cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Extending the case study: assigning an educational novel and student role-playing in the accounting information systems course

Need for innovative and active-learning activities to enhance the teaching-learning experience have never been greater. Students of the ‘video generation,’ compared to prior generations, often have learning styles that are not well matched to the traditional classroom lecture format of teaching. Use of case studies is well documented as an effective way to engage students. The educational novel extends the case study approach. Educational novels have been described as effectively a very lengthy case problem, with a myriad of inter-connected sub-cases, incorporating interesting characters and plot elements. This study describes two teaching devices, educational novels and student role-playing, that can be used to complement traditional lectures. These two teaching devices can be used in accounting information system (AIS) classes, and other classes, to provide technical information in a way that encourages learning and generates student enthusiasm. This study reports how each of these teaching devices can be readily implemented and how each has produced positive feedback from AIS students.
De-Rigging Elections: Direct Democracy and the Future of Redistricting Reform

Alarmed critics of partisan gerrymandering look to apolitical institutions as possible sources of restraint on gerrymandering - namely courts and independent commissions. They are driven by a conviction that we cannot leave the regulation of politics to politics. However, delegation of redistricting to politically insulated institutions comes with heavy costs. Insulation helps ensure that redistricting is not driven by political self-interest, but it also ensures that redistricting is far removed from the necessary degree of public engagement, scrutiny, and accountability.The Article acknowledges the need for redistricting reform but challenges the impulse to retreat from the political process and re-orients reform back toward proper recognition of legitimate decisionmaking through a political process. Rather than trying to stamp out politics, redistricting reform must seek a new and healthier framework in which redistricting can be conducted as part of an open political process. Redistricting implicates central normative questions of governance that require democratic input and civic debate on contestable value judgments that a democracy must make democratically. Direct democracy offers a viable third way, between skeptics who would leave redistricting completely to the legislature despite the costs, and reformers who would sequester redistricting completely from the political process. The Article proposes direct democracy as a distinctly political solution to the problems of contemporary gerrymandering. By requiring direct democratic approval by the general electorate for passage of any statewide redistricting plan, direct democracy institutionalizes public oversight and invites the public into civic engagement about the fundamental issues of democratic governance that a democracy ought to embrace. The Article describes how a basic requirement of direct democratic approval would moderate partisan gerrymandering, induce the major parties to compete for public approval, and draw the public into a healthier political process of redistricting.
Nodal theorems for the Dirac equation in d ≥ 1 dimensions

A single particle obeys the Dirac equation in d � 1 spatial dimensions and is bound by an attractive central monotone potential that vanishes at infinity. In one dimension, the potential is even, and monotone for x � 0. The asymptotic behavior of the wave functions near the origin and at infinity are discussed. Nodal theorems are proven for the cases d = 1 and d > 1, which specify the relationship between the numbers of nodes n1 and n2 in the upper and lower components of the Dirac spinor. For d = 1, n2 = n1 + 1, whereas for d > 1, n2 = n1 + 1 if kd > 0, and n2 = n1 if kd < 0, where kd = �(j + d−2 2 ), and � = ±1. This work generalizes the classic results of Rose and Newton in 1951 for the case d = 3. Specific examples are presented with graphs, including Dirac spinor orbits ( 1(r), 2(r)),r � 0.
Goods allocation by queuing and the occurrence of violence: A probabilistic analysis

Abstract Goods for which demand greatly exceeds supply are frequently allocated to citizens using queuing mechanisms. However, violence can occur either when queues are very long or when large numbers of citizens are not provided goods being allocated with queuing mechanisms. Hence, we use the theory of discrete-time Markov chains (DTMCs) to construct and analyze models in which we explicitly account for queue length and the number of citizens who are not provided a good that is allocated with a queuing mechanism. Specifically, we first delineate a version of our DTMC model in which there is no capacity constraint. Second, we state two key properties of this model and then we derive our first metric of the likelihood of violence. Finally, we describe an alternate version of our DTMC model with a capacity constraint and then we derive our second metric of the likelihood of violence.
Evaluating the Strength of Evidence: How Experience Affects the Use of Analogical Reasoning and Configural Information Processing in Tax

ABSTRACT: Evidence evaluation in accounting often involves both the assessment of evidence relevance and the combination of its relevance and source to assess overall strength. We decompose this strength-assessment judgment into its components—relevance assessment and source and relevance combination—and consider the effects of experience. Participants in our experiment assess the strength and relevance of tax authorities in relation to a client scenario. Contrary to prior research, we find that more-experienced participants exhibit greater use of analogical reasoning when evaluating tax-authority relevance than do less-experienced participants. We find a similar experience effect in the use of configural information processing to combine authority source and relevance, a judgment not previously considered in tax. The effects of experience are particularly important in the current environment as the tax function is a leading cause of material weaknesses and restatements under Sarbanes-Oxley and tax execut...
Natural Born Copycat Killers and the Law of Shock Torts

