cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Preemption and Regulatory Failure

Daily front-page stories recounting the failure of defibrillators, pacemakers, heart stents and infusion pumps have raised questions about the adequacy of FDA regulation of medical devices. At the same time, lower courts are struggling to apply the Supreme Court's ruling in Medtronic, Inc. v. Lohr to determine the preemptive reach of the Medical Device Amendments ("MDA"). This article explores the repercussions of Medtronic and argues that Congress' use of words like "requirements" in regulatory statutes should be seen as references to positive state law only, and should not be read, absent an explicit command by Congress, to subsume state law damage actions. The lower courts' confusion over Medtronic's preemption rule may have been sown by the complexity of the opinion itself. Fairly read, Medtronic's preemption rule is narrow, requiring specific and conflicting requirements for a device imposed by both state and federal law. General tort duties do not trigger preemption because they do not impose requirements specific to a given device. The article also explores the Executive Branch's current efforts to push its tort reform agenda by pressing broad preemption arguments in private tort litigation. The article argues that courts should be wary of such efforts and suggests that, by working to shield industry from tort liability, the Administration has given the public reason to question whether the FDA is serving the interests of the public or the industry it regulates. Finally, the article argues that preemption claims are an effort to shed an important source of market discipline - the threat of liability for visiting unjustifiable harm on others - a discipline that regulation cannot itself provide. Judges reviewing preemption claims should evaluate industry's preemption claims in light of the overall regulatory and liability context. Medical devices are an illustration of the inadequacy of relying on regulation alone. The MDA was passed in response to several notorious medical device failures, failures which were brought to light through product liability litigation. Since the MDA became law, the medical device industry has been extensively regulated by the FDA. But the FDA alone cannot exert sufficient discipline on the marketplace to ensure an adequate margin of safety for medical devices, a fact that the agency, at least until recently, itself acknowledged.
Predicting Erroneous Convictions

The last thirty years have seen an enormous increase not only in the exonerations of innocent defendants but also academic scholarship on erroneous convictions. This literature has identified a number of common factors that appear frequently in erroneous conviction cases, including forensic error, prosecutorial misconduct, false confessions, and eyewitness misidentification. However, without a comparison or control group of cases, researchers risk labeling these factors as “causes” of erroneous convictions when they may be merely correlates. This article reports results from the first large scale empirical research project to compare wrongful convictions with other innocence cases in which the defendant escaped conviction (so-called “near misses”). Employing statistical methods and an expert panel, the research helps us to understand how the criminal justice system identifies innocent defendants in order to prevent erroneous convictions. In another first, the research secured the cooperation of practitioners from multiple sides of the criminal justice system, including the national Innocence Project, the Police Foundation, the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, and the National District Attorneys Association. The results highlight ten factors that distinguish wrongful convictions from near misses, but the larger story is one of system failure in which the protections of the criminal justice system operate in a counterintuitive manner. The article closes with a series of policy reforms to address these failings.
Beer Advertising and Marketing Update: Structure, Conduct, and Social Costs

Beer advertising is a topic that has frequently attracted the attention of industrial organization economists. This update reviews major events, data trends, and research for each of three issues: (1) the importance of advertising and product differentiation for structural change in the brewing industry; (2) the manner and extent to which brewers can strategically alter market shares using advertising; and (3) the social costs of beer advertising and marketing, including advertising bans, targeting of underage youth, and recent changes in the three-tier system of alcohol distribution. Major legal decisions pertaining to commercial speech and other regulations also are discussed.
Home Bias and Local Contagion: Evidence from Funds of Hedge Funds

Our paper analyzes the geographical preferences of hedge fund investors and the implication of these preferences for hedge fund performance. We find that funds of hedge funds overweigh their investments in hedge funds located in the same geographical areas and that funds with a stronger local bias exhibit superior performance. Local bias also gives rise to excess flow comovement and extreme return clustering within geographic areas. Overall, our results suggest that while funds of funds benefit from local advantages, their local bias also creates market segmentation that can destabilize the underlying hedge funds.
The medium term schooling and health effects of low birth weight: Evidence from siblings

Abstract Research has shown that low birth weight is linked to infant mortality as well as longer term outcomes. This paper examines the medium term outcomes that may link low birth weight to adult disadvantage using a national longitudinal sample with a large sample of siblings (Add Health). Results show strong effects on several educational outcomes, including early grade repetition, receipt of special education services, and reports of a learning disability. Results for longer term outcomes are suggestive, though less robust and small in magnitude. Overall, the results suggest that medium term educational disadvantages associated with low birth weight are not driven by family level unobservables and do not accumulate into large long-term disadvantage.
Performance Management in Government Internal Audits: Critical Success Factors

