cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Trust in Immigration Enforcement: State Noncooperation and Sanctuary Cities After Secure Communities

The conventional wisdom, backed by legitimacy research, is that most people obey most of the laws, most of the time. This turns out to not be the case in a study of state-local participation in immigration law enforcement. Two enforcement programs involving the use of immigration detainers, a vehicle by which the federal government (through ICE) requests that local law enforcement agencies (LEAs) detain immigrants beyond their scheduled release upon suspicion that they are removable, demonstrate the breakdown of conventional wisdom. In the five years following initiation of the Secure Communities program, a significant and growing number of states and localities have declined to cooperate with federal immigration detainer requests or enacted sanctuary policies -- ultimately leading to the demise of the Secure Communities program and a reworking of federal-local partnerships in immigration enforcement through the Priority Enforcement program that replaced it in November 2014. The balance of crime control and community trust in immigration enforcement is being reset as the political pendulum swings as Congress considers legislative reforms to curb local resistance to detainers following the killing of Kathryn Steinle in July 2015.This Essay finds that state and local non-cooperation in immigration enforcement -- a timely example of uncooperative federalism -- is influenced by attitudes toward the legitimacy of executive action -- distinct from attitudes toward the law’s legality, morality, or politics. Both cooperation and noncooperation contribute to a policymaking feedback loop in ways more complicated than existing theories of cooperative federalism and executive action presage.
Changes in bonus contracts in the post-Sarbanes–Oxley era

We examine whether the relation between earnings and bonuses changes after Sarbanes–Oxley. Theory predicts that, as the financial reporting system reduces the discretion allowed managers, firms will put more weight on earnings in compensation contracts to encourage effort. However, the increased risk imposed by Sarbanes–Oxley on executives may cause firms to temper this contracting outcome. We examine and find support for the joint hypothesis that the implementation of Sarbanes–Oxley and related reforms led to a decrease in earnings management and that firms responded by placing more weight on earnings in bonus contracts. We find no evidence that firms changed compensation contracts to compensate executives for assuming more risk.
The Neutered Parent

Despite family law’s broader recognition of nonmarital sexualities and nonmarital parental status in the past forty years, marriage has continued to shape the legal and social experiences of parents in a critical aspect of their lives — sexuality. Encompassing sexual behavior and sexual orientation, the sexuality of parents has curiously drawn little attention in legal scholarship, except in contexts the law has deemed aberrant. This Article breaks ground by widening the lens on parental sexuality to examine how the law’s conventional framing of evaluations of parental sexuality obscures the marriage-based structure of these appraisals.The law of custody and visitation, in particular, reveals a legal and social preference for that perceived as “sexually neutral” parenting, an ideal that assumes that parenting can and should occur far removed from parents’ sexuality. As I argue in this Article, family law has premised this ideal on a dichotomy of parental sexuality based on marriage and on traditional, gendered norms of parental sexuality within marriage. Parents hewing to traditional marriage-based norms of parental sexuality have been held up as embodying a “sexually neutral” baseline, pursuant to which their sexuality fails to register as problematic. By contrast, parents who have strayed from these norms — historically, sexually active heterosexual mothers and lesbian and gay parents — have tended to be perceived as “sexually salient.” The legal construction of a parent as “sexually neutral” or “sexually salient” shapes how courts assess harm in making child placement decisions and promises to influence evaluations of parental fitness across a variety of evolving family law contexts, including same-sex marriage.The dichotomization of parental sexuality based on marriage obscures the ability to assess actual harm to children. Moreover, this treatment of parental sexuality “neuters” parents. It metaphorically diminishes their sexual capacity by forcing sexually nonconforming parents to adhere to a standard of sexual neutrality that is fundamentally structured in opposition to them. Moreover, it undermines parents’ ability to achieve the laudable goal of experiencing meaningful adult-oriented parental sexuality in the context of successful parenting.
A Fool And His Money: Buying Bankrupt Stocks

Should investors buy stock in companies that are in bankruptcy but still trading on an exchange? Hardly. Two hundred eleven of the firms filing for backruptcy during 1984 - 1993 remained listed on the NYSE, the Amex, or the Nasdaq for at least one month after filing. The authors' analysis of returns on these stocks reveals that the exchanges' decision to maintain trading in such firms turns out to have been a poor one for investors. Those buying stock in these companies lost all their money in over one-third of the firms and experienced substantial losses on average, especially on Nasdaq firms.
Spatial Competition at the Intersection of the Large and Small Audit Firm Markets