The recent Columbine-related filing of a $5 billion lawsuit against various video game manufacturers and other entertainment industry entities has focused attention on the vital and complex legal issues implicated in any attempt to hold media defendants liable for physical harms they cause. This case, along with other similar cases, presents a fascinating juxtaposition of First Amendment principles, products liability, and traditional tort law. "Natural Born Copycat Killers and the Law of Shock Torts," is my contribution to this subject. I begin by describing some examples of allegedly media-inspired murders and suicides, and I coin a new term, "shock torts," to denote the phenomenon of shockingly violent mass entertainment and its possible linkage to such incidents. I then systematically examine the case law pertinent to shock torts, from the U.S. Supreme Court to the state court level. From there, I criticize the reflexive and restrictive application of the Brandenburg v. Ohio "incitement" test as found in many shock torts decisions and I propose a new, more appropriate balancing test consistent with the principles underlying the key Supreme Court precedent. I also analyze the legal and policy issues attendant to a products liability approach to entertainment industry "products" and the possibility of judicial recognition of a new category of disfavored speech for extremely violent mass-media entertainment.
How Do the Elderly Fare in Medical Malpractice Litigation, Before and After Tort Reform?: Evidence from Texas

The elderly account for a disproportionate share of medical spending, but little is known about how they are treated by the medical malpractice system, or how tort reform affects elderly claimants. We compare paid medical malpractice claims brought by elderly plaintiffs in Texas during 1988--2009 to those brought by adult non-elderly plaintiffs. Controlling for healthcare utilization (based on inpatient days), elderly paid claims rose from about 20% to about 40% of the adult non-elderly rate by the early 2000s. Mean and median payouts per claim also converged, although the elderly were far less likely to receive large payouts. Tort reform strongly affected claim rates and payouts for both groups, but disproportionately reduced payouts to elderly claimants. We thus find evidence of convergence between the elderly and the adult non-elderly in both claim rates and payouts, which is interrupted by tort reform. Copyright 2012, Oxford University Press.
Judicial Independence and Opinion Clarity on State Supreme Courts

We contribute to the literature on judicial independence and performance in the states by analyzing opinion clarity. Written opinions are the primary means of communication for state supreme court justices, and clarity is a core component of judicial performance. Using automated text analysis on a sample of state supreme court opinions from all 50 states, we find that variation in judicial retention systems is not associated with substantively meaningful differences in opinion clarity. Furthermore, elected judges do not seem to produce clearer opinions in salient cases notwithstanding the increased public visibility of those decisions. These results suggest that judges tend to conform to prevailing professional norms despite differing institutional pressures.
Empirical Asset Pricing via Machine Learning

We perform a comparative analysis of machine learning methods for the canonical problem of empirical asset pricing: measuring asset risk premia. We demonstrate large economic gains to investors using machine learning forecasts, in some cases doubling the performance of leading regression-based strategies from the literature. We identify the best performing methods (trees and neural networks) and trace their predictive gains to allowance of nonlinear predictor interactions that are missed by other methods. All methods agree on the same set of dominant predictive signals which includes variations on momentum, liquidity, and volatility. Improved risk premium measurement through machine learning simplifies the investigation into economic mechanisms of asset pricing and highlights the value of machine learning in financial innovation.
Optimal pricing of a personalized product

This paper deals with optimal pricing of a personalized product such as a personal portrait or photo. A new model of the pricing structure inspired by two real-life cases is introduced to the literature and solved to obtain optimal photo sitting fees and the final product price. A sensitivity analysis with respect to the problem parameters is performed.
Conflicts of interest on corporate boards: The effect of creditor-directors on acquisitions

Abstract This paper investigates the effects on acquisitions of creditor-director presence on corporate boards. Using a hand-collected dataset for boards of large U.S. corporations, we find that companies with creditor-directors are more likely to engage in acquisitions with attributes that are unfavorable to shareholders and favorable to creditors (more diversifying and fewer cash-financed acquisitions). Consistent with these patterns, acquisition announcements are associated with lower shareholder value, higher creditor value, and lower overall firm value when a creditor is present. These results support the hypothesis that conflicts of interest between shareholders and creditors can result in value-destroying acquisitions. In addition, commercial bankers with no lending relationship are not affected by conflicts of interest. Where appropriate, our estimation strategy takes into account that there may be self selection of bankers onto corporate boards.
How do conflicting theories about financial markets coexist

