cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Understanding Real Business Cycles

he 1 960s were a time of great optimism for macroeconomists. Many economists viewed the business cycle as dead. The Keynesian model was the reigning paradigm and it provided all the necessary instructions for manipulating the levers of monetary and fiscal policy to control aggregate demand. Inflation occurred if aggregate demand was stimulated "excessively" and unemployment arose if demand was "insufficient." The only dilemma faced by policymakers was determining the most desirable location along this inflation-unemployment tradeoff or Phillips curve. The remaining intellectual challenge was to establish coherent microeconomic foundations for the aggregate behavioral relations posited by the Keynesian framework, but this was broadly regarded as a detail that should not deter policymakers in their efforts to "stabilize" the economy. The return of the business cycle in the 1970s after almost a decade of economic expansion, and the accompanying high rates of inflation, came as a rude awakening for many economists. It became increasingly apparent that the basic Keynesian framework was not the appropriate vehicle for understanding what happens during a business cycle nor did it seem capable of providing the empirically correct answers to questions involving changes in the economic environment or changes in monetary or fiscal policy. The view that Keynesian economics was an empirical success even if it lacked sound theoretical foundations could no longer be taken seriously. The essential flaw in the Keynesian interpretation of macroeconomic phenomenon was the absence of a consistent foundation based on the choice theoretic framework of microeconomics. Two important papers, one by Milton Friedman (1968) and the other by Robert Lucas (1976), forcefully demonstrated examples of
Social Norms and the Enforcement of Laws

We examine the interplay between social norms and the enforcement of laws. Agents choose a behavior (e.g., tax evasion, production of low-quality products, corruption, harassing behavior, substance abuse, etc.) and then are randomly matched with another agent. There are complementarities in behaviors so that an agent’s payoff decreases with the mismatch between her behavior and her partner’s, and with overall negative externalities created by the behavior of others. A law is an upper bound (cap) on behavior. A law-breaker, when detected, pays a fine and has her behavior forced down to the level of the law. Equilibrium law-breaking depends on social norms because detection relies, at least in part, on whistle-blowing. Law-abiding agents have an incentive to whistle-blow on a law-breaking partner because this reduces the mismatch with their partners’ behaviors as well as the negative externalities. When laws are in conflict with norms and many agents are breaking the law, each agent anticipates little whistle-blowing and is more likely to also break the law. Tighter laws (banning more behaviors), greater fines, and better public enforcement, all have counteracting effects, reducing behavior among law-abiding individuals but increasing it among law-breakers. We show that laws that are in strong conflict with prevailing social norms may backfire, whereas gradual tightening of laws can be more effective in influencing social norms and behavior.
Justifying Wartime Limits on Civil Rights and Liberties

Many law professors and commentators condemned the Bush Administration’s “War on Terrorism” as involving unprecedented assertions of Article II power that sacrificed constitutional rights and liberties for no purpose, as America actually became less safe.1 This Symposium provides a valuable opportunity to test such claims against history, with a special focus on Abraham Lincoln’s actions during the Civil War. This historical perspective casts doubt upon the conventional wisdom that the War on Terrorism has caused unique harm to the Constitution’s structure and the individual rights it guarantees. More specifically, our panel has been asked to address three questions concerning the Constitution’s delicate balance between protecting national security and preserving fundamental rights. First, are wartime limitations on civil liberties necessary to avoid military defeat? Second, do such restrictions influence the subsequent creation and enhancement of civil rights? Third, if these later legal gains occur, do they ultimately justify the wartime measures? I am afraid that I cannot answer any of these questions with much confidence. Initially, it is impossible to say with any certainty whether or not Presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt had to infringe constitutional liberties the way they did in order to win their wars.2 Perhaps they could have achieved the same results with fewer intrusions. But maybe greater solicitude for personal freedoms would have led to defeat, or to a victory that exacted a far greater cost in blood and money. Speculating about such matters is an academic exercise. All we know for sure is that these Presidents took the actions they deemed necessary to
Linguistic Life Expectancies: Immigrant Language Retention in Southern California