This study investigates the factors that impact successful performance management in government internal audit units. Studies show that besides formal compliance with statutory and administrative mandates such as compilation and reporting, public sector performance measures are not utilized for managerial decision making, budgetary allocation and accountability. The National Performance Management Advisory Commission has identified in the Performance Management Framework for State and Local Government, activities that constitute key factors for sustaining performance management. Using 2012 benchmarking data from the Association of Local Government Auditors, this study analyzed the extent to which the uses of government internal audit performance reports, as well as audit performance of the activities identified as key factors in the above-mentioned framework, impact successful audit performance management. Results show that successful performance management is a function of audit oversight body’s commitment, audit staff accountability, availability of adequate resources, as well as the use of audit performance report to monitor achievement against performance objectives, and to coordinate efforts within government. The results also generally confirm both the literature on the low utilization of performance measures and many key factors outlined in the performance management framework.
The Dynamics of Location in Home Price

It is well established that house prices are dynamic. It is also axiomatic that location influences such selling prices, motivating our objective of incorporating spatial information in explaining the evolution of house prices over time. In this paper, we propose a rich class of spatio-temporal models under which each property is point referenced and its associated selling price modeled through a collection of temporally indexed spatial processes. Such modeling includes and extends all house price index models currently in the literature, and furthermore permits distinction between the effects of time and location. We study single family residential sales in two distinct submarkets of a metropolitan area and further categorize the data into single- and multiple-transaction observations. We find the spatial component is very important in explaining house price. Moreover, the relative homogeneity of homes within the submarket and the frequency with which homes sell affects the pattern of variation across space and time. Differences between single and repeat sale data are evident. The methodology is applicable to more general capital asset pricing when location is anticipated to be influential.
Evidence on differences between recognition and disclosure: A comparison of inputs to estimate fair values of employee stock options

I investigate reliability differences across recognition and disclosure regimes to shed light on differing incentives and reporting of employee stock option (ESO) fair values. I compare ESO fair values based on firm-reported inputs with ESO fair values based on benchmark inputs, estimated following authoritative guidance. On average, I find opportunism increases with recognition as compared with disclosure, and that it is associated with incentives to manage earnings. Despite the increase in opportunism, I find that accuracy does not decline for recognizers, and that accuracy differs across voluntary and mandatory recognition.
The relationship between team autonomy and new product development performance under different levels of technological turbulence

Abstract Operations management researchers have frequently suggested that autonomy can motivate teams to actively and flexibly adapt to fast-changing environments, fostering innovation and creative problem solving. However, empirical studies have not consistently supported the benefits of team autonomy. We articulate the behavioral and mechanistic effects of team autonomy by integrating operations management and behavioral literatures. Further, we view team autonomy as a bipolar factor and argue that both the behavioral and mechanistic effects of team autonomy on operational outcomes are non-linear. Drawing on information processing theory, we propose that the benefits of team autonomy depend on the degree of technological turbulence. A study of 212 new product development projects supports these propositions. Specifically, the relationship between team autonomy and operational outcomes is ∩-shaped in technologically turbulent environments and U-shaped in technologically stable environments. Further, operational outcomes mediate the relationships between team autonomy and product success. We discuss the theoretical implications regarding new product development, operations management, the bipolarity of autonomy, and information-processing theory.
If looks could sell: Moderation and mediation of the attractiveness effect on salesperson performance

Abstract This study empirically investigates the effect of perceived salesperson attractiveness on actual salesperson performance, focusing first on the moderating effect of length of the buyer–salesperson relationship and then on the mediating effects of perceived communication ability, likeability, expertise, and trustworthiness on the attractiveness effect. A sample of 339 physicians was surveyed to obtain their evaluations of pharmaceutical company sales representatives' attractiveness as well as their perceptions of the mediators. Actual brand-by-brand market share data of the subject physicians' prescriptions was collected as the dependent variable. The results showed that perceived salesperson attractiveness had a significant positive effect on salesperson performance, but the effect was found to diminish as the length of the salesperson–customer relationship increased. Three of the four proposed mediators were found to partially mediate the effect of attractiveness on sales performance.
Liquidity provision in a limit order book without adverse selection

