cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Corporate securities fraud: Insights from a new empirical framework

Empirical analysis of corporate fraud faces a challenge because the commission of fraud is not directly observable. We observe only detected frauds. In this article, I introduce a new empirical model to address this partial observability of fraud. The new model generates new insights about not only the determinants of fraud commission and fraud detection but also the interaction between the two latent processes. I also show that the empirical models used in the existing literature can lead to incorrect assessment of corporate or public policies designed to combat fraud. (JEL G30, G34, K22) The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Yale University. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.
The Political Economy of National Debt Burdens, 1970-2000

Why did developing country governments find themselves mired in high debt by the end of the twentieth century? This paper develops a theoretical framework to understand the relationship between political institutions, resource wealth, and debt burdens. Hypotheses generated are tested on a time-series cross-section data set of developing countries from 1970–2000. Three main findings are reported: oil wealth has a positive relationship with debt; this relationship is weakly conditional on the country's regime type; and the relationship is independent of general commodity price volatility. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this research for our understanding of the ‘resource curse.’
Friends and Profits Don’t Mix: The Performance Implications of Repeated Partnerships

Firms use repeated partnerships to gain benefits of shared experience such as improved coordination, collaboration, and adaptation. However, there are downsides to partnering repeatedly, including ...
Fiduciary Relationships Are Not Contracts

This Article, which explores the nature of fiduciary relationships, demonstrates that these relationships arise and function in ways that are alien to contractualist thought. While the relationships may, like marriage relationships, be part of the same genus, they are indeed members of a different species. Fiduciary relationships differ both in doctrinal structure and ethical basis. However, some contractualist writing denies one or the other of these two propostitions. This Article, therefore, aims to establish that both are in fact true. The author presents that fiduciary relationships have value and serve purposes that are largely unknown to contractualists. Furthermore, these relationships facilitate the doing of justice, promote virtue, and enhance freedom in a distinctive way.
The effect of controversial global sourcing practices on the ethical judgments and intentions of U.S. consumers

Global sourcing has led to lower cost and more effective supply chains for many companies. However, when the cost-driven practices of many suppliers in these chains come to light there is often considerable debate over the ethics of these practices. This research uses the well-known Hunt–Vitell framework as the theoretical foundation for a structural equation model of the deontological and teleological evaluations used by consumers when making ethical judgments of a firm's controversial cost-driven global sourcing practices. Data from a large-scale U.S. consumer survey show the importance of deontological and teleological evaluations in forming consumers’ ethical judgments of global sourcing practices, and establish a strong relationship between ethical judgment and the intention of consumers to alter consumption of a firm's products. Extensions to the framework and demographic analyses for age, gender, and income provide insights as to how perceptions of these practices affect consumer evaluations of a company involved in global sourcing and how consumers actualize their resultant intentions.
Did Medicare Part D reduce mortality

We investigate the implementation of Medicare Part D and estimate that this prescription drug benefit program reduced elderly mortality by 2.2% annually. This was driven primarily by a reduction in cardiovascular mortality, the leading cause of death for the elderly. There was no effect on deaths due to cancer, a condition whose drug treatments are covered under Medicare Part B. We validate these results by demonstrating that the changes in drug utilization following the implementation of Medicare Part D match the mortality patterns we observe. We calculate that the value of the mortality reduction is equal to $5 billion per year.
International comovements in inflation rates and country characteristics

Abstract Common shocks, similarities in central bank reaction functions, and international trade potentially produce common components in international inflation rates. This paper characterizes such links in international inflation rates with a dynamic latent factor model that decomposes 64 national inflation rates into world, regional, and idiosyncratic components. The world and regional components account for 35% and 16%, respectively, of annual inflation variability on average across countries, so that international influences together explain just over half of inflation variability. The importance of the world and regional components, however, differs substantially across countries. Economic policy choices and development measures strongly explain the cross-sectional variation in the relative importance of international influences. A subsample analysis reveals that the regional (world) factor increases in importance for a number of North American and European (Latin American and Asian) countries since 1980.
NEA v. Finley: A Decision in Search of a Rationale

