cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Campaign Contributions from Corporate Executives in Lieu of Political Action Committees

Limiting corporate participation in electoral politics is a central focus of campaign finance reform. In this spirit, individual candidates for office have prohibited corporate-linked political action committees (PACs) from contributing to their campaigns. On the surface, such no-PAC policies might seem like an effective way to keep corporate-linked monies out of electoral politics; however, they ignore the reality that corporate monies have a variety of ways to find their way into candidates’ campaign accounts. We leverage these candidate-specific refusals to accept PAC monies to uncover concomitant spikes in the pattern of corporate executives’ personal campaign contributions that are most pronounced for executives at firms with active PACs which contributed to the candidates in question. These results come from a newly constructed dataset that includes all CEO–firm–candidate contribution pairs for active S&P500 firms over an 18-year period and suggests that CEOs strategically act in lieu of their firms’ linked PACs.
The Contribution of Veto Players to Economic Reform

Contrary to the conventional understanding that reform is more difficult when veto players are numerous, we show formally that veto players may encourage policy change by weakening the power of special interests that prefer inefficient reform outcomes. Using the same model, we demonstrate that reform reversals are less likely in the presence of multiple veto players, implying that a constitutional framework conducive to initial reforms may also lock in those achievements over time. We find support for our theoretical perspective in a study of the relationship between veto players and economic reform in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
The Public Trust Doctrine in the Shadow of State Environmental Rights Laws: A Case Study

This Article looks at the relationship between state environmental rights statutes and the common law public trust doctrine. In addressing this issue, it focuses on the state of Minnesota, where, in the early 1970s, the state legislature enacted a far-reaching environmental rights statute, the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act (MERA), that served to codify many public trust principles. Beginning in the early 1970s and for the next forty years, litigants in Minnesota that might otherwise have brought common law public trust doctrine claims for environmental protection purposes instead channeled that litigation through MERA. As a result, Minnesota courts have rarely been asked to interpret or use the common law public trust doctrine at all in the context of environmental protection. And, more importantly, they did not have an opportunity to use and develop the doctrine during the time the environmental protection movement was at its height in the 1970s and early 1980s. Instead, the lyrical language many courts used in public trust doctrine cases in other states during that era to protect natural resources and expand the scope of the doctrine is found, in Minnesota, in MERA cases, not in public trust doctrine cases. This Article explores the implications of the underuse of the common law public trust doctrine in Minnesota by focusing on a 2012 case, White Bear Lake Restoration Association v. Department of Natural Resources, which is the first case to begin a new conversation on the common law public trust doctrine in the state—one that never took place in the 1970s. This case involves traditional public trust resources—a lake and a lakebed—as well as efforts by private citizens to compel the state to protect those resources for present and future generations, thus coming squarely within the purview of MERA and even the most narrow reading of the public trust doctrine. The state argued in part that MERA had replaced the common law public trust doctrine in Minnesota
Economic Challenges and Coping Mechanisms in Protracted Displacement: A Case Study of the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh

In protracted refugee situations, basic needs are increasingly deficient as humanitarian relief decreases over time. In response to unmet needs, refugees often seek opportunities for income generation to meet their basic needs. The objective of this qualitative study was to explore the desires and concerns of refugee populations surviving without adequate aid in order to explore risks associated with income-generating activities and the possibilities for livelihood support. The case study focused on the Rohingya refugees, an ethnic Muslim minority from Myanmar, residing in southern Bangladesh. This study, based on 127 interviews, showed that although there is no legal right to work for refugees in Bangladesh, nearly every refugee household was engaged in multiple forms of wage-earning employment as a coping mechanism to economic deprivations.
Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich and the Prior Inconsistent Statement

In the movie, Witness for the Prosecution, Charles Laughton plays a defense barrister in a murder case. On cross-examination, he confronts Marlene Dietrich, a key prosecution witness, with her own letters contradicting her direct testimony. The letters destroy her credibility. The confrontation is the denouement of the trial, but not of the movie. We learn after the trial that Dietrich contrived the letters herself, enabling Laughton to destroy her in front of the jury, thereby gaining an acquittal for the defendant, Tyrone Power, her lover. In a climactic twist, Dietrich kills Power when she discovers that he no longer loves her?before ultimately being represented by Laughton in her own murder trial. There comes a point in a trial when advocacy skill, knowledge of the law, and professional responsibility uniquely come together. This is also the time when the adversarial nature of our system is clearest. This point occurs when a witness is impeached with a prior inconsistent statement, as portrayed dramatically in the Laughton-Dietrich confrontation. This essay supports the assertion that witness impeachment is an indispensable part of the common law justice system, returning from time to time to the movie, Witness for the Prosecution.
Size and Focus of a Venture Capitalist's Portfolio