Abstract In this paper, we develop a dynamic model of a limit order market populated with liquidity traders who have only private values. We characterize and analyze the equilibrium order placement strategies of traders and the conditional execution probabilities of limit orders as a function of traders’ liquidity demand and the state of the limit order book. We solve for the equilibrium of the model numerically, and analyze its properties by performing comparative dynamics analysis. Our analysis shows that changes in the steady state of the limit order book and optimal order placement strategies reflect corresponding changes in the trade-off between order execution risk and the size of potential trading gains. The equilibrium order flow depends on the current state of the limit order book since a trader's optimal trading strategy is largely affected by the time and price priorities of the existing limit orders in the book. We demonstrate how changes in the dispersion of traders’ private values affect optimal trading strategies and conditional execution probabilities of limit orders. Our main result is that the dispersion in private values across traders has a significant impact on the stationary state of the equilibrium limit order book and the average bid–ask spread. A wider distribution of private values leads to more order placement at prices away from the consensus value, and therefore, to a larger bid–ask spread. Further, our numerical simulations show that extending the life span of limit orders reduces the average bid–ask spread observed in equilibrium. Finally, we find that the equilibrium percentage of market order submissions is also increasing in the dispersion in liquidity traders’ private values.
Consenting Adults? Why Women Who Submit to Supervisory Sexual Harassment are Faring Better in Court than Those Who Say No…And Why They Shouldn’t

Today, as a sexual harassment plaintiff who failed to report harassment before bringing suit, you likely will fare better under the law if you submitted to your harasser and engaged in relations with him, than you would if you had passively resisted until you were driven out of your employment. This Article examines the law’s illogical preference for plaintiffs who acquiesced to the propositions of their supervisors over those who resisted harassment but nonetheless failed to report it. It explores the roots of such a preference in society, as well as its consequences. Ultimately, this Article asks critical questions that have not been asked before: why does the law view a victim’s failure to report harassment for almost any reason as a conscious choice whose consequences will almost invariably prove fatal to her legal claim, but view a plaintiff’s submission to her supervisor in order to retain her job as presumptively coerced? Is there a subconscious desire on the part of those crafting the law to alleviate from responsibility or to somehow “rescue” women deemed too powerless to resist the influence and allure of a male boss? How and why should outward indices of consent be discounted when a plaintiff alleges that she engaged in relations with her boss to maintain her status quo at work or to procure a promotion or a raise? This Article proposes that “the romance of patriarchal power” fuels not only the way in which victims respond to harassment, but also the way in which the law has responded to harassment claims. A woman in the workplace continually combats the culturally-pervasive notion that if she is lucky, she will somehow be “discovered,” “chosen,” or “rescued” by a powerful man. Why then, is anyone surprised that the law cannot resist swooping in to identify, insulate, and “rescue” a woman who has already identified herself as a victim and who has, more importantly, already compromised herself by buying into the fantasy so wholly that she was actually intimate with the man identified as her victimizer? In most cases, one’s failure to report harassment is no less coerced or constrained by financial and professional motivations than is one’s acquiescence to a supervisor’s advances. Just as a plaintiff can provide her employer with notice of her harassment to avoid further harm, so may a plaintiff stave off injury by reporting an advance before choosing to submit to it. The law should not infantilize women by treating certain plaintiffs as too compromised to function as accountable adults, while holding virtually all women who fail to report harassment to often super-human standards of care, courage, and wisdom.
IP Things as Boundary Objects: The Case of the Copyright Work

The goal of this article is to initiate the exploration of the meanings and functions of the things of intellectual property: the work of authorship (or copyright work) in copyright, the invention in patent, and the mark and the sign in trademark. The article focuses firstly on the example of copyright work. Relevant challenges are both technological and conceptual, because these things blend the material and the immaterial. Works are neither as clearly defined nor as clearly limited as copyright law often suggests they are. To explain and justify that proposition, the article borrows from information science literature exploring boundary objects, which are stable physical and intangible things that align distinct but overlapping communities of practice in flexible ways, via interpretive openness. The article shows that the meanings of the work in copyright law can be unified conceptually in the sense that the work operates as a boundary object across a number of different legal and cultural divides. This view of the work clarifies the distinct status of relevant communities and practices in copyright but also bridges them in copyright’s construction and governance of culture. None of the boundaries represented in these boundary objects is fixed or impermeable. Their very dynamic and sometimes porous character is precisely the governance role illuminated here.
Mandatory Steroid Testing of High School Athletes: A Synthesis of State Initiatives and Federal Constitutional Rights