SUMMARY: In this paper, we study spatial competition in the U.S. audit market while accounting for its two-tiered nature. We provide evidence on the differential impact that market share distances within and between the players in the large and small audit markets have on competition. We find that the market share distance from small audit firm competitors has a greater effect on the Big 4's audit fees than distances from other Big 4 competitors. This finding suggests that small audit firms play a significant part in the competitive landscape in local markets. Further, we find that audit fees are increasing with the distance between a small audit firm and its closest competing small audit firm while audit fees are decreasing with the distance between a small audit firm and its closest competing large audit firm. This suggests that while obtaining separation in market space from competing small audit firms reduces competitive pressure from other small audit firms, as a small audit firm gets closer to the ...
Emotional Competence, "Rational Understanding," and the Criminal Defendant

Adjudicative competence, more commonly referred to as competence to stand trial, is a highly undertheorized area of law. Though it is well established that, to be competent, a criminal defendant must have a “rational” as well as “factual” understanding of her situation, the meaning of such “rational understanding” has gone largely undefined. Given the large number of criminal prosecutions in which competence is at issue, the doctrine’s instability stands in stark contrast to its importance. This Article argues that adjudicative competence, properly understood, asks whether a criminal defendant has capacity to participate meaningfully in the host of decisions potentially required of her. Further, sound assessment of such capacity requires attention to both the cognitive and emotional influences on rational decision-making in situations of personal relevance and risk. The role of emotion has been neglected, both in traditional accounts of decision-making and in assessments of adjudicative competence, and merits particular attention. This Article explores two examples of potentially competence-threatening emotional dysfunction—severe psychiatric mood disorder and organic brain damage—either of which may interfere unreasonably with decision-relevant emotional perception, processing, and expression. Existing legal theory and forensic testing methods, which reflect a predominantly cognitive approach, do not account adequately for such dysfunction. Shifting the adjudicative competence inquiry away from a general search for “rationality” and toward a more finely-grained examination of the cognitive and emotional influences on rational decision-making processes offers our best hope for giving meaning to “rational understanding.” EMOTIONAL COMPETENCE, “RATIONAL UNDERSTANDING,” AND THE CRIMINAL DEFENDANT
Clustering and External Validity in Randomized Controlled Trials

In the literature studying randomized controlled trials (RCTs), it is often assumed that the potential outcomes of units participating in the experiment are deterministic. This assumption is unlikely to hold, as stochastic shocks may take place during the experiment. In this paper, we consider the case of an RCT with individual-level treatment assignment, and we allow for individual-level and cluster-level (e.g. village-level) shocks to affect the potential outcomes. We show that one can draw inference on two estimands: the ATE conditional on the realizations of the cluster-level shocks, using heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors; the ATE netted out of those shocks, using cluster-robust standard errors. By clustering, researchers can test if the treatment would still have had an effect, had the stochastic shocks that occurred during the experiment been different. Then, the decision to cluster or not depends on the level of external validity one would like to achieve.
Growth and Global Imbalances: The Role of Learning-by-Exporting

Rapidly growing developing economies have exported heavily and run current account surpluses. Empirical studies suggest that "learning-by-exporting" may be quantitatively large in developing countries and behind some of this dramatic growth. This paper explores if learning-by-exporting helps explain the key macroeconomic behavior of fast growing developing countries. It builds up a two country general equilibrium growth model in which a developing economy benefits from learning-by-exporting as it trades with a developed economy. As the benchmark, I consider a setup in which the policies are restricted to non-trade related ones by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and compare it to a model with "No-WTO restrictions". The optimal policies in the presence of WTO restrictions rationalize the observed current account surpluses of rapidly growing developing economies. However, if there were no WTO restrictions, the developing countries would manipulate their terms of trade rather than their current account, which improves the welfare of both developing and developed countries. This highlights the fact that terms of trade manipulation can be "win-win" in the presence of learning-by-exporting. This paper also considers a "Coordinated Policy" problem to obtain the first-best outcomes for the world. In this setup, the developing country's terms of trade deteriorate even more and it runs a greater current account deficit relative to the "No-WTO Restrictions" case.
An Anchoring and Adjustment Model of Purchase Quantity Decisions

How do consumers decide how many units to buy? Whereas prior research on individual consumers’ purchases has focused primarily on purchase incidence and brand choice, the authors focus on the psych...
Deep Networks and the Multiple Manifold Problem