There are many conflicting interpretations of security prices and price determination in financial markets. They range from academic theories based on efficient markets and rational expectations hypotheses, to more traditional methods of fundamental analysis, to theories of "value" and "growth" investing, to chart-reading and technical analysis, to notions such as "reflexivity." These interpretations are logically inconsistent with each other, but they seem to coexist, sometimes even on the same trading desk. In this paper, we seek to formulate an explanation for this strange coexistence, using some tools from critical theory to understand how financial markets operate. Structuralism is used to analyze various kinds of narratives appearing in the financial literature, which are intended to have explanatory force, and appearance of sometimes contradictory elements in such narratives; poststructuralism is used to explain the way in which contradictory interpretations coexist. We discuss some practical impli...
September 11 and Mexican Immigrants: Collateral Damage Comes Home

This article "September 11 and Mexican Immigrants: Collateral Damage Comes Home" was published in an immigration symposium issue of the DePaul Law Review. Most of the emerging scholarship on the civil rights impacts on immigration due to the federal government's security measures since September 11 understandably has focused on the injuries to Arab and Muslim noncitizens, the primary targets of the government's actions. In contrast, this article considers how, as with past efforts to crack down on terrorism, the new security measures have adversely affected the Mexican immigrant community, the largest immigrant group in the United States, as well as many Mexican-American citizens. The injuries include (1) mass deportations of Mexican immigrants; (2) immigration reforms in the USA PATRIOT Act that greatly expand the grounds for which immigrants can be deported; (3) increased racial profiling in law enforcement; (4) the imposition of citizenship requirements for certain jobs; (5) greater local police involvement in immigration enforcement; and (6) the end for the foreseeable future of a possible migration agreement between the United States and Mexico.
Loewen v. United States: Trials and Errors Under NAFTA Chapter Eleven

There have been many efforts to reform the American civil justice system, stretching back more than thirty years. During the past decade, the United States Supreme Court has begun to play a more active role, using the Due Process Clause to impose both substantive and procedural limitations on punitive damages. The Loewen case, a claim filed against the United States under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), raises another possibility: using international tribunals to correct errors in civil trials.
SABINUS THE MULETEER

L’article revient sur le poeme de Virgile, parodie de celui de Catulle. A son tour, l’auteur s’interroge sur l’identite du personnage Sabinus, son origine, ses activites, la raison de ce nom, ainsi que sur la date de redaction de l’œuvre. Ce Sabinus semble avoir ete au service du frere de l’empereur Vespasien
Does an Inclusive Citizenship Law Promote Economic Development

This paper analyzes the impact of citizenship laws on economic development. We first document the evolution of citizenship laws around the world, highlighting the main features of jus soli, jus sanguinis as well as mixed regimes, and shedding light on the channels through which they could have differentiated impact on economic development. We then compile a data set of citizenship laws around the world. Using cross-country regressions, panel-data techniques, as well as the synthetic control method and subjecting the results to a battery of tests, we find robust evidence that jus soli lawsâbeing more inclusiveâlead to higher income levels than alternative citizenship rules in developing countries, though to a less extent in countries with stronger institutional environment.
Economic Backwardness in Political Perspective

Government policies and institutions shape economic incentives, and via this channel, have a first-order impact on economic development. Why, then, do many societies adopt policies that discourage investment and maintain institutions that cause economic backwardness? Perhaps, politically powerful groups (elites) are not in favor of economic growth. But why? It would appear that economic growth would provide more resources for these groups to take over or tax, increasing their economic returns. So why don’t powerful groups always support economic development? In this paper, we develop a theory of inefficient government policies and institutions. All else equal, politically powerful groups would welcome superior institutions and technologies. But in practice all else is not equal, because superior institutions and technologies may reduce their political power and make it more likely that they will be replaced. At the center of our theory is therefore the idea that changes in institutions or the introduction of new technologies often create turbulence, eroding the political advantages and future economic rents of incumbent elites. Alternatively, new technologies may enrich competing groups, increasing their threat to incumbents. These considerations make politically powerful groups fear losing power and oppose economic and political change, even when such change will benefit society as a whole. To understand the mechanism at work and its potential applications, consider a concrete example: industrialization in the nineteenth century. Bairoch (1982) estimates that between 1830 and 1913, world manufacturing output increased by a factor of 5 (see Table 1 Panel A). Nevertheless, this process was highly uneven across regions and countries. Bairoch also calculates that over the same period manufacturing output in developed countries (Europe and North America) increasedbyafactorofover10,whereasitdeclinedinthe Third World. Among developed countries, there were
Doing consumer research in the field

