uncertain demand, they find further evidence of strategic forward buying....
The ontological status of shocks and trends in macroeconomics

Modern empirical macroeconomic models, known as structural autoregressions (SVARs) are dynamic models that typically claim to represent a causal order among contemporaneously valued variables and to merely represent non-structural (reduced-form) co-occurence between lagged variables and contemporaneous variables. The strategy is held to meet the minimal requirements for identifying the residual errors in particular equations in the model with independent, though otherwise not directly observable, exogenous causes (“shocks”) that ultimately account for change in the model. In nonstationary models, such shocks accumulate so that variables have discernible trends. Econometricians have conceived of variables that trend in sympathy with each other (so-called “cointegrated variables”) as sharing one or more of these unobserved trends as a common cause. It is possible for estimates of the values of both the otherwise unobservable individual shocks and the otherwise unobservable common trends to be backed-out of cointegrated systems of equations. The issue addressed in this paper is whether and in what circumstances these values can be regarded as observations of real entities rather than merely artifacts of the representation of variables in the model. The issue is related, on the one hand, to practical methodological problems in the use of SVARs for policy analysis—e.g., does it make sense to estimate of shocks or trends in one model and then use them as measures of variables in a conceptually distinct model? The issue is also related to debates in the philosophical analysis of causation—particularly, whether we are entitled, as assumed by the developers of Bayes-net approaches, to rely on the causal Markov condition (a generalization of Reichenbach’s common-cause condition) or whether cointegration generates a practical example of Nancy Cartwright’s “byproducts” objection to the causal Markov condition.
REDEFINING AND CONTAINING SYSTEMIC RISK

Official definitions of systemic risk leave out the role of government officials in generating it. Policymakers’ support of creative forms of risk-taking and their proclivity for absorbing losses in crisis situations encourage opportunistic firms to foster and exploit incentive conflicts within the supervisory sector. To restore faith in the diligence, competence, and integrity of officials responsible for managing the financial safety net, reforms need to rework incentives in the government and financial sectors. The goal should be to align the incentives of private risk managers, accountants, credit-rating firms, and government supervisors with those of ordinary taxpayers. This article describes a series of complementary ways of advancing toward this goal. The most important steps would be to measure regulatory performance in terms of its effect on the loss exposures that the safety net passes through to taxpayers and to require institutions that benefit from the net to produce information that would support this effort. This entails estimating the explicit and implicit safety-net benefits individual institutions receive and issuing extended-liability securities whose prices would improve the accuracy of these estimates.
Putting social preferences to work: Can revealed preferences predict real effort provision?

Abstract This paper presents a model of real effort provision in conjunction with rational social preference theory to predict how individuals exert effort to replace an exogenously determined “state of the world” with a preferred social outcome. Binary dictator games and real effort tasks are used to examine whether individuals exert effort in a manner that is consistent with their revealed preferences. The analysis of controlled laboratory experiments suggest that while individuals’ effort provisions are generally consistent with the theory, those who reveal relatively pro-social preferences fail to procure their “preferred” outcomes too frequently when the state of the world is highly inequitable in their favor. Consideration is given to alternative theories, namely ego depletion and cognitive dissonance, as potential explanations of social outcomes. There is evidence to suggest that dictators, on average, experience ego depletion which leads to a reduction in pro-social behavior through time.
Mind Bombs: Searching for Truth in the Great Debate Between Einstein and Bohr

Albert Einstein is regarded by many as perhaps the greatest scientist of the 20th century. Yet, one of his most enduring legacies is the monumental debate that he lost over the issue of quantum mechanics. Time and again, Einstein focused every bit of his extraordinary intellect on numerous efforts to undermine quantum mechanics only to fail on each and every occasion. While Einstein’s reputation among his fellow physicists may have suffered as a result, his efforts, nonetheless, did much to advance the field of physics—and also, I argue, to sustain a commitment to good science.
Health expenditures and personal bankruptcies

