cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
International Financial Integration and Economic Growth

Abstract This paper uses new data and new econometric techniques to investigate the impact of international financial integration on economic growth and also to assess whether this relationship depends on the level of economic development, financial development, legal system development, government corruption, and macroeconomic policies. Using a wide array of measures of international financial integration for 57 countries and an assortment of statistical methodologies, we are unable to reject the null hypothesis that international financial integration does not accelerate economic growth even when controlling for particular economic, financial, institutional, and policy characteristics.
Environmental performance and analyst information processing costs

Abstract This study tests whether the information processing costs of analysts vary positively with the environmental performance information available on the firms they follow. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that these costs increase when analysts process a wider array of environmental performance ratings. Specifically we find that as the number of environmental performance ratings increases, analysts cover fewer firms in their portfolio, provide fewer earnings-per-share (EPS) forecast revisions, and make less timely forecast revisions. Two additional tests confirm that our results relate to environmental performance information and not to confounding factors. First, the “shock” of the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 implemented for California firms in 2012 increases analyst information processing costs incremental to the main effect of environmental performance ratings. Second, analyst information processing costs increase further in the year a firm covered by an analyst provides a CSR report for the first time. Our results have implications for firm managers considering voluntary environmental disclosure and investors deciding on what stocks to include in their socially responsible portfolios because when processing costs are high, analysts will provide less information or less timely information, resulting in more gradual price discovery in capital markets.
Why Is the Policeman Asking for My Visa - The Future of Federalism and Immigration Enforcement

The allocation of power between the federal government and the states to control immigration has long been a subject of controversy in the United States. Likewise controversial has been the allocation of authority between federal criminal law and federal civil remedies in the regulation of federal immigration norms. Recent years have seen reallocations of regulatory authority along both these axes. Through statute, regulation and, in some cases, fiat, the federal government has enlisted the states in the effort to control immigration. This invitation has been graciously accepted by some jurisdictions and resisted by others. The federal government has significantly expanded the scope of criminal law over immigration violations. The changes in the traditional allocations of authority have made the activities of local law enforcement a focal point of much immigration debate. This article details the relationship between this historic change in the immigration regulation and the activities of state and local law enforcement. It illustrates how criminal law has displaced civil procedures and remedies intended to curb illegal immigration. It details five significant ways in which the federal government has invited or compelled states and localities to participate in immigration enforcement. The article then discusses the wisdom of these changes: the case for and against decentralized law enforcement, the desirability of merging traditional state policing functions and federal immigration enforcement in single agencies, and the benefits and burdens of expanding the scope of the criminal law. The article concludes that states and localities should certainly be free to refrain from vigorous enforcement of the new boundaries of federal criminal immigration law. It concedes, grudgingly, that the legal impediments against enforcement by state or local authorities are rather weak, however poor the policy decision to do so may be in many instances. It also concludes that at least some of the debate over local law enforcement is a disguised rehash of the important debate over the wisdom of current federal immigration policy. In many instances the issue is not the extent to which local law enforcement should be enforcing a federal immigration law, but whether that law should be on the books at all.
Sustainable fashion supply chain management under oligopolistic competition and brand differentiation

Abstract In this paper, we developed a new model of oligopolistic competition for fashion supply chains in the case of differentiated products with the inclusion of environmental concerns. The model assumes that each fashion firm's product is distinct by brand and the firms compete until an equilibrium is achieved. Each fashion firm seeks to maximize its profits as well as to minimize its emissions throughout its supply chain with the latter criterion being weighted in an individual manner by each firm. The competitive supply chain model is network-based and variational inequality theory is utilized for the formulation of the governing Nash equilibrium as well as for the solution of the case study examples. The numerical examples illustrate both the generality of the modeling framework as well as how the model and computational scheme can be used in practice to explore the effects of changes in the demand functions; in the total cost and total emission functions, as well as in the weights.
Using inclusive wealth for policy evaluation: Application to electricity infrastructure planning in oil-exporting countries

