cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Are the poor less well insured? Evidence on vulnerability to income risk in rural China

The authors test how well consumption is insured against income risk in a panel of sampled households in rural China. They estimate the risk insurance models by Generalized Method of Moments, treating income and household size as endogenous. Insurance exists for all wealth groups, although the hypothesis of perfect insurance is universally rejected. Those in the poorest wealth decile are the least well-insured, with 40 percent of an income shock being passed on to current consumption. By contrast, consumption by the richest third of households is protected from almost 90 percent of an income shock. The extent of insurance in a given wealth stratum varies little between poor and nonpoor areas.
R&D Accounting and the Tradeoff Between Relevance and Objectivity

We use a simulation model for a pharmaceutical R&D program to examine the tradeoff between objectivity and relevance of accounting information under various methods of R&D reporting. A simple capitalization rule, similar to the successful-efforts method of capitalizing oil and gas exploration costs, provides a stronger relation between accounting information and economic values than immediate expensing of R&D outlays or capitalizing the full cost of outlays. The superior relevance of this “successful-efforts” method persists even when earnings management is widespread.
Order anticipation around predictable trades

I study the presence of order anticipation strategies by examining predictable patterns in large order trades. I construct three simple signals based on child‐order execution patterns and find empirical evidence that stronger signals are correlated with higher execution costs. I use the SEC's (Securities and Exchange Commission's) ban on unfiltered access and increase in noise trading as shocks to order anticipatory activities of algorithmic traders and find that the price impact of predictability is smaller when order anticipation becomes difficult. The empirical findings are mostly consistent with the back‐running theory that predicts delayed price impact as strategic traders learn about large orders gradually.
The Supreme Court's Renewed Focus on Inefficiently Structured Joint Ventures

Antitrust courts and commentators have long appreciated that joint ventures among rival firms have the potential to provide benefits to consumers and the economy through synergies and economies of scale, but also raise the potential of lessening competition among the venture principals. The case law and academic literature have often ignored, however, the potential harm that befalls consumers when joint ventures with market power are structured in a manner that gives the principals the ability to direct policy and a strategy in a manner that advances their parochial self-interest, rather than the interests of the venture-as-a-whole. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in American Needle, Inc., v. NFL properly focused on the difference between a single economic entity (like a corporation) and the typical sports league, which is governed by club owners who act in the interests of their own clubs. It suggests a renewed opportunity for antitrust enforcers to consider the structure of joint ventures that do not face rigorous competition from other providers of similar goods and services, when analyzing antitrust challenges to either specific venture decisions, or to the structure of the venture itself. In this regard, this Essay proposes a workable standard for evaluating joint ventures, focusing on whether decision makers have a fiduciary duty to,
Pricing Equilibria and Graphical Valuations

We study pricing equilibria for graphical valuations, whichare a class of valuations that admit a compact representation. These valuations are associated with a value graph, whose nodes correspond to items, and edges encode (pairwise) complementarities/substitutabilities between items. It is known that for graphical valuations a Walrasian equilibrium (a pricing equilibrium that relies on anonymous item prices) does not exist in general. On the other hand, a pricing equilibrium exists when the seller uses an agent-specific graphical pricing rule that involves prices for each item and markups/discounts for pairs of items. We study the existence of pricing equilibria with simpler pricing rules which either (i) require anonymity (so that prices are identical for all agents) while allowing for pairwise markups/discounts or (ii) involve offering prices only for items. We show that a pricing equilibrium with the latter pricing rule exists if and only if a Walrasian equilibrium exists, whereas the former pricing rule may guarantee the existence of a pricing equilibrium even for graphical valuations that do not admit a Walrasian equilibrium. Interestingly, by exploiting a novel connection between the existence of a pricing equilibrium and the partitioning polytope associated with the underlying graph, we also establish that for simple (series-parallel) value graphs, a pricing equilibrium with anonymous graphical pricing rule exists if and only if a Walrasian equilibrium exists. These equivalence results imply that simpler pricing rules (i) and (ii) do not guarantee the existence of a pricing equilibrium for all graphical valuations.
Values, Ideology, and the Evolution of the Adversary System

The hallmark of American adjudication is the adversary system. The virtues of the adversary system are so deeply ingrained in the American legal psyche that most lawyers do not question it. The majority of the world, however, uses some version of the inquisitorial system that evolved primarily in continental Europe. Further, some chinks in the adversarial armor have recently begun to appear. This article analyzes them.
How big are potential welfare gains from international risksharing