Using household-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate the extent to which medical expenses are responsible for driving households to bankruptcy. Our results suggest that an increase of 10 percent in medical debts would cause a 27 percent increase in the filing propensity of households with primarily medical debt, and an approximately 36 percent increase in filing propensity of households where medical debts co-exist with primarily credit card debts. Studying the post-bankruptcy scenario, we find that filers are 19 percent less likely to own a home even several years after the filing, compared to non-filers. However, the consequences are less adverse for medical filers i.e. those who filed due to high medical bills compared to other filers.
Growing up without finance

Abstract Early life exposure to local financial institutions increases household financial inclusion and leads to long-term improvements in consumer credit outcomes. We identify the effect of local financial markets using Congressional legislation that led to unintended differences in financial market development across Native American reservations. Individuals from financially underdeveloped reservations enter consumer credit markets later, and upon reaching adulthood, have ten point lower credit scores and four percentage point more delinquent accounts. These effects are long-lived and depreciate slowly after individuals move to more developed areas. Formative exposures to local banking improve consumer credit behavior by increasing financial literacy and financial trust.
Does Customer Satisfaction Matter to Investors? Findings from the Bond Market:

Abstract This article examines whether customer satisfaction is associated with key metrics from corporate bond markets—namely, credit ratings and cost of debt financing. The authors draw on theory in marketing and finance to predict how customer satisfaction should be associated with both measures. To test the hypotheses, they employ the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) database of more than 150 publicly traded firms during the period from 1994 to 2004. The empirical work controls for factors that are known to influence the bond market, such as firm profitability and risk, as well as potential unobservable factors. The findings indicate that firms with lower customer satisfaction exhibit lower credit ratings and higher debt costs—financial consequences of customer satisfaction not previously observed. The results also suggest that the association between ACSI and cost of debt is attenuated by the inherent level of risk faced by the firm.
Criminalizing Humanitarian Intervention

The States Parties of the International Criminal Court (ICC) will likely vote in 2010 on whether to amend the Rome Statute to allow the ICC to prosecute the crime of aggression. If a robust amendment is widely ratified by states, and if the mechanism for triggering ICC jurisdiction in a particular situation is the ICC itself, then the ICC may emerge as an important voice in the debate over the legality of humanitarian intervention taken without Security Council authorization. Prosecutions, or at least indictments, of leaders of those interventions would considerably strengthen the hand of those who regard such intervention as illegal. Yet an unwillingness on the part of the ICC to indict and prosecute those leaders - an outcome that seems likely for incidents of true humanitarian intervention - may lend considerable credence to the view that such intervention is lawful, as well as define the conditions that characterize such intervention.
Small Firms and Formality: The Influence of Judicial Efficiency and Regulation Costs

Small firms face three serious problems, namely, the high costs of regulation, of contract enforcement, and of finance. A simple model is developed to explain why in dealing with these problems small firms choose different strategies. Special emphasis is given to the effects of regulation costs and judicial efficiency on these choices. Several propositions concerning these effects are derived from the model and tested with data on Mexican microenterprises. The results support most hypotheses, and show that firms obtain more credit when they either register with official entities or participate in private associations and especially when they do both.
Perspectives on the recent currency crisis literature

Rational speculative bubble can be well-defined as transient upward movements of stock prices above fundamental value due to speculative investors. The Generalised Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette (GJLS) model has been developed as a flexible device to diagnose the size of rational speculative bubble. This model is combines the economic theory of rational expectation bubbles with finite-time singular crash hazard rates, behavioral finance on imitation and herding of investors and traders as well as mathematical statistical physics of bifurcations and phase transitions. It has been employed successfully to a large variety of stock bubbles in many different markets. The purpose of this study is to predict intrinsic value and size of rational speculative bubble of Hong Kong stock market during global economic crisis 2008. The intrinsic value predicted by using the selected time interval is 20997.03 which shows that the market value is deviated about 33.63% from its fundamental value. This deviation is called as size of the speculative rational bubble that formed during global economic crisis 2008. By using the predicted intrinsic value, we found that the rational speculative bubble start to form and grow in Hong Kong stock market from 15/06/2006 to 10/12/2007. There are two bubble phases found in the period of selected time interval. It is essential needs for researcher to study on financial bubbles. It is because the economic bubbles are one of the serious issue that give negative implications to the development of economy which is the factor leads to an economy crisis.
Auctions with private uncertainty and resale opportunities