In an effort to protect schoolchildren from sacrificing their health for steroid induced athletic grandeur, some states have experimented with laws implementing suspicionless drug testing of student athletes. These laws leave open several avenues for legal challenges to be brought through the prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure found in the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Such drug testing laws, both current and future, should align the policy goals of the initiatives with the constitutional framework of the United States Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence as it specifically relates to suspicionless drug testing of schoolchildren. To assist those interested in such initiatives, the authors have attempted to synthesize the state initiatives with the federal constitutional restraints upon suspicionless searches conducted by public school officials.
Can Central Banks Go Broke

Central banks can go broke and have done so, although mainly in developing countries. The conventional balance sheet of the central bank is uninformative about the financial resources it has at its disposal and about its ability to act as an effective lender of last resort and market marker of last resort. As long as central banks don’t have significant foreign exchange-denominated liabilities or index-linked liabilities, it will always be possible for the central bank to ensure its solvency though monetary issuance (seigniorage). However, the scale of the recourse to seigniorage required to safeguard central bank solvency may undermine price stability. In addition, there are limits to the amount of real resources the central bank can appropriate by increasing the issuance of nominal base money. For both these reasons, it may be desirable for the Treasury to recapitalise the central bank should the central bank suffer a major capital loss as a result of its lender of last resort and market maker of last resort activities. The fiscal authorities of the Euro Area should as a matter of urgency agree on a formula for dividing the fiscal burden of recapitalising the European Central Bank/Eurosystem, should the need arise.
Customer-Base Concentration and Inventory Efficiencies: Evidence from the Manufacturing Sector

What is the link between customer-base concentration and inventory efficiencies in the manufacturing sector? Using hand-collected data from 10-K Filings, we find that manufacturers with more concentrated customer bases hold fewer inventories for less time and are less likely to end up with excess inventories, as indicated by the lower likelihood and magnitude of inventory write-downs and reversals. Using disaggregated inventory disclosures, we find that inventory efficiencies primarily flow through the finished goods inventory account, while raw material efficiencies are offset by higher work-in-process holdings and longer work-in-process cycles. In additional analysis, we document a valuation premium for more concentrated manufacturers after controlling for other firm characteristics, including default risk and cost of capital estimates. We conclude that investors trade off the costs and benefits of relationships with a limited number of major customers and, on balance, consider customer-base concentration as a net positive for firm valuation. Overall, our study adds to interdisciplinary research in accounting and operations management by shedding new light on the relevance of major customer disclosures for fundamental analysis and valuation in the manufacturing sector.
The Price of Victory: Political Triumphs and Judicial Protection in the Gay Rights Movement

A widely held conception of the federal courts is that they are supposed to protect the politically powerless and vulnerable, particularly from state predations. The famous Footnote Four of United States v Carolene Products Co first established the principle that courts should pay special attention to the claims of "discrete and insular minorities."2 This standard has grown to become an important part of the judiciary's heightened scrutiny analysisa part that this Comment argues should be largely abandoned. To be sure, the logic is compelling: heightened scrutiny should be accorded only to groups who cannot protect themselves in the political process. Once they begin flexing political muscle, courts ought to step aside and let the democratic system take the reins. But this paradigm leaves many minority groups in a perplexing paradox. Since truly powerless groups do not typically receive judicial protections, a vulnerable social group must show political power in order to gain the attention of the courts. But, by showing this power, vulnerable groups simultaneously give the judiciary a doctrinal excuse to reject their claims. The history of gay rights illustrates the problem. Though courts can nearly uniformly point to an array of antidiscrimination laws, policies, and principles demonstrating that gays and lesbians possess at least some political clout, they use this information quite inconsistently. Some cite it as evidence of evolving attitudes toward gays and lesbians, a signal that discriminatory practices are wrong and must be abandoned. Others showcase it as proof that gays and lesbians are adequately heard in the democratic arena and thus do not need special judicial protection. But this debate proceeds in the shadow of the broader history of gay rights litigationone that unambiguously shows that without some political influence, gays and lesbians enjoyed no judicial protection at all. The narrative of judges protecting the powerless not only enjoys weak historical grounding, but it also allows
Surrounding Embryos: Biology, Ideology and Politics

This article considers several parameters of the late twentieth and early twenty-first-century debate in the U.S. about ethics, politics, science, and ideology (popularly referred to as the "culture wars"). The article focuses, in particular, on shifting understandings of the embryo. The article reviews developments in science (especially the advent of stem-cell research and cloning) that have affected understandings of embryo, the history of debate about abortion in the U.S., and the place of discourse about abortion in a more far-reaching social debate about family, personal relationships, and the scope of personhood in the U.S.
Equity Incentives and Internal Control Weaknesses

