cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Regulating Opt Out: An Economic Theory of Altering Rules

Whenever a rule is contractible, the law must establish separate rules governing how private parties can contract around the default legal treatment. To date, contract theorists have not developed satisfying theories for how to set “altering rules,” the rules that establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for displacing a default. This Article argues that when setting altering rules, efficiency-minded lawmakers should consider the costs of altering, the costs of various kinds of error, and the possibility that altering can impose negative externalities on others. There are two broad reasons for structuring altering rules that deviate from merely minimizing the transaction cost of altering. First, the Article develops conditions in which minimizing the costs of party error (especially nondrafter error) and third-party error (especially judicial error) will be paramount. It proposes a variety of altering interventions—including “train-and-test” altering rules, “clarity-requiring” altering rules, “password” altering rules, and “thought-requiring” altering rules—that might be deployed to reduce altering error. Second, when externality concerns or paternalistic concerns to protect the contractors themselves are insufficient to justify a full-blown mandatory rule, lawmakers might at times usefully impose “impeding” altering rules, which deter subsets of contractors from contracting for legally disfavored provisions. Impeding altering rules produce an intermediate category of “quasimandatory” or “sticky default” rules, which manage but do not eliminate externalities and paternalism concerns. These two deviations from transaction-cost minimization can often be usefully complemented by a third category of altering rules—what this Article calls “altering penalties”—which penalize one or both contractors who utilize disfavored altering methods. Altering penalties can channel contractors’ altering efforts toward means that better reduce error or better control externalities or paternalism. More explicitly theorizing altering rules as a distinct category of law can make visible legal issues that have largely gone unnoticed and lead toward the development of more defensible choices about how best to regulate opt-out. author. William K. Townsend Professor, Yale Law School. Anne Alstott, Akhil Amar, Tara Ayres, Ray Brescia, Rick Brooks, Geoffrey G. Dellenbaugh, Bill Eskridge, Laura Femino, Elliot Freier, Rob Gertner, Marty Kane, Pat Kane, Al Klevorick, John Langbein, Ruth Mason, Samuel Oliker-Friedland, Gideon Parchomovsky, Matthew Sag, Alan Schwartz, Peter Siegelman, participants at the 2006 Stresa Lecture, and seminar participants at the University of Connecticut, Loyola University Chicago, and Yale law schools provided helpful comments. Sam Lim, Joshua Mitts, and Wendy Zupac provided excellent research assistance.
Expert advice to a voting body

Abstract I provide a theory of information transmission in collective choice settings. In the model, an expert has private information on the effect of a policy proposal and communicates to a set of voters prior to a vote over whether or not to implement the proposal. In contrast to previous game-theoretic models of political communication, the results apply to situations involving multiple voters, multidimensional policy spaces and a broad class of voting rules. The results highlight how experts can use information to manipulate collective choices in a way that reduces the ex ante expected utilities of all voters. Opportunities for expert manipulation are the result of collective choice instability: all voting rules that allow collective preference cycles also allow welfare-reducing manipulative persuasion by an expert. The results challenge prevailing theories of institutions in which procedures are designed to maximize information transmission.
Values and Value Creation in Public-Private Transactions

Scholars have developed a significant body of literature exploring the work of deal lawyers with the essential insight that attorneys acting as transaction-cost engineers have unique potential to add to the overall value of deals. This value-creation literature has traditionally made two foundational assumptions about the role of the state in transactional law. First, scholars have assumed that regulation is essentially irrelevant to transacting-that from the deal lawyer's perspective, the government is a factor only to the extent that the state will enforce private agreements. Second, scholars have assumed that private parties uniformly view public policy as a constraint in the realm of compliance-that from the deal lawyer's perspective, clients are indifferent, if not hostile, to regulatory goals. The first assumption is the subject of recent scholarship convincingly arguing that regulatory arbitrage should be added to the picture of deal lawyers as transaction-cost engineers. The second assumption, however, has gone unchallenged and is the focus of this Article. Although the value-creation literature envisions a monolithic orientation toward the state, in practice, partnerships that engage the private sector in advancing a variety of public goals represent both a significant sector of the economy and one of the central contemporary approaches to policy by federal, state, and local governments. Deal lawyers are thus increasingly called upon not only to reduce transaction costs and leverage regulatory constraints, but also to manage a complex alignment of interests between private means and public ends. In short, lawyers in public-private transactions perform what this Article calls regulatory translation-transmognfying the often abstract goals of public policy into the concrete mechanisms of private ordering. * Associate Professor, University of Colorado Law School. J.D., Columbia Law School, 1997, A.B., Harvard University, 1990. For helpful comments, the author wishes to thank Deborah Cantrell, Scott Cummings, Vic Fleischer, Clare Huntington, Scott Moss, Pierre Schlag, Jim Smith, Phil Weiser, and the participants in the 2007 Workshop on Affordable Housing and Public/Private Partnerships. Charles Swanson and Kelly Kafer provided excellent research assistance.
Robust response-guided dosing