We study the multiple manifold problem, a binary classification task modeled on applications in machine vision, in which a deep fully-connected neural network is trained to separate two low-dimensional submanifolds of the unit sphere. We provide an analysis of the one-dimensional case, proving for a simple manifold configuration that when the network depth L is large relative to certain geometric and statistical properties of the data, the network width n grows as a sufficiently large polynomial in L, and the number of i.i.d. samples from the manifolds is polynomial in L, randomly-initialized gradient descent rapidly learns to classify the two manifolds perfectly with high probability. Our analysis demonstrates concrete benefits of depth and width in the context of a practically-motivated model problem: the depth acts as a fitting resource, with larger depths corresponding to smoother networks that can more readily separate the class manifolds, and the width acts as a statistical resource, enabling concentration of the randomly-initialized network and its gradients. The argument centers around the "neural tangent kernel" of Jacot et al. and its role in the nonasymptotic analysis of training overparameterized neural networks; to this literature, we contribute essentially optimal rates of concentration for the neural tangent kernel of deep fully-connected ReLU networks, requiring width n≥Lpoly(d0) to achieve uniform concentration of the initial kernel over a d0-dimensional submanifold of the unit sphere Sn0−1, and a nonasymptotic framework for establishing generalization of networks trained in the "NTK regime" with structured data. The proof makes heavy use of martingale concentration to optimally treat statistical dependencies across layers of the initial random network. This approach should be of use in establishing similar results for other network architectures.
Pay Secrecy/Confidentiality Rules and the National Labor Relations Act

For many years employers have been confronted with the issue of whether to allow employees to openly discuss their pay, or instead to require employees to keep information regarding their compensation confidential. Survey data indicates that a significant sector of private sector employers in the United States have formal rules prohibiting employees from discussing their pay with others. Furthermore, survey data also suggests that a significant majority of managers would prefer to establish such rules. Interestingly, these rules continue to be quite prevalent despite the fact that they have consistently been held to be illegal under the National Labor Relations Act. This Article seeks to provide a comprehensive account of doctrinal issues related to the use of pay secrecy/confidentiality rules under the NLRA. After discussing both the use of these rules and the current legal framework under which pay secrecy rules are evaluated, we ponder about the future of PSC rules under the NLRA given current trends in the American workplace.
Reading between the lines: An empirical examination of qualitative attributes of financial analysts’ reports

Abstract This paper examines whether two qualitative attributes of financial analysts’ reports, detail and tone, are significant in explaining how the market responds to analysts’ reports, after controlling for the information contained in the reports’ quantitative summary measures. Report detail is hypothesized to reflect the level of effort expended by the analyst in preparing the report, and therefore the usefulness of their intrinsic firm value estimates. Report tone is predicted to signal the analyst’s underlying sentiment regarding the firm and may be used to assess the extent to which analysts’ conflicts of interest interfere with the mapping of firm value estimates into stock recommendations. Consistent with these hypotheses, we find that the tone of financial analyst reports contain significant information content incremental to the reports’ earnings forecasts and recommendations, and report complexity (one component of report detail) helps explain cross-sectional variation in the market’s response to the reports’ recommendations.
Young Jewish Refugees in Britain 1938/9 and 1945/6

The Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted by the League of Nations in 1924, was greeted as a major step in the field of human rights. But the rise of fascism and the extinction of the League dashed all its good intentions. The outbreak of the Second World War had tragic consequences for European children, none more so than Jewish children who, along with their Gypsy counterparts, became victims of one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever during that war. By recording their experiences, childrens' perception is opened up so that we can see beyond the dry statistics to the human and emotional side of the story, which surely is relevant where any child has been, or is, at risk. Their ordeal during the Holocaust has become a yardstick against which all other human rights abuses against children have been measured.
The Value-Relevance of Cash Flows and Accruals: The Role of Investment Opportunities

ABSTRACT: We examine the role of investment opportunities as a determinant of the relative importance of cash flows from operations (CFO) and accruals in firm valuation. We find that at low investment-opportunity levels, CFO value-relevance increases with investment opportunities. When investment opportunities are high, accrual value-relevance declines as investment opportunities increase. Consequently, earnings value-relevance first varies directly and then inversely with investment opportunities. We show that the increase in CFO value-relevance is consistent with cost differentials between internal and external financing causing CFO to be an increasingly important determinant of the realization of investment opportunities. The decline in accrual value-relevance at high investment-opportunity levels appears to be attributable to accounting measurement deficiencies.
Voluntary environmental programs in the United States : Whose interests are served?

