cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Master funds in portfolio analysis with general deviation measures

Abstract Generalized measures of deviation are considered as substitutes for standard deviation in a framework like that of classical portfolio theory for coping with the uncertainty inherent in achieving rates of return beyond the risk-free rate. Such measures, derived for example from conditional value-at-risk and its variants, can reflect the different attitudes of different classes of investors. They lead nonetheless to generalized one-fund theorems in which a more customized version of portfolio optimization is the aim, rather than the idea that a single “master fund” might arise from market equilibrium and serve the interests of all investors. The results that are obtained cover discrete distributions along with continuous distributions. They are applicable therefore to portfolios involving derivatives, which create jumps in distribution functions at specific gain or loss values, well as to financial models involving finitely many scenarios. Furthermore, they deal rigorously with issues that come up at that level of generality, but have not received adequate attention, including possible lack of differentiability of the deviation expression with respect to the portfolio weights, and the potential nonuniqueness of optimal weights. The results also address in detail the phenomenon that if the risk-free rate lies above a certain threshold, the usually envisioned master fund must be replaced by one of alternative type, representing a “net short position” instead of a “net long position” in the risky instruments. For nonsymmetric deviation measures, the second type need not just be the reverse of the first type, and there can sometimes even be an interval for the risk-free rate in which no master fund of either type exists. A notion of basic fund, in place of master fund, is brought in to get around this difficulty and serve as a single guide to optimality regardless of such circumstances.
An ordered probit analysis of transaction stock prices

We estimate the conditional distribution of trade-to-trade price changes using ordered probit, a statistical model for discrete random variables. This approach recognizes that transaction price changes occur in discrete increments, typically eighths of a dollar, and occur at irregularly-spaced time intervals. Unlike existing models of discrete transactions prices, ordered probit can quantify the effects of other economic variables like volume, past price changes, and the time between trades on price changes. Using 1988 transactions data for over 100 randomly chosen U.S. stocks, we estimate the ordered probit model via maximum likelihood and use the parameter estimates to measure several transaction-related quantities, such as the price impact of trades of a given size, the tendency towards price reversals from one transaction to the next, and the empirical significance of price discreteness.
Markets and games: a simple equivalence among the core, equilibrium and limited arbitrage

This note provides simple proofs of the equivalence among the core, equilibrium and limited arbitrage in markets with short sales, and with uniform strictly convex preferences.
Academic Freedom and the Post-Garcetti Blues

The Supreme Court's reasoning in Garcetti v. Ceballos, a significant public employee free speech case, raises troublesome questions because it appears to leave little breathing space for First Amendment protection for teacher speech in the classroom and for academic scholarship. In this Article, I argue for a normative approach to academic freedom in public elementary and secondary education and in higher education that takes account of Garcetti but is not over-determined by it. This normative approach is grounded on the self-government rationale of the Constitution's text and structure, including the First Amendment, and inquires into the purposes of education in a democracy. I then address the doctrinal implications of these educational purposes for academic freedom and the First Amendment. Painting with a broad First Amendment brush, I conclude that the scope of academic freedom in elementary and secondary education has not been changed by Garcetti: it remains quite limited. However, I also conclude that academic freedom in higher education should not be governed by Garcetti. Rather, as high-value speech in a democracy, it deserves maximum First Amendment protection.
Rape Trauma, the State, and the Art of Tracey Emin

Prosecutors use rape trauma syndrome evidence at rape trials to explain victims’ “counterintuitive” behaviors and demeanors, such as their late reporting, rape denials, returns to the scenes of their attacks, and lack of emotional affect. Courts and experts, in instructions and testimony, usually describe victim reticence as a product of shame or trauma. But feminist critics of Rape Trauma Syndrome evidence posit that the syndrome is based on incomplete evidence because most rapes are unreported. Furthermore, they object to its condescending, sexist, and colonial construction of rape victims and their emotions.
Senate confirmation of cabinet appointments: Congress-centered, presidency-centered, and nominee-centered explanations

Abstract Recent presidents find greater proportions of their executive nominations encountering substantial opposition in the Senate. What accounts for failed nominations to senior-level executive positions? We address this question by examining 297 cabinet and other senior-level nominations between 1969 and 2012, testing multivariate models of the effects of the partisan and ideological composition of the Senate, the president's public approval and electoral mandate, and characteristics of the nominee. The analysis demonstrates that allegations of illegal or unethical behavior by the nominee and concerns over policy preferences best explain the Senate's response to executive nominations. It is clear that, unlike legislative outcomes, confirmation outcomes are the products of nominee-centered factors with presidency-centered factors and Congress-centered factors having little impact on Senate decisions.
The Impact of Dealing Patterns on Purchase Behavior