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH generally supports the view that Latin Americans in the United States assimilate linguistically. Studies using data from the US Census and other official statistics (Alba and Nee 2003; see also Alba et al. 2002; Bean and Stevens 2003), as well as investigations based on longitudinal surveys conducted among the children of immigrants (Portes and Rumbaut 2001, 2006), reveal a quick shift to English fluency, if not outright dominance, between the first and second generations. Nevertheless, research on immigrant language retention has been hampered by a lack of data on language use or ability broken down by generation. Surveys that focus on the children of immigrants, by definition, permit only a contrast between first and second generations. Moreover, because the US Census Bureau eliminated the question on parents’ place of birth after 1970, it is no longer possible to distinguish generations using census data, forcing researchers into crude native-born/foreign-born comparisons. In his controversial book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Samuel P. Huntington (2004) argued that the arrival of Latin American immigrants in large numbers during the last three decades of the twentieth century threatens the core of American identity and culture in the twenty-first century. According to Huntington, Latin American immigrants are much less likely to speak English than earlier generations of European immigrants because they all speak a common language; they are regionally concentrated and residentially segregated within Spanish-speaking enclaves; they are less interested in linguistic and cultural assimilation; and they are encouraged in this lack of interest by activists who foment identity politics. He is particularly pessimistic about the prospects of Mexi-
Managerial objectives, the R-rating puzzle, and the production of violent films

We analyze project choice in the motion picture industry and find evidence consistent with revenue maximization and excessive hedging. We find that movies that are very violent or feature sex and violence do not provide excess returns, but they increase revenues, particularly in the international market. Further, they tend to lose money less often and their returns are more predictable, even though there are never mega‐hits. This evidence is consistent with studies of other industries, and it partially explains the “R‐rating puzzle,” that is, the preponderance of R‐rated films although most studies find that G‐ and PG‐rated films perform better.
Self‐Employment and Wage Earning in Hungary

This paper examines the earnings determinants of the self-employed and wage earners in Hungary in the mid-1990s, taking into account two forms of selection: selection into working or non-working for every individual in its sample and selection into self-employment or wage-earning jobs for workers only. Previous studies use switching regression to examine the returns to individual characteristics, taking into account only selection into self-employment or wage-earning jobs. The authors find that the estimated returns to individual characteristics when accounting for both forms of selection, differ from estimates correcting for only selection into self-employment or wage-earning jobs. They also find that the earnings determinants of the two sectors are not significantly different from each other.
Single image portrait relighting

Lighting plays a central role in conveying the essence and depth of the subject in a portrait photograph. Professional photographers will carefully control the lighting in their studio to manipulate the appearance of their subject, while consumer photographers are usually constrained to the illumination of their environment. Though prior works have explored techniques for relighting an image, their utility is usually limited due to requirements of specialized hardware, multiple images of the subject under controlled or known illuminations, or accurate models of geometry and reflectance. To this end, we present a system for portrait relighting: a neural network that takes as input a single RGB image of a portrait taken with a standard cellphone camera in an unconstrained environment, and from that image produces a relit image of that subject as though it were illuminated according to any provided environment map. Our method is trained on a small database of 18 individuals captured under different directional light sources in a controlled light stage setup consisting of a densely sampled sphere of lights. Our proposed technique produces quantitatively superior results on our dataset's validation set compared to prior works, and produces convincing qualitative relighting results on a dataset of hundreds of real-world cellphone portraits. Because our technique can produce a 640 × 640 image in only 160 milliseconds, it may enable interactive user-facing photographic applications in the future.
Magellanic Cloud X-Ray Sources. III. Completion of a ROSAT Survey

This paper concludes a series of three papers presenting ROSAT High Resolution Imager (HRI) observations of unidentified Einstein and serendipitous ROSAT X-ray sources in the direction of the Magellanic Clouds. Accurate positions and fluxes have been measured for these sources. Optical photometry and spectroscopy were obtained to search for identifications in order to determine the physical nature of these sources. The present paper includes new data for 24 objects; identifications are given or confirmed for 30 sources. For six sources, optical finding charts showing the X-ray positions are provided. The results from this program are summarized, showing that the populations of luminous X-ray sources in the Magellanic Clouds are quite different from those in the Galaxy.
A comparison of poverty trends and policy impacts for working families using different poverty indexes

This study provides empirical evidence on recent trends in poverty among working families based on the headcount rate and a broader alternative that incorporates the headcount rate, the depth of poverty and income inequality among the poor. Estimates reveal that the different indexes produce significantly different trends. The headcount rate indicates a reduction in overall working poverty for the sample period, while the alternative index showed no statistically significant change. The same result was found for various population subgroups. Decompositions of the index changes show that tax changes contributed to lower values for both the headcount rate and the alternative index, largely due to recent expansions of the earned income tax credit. Changes in transfer payments added to measured poverty, mirroring the retrenchment of welfare and other transfer programs. Shifts in market-based income decreased both indexes.
The 'Moralities' of Poaching: Manufacturing Personal Artifacts on the Factory Floor