In this study, we examine whether the monetary incentives associated with equity ownership (broadly defined to include stock and stock options) induce managers to maintain strong internal controls. Supporting the notion that equity ownership provides management incentive to strengthen the company's internal controls we find that the likelihood of a material weakness in internal control decreases with increases in equity incentives. This result holds for both traditional regression analysis, as well as analysis conducted using propensity score matching. Further analysis suggests that these results are more closely related to company-level internal control problems, are more strongly associated with incentives provided by restricted equity, and are more highly correlated with CFO than CEO incentives.
Bridging Bisexual Erasure in LGBT-Rights Discourse and Litigation

LGBT rights are at the forefront of current legal news, with "gay marriage" and other "gay" issues visible beyond dispute in social and legal discourse in the 21st Century. Less visible are the bisexuals who are supposedly encompassed by the umbrella phrase "LGBT" and by LGBT-rights litigation, but who are often left out of LGBT-right discourse entirely. This article examines the problem of bisexual invisibility and erasure within LGBT-rights litigation and legal discourse. The article surveys the bisexual erasure legal discourse to date, and examines the causes of bisexual erasure and its harmful consequences for bisexuals, the broader LGBT community, and jurisprudential integrity as a whole. This article contributes to the bisexual erasure discourse through a unique examination of bisexual erasure through a survey of relevant terminology in LGBT-rights cases, including and beyond recent same-sex marriage litigation. The study documents an almost complete systemic erasure of bisexuals in briefings and opinions, including an absence of any mention of bisexuals by majority opinions in cases where the briefings have set a tone of bi erasure by arguing alternatively for "gay and lesbian" rights, "gay marriage," or "same-sex marriage," while completely omitting reference to bisexuals. In addition to documenting the absence of bisexuals in litigation documents (despite the actual presence of bisexuals as litigants), this article compiles anecdotal evidence of bisexual erasure by attorneys, courts, and the media. The time is overdue for more widespread inclusion of bisexuality in LGBT-rights discourse and litigation. Increased bisexual inclusion can provide a bridge toward more meaningful, holistic, and accurate discourse on the rights of disenfranchised sexual minorities in this country. The tide may finally be turning toward increased bisexual inclusion, however, as some courts and LGBT organizations have employed more inclusive terminology, and one federal judge has explicitly recognized for the first time that bisexuals, like gays, are harmed by same-sex marriage bans. Bisexuality, the last sexual orientation that dare not speak its name, is finally claiming its seat at the table of equal liberty, dignity and respect under law and in the eyes of the LGBT-community itself. The legal community should join this move toward more honest and holistic discourse that acknowledges the equal validity of bisexuality along with other sexual orientations. This article is one of many steps that must be taken for more meaningful and inclusive LGBT-rights discourse.
Peer Effects in Risk Aversion and Trust

Existing evidence shows that risk aversion and trust are largely determined by environmental factors. We test whether one such factor is peer influence. Using random assignment of MBA students to peer groups and predetermined survey responses of economic attitudes, we find causal evidence of positive peer effects in risk aversion and no effects in trust. After the first year of the MBA program, the difference between an individual and her peers' average risk aversion has shrunk by 41%. Finding no peer effects in trust is consistent with recent research showing that distinct cognitive processes govern risk aversion and trust.
The Limits of Price Discrimination

We analyze the welfare consequences of a monopolist having additional information about consumers'tastes, beyond the prior distribution; the additional information can be used to charge dierent prices to dierent segments of the market, i.e., carry out "third degree price discrimination". We show that the segmentation and pricing induced by the additional information can achieve every combi- nation of consumer and producer surplus such that: (i) consumer surplus is non-negative, (ii) producer surplus is at least as high as pro…ts under the uniform monopoly price, and (iii) total surplus does not exceed the e¢ cient gains from trade. As well as characterizing the welfare impact of price discrimination, we examine the limits of how prices and quantities can change under price discrimination. We also examine the limits of price discrimination in richer environments with quantity discrimination and limited ability to segment the market.
WHAT IS SOCIALISM TODAY? CONCEPTIONS OF A COOPERATIVE ECONOMY