Debate has raged over whether Congress can constitutionally restrict, or at least influence, the ability of the National Endowment for the Arts (“NEA”) to award grants to artists and institutions for the creation or display of art work that a significant segment of the public would consider highly offensive. In the October 1997 Term, the Supreme Court, by an 8-1 margin in NEA v. Finley, upheld section 954(d), a 1991 congressional amendment to the NEA Act that requires the Chairperson of the NEA to ensure that, in establishing regulations and procedures for assessing artistic excellence and artistic merit, “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public” are taken into consideration.Perhaps Finley is best understood as a prudential decision validating a political compromise that sought to, and has largely succeeded in, ending the arts funding controversy, as well as insulating the NEA from further and possibly fatal attack. From a doctrinal and theoretical standpoint, Finley is extraordinarily unsatisfying. Justice O'Connor's opinion for the majority makes many salient points, but it fails to pull them together into a coherent rationale. Glaring contradictions in the majority opinion suggest that it was the product of a Court in agreement as to the result but not as to a rationale. Justice Scalia, in concurrence, and Justice Souter, in dissent, demonstrated that a clearer and more principled opinion than the majority's could be written either to uphold or invalidate the legislation. Thus, although the issue was difficult, it was hardly intractable.This Article analyzes the opinions in Finley, speculates on the significance of the case, and suggests an alternative rationale for the decision that has both advantages and disadvantages over the Court's opinion. Part II provides a brief history of the arts funding controversy and the Finley litigation. Part III examines the three opinions in Finley, relying heavily on the incisive critiques of the majority opinion developed by Justices Scalia and Souter. Part IV discusses the dynamics of the Finley opinion as an exercise in Supreme Court decision making. Part V considers the doctrinal impact of Finley on viewpoint discrimination and the unconstitutional conditions doctrine. Finally, Part VI offers a doctrinal rationalization of Finley that I believe better captures the essence of the controversy in Finley and considers whether that rationalization would have been a preferable approach.
Capital Control Measures: A New Dataset

This paper presents a new data set of capital controls by inflows and outflows for 10 asset categories in 100 countries during 1995–2013. Building on the data inSchindler (2009) and other data sets based on the analysis of the IMF’s Annual Report on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Restrictions (AREAER), this data set covers additional asset categories, more countries, and a longer time period. The paper discusses in detail the construction of the data and characterizes them with respect to the prevalence and correlation of controls across asset categories and between inflow and outflow controls, the aggregation of the separate categories into broader indicators, the experience of some particular countries, and the comparison of these data with others indices of capital controls.
Hybrid cars and HOV lanes

The 2005 California Clean Air Access Sticker program offered stickers to owners of hybrid cars allowing unrestricted access to High Occupancy Vehicle lanes. The program was conceived as a zero-cost mechanism to encourage purchase of hybrid cars and to reduce air pollution. Information from sales of used hybrids allows us to estimate sticker market value. We then derive the value of excess HOV space the hybrids occupied, which is considerably greater than the air pollution benefits achieved. A more effective policy would sell space to drivers of any vehicle and use the revenue to stimulate hybrid demand, preferably via direct subsidy.
The undue burden: parental notification requirements for publicly funded contraception.

This article analyzes the legal impact of legislative proposals in 1998 and 1999 to require parental notification for minors seeking publicly funded contraception. Part I explores the history of Title X and some of its amendments, the HHS interpretive “squeal rule,” and the federal courts' rejection of the HHS rule based on the congressional intent behind Title X. Part II focuses on the Parental Notification Act of 1998 and its likelihood for success against a constitutional challenge, based on an analysis of precedent on parental consent requirements for contraception and abortion. Part III discusses the change in the legislative and judicial vision of adolescent privacy rights over time, from a more expansive notion of adolescents as individuals with rights to a more restrictive notion of adolescents as children subject to their parents' rights. The article concludes by touching upon some other legal trends that reveal this narrowing view of minors' privacy rights, including an increase in statutory rape prosecution during the last decade.
Corporate Board Governance and Voluntary Disclosure of Executive Compensation Practices

This study examines how corporate boards respond to investor demands for information on executive compensation practices and whether certain board and compensation committee characteristics, as proxies for board governance quality, are associated with the extent of board disclosure of compensation practices. A unique feature of this study is the development of a comprehensive checklist of 23 compensation-related items. I validate this index by showing that the disclosure scores are inversely related to two measures of information asymmetry: bid-ask spread and return volatility. This provides evidence that greater compensation disclosure reduces information asymmetry. The study presents some evidence that boards with the power to act independently from management provide more details about executive compensation practices. Moreover, it contributes to the literature on corporate governance and disclosure by showing that greater commitment of directors to perform their duties results in greater transparency.
CEO incentives and earnings management