Abstract There is extensive evidence that risksharing across countries is far from perfect. Some have attributed this to small benefits from risksharing. Gains from riskpooling that have been reported range from negligible to enormous. This paper documents to what extent the results are sensitive to the parameterization of preferences, the stochastic process of the endowment, and its measurement. We find that gains from risksharing are quite sizable for realistic assumptions about the underlying factors. For OECD countries they are equivalent to a permanent increase in tradables consumption in the range of 1.1 to 3.5% for a 50 year horizon, and 2.5 to 7.4% for a 100 year horizon.
Helping South Asia cope with natural disasters : the role of social protection

Addressing the social protection needs of households during emergencies is a major development issue. Without social protection measures, such as cash transfers for basic needs or workfare programs, many households faced with large economic and natural shocks might deplete their human and physical capital, reducing their ability to participate in economic development. Social protection measures (cash transfers, in particular) are therefore assuming a growing role in the World Bank to help the poor cope with the aftermath of a disaster. In South Asia, all three recent major emergency-related operations in South Asia (Sri Lanka, Maldives, and Pakistan) included cash transfers components. This discussion paper, an input to the South Asia region's social protection and hazard risk management strategies, describes the cash transfer instruments supported by the Bank in South Asia, evaluates their design and implementation, and suggests improvements to increase their effectiveness. Based on available evidence, the paper finds that cash transfers appear to have performed well in providing relief to affected households, suggesting that they should remain an integral part of Bank-financed support for natural disasters. The paper also suggests that the Bank can ensure timely and high-quality support through a best-practice design toolkit, a right-on-time technical assistance facility, and by integrating social protection in emergency preparedness by building the capacity of national social assistance (cash transfers) agencies to respond to natural disasters. Although the focus is on cash transfers, the note also discusses other types of social protection mechanisms used in emergencies in South Asia and worldwide, e.g., workfare or social care for the vulnerable, and which might also appropriate for including in Bank emergency operations. The note covers South Asia, but lessons from this region may also be relevant for governments of other developing countries and donors. Finally, while the focus of the paper is on social protection instruments for natural disasters, several of these instruments have also proved useful in post-conflict situations and in economic crises.
Failure as the Real A Review of Slavoj Zizek’s Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

Failure as the Real A Review of Slavoj Zizek’s Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
The Price of Diversifiable Risk in Venture Capital and Private Equity

This paper demonstrates how the principal-agent problem between venture capitalists and their investors (limited partners) causes limited partner returns to depend on diversifiable risk. Our theory shows why the need for investors to motivate VCs alters the negotiations between VCs and entrepreneurs and changes how new firms are priced. The three-way interaction rationalizes the use of high discount rates by VCs and predicts a correlation between total risk and net of fee investor returns. We take our theory to a unique data set and find empirical support for the effect of the principal-agent problem on equilibrium private equity asset prices. The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com., Oxford University Press.
Racial Metaphors: Interpreting Sex and AIDS in Africa

Western preconceptions regarding African sexuality distorted early research on the social context of AIDS in Africa and limited the scope of preventive policies. Key works cited repeatedly in the social science and policy literature constructed a hypersexualized pan-African culture as the main reason for the high prevalence of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. Africans were portrayed as the social Other in works marked by sweeping generalizations and innuendo rather than useful comparative data on sexual behaviour. Although biomedical studies demonstrate the role of numerous factors that influence HIV transmission among poor people a narrowly behavioural explanation dominated the AIDS-in-Africa discourse for over a decade and still circumscribes preventive strategies in Africa and elsewhere. (authors)
Post-Soviet Developmentalism and the Political Economy of Russia’s Electricity Sector Liberalization

Observers of Russian state market relations typically consider the state as an entity engaged in creating rent-seeking opportunities for bureaucrats or powerful economic interests. The trajectory and outcomes of electricity sector reforms demonstrate the limits of this perspective and serve to highlight a developmental strand in Russian economic policy, which I call post-Soviet developmentalism. I found that post-Soviet developmentalism is key to understanding the patterns of market institutions that have emerged in the newly liberalized electricity sector and that they cannot be adequately explained if the state is largely seen as a predator or as captured by oligarchic interests. A close analysis of the institutional underpinnings of new electricity markets suggests that they were shaped in political bargains, in which the government sought to enlist Russia’s oligarchic conglomerates for its modernization agenda and developmental priorities. The paper links this discussion to three sets of theoretical literatures: It speaks to the debates on the post-Soviet transition, more broadly to the political economy of market reform, and finally, it addresses the developmental state literature.
Measuring Social Security's financial outlook within an aging society