The appeal of voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) lies in their promise to mutually serve government, industry, and environmental interests because they can reduce administrative burdens, provide flexibility to decide how to implement environmental improvements, and work toward superior environmental performance. In practice, however, one interest may be served to the exclusion of others, and this is a charge that often has been leveled at VEPs in the United States. If VEPs are used to serve some interests at the expense of others, they are likely to lose their value as alternative policy instruments. This article details a framework involving procedural, substantive, and practical tests to determine whether the common interest has been served. This assessment framework is applied to two different VEPs in the United States: the Forest Stewardship Council Certification and the Sustainable Slopes Program.
Monetary policy and alternative means of payment

Abstract This paper captures the trade-offs between alternative payment instruments where each is associated with costs and benefits. Most models of cash–credit choice assume cash is a safe non-interest-bearing asset and credit is interest-bearing but costly. Here, I consider the risk of loss from using cash resulting from theft and foregone interest earnings. I use a cash-in-advance model to analyze the channel through which monetary policy could have a positive impact on the economy by altering the incentives for cash–credit choice. The model indicates that although expansionary monetary policy increases total consumption, the resulting substitution toward credit might increase transactions cost, which may not result in improving welfare. The net effect depends on the change in transactions cost of using credit relative to the responsiveness of theft to inflation. The assumption of fixed cost of credit is crucial to these results. Calibration of the model to the US and Polish economy confirms the results.
Legal Adaptive Capacity: How Program Goals and Processes Shape Federal Land Adaptation to Climate Change

The degree to which statutory goals are pliable is likely to affect significantly the ability of an agency with regulatory or management responsibilities to achieve those objectives in the face of novel challenges or changing circumstances. This Article explores this dynamic by comparing the degree of “give” provided by the goals of the regimes governing management of the five types of federal public lands in responding to the challenges posed by climate change. It asserts that the extent of climate change adaptation in which an agency engages is influenced by a program’s legal adaptive capacity—the mutability of the goals pursued under its authorizing legal framework. Though a few scholars have explored the concept of adaptive capacity as it applies to law, most focus on the impact of procedural discretion on the ability to manage change. A comparative analysis of federal land adaptation to climate change demonstrates that a management regime’s legal adaptive capacity is influenced not only by procedural flexibility, but also by the flexibility the agency has in defining and pursuing a program’s substantive goals. Counterintuitively, for this reason, the land regimes most closely tied to resource preservation goals have generally lagged behind those with mixed conservation-commodity development mandates in preparing for climate change. Accordingly, the Article suggests ways to enhance the substantive legal adaptive capacity of land management agencies to promote ecological health in the face of climate change, and evaluates tradeoffs implicated when policymakers choose more appropriate levels of such adaptive capacity. * Professor of Law and Director, Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources, University of California, Irvine School of Law; Member Scholar, Center for Progressive Reform. ** J. B. & Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law, The George Washington University Law School; Member Scholar, Center for Progressive Reform. The authors thank Rob Fischman and Eric Biber for their thoughtful and challenging comments, and those who provided feedback at workshops held at the George Washington University Law School, the University of Tennessee, and the Northwestern University Law School. Tyler Liu, Stacey Steep, Arshawn Teymoorian, and William Yon, all of whom are J.D. graduates or prospective graduates at The George Washington University Law School, provided helpful research assistance.
Judicial Enforcement of the Establishment Clause

This paper is the author’s contribution to a roundtable conference, held in October of 2008 at Notre Dame Law School, devoted to Prof. Kent Greenawalt’s book, Religion and the Constitution: Establishment and Fairness. It is suggested that Greenawalt’s admirably context-sensitive approach to church-and-state questions might lead us to think that the best course for judges is to find (somehow) some bright-line, on-off “rules” and “tests”, constructed to identify and forbid the most obvious violations of the Religion Clause’s core (whatever that is), and to give up on -- or, perhaps, “underenforce” -- the rest.
Environmental Tax Interactions when Pollution Affects Health or Productivity

Abstract Recent studies indicate that interactions with the tax-distorted labor market increase the cost of pollution regulation. However, these studies make restrictive assumptions regarding preferences and ignore key links between pollution, human health, and labor productivity. Together, these assumptions imply that pollution does not affect labor supply. This paper develops an analytical general-equilibrium model that considers several potential benefits from reduced pollution, including improved health or productivity. It shows that these benefits affect labor supply and thus create a benefit-side tax-interaction effect that can be of the same magnitude as the familiar cost-side interaction. When reduced pollution boosts labor productivity, the effect substantially magnifies such benefits. In contrast, when pollution affects consumer health, the effect tends to diminish the benefits of reduced pollution. The paper considers only environmental regulation, but these concepts apply equally to other policies affecting productivity or health, such as research subsidies or occupational safety regulations.
The Consequences of Audit-Related Earnings Revisions