Abtract We provide evidence that the use of discretionary accruals to manipulate reported earnings is more pronounced at firms where the CEO's potential total compensation is more closely tied to the value of stock and option holdings. In addition, during years of high accruals, CEOs exercise unusually large numbers of options and CEOs and other insiders sell large quantities of shares.
Rationality, Pirates, and The Law: A Retrospective

In the late 1720s Caribbean piracy was brought to a screeching halt. An enhanced British naval presence was partly responsible for this. But most important in bringing pirates to their end was a series of early 18thcentury legal changes that made it possible to effectively prosecute them. This short paper’s purpose is to recount those legal changes and document their effectiveness. Its other purpose is to analyze pirates’ response to the legal changes designed to exterminate them, which succeeded, at least partly, in frustrating the government’s goal. By providing a retrospective look at anti-piracy law and pirates’ reactions to that law, my hope is to supply some useful material for thinking about how to use the law to address the contemporary piracy problem.
Patent Damages and Spatial Competition

This paper analyzes price competition between a spatially difierentiated product patentee and an imitator anticipating the possibility of future patent damages. We compare the performance of three damage regimes. The \reasonable royalty" regime, the only one that yields symmetric equilibrium pricing, maximizes static welfare and yields the highest incentives to innovate when patent enforcement is nearly certain. The \lost proflts" regime, the only one that may deter infringement, yields the highest incentives to innovate when patent enforcement is less-than-certain and product value is su‐ciently high. The \unjust enrichment" regime is weakest. Our results ofier an e‐ciency argument for abandoning it. We also describe new insights into the \hypothetical negotiation" that the courts use to construct
Contracting out of Article 2 Using a License Label: A Strategy That Should Not Work for Software Products

Using a functional approach to commercial law classification of contracts in software products, this article takes the position that because Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code works for these transactions, it should apply. This is the usual approach in the courts, increasingly even for customized software developed for a particular customer. Attempting to contract out of Article 2 using a license label thus is an ineffective legal strategy. Article 2 serves well for the issues it addresses, such as contract formation, quality warranties, and damage remedies. Further law reform will eventually be desirable for the issues at the intersection of commercial and intellectual property law, particularly default use and transfer rights and the limits of contractual (and technological) restrictions on these rights.
Holdout in the Assembly of Complements: A Problem for Market Design

The Colombian government’s recent efforts to aggregate land for housing and infrastructure have run into holdout problems. Hundreds of distinct individual sellers must consent to assembly, and many have demanded substantial, disproportionate shares of the total aggregation surplus. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) faces comparable challenges in its efforts to repurpose spectrum, as profitable reallocation requires large contiguous spectrum blocks, but spectrum ownership rights are fragmented among many sellers. Similar problems arise in a range of other contexts where a buyer attempts to aggregate complementary goods from many self-interested sellers. While mechanisms that fully respect sellers’ property rights 1 cannot alleviate these holdout problems, traditional solutions, such as the use of coercive government powers of “eminent domain” to expropriate property, can encour age wasteful assemblies and undermine both owners’ property rights and social standards of fairness. In Section I, we discuss the problems
Evolution of the relative price of goods and services in a neoclassical model of capital accumulation

Abstract The paper provides an explanation for the secular increase in the price of services relative to that of manufactured goods that relies on capital accumulation rather than on an exogenous total factor productivity growth differential. The key assumptions of the two-sector, intertemporal optimizing model are relatively high capital intensity in the production of goods and limited cross-border capital mobility, allowing the interest rate to vary. With plausible parameterization, the model also predicts a decline in the employment share of the goods sector over time.
The Economics of Risky Health Behaviors

Abstract Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky health behaviors. It describes traditional economic approaches emphasizing utility maximization that, under certain assumptions, result in Pareto-optimal outcomes and a limited role for policy interventions. It also details non-traditional models (e.g. involving hyperbolic time discounting or bounded rationality) that even without market imperfections can result in suboptimal outcomes for which government intervention has greater potential to increase social welfare. The chapter summarizes the literature on the consequences of risky health behaviors for economic outcomes such as medical care costs, educational attainment, employment, wages, and crime. It also reviews the research on policies and strategies with the potential to modify risky health behaviors, such as taxes or subsidies, cash incentives, restrictions on purchase and use, providing information, and restricting advertising. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research.
Does Confidential Proxy Voting Matter

