cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Law versus the State: The Judicialization of Politics in Egypt

This study seeks to explain the paradoxical expansion of constitutional power in Egypt over the past two decades, despite that country's authoritarian political system. I find that the Egyptian regime established an independent constitutional court, capable of providing institutional guarantees on the security of property rights, in order to attract desperately needed private investment after the failure of its socialist-oriented development strategy. The court continued to expand its authority, fundamentally transforming the mode of interaction between state and society by supporting regime efforts to liberalize the economy while simultaneously providing new avenues for opposition activists and human rights groups to challenge the state. The Egyptian case challenges some of our basic assumptions about the conditions under which we are likely to see a judicialization of politics, and it invites scholars to explore the dynamics of judicial politics in other authoritarian political systems.
Simultaneous Determination of Home Work and Market Work of Women in Urban West Africa

Little is known about how women in urban environments in developing countries allocate their time. A simultaneous tobit model of hours in market work and home work, incorporating jointness in decisions regarding time in these activities and allowing for non-participation in either activity, is estimated on a sample of women from Conakry, Guinea. The results indicate that years of formal schooling has non-linear effects on women's market labor supply, becoming positive only around completion of primary school. As in rural areas, infrastructural factors such as transportation costs and access to electricity have substantial impacts on female time in home and market activities.
On the Longitudinal Effects of IT Use on Firm-Level Employment

The effect of information technology (IT) on employment is a crucial question in today’s economy given the increased digitization of work. To analyze the relationship between IT use and firm-level employment, we examine the longitudinal role of IT use in the firm’s total number of employees. Our data set comes from the emerging economy of Turkey, and it represents firms of different sizes and industries. The data capture the firm’s use of enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management, and the use of Web applications, such as e-banking and e-government. Our empirical specifications exploit both within-firm and between-firm variations to show the positive effect of IT use on firm-level employment, which varies across IT applications over time. Interestingly, we find that the effects of the use of enterprise applications materialize after two years, whereas the effects of the use of Web applications are realized in the current year. We also examine whether...
Fishermen's perspectives on climate variability

Abstract Understanding fishermen's perspectives and responses relating to climate variability is important for sustainable fisheries management. To this end, a survey of captains of commercial passenger fishing vessels (CPFVs) was conducted in San Diego. The survey demonstrates that fishermen have observed and adapted to changes in the environment and fish populations associated with climate variability. However, only 12.9% of respondents agreed that global climate change is a possibility. In order to explain fishermen's divergent beliefs on climate change, a semiparametric discrete choice model is used to identify the potential determinants. The empirical results highlight the importance of the following factors: fishermen's experience, observations of the phenomena that are associated with climate variability, and an interaction of fishermen's experience and their observations.
Protection of Close Corporation Minority Shareholders in the United States

This paper discusses the problems and legal protections of minority shareholders in close corporations in the United States. Minority shareholders in their corporation may be concerned with having voice, access to information, some control, return and ability to exit. In addition, minority investors are often concerned that those in control will act opportunistically and take advantage of their control for personal benefit. It is important to understand how corporate law default rules deal with these issues and the extent to which the minority shareholders are protected while allowing those in control to exercise their power. While these issues can all be addressed by shareholders contracting for protection ex ante, those without contracts also have some legal protections ex post.
Reactions to Wal-Mart v. Dukes: Litigation Strategy and Legal Change

Most discussions of legal doctrine assume that litigants will react to a change in doctrine, but not that they will try to influence that doctrine further by adopting new arguments or finding loopholes in the doctrine itself. As a result, legal scholars tend to overstate the reactions to changes in doctrine, and understate the role of legal strategy in changing doctrine. One recent example is the legal academy's pronouncement of the "death of the class action" in response to the Supreme Court's opinion in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes. In fact, when one examines the lower court responses to Dukes, it becomes clear that Dukes did not present a significant change in class-action doctrine, let alone sound a death knell for the device. Instead, it was a periodic correction in an area where litigants have fought for advantage over a period of more than forty years.
Analyzing Valuation Measures: A Performance Horse Race over the Past 40 Years

In this article, the authors compare the investment performance of portfolios sorted on different valuation measures. They find that EBITDA/TEV has been the best performing metric, historically, and outperforms many investor favorites, such as price-to-earnings ratio, free cash flow to total enterprise value, and book-to-market ratio. The authors also explore the investment potential of long-term valuation ratios, which replace one-year earnings with an average of long-term earnings. They find that in contrast to prior empirical work, long-term ratios add little investment value over standard one-year valuation metrics.
Overcoming the Taste Stigma of Soy