Socialism is back on the political agenda in the United States. I propose several variants of socialism, characterized by different kinds of property relation in the ownership of firms. In addition to property relations, a conception of socialism should include a specification of the cooperative ethos, in place of the individualistic ethos of capitalist society. Individualistic economic agents will optimize in the manner of John Nash, whereas cooperative ones do so in the manner of Immanuel Kant. I argue that Kantian optimization decentralizes resource allocation in ways that separate issues of equity (income distribution) from efficiency. I offer tentative thoughts concerning how we should conceive of socialism today.
Executive compensation disclosure and private control benefits: A comparison of U.S. and Canadian dual class firms

Abstract Prior research on the cross-country variation of reporting choices induced by managerial incentives to extract private benefits is limited in its use because the research often used accounting measures that had limited empirical correlations with direct estimates of private control benefits. This study attempts to resolve the void in the literature by using a measure of compensation disclosure that has been shown to be directly correlated with excess compensation. The evidence shows that while compensation disclosure choices in dual class share firms tend to be more opaque, they are lesser so in a relatively weaker investor protection environment. This is consistent with the explanation that a weaker investor protection environment magnifies the perception of agency costs associated with dual class equity, inducing such firms to be less opaque in their disclosures in an attempt to mitigate this perception. Based on prior literature, Canada and the U.S. are used to proxy for weak and strong investor protection environments respectively. The study also provides evidence that institutional blockholders encourage compensation disclosure transparency but lesser so in Canada.
Business & Human Rights Law: Diverging Trends in the United States and France

The application of human rights standards to the activities of transnational corporations has become an increasingly prominent debate in the international law and business arenas. As the international community moves forward in elaborating a framework for accountability for corporate acts, it will be crucial that this framework reflect the existing differences between legal systems in applying human rights law to corporations' operations. This article sets out the differences between the United States and France as two examples of fundamentally different approaches in addressing corporate compliance of human rights. Ultimately, these two different state approaches towards the role of business, government interventionism, stockholders and shareholders, and international law, should be taken into account in tailoring a true international consensus on corporate responsibility, accepted by both sides of the Atlantic.
Resource Flexibility and Capital Structure

This paper examines how the optimal investment in the capacity of flexible and nonflexible resources is affected by financial leverage and, conversely, how a firm's resource flexibility affects its optimal capital structure. We consider a two-product firm that invests in the optimal capacity of product-flexible and product-dedicated resources in the presence of demand uncertainty. Before investing in capacity, the firm issues the optimal amount of debt, trading off the tax benefit and lower transaction cost of debt financing against the cost of financial distress and the agency cost associated with leverage. We show that in the presence of debt, resource flexibility has benefits in addition to reducing the mismatch between supply and demand. Namely, resource flexibility mitigates the shareholder--debtholder agency conflict as well as the risk of costly default. Most interestingly, we show that resource flexibility mitigates the underinvestment problem because it reduces the probability that a firm will go bankrupt with some of its capacity being fully utilized. When lenders anticipate that a firm will choose a relatively flexible capacity mix, they should provide more favorable credit terms, to which the firm should respond by issuing more debt. The main empirical predictions are that resource flexibility is negatively related to the cost of borrowing and positively related to debt. This paper was accepted by Yossi Aviv, operations management.
Regression Discontinuity Design with Many Thresholds

Abstract Numerous empirical studies employ regression discontinuity designs with multiple cutoffs and heterogeneous treatments. A common practice is to normalize all the cutoffs to zero and estimate one effect. This procedure identifies the average treatment effect (ATE) on the observed distribution of individuals local to existing cutoffs. However, researchers often want to make inferences on more meaningful ATEs, computed over general counterfactual distributions of individuals, rather than simply the observed distribution of individuals local to existing cutoffs. This paper proposes a consistent and asymptotically normal estimator for such ATEs when heterogeneity follows a non-parametric function of cutoff characteristics in the sharp case. The proposed estimator converges at the minimax optimal rate of root- n for a specific choice of tuning parameters. Identification in the fuzzy case, with multiple cutoffs, is impossible unless heterogeneity follows a finite-dimensional function of cutoff characteristics. Under parametric heterogeneity, this paper proposes an ATE estimator for the fuzzy case that optimally combines observations to maximize its precision.
Copyright, Death, and Taxes