Abstract Confidential voting in corporate proxies is a principal recommendation in activist institutional investors’ corporate governance guidelines because they believe that it mitigates conflicts of interest that prevent private‐sector institutions from voting against management even though to do so would maximize share value. This article examines the impact of the adoption of confidential voting through a panel data set of shareholder and management proposals at firms that adopted the practice. It finds, contrary to confidential voting advocates’ expectations, that the adoption of confidential voting has no significant effect on voting outcomes. It also does not affect firms’ stock performance. The results are not a function of selection bias in confidential voting firms’ ownership: those firms have higher ownership levels of investors with supposed conflicts (banks and insurance companies) than firms at which confidential voting was proposed but not adopted.
Not Your Mother's Will: Gender, Language, and Wills

“Boys will be boys, but girls must be young ladies” is an echoing patriarchal refrain from the past. Formal equality has not produced equality in all areas, as demonstrated by the continuing wage gap. Gender bias lingers and can be identified in language. This Article focuses on Wills, one of the oldest forms of legal documents, to explore the intersection of gender and language. With conceptual antecedents in pre-history, written Wills found in Ancient Egyptian tombs embody the core characteristics of modern Wills. The past endows the drafting and implementation of Wills with a wealth of traditions and experiences. The past, however, also entombs patriarchal notions inappropriate in Wills of today. This article explores the language of the Will to parse the historical choices that remain relevant choices for today and the vestiges of a patriarchal past that should be avoided.
Designing and using experiential exercises

Experiential learning refers to learning which uses the learner’s experience as a base. This definition implies an active and personal approach to learning. A more operational definition is provided below. While experiential learning has been gaining rapidly in popularity, the evidence on its value is mixed. Wolfe [1] presents evidence suggesting that experiential learning is not superior to traditional methods for transmitting knowledge. Similar results were found by Cherryholmes [2] in a survey of what would appear to be experiential methods; participants did not learn more facts, nor did they retain more facts, nor did they develop more critical thinking abilities. On the other hand, the participants did report more interest in the subject and there was more attitude change. Rather than asking whether experiential learning is superior, one might recast the question in terms of when experiential learning is superior. This paper describes the conditions under which experiential learning is useful. This description is followed by a discussion of how to design an experiential exercise. It concludes with suggestions on how experiential learning may be introduced into current educational systems. Relevant empirical literature is described.
Copyright and the architecture of digital delivery

Copyright law is largely a response to new media: from the printing press through radio, photocopiers, and digital computers, changes in copyright reflect the increased public availability of information reproduction technologies. But while the exclusive rights conferred by copyright are shaped by the technologies they respond to, the opposite is also true: technology is shaped in response to the requirements of copyright, altering or innovating designs to either avoid or accommodate the demands of the law. Nowhere has this dynamic interaction been more apparent than in the 2001 copyright decision against Napster and in the succeeding impact of that case. The Napster case and its progeny reveal a pattern of creative “inventing around” previous definitions of formal copyright boundaries. Such interactive re–imagining of technical and legal standards continues in current legal controversies regarding digital delivery systems such as streaming media, digital lockers, and “cloud” services, extending the pattern present in Napster and its progeny into current copyright policy.
Short-Term Trading and Stock Return Anomalies: Momentum, Reversal, and Share Issuance

This article examines how the extent of short-term trading relates to the efficiency of stock prices. We employ a new duration measure based on quarterly institutional investors’ portfolio holdings, next to existing proxies such as trading volume, the percentage of transient institutions, and fund turnover. Momentum returns and subsequent returns reversal are generally much stronger for stocks held primarily by short-term investors, especially if these investors recently had superior recent performance which could make them overconfident. Our results point toward the behavioral theory in Daniel, Hirshleifer and Subrahmanyam (1998) and seem inconsistent with short-term institutions improving efficiency.
Does the director labor market offer ex post settling-up for CEOs? The case of acquisitions

Abstract We examine the rewards for experience and ability in the director labor market. We show that large acquisitions are associated with significantly higher numbers of subsequent board seats for the acquiring CEO, target CEO, and the directors. We also find that, in the case of acquisitions, experience is more important than ability. Both value-destroying and value-increasing acquisitions have significant and positive effects on a CEO's future prospects in the director labor market. In addition to increasing our understanding of the director labor market, these results suggest that the ex post settling-up incentives thought to exist in the director labor market are weak for acquisitions.
Exogenous Shocks and Growth Crises in Low-Income Countries: A Vulnerability Index