ABSTRACT: Can labels unknowingly influence a person's taste perceptions? Using a “phantom ingredient” taste test, the presence or absence of a labeled ingredient (soy) was shown to influence sensory evaluations of a food. In particular, a nutrition bar wrongly purporting to contain soy generated negative ratings of taste, aftertaste, and attitude, yet generated favorable ratings of its nutritiousness. Because there was actually no soy in the product, these differences represent biases caused by ingredient labeling. Given the appropriate segment of consumers (health-oriented), ingredient labeling may have more favorable consequences. This power of suggestion might also be expanded to other ingredients or processes, such as those involving biotechnology or organic production.
Beyond cloning: expanding reproductive options for same-sex couples.

The possibility of human cloning has sparked debate, a proposed moratorium on cloning by the National Bioethics Advisory Commission and state legislation prohibiting the use of cloning techniques in human reproduction. Yet, anti-cloning guidelines or laws may have the unintended and unfortunate effect of preventing genetic reproduction by same-sex couples.Further advances in cloning technology could permit same-sex couples to have children whose genes come from both members of the couple. If all of the genes of a single adult can become the genes of a child through cloning, then half the genes of two adults should someday be able to become the genes of a child.Such a development could yield profound benefits. Homosexual couples have the same strong interest as heterosexual couples in raising children with whom they have biological ties. Genetically related children permit the continuation of one's lineage and heritage in a way that is not possible with biologically unrelated children. Moreover, with genetic parenthood, the same-sex family would look more like the heterosexual family, and that could help diminish societal stigmatization of homosexual individuals. Prejudice is rooted in large part in perceived differences. If differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals are narrowed, it might help reduce discrimination by heterosexuals against homosexual persons.Despite the value of same-sex reproduction, laws designed to prevent human cloning could inadvertently preclude genetic reproduction by same-sex couples. Anti-cloning legislation defines cloning in a way that would include genetic reproduction by same-sex couples, especially male-male couples. Such an effect of the laws indicates the need for revision, and possibly abandonment, of anti-cloning legislation.
Can labor markets help resolve collusion

Abstract We show that, in a multi-agent contract setting, the principal can effectively rule out tacit collusion among agents (i.e., “bad” equilibrium) by posting permanent job openings to an external labor market. That is, a simple “market-like” employment mechanism can yield collusion-proof contracts.
Strategic Open Routing in Service Networks

We study the behavior of strategic customers in an open-routing service network with multiple stations. When a customer enters the network, she is free to choose the sequence of stations that she visits, with the objective of minimizing her expected total system time. We propose a two-station game with all customers present at the start of service and deterministic service times, and we find that strategic customers “herd,” that is, in equilibrium all customers choose the same route. For unobservable systems, we prove that the game is supermodular, and we then identify a broad class of learning rules—which includes both fictitious play and Cournot best response—that converges to herding in finite time. By combining different theoretical and numerical analyses, we find that the herding behavior is prevalent in many other congested open-routing service networks, including those with arrivals over time, those with stochastic service times, and those with more than two stations. We also find that the system u...
The shifting boundaries of the mixed economy and the future of the nonprofit sector

The nonprofit sector exists because it can solve better than for-profit firms problems associated with the provision of products with publicness (nonrivalry or nonexcludability) attributes, or those affected by asymmetric information between providers and customers. This advantage is likely to be eroded in the future by various technological advances, particularly in the area of information transmission, analysis, storage and retrieval, and by the increase in the effective size of markets. Consequently, the demand for nonprofit organizations will possibly decline in the future. On the other hand, the operational efficiency of nonprofit organizations is likely to improve due to possibilities of stricter audit of and control over management made possible by enhanced access by nonprofit stakeholders to budgetary and operational information. This will help nonprofit organizations respond better to various failures of for-profit firms and to the insufficiency of government correctives. It is difficult to forecast the net effect of the myriad factors that work in opposite directions on the demand for and supply of nonprofit organizations, although it appears to this author that the economic weight of nonprofit organizations and their distinctive features will wane.
Individual political contributions and firm performance

We present evidence that individuals make political contributions strategically by targeting politicians with power to affect their economic well-being. Individuals in Congressional districts with greater industry clustering choose to support politicians with jurisdiction over the industry. Importantly, individual political contributions are associated with improvements in operating performance of firms in industry clusters. The relation between contributions and firm performance is strongest for poorly performing firms, firms closer to financial distress, and for contributions in close elections. The results imply that individual political contributions are valuable to firms, especially during bad economic times.
DO REGIONAL TRADING ARRANGEMENTS HARM THE ENVIRONMENT? AN ANALYSIS OF 162 COUNTRIES IN 1990