We explore the effect of dealing patterns on consumer purchase behavior by developing a normative purchase quantity model that can incorporate any dealing pattern. The model adds to the stream of research on optimal purchasing policy by demonstrating how dealing patterns can be incorporated in a simple manner in dynamic programming models. Implications for purchase behavior are derived by employing the model in a numerical simulation in which time between deals is characterized by a Weibull distribution. The flexibility of the Weibull distribution enables us to establish how particular facets of the dealing distribution e.g., certainty in deal timing, minimum time between deals affect consumer behavior with respect to optimal purchase quantity, inventory, etc. One of the implications of the model is that the average quantity purchased on deal should be larger when there is greater certainty in deal timing. The model also shows that the average quantity purchased on deal should be larger when deals are spaced further apart. even though the buyer is presented with the same number of deals. We test certain model implications in a laboratory experiment and find actual behavior varying across dealing patterns in a manner consistent with model implications.
More Pieces of the CEO Compensation Puzzle

No current issue in corporate governance is more hotly debated than the question, "Why are American CEOs paid such high salaries?" A recent and influential answer, dubbed the "managerial power" approach, has an appealing simplicity: CEOs so thoroughly control their firms' compensation-setting machinery that they simply pay themselves whatever they want, restrained only by the tenuous limits of their own avarice and the vague need to avoid public "outrage." As an explanation for a complex process, however, the simplistic managerial power approach is so flawed as to be nearly useless. The single most intriguingfeature ofCEOcompensationfor example, is its meteoric rise during the 1990s, the very period when CEO control over boards was declining and public outrage was increasing, yet the managerial power approach has no convincing explanation for the anomaly. This article argues that the managerial power approach's failure is rooted in several theoretical problems, including (1) its tacit assumption that we can tell how much CEOs ought to be paid; (2) its reliance on a model of arm's-length bargaining, instead of the relational bargaining model that modern contract theory suggests is usual in employment relationships, (3) its failure to distinguish between the bargaining power of the CEO and the CEO's control of the bargaining process, and (4) its failure to examine CEO compensation in the context of the drastic rise in compensation of those at the tops of many other fields, including baseball players. The article argues that a full explanation of the compensation process will necessarily have to take these factors into account. The managerial power approach is simple and it fits nicely with common ideas about the greed of corporate executives, but it is not a useful description of the CEO compensation process. "Associate Profrssor, Texas Wesleyan University School of Law. Rachel ArnowRichan and Anm Mirabito provided helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks to David Cook. Kellie Nelson Jason Bowman. and Ray Hosack for their fime research assistance. DELAWARE JOURNAL OF CORPORATE LAW
Fluconomics: preserving our hospital infrastructure during and after a pandemic.

Influenza pandemics occur regularly. The deadly Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 infected more than 25% of the United States population, and killed 2.5% of those infected. Virtually all experts agree that it is not a question of if another influenza pandemic as deadly as the Spanish flu will occur, but a question of when. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the direct and indirect medical costs in the United States associated with a "medium-level" influenza pandemic would range from $71 billion to $167 billion. Although public health officials are rapidly implementing pandemic preparedness plans on both the local and national levels, and Congress has appropriated several billion dollars for pandemic preparedness, we currently have no means of ensuring that hospitals acting as isolation, quarantine, and treatment centers in a pandemic will survive the loss of revenue that they will experience in protecting the public's health. Our hospitals depend on a fragmented financing system that presumes the hospital's ability to shift costs from low-paying public payors to higher-paying private payors, and from less lucrative cases to more lucrative, often elective, procedures. During a pandemic, hospitals treating pandemic victims will be unable to perform this cost-shifting function. Furthermore, the stigma that surrounds a hospital that acts as an isolation or quarantine center for an infectious disease will make it difficult for such hospitals to attract privately insured patients for some time after a pandemic ceases. The failure to provide financial assurances to hospitals and other first responders to a pandemic is likely to result in severe damage to our hospital system and to our ability to care for the sick and injured, both during and after a pandemic. This article proposes that we provide the nation's hospitals with financial assurances that they will survive a pandemic as a public health strategy. It proposes that we use some of the billions of dollars being allocated by Congress to pandemic preparedness to create a fund earmarked to compensate hospitals for the direct costs of caring for pandemic victims. It also proposes that Congress create a Public Health Emergency Business Interruption Insurance program, modeled after the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002, to offset losses caused by disruption of the normal system of health care financing engendered by a pandemic. Finally, it proposes that the courts re-interpret the Takings Clause to allow compensation to hospitals for losses of goodwill due to their compliance with the orders of public health officials during a pandemic. This will ensure that the interests of hospitals are aligned with the interests of the public during a pandemic, that the hospitals will therefore cooperate with the orders of public health officials, and that our hospitals will emerge from the pandemic intact and ready to resume providing acute care to the public.
The Power of Suggestion: Inertia in 401(k) Participation and Savings Behavior