Summary This paper develops a new index which provides early warning signals of a growth crisis in the event of large external shocks in low-income countries (LICs). Multivariate regression analysis and a univariate signaling approach are used to map information from a parsimonious set of underlying policy, structural, and institutional indicators into a composite vulnerability index. Both the in-sample and out-of-sample predictive power of the index are high. In particular, it explains well the growth crises observed in LICs during the global financial crisis.
How Do Restatements Begin? Evidence of Earnings Management Preceding Restated Financial Reports

: Most earnings restatements are blamed on error, or misunderstanding of GAAP, but suspicion persists that many of these restatements are instead due to intentional earnings management. We analyze balance sheet bloat, or unusually high levels of working capital account balances, for evidence of sustained, income-increasing earnings management prior to initial non-GAAP financial reports. We establish a pattern of systematically increasing balance sheet bloat for firms later issuing clearly fraudulent financial reports. Next, we compare bloat for apparently non-fraud restatements to fraud and control samples. We find non-fraud restatement companies’ bloat is higher than control companies for two years preceding the initial misstated financial report. But, these firms accumulate less balance sheet bloat than companies with restatements clearly involving fraud. This suggests meaningful, but not pervasive, earnings management underlying even apparently non-fraudulent restatements. We extend our analysis to discretionary accruals and real activity earnings management.
Teaching comparative economic systems 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union

Abstract Twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we reflect on contemporary teaching of undergraduate comparative economic systems (CES). Using qualitative and quantitative measures, we consider how the field responded to the collapse by examining CES textbooks from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. We also consider how the dissolution of the Soviet Union affected economics course offerings at the undergraduate level. Based on our findings, we suggest two strategies for reimagining CES for the 21st century by: (1) changing textbook organization and content, and (2) incorporating more comparative economic concepts throughout the undergraduate curriculum.
Does Career Risk Deter Potential Entrepreneurs

Do potential entrepreneurs remain in wage employment because of concerns that they will face worse job opportunities should their entrepreneurial ventures fail? Using a Canadian reform that extended job-protected leave to one year for women giving birth after a cutoff date, we study whether the option to return to a previous job increases entrepreneurship. A regression discontinuity design reveals that longer job-protected leave increases entrepreneurship by 1.9 percentage points. These entrepreneurs start incorporated businesses that hire employees—in industries where experimentation before entry has low costs and high benefits. The effects are concentrated among those with more human and financial capital.
Collaboration between public health and law enforcement: the constitutional challenge.

In their article “Collaboration Between Public Heath and Law Enforcement: New Paradigms and Partnerships for Bioterrorism Planning and Response,” Butler et al. present a valuable introduction to the practical problems of coordinating public health and criminal law investigations (1). While this problem is not new in public health, the events of September 11, 2001, have given it a special urgency. This commentary outlines the constitutional constraints on such collaborations, with the objective of helping public health and law-enforcement personnel resolve issues that are not addressed by the article.
AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE

This article summarizes empirical research about Collaborative Practice, the Collaborative movement, its interaction with other parts of the dispute resolution field, and its impact on the field. It reviews studies of Collaborative Practice describing the individuals involved in Collaborative cases, how the process works, the operation of local practice groups, and the impact of Collaborative Practice on legal practice generally. Based on this analysis, it suggests an agenda for future research. Finally, it offers suggestions for constructive development of the Collaborative field.
The hyperbolic-oriented efficiency measure as a remedy to infeasibility of super efficiency models

The infeasibility problem in traditional super efficiency models has been well established. A generalization of traditional input- or output-oriented super efficiency models, the directional distance function also suffers from infeasibility and related problems. The hyperbolic-oriented efficiency measure provides an alternative to the input-oriented, output-oriented, and directional efficiency measures in super efficiency models and it has the distinct advantage of eliminating the infeasibility problem for positive input/output data. We also show that using a hyperbolic orientation in a super efficiency model allows us to find feasible solutions for certain cases when the requirement for all data to be positive is relaxed. Further we demonstrate the hyperbolic orientated super efficiency method in an outlier detection application. Together, these results establish the use of the hyperbolic orientation in super efficiency analysis as a realistic alternative in practice.
Scholarly Discourse, Public Perceptions, and the Cementing of Norms: The Case of the Indian Supreme Court and a Plea for Research