In this paper, we investigate the impact of regional trading arrangements (RTAs) on the environment. We propose an empirical model where RTAs, trade, growth and environmental quality are interrelated. As a result, an RTA in our model can impact the environment either directly or indirectly via trade and income. We find that membership in an RTA reduces the amount of environmental damage by increasing the volume of trade and raising per capita income. We do not, however, find that RTAs directly impact the environment. Taken together, our results suggest that the recent surge of regional trading arrangements will not increase the amount of pollution, but in fact may help the environment.
"Whenever Justice Requires": Examining the Elusive Role of Guardian ad Litem for Adults with Diminished Capacity

When Ms. F. first arrived in your office, accompanied by her niece, she was elderly (eighty-two), frail, and a little confused, but still able to coherently relate to you the events that had brought her to your office. A lonely widow, with no close relatives, she had become enamored with a fifty-year-old handyman who offered to repair her bathroom fixtures without charge. A few months later, the helpful handyman moved in with the widow, despite the fact that he was already married to a woman his own age--a fact he did not disclose to Ms. F. Soon, the helpful handyman’s name was listed beside hers on all of her bank accounts, and he was the one writing all of the checks, most of which were payable to cash or to himself. Finally, when the money in the bank accounts ran out, the helpful handyman took Ms. F. to see a friendly real estate investment company, telling Ms. F. that she needed to take out loans against her rental properties and then, several months later, her home. The “loans” turned out to be purchases (at discount prices) of each property, with the investment company representative stating that he had been told by the handyman that Ms. F. needed money to pay bills. The helpful handyman then cashed the proceeds checks from these sales and disappeared, leaving Ms. F. alone to face the action for eviction brought by the friendly real estate investment company. You file suit in a court of equity to enjoin the eviction and seeking rescission of these transactions; you are successful in keeping Ms. F. in her home during the ensuing two- year pendency of the proceedings.
The Use and Abuse of Special-Purpose Entities in Public Finance

Introduction 370 I. State SPE Taxonomy 374 A. Engaging in Interstate Functions 374 B. Running State Programs as Enterprises 375 C. Avoiding Constitutional Debt Limits 375 D. Financing Private Projects 376 E. Reducing State Financial Transparency 376 II. Potential Illegitimacies 377 A. Constitutional Illegitimacy and Tax Avoidance ......... 378 B. Reducing Transparency and Avoiding Public Scrutiny 378 1. De Facto “Guarantees” 381 2. Consequences of Lack of Transparency 383 3. Comparing State and Corporate SPE Lack of Transparency 385 4. Undermining Democratic Control of State Functions 388 III. Towards Regulatory Solutions 389 A. Recent State SPE Reform Efforts 390 B. Recent Corporate SPE Reform Efforts 391 C. A Broader Conceptual Framework for Reform 393 D. Applying the Framework 395 1. Improving Transparency of State SPE Debt ........ 396 2. Improving Monitoring of State SPE Debt 397 3. Limiting State SPE Debt 398
Convergence and divergence: the treatment of certain aspects of real property under the Civil Codes of Qatar and California

This paper compares and contrasts the treatment of certain aspects of real property under the civil codes of Qatar and California, two jurisdictions with very different histories and cultures but somewhat less different economies and environments. Despite their different starting points, the two civil codes have created similar, albeit far from identical, structures to achieve similar goals. This article explores the premise that similar environments - physical, economic, or otherwise - exert, in the long run, a greater pressure on the development of the law governing real property than do history and culture. The real property regimes of Qatar and California converge in many aspects. The nature of the real property right, while couched in civil law terms in one and common law terms in the other, includes in each case the rights of exclusion, use, enjoyment, and alienability. The forms of ownership in each vary according to legal tradition, with Qatar using the simpler civil law forms while California ind...
The Torture Memos and the Demands of Legality