Abstract: Why consider field contexts to understand consumer behavior? Conventional wisdom suggests laboratory contexts are more convenient, offer a greater degree of control, and are generally cheaper. New product failures, however, suggest a lack of consumer information in the contexts that they actually behave. Field contexts can provide this essential information, which can be a catalyst for new product success. This chapter outlines the nature of field research, showing how to navigate through potential landmines that can result in consumer field data being data far afield. Specifically, we discuss four different types of field research based on combinations of control and realism. Within each of these four fields, variables allowing conclusions of not only when they work, but also why, whether to test these variables during one occasion or many, questionnaire design, and field data analysis are considered. We conclude the chapter by discussing common field mistakes regarding a field study’s product, placement, and promotion to research gatekeepers.
Public Debt Guarantees and Private Capital Flight

Significant amounts of private capital have flowed out of several of the more heavily indebted developing countries. This outflow, often called "capital flight ," largely escapes taxation by the borrowing-country government, and has generated concern about the prospects for future servicing of the debt. Imperfect contract enforcement may lead to implicit or explicit government guarantee of foreign debt. The model developed below demonstrates that a government policy of guaranteeing private debt can, in turn, generate more than one outcome. One such outcome replicates the allocation under perfect contract enforcement: national savings is invested domestically and foreign debt is repaid. The tax obligation implied by potential nationalization of private debt, however, can also lead to another outcome in which national capital flees and foreign debt may not be repaid.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
Sticky wages and sectoral labor comovement

Abstract A defining feature of business cycles is the comovement of inputs at the sectoral level with aggregate activity. Standard models cannot account for this phenomenon. This paper develops and estimates a two-sector dynamic general equilibrium model that can account for this key regularity. My model incorporates three shocks to the economy: monetary policy shocks, neutral technology shocks, and embodied technology shocks in the capital-producing sector. The estimated model is able to account for the response of the U.S. economy to all three shocks. Using this model, I argue that the key friction underlying sectoral comovement is rigidity in nominal wages.
Estimating Asymmetric Advertising Response: An Application to U.S. Nonalcoholic Beverage Demand

We propose a regime-switching model that allows demand to respond asymmetrically to upward and downward advertising changes. With the introduction of a smooth transition function, the model features smooth rather than abrupt parameter changes between regimes. We apply the model to nonalcoholic beverage data in the United States for 1974 through 2005 to investigate asymmetric advertising response. Results indicate that a decrease in milk advertising had a more profound impact on milk demand than an increase did. An increase in milk advertising had no impact on milk demand, but a decrease could have an own-advertising elasticity up to 0.049.
The impact of dynamic capacity management on airline seat inventory control

Dynamic capacity management is the reassignment of aircraft to a flight schedule in response to the realisation of demand. Through better matching of the supply and demand for seats, airlines are able to carry more passengers, and the revenue management policy should be adjusted accordingly. This paper proposes a derivative (EMSRd) of the widely used EMSRb booking limit calculation method, which takes into account the effect of possible future capacity changes. The EMSRd approach only depends on the fleet assignment problem through the probability distribution of the aircraft type that operates each flight, and can be solved efficiently once these have been estimated. Numerical experiments show potential revenue improvements of over 1 per cent.
Beyond Worst-case (In)approximability of Nonsubmodular Influence Maximization

We consider the problem of maximizing the spread of influence in a social network by choosing a fixed number of initial seeds, formally referred to as the influence maximization problem. It admits a (1−1/e)-factor approximation algorithm if the influence function is submodular. Otherwise, in the worst case, the problem is NP-hard to approximate to within a factor of N1−v. This article studies whether this worst-case hardness result can be circumvented by making assumptions about either the underlying network topology or the cascade model. All our assumptions are motivated by many real-life social network cascades.First, we present strong inapproximability results for a very restricted class of networks called the (stochastic) hierarchical blockmodel, a special case of the well-studied (stochastic) blockmodel in which relationships between blocks admit a tree structure. We also provide a dynamic-programming-based polynomial time algorithm, which optimally computes a directed variant of the influence maximization problem on hierarchical blockmodel networks. Our algorithm indicates that the inapproximability result is due to the bidirectionality of influence between agent-blocks.Second, we present strong inapproximability results for a class of influence functions that are “almost” submodular, called 2-quasi-submodular. Our inapproximability results hold even for any 2-quasi-submodular f fixed in advance. This result also indicates that the “threshold” between submodularity and nonsubmodularity is sharp, regarding the approximability of influence maximization.
THE HEAT-KERNEL MOST-LIKELY-PATH APPROXIMATION