In this paper, we investigate the consequences that auditors and their clients face when earnings announced in an unaudited earnings release are subsequently revised, presumably as a result of year-end audit procedures, so that earnings as reported in the 10-K differ from earnings as previously announced. Specifically, we examine whether the likelihood of an auditor “losing the client” is greater following such revisions, and whether the likelihood of dismissal is influenced by revisions that more negatively impact earnings, that cause the client to miss important earnings benchmarks, by greater local auditor competition, or by auditor characteristics. We also examine audit pricing subsequent to audit-related earnings revisions for evidence of pricing concessions to retain the client. Finally, we examine whether client executives experience a greater likelihood of turnover following an audit-related earnings revision. Consistent with expectations, we find that auditor dismissals are more likely following audit-related earnings revisions. We also find that dismissals are more likely when revisions cause clients to miss important benchmarks and when there is greater local auditor competition. Among non-dismissing clients, we find that future audit fees are lower when the effect of the revision on earnings is more negative, consistent with auditors offering price concessions to retain clients when revisions are more displeasing. We also find a greater likelihood of future chief financial officer (CFO) turnover as the effect of the revision worsens. Our findings offer important insights into the consequences that auditors face when balancing their responsibility for high audit quality and client satisfaction, as well as into the consequences that CFOs face when releasing inflated but not fully audited earnings. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Enforcement Spillovers: Lessons from Strategic Interactions in Regulation and Product Markets

AbstractWe explore enforcement spillovers, in which sanctions at one entity influence behavior at other entities. We model spillovers arising from a regulatory channel and from a channel not previo...
The value of firms' voluntary commitment to improve transparency: The case of special segments on Euronext

Abstract This paper examines whether a firm's commitment to increase transparency affects firm value and liquidity by studying firms' voluntary decision to be listed in “special segments” created by Euronext. The empirical analysis finds positive valuation effects for firms that opted into the special segments and documents positive effects on the liquidity of these firms. In contrast, when similar market regulations are imposed on all listed firms, and the segments become unavailable, I find marketwide negative valuation effects. The findings suggest that stock exchanges can provide an effective channel that improves firms' liquidity and value; however, when a regulation with similar requirements is imposed on all firms in the market, the effect is less likely to be recognized, at least in the short term.
Regularizing Rioting: Permitting Public Protest in an Authoritarian Regime ∗

Lacking the informative feedback provided by competitive elections, an unfettered press and an active civil society, authoritarian regimes can find it difficult to identify which social groups have become dangerously discontented and to monitor lower levels of government. While a rise in public protest is often seen as a harbinger of regime collapse in such states, this paper uses a formal model and a close examination of the Chinese case to show that the informal toleration and even encouragement of small-scale, narrowly economic protests can be an effective information gathering tool, mitigating these informational problems. The analysis demonstrates that protests should be observed ∗ I am grateful to Avner Greif, John McMillan, Kevin O’Brien, Jean Oi, Robert Powell, Andrzej Skrzypacz, and Steven Tadelis as well as other classmates and seminar participants too numerous to mention for valuable discussions and guidance at various stages of this project. Financial support from the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics at Stanford Law School and from the Center on Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies at Stanford University is gratefully acknowledged.
The Design and Effects of Monetary Policy in Sub-Saharan African Countries

Since the 1990s there have been a number of major changes in the design and conduct of monetary policy. In a globalised environment, there is greater need to achieve closer convergence of economic performance among trading partners. As a result, a number of developing countries have adopted exchange rate regimes with more flexibility, and thereby greater scope for monetary policy. Notable examples include a number of Sub-Saharan African countries moving from fixed exchange-rate regimes to more flexible regimes and the adoption of formal or informal inflation targeting regimes by some of these countries. These changes have triggered considerable debate on how monetary policy should be conducted and the effects it has on the real economy.
Short-Horizon Beta or Long-Horizon Alpha?

The authors study whether the pricing of systematic factors depends on the investment horizon over which risk is measured. Market beta and Fama–French value beta are priced when risk is measured over intermediate horizons, and liquidity beta is priced over short horizons. Alpha on a long–short portfolio formed on short-horizon liquidity beta increases monotonically as an investor’s horizon (for measuring risk) increases, making those assets more attractive to long-horizon investors. Institutional investors align their portfolios to harvest risk premiums that are important to investors with horizons different from their own.
Is Micro too Small? Microcredit vs. SME Finance

Summary Microcredit and small and medium enterprise (SME) finance are often pitched as alternative strategies to create employment opportunities in low-income communities. So far, though, little is known about how employment patterns compare. We integrate evidence from three surveys to show that, compared to Bangladeshi microcredit customers, typical SME employees in Bangladesh have more education and professional skills, and live in households that are notably less poor. SME jobs also require long work weeks, clashing with family responsibilities. The evidence from Bangladesh rejects the idea that SME finance more efficiently creates jobs for the population currently served by microcredit.
Transactions costs and vehicle currencies