Abstract Decision-makers often seek to design policies that support sustainable development. Prospective evaluations of how effectively such policies are likely to meet sustainability goals have nonetheless remained challenging. Evaluating policies against sustainability goals can be facilitated through the inclusive wealth framework, which characterizes development in terms of the value to society of its underlying capital assets, and defines development to be potentially sustainable if that value does not decline over time. The inclusive wealth approach has been developed at a theoretical level and applied to retrospective evaluations. Here, we apply inclusive wealth theory to prospective policy evaluation coupled with dynamic simulation modeling, using a case of electricity infrastructure policies in oil-exporting countries. To demonstrate the prospective evaluation, we analyze investment policies in non-fossil electricity capacity in terms of their forecast impact on several dimensions of inclusive wealth. Illustrative results show that investing in non-fossil capacity in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait can increase components of the countries' inclusive wealth, though the impacts depend on future uncertainties. In contrast, comparable components of the UAE's net inclusive wealth decline under similar investment policies. Finally, including human capital improvements in estimates of inclusive wealth substantially increases its value, though the amount varies across the countries.
John Yoo's War Powers: The Law Review and the World

John Yoo’s 1996 The Continuation of Politics by Other Means: The Original Understanding of War Powers is surely among the most consequential articles ever to appear in the California Law Review. Five years after its publication, Yoo became the principal theorist of the Bush administration's War on Terrorism policies. His expansive theory of presidential primacy became the legal basis for the most controversial of President Bush’s policies, including the use of torture (or “enhanced interrogation”), indefinite detention without charge, warrantless wiretapping within the United States, and the claim that neither constitutional protections nor other provisions of domestic and international law constrain treatment of suspected terrorists.
"Mr. Scalia's Neighborhood": A Home for Minority Religions?

Justice Antonin Scalia may be the most outspoken and persuasive voice of the new conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court. With the departures of Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor—replaced by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito—the strength of Scalia’s influence has grown, with some predicting that Scalia “may well command a majority of the Court in the very near future.”1 Legal scholars are bracing for a significant shift in the Court’s First Amendment Establishment Clause jurisprudence.2 There, Justice Scalia has been a vocal critic for over two decades, arguing for the demise of the much-maligned Lemon test3 and a greater tolerance for religion in the public arena. Scalia’s articulate vision in this area could be the opening shots in a “revolution in Establishment Clause jurisprudence—a wholesale rethinking of the constitutional relationship between church and state.”4
Effective routing design for remote entanglement generation on quantum networks

Quantum network is a promising platform for many ground-breaking applications that lie beyond the capability of its classical counterparts. Efficient entanglement generation on quantum networks with relatively limited resources such as quantum memories is essential to fully realize the network’s capabilities, the solution to which calls for delicate network design and is currently at the primitive stage. In this study we propose an effective routing scheme to enable automatic responses for multiple requests of entanglement generation between source-terminal stations on a quantum lattice network with finite edge capacities. Multiple connection paths are exploited for each connection request while entanglement fidelity is ensured for each path by performing entanglement purification. The routing scheme is highly modularized with a flexible nature, embedding quantum operations within the algorithmic workflow, whose performance is evaluated from multiple perspectives. In particular, three algorithms are proposed and compared for the scheduling of capacity allocation on the edges of quantum network. Embodying the ideas of proportional share and progressive filling that have been well-studied in classical routing problems, we design another scheduling algorithm, the propagatory update method, which in certain aspects overrides the two algorithms based on classical heuristics in scheduling performances. The general solution scheme paves the road for effective design of efficient routing and flow control protocols on applicational quantum networks.
"Venn" and the Art of Shared Governance

This article discusses the concept of shared governance in the context of a law school that is part of a university. It argues that the governance of a law school is a shared process between the dean/administration and the faculty. It explains why law schools can't be run the way that businesses are run, and it tries to explain governance in terms of jurisdiction.
On the effects of joint bidding in independent private value auctions: An experimental study

Abstract This article explores the effect of a subset of symmetric bidders joining to bid together. Possible applications include mergers, collusion and joint-bidding arrangements. The change produces a “strong” party with a more advantageous value distribution than the remaining “weak” bidder(s). The predicted effects include inefficiency, a decrease in the sellerʼs revenue, and higher biddersʼ payoffs. Under risk neutrality, the members of the strong party benefit less than the weak bidders. The prediction is reversed when the bidders are sufficiently risk-averse. These hypotheses are tested experimentally. Contrary to the theory, joint bidding increases efficiency and the sellerʼs revenue decreases by less than expected. Strong bidders benefit more than weak bidders indicating that incentives to bid jointly may be greater than hypothesized. Additionally, the experiment assesses the effect of group decision-making. A Nash equilibrium prediction for individual–group differences based on differences in risk attitudes is not supported by the data.
Default prediction models: The role of forward-looking measures of returns and volatility