In response-guided dosing (RGD), doses are adapted to the uncertain progression of each patient's disease condition. A stochastic dynamic program was recently developed for RGD. We study its robust counterpart, where the dose-response distribution belongs to an uncertainty set. For interval uncertainty sets, we prove that it is optimal to administer higher doses in worsening disease. When a certain scaling of a nominal distribution describes the interval, optimal doses also increase in the scaling parameter. Theory is illustrated via numerical results.
Litigating article III standing: A proposed solution to the serious (but unrecognized) separation of powers problem

The various doctrines of subject-matter jurisdiction represent some of the most important limitations on the powers of the federal judiciary, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly said that Article III standing, which enforces the Constitution’s “case or controversy” requirement, is the most important of these jurisdictional doctrines. So a federal court that exercises its coercive power over litigants by entering a final judgment without first ensuring that the plaintiff has Article III standing would plainly violate the separation of powers. This much should be indisputable. But what if a federal court exercises its coercive power over litigants before entry of final judgment — say, by unlocking the doors to general discovery that is likely to be so expensive that it effectively coerces the defendant into an in terrorem settlement of a weak claim? Simple logic would suggest that the court should correspondingly shift earlier its resolution of the plaintiff’s Article III standing as well. Yet courts inexplicably defer resolving contested issues of standing when raised by defendants, instead treating Article III standing as if it were just another merits issue: something to be plausibly alleged in a complaint, supported by substantial evidence (taken as true) at summary judgment, and eventually proved by a preponderance of evidence at trial. We argue that this approach is wrong, because it potentially subjects litigants to years of coercive proceedings absent a genuine case or controversy. Instead, we propose that courts exclusively and definitively resolve contested issues of Article III standing, no matter when they arise in the litigation, using Rule 12(b)(1) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — including by holding evidentiary hearings and making credibility determinations as necessary. This approach would ensure that courts do not stray beyond the constitutionally dictated boundaries of their power by coercively affecting the primary conduct of litigants without first ensuring the existence of a genuine case or controversy.
Intertemporal effects of consumption and their implications for demand elasticity estimates

Consumption of a good typically diminishes the marginal utility of consuming more, but for how long? This paper adapts a model of consumption capital to allow consumption to have a lasting effect that diminishes the marginal utility of future consumption. Estimates of the model find that it takes the 25th, median and 75th percentile of consumers 19, 32 and 43 days for their marginal utilities to return to pre-consumption levels, and they are forward-looking with respect to these effects. This generates intertemporal substitution of consumption that leads to an overestimate of the own-price elasticity of demand of ten percent when it is estimated using temporary price changes. In addition to these implications consumption effects share with those of durable and storable goods, consumption effects also raise concerns for capacity constrained industries because the timing of consumption affects capacity utilization. In the empirical application in this paper, price variation in one time period generates substantial changes in capacity utilization in that period, but minimal changes in other periods because the intertemporal substitution is spread over many time periods.
Information Effects of Bond Rating Changes: The Role of the Rating Prior to the Announcement

This article shows that studies of announcement effects of bond rating changes should take into account the rating prior to the announcement. First, we provide theoretical support for different price effects as a non-linear function of the prior credit rating, using a structural, Merton-type model linking the change in default probability to the change in the stock price. Next, we show that this theoretical prediction is verified in the empirical data. We find much stronger information effects, measured by stock price effects, for rating changes for low-rated firms relative to high-rated firms. Accounting for the role of the rating prior to the announcement explains in large part the puzzling empirical regularity that stock price effects are associated with downgrades but not upgrades. In addition, it eliminates the investment-grade barrier effect reported in previous studies.
How the "Unintended Consequences" Story Promotes Unjust Intent and Impact.

