cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
A Fistful of Dollars: Lobbying and the Financial Crisis

Has lobbying by financial institutions contributed to the financial crisis? This paper uses detailed information on financial institutions' lobbying and mortgage lending activities to answer this question. We find that lobbying was associated with more risk-taking during 2000-07 and with worse outcomes in 2008. In particular, lenders lobbying more intensively on issues related to mortgage lending and securitization (i) originated mortgages with higher loan-to-income ratios, (ii) securitized a faster growing proportion of their loans, and (iii) had faster growing originations of mortgages. Moreover, delinquency rates in 2008 were higher in areas where lobbying lenders' mortgage lending grew faster. These lenders also experienced negative abnormal stock returns during the rescue of Bear Stearns and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, but positive abnormal returns when the bailout was announced. Finally, we find a higher bailout probability for lobbying lenders. These findings suggest that lending by politically active lenders played a role in accumulation of risks and thus contributed to the financial crisis.
Infant mortality among ethnic immigrant groups.

Abstract The numerically large and growing Indochinese refugee population has been little studied with respect to infant health. It is a population that is young, is experiencing high fertility, late onset of prenatal care, and is characterized by low socioeconomic status. Thus, it presents a high risk profile with respect to infant mortality. Using linked birth and infant death records for the San Diego metropolitan area for the period 1978–1985 infant mortality rates (IMRs) were calculated for Indochinese refugee groups from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in comparison with other ethnic groups. We found, surprisingly, that Indochinese refugees as a group had an IMR below that for non-Hispanic Whites and substantially below that for Blacks. In general, IMRs for Indochinese refugees were similar to those for other Asian groups. These findings held even after controlling for birth weight and onset of prenatal care. The timing and causes of death suggest areas in which the IMR could drop to even lower levels with improved community outreach programs, especially among refugee groups from Laos (Hmong and Lao) who exhibited the unusual pattern of higher post-early neonatal than early neonatal mortality.
The Regulatory State in the Information Age

This Article examines the regulatory state through the lens of evolving political economy, arguing that a significant reconstruction is now underway. The ongoing shift from an industrial mode of development to an informational one has created existential challenges for regulatory models and constructs developed in the context of the industrial economy. Contemporary contests over the substance of regulatory mandates and the shape of regulatory institutions are most usefully understood as moves within a larger struggle to chart a new direction for the regulatory state in the era of informational capitalism. A regulatory state optimized for the information economy must develop rubrics for responding to three problems that have confounded existing regulatory regimes: (1) platform power — the power to link facially separate markets and/or to constrain participation in markets by using technical protocols; (2) infoglut — unmanageably voluminous, mediated information flows that create information overload; and (3) systemic threat — nascent, probabilistically-defined harm to be realized at some point in the future. Additionally, it must develop institutions capable of exercising effective oversight of information-era activities. The information-era regulatory models that have begun to emerge are procedurally informal, mediated by networks of professional and technical expertise that define relevant standards, and financialized. Such models, however, also have tended to be both opaque to external observation and highly prone to capture. New institutional forms that might ensure their legal and political accountability have been slow to develop.
Towards a Right Against Risking

Morality forbids treating people in certain ways, and one way that it does so is through the recognition of rights. Rights form a part of every plausible moral theory, if not at a fundamental level, than at the practical level of application. Indeed, moral theories typically recognize a whole host of rights, like the rights to life and bodily integrity, and of free expression and free association, to name a few. These are uncontroversial, core rights. In this paper I explore a question at the boundary of rights, namely, whether morality also recognizes a right against risking, and if it does, what that right consists in. Do persons have a claim that others not treat them in certain risky ways?
The Amorality of Profit: Transnational Corporations and Human Rights

This chapter begins with an overview of the human rights problems presented by multinational corporations, looking at modern human rights abuses as well as the Holocaust. It explains the regulatory challenge posed by transnational corporations, examining the historical development of the corporate structure and the disjuncture between modern multinational entities and the still largely independent domestic legal systems. The chapter analyzes the current state of the international law governing corporate human rights practices, concluding that core human rights norms apply to corporations as well as to states and individuals. It discusses the harsh reality that corporations often profit from abusive behavior. The chapter also discusses the international norms and coordinated enforcement mechanisms by examining the state's power to regulate transnational corporations. The task ahead is to find effective mechanisms to enforce those norms, to ensure that the amorality of profit does not permit corporate human rights abuses to fester for another fifty years.
Optimality and renegotiation in dynamic contracting