Abstract Using a simple model of transactions costs in the interbank foreign exchange market and a model of vehicle currency use, the interaction between transactions costs and vehicle currency use is explored. The impact of volume on bid–ask spreads is estimated from cross-section time series data on seven currencies. Data on transactions costs and the currency denomination of trade and capital transactions are used to estimate changes in the attractiveness of using the US dollar as a vehicle between 1980 and 1987. The data suggest a modest reduction in the attractiveness and use of the dollar as a vehicle.
Overreaction and the cross-section of returns: International evidence

Abstract A number of theories have linked price momentum with price reversals. While significant empirical evidence has shown the presence of momentum in global equity returns, there have been no large-scale global studies of the subsequent long-term price reversal. We study returns from twenty-three developed countries categorized into the regions of North America, Europe, Japan, and Asia, over 1993–2014 and find evidence supporting the global presence of long-term price reversals. The positive return differential between loser stocks over the past three years and winner stocks over the past three years is economically and statistically significant. Results from independent double sorts and from Fama-MacBeth regressions show that long-term reversals remain significant after controlling for size, book-to-market equity, and momentum.
Wrongful Convictions in Canada

This article provides an overview of wrongful convictions in Canada. The first part examines the number of wrongful convictions concluding that the 40-70 known wrongful convictions are likely the tip of the iceberg given that they mostly arise in homicide and/or sexual assault cases and that a number of recently revealed cases suggests that wrongful convictions may occur in guilty plea cases. The next part uses the Donald Marshall Jr and Tammy Marquardt cases as case studies of the two main forms of overturning wrongful convictions: petitions to the federal Minister of Justice to re-open cases and out of time appeals, both with fresh evidence. The article then examines the main causes of wrongful convictions and the role that police, prosecutors, providers of forensic evidence, defence counsel and judges and juries play in wrongful convictions and the remedies that have been proposed by various public inquiries and sometimes implemented in Canada to deal with those causes. The last part of this article will examine compensation for the wrongfully convicted including the steps that Canada has taken to comply with Article 14(6) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights with respect to compensation.
DO ELECTIONS DELAY REGULATORY ACTION

This paper investigates whether elections delay regulatory action against failing financial institutions in a country with strong institutions and property rights. Exploiting the cross-sectional and time-series heterogeneity in the exogenous electoral cycles of U.S. insurance regulators and governors, we find causal evidence that regulators delay interventions before elections. The extent of the delay is larger before competitive elections and when the regulatory task is assigned to a politician (elected regulator) rather than a bureaucrat (appointed regulator). Regulatory governance mechanisms that constrain the discretion of regulators reduce the politicization of regulatory supervision. The delays induced by elections substantially increase the ultimate costs of failure.
The Path of Legal Education from Edward I to Langdell: A History of Insular Reaction

This article presents an analytic overview of key aspects in the history of legal education in England and the United States from the time of Edward I to the end of the last century. The response of lawyers and legal educators to the perceived need to protect the profession from a variety of ills and plagues is explored.
Domestic Responses to Transnational Crime: The Limits of National Law

The growth of transnational crime has given rise to an increased use of national laws to respond to this criminal activity. International lawyers and scholars routinely make two claims with regard to this trend. First, they assume that the increased use of extraterritorial domestic law is unavoidable and second, they assert that the trend is not merely inevitable, but also desirable. This essay pushes back on these understandings. While globalized crime requires a response, no compelling reason exists for why that response should be unilateral and domestic in nature, rather than multilateral and collaborative. Extraterritorial national laws are more problematic than commonly assumed. They often detract from, and can even undermine, more comprehensive, meaningful, multilateral efforts. And they risk shifting the focus away from the perpetrators and their victims, to the prosecutorial response and whether that response is legitimate and legal. It would be wise for extraterritoriality to remain exceptional, as once reflected in the foundational principles of an international system that respects and promotes territorial sovereignty. Extraterritorial laws should be used hesitantly, and not as a substitute for meaningful multilateralism.
The Right to Appeal

It is time for the Supreme Court to explicitly recognize a constitutional right to appeal. Over the last century, both the federal and state judicial systems have increasingly relied on appellate remedies to protect essential rights. In spite of the modern importance of such remedies, however, the Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to recognize a due-process right to appeal in either civil or criminal cases. Instead, it has repeated nineteenth-century dicta denying the right of appeal, and it has declined petitions for certiorari in both civil and criminal cases seeking to persuade the Court to reconsider that position. In this article, I argue that a right to appeal protects both private litigants and the justice system as a whole. First, doctrinal consistency necessitates the explicit recognition of a constitutional right to appeal — a right that the Supreme Court’s criminal and punitive-damages doctrines have already implicitly recognized. Second, the modern procedural system has developed in a way that relies on appellate remedies as part of fundamental due process. Traditional procedural safeguards — such as the jury trial and the executive clemency process — may once have sufficiently protected due process rights. In the modern era, however, these procedures have diminished at the same time that reliance on appeals has grown; as a result, if appellate remedies are removed from the procedural framework, the system as a whole cannot provide adequate due-process protection. Finally, recognizing constitutional protection for appellate rights would also express a normative view, promoting the values of institutional legitimacy, respect for individual dignity, predictability, and accuracy. Appellate procedure has earned a place in our contemporary understanding of due process; it is time to recognize its role as a fundamental element of fair judicial practice.
Paths of Recruitment: Rational Social Prospecting in Petition Canvassing