We take a portfolio approach to analyze the investment strategy of a venture capitalist (VC) and show that portfolio size and scope affect both the entrepreneurs’ and the VC’s incentives to exert effort. A small portfolio improves entrepreneurial incentives because it allows the VC to concentrate the limited human capital on a smaller number of startups, adding more value. A large and focused portfolio is beneficial because it allows the VC to reallocate the limited resources and human capital in the case of startup failure and allows the VC to extract greater rents from the entrepreneurs. We show that the VC finds it optimal to limit portfolio size when startups have higher payoff potential—that is, when providing strong entrepreneurial incentives is most valuable. The VC expands portfolio size only when startup fundamentals are more moderate and when he can form a sufficiently focused portfolio. Finally, we show that the VC may find it optimal to engage in portfolio management by divesting some of the startups early since this strategy allows him to extract a greater surplus. (JEL G24) The existing theoretical work on venture capital has so far concentrated on a venture capitalist’s (VC) investment in a single entrepreneurial startup in which the VC provides monetary and non-monetary resources to turn the entrepreneur’s project idea into a viable business. 1 However, VC funds typically invest in more than one startup at any given time, and engage in active portfolio management to maximize the return from their investment. In recent research, Kaplan and Schoar (2005) find substantial heterogeneity in performance across private equity funds of different size. They also find that better-performing VC funds grow proportionally slower, and they argue that better VCs may choose to stay small (by deliberately limiting the amount of capital raised) to avoid
Savings by and for the poor: A research review and agenda

The poor can and do save, but often use formal or informal instruments that have high risk, high cost, and limited functionality. This could lead to undersaving compared to a world without market or behavioral frictions. Undersaving can have important welfare consequences: variable consumption, low resilience to shocks, and foregone profitable investments. We lay out five sets of constraints that may hinder the adoption and effective usage of savings products and services by the poor: transaction costs, lack of trust and regulatory barriers, information and knowledge gaps, social constraints, and behavioral biases. We discuss each in theory, and then summarize related empirical evidence, with a focus on recent field experiments. We then put forward key open areas for research and practice.
The Prisoners’ (Plea Bargain) Dilemma

How can a prosecutor, who has only limited resources, credibly threaten so many defendants with costly and risky trials and extract plea bargains involving harsh sentences? Had defendants refused to settle, many of them would not have been charged or would have escaped with lenient sanctions. But such collective stonewalling requires coordination among defendants, which is difficult if not impossible to attain. Moreover, the prosecutor, by strategically timing and targeting her plea offers, can create conflicts of interest among defendants, frustrating any attempt at coordination. The substantial bargaining power of the resource-constrained prosecutor is therefore the product of the collective action problem that plagues defendants. This conclusion suggests that, despite the common view to the contrary, the institution of plea bargains may not improve the well-being of defendants. Absent the plea bargain option, many defendants would not have been charged in the first place. Thus, we can no longer count on the fact that plea bargains are entered voluntarily to argue that they are desirable for all parties involved.
Protecting Families in a Global Economy

The globalization of the economy has placed tremendous pressure on the modern family. Throughout the developed world, marriage rates are declining, birth and fertility rates are falling, real wages are flat or declining, and hours of family external labor supplied are rising. Finding a spouse and raising children can be inconsistent with the demands of careers in the global economy of the new information age. Globalization of the economy tends to encourage individualism and mobility, in direct opposition to family relationships. Moreover, the extensive period of training that is necessary to compete in the global economy interferes with marriage and childrearing and increases the costs of raising children. Finally, the global economy has resulted in increased demand for flexible labor, requiring many lower- and middle-class families to increase time spent in the paid workforce, often with few or no additional benefits.
Regional impacts of environmental regulations and technical change in the US forestry sector: a multiregional CGE analysis

Abstract In this paper, a multiregional computable general equilibrium model, which divides the United States (US) into four broad geographical regions and aggregates other nations into the rest of the world, is used to analyze the effects associated with environmental and technological policy shifts in the US forest sector. In particular, we analyze the impacts of: (i) a 20% reduction in the harvest of timber in the Pacific Northwest relative to other regions; (ii) a 5% increase in the cost of timber production in the US South relative to other regions due to environmental regulations; and (iii) a 2% Total Factor Productivity (TFP) improvement in the South and 1% TFP improvement in the other three US regions. The results show that a 20% reduction in timber harvest induces a shift in regional production and visible gains in welfare, especially in the US South. Furthermore, higher technical progress in the South as compared to the other three regions contributes to an overall increase in forest products’ output and welfare in the US and the rest of the world. On the contrary, an increase in the cost of production in the US South, in response to additional environmental regulations, is shown to reduce welfare for the US and globally. Results of this analysis help forest companies and landowners make production decisions and guide policy makers toward developing appropriate policies to further forest conservation and economic development in the US.
Making Sense of Intellectual Property Law