In this article, we derive a new most-likely-path (MLP) approximation for implied volatility in terms of local volatility, based on time-integration of the lowest order term in the heat-kernel expansion. This new approximation formula turns out to be a natural extension of the well-known formula of Berestycki, Busca and Florent. Various other MLP approximations have been suggested in the literature involving different choices of most-likely-path; our work fixes a natural definition of the most-likely-path. We confirm the improved performance of our new approximation relative to existing approximations in an explicit computation using a realistic S&P500 local volatility function.
ProCD v. Zeidenberg and Cognitive Overload in Contractual Bargaining

Sellers often find it useful to sell products without revealing the terms of the contract to buyers until after buyers have taken the products home or begun to use them. These transactions take a number of forms. A buyer might purchase a box containing software or a database from a store. The box’s skin bears the name of the software and a description of its function, and perhaps a statement that other terms are inside, or perhaps not. The buyer learns the terms only after he takes the box home and opens it; if he does not like the terms, he can return the product as long as he has not yet begun to use it, and sometimes not even then. A buyer might order a computer or appliance or airplane ticket over the phone. The operator tells him none of the terms other than price and a few others; again, he learns those terms when the product or ticket arrives and may (or may not) have an opportunity at that point to repudiate the transaction. The evident business reason for these “terms later” or “rolling” contracts, as they are sometimes called, is that sellers cannot communicate all the relevant information to the buyer on the outsides of boxes or in telephone conversations. Buyers do not have the time or patience to listen to or read and understand the terms. The optimal terms cannot be disclosed without causing cognitive overload. To avoid driving off buyers, sellers provide minimal information in advance of purchase. Yet when buyers learn of unfavorable arbitration clauses or other adverse terms, they complain that they never consented to those terms, and therefore should not be bound to them. 1
Owner-Occupied Housing as a Hedge Against Rent Risk

The conventional wisdom that homeownership is very risky ignores the fact that the alternative, renting, is also risky. Owning a house provides a hedge against fluctuations in housing costs, but in turn introduces asset price risk. In a simple model of tenure choice with endogenous house prices, we show that the net risk of owning declines with a household's expected horizon in its house and with the correlation in housing costs in future locations. Empirically, we find that both house prices, relative to rents, and the probability of homeownership increase with net rent risk.
Legislative organization and ideal-point bias

Four pure types of legislative organization are characterized as data-generating processes for commonly used measures of preferences or, in the spatial vernacular, ideal points. The types of legislative organization are differentiated by their partisan versus nonpartisan nature of agenda formation, and by whether the amendment process is open or closed. For each organization, roll call voting data are Monte Carlo generated and used as input for four different ideal-point measures: standard percent-correct interest-group ratings; linear factor analysis scores; W-NOMINATE ratings; and Markov chain Monte Carlo measures. Three questions motivate and are addressed in the analysis. Do estimated ideal points differ significantly across forms of legislative organization? Are some ideal-point estimates consistently more accurate than others? Are there patterns of substantively relevant, persistent bias in ideal-point estimates? The answers are all affirmative.
Still Other People's Money: Reconciling Citizens United with Abood and Beck

Citizens United has already taken its place as a landmark decision of the 2009 Term of the Roberts Court. Its story is not complete, however: while it overturned Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and rejected the equalization of voice in politics as a valid justification for constraints on spending, it did not excise deeper concerns – both congressional and judicial – about the corrupting misuse of “other people’s money,” in Louis Brandeis’s memorable phrasing. A line of cases regarding the use of union dues for political purposes (primarily Communications Workers of America v. Beck and Abood v. Detroit Board of Education) and the legislative findings of the Tillman Act present a coherent description of political corruption that Citizens United left standing, but never seriously reckoned with. Given that these legislative and judicial convictions retain their vitality even after Citizens United, the Court must modify the Citizens United regime to accommodate this view of corruption. Permitting shareholders to opt their investments out of political use would be a sufficient protection for their right not to have their money used for political speech with which they disagree while protecting the corporation's right to political speech articulated in Citizens United.This article draws out the difficulty recognized in the union-dues cases – having one’s money used for political speech with which one disagrees – and applies it to the new Citizens United world. Because Citizens United presented a legal rule with little guidance as to implementation, this article opens a much-needed discourse on how to work with the new world that has taken hold in campaign finance.
Financial Constraints, Asset Tangibility, and Corporate Investment