The recent economic crisis has breathed new life into policies of upward redistribution, even as it uncovers the disastrous results of a financial market bubble blown by siphoning assets from the bottom up. A anti-government politics has grown from perceptions that justice is bitterly upended in system where the fallout devastates many who are most vulnerable, while bailouts protect some of the richest and most culpable. As prospects for major reform dim, the now-familiar concept of ―unintended consequences‖ has repeatedly surfaced to help explain and excuse the legal framework that supports this perverse economic reordering. How can we challenge the ideological story this phrase conveys, in order to open the door to alternative economic policies?
The Anti-Bottleneck Principle in Employment Discrimination Law

State legislatures and the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC) have moved in parallel in recent years to provide new protections for the employment prospects of some surprising groups: people who are unemployed, people who have poor credit, and people with past criminal convictions. These new protections confound our usual theories of what antidiscrimination law is about. These groups are disanalogous in a variety of respects to groups defined by such characteristics as race, sex, and national origin. But the legislators and regulators enacting these new protections were responding to pervasive problems they observed in the opportunity structure of our society — problems of a particular kind that I call bottlenecks. Essentially, these legal actors judged that poor credit, unemployment, and past criminal convictions were having too outsized an effect on a person’s employment prospects. If many or most employers demand good credit, then good credit becomes a serious bottleneck: a narrow place through which workers must pass to reach a wide range of opportunities on the other side.This Article argues that the anti-bottleneck principle — the principle that the law ought to ameliorate severe bottlenecks in the opportunity structure where it can feasibly do so — is not only a way of understanding these new, cutting-edge protections, but also a way of understanding much of the project of Title VII and our existing body of antidiscrimination law. This Article explores the role the anti-bottleneck principle plays in legislators’ decisions to enact antidiscrimination laws and in decisions by judges and by the EEOC about how to interpret and enforce such laws. The Article argues that the anti-bottleneck idea is at the heart of both disparate treatment law and disparate impact law — and that it should cause us to think differently about the function of disparate impact law. The EEOC lawyers who started down the path that led to Griggs v. Duke Power understood that general ability tests were becoming a major bottleneck in the opportunity structure. By limiting the use of those tests, Griggs ameliorated a bottleneck that had arbitrarily constrained the opportunities of many whites as well as blacks. Finally, turning from the positive to the normative, this Article defends the central — if previously unacknowledged — role that the anti-bottleneck principle plays in our law of equal employment opportunity. It is a profound challenge for any legal system to promote “equal opportunity” in a world of pervasive difference and inequality, where the mechanisms that perpetuate inequality shift over time. The anti-bottleneck principle turns out to be a strong and surprisingly practical response to these challenges.
What We Can Learn About Appeals From Mr. Tillman's Case: More Lessons From Another DNA Exoneration

This paper examines the published opinions in the case of Mr. James Calvin Tillman, the first person in Connecticut exonerated through postconviction DNA testing. Mr. Tillman's case shares much in common with the more than 200 DNA exonerations nationwide, most notably a mistaken cross-racial eyewitness identification. The article uses the opinions in Mr. Tillman's case as a vantage point to consider what we can learn about appellate and postconviction litigation.
Labor supply and aggregate fluctuations

Issues of labor supply are at the heart of macroeconomic explanations of the large cyclical fluctuations of output observed in modern economies. This paper starts with a serious empirical examination of the view that the labor market is always in balance-that every observed combination of employment and compensation is a point of intersection of the relevant supply and demand curves. I will call this the "intertemporal substitution" model of fluctuations. According to this model, workers are willing to shift their hours of work from one year to another in response to modest shifts in relative wages. The paper goes on to point out a strong implication of the pure inter- temporal substitution model, namely, the irrelevance of changes in the money supply for the labor supply function. A model where markets clear instantly ought to obey full monetary neutrality. The data refute this implication absolutely unambiguously. The money stock unambiguously shifts the labor supply function. The pure substitution model seems untenable in the light of this evidence. The paper then turns to explanations of the nonneutrality of money in the short run. According to the most carefully worked out line of thought, monetary shocks cause workers to make inappropriate intertemporal shifts in labor supply, because they lack complete information about the source of aggregate shocks and are forced to respond in the same way to real and nominal disturbances. Finally, the paper turns to the view that, in the short run, labor supply is largely irrelevant to the determination of aggregate employment.
Sample selection and event study estimation

Abstract The anomalies literature suggests that pricing is biased systematically for securities grouped by certain characteristics. If these characteristics are related to selection in an event study sample, imprecise predictions of an event study method may produce erroneous results. This paper performs simulations to compare a battery of short-run event study prediction and testing methods where samples are grouped by market equity, prior returns, book-to-market, and earnings-to-price ratios. Significant statistical errors are reported for both standard and newer methods, including three- and four-factor models. A characteristic-based benchmark model produces the least biased returns with the least rejection errors in all samples.
Information Markets, Administrative Decisionmaking, and Predictive Cost-Benefit Analysis