This review essay considers five recent books concerning the role of governmetn lawyers in the Bush Administration's war on terror: Harold Bruff, Bad Advice (2009); Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency (2007); Jane Mayer, The Dark Side (2008); Philippe Sands, Torture Team (2008); John Yoo, War by Other Means (2006). One theme running through all of these books is whether there is a difference between legal and policy (or moral) advice, and whether lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel can be criticized in terms of norms of legal ethics for the advice they provided. What divides critics and defenders of the OLC lawyers, I claim, is difference on whether the rule of law has normative significance apart from the substantive content of policies furthered by the law. For example, John Yoo's defenses appeal directly to moral and policy considerations, while Jack Goldsmith's critiques appeal to values associated with the rule of law. In my view, the role of lawyers should be understood in connection with the value of legality -- i.e. the distinction between government genuinely constrained by the law and government that aims at doing the right thing all-things-considered, and which regards the law as only a pragmatic constraint.
In Search of Institutional Identity: The Federal Circuit Comes of Age

This article continues my examination of the experiment in specialization that was undertaken when the Federal Circuit was established a quarter of a century ago. There is now a sharp division in opinion regarding the court's performance among the bar, the legal academy, economists, and the Supreme Court. The first part of the paper suggests that opinions diverge because these constituencies disagree on the appropriate criteria for evaluating the court's output. The piece ends with a discussion of the proposals that have been made for improving appellate decision making in patent cases and, more generally, for improving the use of specialized courts.
An anatomy of a cartel: The national industrial recovery act of 1933 and the compliance crisis of 1934

This paper explores the nature and causes of the cartel compliance crisis that befell the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) one year after its passage in 1933. We employ a simple game-theoretic model of the NIRA's cartel enforcement mechanism to show that the compliance crisis can largely be explained by changes in expectations, rather than a change in enforcement policy. Specifically, firms initially overestimated the probability that defection would be met with sanction by the cartel's enabling body, the National Recovery Administration – including a consumer boycott resulting from loss of the patriotic Blue Eagle emblem – and complied with the industry cartel rules. As these expectations were correctly adjusted downward, cartel compliance was lost. We support this hypothesis empirically with industry-level panel data showing how output and wage rates varied according to consumer confidence in the Blue Eagle. The analysis provides insight about cartel performance more generally.
Uniformity of harmonic map heat flow at infinite time

UNIFORMITY OF HARMONIC MAP HEAT FLOW AT INFINITE TIME LONGZHI LIN Abstract. We show an energy convexity along any harmonic map heat flow with small initial energy and fixed boundary data on the unit 2-disk. In particular, this gives an affirmative answer to a question raised by W. Minicozzi asking whether such harmonic map heat flow converges uniformly in time strongly in the W 1,2 -topology, as time goes to infinity, to the unique limiting harmonic map. 1. Introduction Given a compact Riemannian manifold M and a closed (i.e., compact and with- out boundary) Riemannian manifold N which is an isometrically embedded sub- manifold of R n , we can define the Dirichlet energy of a map u 2 W 1,2 (M, N ): Z Energy(u) = E(u) = |ru| 2 dv M , 2 M where W 1,2 (M, N ) is the class of maps Z n u 2 L loc (M, R ) : |ru| 2 dv M 0. We refer to this system of parabolic equations as the harmonic map heat flow, to the map u 0 as the initial data, and to the map
The Complicity and Limits of International Law in Armed Conflict Rape

The inauguration of the International Criminal Court and the proliferation of criminal tribunals over the last twenty years are often presented as historic and progressive moments in the trajectory of international law’s response to victims of rape in armed conflicts. However, these moments may signal not only inclusion, but also repression. They signal not just progress, but also a renewed rhetorical and institutional legitimization of colonialism. Historicizing the advent of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Court, this Article examines some ways that international law obfuscates its complicity in armed conflict rape, looking particularly at calls within the profession for greater efficiency, nation-state security, and reparations for victims. In doing so, this Article grapples with questions concerning the limits and alternatives to our current legal imagination towards rape in armed con-
The Peculiar Federal Marriage Amendment

In this essay, I discuss the Constitution's commitment to three themes - state power over familial matters, individual liberty, and equality - and then demonstrate how the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment is uniquely contrary to all three. I do not intend to go so far as to suggest that the FMA would be an unconstitutional amendment, if such things are possible, nor do I mean to suggest that same-sex marriage is or should be affirmatively protected by the Constitution. I mean only to suggest that proposed amendments altering the Constitution's commitment to multiple existing themes in the Constitution should be scrutinized warily for thematic coherence. Because the FMA is contrary to three existing constitutional themes while furthering no other, the FMA would be a decidedly peculiar appendage to our modern Constitution.
Detecting Historical Inequality Patterns: A Replication of Thomas Piketty's Wealth Concentration Estimates for the United Kingdom