The U.S. Social Security program provides an important “first pillar” of retirement income. Policymakers and the media, therefore, pay considerable attention to the financial viability of the program. Each year, the Social Security trustees release a report that summarizes the financial position of the Social Security program. Among other measures, the report draws attention to the program’s “crossover date” (the year the program’s benefit outlays will begin exceeding its tax receipts), the date of “trust fund exhaustion”, and the present value of the program’s financial shortfalls over the next seventy-five years.
THE EFFECT OF CONTRACT STRUCTURE ON PREDICTION MARKET PRICE BIASES

Prediction markets add value when they produce unbiased forecasts. However, several prior studies find persistent biases when examining prediction market sides contracts. Sides contracts represent bets on whether the score differential between two teams in a contest will be greater or less than a stated value. We propose that inferences generated from examining Tradesports’ sides contracts may be problematic because they are framed exclusively with respect to favorites. If a favorite-longshot (or reverse favorite-longshot) bias causes these deviations from rationality, it may be that non-sports-related ( e.g. , internal corporate) prediction markets assets do not suffer from the same shortcomings. To evaluate the generalizability of prior findings, we contrast the price efficiency of Tradesports’ sides and totals contracts. In totals wagers, traders take a position on whether the combine score of both teams in a game will be above or below a stated value. We find that the fundamental structural differences between totals contracts and sides contracts partly determine differences in price efficiencies. Relative to those in the sides market, some price biases in the totals market are significantly smaller in magnitude, and others are absent altogether. Results indicate that contract structure plays a significant role in the ability of prediction markets to produce unbiased estimates.
Gangstas, Thugs, and Hustlas: Identity and the Code of the Street in Rap Music

Recent research on identity, culture, and violence in inner-city communities describes a black youth culture, or street code, that influences adolescent behavior, particularly violent behavior. I build upon such literature through analysis of gangsta rap music, exploring how the street code is present not only in “the street,” but also in rap music. I first consider how structural conditions in inner-city communities have given rise to cultural adaptations embodied in a street code. These adaptations help to create an interpretive environment where violence is accountable, if not normative. I then examine the complex, reflexive relationship between the street code, rap music, and social identity. These issues are examined through content analysis of 403 songs on rap albums from 1992 to 2000. Portrayals of violence in the lyrics serve many functions including establishing social identity and reputation and exerting social control: these are the central topics of the analysis.
The perception of time, risk and return during periods of speculation

Abstract What return should you expect when you take on a given amount of risk? How should that return depend upon other people's behaviour? What principles can you use to answer these questions? In this paper, I approach these topics by exploring the consequences of two simple hypotheses about risk. The first is a common-sense invariance principle: assets with the same perceived risk must have the same expected return. It leads directly to the well known Sharpe ratio and the classic risk-return relationships of arbitrage pricing theory and the capital asset pricing model. The second hypothesis concerns the perception of time. I conjecture that in times of speculative excitement, short-term investors may instinctively imagine stock prices to be evolving in a time measure different from that of calendar time. They may perceive and experience the risk and return of a stock in intrinsic time, a dimensionless time scale that counts the number of trading opportunities that occur, but pays no attention to the c...
Choosing a Proxy for Academic Aptitude.

Abstract: Although academic ability is the most important explanatory variable in studies of student learning, researchers control for it with a wide array and combinations of proxies. The authors investigated how the proxy choice affects estimates of undergraduate student learning by testing over 150 specifications of a single model, each including a different combination of 11 scholastic aptitude measures—high school grade point average (GPA) and rank and variants of college GPA and Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores. Proxy choices alone cause the magnitude of the estimated learning gains to vary by large and meaningful amounts, with increases ranging from a C+ to less than a B- or to a B. The authors found that collegiate GPA data offer the best proxy for students' individual propensities to learn economics—a result that runs counter to researchers' actual proxy choices. The results suggest that scholars should control for academic aptitude with college grades and either SAT scores or high school GP...
Law, trade, and development ☆

Abstract This paper uses a Ricardian model to generate predictions about the influence of institutions on trade in differentiated (complex) and commoditized (simple) products and then uses a rich international trade data set for empirical tests. The model draws the distinction between the role of international transaction costs and domestic production costs in the trade of complex and simple products. The effects of institutions predicted by the model are identified with a three-step estimation procedure. We find that when countries have low quality institutions, institutional reform primarily influences production costs and has little influence on the volume of trade. Institutional reform, however, increases the diversity of exports in complex goods markets. Conversely, in countries with more developed institutions, institutional reform primarily influences transaction costs and is associated with gains in the volume and the diversity of complex exports.
War and the Vanishing Battlefield