This paper proposes a new strategy to identify the eect of …nancial constraints on corporate investment. When …rms are able to pledge their assets as collateral, investment and borrowing become endogenous: pledgeable assets support more borrowings that in turn allow for further investments in pledgeable assets. We show that this credit multiplier has a …rst-order eect on investment when …rms face …nancing frictions. In particular, investment-cash ‡ow sensitivities will be increasing in the degree of tangibility of constrained …rms' assets. When …rms are unconstrained, in contrast, investment-cash ‡ow sensitivities are unaected by asset tangibility. This theoretical prediction allows us to use a "dierences in dierences" approach to identify the eect of …nancing frictions on corporate investment: we compare the dierential (marginal) eect of asset tangibility on the sensitivity of investment to cash ‡ow across dierent regimes of …nancial constraints. Using two layers of cross-sectional contrasts sidesteps concerns that cash ‡ows might correlate with a …rm's (residual) investment opportunities when Q fails as a control. We implement our testing strategy on a large sample of …rms drawn from COMPUSTAT between 1971 and 2000. The data strongly support our hypothesis about the role of asset tangibility on corporate investment under …nancial constraints.
${\mathcal {H}_2}$ Performance of Series-Parallel Networks: A Compositional Perspective

We examine the $\mathcal {H}_2$ norm of matrix-weighted leader–follower consensus on series–parallel networks. By using an extension of electrical network theory on matrix-valued resistances, voltages, and currents, we show that the computation of the ${\mathcal {H}_2}$ norm can be performed efficiently by decomposing the network into atomic elements and composition rules. Finally, we examine the problem of efficiently adapting the matrix-valued edge weights to optimize the ${\mathcal {H}_2}$ norm of the network.
An Examination of the Effects of Investor Sophistication on the Pricing of Accruals and Cash Flows

We examine the role of sophisticated investors in the pricing of both accruals and cash flows (i.e., the naive-investor hypothesis). Unlike prior research, however, we analyze the returns to three ...
Gene Therapy Oversight: Lessons for Nanobiotechnology

Oversight of human gene transfer research ("gene therapy") presents an important model with potential application to oversight of nanobiology research on human participants. Gene therapy oversight adds centralized federal review at the National Institutes of Health's Office of Biotechnology Activities and its Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee to standard oversight of human subjects research at the researcher's institution (by the Institutional Review Board and, for some research, the Institutional Biosafety Committee) and at the federal level by the Office for Human Research Protections. The Food and Drug Administration's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research oversees human gene transfer research in parallel, including approval of protocols and regulation of products. This article traces the evolution of this dual oversight system; describes how the system is already addressing nanobiotechnology in gene transfer: evaluates gene therapy oversight based on public opinion, the literature, and preliminary expert elicitation; and offers lessons of the gene therapy oversight experience for oversight of nanobiotechnology.
Some unpleasant bargaining arithmetic

Abstract It is commonly believed that voting rules that are relatively more inclusive (e.g., unanimity or supermajority), are likely to yield relatively more equitable outcomes than simple-majority rule. We show that this is not necessarily the case in bargaining environments. We study a multilateral bargaining model a la Baron and Ferejohn (1989) , where players are heterogeneous with respect to the potential surplus they bring to the bargaining table. We show that unanimity rule may generate equilibrium outcomes that are more unequal (or less equitable) than under majority rule. In fact, as players become relatively more patient, we show that the more inclusive the voting rule, the less equitable the equilibrium allocations.
Turning Up the Heat: The Impact of Electric Utility Competition on K–12 Education Funding in Ohio

Ohio, like many states, is currently-considering deregulation of the retail electric power industry. This issue is made more complex in Ohio because structural change in the delivery of electric power is also likely to have a negative effect on state and local government revenues. This effect occurs because of three main forces: the elimination of differential property tax treatment of utilities relative to general businesses, the likely decrease in state electricity excise tax revenues as a result of falling power prices and administrative difficulty in taxing out of state providers, and the potential for stranded costs to diminish the taxable value of electric generating equipment. This article provides an overview of these issues and a brief analysis of the extent to which these problems will be shared by other states. The article then demonstrates the impact of deregulation-induced tax changes on both state and local school district revenues in Ohio and concludes with a discussion of how the state's ability to insulate local governments from these adverse fiscal effects is made both more imperative and more difficult by a recent Supreme Court Ruling on school funding Finally, the issues discussed in the article are placed in a more general context of the challenges of adjusting tax policy to changing circumstances
Diffusion Through Democracy