Abstract We characterize the optimal renegotiation-proof contract in a dynamic principal–agent model in which the type of the agent may change stochastically over time. We show that, under general conditions, the optimal contract with commitment is renegotiation proof even when type realizations are serially correlated. When the renegotiation-proofness constraint is binding, it is always optimal to partially screen the types by offering a menu of choices to the agent; and the distortion induced by the renegotiation-proofness constraint is non-decreasing in the persistence of types.
Guest editor's introduction: The nonprofit mission and its financing

Excerpt from introduction: The idea of commercialism in the nonprofit sector sounds to some people like a paradox: Nonprofits are supposed to be essentially different from private firms for whom commercialism is their very lifeblood. To others, though, the uniqueness of nonprofit organizations is by no means self-evident; perhaps they are really not different from private firms, being just as influenced by business motives and opportunities for self-aggrandizement. Does it matter? Yes, it matters a great deal. At root is whether nonprofit organizations-which are growing rapidly-deserve the encouragement and subsidization they receive. The debate over the proper role, if any, for nonprofit organizations in a modem economy continues, periodically grabbing public attention: Private firms claim that they are victims of "unfair competition" from subsidized, tax-exempt nonprofits, and then pressure lawmakers to restrict nonprofits' commercial activities; the federal government revises the personal income tax in ways that, intentionally or not, affect incentives to donate to charitable nonprofits; and local governments introduce the latest device for extracting money from supposedly tax-exempt nonprofits...
Contingencies within dynamic managerial capabilities: interdependent effects of resource investment and deployment on firm performance

Dynamic managerial capabilities focus on managers' resource-related decisions. Asset orchestration, a central component of dynamic managerial capabilities and of resource management, highlights the importance of integrating (matching) resource investment and deployment decisions. Building on these recent theoretical advances, we examine the contingent nature of resource investment and deployment decisions. The results, based on a sample of banking firms, indicate that firm performance suffers when managers' investment decisions deviate from the norms of rivals for both human and physical capital. However, when deployment decisions support investment decisions, greater investment deviation, both high and low, generally enhances performance. Specifically, firm performance is optimized by making congruent resource investment and deployment decisions as opposed to maximizing or economizing either decision independently. Therefore, resource management via asset orchestration is vital for superior performance. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Policy Implications of Implicit Social Cognition

Basic research in implicit social cognition demonstrates that thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness or conscious control can influence perception, judgment, and action. Implicit measures reveal that people possess implicit attitudes and stereotypes about social groups that are often distinct from their explicitly endorsed beliefs and values. The evidence that behavior can be influenced by implicit social cognition contrasts with social policies that assume that people know and control the causes of their behavior. We consider the present state of evidence for implicit social cognition and its implications for social policy. We conclude that consideration of implicit social cognition can improve policy, and that most policy use of implicit measures as selection or evaluation devices is not easily justified. Two revelations from the mind sciences are easy to understand about other people’s minds yet difficult to accept about one’s own: (1) much of mental life occurs outside of conscious awareness and conscious control, and (2) thinking is often not objective or rational. Minds use shortcuts, heuristics, inferences, stereotypes, and expectations to help comprehend what happened before and predict what will happen next. These processes can be useful and effective on one occasion and suboptimal or plain wrong on another. Moreover, they can influence social perception, judgment, and behavior implicitly—without the person’s awareness or control. If this implicit social cognition was merely a quirky feature of the mind’s internal dialogue, with no implications for perceptions, judgments, or actions, then it would have little relevance for social policy. Social policies are principles, ∗ Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Brian Nosek, Box 400400; 102
Investment potential and risk hedging characteristics of platinum group metals

Abstract We examine the investment potential and risk-hedging characteristics of platinum, palladium, and rhodium by analyzing returns on their spot prices and comparing them with gold, crude oil, and stocks. The three characteristics that we examine that may be of the most importance to investors are the correlation with inflation, the correlation with foreign exchange rates, and the systematic risk of the investments. We find platinum is useful as a hedge against all three factors, and is also useful as a safe haven in periods of extreme stock market declines. Palladium and rhodium do not show the same extensive hedging capabilities.
Dynamics, space, and regional inequality in provincial China: A case study of Guangdong province