This paper analyzes the impact of automatic enrollment on 401(k) savings behavior. We have two key e ndings. First, 401(k) participation is signie cantly higher under automatic enrollment. Second, a substantial fraction of 401(k) participants hired under automatic enrollment retain both the default contribution rate and fund allocation even though few employees hired before automatic enrollment picked this particular outcome. This “ default” behavior appears to result from participant inertia and from employee perceptions of the default as investment advice. These e ndings have implications for the design of 401(k) savings plans as well as for any type of Social Security reform that includes personal accounts over which individuals have control. They also shed light more generally on the importance of both economic and noneconomic (behavioral) factors in the determination of individual savings behavior.
Legal origins, comparative law, and political economy

The "legal origins" scholarship of the past decade has created con troversy both in its application of quantitative methods to comparative law and in its claims that common law is better than civil law for economic development These controversies have unleashed a storm of criticism by traditional comparative law scholars. Without denying the validity of much of that criticism, this short comment seeks to em phasize some positive points about the legal origins scholarship with three main arguments: (1) the quantitative methods used by the legal origins literature are not a substitute for traditional, non-quantitative comparative studies but an extension of traditional scholarship, on which quantitative methods must perforce rely and to which they offer a potentially fruitful partnership; (2) despite the substantial criticisms of the application and interpretation of quantitative methods by the legal origins literature, there is no reason to reject the methods them selves; comparative law needs to explore the utility of quantitative methods for developing and testing generalities about legal systems and we should be wary of a disciplinary bias against using them; and (3) the core idea of the legal origins thesis?that there are aspects of the civil law tradition reflecting a more intrusive or regulatory concep tion of the state than is found in the common law tradition?is borne out by my own work on the political economy of legal systems though the generalization appears to be more useful for fostering understand ing across legal traditions than as a blueprint from legal reform.
Liquidity traps with global Taylor Rules

An important theme in the writings of Jess Benhabib is the global stability of equilibrium in monetary economies. A key result emerging from his research is that Taylor-type interest rate feedback rules that are bounded below by zero can lead to unintended liquidity traps. The present paper shows that even if the interest rate rule is not bounded below by zero, that is, even if the government could credibly commit to a globally active Taylor rule, self-fulfilling liquidity traps cannot be ruled out. This result is shown to obtain in models with flexible and sticky prices and under continuous and discrete time.
A Matter of Life and Death*-Why the ADA Permits Mandatory Periodic Medical Examinations of "Remote-Location" Employees

The Americans with Disabilities Act provides that a covered employer can require an employee to submit to a medical examination if such examination is shown by the employer to be job-related and consistent with business necessity. Some employers that employ workers in high-risk jobs in remote locations desire to institute mandatory periodic medical examination policies that would require current workers to submit to annual medical examinations. The reason for requiring such examinations is to protect the health and safety of the remote-location employee and his or her fellow employees. For example, an offshore oil employee with an undetected heart condition could have a heart attack on the job, causing injury to himself and others. The remoteness of the job site impairs the employer's ability to provide the injured rig employees with access to emergency medical care. A periodic medical examination could prevent such a catastrophe. Unfortunately, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has issued enforcement guidance that prohibits remote-location employers from demonstrating that their mandatory periodic medical examination policies are job-related and consistent with business necessity. The plain language of the statute, the ADA legislative history, and economic efficiency, however, indicates that employers should have the opportunity to demonstrate that such policies further their legitimate health and safety interests and meet a lenient business necessity standard. And, in fact, such employers should often times be able to satisfy this standard.
‘Déjà vol’: Predictive regressions for aggregate stock market volatility using macroeconomic variables

Abstract Aggregate stock return volatility is both persistent and countercyclical. This paper tests whether it is possible to improve volatility forecasts at monthly and quarterly horizons by conditioning on additional macroeconomic variables. I find that several variables related to macroeconomic uncertainty, time-varying expected stock returns, and credit conditions Granger cause volatility. It is more difficult to find evidence that forecasts exploiting macroeconomic variables outperform a univariate benchmark out-of-sample. The most successful approaches involve simple combinations of individual forecasts. Predictive power associated with macroeconomic variables appears to concentrate around the onset of recessions.
IRS Reform: Politics As Usual?