Poaching, usually understood as trespassing in pursuit of game, in the context of the French aerospace factory described in this article, amounts to manufacturing objects on company time and with company materials and tools for personal use. These objects are known as `homers' in English and perruques in French. The account of homers by a French aerospace employee presented in this article is informed by other ethnographic accounts of similar practices. These accounts highlight the cognitive contrast between homers and work but also some practical similarities between homer production processes and more traditional work processes. Competing definitions of unofficial (and by contrast official) work emerge from this analysis. The `moralities' of poaching are therefore multiple and this multiplicity sustains the poaching system.
Loss function assumptions in rational expectations tests on financial analysts' earnings forecasts

Abstract Prior research concludes that financial analysts do not process public information efficiently in generating their earnings forecasts. The ordinary least squares (OLS) regression-based tests used in prior studies assume implicitly that analysts face a quadratic loss function. In contrast, we argue that analysts likely face a linear loss function, and hence, try to minimize their absolute forecast errors. We conduct and compare rational expectations tests using these two alternative loss functions. We reproduce most prior findings of forecast inefficiency with OLS regressions, but find virtually no evidence of forecast inefficiency with least absolute deviation regressions, where we explicitly assume a linear loss function.
Labor Flexibility and the Prevalence of High-Growth Entrepreneurial Activity

Abstract Entrepreneurs are embedded in country-specific institutional arrangements that may facilitate or constrain their growth potential. This study addresses country conditions predicting rates of high-growth entrepreneurship—entrepreneurial ventures leading to the hiring of 20 or more employees. We analyze the role of labor flexibility, together with cultural, economic, and policy conditions in 32 countries, in predicting high-growth entrepreneurship. Results of the study indicate that labor flexibility is a significant predictor of the prevalence rates of high-growth entrepreneurship. Labor flexibility also predicts high-growth entrepreneurship when controlling for countries’ levels of early-stage entrepreneurial activity, indicating that it is related to the growth of existing firms, rather than simply the number of people entering into entrepreneurship.
The Role of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Assurance in Investors' Judgments When Managerial Pay is Explicitly Tied to CSR Performance

SUMMARY: While corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports are intended to faithfully represent CSR performance, voluntarily disclosed CSR information tends to be positive, and demand is rising for both independent assurance and integrated reporting of CSR. However, the supply of CSR assurance is not widespread in the United States, and CSR performance information remains largely separated from supporting and governance information. We thus examine the role of CSR assurance when information on CSR investment level is integrated with information on whether managerial pay is explicitly tied to sustainability. While a firm may report a high level of CSR investment to indicate an authentic commitment to CSR, investors may become skeptical of reported information if managerial pay is explicitly tied to CSR performance. Such pay-for-CSR-performance provides managers with greater incentives to overinvest in CSR and thereby report strong CSR performance. In turn, investors will seek CSR assurance as a disclosur...
POSITIVE ALPHAS, ABNORMAL PERFORMANCE, AND ILLUSORY ARBITRAGE

Jensen’s alpha is well known to be a measure of abnormal performance in the evaluation of securities and portfolios where abnormal performance is defined to be an expected return that exceeds the equilibrium risk adjusted rate. It is also well known that in estimating Jensen’s alpha, a nonzero value can be obtained by using incorrect factors or not employing time varying betas. This paper makes two additional contributions to the performance evaluation literature. First, we show that a stronger statement is true regarding the meaning of a nonzero Jensen’s alpha. In fact, a nonzero Jensen’s alpha represents an arbitrage opportunity. Second, we show that even if the correct factors and time varying betas are used, a nonzero Jensen’s alpha can result if the estimate is conditioned on the wrong information set in the presence of an asset price bubble. We call this illusory arbitrage. Both facts are relevant to interpreting the existing empirical literature evaluating the performance of mutual and hedge funds.
Colonial Migration and the Origins of Governance: Theory and Evidence From Java