The Copyright Act of 1976 is nearing its fourth decade of existence.1 By historical standards, that longevity puts the 1976 Act “on the clock” for a major revision in the near future. Indeed, given the incredible advances in digital technologies and the Internet—all of which were unforeseen by Congress back in 1976—the need for a major revision and modernization of copyright law may already be upon us.2 This time around, however, Congress faces a challenge it has never faced before. In none of the five previous copyright acts did Congress have international treaty obligations effectively limiting the alternatives available for reform.3 The Berne Convention and the TRIPS Agreement—which the United States joined in 1989 and 2004, respectively—set forth numerous minimum standards of copyright law and restrict the scope of permissible copyright exceptions.4 Although these agreements do allow some flexibility for
Executive stock options, differential risk-taking incentives, and firm value

Abstract The sensitivity of stock options' payoff to return volatility, or vega, provides risk-averse CEOs with an incentive to increase their firms' risk more by increasing systematic rather than idiosyncratic risk. This effect manifests because any increase in the firm's systematic risk can be hedged by a CEO who can trade the market portfolio. Consistent with this prediction, we find that vega gives CEOs incentives to increase their firms' total risk by increasing systematic risk but not idiosyncratic risk. Collectively, our results suggest that stock options might not always encourage managers to pursue projects that are primarily characterized by idiosyncratic risk when projects with systematic risk are available as an alternative.
Avoiding Accounting Fixation: Determinants of Cognitive Adaptation to Differences in Accounting Method*

Much research over the last 30 years has provided evidence that individuals display accounting fixation; that is, their cognitive process does not appropriately adapt to cross-sectional or temporal differences in an accounting method. This paper presents the results of a quasi-experimental test of the hypothesis that cognitive adaptation to a change in accounting method is an ordinal interactive function of three person characteristics: relevant accounting knowledge, general problem-solving ability, and intrinsic motivation to appropriately engage in the decision task. Based on a product-pricing decision task in which participants are provided with product costs reported by two generally employed product-costing methods (activity-based costing [ABC] and volume-based costing), the results show that the majority of participants did not change their cognitive behavior when there was a change in the costing method. Further, those participants who did adapt to the change in accounting method, and thus avoided accounting fixation, did so by debiasing costs reported by volume-based costing but not by ABC. Finally, these adapters generally exhibited high values for all three of the person characteristics compared with those who did not adapt.
"Big Love"?* the Recognition of Customary Marriages in South Africa

This Comment contextualizes the issue of polygamous marriages within the South African constitutional paradigm, one committed unequivocally to the principle of equality. This Comment analyzes how South African law, European in origin, had to incorporate the laws and institutions of indigenous communities within the national legal framework, as part of the overall transformative legal project underway in the country since 1994. By focusing on the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act, this Comment examines such incorporation, while questioning its effect on the overall project of constitutionalism, human rights, and equality.
Why Federal Dietary Guidelines Should Acknowledge the Food-Choice / Environment Nexus: Examining the Recommendation to Eat More Seafood

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and all federal programs and activities that flow from them (for example, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, and the National School Lunch Program), should integrate environmental sustainability considerations into policy development and on-the-ground implementation. While federal dietary advice is nonbinding on the American public, it is a policy vehicle intended to have specific, significant effects on the food choices of several hundred million people. These effects translate into significant foreseeable environmental impacts that should be taken into consideration under the National Environmental Policy Act in deciding what advice to give and precisely how to frame it. Currently, this does not happen, and the result is nutritional recommendations that are blindered to their actual impacts. For example, the 2010 Guidelines recommend that Americans more than double their average intake of seafood but fail to include guidance about — or even to acknowledge — the relative environmental impacts of different seafood choices. This is both irresponsible and, in the slightly longer term, self-defeating: Overfishing and habitat destruction today contribute to seafood scarcity and food insecurity tomorrow. We cannot afford to continue to ignore the unintended environmental consequences of federal dietary advice.
Homeownership Determinants for Chinese Americans: Assimilation, Ethnic Concentration and Nativity

Chinese homeownership rates in the Los Angeles Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area adjusted by socioeconomic and housing market characteristics are, on average, 18 percentage points higher than those of native white households. This finding runs contrary to most immigration literature, which suggests that immigrants usually lag behind the host society in measures of economic well-being. This study focuses on two additional factors, which most economic studies of homeownership choice ignore, that may play a role in helping Chinese households achieve high homeownership in ways that other immigrant groups do not. The results of this analysis find that the high homeownership rates cannot be explained by the English skills of households. The cultural influence of homeowning peers may have partially contributed to the higher homeownership of Chinese households. While living in ethnic Chinese communities lowers homeownership rates, in general, it helps improve the likelihood that Chinese immigrants will own a home. Finally, we find that there is great diversity among Chinese subgroups with respect to their likelihood of owning a home, but very little diversity with respect to the education and income level of Chinese households across subgroups.
When Justice Can’t Be Done: The Obligation to Govern and Rights in the State of Terror