This paper investigates the regional inequality in one of the most developed provinces in China, Guangdong, from 1979 to 2009 and follows the multi-scale and multi-mechanism framework. We have found a new round of intensifying inequality in Guangdong since the early 2000s, which is attributed to the widening gap between the core region of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) and the rest of the province (periphery) and between the urban and rural areas. The authors also apply a distribution dynamics approach and spatial Markov chains to identify the spatial-temporal dynamics of regional disparities in Guangdong. The results show that there has been a progressive bias toward a poverty trap in the province and the effect of self-reinforcing agglomeration is evident. Using a multi-level model, the study further unfolds that the regional inequality in Guangdong is sensitive to the core-periphery hierarchy of multi-mechanisms and reveals the relative influence of decentralization, marketization and globalization. We argue that the policies toward inequality-reducing in Guangdong have been constrained by the geographical barriers and the effect of self-reinforcing agglomeration in the PRD, while marketization has potential to mediate the uneven development driven by the spatial concentration of foreign investment.
The Choice for Multilateralism: Foreign Aid and American Foreign Policy

Why do governments choose multilateralism? We examine a principal-agent model in which states trade some control over the policy for greater burden sharing. The theory generates observable hypotheses regarding the reasons for and the patterns of support and opposition to multilateralism. To focus our study, we analyze support for bilateral and multilateral foreign aid giving in the US. Using new survey data, we provide evidence about the correlates of public and elite support for multilateral engagement. We find weak support for multilateralism and deep partisan divisions. Reflecting elite discourse, public opinion divides over two competing rationales—burden sharing and control—when faced with the choice between multilateral and bilateral aid channels. As domestic groups’ preferences over aid policy diverge from those of the multilateral institution, maintaining control over aid policy becomes more salient and support for multilateralism falls.
A Metric for Money

The argument advanced here is that money worldwide has no recognized metric, no measuring instrument that defines the value of national currencies. In place of a metric, economists have substituted price indexes and monetary policy. Unanchored to economic realities, money numbers have dispersed in ever-greater inequality. At the same time, the proper metric for money has been the center of gravity of currency exchange rates, unrecognized, the de facto world money metric, for as long as the International Monetary Fund has published the data to see it. That metric is work time. It now needs to be adopted de jure as the world money unit.
Political distortions in state forecasts

This study provides evidence that political incentives lead state budget officials to make biased forecasts. Specifically, the budget in the year that ends right before an election is based on overly optimistic forecasts. Similarly, the budget that starts right before an election is also based on optimistic forecasts. These biases are even larger if the incumbent party is more likely to lose the gubernatorial election. Accordingly, budget deficits are $27 per capita higher in election years and $26 per capita higher the following year.
Restricting Hate Speech against Private Figures: Lessons in Power-Based Censorship from Defamation Law

This article examines the debate between those who favor greater protection for minorities vulnerable to hate speech and First Amendment absolutists who are skeptical of any burdens on pure speech. The author also provides another perspective on the debate by highlighting the "public/private figure" distinction as an area within First Amendment law that acknowledges differences in power, a construct anti-hate speech advocates should use to further their cause. Specifically, the author places the "public/private figure" division in a theoretical and historical context and then provides empirical support for the thesis that whites enjoy a more prominent societal role and greater access to media than nonwhites. Finally, the author applies the "public/private figure" analogy to the context of websites, arguing that white supremacist websites should be censored while anti-majority ones should not.
Re-evaluating the Emerging Standard of Review for Matching Rights in Control Transactions

In recent years courts have taken a permissive approach to matching rights, viewing them as standard features in merger agreements. Matching rights are deal protection devices intended to give the rightholder assurance that the deal will be completed, consequently these measures can deter subsequent bidders and, in the event a subsequent bid appears, ensure that the initial bidder is advantageously positioned to succeed. This Article argues that courts should re-evaluate the emerging legal standard governing the use of "matching rights" in merger agreements. Plaintiffs have brought challenges to the use of matching rights in various circumstances. Until now, however, courts have refused to acknowledge that there might be circumstances in which matching rights are preclusive deal protections and therefore unreasonable. Consequently, the emerging legal standard with respect to matching rights is one of permissiveness. In fact, there are circumstances in which one can expect matching rights to be potentially powerful deterrents to second bidders. In such circumstances, the use of matching rights may be unreasonable. Courts should employ the same fact-intensive review to the use of matching rights that they employ with respect to other deal protection measures. Once sensitized to the specific deterrent effects of matching rights, courts should more closely scrutinize the use of matching rights, particularly when the right-holder is a financial buyer or the sales process demonstrates characteristics of a common value sale. Assistant Professor of Law, Boston College Law School. Research for this paper was made possible through the support of the BC Law Fund. Thanks to Steven Davidoff, Michael Klausner, and David Walker for their insights on this issue. Special thanks to Elizabeth D. Johnston (BCLS, '11) for her valuable editorial and research assistance over the past few years. 1012 DELAWARE JOURNAL OF CORPORATE LAW [Vol. 36
Technology, trade and factor prices