This article utilizes a replication exercise to evaluate the reliability of the historical time series for top income share concentrations in the United Kingdom, as presented in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century (2014). Piketty’s depiction of the top 1% and 10% wealth shares for 1910 to 2010 is compared against both his source data and subsequent improvements by other scholars. Piketty’s time series is shown to diverge substantially from each, and does not appear to be replicable. In particular, Piketty introduces a sizable post-1980 adjustment that suggests a substantially more rapid acceleration of wealth concentration than its source statistics reveal. Issues of reliability in the U.K. time series mirror similar problems with Piketty’s wealth estimates for the United States, although their implications for historical interpretation differ in light of subsequent data. These findings indicate that Piketty’s historical account of changing wealth concentrations in the United Kingdom in the 20th century is unreliable. An alternative interpretation of the source data is therefore offered, pointing to a century long L-shaped pattern in place of Piketty’s depicted U-curve.
American options: The EPV pricing model

We explicitly solve the pricing problem for perpetual American puts and calls, and provide an efficient semi-explicit pricing procedure for options with finite time horizon. Contrary to the standard approach, which uses the price process as a primitive, we model the price process as the expected present value of a stream, which is a monotone function of a Levy process. Certain processes exhibiting mean-reverting, stochastic volatility and/or switching features can be modeled this way. This specification allows us to consider assets that pay no dividends at all when the level of the underlying stochastic factor is too low, assets that pay dividends at a fixed rate when the underlying stochastic process remains in some range, or capped dividends.
Reimplementing the Hierarchical Data System using HDF5

Abstract The Starlink Hierarchical Data System has been a very successful niche astronomy file format and library for over 30 years. Development of the library was frozen ten years ago when funding for Starlink was stopped and almost no-one remains who understands the implementation details. To ensure the long-term sustainability of the Starlink application software and to make the extensible N -Dimensional Data Format accessible to a broader range of users, we propose to re-implement the HDS library application interface as a layer on top of the Hierarchical Data Format version 5. We present an overview of the new implementation of version 5 of the HDS file format and describe differences between the expectations of the HDS and HDF5 library interfaces. We finish by comparing the old and new HDS implementations by looking at a comparison of file sizes and by comparing performance benchmarks.
The Effects of Earnings Inequality on State Social Spending in the United States

States provide a variety of goods and services to their citizens, ranging from police protection to highway construction to education and health services. This study is concerned with how earnings inequality has affected such spending at the state level in the United States between 1977 and 2005. The results show that for every 1 percent increase in the 9050 percentile ratio of earnings, social spending on non-health and non-education goods and services increases by approximately 0.231 percent, or about $615 per person. A similar 1 percent increase in the 5010 percentile ratio of earnings is associated with a smaller 0.042 percent rise in spending, or $112 per person. A one percent increase in overall inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, is associated with a rise in social spending of about 0.255 percent, or $680 per person. The model is robust to a variety of sensitivity tests and generally shows that increases in inequality in both the upper- and lower-tail of the earnings distribution serve...
Mourning Emmett Till

After Emmett Till’s murder in 1955, African-Americans mobilized political mourning to oppose the status quo of white power. Till’s death and media coverage that followed generated an affective conn...
Class Dismissed: Contemporary Judicial Hostility to Small-Claims Consumer Class Actions

I start from the view that small-value consumer claims are a primary reason that class actions exist, and that without class actions many - if not most - of the wrongs perpetrated upon small-claims consumers would not be capable of redress. It would then seem to follow that the class action device should be readily available in small-claims consumer cases. And yet, over the past decade, federal district courts have repeatedly declined to certify class actions on grounds that are specific to small-claims consumer cases. Foremost among those grounds is the notion that the federal class action rule carries within it an implicit requirement of “ascertainability.” More specifically, courts have held that in order to certify a class, the identity of class members must be sufficiently ascertainable to ensure the efficacy of a subsequent distribution of damages. In practice, what this shadow standard of ascertainability has come to mean is that no matter how clear the evidence of wrongdoing, plaintiffs have no redress in the typical consumer case involving small retail transactions. This article examines the ascertainability doctrine as it is developing in the courts, and shows that the traditional goals of class actions - deterrence and compensation - cannot plausibly be said to animate this new certification requirement. Indeed, the ascertainability requirement readily sacrifices both deterrence and compensation in favor of an alternative value, namely, ensuring that compensation does not flow to uninjured parties. I end with a first-round effort to understand what really may be animating the ascertainability doctrine, suggesting that the explanation lies in a conception of class actions that is based on a private law model - i.e., a conception that demands unity among the injured parties, the prosecutors of civil actions, and the beneficiaries of remedies. Future work will seek to tease out the normative underpinnings of this private law model.
The Currency of Taxation