Abstract This paper proposes a variant application of the Merton distance-to-default model by employing implied volatility and implied cost of capital to predict defaults. The proposed model’s results are compared with predictions obtained from three popular models in different setups. We find that our “best” model, which contains forward-looking proxies of returns and volatility outperform other models, carries a default prediction accuracy rate of 89%. Additional analysis using a discrete-time hazard model indicates the pseudo-R2 values from regression models that include the two forward-looking measures are as high as 51%. Overall, our results establish the informational relevance of implied cost of capital and implied volatility in predicting defaults.
Are executive stock options associated with future earnings

Abstract We estimate the relation between stock option (ESO) grants to the top five executives and future earnings to examine whether incentive alignment or rent extraction by top managers explains option granting behavior. The future operating income associated with a dollar of Black-Scholes value of an ESO grant is $3.71. To understand the source of these positive payoffs, we parse out ESO grant values into components predicted by economic determinants of option grants, governance quality, and a residual grant value. The payoffs to ESOs appear to be driven predominantly by the economic determinants of option grants and not poor governance quality.
Saving Lives or Saving Money? Understanding the Dual Nature of Physician Preferences

A longstanding literature has highlighted the tension between the altruism of physicians and their desire for profit. This paper develops new implications for how these competing forces drive pricing and utilization in healthcare markets. Altruism dictates that providers reduce utilization in response to higher prices, but profit-maximization does the opposite. Rational physicians will behave more altruistically when treating poorer patients or those that face higher medical cost burdens, and when foregone profits are lower. These insights help explain the observed heterogeneity in pricing dynamics across different healthcare markets. We empirically test the implications of our model by utilizing two exogenous shocks in Medicare price setting policies. Our results indicate that patient income, out-of-pocket costs, and profitability alone explain up to one-quarter of the variation in price elasticities. Finally, we demonstrate that uniform policy changes in reimbursement or patient cost-sharing may lead to unintended consequences.
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”: Airline Liability for Checked-In Jewelry

It is expected that when you arrive at an airport you most likely will have to check in a bag or two. What is not expected, however, is that someone would rummage through your baggage and take your belongings. Unfortunately, this happens frequently. A passenger packs her jewelry in her luggage, checks that luggage in, boards her flight, and never sees that jewelry again. Once she discovers the missing jewelry, her options for recovering the loss are quite limited. This article examines the history and current state of the law regarding airline liability for passengers’ lost belongings on domestic as well as international flights. The article further discuss how these problems increased in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. The article concludes by offering suggestions for changes to the airline industry's liability and standards regarding loss of jewelry in checked-in baggage.
Controlling Financial Chaos: The Power and Limits of Law

This Essay examines how law can help to control financial chaos. To that end, regulation should strive to not only maximize economic efficiency within the financial system but also protect the financial system itself. Any regulatory framework for achieving these goals, however, will be imperfect and have tradeoffs. Increasing financial complexity has created information failures that even disclosure cannot remedy, whereas lawimposed standardization would have its own flaws. Bounded human rationality limits the effectiveness of even otherwise ideal laws. Furthermore, the increasing dispersion of financial risk is undermining monitoring incentives. We also do not yet fully understand how systemic risk is triggered and spread. Because regulation therefore cannot prevent systemic shocks, regulation should also operate to reduce systemic consequences by stabilizing parts of the financial system afflicted by those shocks.
Avoiding the Mistakes of Terrell R.: The Undoing of the California Tort Claims Act and the Move to Absolute Governmental Immunity in Foster Care Placement and Supervision

This article addresses the issue of governmental immunity and mandatory duty liability in the context of foster child abuse. The article should be of interest to children's rights organizations, legal scholars, practitioners and judges who face governmental liability issues related to the California foster care system. The California Tort Claims Act has, until recently, long served as an important means by which foster children may obtain recourse from the government for injuries caused by social worker negligence. In the late 1990s, however, the California courts of appeal retreat - without justification - from the dictates of the Tort Claims Act. A low point was reached in 2002 when, in the landmark case Los Angeles County v. Superior Court (Terrell R.), the court of appeal interpreted the California Tort Claims Act, along with the statutory provisions governing foster care placement, so narrowly that governmental immunity would now appear inevitable in any case alleging foster child mistreatment. That decision was a radical departure from prior law, and one that renders California governmental immunity law inconsistent with the laws of the vast majority of other states. The harsh result is that innocent children abused or neglected in the California foster care system now face formidable - if not insurmountable - barriers to obtaining legal redress for their injuries. This article examines the recent mistakes the California courts of appeal have made, with a particular focus on the errors made in Terrell R.. First, the article examines the systematic problems facing children in the California foster care system, and explains why it is a "system in crisis." Second, the article traces the history of the California Tort Claims Act. It explains how the government was, until the late 1990s, subject to liability when its social workers negligently supervise foster care children. Third, the article explains how in recent years the courts of appeal have erred in granting the government absolute immunity in foster care abuse cases. The article explains how this move to absolute immunity, whether done intentionally or unintentionally, not only contradicted sound public policy, but is a result long rejected by the California Legislature and California Supreme Court. The article concludes that if a social worker negligently places or negligently supervises a child in foster care, and the child is physically or sexually abused as a result of that negligence, liability is the rule, not the exception.
Taking Economic Human Rights Seriously After the Debt Crisis.