FutureMAP, a project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was to involve experiments to determine whether information markets could improve Defense Department decisionmaking. Information markets are securities markets used to derive information from the prices of securities whose liquidation values are contingent on future events. The government intended to use such a market to assess the probabilities of potential political assassinations, and the indelicacy of this potential application contributed to a controversy leading to the cancellation of the program. In this Article, Professor Abramowicz assesses whether information markets in theory could be useful to administrative agencies, and it concludes that information markets could help discipline administrative agency predictions, but only if a number of technical hurdles such as the danger of manipulation can be overcome. Because the predictions of well-functioning information markets are objective, they function as a tool that exhibits many of the same virtues in predictive tasks that cost-benefit analysis offers for normative policy evaluation. Both approaches can help to overcome cognitive errors, thwart interest group manipulation, and discipline administrative agency decisionmaking. The Article suggests that the two forms of analysis might be combined to produce a "predictive cost-benefit analysis." In such an analysis, an information market would predict the outcome of a retrospective cost-benefit analysis, to be conducted some years after the decision whether to enact a particular policy. As long as the identity of the eventual decisionmaker cannot be anticipated, predictive cost-benefit analysis estimates how an average decisionmaker would be expected to evaluate the policy. Because the predictive cost-benefit analysis assessment is not dependent on the identity of current agency officials, they cannot shade the numbers to justify policies that the officials prefer for idiosyncratic or ideological reasons.
How Much Value within Foreign Direct Investment Can a Government Destroy

This article employs techniques from real options analysis to determine an actual value that can be gained or lost due to government policy instead of a speculated value. Although a government commits to promoting a particular area of business (in this case, the sugar industry in Vietnam), implementation and conflicting policies can make the investment much less profitable. By employing real options analysis, the investor receives a clearer picture of the losses and gains under a particular governmental policy, which should lead to more prudent investment decisions.
Myths and Misunderstandings

The development of a body of law for a new communications techology is an odd experience for American jurisprudence. Stare decisis is designed to ensure that both common law and constitutional law develop sequentially, with principles of the past adopted, and adapted, for current usages. Peculiarly, even though we have but one First Amendment, there has long been recognition that the principles that are bedrock for one medium are irrelevant to another.
Materiality in Corporate Governance: The Statement of Significant Audiences and Materiality

Materiality is an elusive, but fundamentally important concept in corporate reporting of all kinds—not only in traditional financial reporting, but in sustainability and integrated reporting as well. In the end, materiality is entity-specific and based on judgment. Moreover, it is a judgment that should ultimately be made by a company's board of directors, which makes materiality as much a governance as a reporting issue. Whether a given ESG issue is material is in large part a function of the corporate stakeholders, or “audiences,” that the company's board of directors deems to be “significant”—that is, important to the company's ability to create value over the short, medium, and long term. The identification of such audiences—together with the time frames the board uses to evaluate the impact of the company's decisions on these audiences—provides the basis for determining the sustainability issues that corporate management must focus on for performance and reporting purposes. To help ensure that decisions about materiality receive the attention they deserve, the authors propose that corporate boards articulate their views in an annual “Statement of Significant Audiences and Materiality.” Contrary to the prevailing belief that the fiduciary duty of the board is to place shareholders’ interests first, nothing precludes corporate boards from issuing such a statement. Recent research, including the compilation of legal memos on fiduciary duty and nonfinancial reporting for all G20 countries, makes it clear that the board's fiduciary duty is to “the corporation itself.” In exercising this duty, directors have full discretion, under the business judgment rule and other authorities, to decide which audiences, along with the company's shareholders, should be deemed significant.
Trade in Environmental Goods: A Review of the WTO Appellate Body’s Ruling in US — Countervailing Measures (China)

In this paper we claim that, in the WTO Appellate Body (AB)’s ruling in US — Countervailing Measures (China), the AB decision has not put in question the practice of imposing countervailing duties (CVDs). While the US has formally “lost” the case, a change in the procedures and tests used to motivate the CVD will allow the US to continue using this policy tool on the specified products. From an economic point of view, this is not welcome news since CVDs have the standard distortionary effects of tariffs and could go against environmental goals. From a political-economy point of view, the CVDs in this case appear driven by pressure of domestic manufacturers of clean energy technology and products.
Generalization bounds via distillation