In its canonical rendition, income taxation aspires to achieve the sometimes-conflicting goals of maximizing social welfare and promoting distributive justice. We do not usually think about tax law as participating in the formation of our identities, shaping the ways in which we perceive ourselves, or influencing how we interact with others. I argue, however, that income tax is a powerful social instrument that plays an important role in the construction of our identities and interactions with one another. Income tax law, I claim, simultaneously reflects and shapes our identities, self-perceptions, and social interactions in various contexts, including within our families and communities, as well as our sense of social solidarity and participation in political institutions. There are many ways in which tax law participates in identity formation, as demonstrated in the articles in this symposium. In this Article, however, I focus on a systemic phenomenon that impacts us significantly, what I term “the currency of taxation.” This phenomenon is not limited to a specific group of taxpayers or specific area of income taxation (e.g., domestic or international taxation), nor to a particular tax mechanism (e.g., deductions, exemptions, or credits). Rather it affects, in varying ways and degrees, any area that income taxation touches on. The currency of taxation is related to the very basic mechanism of income taxation: in order to achieve its alleged goal to equitably and efficiently distribute the costs of government, income taxation has to assess taxpayers’ liability and determine the efficient and equitable share each must bear. This inevitably entails: comparisons of people and their behavior; the assessment of individual attributes; interpersonal interactions and social institutions; and the translation of all of these into the currency of taxation. Accordingly, the currency of taxation necessarily sorts through attributes and actions and measures and arranges them along the income tax scale. I argue that this process of classifying, comparing, and measuring has certain features that challenge and, at times,
Hyperbolic Discounting, Reference Dependence, and its Implications for the Housing Market

The influential work of Genesove and Mayer (2001) uses loss aversion theory to explain several puzzling behaviors in the housing market. In this paper, we present an alternative theory, which does not require an asymmetric value function to observe the same “loss aversion” behavior. Specifically, this paper presents a model in which a reference-dependent home seller has a symmetric value function, but faces an inter-temporal decision problem. Furthermore, the framework of the model also helps explain the positive price-volume relationship and price dispersion effect, two observations that are well-documented in the housing market.
Developing human resources for the technical workforce: a comparative study of Korea and Thailand

Asian countries face significant and growing shortages of technically skilled workers. Vocational-technical systems are key components of national human resource development. Using labor market data from Thailand and Korea, this paper analyzes the economic payoff for individual investment in vocational-technical education, and subsequent employment in a related occupation. The results are mixed, showing that relatively few men or women end up working in areas that they are trained for, but that for men in Korea and women in Thailand, employment in a related field pays off in terms of higher monthly earnings. As governments move toward workforce policy created in conjunction with firms and education, the results of this study reinforce the need for national development plans that address the relatively weak relationship between initial training and employment in Asian countries.
Keep your eye on the pelota: sports arbitration at the Jai-Alai Fronton

This article introduces the reader to the world sport of jai-alai and the adjudication of grievance disputes involving players of the game. After the jai-alai players organized a union in South Florida, an extended strike ensued. After the settlement of the labor dispute, management terminated some of the most senior players, and their union grieved. The author was appointed as the neutral arbitrator to hear and resolve the dispute. The article traces the operation of arbitration process in this unique setting and includes the arbitrator’s final-and-binding award in the case.
Punishing the Innocent