Abstract The view that recent changes in the distribution of income primarily reflect technology rather than trade may be the majority opinion, but has been harshly criticized by some trade economists. This paper will argue that the critique in fact misses the point, essentially because the critics undertake the wrong thought experiments. Trade volumes are not irrelevant: if one poses the question correctly, one immediately realizes that small trade volumes are inconsistent with a story that attributes large distributional effects to trade. The factor bias of technological change is not immaterial, except in the case where such change takes place in a small open economy (as opposed to one that can affect world prices), and where technical change occurs only in that economy (rather than occurring simultaneously in other economies as well); since the real situation does not meet either criterion, factor bias definitely does matter. Most surprisingly, the much maligned use of a factor content approach to infer the effects of trade on factor prices turns out to be an entirely justified procedure when carefully applied.
Mobilizing Law in Contemporary Russia: The Evolution of Disputes Over Home Repair Projects

The Article explores the relevance of law to the lives of ordinary Russians. Drawing on the discussion in six focus groups composed of Russians who had recently participated in home repair projects, the analysis traces their behavior using the “disputing pyramid” framework developed by Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat. Few of the homeowners were satisfied with the outcomes of their projects, but less than half made any sort of claim. Their belief that the substantive law would block their claims emerged as a more important explanatory variable than a lack of trust in judicial institutions due to corruption. The initial hypothesis that age (as a proxy for exposure to Soviet-era justice) would be a powerful predictor of behavior was not born out. The research also suggests that lawyers are not critical in the evolution of claims.
The Basic Law and Democratization in Hong Kong

Hong Kong's constitution, the Hong Kong Basic Law ("Basic Law"), has sparked a number of debates over democratization and its pace. It is generally understood that greater democratization will mean greater autonomy and vice versa, less democracy means more control by Beijing. Will the democracy promised under the "one country, two systems" formula in Hong Kong be achieved? Does Beijing's constant interference to head off democratization also pose a grave risk to the rule of law and related stability in Hong Kong? The April 26, 2004 response of the Standing Committee to the Chief Executive's report sealed the doom for democratic reform, essentially barring any meaningful reform for the 2007-2008 elections by requiring continued use of the Election Committee for selecting the Chief Executive - though its membership could be increased - and specifying that the current ratio of directly elected to functional legislators be maintained. The interpretation, by effectively amending the Basic Law, posed a severe threat to Hong Kong's autonomy and rule of law, and largely took the democratic reform debate out of Hong Kong hands. While the democratic camp has insisted that the nominating committee for popular election of the Chief Executive not be used as a device to screen out democratic candidates, their stance faces severe resistance from Beijing supporters.
Determinants of Asset Ownership: A Study of the Carpentry Trade

We use a data set describing ownership of productive assets in the carpentry trade to evaluate several factors influencing the allocation of asset ownership between an employer and his employees. The findings suggest that the allocation involves a tradeoff between two incentive effects influencing how the employee uses the asset and what the employer decides it should be used for. In particular, the allocation of ownership hinges on whether an asset is easily lost or stolen, which favors employee ownership, and whether the employer's task assignment affects the asset's depreciation, which favors employer ownership. There is also evidence that more expensive assets and assets that are shared by more than one employee are more likely to be owned by the employer. The results suggest that a general theory of asset ownership should be able to take account of at least these effects.
Risky Income or Lumpy Investments? Evidence on Two Theories of Under-Specialization

Why do the poor have so many economic activities? According to one theory the poor do not specialize because relying on one income source is risky. I test the theory by measuring the response of Thai rice farmers to conditional volatility in the international rice price. Households expecting a harvest take on 1 extra activity when the volatility rises by 21 percent. I confirm the decrease in specialization costs households foregone revenue. I find no evidence to back a second theory in which households under-specialize because they cannot afford lumpy business investments.
Text-Based Industry Momentum

We test the hypothesis that low-visibility shocks to text-based network industry peers can explain industry momentum. We consider industry peer firms identified through 10-K product text and focus on economic peer links that do not share common Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes. Shocks to less visible peers generate economically large momentum profits and are stronger than own-firm momentum variables. More visible traditional SIC-based peers generate only small, short-lived momentum profits. Our findings are consistent with momentum profits arising partially from inattention to economic links of less visible industry peers.
Momentum and post-earnings-announcement drift anomalies: The role of liquidity risk☆