The financial crisis of 2007–2009 arose from a wide variety of causes. Early on in the crisis, many economists and commentators identified the dollar reserve system underlying the global economy as one such cause.1 Under this system, nations accumulate dollar reserves to sell in the event of an attack on their currency and to maintain a lower-dollar exchange rate to subsidize export-led growth.2 Inexorably, this system leads to excessive debt in the United States and drains buying power from the global economy, as massive funds migrate from consumption to savings in the form of dollar-denominated assets that operate to lower interest rates in the United States and encourage excess debt.3 This article seeks a means of ameliorating the negative effects of this system, and avoiding otherwise inevitable crises emanating from it.4 In sum, this article argues for creating a more macroeconomically-
Gardner on the Philosophy of Criminal Law

Offences and Defences is an outstanding collection of eleven of John Gardner's previously published papers in the philosophy of criminal law. I briefly examine his views on five central issues: his claims about basic responsibility and whether it should be construed as relational; his positions on agent neutrality; his arguments about whether moral and criminal wrongs are typically strict; his thoughts about the structure of defences, and, finally, what his account of rape reveals about the content of the harm principle.
Bank Liquidity Creation, Monetary Policy, and Financial Crises

Abstract This paper examines the interplay among bank liquidity creation (which incorporates all bank on- and off-balance sheet activities), monetary policy, and financial crises. We find that: (1) high liquidity creation (relative to trend) – particularly off-balance sheet liquidity creation – helps predict crises, controlling for other factors; (2) monetary policy has statistically significant, but economically minor effects on liquidity creation by small banks during normal times, and these effects are even weaker during financial crises; (3) monetary policy has very little effects on medium and large bank liquidity creation during both normal times and crises. These findings suggest that authorities may wish to monitor bank liquidity creation closely in order to predict and perhaps lessen the likelihood of financial crises. They might also consider other tools to control bank liquidity creation, such as capital and liquidity requirements.
Breathing life into the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control: smoking cessation and the right to health.

The harms of smoking are global in scope, and states must act multilaterally to repel this global threat to public health. Embodying this cooperative spirit, the member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) have banded together to challenge tobacco through international law. While successful in its execution, this international effort to control smoking neglects cessation interventions, thereby offering little salvation to those whose health is at greatest risk—those already addicted to tobacco. Addressing these forgotten victims requires a new paradigm for tobacco control: the human right to health. The WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) has created general principles of cognitive and normative consensus for international public health, challenging the globalization of smoking through the globalization of tobacco control. Based upon a
Reconstituting Japanese Law: International Norms and Domestic Litigation

This paper examines a number of lawsuits challenging racial discrimination in Japan’s private sector. Since Japan does not have a law banning private acts of racial discrimination, victims of racial discrimination invoke international human rights law to buttress their claims for compensation. I argue that Japanese judges are, by and large, receptive to these international law claims, but that the system for adjudicating racial discrimination disputes is inadequate. Specifically, a law that bans private acts of racial discrimination would put Japan in line with recently emergent global norms of equality.
Joint model for survival and multivariate sparse functional data with application to a study of Alzheimer's Disease