For economic and nuclear reasons, India has received considerable attention over the last decade from observers in the United States. But attuned Americans are well-aware of India's rich culture and status as a shining constitutional democracy for most of its post-1947 independent history. For all that India has accomplished, however, its public has long viewed its government officials with great disdain. At the same time, a fascinating norm exists in this society which holds one institution in exceedingly high regard - the Indian Supreme Court. In this article, I seek to examine what accounts for this counter-intuitive norm. As opposed to other state institutions, the Indian Supreme Court is perceived as uncorrupted and as an aggressive protector of individual rights. Yet as I argue, these affirmative sentiments towards the Court mainly appear within scholarly discourse. The Court's various landmark judgments over the years certainly have enabled participants in this discourse to promote its reputation. But because actual evidence is lacking, we simply do not know if this scholarly norm reflects the perceptions of the mass public. Indeed the reality is that most Indians never have any contact with the Court; interaction with the legal process is usually done at the lower court level which can be delay-ridden and expensive. Moreover, because there are legal sanctions that can result from criticizing the Court, it may well be that many within the general public individually reject the scholarly norm but are afraid to speak-out or believe that they are alone in their disagreement. That this psychological phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance, which I discuss in detail, may be occurring has important implications, including forcing us to reexamine the extent to which the Court is able - in the eyes of the Indian public - to protect and advance a substantive rights agenda.
Snobbery, Racism, or Mutual Distaste: What Promotes and Hinders Cooperation in Local Public-Good Provision?

A political jurisdiction may decide to cooperate in public schooling provision with its neighbors or remain independent. The determinants of the consolidation decision are compared for the richer and the poorer and for the whiter and the less white jurisdiction in each potential consolidation pair. Property values and scale economies matter most. However, poorer jurisdictions prefer merging with richer ones that are less white than themselves. Whiter jurisdictions prefer to consolidate with less white ones of similar income. Less white jurisdictions are more open to consolidation with whiter ones if their incomes differ in either direction. Traditional club-theory predictions are not supported.
Smart Regulation and Federalism For the Smart Grid

This Article examines the “Smart Grid,” a set of concepts, technologies, and operating practices that may transform America’s electric grid as much as the Internet has done, redefining every aspect of electricity generation, distribution, and use. While the Smart Grid’s promise is great, this Article examines numerous key barriers to its development, including early stage resistance, a lack of incentives for consumers, and the adverse impacts of the federal-state tension in energy regulation. Overcoming these barriers requires both new technologies and transformative regulatory change, beginning with the development of a foundation of interoperability standards (rules of the road governing interactions on the Smart Grid) that will influence development for many years. This Article describes the federally coordinated standard-setting process started in the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, leading to a collaborative dialogue among hundreds of participants, with leadership from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”). After setting forth the need for interoperability standards and elaborating on the standard-setting process, the Article focuses on a 2011 order by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”) that declined to adopt an initial group of standards. While this may appear a step backward, the Article argues to the contrary, finding that FERC’s order supports the flexibility of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel, the NIST-led process that will produce interoperability standards critical to a wide range of energy saving technologies. FERC’s order allows this process, not a regulator’s imprimatur, to give standards credibility. By holding off on forcing adoption of the standards, but preserving the potential for more significant federal intervention later, it may lead to state adoption of the resulting standards. In this adaptive approach to energy law federalism, neither top-down federal regulation nor private sector standard setting is the exclusive means of overseeing Smart Grid development. FERC’s approach may promote a more positive federal-state relationship in the development of the Smart Grid, and may even portend a more collaborative relationship in energy law federalism generally, avoiding the disruptive jurisdictional clashes that have marked recent attempts to innovate in the electric grid.
Using the Press Clause to Amplify Civic Discourse Beyond Mere Opinion Sharing