Abstract This paper investigates the components of liquidity risk that are important for understanding asset-pricing anomalies. Firm-level liquidity is decomposed into variable and fixed price effects and estimated using intraday data for the period 1983–2001. Unexpected systematic (market-wide) variations of the variable component rather than the fixed component of liquidity are shown to be priced within the context of momentum and post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD) portfolio returns. As the variable component is typically associated with private information [e.g., Kyle, 1985. Econometrica 53, 1315–1335], the results suggest that a substantial part of momentum and PEAD returns can be viewed as compensation for the unexpected variations in the aggregate ratio of informed traders to noise traders.
A Becoming Modesty - U.S. Litigation in the Mirror of International Law

I address two parallel and paradoxical trends involving U.S. litigation and international law. I describe how U.S. courts have sought to widen their influence over the provision of succor to foreign victims of cruelty and injustice. I argue that a desire to increase the capacity of U.S. judges to instruct the world explains, at least in part, these developments. I then review how international arbitral bodies have had new opportunities to scrutinize the fairness and efficacy of civil litigation in the United States, and have tended to find our civil process wanting. These cases also implicate two other issues. Many have questioned the wisdom of international commitments that submit U.S. civil practice to the scrutiny of independent arbiters. Doubts also exist about the willingness of U.S. courts to enforce arbitration awards that compensate for perceived failures in U.S. litigation. How one addresses these issues turns largely on how one regards the tension between the ambition of U.S. courts and the critique embedded in the arbitration proceedings. I proceed from these descriptive tasks to the development of alternative idealizations of judicial function. I offer two stylized accounts of what a civil litigation process might set out to do. What I will call the expressive function involves a deliberative process that engages more than the parties to the suit. What I will call the distributive function involves a contest among the parties before the court over the assignment of discrete interests, duties, powers, immunities and rights. I then explore the different implications of these functions for the judiciary's posture toward the Executive and Congress. I argue that the expressive function does not require a distinction between the judiciary and other branches of government, as the engagement in deliberative discourse has only an accidental connection to the medium of the lawsuit. The distributive function, by contrast, suggests a distinct role for the judiciary and thus invites consideration of how the operation of the political branches might restrict the scope of judicial activity.
ENHANCING DEMOCRACY THROUGH LEGISLATIVE REDISTRICTING

We demonstrate the surprising benefits of legislative redistricting (including partisan gerrymandering) for American representative democracy. In so doing, our analysis resolves two long-standing controversies in American politics. First, whereas some scholars believe that redistricting reduces electoral responsiveness by protecting incumbents, others, that the relationship is spurious, we demonstrate that both sides are wrong: redistricting increases responsiveness. Second, while some researchers believe that gerrymandering dramatically increases partisan bias and others deny this effect, we show both sides are in a sense correct. Gerrymandering biases electoral systems in favor of the party that controls the redistricting as compared to what would have happened if the other party controlled it, but any type of redistricting reduces partisan bias as compared to an electoral system without redistricting. Incorrect conclusions in both literatures resulted from misjudging the enormous uncertainties present during redistricting periods, making simplified assumptions about the redistricters' goals, and using inferior statistical methods.
An Investigation of Auditors’ Judgments When Companies Release Earnings Before Audit Completion

The majority of U.S. public companies release annual earnings prior to the completion of audit fieldwork. We investigate this phenomenon in a controlled experiment with audit partners and senior managers. We find that releasing earnings before completion of the audit pressures auditors to adopt the goals of management, thereby reducing the likelihood of post‐announcement audit‐adjustment recommendations. We also examine the effect of audit committee (AC) strength in improving auditors’ judgments after annual earnings are released. When ACs are actively involved in accounting issues and proactively communicating with auditors—characteristics currently lacking in most ACs—the negative effects on auditors’ judgments are completely mitigated. Our study provides evidence on potential unintended consequences of early release of earnings and the importance of investing in high‐quality ACs to mitigate adverse effects of client pressures on audit judgment and financial reporting quality.
Mediated moderation in combined cognitive behavioral therapy versus component treatments for generalized anxiety disorder