Studies of Alzheimer's disease (AD) often collect multiple longitudinal clinical outcomes, which are correlated and predictive of AD progression. It is of great scientific interest to investigate the association between the outcomes and time to AD onset. We model the multiple longitudinal outcomes as multivariate sparse functional data and propose a functional joint model linking multivariate functional data to event time data. In particular, we propose a multivariate functional mixed model to identify the shared progression pattern and outcome-specific progression patterns of the outcomes, which enables more interpretable modeling of associations between outcomes and AD onset. The proposed method is applied to the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative study (ADNI) and the functional joint model sheds new light on inference of five longitudinal outcomes and their associations with AD onset. Simulation studies also confirm the validity of the proposed model. Data used in preparation of this article were obtained from the ADNI database.
To Russia With Love: How Moral Arguments for a Humanitarian Intervention in Syria Opened the Door for an Invasion of the Ukraine

The United Nations has been incapable of authorizing an international response to stop the mass atrocities taking place in the Syrian Civil War. This has led some concerned nations to argue for a unilateral military operation based upon the controversial international legal concept titled humanitarian intervention. Humanitarian intervention provides a distinct legal basis for the use of force when there is a moral obligation to protect victims of war crimes, genocide, or other crimes against humanity. This is in contrast to the more conservative approach known as the Responsibility to Protect. Despite the obvious appeal of invoking a progressive use of force doctrine in Syria, relying on moral authority to authorize military action raises a particularly troubling international law question: What keeps an aggressive state from invading another nation under the pretext of stopping a “humanitarian crisis”? The legal justifications for the recent military acts by the Russian Federation in the Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula starkly illustrate the impossibility of objectively answering this question. The Ukrainian crisis has instead demonstrated that determining when a humanitarian intervention is necessitated is a subjective and political decision. It is this subjectivity which underscores the logic of the post-World War II jus contra bellum prohibition on acts of aggression and why using a moral argument to legally justify the use
The Coming Showdown Over University Endowments: Enlisting the Donors

This essay focuses on the discordance between universities with endowments in excess of one billion dollars and what is occurring in the rest of higher education, particularly with respect to skyrocketing tuition and a growing institutional wealth gap. The essay analyzes absolute endowment values, the amount of endowment per student, and expense-endowment ratios at 60 private universities. It concludes that a small number of schools have an excess endowment, and then provides a convenient proxy for determining when an endowment is so large that it should receive less-preferential tax treatment. The essay then considers the effects that large endowments have at their home institutions and throughout higher education, the arguments in defense of large endowments, and some frequently-proposed modifications to the tax code. The essay recommends that policymakers modify the charitable deduction for gifts to universities with mega-endowments, as part of a multi-faceted effort to spur endowment spending and control tuition.
Legislating for Care:A Comparative Analysis of Long-term Care Insurance Laws in Japan and Germany*

Populations throughout the developed world are dramatically ageing owing to rapid declines in fertility and mortality Providing long-term care to the growing numbers of frail elderly people will be a vital public policy challenge in the decades ahead. Japan and Germany are among the few countries that have met this challenge by introducing comprehensive legislation directed at long-term care.This paper reviews the differences between these Long-term Care Insurance Laws, with a focus on the availability of a cash allowance for people receiving family-based care. It reflects on the social, political and economic context of the laws, characterizes each system and points out the inherent difficulties on each side.
Contributions of Zvi Griliches

ln this article, I summarize Zvi Griliches' contributions to economics and to applied econometrics. It is a slightly revised version of my Nobel Prize nominating statement, submitted on multiple occasions before his death.
The Rhetoric and Reality of Small Business Preferences in the 2017 Tax Legislation

This Essay describes the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of preferences for small business in the 2017 tax legislation. In the effort to shape public opinion on the legislation, proponents frequently highlighted the benefits for small businesses while often eliding the much larger benefits for large businesses and the wealthiest individuals. This strategic framing follows a recognizable historic pattern whereby tax benefits for the rich are sold to the public through a rhetoric emphasizing benefits lower down the economic ladder.
Show Me the Money: Interjurisdiction Political Competition and Fiscal Extraction in China

We argue that interjurisdiction competition in authoritarian regimes engenders a specific logic for taxation. Promotion-seeking local officials are incentivized to signal loyalty and competence to their principals through tangible fiscal revenues. The greater the number of officials accountable to the same principal, the more intense political competition is, resulting in higher taxation; however, too many officials accountable to the same principal leads to lower taxation due to shirking by uncompetitive officials and the fear of political instability. Using a panel dataset of all Chinese county-level jurisdictions from 1999–2006, we find strong evidence for an inverse U-shaped relationship between the number of county-level jurisdictions within a prefecture—our proxy for the intensity of political competition—and fiscal revenues in most provinces but not so in politically unstable ethnic minority regions. The results are robust to various alternative specifications, including models that account for heterogeneous county characteristics and spatial interdependence.
Sex differences and statistical stereotyping in attitudes toward financial risk