Many argue that international norms influence government behavior, and that policies diffuse from country to country, because of idea exchanges within elite networks. However, politicians are not free to follow their foreign counterparts, because domestic constituencies constrain them. This article examines how electoral concerns shape diffusion patterns and argues that foreign templates and international organization recommendations can shift voters’ policy positions and produce electoral incentives for politicians to mimic certain foreign models. Experimental individual-level data from the field of family policy illustrates that even U.S. voters shift positions substantially when informed about UN recommendations and foreign countries’ choices. However, voters receive limited information about international developments, biased towards the policy choices of large and proximate countries. Aggregate data on the family policy choices of OECD countries show how voters’ limited information about international models shapes government decisions: governments are disproportionately likely to mimic countries whose news citizens follow, and international organizations are most influential in countries with internationally oriented citizens.
Measuring the economic effects of data breaches on firm outcomes: Challenges and opportunities

We estimate the association between data breaches and firm-level outcomes using newly assembled data on the universe of reported data breaches between 2005 and 2016. First, we document several new facts about the incidence of data breaches. Second, using cross-sectional variation and controlling for time-varying observable firm inputs, we find that a 10% rise in breaches is associated with approximately a 0.2% decline in firm productivity. However, we also find large heterogeneity depending on the type of breach (e.g., theft of a company laptop). Third, we characterize a major limitation with publicly reported breach data, namely a sample selection problem that creates non-classical measurement error. While our results suggest that breaches do have a negative effect on firm financial outcomes, our results also point out the inadequacy of publicly reported breach data for causal inference.
Resolving “Too Big to Fail”

Using a synthetic control research design, we find that living will regulation increases a bank’s annual cost of capital by 22 bps, or 10% of total funding costs. This effect is stronger in banks measured as systemically important before the regulation’s announcement. We interpret our findings as a reduction in Too-Big-to-Fail subsidies. The effect size is large: multiplying our bank-specific point estimates by funding size implies a subsidy reduction of $42B annually. The impact on equity drives the main effect. The impact on deposits is statistically indistinguishable from zero, passing the placebo test for our empirical strategy.
Leniency in Chinese Criminal Law? Everyday Justice in Henan

This article examines one-year of publicly available criminal judgments from one basic-level rural county court and one intermediate court in Henan Province in order to better understand trends in routine criminal adjudication in China. I present an account of ordinary criminal justice in China that is both familiar and striking: a system that treats serious crimes, in particular those affecting state interests, harshly while at the same time acting leniently in routine cases. Most significantly, examination of more than five hundred court decisions shows the vital role that settlement plays in criminal cases in China today. Defendants who agree to compensate their victims receive strikingly lighter sentences than those who do not. Likewise, settlement plays a role in resolving even serious crimes, at times appearing to make the difference between life and death for criminal defendants. My account of ordinary cases in China contrasts with most western accounts of the Chinese criminal justice system, which focus on sensational cases of injustice and the prevalence of harsh punishments.The evidence I present provides insight into the roles being played by the Chinese criminal justice system and the functions of courts in that system. This article also provides empirical evidence that contributes to debates on a range of other issues, including the relationship of formal law to community norms in Chinese criminal justice, the roles of witnesses and lawyers, the function of appellate review, and how system confronts and handles a range of high profile topics. My findings also contribute to literature on courts in authoritarian regimes and the evolution of authoritarian transparency. This article provides a base for discussing the future of empirical research on Chinese court judgments, demonstrating that there is much to learn from the vast volume of cases that have in recent years become publicly available in China.
Make-or-Buy? The Provision of Indigent Defense Services in the U.S.

Most criminal defendants cannot afford to hire an attorney. To provide constitutionally mandated legal services, states commonly use either private court-appointed attorneys or a public defender or...
Measuring Tax-Sensitive Institutional Investor Ownership

ABSTRACT: We classify all institutional investors that file Form 13-F over the period 1995–2013 as either “tax-sensitive” or “tax-insensitive” based on their trading behavior and portfolio characteristics. We examine tests of the effects of investor tax-sensitivity on portfolio rebalancing, price pressure, and fund performance, and compare our measure of tax-sensitive institutional investor ownership to three measures used in prior studies. We show that our measure of tax-sensitive investors dominates other measures in the portfolio rebalancing and price pressure tests. In the fund performance test, our measure of tax-sensitivity is the only one that finds that tax-sensitive investors have significantly lower returns on their portfolio stocks, which is a new result in the literature. JEL Classifications: G11; G20; H24.
Regulating the Plea-Bargaining Market: From Caveat Emptor to Consumer Protection