Objective: This study examined (a) duration of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) as a moderator of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) versus its components (cognitive therapy and self-control desensitization) and (b) increases in dynamic flexibility of anxious symptoms during the course of psychotherapy as a mediator of this moderation. Degree of dynamic flexibility in daily symptoms was quantified as the inverse of spectral power due to daily to intradaily oscillations in four-times-daily diary data (Fisher, Newman, & Molenaar, 2011). Method: This was a secondary analysis of the data of Borkovec, Newman, Pincus, and Lytle (2002). Seventy-six participants with a principle diagnosis of GAD were assigned randomly to combined CBT (n 24), cognitive therapy (n 25), or self-control desensitization (n 27). Results: Duration of GAD moderated outcome such that those with longer duration showed greater reliable change from component treatments than they showed from CBT, whereas those with shorter duration fared better in response to CBT. Decreasing predictability in daily and intradaily oscillations of anxiety symptoms during therapy reflected less rigidity and more flexible responding. Increases in flexibility over the course of therapy fully mediated the moderating effect of GAD duration on condition, indicating a mediated moderation process. Conclusions: Individuals with longer duration of GAD may respond better to more focused treatments, whereas those with shorter duration of GAD may respond better to a treatment that offers more coping strategies. Importantly, the mechanism by which this moderation occurs appears to be the establishment of flexible responding during treatment.
Strategic Intellectual Property Litigation, the Right of Publicity, and the Attenuation of Free Speech: Lessons from the Schwarzenegger Bobblehead Doll War (and Peace)

This article is part of a Symposium that examines the legal and policy issues raised by the Schwarzenegger bobblehead doll litigation, in which a Hollywood star-turned-governor sued under California's right of publicity laws and under federal copyright law to stop a small Ohio company from selling a bobblehead doll depicting Schwarzenegger in a business suit, with a bandolier of bullets, and brandishing an assault rifle. The article contends that defendants' unauthorized use of the Schwarzenegger image on dolls and their accompanying packaging was permissible as First Amendment-protected free speech under California's right of publicity laws and also constituted fair use under federal copyright law. The article rejects the argument that a First Amendment defense to plaintiff's right of publicity claims was unavailable because a bobblehead doll is not a "traditional" medium of expression for ideas. The article recognizes that overly expansive assertions of rights of publicity and other intellectual property rights threaten to stifle creative expression and diminish the cultural commons. The article also calls for clearer and more consistent recognition of defenses to right of publicity claims, particularly for cases where a defendant's unauthorized appropriation of another's image or likeness is for purposes of caricature, parody, or satire?especially where the image is that of a politician. It concludes that the settlement of the Schwarzenegger bobblehead doll case illustrates how "strategic" assertions of even objectively non-meritorious rights of publicity can allow powerful plaintiffs to censor unflattering depictions of them and to unduly expand intellectual property rights without full adjudication on the merits of such claims.This insight is critical, because while other scholars have suggested that the "over-protection" of intellectual property rights (including rights of publicity) has a deleterious effect on freedom of expression and the public domain, these criticisms focus almost exclusively on published appellate cases. Yet, as this article reminds us, most cases settle and never become litigated cases, much less published appellate decisions. And most disputes - including intellectual property disputes - never result in formal litigation in the first instance. As with most other areas of the civil disputing process, intellectual property disputes are processed in the "shadow of the law", where repeat players have strategic advantages to shape the outcomes of disputes in their favor. Thus, if we want to know whether intellectual property rights are over-protected, we need to know what happens (and why) in the shadow of intellectual property law. This insight is the basis for the author's empirical research-in-progress focusing on "strategic intellectual property enforcement" by owners of trademarks, copyrights, and patents, including enforcement that never results in litigation and is thus under the radar of what most legal scholars in this area of law examine.
Trade and the Crisis: Protect or Recover

We show that new trade restrictions implemented since the onset of the global financial crisis have had — in the limited products targeted — a strong distortionary impact on trade. Their aggregate impact is modest, however, as most countries have resisted a widespread resort to protectionism. Looking ahead, sustained high unemployment, uneven growth, and an unwinding of government stimulus measures suggest that protectionist pressures may rise. Continuing and further enhancing monitoring of all protectionist measures will help, but the surest way to avoid such a downside scenario is to tighten multilateral trade commitments by completing the World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha Round.
Dietary Supplements are Not all Safe and Not all Food: How the Low Cost of Dietary Supplements Preys on the Consumer