Subjects in a laboratory experiment completed the Zuckerman Sensation-Seeking Scale (SSS) then chose among five alternative gambles with substantial financial stakes. The gambles differed in expected return and variance. Gambles were presented in one of two different frames in a betweensubjects design. In one, subjects were paid a fixed sum for completing the survey and that sum was then at risk in the subsequent gamble choices. In the other, all payoff amounts for the gambles were nonnegative. Subjects were paid according to their choices and the outcomes of the gambles. We tested for sex differences in this choice task and found women to be consistently more risk averse, on average, than men. We observed no difference across frames. Subjects were then asked to guess the gamble choices of each of the other participants and were rewarded for each correct answer. Subjects of both sexes did substantially better than chance in guessing the particular choices of individuals of both sexes, but both men and women overestimated the risk aversion of others, especially that of women, and most strongly of all with respect to men’s predictions of women’s choices. Possible realworld implications of biased assumptions about women’s risk attitudes are discussed. D 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.
The Presence of Absence: Ethnicity Policy in Russia

Even though nationalism as an analytical category and political practice has been widely condemned in recent decades, the nation-state remains the predominant form of political structure throughout the world. The break-up of the Soviet Union led to the emergence of 15 states, which began actively promoting national identity as a building bloc of their newly-won independence. The Russian Federation is something of an exception to this trend, since it faces difficult and unresolved questions arising from its multi-ethnic composition. Russian nationalism played an important though somewhat ambiguous role in the break-up of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin used appeals to Russian sovereignty to undermine the position of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. But Yeltsin never subscribed to a clearly-articulated concept of Russian national identity. For Yeltsin, the most important symbol of the new Russian state was — Yeltsin himself. (He was officially described as the ‘first president’ of Russia.)
Statistical Discrimination and Efficiency

This paper asks whether statistical discrimination is a market failure. I consider the problem for a utilitarian social planner who operates in an environment that can generate statistical discrimination as an equilibriumphenomenon. It is found that there are potential efficiency gains from discrimination in terms of reduced "mismatch" between workers and jobs. Whether the solution to the planning problem involves discrimination depends on the trade-off between the informational gains of specialization and the losses in terms of increased investment costs.
Rethinking Legal Education

The time has come to rethink legal education. I contend that it lacks a soul -- a soullessness that is a consequence of our absorption in and preoccupation with the words of the law and how those words (and their meanings) are manipulated. Law schools' focus on "law-words" is more that a glorification of glibness. It tends to convince students of two things: that words are talismanic keys to the kingdom of wealth and prestige, and that morality does not count. Students learn in the space of three years that "good" legal arguments can be adduced for either side of any case and that what wins lawsuits is the most sophisticated legal argument -- not what is right, true or just. The students, in short, absorb the lesson of moral relativism, and it stay with many of them throughout their careers as practitioners.
Disestablishing Sex and Gender

This Article suggests that the Constitution might be understood to "disestablish" sex and gender. Gender ideologies and religious ideologies have acted and continue to act in similar harmful ways, underwriting social dividing practices on the basis of the supposed extra-human authority of Nature or God, and thereby violating a congeries of constitutional principles. Under the disestablishment of sex and gender, government would be significantly constrained in its ability to rely upon sex or gender beliefs or groups. Moving beyond current equal protection doctrine with its focus on discrimination, this arguably radical approach to gender would make key the support and reinforcement of sex and gender beliefs and divisions, imposing greater constraints on government than the Supreme Court and Congress have been willing to honor. The Article examines how different conceptions of disestablishment would have different effects on such issues as governmental recognition of sex changes, sex-segregated education, and the mixed-sex requirement for civil marriage.
The social functions of explicit coherence evaluation

Coherence plays an important role in psychology. In this article, I suggest that coherence takes two main forms in humans’ cognitive system. The first belong to ‘system 1’. It relies on the degree of coherence between different representations to regulate them, without coherence being represented. By contrast other mechanisms, belonging to system 2, allow humans to represent the degree of coherence between different representations and to draw inferences from it. It is suggested that the mechanisms of explicit coherence evaluation have social functions. They are used as means of epistemic vigilance—to evaluate what other people tell us. They can also be turned inwards to examine the coherence of our own beliefs. Their function is then to minimize the chances that we are perceived as being incoherent. Evidence from different domains of psychology is briefly reviewed in support of these hypotheses.
Is Government Consolidation the Answer