This article examines the role of the battlefield as a regulatory concept in the laws of war. It argues that the idea of the battlefield continues to haunt our concept of what war entails, and that the deconstruction of the battlefield thus heralds a decay of the laws of war as a normative system designed to regulate armed conflict. That development predates spectacular post 9/11 redefinitions of the battlefield, although the latter are threatening to engulf the last remains of what made war a social activity distinct from the reign of arbitrary violence.
Escape from Third-Best: Rating Emissions for Intensity Standards

An increasingly common type of environmental policy instrument regulates the carbon intensity of transportation and electricity markets. In order to extend the policy’s scope beyond point-of-use emissions, regulators assign each potential fuel an emission intensity rating for use in calculating compliance. I show that welfare-maximizing ratings do not generally coincide with the best estimates of actual emissions. In fact, the regulator can achieve a higher level of welfare by properly selecting the emission ratings than possible by selecting only the level of the standard. Moreover, a fuel’s optimal rating can actually decrease when its estimated emission intensity increases. Numerical simulations of the California Low-Carbon Fuel Standard suggest that when recent scientific information increased the estimated emissions from conventional ethanol, regulators should have lowered ethanol’s rating (making it appear less emission-intensive) so that the fuel market would clear with a lower quantity.
The Effectiveness of Cigarette Regulations in Reducing Cases of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is a leading cause of mortality among infants and is responsible for thousands of infant deaths every year. Prenatal smoking and postnatal environmental smoke have been identified as strong risk factors for SIDS. Given the link between smoking and SIDS, this paper examines the direct effects of cigarette prices, taxes and clean indoor air laws in explaining changes in the incidence of SIDS over time in the United States. State-level counts of SIDS cases are generated from death certificates for 1973-2003. After controlling for some observed and unobserved confounding factors, the results show that higher cigarette prices and taxes are associated with reductions in SIDS cases. Stronger restrictions on smoking in workplaces, restaurants and child care centers are also effective in reducing SIDS deaths.
Damages Caps, Insurability, and the Performance of Medical Malpractice Insurance

This article uses the complete property-casualty insurance files of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners from 1984 to 1991 to assess the effect of medical malpractice reforms pertaining to damages levels and the degree to which these damages are insurable. Limits on noneconomic damages were most influential in affecting insurance market outcomes. Several punitive damages variables specifically affected the medical malpractice insurance market, including limits on punitive damage levels, prohibitions of the insurability of punitive damages, and prohibition of punitive damages awards. Estimates for insurance losses, premiums, and loss ratios indicate effects of reform in the expected directions, where the greatest constraining effects were for losses. The quantile regression analysis of losses indicates that punitive damages reforms and limits were most consequential for firms at the high end of the loss spectrum. Tort reforms also enhanced insurer profitability during this time period.
The Irrelevancy of the Fourth Amendment in the Roberts Court

Since John Roberts Jr. became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, there has been a measurable decline in the number of cases addressing Fourth Amendment questions. This article examines the reasons for that decline and predicts the substantial elimination of Fourth Amendment litigation in the Roberts Court. The prediction is based on several premises, including the lack of interest of the justices on the Court concerning search and seizures principles and two significant recent cases, Pearson v. Callahan and United States v. Herring, which presage a significant decline in the number of lower court cases addressing the merits of the Fourth Amendment and, consequently, fewer cases worthy of Supreme Court review. If these premises hold true, the Fourth Amendment, while remaining the most commonly implicated aspect of the Constitution, may lose its status as the most frequently litigated part. What will remain is a residual, complex jurisprudence with little relevance.
The Case for Preferring Patent-Validity Litigation over Second-Window Review and Gold-Plated Patents: When One Size Doesn't Fit All, How Could Two Do the Trick

Complaints about frivolous patents abound in academic, business, and policy circles, and the focus of blame is usually on the large number of junk patents that have issued from the Patent Office that are actually invalid. The underlying cause is said to be the relatively modest examination performed by the Patent Office. Most popular proposals for change suggest methods for segregating patents into two or so bundles based on whether the patents should be subject to closer examination. A so-called “second window of review” has been proposed to allow competitors to make the choice of which patents get closer examination; and a so-called “gold-plated approach” has been proposed to allow patentees to make the election. Applying a back-to-basics approach, this Article points out two core problems with these popular proposals: (1) they do not adequately account for the information costs, error costs, and risks of capture that accompany any system premised on flexible and discretionary administrative review, and (2) they overlook the central lessons learned through debates over civil litigation generally about how to balance the conflicting goals of speed,
You're on Your Own, Kid…But You Shouldn't Be