Petition canvassers are political recruiters. Building upon the rational prospector model, we theorize that rational recruiting strategies are dynamic (Bayesian and time-conscious), spatial (constrained by geography) and social (conditioned on relations between canvasser and prospect). Our theory predicts that canvassers will exhibit homophily in their canvassing preferences and will alternate between "door- to-door” and “attractor” (working in a central location) strategies based upon systematic geographical variation. They will adjust their strategies midstream (mid-petition) based upon experience. Introducing methods to analyze canvassing data, we test these hypotheses on geocoded signatory lists from two petition drives — a 2005-2006 anti-Iraq War initiative in Wisconsin and an 1839 antislavery campaign in New York City. Canvassers in these campaigns exhibited homophily to the point of following geographically and politically “inefficient” paths. In the aggregate, these patterns may exacerbate political inequality, limiting political involvement of the poorer and less educated.
Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space

GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities or subnational regions. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. We develop a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, under the assumption that measurement error in using observed light as an indicator of income is uncorrelated with measurement error in national income accounts. For countries with good national income accounts data, information on growth of lights is of marginal value in estimating the true growth rate of income, while for countries with the worst national income accounts, the optimal estimate of true income growth is a composite with roughly equal weights. Among poor-data countries, our new estimate of average annual growth differs by as much as 3 percentage points from official data. Lights data also allow for measurement of income growth in sub- and supranational regions. As an application, we examine growth in Sub Saharan African regions over the last 17 years. We find that real incomes in non-coastal areas have grown faster by 1/3 of an annual percentage point than coastal areas; non-malarial areas have grown faster than malarial ones by 1/3 to 2/3 annual percent points; and primate city regions have grown no faster than hinterland areas. Such applications point toward a research program in which "empirical growth" need no longer be synonymous with "national income accounts."
Starving the Beast: Using Tax Policy and Governmental Budgeting to Drive Social Policy

ABSTRACT: This study explores the philosophical and theoretical bases underlying U.S. tax and social policy for over 25 years in order to develop a comprehensive framework from which to evaluate the intended and actual effects on wealth distribution and social policy overall. The framework provides a basis for understanding the overarching social agenda of neoconservative leadership as it advocates what has become known as Starve the Beast (STB). The STB strategy focuses on altering taxation structures in order to facilitate desired reallocations in government budgets to effect change in social policy. This study explores the roots of STB beginning with the political philosophy of Leo Strauss, followed by the adaptation of Strauss's philosophy by Irving Kristol (the godfather of neoconservatism) in establishing the basic tenets of neoconservative political theory, and the marriage of neoconservatism with supply‐side economics to increase popular support. Through this anthropological study, 11 propositions...
High-precision measurements of half‐lives for 69Ge, 73Se, 83Sr, 85mSr, and 63Zn radionuclides relevant to the astrophysical p-process via photoactivation at the Madison Accelerator Laboratory

The ground state half-lives of 69Ge, 73Se, 83Sr, 63Zn, and the half-life of the 1/2− isomer in 85Sr have been measured with high precision using the photoactivation technique at an unconventional bremsstrahlung facility that features a repurposed medical electron linear accelerator. The γ-ray activity was counted over about 6 half-lives with a high-purity germanium detector, enclosed into an ultra low-background lead shield. The measured half-lives are: T1/2(69Ge) = 38.82 ± 0.07 (stat) ± 0.06 (sys) h; T1/2(73Se) = 7.18 ± 0.02 (stat) ± 0.004 (sys) h; T1/2(83Sr) = 31.87 ± 1.16 (stat) ± 0.42 (sys) h; T1/2(85mSr) = 68.24 ± 0.84 (stat) ± 0.11 (sys) min; T1/2(63Zn) = 38.71 ± 0.25 (stat) ± 0.10 (sys) min. These high-precision half-life measurements will contribute to a more accurate determination of corresponding ground-state photoneutron reaction rates, which are part of a broader effort of constraining statistical nuclear models needed to calculate stellar nuclear reaction rates relevant for the astrophysical p-process nucleosynthesis.
Remarks on Executive Action and Immigration Reform