The Great Recession that started in late 2007 is threatening to alter the local government landscape in the United States. With the steep decline in property and sales taxes, a number of state governments are now reviewing how their local government systems can be restructured to improve service delivery. Scholars from two camps—the advocacy of regional versus multiple centers of local government—have proposed contrasting visions of how the local public sector should be organized. The century-old debate between regionalists and localists has generated a considerable body of theoretical and empirical literature from which state governments can draw as they consider the most effective way of organizing their local governments. This essay discusses the different arguments for local government fragmentation versus consolidation, reviews the empirical evidence, and identifies future areas of research. It focuses on the impacts of the local public sector structure on service delivery, social class and racial se...
Corruption and the Composition of Public Spending in the United States

I investigate the relation between corruption and the composition of state government spending in the United States. The analysis reveals that the United States is not immune to the adverse effects...
The Framing of a Right to Choose: Roe v. Wade and the Changing Debate on Abortion Law

The Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, arguably the most hotly debated in recent decades, has produced an impressive body of historical scholarship. The leading histories have focused on the evolution of the arguments and alliances that shape abortion debate today, rights-based prolife and pro-choice arguments, alliances between women's rights leaders and public health advocates, and the adoption of pro-choice positions by the Democratic Party and pro-life positions by the Republicans. This orientation is unquestionably a sensible one; rights-based arguments, in play before Roe, have come to dominate the debate after the decision. However, by emphasizing rights-based debate before the decision, the current scholarship has mostly missed a significant change in the rhetoric and coalitions on either side of the debate that was partly produced by Roe itself.
Belt and Suspenders? The World Heritage Convention's Role in Confronting Climate Change

In the face of increasing frustration with the tepid, and largely feckless, national and international institutional responses to the growing threat of climate change, many governments, as well as non-governmental actors, have either initiated or are exploring potential causes of action in judicial and quasi-judicial fora. This article explores one of these recent actions, the petitions before the World Heritage Committee requesting listing of several sites listed as World Heritage Sites under the World Heritage Convention on the List of World Heritage in Danger. The article explores the contours of the petitions filed to the Committee, the potential implications of listing of sites threatened by climate change on the List of World Heritage in Danger and the merits of the legal arguments advanced in opposition to such listings.
Feminism for Everyone

Every idea has its time. Joan Williams’s idea is that we need to reframe debates about work and family by paying attention to how our gender system of domesticity harms everyone: women, men, privileged Americans, and working-class people. Williams defines domesticity as the gender system that organizes market work and family work around traditional gender roles through a set of entrenched narratives and institutional arrangements. Her basic argument is that to achieve more familyfriendly public policy in the United States, feminists and advocates need to pay attention to the impact of domesticity on men and working-class people as well as privileged women. In Williams’s view, we also need to be more sophisticated about politics. Like her formidable body of work on the subject, Williams’s new book, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter, has a lot to say about the harms of domesticity for women. Yet her latest contribution to the subject signals a reorientation of priorities. The cover makes her point clearly: we see an image of a sweatshirt-clad, unshaven white man looking into the eyes of a young white boy, presumably a father and son. Is this a working-class man saying goodbye to his son before leaving for a blue-collar job? Or is it a laid-off Wall Street investment banker newly discovering the joys of fatherhood? The point is this: it does not matter, for the financial crisis of 2008 increasingly leveled the playing field between the two. Joan Williams’s timely book seeks to harness this potential alignment of working-class and elite interests to further advance her lifelong project of disrupting separate-spheres ideology and creating more family-friendly workplaces in America.
Disagreement and Learning in a Dynamic Contracting Model

We present a dynamic contracting model in which the principal and agent disagree about the resolution of uncertainty, and we illustrate the contract design in an application with Bayesian learning. The disagreement creates gains from trade that the principal realizes by transferring payment to states that the agent considers relatively more likely, changing incentives. The interaction between incentive provision and learning creates an intertemporal source of "disagreement risk" that alters optimal risk sharing. There is an endogenous regime shift between economies with small and large belief differences, and an early shock to beliefs can lead to large persistent differences in variable pay even after beliefs have converged. Under risk-neutrality, "selling the firm" to the agent does not implement the first-best because it precludes state-contingent trades. The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.
Are accruals mispriced? Evidence from tests of an Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model