This article addresses the question: Should courts recognize a duty on the part of schools to implement proven strategies to reduce and prevent bullying? Nothing influences the answer to that question as understanding the nature of bullying in schools. Once understood, bullying seems less a rite of passage or builder of character and more like child abuse perpetuated by peers. The realization that many school children suffer such abuse that inflicts long-lasting and severe damage shifts the analysis from whether the problem is serious enough for courts to engage to how they might most effectively engage it. This article addresses what educational researchers mean by “bullying in schools,” its effects as well as what has long been known about proven strategies to reduce bullying. It then articulates two bases upon which courts might act to impose a duty on school officials to reduce the problem and protect students. The first theory is based on the second prong of the Tinker standard governing private student speech. The “Right of other students to be secure and to be let alone” is perfectly suited to recognition of a constitutional right of reasonable protection from peer-on-peer abuse in public schools. The second theory is based on a seldom cited comment to §320 of the Restatement of Torts where the duty of school officials to prevent bullying has been recognized for seventy years. The article concludes that both federal constitutional law and state common law require what common sense and professional competence plainly require – that school officials become serious and proactive against bullying in their schools and use proven methods for doing so.
Hedging and hedging effectiveness under required disclosures: a study of the impact of derivatives use on capital investment

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of derivatives use on corporate capital expenditures by utilizing reporting changes under the disclosure requirements of the Statement of Financial Accounting Standards 133 (SFAS 133). The standard requires firms to recognize and report the use of derivatives in their financial statements, including its purpose and its hedging effectiveness. This greater transparency is expected to incentivize firms toward demonstrating greater effectiveness in their derivatives use for hedging purposes. The literature on the real consequences of derivatives use is limited, probably due to the difficulty of ascertaining its hedging effectiveness in addition to its purpose, which is made possible under SFAS 133. Since effective hedging reduces risk exposure, lowers the costs of financial distress, and mitigates underinvestment, it can have a real effect in the form of raising the level of capital investment. The research in this paper distinguishes itself from earlier studies in linking derivatives use to hedging and hedging effectiveness in its study of the impact of derivatives use on capital investment. I find evidence supporting a positive effect of derivatives use on capital investment. Additionally, a lower risk exposure that can be linked to hedging effectiveness, as it is under SFAS 133, is shown to have a positive impact on capital investment. From a policy standpoint, the results suggest that required disclosures may have a real impact if they provide affected firms with an incentive to change their behavior while meeting the disclosure requirements.
Retail Prices for Milk by Fat Content: A New Theory and Empirical Test of Retailer Pricing Behavior

We study a heretofore unexamined type of product differentiation, horizontally differentiated products with differential costs, and apply the analysis to retail pricing of fluid milk products. The theoretical models yield unique predictions for the relationship among prices of the four horizontally differentiated fluid milk products (skim, 1%, 2%, and whole milk) and the impacts of butterfat and nonfat milk costs on prices, depending upon the form of retail competition. An empirical analysis of retail milk pricing for four major cities in California enables tests to be conducted of which form of behavior best characterizes grocery retailing in these cities.
Implications of the integral approach and earnings management for alternate annual reporting periods

We compare the last 12 months’ earnings ending in quarter four (i.e., fiscal year earnings), three, two and one. Lipe and Bernard (2000) offer two competing explanations for higher volatility in fourth quarter earnings relative to other quarters. First, under the integral approach, any estimation errors in the earlier quarters are corrected through fourth quarter earnings, which could make them more volatile. Second, earnings management concentrated in the fourth quarter renders fourth quarter earnings more volatile. While both explanations have similar implications for the properties of quarterly earnings, their implications differ for the properties of annual earnings ending in each quarter. Our result comparing earnings variability is more consistent with earnings management than the integral approach. We examine the relative earnings attributes and find that fiscal year earnings attributes rank lower. Finally, we re-investigate the accrual anomaly and find that the accrual anomaly is more pronounced for fiscal year earnings.
The Labor Market and Economic Adjustment