When an auction is followed by an opportunity for resale, bidder valuations are endogenously determined, reflecting anticipated profit from buying/selling in the resale market. These valuations vary with the resale market structure, can differ across auction types, andmay be lower or higher than if resale were impossible. Although resale introd uces a common value element to the model, revenue equivalence can hold; when it fails, this is due not to affiliation but to differences in information conveyed to the secondary market. Information linkages between markets can also lead to signaling and, in some cases, preclude separation in the auction.
Custom in the courtroom, law in the village: legal transformations in Papua New Guinea

Apres avoir appartenu pendant vingt-cinq ans au paysage legal de la Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinee, le droit coutumier est pret pour une reevaluation, plus particulierement parce qu'il apparait comme etant un mecanisme ideal, avec lequel l'Etat peut remplir quelques unes de ses obligations envers le corpus florissant de lois internationales. L'A. tente de comprendre la loi coutumiere dans le contexte de ses divers usages a travers des domaines legaux differents, dans un archetype de l'Etat pluraliste. Contrairement a des approches plus anciennes, focalisees sur l'interface problematique entre un systeme legal exogene et les methodes indigenes pour le reglement des conflits, l'A. examine les facons dont ces formes legales distinctes se sont tenu cotoyees depuis l'independance en 1975. Les etudes de cas provenant d'une cour de village et d'une cour urbaine nationale, demontrent que tout comme les magistrats d'une cour de village, les juges de haute-cour utilisent la coutume et la loi en tant que sources d'autorite strategiques. Alors que les cours de villages considerent la coutume comme acquise et doivent donc decouvrir la loi, les hautes cours, quant a elles, considerent la loi comme acquise et doivent decouvrir la coutume. Ces processus indiquent que plutot que d'etre hybridees dans une loi coutumiere, les distinctions entre la coutume et la loi sont souvent entretenues pour que l'une apparaisse comme etant la ressource dans laquelle l'autre peut puiser.
Analytical evaluation of the power of tests for the absence of cointegration

Abstract This paper proposes a theoretical explanation for the common empirical results in which different tests for cointegration give different answers. Using local to unity parametrization, this paper analytically computes the power of four tests for the null of no cointegration: The ADF test on the residuals of the cointegration regression, Johansen's maximum eigenvalue test, the t-test on the Error Correction (EC) term, and Boswijk (1994) Wald test. The test statistics are shown to converge under a local alternative to random variables whose distributions are functions of Brownian Motions and Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes and of a single nuisance parameter. The nuisance parameter is determined by the correlation at frequency zero of the errors in the cointegration relation with the shocks of the right-hand variables. I show that, when this correlation is high, system approaches, like the Johansen maximum eigenvalue or tests of the EC model, can exploit this correlation and significantly outperform single equation tests. Many of the varying results from applying different tests can be attributed to different values of this nuisance parameter.
Between Two Brands: A Goal Fluency Account of Brand Evaluation

Abstract The authors present the results of two studies that show how consumers' evaluations of an advertised product can be influenced by the compatibility or conflict between the regulatory goals (promotion or prevention) addressed by the product and prior advertising of related products. Participants across both studies were exposed sequentially to the advertising of two products (prime and target), and they demonstrated a regulatory goal fluency effect in their evaluations of the target brand. When the regulatory goal serviced by the target matched (conflicted with) the regulatory goal serviced by the prime, participants indicated higher (lower) purchase intent (Experiment 1) and more favorable evaluations of the target brand (Experiment 2). These effects were not accounted for by differences in participants' involvement or affective state across the conditions. Instead, mediation analyses show that participants' ease of processing the target advertisement underlies the effect of goal compatibility on...
Choice, emergence, and constitutional process: a framework for positive analysis