This article explores the origins of local governance in postcolonial contexts. Focusing on migrant communities in the Indonesian island of Java and the networks of elite political and economic relations that emerged under colonial rule, I develop a theory of social exclusion and competition that specifies the conditions under which trading minorities will forge cooperative relations with local political elites in the absence of well-functioning property rights institutions. These informal relationships under colonial rule affect contemporary economic governance. To clarify the importance of social exclusion rather than other factors that may differentiate colonial districts with large Chinese populations, I exploit variation in the settlement patterns of Chinese and Arab trading minorities in Java, which played comparable roles in the island’s colonial economy but faced different degrees of social exclusion. These findings contribute to recent work on colonialism and development, ethnicity and informal i...
Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics

This address to a philosophical conference on truth and faith in ethics engages in an extended critique of the account of truth in Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: an essay in genealogy (Princeton University Press, 2002). For any jurisprudential, moral or political theory that affirms natural law needs to respond first to sceptical denials that reason can discover any truths about what ends all human individuals or groups ought to pursue. But any such theory also needs to make clear how it differs from, even when it coincides in moral judgment with, bodies of moral teaching self-identified as part of a divine revelation addressed to everyone. It also needs to show how truths of natural law provide grounds for rejecting, as well as for accepting, particular human claims to be the bearer of such a universal revelation. Parts I to III below address these issues through a critical examination of some contemporary philosophizing which, while acknowledging the warranted universality of the predicate “is true,” withhold that predicate from the principles of practical reason. Parts IV and V address another aspect of universality and particularity about which natural law theory needs to get clear: how the moral norms of natural law, properly as universal as human nature and the community of all people and peoples, nonetheless warrant strong loyalty to specific communities, above all one’s country and one’s marital family.
Employment Law, Negotiation, and the Business Environment: A Cooperative Collective Bargaining Negotiation of the National Hockey League Lockout of 2004.

Teaching courses revolving around business law and ethics is a daunting challenge. Students need real-world examples to make the difficult topics and concepts come to life. This article explores legal negotiation and negotiation ethics in the context of the National Hockey League Lockout of 2004-2005. The article describes the basics of collective bargaining and negotiation strategy and then offers a group exercise to hammer out a CBA. Student teams represent the NHL Owners and NHL Player's Union respectively and enter into a series of three timed negotiations followed by a large group debrief. The exercise described in this article won the Charles M. Hewitt Master Teacher Competition at the 2006 Academy of Legal Studies in Business International Conference.
Complexity of Quantum State Verification in the Quantum Linear Systems Problem

The prospects of quantum advantage using NISQ devices to solve linear algebra problems are shown to be fairly small.
STRUCTURAL FACTORS AND BLACK INTERRACIAL HOMICIDE: A NEW EXAMINATION OF THE CAUSAL PROCESS*

This study evaluates the assumption that deprivation among African Americans and racial inequality lead to black interracial homicide due to racial conflict and antagonism. Using refined race-adjusted Supplemental Homicide Report data, Uniform Crime Report data and census data, we test an alternative hypothesis that draws on the macrostructural opportunity theory to assess and more accurately specify the relationship between structural characteristics and black interracial homicide. We find that first, the relationship between economic factors and black interracial homicide can be explained in large part by high rates of financially motivated crime such as robbery, and second, that economic factors are associated with financially motivated but not expressive black interracial killings. Analyses of black intraracial killings are performed for comparison purposes. Collectively, the findings suggest that conflict-based explanations rooted in racial antagonism and frustration aggression may be premature.
Recharacterization and the Nonhindrance of Creditors

Using a 1977 article by Robert Clark as its starting point, this article attempts to shed new light on the question of whether and when shareholder loans to her company should be either equitably subordinated or, as courts have done in a few recent cases, recharacterized as equity. In its emphasis on the particular issue of shareholder loans, the article has a narrower compass than Clark’s article, which uses a four-part typology to explore the relationship among fraudulent conveyance law, equitable subordination, veil piercing, and dividend restrictions. But the article also expands Clark’s analysis in several respects. The most important adjustment involves the general Nonhindrance ideal, which we use to identify a crucially important form of interference with the rights of creditors that Clark does not himself consider directly.
The Effects of Medicare on Medical Expenditure Risk and Financial Strain

Medicare offers substantial protection from medical expenditure risk, protection that has increased in recent years. At age 65, out-of-pocket expenditures drop by 33 percent at the mean and 53 percent at the ninety-fifth percentile. Medical-related financial strain, such as difficulty paying bills and collections agency contact, is dramatically reduced. Nonetheless, using a stylized expected utility framework, the gain from reducing out-of-pocket expenditures accounts for only 18 percent of the social costs of financing Medicare. This calculation ignores any direct health benefits from Medicare or any indirect health effects due to reductions in financial stress.
Gender and the credit rationing of small businesses