This paper examines the role of the labor market in the transmission process of adjustment policies in developing countries. It begins by reviewing the recent evidence regarding the functioning of these markets. It then studies the implications of wage inertia, nominal contracts, labor market segmentation, and impediments to labor mobility for stabilization policies. The effect of labor market reforms on economic flexibility and the channels through which labor market imperfections alter the effects of structural adjustment measures are discussed next. The last part of the paper identifies a variety of issues that may require further investigation, such as the link between changes in relative wages and the distributional effects of adjustment policies.
The Role of Equality Principles in Preemption Analysis of Sub-federal Immigration Laws: The California TRUST Act

In December 2014 the Obama Administration acknowledged the serious critiques of Secure Communities and replaced it with the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP). The United States Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Communities program had been subject to extensive and prolonged critique, and quantitative data suggested that it did not deter crime in spite of identifying deportable individuals, nor did it primarily result in deportation of dangerous or serious criminals.1 Tangible resistance to Secure Communities manifested in the form of “sanctuary city” policies and, more recently, sheriffs’ refusal to detain individuals otherwise subject to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers.2 California is one of two states that
"State Sponsors of Terrorism" Are Entitled to Due Process Too: The Amended Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act is Unconstitutional

In 1996, Congress, as part of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, amended the list of noncommercial tort exceptions to sovereign immunity in the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act ("FSIA") in response to a federal court's determination that it lacked subject matter jurisdiction over Libya and alleged Libyan terrorists in Smith v. Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, one of many cases resulting from the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The ambiguously worded amendment appears to give federal courts both subject matter jurisdiction, which Congress clearly intended, and personal jurisdiction over the seven nations currently listed by the Executive Branch as "state sponsors of terrorism." The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the only court to address the amended FSIA, unconstitutionally interpreted it as according the court personal jurisdiction over Libya in the re-filed suit by the survivors, executors, administrators, and personal representatives of those killed over Lockerbie. This Article demonstrates that giving the court personal jurisdiction over a foreign sovereign simply because the Executive Branch has concluded that it is a "state sponsor of terrorism" or because an offshore terrorist act had some "effect" in the United States would violate the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment absent the performance of traditional "minimum contacts" analysis under both the specific and general personal jurisdiction tests.
When Do Covariates Matter? And Which Ones, and How Much?

Authors often add covariates to a base model sequentially either to test a particular coefficient’s “robustness” or to account for the “effects” on this coefficient of adding covariates. This is problematic, due to sequence sensitivity when added covariates are intercorrelated. Using the omitted variables bias formula, I construct a conditional decomposition that accounts for various covariates’ role in moving base regressors’ coefficients. I also provide a consistent covariance formula. I illustrate this conditional decomposition with NLSY data in an application that exhibits sequence sensitivity. Related extensions include instrumental variables, the fact that my decomposition nests the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, and a Hausman test result.
Trademark Exhaustion in the European Union: Community-Wide or International?The Saga Continues

This Article analyzes the principle of "trademark exhaustion" or "first-sale rule" in the European Union (EU), with particular attention to the language and different interpretations of Article 7(1) of the First Council Directive 89 104 EEC of December 21, 1988. Traditionally, most jurisdictions define the extent of trademark exhaustion as either "national" or "international" exhaustion, depending on whether the rights granted by a mark are considered exhausted only in the domestic territory or also in foreign jurisdictions. Because of its nature as a regional integration of sovereign countries, the EU has historically favored a compromising approach toward the issue, and has adopted the so called principle of Community-wide exhaustion. According to this principle, trademark rights are exhausted throughout the territory of the whole EU once a product has been put on the market in any Member State. This principle was originally developed by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), and was incorporated into Article 7(1) of the Trademark Directive in 1988. Yet, the wording of the provision is unclear as to whether Community-wide exhaustion represents a minimum standard that leaves Member States free to apply more generous rules - such as international exhaustion - or whether it applies to all trade within the EU. Unsurprisingly, this uncertainty has created many ambiguities, which have required the intervention of the ECJ in multiple instances. As a result, the ECJ has repeatedly clarified that the principle of Community-wide exhaustion is to be considered not as a minimum, but as the general standard for all trade within the EU. Still, despite these decisions, the pressure for a shift toward a regime of international exhaustion has not diminished, and considerable confusion continues to characterize the issue. Starting from the principle that consumer protection is still the major focus of trademark laws and policy in the EU, this Article explores whether, and under what conditions, a regime of international exhaustion could still be possible in the EU in the aftermath of the recent ECJ''s decisions.
DeepDist: real-value inter-residue distance prediction with deep residual convolutional network