Dietary supplements are regulated as food, even though the safety and efficacy of some supplements are unknown. These products are often promoted as 'natural.' This leads many consumers to fail to question the supplements' safety, and some consumers even equate 'natural' with safe. But, 'natural' does not mean safe. For example, many wild berries and mushrooms are dangerous although they are natural. Another example is tobacco--a key ingredient in cigarettes: it is natural, but overwhelming studies have established the harm of cigarette smoke. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires safety and efficacy testing prior to market entry for drugs. In contrast, the FDA only has limited ability to regulate the entry of new dietary supplements into the marketplace because supplements are treated as food. Two main arguments support the current regulatory structure of dietary supplements: (1) cost and (2) access. But lower cost and increased access to dietary supplements do not necessary have any relationship to safety and efficacy. Manufacturers' marketing techniques tout the health benefits of their supplements. Meanwhile, consumers are ingesting supplements without scientific studies indicating whether or not they are harmful. The FDA Food Safety and Modernization Act, signed into law on January 4, 2011, did not address the safety concerns regarding dietary supplements. This article discusses the regulatory deficiencies concerning dietary supplements and proposes novel solutions to address this specific sector of the food supply. This article advocates for the use of scientific data to support a multi-tiered classification system to ensure that dietary supplements on the market are safe.
Inside Organizations: Pricing, Politics, and Path Dependence

When economists have considered organizations, much attention has focused on the boundary of the firm, rather than its internal structures and processes. In contrast, this review sketches three approaches to the economic theory of internal organization—one substantially developed, another rapidly emerging, and a third on the horizon. The first approach (pricing) applies Pigou's prescription: If markets get prices wrong, then the economist's job is to fix the prices. The second approach (politics) considers environments where important actions inside organizations simply cannot be priced, so power and control become central. Finally, the third approach (path dependence) complements the first two by shifting attention from the between variance to the within. That is, rather than asking how organizations confronting different circumstances should choose different structures and processes, the focus here is on how path dependence can cause persistent performance differences among seemingly similar enterprises.
Size-dependent regulations, firm size distribution, and reallocation

In France, firms that have 50 employees or more face substantially more regulation than firms that have less than 50. As a result, the size distribution of firms is visibly distorted: there are many firms with exactly 49 employees. We model the regulation as the combination of a sunk cost that must be paid the first time the firm reaches 50 employees and a payroll tax that is paid each period thereafter when the firm operates with more than 50 employees. We estimate the model using indirect inference by fitting the discontinuity of the size distribution. The key finding is that the regulation is equivalent to a combination of a sunk cost approximately equal to about 1 year of an average employee salary and a small payroll tax of 0.04%. Our structural model fits well the discontinuity in the size distribution. Removing the regulation improves labor allocation across firms, leading in steady state to an increase in output per worker slightly less than 0.3%, holding the number of firms fixed. However, if firm entry is elastic, the steady-state gains are an order of magnitude smaller. Keywords. Firm size distribution, regulation, threshold effect, reallocation. JEL classification. E23, O1, O40.
From Road to Lab to Math: The Co-evolution of Technological, Regulatory, and Organizational Innovations for Automotive Crash Testing

Today, in the midst of economic crisis, senior executives at US automakers and influential industry analysts frequently reflect on the progression that safety testing has taken from the crude trials done on the road, to controlled laboratory experiments, and to today's complex math-based simulation models. They use stories of this seemingly linear and natural sequence to justify further investment in simulation technologies. The analysis presented in this paper shows that change in the structures of automakers' organizations co-evolved with regulations specifying who was at fault in vehicle impacts, how vehicles should be built to withstand the force of an impact, and how testing should be done to assure that vehicles met those requirements. Changes in the regulatory environment were bolstered by new theories about crash test dynamics and changing technologies with which to test those theories. Thus, as new technological and regulatory innovations co-evolved with innovations in organizational structuring, ideas about how to best conduct crash tests shifted and catalyzed new cycles of technological, regulatory, and organizational innovation. However, this co-evolutionary story tells us that the move from road to lab to math was not natural or linear as today's managerial rhetoric would have us believe. Rather, the logic of math-based simulation was the result of technological, regulatory and organizational changes that created an industry-wide ideology that supported the move toward math while making it appear natural within the shifting structure of the industry.
Commons at the Intersection of Peer Production, Citizen Science, and Big Data: Galaxy Zoo

The knowledge commons research framework is applied to a case of commons governance grounded in research in modern astronomy. The case, Galaxy Zoo, is a leading example of at least three different contemporary phenomena. In the first place Galaxy Zoo is a global citizen science project, in which volunteer non-scientists have been recruited to participate in large-scale data analysis via the Internet. In the second place Galaxy Zoo is a highly successful example of peer production, sometimes known colloquially as crowdsourcing, by which data are gathered, supplied, and/or analyzed by very large numbers of anonymous and pseudonymous contributors to an enterprise that is centrally coordinated or managed. In the third place Galaxy Zoo is a highly visible example of data-intensive science, sometimes referred to as e-science or Big Data science, by which scientific researchers develop methods to grapple with the massive volumes of digital data now available to them via modern sensing and imaging technologies. This chapter synthesizes these three perspectives on Galaxy Zoo via the knowledge commons framework.
The Place of Workers in Corporate Law