This paper provides a suite of mathematical tools to bound the generalization error of networks that possess low-complexity distillations --- that is, when there exist simple networks whose softmax outputs approximately match those of the original network. The primary contribution is the aforementioned bound, which upper bounds the test error of a network by the sum of its training error, the distillation error, and the complexity of the distilled network. Supporting this, secondary contributions include: a generalization bound which can handle convolutions and skip connections, a generalization analysis of the compression step leading to a bound with small width- and depth-dependence via weight matrix stable ranks, and a sampling theorem to sparsify dense networks. The bounds and their behavior are illustrated empirically on the standard mnist and cifar datasets.
The Who, When, and Where of Executive Nominations: Integrating Agency Independence and Appointee Ideology

In recent years, scholars have expended considerable efforts to understand the executive appointment process and the forces influencing the choices made by the president and the Senate. However, some factors integral to theoretical models have not been well integrated empirically, and other relevant factors have not been incorporated much at all. Here, we focus on one determinant corresponding to the former critique—nominee ideology—and another corresponding to the latter—the independence of decision makers in the targeted agencies. We examine a series of theoretically driven hypotheses regarding the effects of both ideology and independence on who gets nominated and if and when nominees are eventually confirmed. Results show nominee ideology and decision maker independence matter a great deal and factor into presidential strategic choices and senatorial responses in ways according to expectations. Our findings have important ramifications for understanding appointments empirically and for future theoretical development.
The Chernobyl Accident: A Case Study in International Law Regulating State Responsibility for Transboundary Nuclear Pollution

This international law case study, by Professor Linda Malone, explores the Chernobyl Accident and regulating state responsibility for the incident. The accident occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986. This accident is of importance because it brought to light the domestic failure to protect against damage to the global environment.
ERISA Remedies, Welfare Benefits, and Bad Faith: Losing Sight of the Cathedral

After many years of study and debate, Congress enacted the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”). Although born from concerns about pension security, ERISA governs both pension and welfare plans. ERISA defines a “pension plan” to include “any plan, fund, or program . . . established or maintained by an employer” that “provides retirement income” or “results in a deferral of income by employees.” Its importance in protecting the retirement security of Americans can hardly be overstated.
Propositional attitude psychology as an ideal type

This paper critiques the view, widely held by philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists, that psychological explanation is a matter of ascribing propositional attitudes (such as beliefs and desires) towards language-like propositions in the mind, and that cognitive mental states consist in intentional attitudes towards propositions of a linguistic quasi-linguistic nature. On this view, thought is structured very much like a language. Denial that propositional attitude psychology is an adequate account of mind is therefore, on this view, is tantamount to eliminative materialism, the denial that human beings are thinking beings. I dispute this on the basis of recent work in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Mental models theory, on which thought is better understood as nonpropositional intentional psychology, accords better with the evidence and offers an alternative view to propositional attitude psychology -- one that means that the denial that that is propositional is not eliminative. However, I argue that propostional attitude psychology is a useful idealization, as classical mechanics is of relativity theory, strictly but not radically false, and useful for prediction and indeed, as long as its idealized character is born in mind, for explanation of behavior.
Sex and Marriage in the Protestant Tradition, 1500–1900

This Article analyzes the mainline Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican models of sex, marriage, and family and their gradual liberalization by Enlightenment liberalism. The theological differences between these models can be traced to their grounding in Lutheran two kingdoms doctrines, Calvinist covenantal theology, Anglican commonwealth theory, and Enlightenment contractarian logic. Lutherans consigned primary marital jurisdiction to the territorial prince or urban council. Calvinists assigned interlocking marital roles to local consistories and city councils. Anglicans left marital jurisdiction to church courts, subject to state oversight and legislation. The early Enlightenment philosophers, many of them Protestants, pressed for a sharper separation of church and state in the governance of marriage, and for stronger protections of the rights and equality of women and children within and beyond the marital household. But they maintained traditional Protestant prohibitions extramarital sex and no-fault divorce in an effort to protect especially women and children from exploitation.
Ambiguity Aversion and the Criminal Process

This is the first article to examine the effects of ambiguity aversion on the criminal process. Ambiguity aversion is a person’s rational attitude towards probability's indeterminacy. When a person is averse towards such ambiguities, he increases the probability of the unfavorable outcome to reflect that fear. This observation is particularly true about a criminal defendant who faces a jury trial. Neither the defendant nor the prosecution knows whether the jury will convict the defendant. Their best estimation relies on a highly generalized probability that attaches to a broad category of similar cases. The prosecution, as a repeat player, is predominantly interested in the conviction rate that it achieves over a long series of cases. It therefore can depend on this general probability as an adequate predictor of this rate. The defendant only cares about his individual case and cannot depend on this general probability. From the defendant's perspective, his individual probability of conviction is ambiguous. The defendant consequently increases this probability to reflect his fear of that ambiguity. Because most defendants are ambiguity-averse, while the prosecution is not, the criminal process systematically involves and is thoroughly affected by asymmetric ambiguity-aversion.
Towards a Better Climate Treaty