Driven by deep learning, inter-residue contact/distance prediction has been significantly improved and substantially enhanced ab initio protein structure prediction. Currently, most of the distance prediction methods classify inter-residue distances into multiple distance intervals instead of directly predicting real-value distances. The output of the former has to be converted into real-value distances to be used in tertiary structure prediction. To explore the potentials of predicting real-value inter-residue distances, we develop a multi-task deep learning distance predictor (DeepDist) based on new residual convolutional network architectures to simultaneously predict real-value inter-residue distances and classify them into multiple distance intervals. Tested on 43 CASP13 hard domains, DeepDist achieves comparable performance in real-value distance prediction and multi-class distance prediction. The average mean square error (MSE) of DeepDist’s real-value distance prediction is 0.896 A2 when filtering out the predicted distance ≥ 16 A, which is lower than 1.003 A2 of DeepDist’s multi-class distance prediction. When distance predictions are converted into contact predictions at 8 A threshold (the standard threshold in the field), the precision of top L/5 and L/2 contact predictions of DeepDist’s multi-class distance prediction is 79.3% and 66.1%, respectively, higher than 78.6% and 64.5% of its real-value distance prediction and the best results in the CASP13 experiment. DeepDist can predict inter-residue distances well and improve binary contact prediction over the existing state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the predicted real-value distances can be directly used to reconstruct protein tertiary structures better than multi-class distance predictions due to the lower MSE. Finally, we demonstrate that predicting the real-value distance map and multi-class distance map at the same time performs better than predicting real-value distances alone.
A new framework for testing the effect of government spending on growth and productivity

Does government spending have a positive or negative effect on economic growth? The results of earlier empirical studies give mixed results. In this study we suggest a new method for testing the effect of different kinds of government expenditure on productivity growth in the private sector. The focus on productivity in the private sector and the use of disaggregated data makes it possible to avoid or mitigate a number of methodological problems. The major conclusions, which are quite robust, are that government transfers, consumption and total outlays have consistently negative effects, while educational expenditure has a positive effect, and government investment has no effect on private productivity growth. The impact is also found to work solely through total factor productivity and not via the marginal productivity of labor and capital.
The enforceability of the GM–Fisher Body contract: comment on Goldberg

Goldberg unconvincingly claims that the General Motors (GM)-Fisher Body contract was in fact legally unenforceable. But even if Goldberg's contract law conclusion were correct, it is economically irrelevant. It is clear from the actions of Fisher and GM and from the testimonial and other contemporaneous evidence that both transactors considered the contract legally binding and behaved accordingly. Therefore, proper economic analysis of the Fisher-GM case should continue to assume contract enforceability, and the economic determinants of organizational structure illustrated by the case remain fully valid.
NOVELTY EFFECTS OF NEW FACILITIES ON ATTENDANCE AT PROFESSIONAL SPORTING EVENTS

We investigate the effect of new facilities on attendance in professional baseball, basketball, and football from 1969 to 2001. We find a strong, persistent effect in baseball and basketball, and little effect in football. Size and duration estimates imply that baseball teams sell 2,500,794 additional tickets over the first eight seasons, basketball teams 293,878 over the first nine seasons, and football teams 137,792 over the first five seasons, implying an increase in revenues that could defray public subsidies that state and local governments provide for new sports construction projects. Rough calculations suggest that stadium subsidies are an inefficient method of subsidizing professional sports franchises. (JEL R39, D12, L83) I. INTRODUCTION Both conventional wisdom and casual empiricism suggest that new sports facilities boost attendance at sporting events. Part of this increased attendance is attributed to the desire by both fans and nonfans to see and experience the new stadium. We refer to these attendance gains as the ‘‘novelty effect.’’ 1 Economists, when analyzing the economic impact of professional sports teams and facilities on local economies, typically assume that these effects are concentrated in the years immediately following the opening. Indeed, some evidence of a relatively large novelty effect on attendance exists. Quirk and Fort (1997) report an average increase in attendance of about 62% during the first five years a baseball team plays in a new stadium. But based on attendance at several new baseball stadiums, where attendance is down significantly, the era of large novelty effects on attendance may be ending. Whether this decline can be attributed to macroeconomic events outside the control of sports teams or to the glut of new stadiums opened in the last decade is an open question. In order to address these issues, several fundamental questions must be answered about the novelty effect of new facilities on attendance, including how this effect varies over time and between sports. In this article we investigate the size and dynamic behavior of the effect of a new sports facility on average annual live game attendance in professional football, basketball, and baseball. 2 The novelty effect has received little systematic attention in the literature. Many studies of attendance and the economic impact of sporting events mention the possibility that new facilities affect attendance, and some include ad hoc time dummy variables to control for these effects, but little systematic research on the length and magnitude of the novelty effect exists. We address this gap in the literature by formulating and estimating an attendance model that allows for the novelty effect to systematically vary in both duration and magnitude in each year following the opening of a new professional sports stadium or arena in the National Football League (NFL), the
A Parallactic Distance of 389 +24 -21 Parsecs to the Orion Nebula Cluster from Very Long Baseline Array Observations