Constitutional theorizing typically employs a bi-level analytical framework wherein the choice of rules precedes the actions that people pursue within those rules. Constitutions are thus products of planning and are prior to the spontaneous ordering that characterizes market processes. This paper explores an alternative conceptual framework wherein rules and actions are coeval and not sequential. Hence, constitutions are subject to spontaneous ordering just as are ordinary market processes. All societies necessarily possess constitutional frameworks that frame the actions of participants; however, those frameworks are not fully settled prior to action but rather evolve through action, which means, in turn, that constitutions, like societies, are living entities and not background precepts against which societal life evolves.
Economics of Free Under Perpetual Licensing: Implications for the Software Industry

In this paper, we explore the economics of free under perpetual licensing. In particular, we focus on two emerging software business models that involve a free component: feature-limited freemiumFLF and uniform seedingS. Under FLF, the firm offers the basic software version for free, while charging for premium features. Under S, the firm gives away for free the full product to a percentage of the addressable market uniformly across consumer types. We benchmark their performance against a conventional business model under which software is sold as a bundle labeled as “charge for everything” or CE without free offers. In the context of consumer bounded rationality and information asymmetry, we develop a unified two-period consumer valuation learning framework that accounts for both word-of-mouth WOM effects and experience-based learning, and use it to compare and contrast the three business models. Under both constant and dynamic pricing, for moderate strength of WOM signals, we derive the equilibria for each model and identify optimality regions. In particular, S is optimal when consumers significantly underestimate the value of functionality and cross-module synergies are weak. When either cross-module synergies are stronger or initial priors are higher, the firm decides between CE and FLF. Furthermore, we identify nontrivial switching dynamics from one optimality region to another depending on the initial consumer beliefs about the value of the embedded functionality. For example, there are regions where, ceteris paribus, FLF is optimal when the prior on premium functionality is either relatively low or high, but not in between. We also demonstrate the robustness of our findings with respect to various parameterizations of cross-module synergies, strength of WOM effects, and number of periods. We find that stronger WOM effects or more periods lead to an expansion of the seeding optimality region in parallel with a decrease in the seeding ratio. Moreover, under CE and dynamic pricing, second period price may be decreasing in the initial consumer valuation beliefs when WOM effects are strong and the prior is relatively low. However, this is not the case under weak WOM effects. We also discuss regions where price skimming and penetration pricing are optimal. Our results provide key managerial insights that are useful to firms in their business model search and implementation.
Private Benefits of Control: An International Comparison

We estimate private benefits of control in 39 countries using 393 controlling blocks sales. On average the value of control is 14 percent, but in some countries can be as low as ‐4 percent, in others as high a +65 percent. As predicted by theory, higher private benefits of control are associated with less developed capital markets, more concentrated ownership, and more privately negotiated privatizations. We also analyze what institutions are most important in curbing private benefits. We find evidence for both legal and extra-legal mechanisms. In a multivariate analysis, however, media pressure and tax enforcement seem to be the dominating factors. THE BENEFITS OF CONTROL OVER corporate resources play a central role in modern thinking about finance and corporate governance. From a modeling device (Grossman and Hart (1980)) the idea of private benefits of control has become a centerpiece of the recent literature in corporate finance, both theoretical and empirical. In fact, the main focus of the literature on investor protection and its role in the development of financial markets (La Porta, Lopez-de-Salines, and Shleifer (2000)) is on the amount of private benefits that controlling shareholders extract from companies they run. In spite of the importance of this concept, there are remarkably few estimates of how big these private benefits are, even fewer attempts to document empirically what determines their size, and no direct evidence of their impact on financial development. All of the evidence on this latter point is indirect, based on the (reasonable) assumption that better protection of minority shareholders is correlated with higher financial development via its curbing of private benefits of control (La Porta et al. (1997)). The lack of evidence is no accident. By their very nature, private benefits of control are difficult to observe and even more difficult to quantify in a reliable
On Financial Accounting Measurement: A Reconsideration Of SFAC 5 By The FASB Is Needed