The Kyoto Protocol is an example of how not to construct a treaty. Negotiators began by focusing on the short term, agreeing that the industrialized countries should cut their emissions of greenhouse gases by about 5% relative to 1990 by 2008â€“2012. Then they agreed that these cuts should be achieved cost-effectively, incorporating â€˜flexible mechanismsâ€™. Only later did they worry about whether the treaty created incentives for broad participation and full compliance. Negotiators should have approached things the other way around. They should have begun by thinking of how they could achieve both broad participation and full compliance, and of how they could reduce emissions in the long term. Had they done so, a better, more effective treaty would have been negotiated. In this essay the author explains why Kyoto is unlikely to succeed in mitigating climate change. He also proposes an alternative treaty design that is likely to work better.
Implementing Market Access

This paper examines ex post subsidies as a means of enforcing market share targets. Subsidies set after firms make their strategic decisions are shown to create powerful incentives for firms to raise prices. These effects are stronger when targets, and hence subsidies, are specified on a firm-specific rather than industry-wide basis. This occurs because firms perceive themselves as subject to more competition (i.e., more elastic demand) in the latter case.
Imperfect Competition in Auto Lending: Subjective Markup, Racial Disparity, and Class Action Litigation

While the market for auto lending at first appears to be highly competitive, many consumers lack the ability to obtain accurate information about price. In many markets, uninformed consumers can “free ride” off the knowledge of informed consumers. Auto lending, however, differs from traditional markets because price is not transparent and ultimately depends upon both the credit worthiness of the individual borrower and the details of the auto loan (term length, payment-to-income ratio, etc.). Auto dealers in this market act as agents of both consumers (identifying suitable auto lenders) and lenders (identifying prospective borrowers). Given the asymmetric information in the market, prices paid by consumers for auto loans vary widely even after controlling for factors such as credit worthiness. While the majority of auto loans are written without any markup, some consumers are charged thousands of dollars in addition to the risk-based interest rate. For example, the top 5% of customers account for over 40% of dealer markup from auto lending. While charging different prices to different consumers is not illegal, one of the apparent consequences in auto lending is that minority consumers – African-Americans and Hispanics in particular – have systematically been charged a higher markup on auto loans than White borrowers. It is this fact – coupled with federal laws outlawing discrimination in credit markets – that led to a series of lawsuits against auto lending institutions. This paper reviews the theory and evidence of subjective markups on auto loans and examines how class action litigation has changed the auto lending market.
Mindful judgment and decision making

A full range of psychological processes has been put into play to explain judgment and choice phenomena. Complementing work on attention, information integration, and learning, decision research over the past 10 years has also examined the effects of goals, mental representation, and memory processes. In addition to deliberative processes, automatic processes have gotten closer attention, and the emotions revolution has put affective processes on a footing equal to cognitive ones. Psychological process models provide natural predictions about individual differences and lifespan changes and integrate across judgment and decision making ( JDM) phenomena. “Mindful” JDM research leverages our knowledge about psychological processes into causal explanations for important judgment and choice regularities, emphasizing the adaptive use of an abundance of processing alternatives. Such explanations supplement and support existing mathematical descriptions of phenomena such as loss aversion or hyperbolic discounting. Unlike such descriptions, they also provide entry points for interventions designed to help people overcome judgments or choices considered undesirable.
Defined by Dictum: The Geography of Revlon-Land in Cash and Mixed Consideration Transactions

Anyone familiar with corporate law knows well how much of that law has been shaped by just one state: Delaware. Less obvious, however, is that so much of Delaware corporate law has been defined by the nonbinding dictum of that state’s judges. To illustrate this point, this Article considers the central role of dictum in the evolving doctrine first articulated by the Delaware Supreme Court in Revlon, Inc. v. MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, Inc. And in doing so, this Article refutes the thesis, recently advanced by Professor Stephen Bainbridge, that a judicial concern for director conflicts of interests, alone, is what animates the Revlon doctrine. Employing a conflict-of-interests understanding of Revlon, Bainbridge decries a string of Delaware Chancery Court opinions that have applied Revlon to transactions in which a target corporation is sold for cash or a mix of cash and stock in a publicly traded, diffusely held acquirer. In constructing his critique, however, Bainbridge overstates the chancery court precedent with which he takes issue as well as the supreme court precedent upon which he bases his conflict-of-interests thesis. In reality, the boundaries of Revlon-land are murky. Left uncertain by Delaware Supreme Court precedent, the scope of the Revlon doctrine has been purposefully, but cautiously, defined by the Delaware Chancery Court through the use of dictum.
Internet Fraud: Information for Teachers and Students.