The First Amendment unambiguously proclaims that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." The First Amendment's Speech Clause primarily bears the deliberative weight of protecting and maintaining the discursive space of America's self-governing democracy. It has done so by indiscriminately protecting a broad array of expression from government intrusion. As a result, the Speech Clause has democratically legitimized such expression in America's civic discourse. This legitimization is essential to a more deliberative democracy. The Speech Clause's legitimizing function, however, has not helped to advance another essential element for a well-functioning deliberative democracy, namely, democratic competence. Instead, it has hurt it. Democratic competence relates to the cognitive empowerment of citizens within civic discourse and requires, at a minimum, deliberation-enhancing end-products and exchanges, grounded in factual truth and disclosure of corporate or government sponsorship when applicable. The protective scope of the Speech Clause has ironically contributed to the current * Associate Professor of Law at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University. I would like to thank the organizers of the Northeast People of Color Conference hosted at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University for allowing me to present earlier ideas on this paper. Many thanks also to the Southern Methodist University Law School junior faculty forum, the organizers of the Association of the Study of Law, Culture, and Humanities, and the Lutie Lytle Black Women Law Faculty Black Writing Workshop for allowing me to present and receive feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. I extend a thank you to Professors Alafair Burke, Angela Kupenda, Erika George, Janai Nelson, Julie Steiner, Kamille Wolff, Lyrissa Lidsky, RonNell Andersen Jones, and Michelle Adams for providing helpful comments to earlier oral presentations or written drafts of this paper as well. I would also like to thank Bethany Simmons, Adam Kahn, and Melissa Mendoza for their invaluable research assistance on this project.
The Miraculous Year 2010 in United States Gay Rights Law: Anomaly or Tipping Point?

During 2010 a series of decisions by United States District Court judges appeared to mark a significant breakthrough in the ongoing struggle by sexual minorities in the United States to achieve legal equality through the removal of objectionable laws and policies. Almost as if a dam had broken, there was a sudden rush of developments on three highly contested fronts: (1) the statutory ban on military service by openly gay individuals, (2) the exclusion from federal recognition for lawfully contracted same-sex marriages, and (3) a popularly enacted California state constitutional amendment taking away same-sex marriage rights that had previously been granted by a state supreme court decision. In each of these cases, the district courts declared the contested policy to be unconstitutional and ordered injunctive relief, placing in doubt the willingness of courts to continue crediting traditional arguments that had been successfully invoked by the government when defending these and similar policies in past cases. In this comment, the author argues that these decisions may work a fundamental change in the analysis of LGBT constitutional claims that portends significant progress towards achieving legal equality for sexual minorities in the United States.
MEASURING WELFARE IN RESTRUCTURED ELECTRICITY MARKETS

Abstract Restructuring electricity markets has enabled wholesalers to exercise market power. Using a common method to measure competition, several studies have found substantial inefficiencies. This method overstates actual welfare loss by ignoring production constraints that result in non-convex costs. I develop an alternative method that accounts for these constraints and apply it to the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland market. For the summer following restructuring, the common method implies that market imperfections resulted in considerable welfare loss, with actual production costs exceeding the competitive model's estimates by 13%–21%. In contrast, my method finds that actual costs were only between 3% and 8% above the competitive levels.
Authorizations for the Use of Force, International Law, and the Charming Betsy Canon

Although international . law has figured prominently in many disputes around actions of the U.S. military, the precise relationship between international law and the President's war powers has gone largely unexplored. This Article seeks to clarify one important aspect of that relationship: the role of international law in determining the scope of Congress's general authorizations for the use of force. In the seminal case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the plurality opinion used international law to interpret the authorization by Congress for the use of force, but did so without adequate attention to the content or interpretive function of international law. This Article identifies and defends a better approach: courts should presume that general authorizations for the use of force do not empower the President to violate international law. Such a presumption is consistent with long-standing tools of statutory interpretation reflected in the Charming Betsy canon, maximizes the presumed preferences of Congress, advances separation of powers values, and promotes normative values that favor the use of international law as an interpretive tool.
Commercializing Social Interaction: The Ethics of Stealth Marketing

Abstract Firms striving to reach consumers through today's swell of marketing clutter frequently are employing novel marketing practices. Although many nontraditional marketing messages are effective through clever, entertaining, and, ultimately, benign means, others rely on deception to reach consumers. In particular, one form of covert marketing, known as stealth marketing, uses surreptitious practices that fail to disclose or reveal the true relationship with the company producing or sponsoring the marketing message. In addition to deception, stealth marketing can involve intrusion and exploitation of social relationships as means of achieving effectiveness. In this article, the authors consider the ethical implications using three stealth marketing case studies. They cast the discussion in the context of consumer defense mechanisms by employing literature on skepticism and persuasion knowledge to help explain the effectiveness of these practices. The authors identify the ethical problems inherent to s...
The Missing Organizational Dimension of Prisoner Reentry: An Ethnography of the Road to Reentry at a Nonprofit Service Provider