Abstract Rapid small business ownership growth rates among women have motivated research on issues related to gender and small business performance. The importance of credit access for the success of small businesses, as well as evidence that women have less access to credit than male business owners, has led researchers to explore the reasons for this. In this paper, we estimate a model of credit rationing by gender of the business owner. Our results are consistent with previous studies that find higher loan denial rates and lower loan application rates among women compared with men. Testing the robustness of the results we find that women seem to be rationing themselves in the credit market rather than being discriminated against by banks. Reasons for this self-rationing behavior are an important topic for further research.
Investors Beware: Assessing Shareholder Derivative Litigation in India and China

In response to the 2008 financial crisis, the United States government bailed out many business entities in exchange for equity and debt interests in such entities. It also dramatically increased the regulations imposed on businesses. This level of government ownership and intervention in corporations is rare in free-market capitalist systems such as the United States. Government ownership and control, however, are common among historically socialist countries such as India or communist countries such as China. Yet, the United States’ recent actions stand in stark contrast to the trend in India and China, which have both been moving toward more capitalist systems by disentangling government from business enterprises, reducing regulations and government interventions, and allowing free markets to develop. One specific example of such change in India and China is their recent acceptance of the shareholder derivative device, which empowers private investors to bring claims on behalf of a corporation when it has been harmed by outside parties or, more typically, by its own management. The shareholder derivative device is widely recognized among developed countries. This Article compares the nature of corporations and shareholder derivative litigation in the United States, India, and China. It specifically examines why India and China have embraced the shareholder derivative device and analyzes whether the device provides real protection for investors in Indian and Chinese * Associate Professor of Law, Saint Louis University. This Article has benefited from comments by participants at the Midwest Law and Economics Association’s Annual Meeting on October 9, 2010 that was sponsored by the University of Colorado School of Law. It has also benefited immeasurably from comments by participants in workshops at the Salmon P. Chase College of Law at Northern Kentucky University and at Saint Louis University School of Law. I thank Nicole Oelrich, Joseph Goedde and Thomas Bussen for their excellent research assistance. 04 SCARLETT (DO NOT DELETE) 10/30/2011 9:26 PM 174 U. Pa. J. Int’l L. [Vol. 33:1 corporations. Finally, this Article considers the lessons that investors, corporations, and the United States should draw from India and China’s recognition of shareholder derivative litigation.
Over The Cliff: From the Subprime to the Global Financial Crisis

This paper examines what transformed a significant, but relatively mild, financial disruption into a full-fledged financial crisis. It discusses why, although the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy was a key trigger for the global financial crisis, three other events were at least as important: the AIG collapse on September 16, 2008; the run on the Reserve Primary Fund on the same day; and the struggle to get the Troubled Asset Relief Plan (TARP) plan approved by Congress over the following couple of weeks. The paper then looks at the policy responses to the financial crisis to evaluate whether they helped avoid a worldwide depression. The paper ends by discussing the policy challenges raised in the aftermath of the crisis.
Roughing up beta: Continuous versus discontinuous betas and the cross section of expected stock returns

We investigate how individual equity prices respond to continuous and jumpy market price moves and how these different market price risks, or betas, are priced in the cross section of expected stock returns. Based on a novel high-frequency data set of almost 1,000 stocks over two decades, we find that the two rough betas associated with intraday discontinuous and overnight returns entail significant risk premiums, while the intraday continuous beta does not. These higher risk premiums for the discontinuous and overnight market betas remain significant after controlling for a long list of other firm characteristics and explanatory variables.
Shareholder Voting and Corporate Governance

This article reviews recent research into corporate voting and elections. Regulatory reforms have given shareholders more voting power in the election of directors and in executive compensation issues. Shareholders use voting as a channel of communication with boards of directors, and protest voting can lead to significant changes in corporate governance and strategy. Some investors have embraced innovative empty voting strategies for decoupling voting rights from cash flow rights, enabling them to mount aggressive programs of shareholder activism. Market-based methods have been used by researchers to establish the value of voting rights and show how this value can vary in different settings.
Why weak patents? Rational ignorance or pro-"customer" Tilt?