This article explores a view nearly absent from modern political theory, that there is a duty to create and secure government which imposes on some a duty to govern. This duty is grounded in philosophers as disparate as Aquinas, Locke, Hobbes and Finnis. To fail one’s duty to govern, especially over the range of goods that can only be secured by government, is to have committed a wrong against another. If there is an obligation to govern that is rooted in the common good, then one might believe there is an obligation to maintain a government which pursues the common good. After disentangling the duty to govern from political duties which are much better explored, I focus on the more subtle question of how political legitimacy and the obligation to obey the law may clash with a duty to govern. Again, it is surprising that this claim can be located in scholars as disparate as Kant, Hobbes and Finnis. Yet in each example these thinkers give us, we are troubled by the tension between the duty to maintain a government and its conceptual fellow travelers, legitimate government and the obligation to obey. Nor is this question one restricted to abstract political philosophy. Particularly troubling are scenarios in which a threat to governance might lead to a reasonable belief that the government must maintain itself by taking actions which appear illegitimate. A scenario where a government must racially profile or violate civil liberties to guard against threats to the ability to govern brings the problem to life. Difficult moments of American history – the interment of the Japanese during World War II, racial profiling after September 11th and the use of torture by the United States government were surely mistakes. But they make live the perceived and potential clash between a duty to maintain a government, legitimate government and our duty to obey the law.
A non-parametric estimate of mass ‘scoured’ in galaxy cores

We present a simple estimate of the mass ‘deficits’ in cored spheroids, as a function of galaxy mass and radius within the galaxy. Previous attempts to measure such deficits depended on fitting some functional form to the profile at large radii extrapolating inwards; this is sensitive to the assumed functional form and does not allow for variation in nuclear profile shapes. For example, we show that literally interpreting the residuals from a single/cored Sersic function fit as implied ‘deficit’ can be misleading. Instead, we take advantage of larger data sets to directly construct stellar mass profiles of observed systems and measure the stellar mass enclosed in a series of physical radii (M_*(< R)), for samples of cusp and core spheroids at the same stellar mass. We show that there is a significant (model-independent) bimodality in this distribution of central structure for this sample at small radii. We non-parametrically measure the median offset between core and cusp populations (the ‘deficit’ΔM_*(< R)). We can then construct the scoured mass profile as a function of radius, without reference to any assumed functional form. The mass deficit rises in power-law fashion (ΔM_*(< R) ∝ R^(1.3−1.8)) from a significant but small mass at R ≲ 10 pc, to asymptote to a maximum ∼ 0.5–2 M_(BH) at ∼ 100 pc, where M_(BH) is the mass of the central, supermassive black hole (BH) hosted by the spheroid. At larger radii there is no statistically significant separation between populations; the upper limit to the cumulative scoured mass at ∼kpc is ∼ 2–4 M_(BH). This does not depend strongly on stellar mass. The dispersion in M_*(< R) appears larger in the core population, possibly reflecting the fact that core scouring increases the scatter in central profile shapes. We measure this broadening effect as a function of radius. The relatively low mass deficits inferred, and characteristic radii, are in good agreement with models of ‘scouring’ from BH binary systems.
Impact of Heterogeneity in Multi-Robot Systems on Collective Behaviors Studied Using a Search and Rescue Problem

Many species in nature demonstrate symbiotic relationships leading to emergent behaviors through cooperation, which are sometimes beyond the scope of the partnerships within the same species. These symbiotic relationships are classified as mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism based on the benefit levels involved. While these partnerships are ubiquitous in nature, it is imperative to understand the benefits of collective behaviors in designing heterogeneous multi-robot systems (HMRS). In this paper, we investigate the impact of heterogeneity on the performance of HMRS applied to a search and rescue problem. The groups consisting of searchers and rescuers, varied in the individual robot behaviors with multiple degrees of functionality overlap and group compositions, demonstrating various levels of heterogeneity. We propose a new technique to measure heterogeneity in the agents through the use of Behavior Trees and use it to obtain heterogeneity informatics from our Monte Carlo simulations. The results show a positive correlation between the groups' heterogeneity measure and the rescue efficiency demonstrating benefits in most of the scenarios. However, we also see cases where heterogeneity may hamper the group's abilities pointing to the need for determining the optimal heterogeneity in group required to maximally benefit from HMRS in real-world applications.