Prisoner reentry has received great interest in political sociology, criminology, and beyond. Research documents the struggles of individuals trying to find their way back into society. Less attention has been given to the organizational aspects of reentry. This is unfortunate given the rapid growth of nonprofit reentry organizations in the United States, which introduces a new set of questions about the context and challenges to prisoner reentry. Drawing on an ethnography of Safe, a nonprofit reentry organization in the Northeast, I describe the organization’s pivotal role in institutionalizing the pathway to prisoner reentry: a road to reentry, which takes former prisoners through a process that reconfigures their morality, identity, and social relationships. The road-to-reentry concept helps bring together scholars of the welfare state and criminology by highlighting how the challenges of prisoner reentry rely on how this process is organized. The way in which prison reentry is organized, in turn, affects former prisoners’ agency and shapes the relationship between these men and women and their respective families and communities.
Financial Privacy and the Theory of High-Tech Government Surveillance

How would you like the government to have access to the records of every purchase you have ever made? Part I of this paper describes the trend toward more electronic and more traceable payments over time, and identifies some of the harms that can occur when an individual's transactions records are readily accessible. Part II introduces the metaphor of data entering a 'vault 600 feet down,' and uses that metaphor to understand the range of ways that data can 'reach the surface,' or become accessible. Part III systematically examines the advantages and disadvantages of government access to financial transactional data. Advantages come in administration of the tax system, in avoiding welfare and other benefits fraud, and in money laundering and other rules that seek to detect, deter and prove illegal activity. These advantages, however, can be offset by troublesome ways that government officials and unauthorized third parties might misuse financial data. Part IV expands the analysis to high-tech government surveillance more generally. The arguments developed in Part III apply to key escrow, tracking of cellular phone location, transaction-generated information for telephone calls, and other surveillance systems. One important conclusion is that the government should have a greater burden in order to get 'real time' access to data than to get 'audit trail' access after the fact.
A Flexible Bayesian Nonparametric Model for Predicting Future Insurance Claims

ABSTRACTAccurate prediction of future claims is a fundamentally important problem in insurance. The Bayesian approach is natural in this context, as it provides a complete predictive distribution for future claims. The classical credibility theory provides a simple approximation to the mean of that predictive distribution as a point predictor, but this approach ignores other features of the predictive distribution, such as spread, that would be useful for decision making. In this article, we propose a Dirichlet process mixture of log-normals model and discuss the theoretical properties and computation of the corresponding predictive distribution. Numerical examples demonstrate the benefit of our model compared to some existing insurance loss models, and an R code implementation of the proposed method is also provided.
Does the WTO Make Trade More Stable

I examine the hypothesis that membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) has increased the stability and predictability of trade flows. I use a large data set covering annual bilateral trade flows between over 175 countries between 1950 and 1999, and estimate the effect of GATT/WTO membership on the coefficient of variation in trade computed over 25-year samples, controlling for a number of factors. I also use a comparable multilateral data set. There is little evidence that membership in the GATT/WTO has a significant dampening effect on trade volatility.
MATERIAL ADVERSE CHANGE CLAUSES AND ACQUISITION DYNAMICS

Material adverse change (MAC) clauses are a ubiquitous feature of acquisitions and exhibit substantial cross-sectional variation in the number and types of events that are excluded from being material adverse events (MAEs). MAEs are the underlying cause of 69% ofacquisition terminations and 80% of renegotiations. These renegotiations lead to substantial changes in the price offered to target shareholders. Acquisitions with fewer MAE exclusions are characterized by wider arbitrage spreads during the acquisition period and are associated with higher offer premiums. We conclude that MAC clauses have an economically important impact on the dynamics of corporate acquisitions.
Can firms with the best training program withstand the storm of economic policy uncertainty

AbstractThis study examines if firms whose training programs ranked as the best ones in the United States can withstand the changes in economic policy uncertainty. The regression analysis of monthly changes in economic policy uncertainty index, monthly returns on the CRSP value-weighted index, and monthly returns on an equal-weighted portfolio of public firms in the United States ranked consecutively from 2006 to 2011 in the top 50 of the Training Top 125 shows that the increased changes in economic policy uncertainty negatively affect the portfolio returns; however, this effect is not statistically significant at the 1% level. The result from regressing monthly returns on CRSP value-weighted index on the monthly changes of economic policy index yields a statistically significant negative coefficient at the 1% level, and this coefficient is more negative than the coefficient obtained from regressing the monthly portfolio returns on the monthly changes in economic policy uncertainty. This study provides em...