The issuance of weak patents is widely viewed as a fundamental problem in the current US patent system. Reasons that have been offered for the granting of weak patents by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) include examiners’ “rational ignorance” of the patentability of applications and pro-“customer” rules and institutions that create incentives for examiners to grant patents of dubious validity to their “customers”- applicants. In this paper, we study whether US examiners’ behavior in prior art search betrays their assessment of applications’ patentability. For a sample of US patents for which applications were also filed at the European Patent Office (EPO), we construct a measure of the fraction of prior art that is missed by US examiners. We find that this measure significantly explains the probability of receiving a patent at the EPO. The results are robust to different empirical specifications. US examiners’ prior art searches indicate that they are, on average, not “rationally ignorant”. On the contrary, they identify and dedicate more search effort to those applications that seem more problematic, because they bear the burden of proof of non-patentability. Our study offers empirical evidence that a systematic problem of weak patents likely exists, and suggests that the problem may be more strongly attributable to the pro-applicant rules and policies than to examiners’ ignorance. The current prevalence of weak patents does not appear to be caused at the margin by lack of resources at the USPTO.
Specialization in Law and Business: A Proposal for a J.D./'MBL' Curriculum

The curricula of most law schools are not well-suited to train lawyers for advising corporate clients in a sophisticated practice from the get-go, much less pursuing a career in business. This has always been true of a generalist legal education, but this weakness was not seen as a problem until recently. In more bountiful times, law firms trained new lawyers and corporate clients subsidized this training by paying the bill for the services of young associates. True, the typical law school may have a big menu of business law courses, and law students can take as many of these courses as a fourteento sixteen-credit semester may fit in during their meander through the largely unstructured 2L and 3L years. The breadth of curricular offerings and student choice are not enough to provide the basic foundation of a sophisticated training in business law and business geared toward meeting the needs of corporate clients. The outcome—starting preparedness for corporate careers—is not as good as it could be. In today’s climate, corporate clients are refusing to over-hire and overpay for this output.1 The changing practice of clients is a market judgment on the value of legal education’s finished products. This assessment cannot be dismissed by law schools and legal educators. The economic effects of reduced demand are felt by lawyers, law firms, students, and ultimately law schools.2 While macroeconomic and
An Empirical Test of a Contingent Claims Lease Valuation Model

Despite the importance of leases in the U.S. economy, and the existence of several theoretical lease pricing models, there has been little systematic attempt to estimate these models. This paper pr...
Interpersonal Dynamics: Helping Lawyers Learn the Skills, and the Importance, of Human Relationships in the Practice of Law

This article explains the relationship skills that attorneys need. Since attorneys often work in the midst of intense conflict and stress, they may need these skills more than other people do, but the skills themselves are not unique to attorneys. Basically, to function most effectively, people need to be able to listen to others, to be able to solicit, to receive and to give effective feedback, and to assert themselves directly. They need to know that people are not purely rational beings, but that our emotions, thoughts, behaviors and perceptions affect each other on an ongoing basis; they need to be self-aware, and they need to understand and be concerned about the way they affect others. Put simply, lawyers need "emotional intelligence." There are thousands of "self-help" books intended to teach all of these basic skills. The problem, though, is that these skills cannot be learned by reading a book, any more than one can learn tennis or golf from reading a book. It takes practice. This article describes how these skills can be effectively taught. The course in "Interpersonal Dynamics" uses small groups (10-14 people) and primarily encourages and supports feedback and self-disclosure among the participants. By doing so in a relatively safe setting, the course teaches emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and appreciation of and respect for others. For many students it is not just educational but personally transformative.
The Obama Effect : How a salient role model reduces race-based performance differences

Abstract Barack Obama, the first Black-American president, has been widely heralded as a role model for Black-Americans because he inspires hope. The current study was conducted to assess whether, beyond simply inspiring hope, this “Obama Effect” has a concrete positive influence on Black-Americans’ academic performance. Over a three-month period we administered a verbal exam to four separate groups of Black- and White-American participants at four predetermined times. When Obama’s stereotype-defying accomplishments garnered national attention – just after his convention speech, and election to the presidency – they had a profound beneficial effect on Black-Americans’ exam performance, such that the negative effects of stereotype threat were dramatically reduced. This effect occurred even when concerns about racial stereotypes continued to exist. The fact that we found performance effects with a random sample of American participants, far removed from any direct contact with Obama, attests to the powerful impact of ingroup role models.
The impact of college football on academic achievement