The IRS is still reeling from accusations that it “targeted” Tea Party and other non-profit organizations for delays of their applications for tax-exempt status. Although multiple government investigations found no politically motivated behavior — only mismanagement — Congressional hearings were quite inflammatory. Congress recently followed up those hearings with a set of IRS reforms. Congress’s approach is reminiscent of the late 1990s, when highly publicized Congressional hearings regarding alleged abuses by the IRS resulted in a major IRS reform and restructuring, although the allegations subsequently were largely debunked. This Article argues that the recent allegations against the IRS also were overblown. It looks to the aftermath of the 1998 IRS reform, which included a major downturn in enforcement, for lessons for the present day. The Article concludes that Congress as a whole can do a better job of keeping politics from undermining tax administration.
Is It Worth Trusting Your Manager

Researchers have long been interested in the role of top managers in organizations. The existing research, however, has largely focused on the individual characteristics of managers and paid less a...
Prosecuting Those Bearing 'Greatest Responsibility': The Lessons of the Special Court for Sierra Leone

This Article examines the controversial article 1(1) of the Statute of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) giving that tribunal the competence “to prosecute those who bear the greatest responsibility” for serious international and domestic crimes committed during the latter part of the notoriously brutal Sierra Leonean conflict. The debate that arose during the SCSL trials was whether this bare statement constituted a jurisdictional requirement that the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt or merely a type of guideline for the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. The judges of the court split on the issue. This paper is the first to critically assess the reasons why the tribunal’s judges disagreed in the interpretation of this seemingly simple legal question. It then attempts to discern the common ground in the judicial reasoning, and argues that the ultimate conclusion that “greatest responsibility” implied that leaders as well as the worst killers may be prosecuted is a welcome jurisprudential contribution to our understanding of personal jurisdiction in international criminal law. The paper makes several contributions to the literature. First, it takes up and highlights a widely ignored but important legal question. Second, it demonstrates why the reasoning of the Appeals Chamber was results-oriented and wrong. Finally, it identifies the lessons of Sierra Leone and builds on them to offer preliminary recommendations on how the greatest responsibility conundrum can be avoided when drafting personal jurisdiction clauses for future ad hoc international penal tribunals.
Information Ethics for 21st Century Library Professionals

Purpose: To provide an introduction to concepts and resources that will be useful to library professionals learning about information ethics. Methodology: This paper argues for the importance of information ethics to 21 century library professionals. It describes what various authors have said about how information ethics can be applied to the ethical dilemmas faced by library professionals. Findings: In order to deal effectively with their ethical dilemmas, library professionals must have a good working knowledge of information ethics. Codes of professional ethics can help to provide such knowledge, but they are not sufficient. Courses on information ethics must be part of the education of information professionals. Such courses should provide library professionals with an understanding of ethical theories and how they apply to concrete practical cases. Such courses should also make explicit the connection between information ethics and the mission of the library professional. Research limitations: This paper is not intended to provide an exhaustive list of publications on the topic of information ethics and library professionals. Value: This paper provides library professionals with a concise introduction to information ethics.
From Here to Beijing: Public/Private Overlaps in Trade and Their Effects on U.S. Law

INTRODUCTION Despite China’s recent achievements at the Beijing Olympics,1 news involving contaminated pet food and unsafe toys imported from China makes us question the legal frameworks that facilitated such incidents and stirs anti-globalization sentiment.2 While consumers wonder about the role their governments play in this context and look for remedies that respond in some meaningful way to the forces of globalization, deeper questions lie underneath the surface of the legal remedial work of domestic courts. International trade and globalization have provided greater access to imported goods for consumers and more opportunities for corporations to export their products. However, amid this increasing exchange of goods, the regulatory power of states and the jurisdictional reach of domestic courts are constrained. International regimes such as
The Principle of Misalignment: Duty, Damages, and the Nature of Tort Liability