Abstract This paper proposes a risk-based explanation for the accrual anomaly. Risk is measured using a four-factor model motivated by the Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model. Tests of the model suggest that a considerable portion of the cross-sectional variation in average returns to high and low accrual firms is explained by risk. The four-factor model also performs better than some other widely used models in pricing a number of different hedge portfolios.
Fiscal discipline and the choice of exchange rate regime

Conventional wisdom claims that fixed exchange rates provide more fiscal discipline than do flexible rates, but the recent experiences in Europe, the record of Sub-Saharan countries in the 1980s, and the history of stabilization attempts in Latin America cast empirical doubts on this wisdom. To explore this puzzle we present a standard intertemporal model with perfect capital mobility and price flexibility, in which fiscal policy is endogenously determined by a maximizing fiscal authority.
Wealth Shocks and Health Outcomes: Evidence from Stock Market Fluctuations

Do wealth shocks affect the health of the elderly in developed countries? The economic literature is skeptical about such effects which have so far only been found for poor retirees in poor countries. In this paper I show that wealth shocks also matter for the health of wealthy retirees in the US. I exploit the booms and busts in the US stock market as a natural experiment that generated considerable gains and losses in the wealth of stock-holding retirees. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study I construct wealth shocks as the interaction of stock holdings with stock market changes. These constructed wealth shocks are highly predictive of changes in reported wealth. And they strongly affect health outcomes. A 10% wealth shock leads to an improvement of 2-3% of a standard deviation in physical health, mental health and survival rates. Effects are heterogeneous across physical health conditions, with most pronounced effects for the incidence of high blood pressure, smaller effects for heart problems and no effects for arthritis, diabetes, lung diseases and cancer. The comparison with the cross-sectional relationship of wealth and health suggests that the estimated effects of wealth shocks are larger than the long-run wealth elasticity of health.
TARP’s deadbeat banks

This paper tests whether poorly capitalized banks with troubled loan books are more likely to miss their bailout dividends. Privately held banks with weaker core capital ratios, more charged off loans, more allowances for loan losses, and more non-performing loans are more likely to miss their Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) dividends. Banks that issue non-cumulative preferred stock are also more likely to be TARP deadbeats. In addition, banks that missed a bailout dividend in the prior quarter are significantly more likely to miss the next bailout dividend.
Analyst coverage and corporate tax aggressiveness.

Abstract We examine the impact of analyst coverage on corporate tax aggressiveness. To address endogeneity concerns, we perform a difference-in-differences analysis using a setting which causes exogenous decreases in analyst coverage. Our tests identify a negative causal effect of analyst coverage on tax aggressiveness, suggesting that higher analyst coverage constrains corporate tax aggressiveness. Further cross-sectional variation tests find that this constraining effect on tax aggressiveness is more pronounced in firms with lower investor recognition and firms with more opaque information environments. Our results are consistent with the notion that higher analyst coverage increases the visibility of aggressive tax planning behavior as well as heightens analysts’ demand for more transparent information, which in turn reduces tax aggressiveness.
Does School District Consolidation Cut Costs

Abstract Consolidation has dramatically reduced the number of school districts in the United States. Using data from rural school districts in New York, this article provides the first direct estimation of consolidation's cost impacts. We find economies of size in operating spending: all else equal, doubling enrollment cuts operating costs per pupil by 61.7 percent for a 300-pupil district and by 49.6 percent for a 1,500-pupil district. Consolidation also involves large adjustment costs, however. These adjustment costs, which are particularly large for capital spending, lower net cost savings to 31.5 percent and 14.4 percent for a 300-pupil and a 1,500-pupil district, respectively. Overall, consolidation makes fiscal sense, particularly for very small districts, but states should avoid subsidizing unwarranted capital projects.
The law (and politics) of safe injection facilities in the United States.

Safe injection facilities (SIFs) have shown promise in reducing harms and social costs associated with injection drug use. Favorable evaluations elsewhere have raised the issue of their implementation in the United States.Recognizing that laws shape health interventions targeting drug users, we analyzed the legal environment for publicly authorized SIFs in the United States. Although states and some municipalities have the power to authorize SIFs under state law, federal authorities could still interfere with these facilities under the Controlled Substances Act. A state- or locally-authorized SIF could proceed free of legal uncertainty only if federal authorities explicitly authorized it or decided not to interfere.Given legal uncertainty, and the similar experience with syringe exchange programs, we recommend a process of sustained health research, strategic advocacy, and political deliberation.