First, I would like to thank Professor Avidan Cover for inviting me to speak on this panel and to the law students, faculty, and staff who organized this conference. It is an honor to be on such a distinguished panel and also to be in Ohio (more on that later). I will use my time to place the President’s executive actions on immigration last November into a larger context by providing a brief history of prosecutorial discretion in immigration cases. I will also describe how law students at Penn State Law School used the President’s announcement of executive actions as a platform for local change in our community. Last November, President Obama announced a line of executive actions on immigration, the most controversial of which include an update to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program (a program originated in 2012) and a new program for qualifying parents of children in a permanent legal status known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Legal Residents
ON CATEGORIES O FOR QUANTIZED SYMPLECTIC RESOLUTIONS

In this paper we study categories O over quantizations of symplectic res- olutions admitting Hamiltonian tori actions with finitely many fixed points. In this generality, these categories were introduced by Braden, Licata, Proudfoot and Webster. We establish a family of standardly stratified structures (in the sense of the author and Webster) on these categories O. We use these structures to study shuffling functors of Braden, Licata, Proudfoot and Webster (called cross-walling functors in this paper). Most importantly, we prove that all cross-walling functors are derived equivalences that define an action of the Deligne groupoid of a suitable real hyperplane arrangement.
Zero-Coupon Yields and the Cross-Section of Bond Prices

I estimate a dynamic term-structure model with time-varying risk premia on a panel of Treasury coupon bonds, without relying on an interpolated zero-coupon yield curve or a selection of maturities. The model implies that coupon-bond prices are linear functions of latent factors. I use the model to quantify the large deviations between the prices of bonds older and younger than 15 years during the financial crisis. I show that prices of risk estimated from short-horizon vector autoregressions of latent factors lead to biased forecasts of long-horizon holding-period returns; prices of risk estimated on realized holding-period returns lead to better forecasts.
Tridiagonal pairs of q-Racah type and the q-tetrahedron algebra

Abstract Let F denote a field, and let V denote a vector space over F with finite positive dimension. We consider an ordered pair of F -linear maps A : V → V and A ⁎ : V → V such that (i) each of A , A ⁎ is diagonalizable; (ii) there exists an ordering { V i } i = 0 d of the eigenspaces of A such that A ⁎ V i ⊆ V i − 1 + V i + V i + 1 for 0 ≤ i ≤ d , where V − 1 = 0 and V d + 1 = 0 ; (iii) there exists an ordering { V i ⁎ } i = 0 δ of the eigenspaces of A ⁎ such that A V i ⁎ ⊆ V i − 1 ⁎ + V i ⁎ + V i + 1 ⁎ for 0 ≤ i ≤ δ , where V − 1 ⁎ = 0 and V δ + 1 ⁎ = 0 ; (iv) there does not exist a subspace U of V such that A U ⊆ U , A ⁎ U ⊆ U , U ≠ 0 , U ≠ V . We call such a pair a tridiagonal pair on V. We assume that A , A ⁎ belongs to a family of tridiagonal pairs said to have q-Racah type. There is an infinite-dimensional algebra ⊠ q called the q-tetrahedron algebra; it is generated by four copies of U q ( sl 2 ) that are related in a certain way. Using A , A ⁎ we construct two ⊠ q -module structures on V. In this construction the two main ingredients are the double lowering map ψ : V → V due to Sarah Bockting-Conrad, and a certain invertible map W : V → V motivated by the spin model concept due to V. F. R. Jones.
Pan-Cancer Drivers Are Recurrent Transcriptional Regulatory Heterogeneities in Early-Stage Luminal Breast Cancer.

The heterogeneous composition of solid tumors is known to impact disease progression and response to therapy. Malignant cells coexist in different regulatory states that can be accessed transcriptomically by single-cell RNA sequencing, but these methods have many caveats related to sensitivity, noise, and sample handling. We revised a statistical fluctuation analysis called stochastic profiling to combine with 10-cell RNA sequencing, which was designed for laser-capture microdissection (LCM) and extended here for immuno-LCM. When applied to a cohort of late-onset, early-stage luminal breast cancers, the integrated approach identified thousands of candidate regulatory heterogeneities. Intersecting the candidates from different tumors yielded a relatively stable set of 710 recurrent heterogeneously expressed genes (RHEG) that were significantly variable in >50% of patients. RHEGs were not strongly confounded by dissociation artifacts, cell cycle oscillations, or driving mutations for breast cancer. Rather, RHEGs were enriched for epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition genes and, unexpectedly, the latest pan-cancer assembly of driver genes across cancer types other than breast. These findings indicate that heterogeneous transcriptional regulation conceivably provides a faster, reversible mechanism for malignant cells to evaluate the effects of potential oncogenes or tumor suppressors on cancer hallmarks.