When a tort rule is fully aligned, harms are valued equally across the elements. Because the valuation of harm within duty equals the valuation within the damages remedy, a fully aligned rule gives dutyholders the option to fully comply with the duty with respect to any harm by paying (the equally valued) compensatory damages for that harm. Full alignment characterizes a rule of strict liability but not negligence liability, which partially misaligns the elements for reasons of principle. Owing to its primary reliance on the damages remedy, a fully aligned rule is unable to address adequately the problem of irreparable injury, a common law category encompassing bodily injury and damage to real or tangible property. In cases of irreparable injury, the common law has long recognized the principle that it is better to prevent the harm instead of attempting to compensate for its occurrence with the inherently inadequate monetary damages award. This principle explains why tort law has adopted a default rule of negligence liability that seeks to prevent the irreparable injury of physical harm without imposing undue hardship on the dutyholder. To function in this manner, the negligence rule must misalign the elements so that dutyholders are prohibited from rejecting the primary duty of care (based on a higher legal valuation of harm) in exchange for payment of (the lower-valued) compensatory damages. The principle of misalignment reorients the interpretation of tort law in a manner that has been missed by leading accounts. It decisively shows that courts have formulated the negligence rule in a fundamentally inefficient manner, while also showing that the rights-based accounts of corrective justice must explain why that form of justice would primarily value the exercise of reasonable care as opposed to the payment of compensatory damages. For reasons revealed by the misaligned negligence rule, that type of explanation can be supplied by a compensatory tort norm that redirects the dutyholder’s compensatory obligation from the damages remedy into expenditures that would prevent physical harm, yielding the type of misaligned negligence rule that now constitutes the default rule of tort liability. In a world of irreparable injuries and scarce resources, the varied limitations of tort liability can all be understood in relation to a norm of compensation for reasons fully illustrated by the misaligned negligence rule. author. Sheila Lubetsky Birnbaum Professor of Civil Litigation, New York University School of Law. Copyright 2011 Mark A. Geistfeld. Special thanks to the New York City Torts Group for the helpful input on an earlier iteration of this project. Financial support was provided by the Filomen D’Agostino and Max E. Greenberg Research Fund of the New York University School of Law. the principle of misalignment
Agreement and similarity in self-other perceptions of moral character

Abstract We surveyed well-acquainted dyads about two key moral character traits (Honesty–Humility, Guilt Proneness), as well as several other individual differences. We examined self-other agreement, similarity, assumed similarity, and similarity-free agreement (i.e., self-other agreement controlling for similarity and assumed similarity). Participants projected their own level of moral character onto their peers (i.e., moderately high assumed similarity), but were nonetheless able to judge moral character with reasonable accuracy (moderately high self-other agreement and similarity-free agreement), suggesting that moral character traits can be detected by well-acquainted others. Regardless of reporting method, Honesty–Humility and Guilt Proneness were correlated with delinquency, unethical decision making, and counterproductive work behavior, suggesting that unethical behavior is committed disproportionately by people with low levels of these character traits.
Wednesbury Reformulated: Proportionality and the Supreme Court of India

(2013). Wednesbury Reformulated: Proportionality and the Supreme Court of India. Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 191-208.
Hazard functions and life distributions in discrete time

The problem of studying lifelength distributions in discrete time is considered for certain forms of hazard functions. A class of life distributions that consists of the geometric, the Waring and the negative hypergeometric distributions is shown to result when the hazard function is inversely proportional to some linear function of time.
As You Sow, So Shall You Reap: The Welfare Impacts of Contract Farming

Summary Contract farming is widely perceived as a means of increasing welfare in developing countries. Because of smallholder self-selection in contract farming, however, it is not clear whether contract farming actually increases grower welfare. In an effort to improve upon existing estimates of the welfare impacts of contract farming, this paper uses the results of a contingent-valuation experiment to control for unobserved heterogeneity among smallholders. Using data across several regions, firms, and crops in Madagascar, results indicate that a 1-percent increase in the likelihood of participating in contract farming is associated with a 0.5-percent increase in household income, among other positive impacts.
Opportunity Platforms and Safety Nets: Corporate Citizenship and Reputational Risk

It is argued that no simple correlation can be established between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance. The activities that generate CSP do not directly impact the company's financial performance, but instead affect the bottom line via its stock of reputational capital - the financial value of its intangible assets. It is suggested that corporate citizenship programs can be designed to help companies address reputational threats and opportunities to achieve reputational gains while mitigating reputational losses.
PORTFOLIO CHOICE AND RISK ATTITUDES: AN EXPERIMENT

We study the following basic intuition: when faced with a decision how to split their investment between a risky lottery and an asset with a fixed return, people increase the proportion invested in the risky option the more they like the lottery. We find counter-examples to this, and in fact we find no simple relation between preferences between lotteries and the fraction invested in them. We use three well-documented biases (ambiguity aversion, the illusion of control and myopic loss aversion) to show this. First we replicate the previous results in a laboratory experiment with financial incentives, and then test whether participants are willing to explicitly pay a small sum of money in line with the bias (pay for less ambiguity, more perceived control, or more frequent information about portfolio performance). We then study how portfolio choice depends on these biases. With the parameters chosen, the illusion of control was eliminated when participants were asked to pay to gain more control, and the bias did not affect investment behavior (i.e., participants invested in a risky option the same fraction when faced with more or less control). In the ambiguity treatment, people were willing to pay for less ambiguity, but again the level of ambiguity did not influence investment. Finally, in the myopic loss aversion treatment participants were willing to pay money to have more freedom to choose, even though (in line with the documented bias) they invested less when having more freedom to change their investment.
The Architecture of Smart Intelligence: Structuring and Overseeing Agencies in the Post-9/11 World