We determine the parallax and proper motion of the flaring, nonthermal radio star GMR A, a member of the Orion Nebula Cluster, using Very Long Baseline Array observations. Based on the parallax, we measure a distance of 389 pc to the source. Our measurement places the Orion Nebula Cluster considerably closer than the canonical distance of 480 ± 80 pc determined by Genzel et al. A change of this magnitude in distance lowers the luminosities of the stars in the cluster by a factor of ~1.5. We briefly discuss two effects of this change—an increase in the age spread of the pre-main-sequence stars, and better agreement between the zero-age main sequence and the temperatures and luminosities of massive stars.
The Deterrence Case for Comprehensive Automaker Enterprise Liability

This paper explores the potential deterrence advantages of shifting to a comprehensive automaker enterprise liability regime. Under such a system, automakers would be responsible for the economic harms resulting from automobile accidents, irrespective of the type of vehicle (whether fully driverless vehicles, partially automated, or fully human-driven). The paper argues that such a regime would simplify the existing auto tort/compensation system by replacing all of automaker liability law (including auto product defect claims) and driver liability law (as well as existing auto no-fault regimes) with a single enterprise liability system under which all auto-accident victims could seek recovery. It could also have the following deterrence benefits: it would encourage automakers to design and manufacturer safer vehicles; it would incentivize automakers to provide better warnings and instructions with their vehicles; it would result in automobile prices that better reflect the actual costs of driving, leading to a more socially efficient level of auto production; it would induce automakers to coordinate with auto insurers to improve the efficiency of driver care and activity levels; and, finally, it would provide an implicit subsidy for the development and sale of driverless vehicles and automated driving technology generally, funded by an implicit enterprise liability "tax" on less safe vehicles.
Errors, robustness, and the fourth quadrant

Abstract The paper presents evidence that econometric techniques based on variance– L 2 norm–are flawed and do not replicate. The result is un-computability of the role of tail events. The paper proposes a methodology to calibrate decisions to the degree (and computability) of forecast error. It classifies decision payoffs in two types: simple (true/false or binary) and complex (higher moments); and randomness into type-1 (thin tails) and type-2 (true fat tails), and shows the errors for the estimation of small probability payoffs for type 2 randomness. The fourth quadrant is where payoffs are complex with type-2 randomness. We propose solutions to mitigate the effect of the fourth quadrant, based on the nature of complex systems.
Requests for Admission in Wisconsin Procedure: Civil Litigation's Double-Edged Sword

Requests for admission are the most effective, but least utilized, form of discovery. Interrogatories, document production requests and depositions are routinely used in civil litigation, but as few as ten percent of attorneys use requests for admission. Admissions have the potential to simplify legal and factual issues, expedite civil litigation, and reduce costs for clients, lawyers and taxpayers. Requests for admission have proven to be an effective discovery device in many types of civil actions,and nothing expedites discovery and brings the litigation to a head faster than requests for admission. Despite such enormous potential, Wisconsin trial lawyers have been extremely hesitant to use requests for admission, as evidenced by the number of reported decisions involving this potent form of discovery. This Article contains a comprehensive survey designed to educate practitioners, academicians, and students on the law of requests for admission in Wisconsin. The primary goal of this Article is to demonstrate that requests for admission are double-edged swords. On the one hand, they can be used by the requesting party to reduce the time and expense of civil litigation and, in some cases, even to achieve outright victory. On the other hand, the answering party faces virtual ruin if the requests are not responded to in a proper and timely fashion. Another goal of this Article is to prove that although the dangers associated with requests for admission are far greater than those of any other discovery device, it is a form of discovery that should be praised, not disparaged. This Article also has four secondary goals, which hopefully will be achieved as a by-product of its primary goals: (1) a disclosure of the fact that requests for admission are the most underutilized form of discovery; (2) an explanation of why this discovery tool is used so infrequently in civil litigation; (3) a demonstration of the enormous potential of requests for admission in Wisconsin civil litigation; and (4) an illustration of the hazards lawyers face if requests for admission are mishandled, including exposure to sanctions, malpractice liability and, in some instances, professional discipline.