Scholars highlight an “innocence problem” as one of plea bargaining’s chief failures. Their concerns, however, are misguided. In fact, many innocent defendants are far better off in a world with plea bargaining than without. Plea bargaining is not the cause of wrongful punishment. Rather, inaccurate guilty pleas are merely symptomatic of errors at the points of arrest, charge, and/or trial. Much of the worry over an innocence problem proceeds from misperceptions over (i) the characteristics of typical innocent defendants, (ii) the types of cases they generally face, and (iii) the level of due process they ordinarily desire. In reality, most innocent defendants are recidivists, because institutional biases select for the arrest and charge of these repeat players. And most cases are petty. In these low-stakes cases, recidivist innocent defendants face high pretrial process costs (particularly if they are detained). But innocent defendants also enjoy low plea prices, because prosecutors ultimately prioritize work avoidance over sentence maximization. Moreover, defendants possess certain underappreciated bargaining advantages in these low-stakes cases. In the end, the costs of proceeding to trial often swamp the costs of pleading to lenient bargains. Put differently, many recidivist innocent defendants are punished by process and released by plea. Thus, plea bargaining is no source of wrongful punishment; rather, it is a normative good that may cut punishment short, and (for the innocent at least) less punishment is a net positive. Accordingly, the system must provide innocent defendants access to plea bargaining. Current vehicles for rational choice pleas—like nocontest pleas and equivocal pleas—are not up to the task. Instead, the system should reconceive of false pleas as legal fictions and require defense lawyers to advise and assist innocent defendants who wish to enter into plea bargains and mouth dishonest on-therecord words of guilt. ∗ Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law, University of Chicago Law School. Thanks to Daniel Abebe, Douglas Baird, Stephanos Bibas, Alafair Burke, David Fagundes, Bernard Harcourt, Elizabeth Joh, Jonathan Masur, Jonathan Mitchell, Tracey Meares, Michael O’Hear, Jamelle Sharpe, and Ronald Wright for helpful comments. Speical thanks to Matt Kadushin for his generosity. Josh Bowers, Punishing the Innocent, 156 U. PA. L. REV. ___ (forthcoming 2008) 2 Punishing the Innocent
Capital Gains Taxes and Acquisition Activity: Evidence of the Lock-in Effect*

The lock-in effect proposes that capital gains taxes represent transaction costs that increase the reservation price for security owners and, ceteris paribus, reduce trading volume. Consistent with the lock-in effect, previous empirical research documents price and volume reactions to enacted changes in the capital gains tax rate. We investigate whether the “volume hypothesis” predicted by the lock-in effect extends to corporate acquisition activity. In particular, we analyze whether aggregate corporate acquisition activity is inversely associated with shareholder capital gains tax rates. We measure quarterly corporate acquisition activity from 1973 through 2001 using (1) the percentage of publicly traded firms acquired in a calendar quarter and (2) the percentage of market value of publicly traded firms acquired in a calendar quarter. In supplemental analysis, we measure acquisition activity at the industry level (i.e., as the percentage of firms and percentage of market value acquired by industry in each year). In each analysis we model acquisition activity as a function of the maximum long-term capital gains tax rate for individuals and other macro-economic factors previously hypothesized to be associated with acquisition activity. Consistent with a lock-in effect for corporate acquisitions, we find a significant negative association between corporate acquisition activity and the capital gains tax rate whether we measure acquisition activity in the aggregate or at the industry level. In addition, we find that this negative association is attributable to increased (decreased) taxable acquisition activity during periods of low (high) capital gains tax rates. These results suggest that, ceteris paribus, capital gains taxes represent significant transaction costs or market frictions that influence the level of corporate acquisition activity.
Stochastic competitive entries and dynamic pricing

Abstract How should firms price new products when they do not know the timing, nor the nature of the next competitive entry? To guide managers’ pricing decisions in such contexts, we propose a dynamic pricing model with two types of randomly timed entry, i.e. imitative and innovative. The characterization of the equilibrium strategies reveals how optimal prices vary with the manager’s knowledge about the timing of future competitive entries. We show that price skimming is not always optimal when entry dates are unknown to managers. Everything else equal, we demonstrate that the randomness of competitive entries make forward looking managers to choose constant prices, even though the characteristics of the market would have justified skimming the demand in the normal course. Moreover, we show that the constant pricing policy remains optimal even when the incumbent’s optimal pricing strategy influences the probability of facing a competitive entry. Finally, we find that uncertainty does not necessarily hurt firms’ profits.
Information immobility and foreign portfolio investment

We examine how residents of the United States allocate their stock portfolios internationally. We find that a large U.S. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) position in a destination country in 1990 is associated with a relatively large stock portfolio position in that country in the 2001‐2006 period. Moreover, a change in the U.S. FDI position from 1980 to 1990 helps predict the change in the U.S. Foreign Portfolio Investment position from 1994 to 2006. These results are rationalized by Van Nieuwerburgh and Veldkamp’s (2009) equilibrium model of learning and portfolio choice under an information processing constraint. FDI establishes marginal differences in the endowments of information about different countries, which later translate into differences in stock portfolio holdings. We control for cross-country differences in capital controls, proximity along different dimensions, corporate governance, and economic and capital market development. Our results also hold for the G6 countries collectively. (JEL F21, F36, G11)
Is the Solomon Amendment F.A.I.R.: Some Thoughts on Congress's Power to Impose this Condition on Federal Spending