This paper attempts to reinforce by means of social theory the procedure and property (attribute) of financial accounting measurement advanced by Salvary (1985, 1989, 1992). The procedure entails estimating the amount of cash flows derivable form existing investment projects; and the measurement property (attribute) is identified as recoverable cost. The cash-in and cash-out principle establishes financial capital maintenance as the appropriate capital maintenance concept to be followed in the measurement of periodic income. An analogy between a bank savings account and an equity security is used to identify the measurement property (attribute) and validate the additivity of financial accounting numbers. Problems with the monetarist model were used to demonstrate the appropriateness (stability) of the measurement scale (monetary unit). The logical analysis developed in this paper makes a compelling case for a reconsideration of Statement of Financial Accounting Concept No. 5 by the FASB.
Expanding the Circle of Membership by Reconstructing the Alien: Lessons from Social Psychology and the Promise Enforcement Cases

Recent legal scholarship suggests that the Supreme Court's decisions on immigrants' rights favor conceptions of membership over personhood. Federal courts are often reluctant to recognize the personal rights claims of noncitizens because they are not members of the United States. Professor Michael Scaperlanda argues that because the courts have left the protection of noncitizens' rights in the hands of Congress and, therefore, its constituents, U.S. citizens must engage in a serious dialogue regarding membership in this polity while considering the importance of constitutional principles of personhood. This Article takes up Scaperlanda's challenge. Borrowing from recent research in social psychology, this Article contends that "We the People" can better inform our ideas of polity membership by resisting existing invidious stereotypes of the noncitizen as the "alien" and by embracing instead the notion of equal personhood. This Article also urges citizens to demand the repeal of the "court-stripping" provisions of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. These provisions encourage the federal government to renege on promises not to deport noncitizen defendants in exchange for assistance in criminal prosecutions. Without fear of judicial review, the government is free to enter into cooperation agreements with noncitizen defendants and then breach those agreements with impunity so as to achieve its dual goals of criminal prosecution and deportation. The federal government should not be allowed to break its promises, especially when the goal of the agreement with the noncitizen is to facilitate a criminal prosecution, not to impact immigration law.
Random Scenario Forecasts Versus Stochastic Forecasts

Summary Probabilistic population forecasts are useful because they describe uncertainty in a quantitatively useful way. One approach (that we call LT) uses historical data to estimate stochastic models (e.g., a time series model) of vital rates, and then makes forecasts. Another (we call it RS) began as a kind of randomized scenario: we consider its simplest variant, in which expert opinion is used to make probability distributions for terminal vital rates, and smooth trajectories are followed over time. We use analysis and examples to show several key differences between these methods: serial correlations in the forecast are much smaller in LT; the variance in LT models of vital rates (especially fertility) is much higher than in RS models that are based on official expert scenarios; trajectories in LT are much more irregular than in RS; probability intervals in LT tend to widen faster over forecast time. Newer versions of RS have been developed that reduce or eliminate some of these differences. Resume Les projections de population probabilistes sont utiles car leur facon de representer l'incertitude est utilisable quantitativement. Une approche possible (que nous appellerons LT) consiste a utiliser des donnees historiques pour estimer de modeles stochastiques (c'est a dire des modelisations en series temporelles) des taux demographiques et, a partir de la, faire des previsions. Une autre approche (que nous appellerons RS) trouve sa source dans l'utilisation de sorte de scenarios aleatoires. Nous considerons ici sa variante la plus simple, dans laquelle on se sert de l'opinion d'experts pour construire une distribution de probabilite des taux demographiques finaux, puis on projette une trajectoire lissee dans le temps. Au moyen d'arguments analytiques et d'exemples, nous montrons plusieurs differences importantes entre ces methodes: les correlations au sein des series lors des previsions sont bien plus faibles dans les modeles LT; la variance des taux demographiques (en particulier celle de la fertilite) est bien plus elevee dans la modelisations LT que dans les modelisations RS, qui se fondent sur les scenarios des experts publics; la trajectoire des modeles LT est bien plus irreguliere qu'avec LS; les intervalles de confiance dans les modeles LT ont tendance a augmenter plus vite au cours de la periode de prevision. De nouvelles versions des modeles RS ont ete developpees et reduisent ou eliminent certaines des differences.
Pluralistic Ignorance in Corporate Boards and Firms' Strategic Persistence in Response to Low Firm Performance:

This study examines how a social psychological bias referred to as pluralistic ignorance may occur in corporate boards and how this bias could contribute to strategic persistence in response to rel...
Y2K AND OFFSHORING: THE ROLE OF EXTERNAL ECONOMIES AND FIRM HETEROGENEITY

We construct a model of offshoring with externalities and firm heterogeneity. Due to the presence of externalities, temporary shocks like the Y2K problem can have permanent effects, i.e., they can permanently raise the extent of offshoring in an industry. Also, the initial advantage of a country as a potential host for outsourcing activities can create a lock in effect, whereby late movers have a comparative disadvantage. Furthermore, the existence of firm heterogeneity along with externalities can help explain the dynamic process of offshoring, where the most productive firms offshore first and the others follow later. Finally, we show the possibility of complementarity between two modes of offshoring: FDI and offshore outsourcing.
A new strategy to combat racial inequality in American health care delivery.

This article examines the pervasive statistical and anecdotal evidence that racial segregation and discrimination in health care has taken new forms. Replacing the "Whites Only" waiting room signs are more subtle forms of selective geographic placement, insurance cost containment mechanisms and specialty referral patterns that have resulted in highly segregated services and disparate health outcomes for minority vs. majority patients. After a comprehensive review of the literature that describes current racial disparities in health care, the paper examines not just the existence and magnitude of those disparities, but will also consider what factors have contributed to the existence of such a gap. The second section of article confirms that traditional civil rights and litigation tools have limited impact and usefulness in addressing current discriminatory patterns. Instead, the article advocates use of a new and perhaps "radical" application of the civil rights laws, using the Civil False Claims Act to bring federal lawsuits against Medicare participants who discriminate.
The Pervasive Role of Uncertainty in Tort Law: Rights and Remedies

This Essay focuses on two strands, or themes, that seem to me central to understanding the place of uncertainty in the rich history of tort law: first, from a liability (or substantive doctrinal) perspective, the tension between rules and standards; and, second, from a remedial perspective, the claims for “make whole” versus categorical damages.From a liability perspective, I begin by examining accident law from a historical vantage point, emphasizing the rules-dominant character of the system in earlier times. I then explore the heyday of standards, beginning in the mid-1960s, which is followed by what I regard as a period of equipoise extending to the present day.From a damages perspective, I contrast some of the judicial and scholarly efforts to promote categorical initiatives with the strong adherence to a “make-whole” approach to compensation in the courts. To conclude this perspective, I provide an afterword on punitive damages. A brief summary suggests that both ethical and pragmatic concerns illuminate why the tension between liability rules and standards, as well as between make-whole and categorical approaches to damages, resists full resolution.
Internet Business Practices Across the Globe: Lessons from Emerging Economies

The Internet has accelerated the capability of firms to coordinate processes and personnel across organizational and geographic boundaries, which has in turn facilitated a dramatic increase in globalization. This globalization includes the development of new multinationals from emerging economies that are challenging developed-economy firms. This paper investigates how firms use the Internet to achieve their strategic objectives, and studies how use, motivation and performance impacts differ between emerging-economy firms and developed-economy firms. We use data from a large survey of firms in 10 countries across North and South America, Europe and Asia, and complement the survey data with recent case examples drawn primarily from Fortune Global 500 firms. Our results indicate that compared with developed-economy firms, emerging-economy firms report a higher rate of Internet use to integrate processes with business partners, and a stronger motivation to use the Internet to achieve revenue growth and operational efficiency.
Modularity and Morality in the Law of Torts