Padilla v. Kentucky was a watershed in the U.S. Supreme Court’s turn to regulating plea bargaining. For decades, the Court had focused on jury trials as the central subject of criminal procedure, with only modest and ineffective procedural regulation of guilty pleas. This older view treated trials as the norm, was indifferent to sentencing, trusted judges and juries to protect innocence, and drew clean lines excluding civil proceedings and collateral consequences from its purview. In United States v. Ruiz in 2002, the Court began to focus on the realities of the plea process itself, but did so only halfway. Not until Padilla last year did the Court regulate plea bargaining’s substantive calculus, its attendant sentencing decisions, the lawyers who run it, and related collateral civil consequences. Padilla marks the eclipse of Justice Scalia’s formalist originalism, the parting triumph of Justice Stevens’s common-law incrementalism, and the rise of the two realistic exprosecutors on the Court, Justices Alito and Sotomayor. To complete Padilla’s unfinished business, the Court and legislatures should look to consumer protection law to regulate at least the process if not the substance of plea bargaining.
Robust risk measurement and model risk

Financial risk measurement relies on models of prices and other market variables, but models inevitably rely on imperfect assumptions and estimates, creating model risk. Moreover, optimization decisions, such as portfolio selection, amplify the effect of model error. In this work, we develop a framework for quantifying the impact of model error and for measuring and minimizing risk in a way that is robust to model error. This robust approach starts from a baseline model and finds the worst-case error in risk measurement that would be incurred through a deviation from the baseline model, given a precise constraint on the plausibility of the deviation. Using relative entropy to constrain model distance leads to an explicit characterization of worst-case model errors; this characterization lends itself to Monte Carlo simulation, allowing straightforward calculation of bounds on model error with very little computational effort beyond that required to evaluate performance under the baseline nominal model. Thi...
Physician fees and procedure intensity: the case of cesarean delivery.

Abstract While there is a large literature investigating the response of treatment intensity to Medicare reimbursement differentials, there is much less work on this question for the Medicaid program. The answers for Medicare may not apply in the Medicaid context, since a smaller share of a physician's patients will be Medicaid insured, so that income effects from fee changes may be dominated by substitution effects. We investigate the effect of Medicaid fee differentials on the use of cesarean delivery over the period 1988–1992. We find, in contrast to the backward-bending supply curve implied by the Medicare literature, that larger fee differentials between cesarean and normal childbirth for the Medicaid program leads to higher cesarean delivery rates. In particular, we find that the lower fee differentials between cesarean and normal childbirth under the Medicaid program than under private insurance can explain between one half and three-quarters of the difference between Medicaid and private cesarean delivery rates. Our results suggest that Medicaid reimbursement reductions can cause real reductions in the intensity with which Medicaid patients are treated.
Can Higher Prices Stimulate Product Use? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Zambia

The controversy over how much to charge for health products in the developing world rests, in part, on whether higher prices can increase use, either by targeting distribution to high-use households (a screening effect), or by stimulating use psychologically through a sunk-cost effect. We develop a methodology for separating these two effects. We implement the methodology in a field experiment in Zambia using door-to-door marketing of a home water purification solution. We find evidence of economically important screening effects. By contrast, we find no consistent evidence of sunk-cost effects. (JEL C93, D12, I11, M31, O12)
Observation of interspecies ion separation in inertial-confinement-fusion implosions

Here we report direct experimental evidence of interspecies ion separation in direct-drive, inertial-confinement-fusion experiments on the OMEGA laser facility. These experiments, which used plastic capsules with D2/Ar gas fill (1% Ar by atom), were designed specifically to reveal interspecies ion separation by exploiting the predicted, strong ion thermo-diffusion between ion species of large mass and charge difference. Via detailed analyses of imaging x-ray-spectroscopy data, we extract Ar-atom-fraction radial profiles at different times, and observe both enhancement and depletion compared to the initial 1%-Ar gas fill. The experimental results are interpreted with radiation-hydrodynamic simulations that include recently implemented, first-principles models of interspecies ion diffusion. Finally, the experimentally inferred Ar-atom-fraction profiles agree reasonably, but not exactly, with calculated profiles associated with the incoming and rebounding first shock.
Commentary on the impact of a 25-cent-per-drink alcohol tax increase.

The recent article by Daley et al. advocates large increases in alcohol taxes claiming both public health benefits from reduced consumption and that almost all of the cost would be borne by high-risk drinkers. The authors rely on the assumption that the majority of drinkers impose external costs on society and that the majority of drinkers would benefit if they reduced their consumption. Neither of these assumptions holds up under scrutiny. The authors also fail to consider how higher taxes harm moderate drinkers. Not only will moderate drinkers lose the enjoyment of drinks not consumed, but many would lose the positive health benefits from moderate drinking as well. One should not attempt to engage in cost-benefit analysis while ignoring the benefits side of the equation. It appears that the Daley et al. assumptions favoring higher alcohol taxes drive their results.