Internet fraud takes a number of forms with the respon- sible individuals changing tactics rapidly to avoid detection. The perpetrators rely on telemarketing, emails, as well as presenting themselves personally to unsuspecting people. The evolution of internet market- ing as well as ecommerce and the ease of connectivity create increasing opportunities for fraudsters while at the same time placing more unsuspecting internet users at risk of falling prey to these schemes. There exists a thriving economy online with large sums of money changing hands online. It is therefore important for any internet user to easily identify when they are exposed to internet fraud schemes and as such avoid being a vic-
Understanding Earnings Quality: A Review of the Proxies, Their Determinants and Their Consequences

Abstract Researchers have used various measures as indications of “earnings quality” including persistence, accruals, smoothness, timeliness, loss avoidance, investor responsiveness, and external indicators such as restatements and SEC enforcement releases. For each measure, we discuss causes of variation in the measure as well as consequences. We reach no single conclusion on what earnings quality is because “quality” is contingent on the decision context. We also point out that the “quality” of earnings is a function of the firm’s fundamental performance. The contribution of a firm’s fundamental performance to its earnings quality is suggested as one area for future work.
Marketing Research: Current State and Next Steps

We highlight the current state-of-the-art and identify trends that are likely to shape the role of marketing research in the future. We discuss the growing importance of marketing research and some of the factors that are driving its importance. The redefinition of the marketing researcher and the line of demarcation between marketing research and marketing management, and thus the distinction between marketing researchers and marketing managers, that is becoming thinner and thinner, is described. The sheer availability of secondary data is driving their importance. In a paradigm shift, more and more marketing research is and will be undertaken as part of normal on-going business operations, rather than in response to specific marketing problems or opportunities.
Behavioral finance: Finance with normal people

Abstract Behavioral finance is under construction as a solid structure of finance. It incorporates parts of standard finance, replaces others, and includes bridges between theory, evidence, and practice. Behavioral finance substitutes normal people for the rational people in standard finance. It substitutes behavioral portfolio theory for mean-variance portfolio theory, and behavioral asset pricing model for the CAPM and other models where expected returns are determined only by risk. Behavioral finance also distinguishes rational markets from hard-to-beat markets in the discussion of efficient markets, a distinction that is often blurred in standard finance, and it examines why so many investors believe that it is easy to beat the market. Moreover, behavioral finance expands the domain of finance beyond portfolios, asset pricing, and market efficiency and is set to continue that expansion while adhering to the scientific rigor introduced by standard finance.
What Are the Drivers of Fiscal Performance Gaps between Anglophone and Francophone Africa? A Blinder–Oaxaca Decomposition

In this paper, we make use of the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition to examine how the quality of budget institutions affects fiscal performance – primary balance and public debt – in sub-Saharan Africa. To organise our approach, we categorise sub-Saharan Africa countries according to the two main systems of budgetary institutions: the English-based system and the French-based system. The quality of budget institutions is measured through five criteria: centralisation, comprehensiveness, fiscal and procedural rules, sustainability and credibility, and transparency. Our findings show that, on average, Anglophone Africa countries have better budgetary institutions than their Francophone counterparts, and this difference is the main determinant of the fiscal performance gaps between the two groups. These performance gaps are mostly due to the characteristics effect, meaning that the relative poor fiscal performance of Francophone countries is not due to the French-based system itself but rather to the environment in which it operates. The budget process and procedures in these countries are relatively less comprehensive, sustainable and transparent and that adversely affects their fiscal performance.
Congressional intervention in the standard-setting process: An analysis of the stock option accounting reform act of 2004

We examine H.R. 3574, the Stock Option Accounting Reform Act of 2004 (the Act), which sought to prevent the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) from requiring the expensing of employee stock options at fair value. We find that employee stock option expense under the Act would be approximately 2 percent of what it would be under the FASB's preferred method. We also find that House members supporting the Act were more likely to be Republican, to be conservative, and to have received larger Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions. Finally, the larger the impact of H.R. 3574 on the amount of stock option expense reported by the firm for employees who are not top‐five executives, the more contributions the firm's PAC made to House members and to members of the committee that approved the Act. This result suggests that corporate opposition to the mandatory expensing of stock options at fair value is not driven solely by concerns of top‐five executives about the cost of recognizing their own options.
Again, For the Want of a Theory: The Challenge of the “Series” to Business Organization Law