Tort law presents a puzzle from an information cost point of view. Like property, its duties often avail against others generally, but unlike property it is appears not to be standardized and is more subject to judicial innovation. This essay argues that torts, like property, employs modular structures to manage the complexity of interactions between actors. Both property and torts solve the information cost problem with “in rem” rights in similar ways, by chopping up the world of interactions between parties into manageable chunks—modules—that are semi-autonomous. Instead of employing “things” to achieve modularity, tort law employs other strategies to limit information costs, by hiding information and making tort law less context-dependent than one might expect from a “law of actions.” The features of tort law emphasized by noneconomic theories of tort law—corrective justice, civil recourse, and natural rights—can be seen as managing the complexity of tort law. These include tort’s bilateral structure, the content of duties, and proximate cause. As in property, a heavy reliance in tort law on simple moral norms, which are easy to communicate and self-enforce, receives a partial explanation in terms of information costs. Economic analysis and broadly moral theories of torts turn out to be closer together at the descriptive level than is usually thought. ∗Henry E. Smith is Fessenden Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. Please send correspondence to hesmith@law.harvard.edu. For helpful comments, the author would like to thank Lisa Austin, Richard Epstein, Michael Heller, Andrew Gold, John Goldberg, Greg Keating, and participants at the Property, Tort & Private Law Theory Conference at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.
Inefficient Hiring in Entry-Level Labor Markets

Hiring inexperienced workers generates information about their abilities. If this information is public, workers obtain its benefits. If workers cannot compensate firms for hiring them, firms will hire too few inexperienced workers. I determine the effects of hiring workers and revealing more information about their abilities through a field experiment in an online marketplace. I hired 952 randomly-selected workers, giving them either detailed or coarse public evaluations. Both hiring workers and providing more detailed evaluations substantially improved workers' subsequent employment outcomes. Under plausible assumptions, the experiment's market-level benefits exceeded its cost, suggesting that some experimental workers had been inefficiently unemployed.
Evaluating Mitigation Effort: Tools and Institutions for Assessing Nationally Determined Contributions

The emerging pledge and review approach to international climate policy provides countries with substantial discretion in how they craft their intended emission mitigation contributions. The resulting heterogeneity in mitigation pledges creates a significant demand for a well-functioning transparency and review mechanism. In particular, the specific forms of intended contributions necessitate economic analysis in order to estimate the aggregate effects of these contributions, as well as to permit "apples-to-apples" comparisons of mitigation efforts. This paper discusses the tools that can inform such analyses, as well as the institutional framework needed to support climate transparency. In light of the negotiating challenges with respect to transparency, the paper describes the potential for countries to implement Living Mitigation Plans that include regular updating of domestic mitigation programs with data and analyses on their outcomes. Such Living Mitigation Plans can serve as the foundation for independent, expert review of domestic mitigation programs. Moreover, they can include the inputs necessary to assess the mitigation value of domestic mitigation efforts. Such assessments could inform the linkage of domestic mitigation policies, especially among disparately designed mitigation policies.
Market Power and Inflation

Market power exercised by firms has become central to macroeconomics. Recent theoretical work highlights the importance of the relation between market power and inflation. We examine this relation for individual firms in eleven U.S. industries. Our econometric framework exploits restrictions from dynamic theory and information from financial markets to generate quantitative evidence on the responsiveness of market power to inflation. We find that inflation usually has a positive effect on market power. This relation is heterogeneous across the eleven industries, and statistically significant positive relations are concentrated in industries with little market power.
Expropriation risk and technology.

Abstract This paper develops a unified framework to analyze the dynamics of firm investment in countries with poor legal enforcement. The firm's technology edge over the government generates endogenous property rights. Industry variation in the technology gap predicts a sectoral pecking-order of expropriations. Long-run investment distortions may be Pareto superior relative to persistent investment at the static optimum. The dynamics of investment and transfers depend on whether incentives (backloading) or efficiency (frontloading) concerns dominate at the initial division of surplus. An increase in government efficiency may reduce its welfare. The model provides a technology-driven rationale for the widespread use of conglomerate structures in emerging market countries.
A quiet ego quiets death anxiety: Humility as an existential anxiety buffer.