Copyright © 2006 California Law Review, Inc. California Law Review, Inc. (CLR) is a California nonprofit corporation. CLR and the authors are solely responsible for the content of their publications. † Assistant Professor of Law, Boalt Hall, School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. I am grateful to Jamie O’Connell, Eugene Bardach, Melvin Eisenberg, Christopher Elmendorf, Daniel Farber, Philip Frickey, Andrew Guzman, Daniel Ho, Sonya Lebsack, Jonathan Masur, Robert Merges, Paul Schwartz, Martin Shapiro, Matthew Stephenson, Eric Talley, John Yoo, David Zaring, Amy Zegart, editors of California Law Review, and participants in the University of California, Davis, Law School Faculty Workshop, the Boalt Hall-Montpellier University Faculty Conference, Boalt Hall’s Advanced Constitutional Theory Student Seminar, the University of California, Los Angeles, Law School Faculty Workshop, the University of California, Berkeley, Learning in Retirement Program on Constitutional Law, and the American Law and Economics Association’s 2006 Annual Meeting for helpful discussions and suggestions. In May 2005, I worked with five undergraduates—Paul Angelo (Naval Academy), Albert Chang (Stanford University), Chris Culver (Air Force Academy), Becky Perry (University of Texas, Austin), and Marissa Vahlsing (Swarthmore College)—on a policy proposal to reform congressional oversight of the intelligence community; conversations with those students improved my ideas on this topic. Casey Roberts, Bruno Salama, and James Chavez provided extremely helpful research assistance, and Doug Avila of the Boalt Hall Library tracked down copies of many sources. The Boalt Hall Fund provided financial assistance. From 2001 to 2003, I was a trial attorney at the Federal Programs Branch of the U.S. Department of Justice. As a team member helping to review designations of entities linked to terrorism before their assets were frozen and defend those designations when legal challenges were brought, I interacted with members of the intelligence community. Nothing in this Article is based on confidential or classified information, and none of my views should be attributed to the Department of Justice. 1. William E. Odom, Fixing Intelligence for a More Secure America 187 (2003). Judge Posner has questioned this inference. Richard A. Posner, The 9/11 Report: A Dissent, (Review of Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States), N.Y. Times Book Rev., Aug. 29, 2004, at 1; see also Richard A. Posner, Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11, at 20 (2005); Luis Garicano & Richard A.
Are Migratory Birds Extending Environmental Criminal Liability

Environmental statutes frequently include criminal provisions as a means of enforcing their regulations. However, these provisions often include little if no mens rea requirement. As with any form of criminal liability that approaches strict liability, courts must therefore somehow insure that convictions satisfy constitutional due process concerns. During the last century, and accompanying the rise of regulatory statutes, the court developed the public welfare doctrine as a method of justifying the lack of a mens rea requirement for certain types of crimes. These crimes, known as public welfare offenses, involve regulations so potentially dangerous to public health and safety that the court was willing to presume that the allegedly criminal actor had knowledge of his wrong doing, thus satisfying due process. United States v. Apollo Energies, Inc.’s, interpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, demonstrates another justification for a lack of a mens rea requirement. However, for a criminal offense that did not fall under the coverage of the public welfare doctrine: an offense that does not affect the public health, and which features a causation element. To satisfy due process, the Tenth Circuit borrows several elements embedded in the public welfare doctrine: foreseeability of regulation and foreseeability of harm. The use of these elements, and the Tenth Circuit’s willingness to apply them outside of the public welfare setting, illuminates when courts might find liability for future environmental regulatory crimes.
An Examination of the Impact of Budget Reform on Arizona and Oklahoma Appropriations

Government reform shifts from using the budget as a control mechanism to focusing on how the budget can leverage planning and management tools that emphasize results. This research investigates reform at the state level. First, has the emphasis in the appropriations format changed from a control to more of a planning or performance orientation? Second, what factors explain any change in the level of control exercised through the appropriations process? Through multiple regression analysis, this research finds that Arizona, a reform state, is more likely to have reduced appropriations format control than Oklahoma, a nonreform state. Also, an elected agency head, the number of changes in the head of the agency, the level of reliance on the general fund, and the format received in a prior year are predictors of change.
Prejudice, Exclusion, and Economic Disadvantage: A Theory