This article critiques the low place of workers within corporate law doctrine. Corporate law, as it is traditionally taught, is primarily about shareholders, boards of directors, and managers, and the relationships among them. This is despite the fact that workers provide an essential input to a corporation's productive activities, and that the success of the business enterprise quite often turns on the success of the relationship between the corporation and those who are employed by it. Black letter corporate law requires directors to place the interests of shareholders above the interests of all other "stakeholders," including workers. This article analyzes and criticizes the arguments for shareholder dominance. The article proposes that implicit, and often incorrect, assumptions about workers form an important building block for corporate law theory and doctrine. Moreover, justifications for shareholder dominance -- traditional notions of ownership; agency costs; the residual nature of shareholder claims; and the inability of shareholders to contract with management -- are not as strong as sometimes proposed and often apply to workers as well. Indeed, the dominant contemporary justifications for shareholder preeminence do not adequately distinguish the interests of shareholders from those of workers. Workers, too, bear agency costs of monitoring management to ensure that management fulfills its part of the implicit and explicit understandings that define the relationship. Workers, too, retain an unfixed, residual interest in their firm; their fortunes rise when the company does well, and they are worse off when the company founders. Workers, too, enter into long-term, relational contracts with management in which it is very difficult to reduce all important aspects of the agreement to writing. The fact that workers have much in common with shareholders argues for a closer examination of the affirmative arguments for the creation of fiduciary duties running to workers and for worker participation in company management. Moreover, there are reasons to doubt that what one observes as a positive matter in corporate law is an accurate reflection of the preferences of all the parties to the corporate "contract." Because of inefficiencies in the labor market (many of which are simply assumed away in the corporate law scholarship) workers have much less ability than shareholders to exact bargaining concessions from other contracting parties or to walk away. Also, these inefficiencies make it more possible that the shareholder/management "contract" externalizes some of the costs of their agreement onto workers.
Diversifying America's Energy Future: The Future of Renewable Wind Power

This article reviews the arguments pro and con relating to large scale expansion of wind energy facilities in the United States. It also examines the existing government policy encouraging renewable energy development as an alternative to conventional forms of electricity. It concludes that wind power, if properly located, can contribute an important amount of electricity to the American energy grid.
What is Capital Flight

This paper offers a definitive distinction between capital flight and capital outflows. It unifies and synthesises the capital flight concept as used in both theoretical and empirical work and shows that various definitions have two common elements. These are: (1) capital flight is a subset of capital outflows from developing countries by its residents; (2) these outflows must be motivated by risks and uncertainties that are peculiar to developing countries. The former points to the counter-intuitive nature of these outflows. The latter gives these counterintuitive outflows’ explanation. We then propose an econometric method to measure this concept, and illustrate its use by applying it to Korea.
Dry Holes in Economic Research: Reply

As Mayer (2004) recognizes, our paper refers generally to the optimal rate of scientific exploration and specifically to what seems to us to be little evidence of socially efficient investment, at least with respect to economics. We do not claim to know, or care to argue about, the optimal incidence of scientific papers that no one uses in subsequent research. In our opinion, Mayer’s focus on the technical issues he raises, with which we have no quarrel, suggests that he may be missing the forest for the trees. Even admitting that more good (and many more bad) papers are being produced now, relative to a generation ago, it is very difficult to argue that the social rate of return is positive. Consider our case in terms of the numbers of highly-cited papers (rather than the percentage of never-cited papers). The stock of existing literature is growing exponentially over time, which means that the universe of citable literature is expanding rapidly. Compounded with the increasing tendency to cite others, as noted by Mayer (Ellison 2002), this means that, on average, those papers that are cited ought to attract more citations now than 25 years ago, ceteris paribus. This is borne out by the evidence, taken from Table 2 of our original paper. In 1974, there were 11 papers published (0.55 percent of the papers in that year’s sample) that attracted more than 40 citations in the following 5 years. In 1996, there were 43 papers (1.16 percent of the papers in that year’s sample) that attracted more than 40 citations in the 5 years immediately following publication. Now comes the tricky part – interpretation. Has the massive implicit social investment in academic research that we discussed in our original paper been justified in terms of producing 32 more papers with this level of citations? Although we looked at only 2 years, let’s suppose that we are producing an additional 32 papers per year with that level of citation. Is this payoff worth the investment? Let’s pick a different threshold for judging ‘important’