We revisit a recent study by Lindo, Swensen, and Waddell (2012), who found a negative relationship between the success of the University of Oregon football team and the academic performance of students as measured by grades. Using data from Clemson University, we also find that the football team's winning percentage is negatively related to academic performance. Although Lindo et al. (2012) found that the academic performance of male students was more sensitive to changes in the winning percentage than the academic performance of female students, we find evidence of the opposite phenomenon in the Clemson data. Moreover, the negative relationship between wins and academic performance at Clemson appears to persist into the spring semester.
The Colonial Scholar: Do Outsider Authors Replicate the Citation Practices of the Insiders, but in Reverse

Part of a symposium issue on legal scholarship, this article addresses a question many have asked in the wake of my Imperial Scholar article in the Pennsylvania Law Review -- namely, do scholars of color behave in much the same way the imperial (white) scholars do, that is, citing each other and taking little note of writing by authors on the other side of the color line? I find that the answer is, in a word, no: minority scholars writing about race and civil rights cite white and non-white authors in numbers roughly proportionate to their representation in the relevant bodies of scholarship.
Assessing the risk in e-commerce

This study identifies the risks to e-commerce using a diverse sample of Internet and other firms by assessing the stock market reaction to hacker attacks. The research issue is: do expert business risk assessors perceive that Internet activity and e-commerce risks per se generate an incremental risk of financial distress?.
Evolutionary Theory and the Origin of Property Rights

Legal scholars have never settled on a satisfactory account of the evolution of property rights. The touchstone for virtually all discussion, Harold Demsetz's Toward a Theory of Property Rights, has a number of well-known (and not so well-known) shortcomings, perhaps because it was never intended to be taken as an evolutionary explanation in the first place. There is, in principle at least, a pretty straightforward fix for the sort of evolutionary approach pursued by followers of Demsetz, but even then that approach - call it the conventional approach - fails to account for very early property rights, right at the genesis. The early developments are better explained by a very different approach based on evolutionary game theory. The game theoretic approach can account for a basic system of property rights rooted in possession; it cannot, however, account for complex property systems. To explain the latter requires the conventional approach. Hence, the two approaches combined suggest a satisfactory account of the origins and development of property rights systems.
Breaking barriers, building understanding: a multigenerational approach to digital literacy instruction for older adults

In entering the digital realm, older adults face obstacles beyond the physical and cognitive barriers traditionally associated with accessibility. One of these obstacles, technology related anxiety, is particularly problematic because it discourages exploration and way finding, two behaviors critical to the development of digital literacy. We see opportunities to address this issue and bring isolated older adults into a larger digital community, while simultaneously offering our students with valuable first-hand experience learning about and addressing the challenges faced by capable people struggling with unfamiliar technology. Here, we describe our social-cognitive approach to training digital literacy skills, pairing university student tutors with learners from the local community.
Reflections on the Manifold Means of Enforcing the Antitrust Laws: Too Much, Too Little, or Just Right?

Lately, much attention has been given to the scope of the antitrust laws. This discussion has two overlapping components: (1) consideration of the substantive doctrines specifying the behavioral or structural changes that are or are not unlawful and the appropriate methodology; and (2) analysis for making those determinations with attention given to the appropriate vehicles for enforcing the antitrust laws. Some argue that the antitrust laws proscribe activities that are either pro-competitive or at worst benign. Further, they assert that the multiplicity of antitrust enforcers and enforcement devices has resulted in undue burdens, including excessive cost, time delay, and forestalling of legitimate, procompetitive behavior. The discussion of this second component of antitrust enforcement involves two discrete, but overlapping, inquiries. The first, at what might be described as the “macro-level,” is whether the aggregate of enforcement activities is beneficial or deleterious. The second inquiry, which inevitably dovetails with the first, looks rather at the distribution of antitrust enforcement. Among the many questions raised here are: (1) whether we have correctly allocated authority to the various governmental and private enforcers; (2) whether we have the correct balance of enforcement through litigation or other compliance mechanisms; (3) whether nonAmerican parties (both private and governmental) play an appropriate role in antitrust enforcement; and (4) whether the range of remedies
Stock market liberalization and operating performance at the firm level

Abstract I use firm-specific measures of openness to foreign investors to study the impact of stock market liberalization on firm-level operating performance. In a sample of over 1,100 firms from 28 countries, firms with stocks that are open to foreign investors experience higher growth, greater investment, greater profitability, greater efficiency, and lower leverage. Strategies to address potential endogeneity suggest that the observed relation reflects, at least in part, a causal effect of openness on operating performance.
Supplier surfing: competition and consumer behavior in subscription markets