A central hypothesis about discrimination is that prejudice forces the stigmatized into low-paying, undesirable jobs. Prejudice clearly leads to exclusion. But surprisingly, evidence linking exclus...
ADA Title III: A Fragile Compromise

ADA Title III protects individuals with disabilities from discrimination at places of public accommodation. Because the definition of "public accommodations" is broad, the title requires accessibility and nondiscrimination at entities that individuals visit on a frequent basis, as well as at entities that individuals visit to enhance the quality of their lives. The broad coverage came at a price - in return for a broad list of covered entities, civil rights advocates agreed to a limited set of remedies under ADA Title III. This article explores the legislative history underlying this compromise, and its implications for enforcement of the title. The author concludes that the current trend of under-enforcement of ADA Title III should cause us to consider enhancing remedies at the state and federal level.
EXPANDING THE NAFTA CHAPTER 19 DISPUTE SETTLEMENT SYSTEM: A WAY TO DECLAW TRADE REMEDY LAWS IN A FREE TRADE AREA OF THE AMERICAS?

Chapter 19 of the NAFTA transfers judicial review of U.S., Canadian, and Mexican government investigations under the controversial anti-dumping and countervailing duty (AD/CVD) laws from national courts to binational panels of private international law experts. The system stands as a unique surrender of judicial sovereignty to an international body, a hybrid of national courts and international dispute settlement with as yet no parallel in the world of international trade or other international law regimes. Binational panel decisions have been controversial because agencies chafe at their intimate examination of agency findings and supporting evidence. Panels also are viewed as substantially more likely to overturn agency conclusions than national courts. Given the record of chapter 19 NA ETA panels, the author examines whether the system created to fill a unique need among the NAFTA parties may have broader utility, albeit one perhaps less true to its original purpose. We will recall that U.S. recalcitrance on proposed changes to its ADI CVD laws (and its agricultural subsidies) were the principal reasons that Brazilforced Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) talks onto the back burner to await the Doha Round results on these issues. The United States is unlikely to condone major changes to the WTO Anti-Dumping and Subsidies Agreements, which will become the final sticking point for reaching agreement after members resolve the agriculture issues now blocking conclusion of the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations. Thus, trade remedies will again surface as major issues once FTAA talks resume. Studies indicate that binational panels reverse agency decisions at a greater rate than national courts and that existence of the system has reduced the rate of filing of industry requests for AD/CVD investigations. Rather than finding an elusive set of substantive revisions to these laws, might changing the method of review of agency determinations furnish a missing piece in the 1. Lecturer in Law and Director, International Trade Law Program, University of Florida Levin College of Law; Chief Counsel for Import Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1982-1999. Professor Powell wishes to thank his students, Reka Toth Beane and Jean Pierre Espinoza, for their excellent research assistance.
The Q-626 Report: A Study Analyzing the Diversity of the 626 Largest Businesses, and the 105 Largest Minority-Owned Businesses in Queens

The borough of Queens in New York City is the most diverse county in the United States. The population is evenly divided between and among African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Whites. Entrepreneurship has grown steadily among minority-owned businesses in the United States. The Q-626 Report examines and analyzes the 626 largest and 105 largest minority-owned businesses in Queens. The Q-626 Report finds that the 105 largest minority-owned businesses in Queens have annual sales of approximately $2 billion. Most of the largest minority-owned businesses in Queens are Asian owned. They are also diversified in the types of products and services that they sell. The Q-626 Report finds an underrepresentation of African American and Latino businesses in Queens. This underrepresentation needs further study, but could result from lack of access to capital and lack of access to formal business networks.
System identification in noisy data environments: An application to six Asian stock markets

Abstract This paper analyzes the systematic relationship between the stock market valuations, the nominal GDPs and the interest rates of six Asian countries, using not “single equation regression”, but an alternative methodology based on complete, multidirectional, least squares projections in the tradition of Frisch (1934). We compare the results with the spectral analysis of the information matrices and determine the noise levels. The objective is to extract the multidimensional economic system structures from the noisy empirical observations. This complete methodology sharply contrasts with the incomplete methodology of Fama [Fama, E.F., 1990. Stock returns, expected returns, and real activity. Journal of Finance 45, 1089–1108] and Schwert [Schwert, G.W., 1990. Stock returns and real activity: A century of evidence. Journal of Finance 45, 1237–1257], etc., who presume planal relations, fit them to the multidimensional data by only one prejudiced unidirectional projection, thereby ignoring between 75% and 92% of the available covariance information and not publishing all possible model projections. The results in this paper show that the analyzed countries are better analyzed using such complete multidirectional LS projections, even though the analysis is combinatorially much more complex. All six Asian financial-economic systems are high data noise environments, in which it is very difficult to separate the systematic signals from the noise. Because of these high noise levels, spectral analysis is very unreliable. We identify Taiwan’s stock market, economy and financial market to be rationally coherent. In contrast, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Indonesia show only partially coherent systems, while no coherent system can be identified among Japan’s data.
On integrating hypermedia into decision support and other information systems