In this article, I explore the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment, by which Congress required that recipients of federal grants to institutions of higher education permit the military to conduct job interviews on campus despite the institution's objection to the military's ban on homosexuality in the military. I first consider the constitutionality of the spending program on which the Solomon Amendment imposed conditions, recognizing that spending for education is not part of the enumerated powers of Congress. I then consider Congress's power to raise and support armies, and concludes that a plausible, originalist argument can be made that federal support for higher education may be a constitutionally adequate means toward that end and that this is, in fact, the strongest ground for federal spending on higher education. Conditions on that spending such as the Solomon Amendment, which insure that the federal grants supports the constitutionally valid purpose, are therefore not only constitutional but may well be necessary to render valid the federal spending program itself.
The Case for Mandatory Disclosure in Securities Regulation Around the World

The desirability of mandatory disclosure requirements in securities regulation has been the subject of a longstanding debate among corporate law scholars and economists. The debate has largely focused on the desirability of mandatory disclosure requirements in the United States, a country characterized by dispersed ownership structures. This article argues that there are strong theoretical reasons to believe that mandatory disclosure requirements can play a socially useful role in countries with concentrated ownership structures. Controlling shareholders will tend to prefer poor firm transparency, to protect their private benefits of control, even if the presence of a demanding disclosure regime would have the socially desirable effect of increasing competition in the capital and product markets and reducing the agency costs associated with concentrated ownership structures. Recent empirical work is consistent with mandatory disclosure requirements fulfilling the valuable role of enhancing competition and reducing agency costs. * Assistant Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. I would like to thank Lucian Bebchuk, Mark Roe and participants in the Harvard Law School Law and Finance seminar for helpful comments and conversations and the Harvard Law School John M. Olin Foundation in Law, Economics and Business and the Harvard Milton Fund for financial support.
How Disclosure Features of Corporate Social Responsibility Reports Interact with Investor Numeracy to Influence Investor Judgments

Firms’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports typically frame their strategies in terms of either community or global efforts (i.e., “strategy frame”). Further, the style used to depict CSR performance in reports often highlights either pictures or words (i.e., “presentation style”). These two prominent disclosure features of CSR reports promote a natural fit or misfit in the focus (relatively low-level or high-level focus) investors adopt when thinking about the firm and its CSR efforts. Further, these disclosure features likely have different effects on investors depending on their numeracy or, in other words, the way that they naturally process numerical information. In this study, we predict and find that a fit between the strategy frame and the presentation style of a firm's CSR report causes less numerate investors to be more willing to invest than when a fit is not present. Specifically, we find that a fit leads less numerate investors to experience subjective feelings of processing fluency and, in turn, positive affect that serves as a cue that the positive CSR performance information can be relied upon, which positively influences willingness to invest. Our results have implications for both CSR reports as well as other types of firm disclosures that increasingly vary along similar disclosure characteristics. Our results also contribute to both the growing literature on presentation effects in accounting, as well as the broader business literature on CSR reporting.
The effect of judicial independence on entrepreneurship in the US states

Abstract The relationship between institutional quality, entrepreneurship, and economic growth has been well documented within the literature. However, much less work has been done regarding judicial independence and how this affects, specifically, entrepreneurial activity. Therefore, this paper attempts to fill that gap by exploiting the differences in judicial independence that exist between the US states and empirically evaluating how this affects entrepreneurship. Overall, the results suggest that the method of selecting and retaining justices of both courts of last resort and intermediate appellate courts has a significant and direct effect on entrepreneurial activity, though the latter result is somewhat less robust. The presence of judicial nominating and retention commissions also has a significant and direct effect. Further, although somewhat weaker, the method of selecting the chief justice of a state court of last resort would also appear to have an impact on entrepreneurship. These results are robust to a number of specifications.
Retributivism: The Right and the Good

Victor Tadros claims that punishment must be justified either instrumentally or on the grounds that deserved punishment is intrinisically good. However, if we have deontic reasons to punish wrongdoers then these reasons could justify punishment non-instrumentally. Morever, even if the punishment of wrongdoers is intrinsically good this fact cannot contribute to the justication of punishment because goodness is not a reason-giving property. It follows that retributivism is both true and important only if we have deontic reasons to punish. Tadros also claims that the constitutive aim of punishment is to inflict harm or suffering on offenders. On the contrary, the constitutive aim of retributive punishment is to inflict (justified) wrongs on offenders that are proportionate to the (unjustified) wrongs they commit. Indeed, punishment should involve the least harmful wrong that is proportionate to the wrongfulness of the offense, adequate to facilitate recognition, and (perhaps) conducive to deterrence.