Five studies tested the hypothesis that a quiet ego, as exemplified by humility, would buffer death anxiety. Humility is characterized by a willingness to accept the self and life without comforting illusions, and by low levels of self-focus. As a consequence, it was expected to render mortality thoughts less threatening and less likely to evoke potentially destructive behavior patterns. In line with this reasoning, Study 1 found that people high in humility do not engage in self-serving moral disengagement following mortality reminders, whereas people low in humility do. Study 2 showed that only people low in humility respond to death reminders with increased fear of death, and established that this effect was driven uniquely by humility and not by some other related personality trait. In Study 3, a low sense of psychological entitlement decreased cultural worldview defense in response to death thoughts, whereas a high sense of entitlement tended to increase it. Study 4 demonstrated that priming humility reduces self-reported death anxiety relative to both a baseline and a pride priming condition. Finally, in Study 5, experimentally induced feelings of humility prevented mortality reminders from leading to depleted self-control. As a whole, these findings obtained from relatively diverse Internet samples illustrate that the dark side of death anxiety is brought about by a noisy ego only and not by a quiet ego, revealing self-transcendence as a sturdier, healthier anxiety buffer than self-enhancement.
Textual analysis and international financial reporting: Large sample evidence ☆

Abstract We examine annual report text for over 15,000 non-US companies from 42 countries over the period 1998–2011, focusing on the length of disclosure, presence of boilerplate, comparability with US and non-US firms, and complexity. We find that textual attributes are predictably associated with regulation and incentives for more transparent disclosure and are correlated with economic outcomes such as liquidity, institutional ownership, and analyst following. Using mandatory IFRS adoption as an exogenous shock, annual report disclosure improved in the sense that quantity of disclosure increased, boilerplate was reduced, and comparability increased relative to both US and non-US firms. Firms with the greatest improvements in financial reporting experienced the greatest improvements in economic outcomes around IFRS adoption.
A simulation of strategic decision making in situational stereotype conditions for entrepreneurial companies

Entrepreneurship is concerned with pattern recognition of situations and information by entrepreneurs. Simulation methods represent an attractive venue for exploring pattern recognition and information interpretation issues. A computerized decision-making simulation was developed and run to test hypotheses concerning interpretation of stereotypical situational cues to which new ventures are subject. Partial support is found for the existence of classes of situations to which entrepreneurs and managers respond. Stereotypical views of situations may develop quickly and be acted on easily in critical decision making. Future simulation research on cognition issues in entrepreneurship may enable entrepreneurs to better learn how to learn.
Elections and Discretionary Accruals: Evidence from 2004

We examine the accrual choices of outsourcing firms with links to U.S. congressional candidates during the 2004 elections, when corporate outsourcing was a major campaign issue. We find that politically connected firms with more extensive outsourcing activities have more income-decreasing discretionary accruals. Further, relative to adjacent periods, the evidence is concentrated in the two calendar quarters immediately preceding the 2004 election, consistent with heightened incentives for firms to manage earnings during the election season. The incentives can be attributed to donor firms' concerns about the potentially negative consequences of scrutiny over outsourcing for themselves and for their affiliated candidates.
A Psychological Critique of the Assumptions Underlying the Law of Evidentiary Privileges: Insights from the Literature on Self-Disclosure

The modern law of privileges rests on Wigmore's paradigm. One of his principal tenets was that communications privileges must be absolute in character. He based that tenet on the instrumental rationale for recognizing privileges. Wigmore assumed that but for the assurance of confidentiality provided by an absolute privilege, the typical layperson such as a client would be unwilling to confer and confide in professionals such as attorneys. In the past few decades, there have been several empirical studies of the willingness of clients and patients to make revelations to confidants such as attorneys and psychotherapists. However, to date, legal commentators have ignored the large body of literature on the psychology of self-disclosure. This article surveys that literature and attempts to identify the research findings with the most significant implications for evidentiary doctrine. Psychology paints a far more complex picture of the motivations of human beings contemplating self-disclosure than Wigmore posited. In many cases, the layperson may have such an overpowering need to disclose that there is no need to provide an absolute evidentiary privilege to remove disincentives to disclosure. However, the psychological literature also suggests that under a regime of qualified privileges, in some cases the judge should attach great weight to the layperson's need for intimate communication. In some cases, the inhibition of disclosure can not only impair the layperson's ability to resolve the legal or medical problem which prompts the consultation; worse still, there are instances in which inhibition can have serious, long-term repercussions for the layperson's physical and mental health.