Abstract The goal of this research is to provide hypermedia functionality to all information systems that interact with people. Hypermedia is a concept involving access to information, embodying the notions of context-sensitive navigation, annotation and tailored presentation. This paper presents the architecture of a system-level hypermedia engine , designed both to manage full hypermedia functionality for an information system and to bind interface-oriented front-end systems with separate computation-oriented back-end systems. The engine dynamically superimposes a hypermedia representation over a back-end application's knowledge components and processes. The hypermedia engine generates this representation using bridge laws , which capture the internal structure of client systems. Users access the application through its hypermedia representation. The paper also describes a set of minimal requirements for integrating the hypermedia engine with an information system. These guidelines apply to all integration efforts, not just that described here. Information systems will require some supplementary routines for the engine to manage hypermedia functionality for them. The more sophisticated and cooperative the information system, the higher the level of hypermedia support the engine will provide.
Does Social Media Influence Conflict? Evidence from the 2012 Gaza Conflict

How does international public support via social media influence conflict dynamics? To answer this question, I construct a unique, extremely disaggregated data set drawn from social media sources to examine the behavior of Israel and Hamas during the 2012 Gaza Conflict. The data set contains conflict actions and international audience behavior at the hourly level for the full 179 hours of the conflict. Notably, I also include popular support for each side from international audiences on social media. I employ a Bayesian structural vector autoregression to measure how Israel’s and Hamas’s actions respond to shifts in international public support. The main finding is that shifts in public support reduce conflict intensity, particularly for Israel. This effect is greater than the effect of the key international actors—United States, Egypt, and United Nations. The results provide an important insight into how information technology is changing the role of international audiences in conflict.
Internet regulation: a case study in the problem of unilateralism

The paper identifies two insights that the problem of Internet regulation provides for understanding the more general problem of unilateralism. First, it suggests the existence of a wide variety of mechanisms for encoding the normative preferences of one nation as behavioural constraints on the citizens of another. In the Internet context in particular, technological and organizational adaptations to law play this role. A broad principle of cooperation among nations, which would require each nation to take account in its public actions of the constraints it would impose on the citizens of other nations, would therefore entail a breathtaking degree of cooperation and consideration among nations, or risk that the very breadth of its ambition will severely limit its domain of operation. Secondly, it suggests that the interplay between unilateral lawmaking on the one hand, and a harmonization ethic implemented by imperfectly articulated multilateral processes on the other hand, creates an institutional environment ripe for the picking by non-representative commercial or other organizations to embed their values in the regulatory system that will ultimately emerge. 1 On the Transmission of Values as Behavioural Constraints The problem of Internet regulation presents a microcosm of the debates about, and conceptions of, the problem of unilateralism in relations among nations. I will address this paper to two specific insights that the problem of Internet regulation has to offer the more general study of the problem of unilateralism. First, there is the question of the appropriate normative and legal domain of application of the problem. In particular, the question is what mechanisms of transmission of the values of one nation as behavioural constraints in another are within the ambit of concern for international law. Another way of putting this is to think of it as a test case for the proper scope of a 'principle of cooperation' among nations such as the one proposed by
Text Preprocessing for Unsupervised Learning: Why It Matters, When It Misleads, and What to Do about It

Despite the popularity of unsupervised techniques for political science text-as-data research, the importance and implications of preprocessing decisions in this domain have received scant systematic attention. Yet, as we show, such decisions have profound effects on the results of real models for real data. We argue that substantive theory is typically too vague to be of use for feature selection, and that the supervised literature is not necessarily a helpful source of advice. To aid researchers working in unsupervised settings, we introduce a statistical procedure and software that examines the sensitivity of findings under alternate preprocessing regimes. This approach complements a researcher’s substantive understanding of a problem by providing a characterization of the variability changes in preprocessing choices may induce when analyzing a particular dataset. In making scholars aware of the degree to which their results are likely to be sensitive to their preprocessing decisions, it aids replication efforts.