The notion of a series, essentially an internal compartment of a limited liability company (LLC), limited partnership, or business trust that affords both an affirmative and a negative liability shield and has some of the attributes of a legal entity, has of late caused significant confusion. Some of that confusion has arisen from concerns about how the series will be treated in the areas of federal and state taxation and in the bankruptcy system. Other questions, they being the primary focus of this presentation, have arisen from the effort to conceptualize the individual series and to place them in the context of the primary business organization of which they are, in some manner, components.
Against a Federal Patients' Bill of Rights

The failure of the 107th Congress to pass a "Patients' Bill of Rights" (PBR) is widely considered a major disappointment,1 to be remedied in the 108th Congress by the adoption of such legislation. Indeed, federal PBR proposals have achieved the proverbial motherhood-and-apple-pie status; it is virtually impossible to find anyone actively opposing a federal PBR. Many members of the 108th Congress likely feel pressure to pass PBR legislation before returning to the electorate in 2004.
The Political Question Doctrine: An Update in Response to Climate Change Case Law

The United States has failed to enact climate change legislation to regulate greenhouse gases despite the near consensus that anthropogenic climate change is occurring. In the wake of this failure, various private parties and states have initiated “climate change nuisance” litigation for harms incurred due to climate change. Unfortunately, several climate change nuisance cases were dismissed at the district court level due to a flawed application of the political question doctrine. These cases exemplify the scholarly debate and discontent surrounding the current formulation of the political question doctrine. Scholars do generally agree that contentious and politically charged disputes involving novel legal theories do not necessarily implicate the doctrine. However, due to the broad nature of the doctrine in its current form, it has been erroneously applied to the politically charged, but judiciable, climate change litigation cases. This Comment suggests a re-articulated political question doctrine, which captures the purpose of the doctrine while also acting to limit its application to truly nonjudicial political questions. The key to this formulation is its foundation: it rests not only on the classical origin of the doctrine, but also on principles upon which our judiciary is based.
Horizontal vs. vertical transmission of fertility preferences

Abstract I study the cultural transmission of fertility preferences among second-generation immigrant women observed in U.S. Censuses from 1910 to 1970. As hypothesized by Bisin and Verdier (2001), the transmission of preferences can be “vertical” or “horizontal”. Using a unique source documenting the variation in fertility behavior in Europe before and after the first demographic transition (1830–1970), I unpack the influence of parents (measured by source-country fertility at the time of departure from Europe) versus the influence of peers from the same source-country (measured by fertility of the same-age cohorts living in the source-country and transmitted by same-age recent immigrants). I find that the transmission mechanism is crucially affected by the number of foreign-born immigrant peers living in the same MSA. On one hand, the “vertical” channel of transmission is stronger in places where there are few newly arrived foreign-born immigrant couples from the same source-countries. On the other hand, the “horizontal” channel prevails in MSA’s densely populated by recently arrived immigrants from the same source-countries of second-generation ones.
Superior female education: Explaining the gender earnings gap trend in Thailand

Abstract It is well-known that along with Thailand's remarkable increase in real income per capita during 1985–2005, an increase in overall income inequality was observed. What is not documented in the literature is that, during the same time period, the gender earnings inequality declined considerably. This paper seeks to identify the main factors that contributed to the decline in gender earnings gap in Thailand's wage and salary sector during 1985–2005. A parametric methodology, the Neumark (1988) version of the Blinder–Oaxaca (1973) method, is implemented in order to decompose gender earnings gap. I also make a methodological contribution by proposing a way to modify the DiNardo–Fortin–Lemieux (1996) nonparametric decomposition method so that its results are comparable to those from the Neumark version of the Blinder–Oaxaca method. The key findings of this paper are as follows. First, I find that increases in female education and changes in unobserved factors, which were concurrent with modernization, were the main sources of the decline in gender earnings gap. Second, over time, improvements in the education of females in this sector surpassed that of males. However, the superior education of females did not result in females earning higher than males due to the existing counteracting effect of the unexplained factors. Finally, the nonparametric investigation corroborated the results from the parametric methodology.
Informality and Nonprofits in East Central European Capitalism

This paper presents an analysis of nonprofit organizations—the organizational infrastructure of civil society—in East Central Europe, from one important respect: by placing them in the context of the comparative historical sociology of the region's widespread informality. This involves two steps: (1) summarizing an argument about the role of informality in East Central European capitalism today in order to (2) outline its implications for the study of post-state-socialist nonprofits. Most of the empirical examples come from Hungary. These examples serve illustrative purposes and are intended as devices to provoke new analysis. They are meant to open, rather than close, discussion.