I explore the practice of offering subscribers enticements to switch suppliers. This type of competition is natural in subscription markets for homogeneous goods and services. Efficiency is impaired because subscribers are induced to expend resources changing suppliers. Subscription markets are fully competitive only when three or more firms serve the industry. In this case, the price offered to switchers is below cost, while nonswitchers pay a premium. Each firm earns rent on its customer base, but zero expected profit on each new subscriber it attracts. When firms can track switching behavior, consumers may change suppliers in order to establish reputations. Copyright 2003 by the RAND Corporation.
Experimental Estimates Of Education Production Functions

This paper analyzes data on 11,600 students and their teachers who were randomly assigned to different size classes from kindergarten through third grade. Statistical methods are used to adjust for nonrandom attrition and transitions between classes. The main conclusions are (1) on average, performance on standardized tests increases by four percentile points the first year students attend small classes; (2) the test score advantage of students in small classes expands by about one percentile point per year in subsequent years; (3) teacher aides and measured teacher characteristics have little effect; (4) class size has a larger effect for minority students and those on free lunch; (5) Hawthorne effects were unlikely.
Doubling Down: Inequality in Responsiveness and the Policy Preferences of Elected Officials

Is bias in responsiveness to constituents conditional on the policy preferences of elected officials? The scholarly conventional wisdom is that constituency groups who do not receive policy representation still obtain some level of responsiveness by legislators outside of the policy realm. In contrast, we present a theory of preference-induced responsiveness bias where constituency responsiveness by legislators is associated with legislator policy preferences. Elected officials who favor laws harming minority groups are also less likely to engage in non-policy responsiveness to minority groups. To test this proposition, we conducted a field experiment in 28 U.S. legislative chambers. Legislators were randomly assigned to receive messages from Latino, Anglo, English-speaking, and Spanish-speaking constituents asking if a driver’s license is required for voting. If legislators supported voter identification, Latino constituents were less likely than Anglo constituents to receive communications from legislators. The implication is that discriminatory intent underlies legislative support for voter identification laws.
Does the Stock Market Fully Value Intangibles? Employee Satisfaction and Equity Prices

Abstract This paper analyzes the relationship between employee satisfaction and long-run stock returns. A value-weighted portfolio of the “100 Best Companies to Work For in America” earned an annual four-factor alpha of 3.5% from 1984 to 2009, and 2.1% above industry benchmarks. The results are robust to controls for firm characteristics, different weighting methodologies, and the removal of outliers. The Best Companies also exhibited significantly more positive earnings surprises and announcement returns. These findings have three main implications. First, consistent with human capital-centered theories of the firm, employee satisfaction is positively correlated with shareholder returns and need not represent managerial slack. Second, the stock market does not fully value intangibles, even when independently verified by a highly public survey on large firms. Third, certain socially responsible investing (SRI) screens may improve investment returns.
What We Know and Do Not Know About the Natural Rate of Unemployment

Over the past three decades, much research has attempted to identify the determinants of the natural rate of unemployment. The authors reach two main conclusions about this body of work. First, there has been considerable theoretical progress over the past thirty years. A framework emerged that can be used to think, for example, about the relation between technological progress and unemployment. Second, empirical knowledge lags behind. Economists don't have a good quantitative understanding of the determinants of the natural rate, either across time or countries. The authors look at two issues, the relation of wages to unemployment and the rise of European unemployment.
The impact of information and communication technology on relation-based governance systems

This study offers a new perspective to the analysis of the interface between information and communication technology (ICT) and corporate governance and how the interface differs across countries with different political and economic environments. We first introduce a theoretical framework of relation-based and rule-based governance that distinguishes economies/firms based on whether they rely on public rules or personal relations to govern business. Economically more developed countries tend to be rule-based and less developed countries (LDCs) tend to be relation-based. Based on the theoretical framework, the paper analyzes the interface between ICT and corporate governance and the barriers to adopting ICT by relation-based LDCs. We argue that economic-and legal-system-specific governance effects are more fundamental than national cultural effects on ICT adoption, and that the barriers to adopting ICT are greater for the LDCs that rely on relation-based governance. We expect that in the long run ICT will make rule-based, developed countries more competitive, thus exerting pressures on relation-based LDCs and accelerating the transition of LDCs from relation-based to rule-based governance. Increasing ICT compatibility, in turn, will facilitate LDCs transition to rule-based governance.