Intellectual property (IP) scholars have long struggled to explain the boundaries of and differences between copyright and patent law. This Article proposes a novel explanation: copyright and patent can be fruitfully understood as establishing a dichotomy between the different human senses. Copyright has bracketed works addressed to the senses of sight and hearing, and it treats products appealing to touch, taste, and smell as functional and, thus, uncopyrightable. To the extent the latter receive IP protection, it is through the utility patent regime. The Article begins by establishing this descriptive proposition, and it shows how some of the most contested areas of IP (e.g., the useful articles doctrine in copyright law and design patents) involve breaches of this sensory dichotomy. Next, I argue that the sensory dichotomy in IP reflects the sensory hierarchy in traditional Western aesthetic theory. According to this tradition, sight and hearing are considered “high” senses capable of unconstrained aesthetic and cultural experiences. Touch, taste, and smell, by contrast, are considered “low” senses, because their connection to natural bodily needs constrains their aesthetic capacities. IP law’s treatment of the senses in copyright and patent law matches this hierarchy. In recent years, however, fundamental principles of Western aesthetic theory have been undermined by developments in cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary aesthetics, and haptic and culinary communication. This research suggests that sight and hearing are not as aesthetically unconstrained and functionless, nor are touch, taste, and smell as aesthetically constrained and functional as previously believed. Accordingly, I argue that IP law should treat appeals to the senses uniformly. Works that express or communicate ideas, emotions, or pleasures to any of the five senses in such a way that creates original works of authorship should be potentially copyrightable. The Article concludes with an analysis of this proposal’s effects on various creative fields, including tactile objects, fashion, culinary dishes, and yoga.
Do leases expand debt capacity

Abstract Theoretically and empirically, debt and leases have been shown to be both substitutes and complements. To explore the relation, we divide our sample into two subsets: those that exhibit a complementary relation (43% increase debt after increasing leases), and those that exhibit a substitutionary relation (57% decrease debt after increasing leases). For complement firms, we find a significant negative relation between leasing and the firm's size, marginal tax rate, and z-score, consistent with “complementary” theories. For substitute firms, we find a positive and significant relation between leasing, the marginal tax rate and changes in cash. We also find a significant positive stock market reaction to the announcement of the SLB, which is stronger for the complement subset of firms.
Convergence and risk-return linkages across financial service firms

Abstract We examine the risk and return linkages across US commercial banks, securities firms, and life insurance companies during the 1991–2001 period. After controlling for changes in the broader stock market, interest rates, and foreign currency values, we find that return and risk interdependencies across these financial firms are significant and size-varying; larger institutions display stronger volatility transmission linkages, while smaller ones exhibit more prominent return-related linkages. The tighter link in risk among large financial institutions (FIs) suggests stronger convergence, employment of common models of risk measurement and risk management, and more intense inter-industry competition, particularly between large banks and large securities firms, compared to smaller institutions. Lack of risk spillover among smaller FIs confirms the intuition that they typically assume more localized and idiosyncratic risk. The co-movement of stock returns among smaller FIs has been helped by the effects of locally based factors, such as economic conditions and state regulations, on all such institutions, and a less diversified product set. Differences in spillover patterns between large and smaller institutions have implications on investment choices and mergers and acquisitions in the industry. Introduction of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (1999) has had dissimilar effects on the riskiness of large versus smaller life insurance and securities firms, and an insignificant effect on commercial banks.
External and Internal Pricing in Multidivisional Firms

Multidivisional firms frequently rely on external market prices in order to value internal transactions across profit centers. This paper examines market-based transfer pricing when an upstream division has monopoly power in selling a proprietary component both to a downstream division within the same firm and to external customers. When internal transfers are valued at the prevailing market price, the resulting transactions are distorted by double marginalization. The imposition of intracompany discounts will always improve overall firm profits provided the supplying division is capacity constrained. Under certain conditions it is then possible to design discount rules so that the resulting prices and sales quantities are efficient from the corporate perspective. In contrast, the impact of intracompany discounts remains ambiguous when the capacity of the selling division is essentially unlimited. It is then generally impossible to achieve fully efficient outcomes by means of market-based transfer pricing unless the external market for the component is sufficiently large relative to the internal market.
Commercializing public technology through cooperative R&D

Abstract We analyze 582 R&D agreements between Air Force agencies and outside partners. Agenices choose partners and contractual terms consistent with predictions from a rational model, which suggests that they could be incentive efficient from an ex ante perspective.
Consultants, lawyers, and the ‘union free’ movement in the USA since the 1970s

This paper provides a qualitative analysis of the services that the anti–union consultants and law firms have provided to American employers during the past three decades and an account of the campaign tactics of several ‘superstars’ of the union–free movement. It describes a multi–million dollar industry that has helped employers to circumvent the intent of federal labour law through a vast array of union–busting tactics, implemented before the union arrives and continuing until after it is defeated: tactics that are designed, at every juncture, to undermine employees’ free choice of bargaining representatives.
Adjustment costs, durables, and aggregate consumption

Abstract Previous tests of the permanent-income hypothesis (PIH) have focused on either non-durables or durables expenditures in isolation. This paper studies consumer purchases of non-durables and durables as the outcome of a single optimization problem. It is shown that, with non-separability in utility, the presence of adjustment costs of changing durables stocks may affect the time series properties of both components of expenditure. An econometric test of the PIH based on the model developed in the paper is both more efficient and less prone to bias than those in some previous studies; however, this test confirms earlier rejections of the PIH in aggregate quarterly data.
Fleecing the Family Jewels

Crown jewel lock-up options, a common deal protection device during the 1980s mergers and acquisitions boom, are back. During their popularity in the 1980s, these options took the form of agreements between a target company and a buyer pursuant to which the buyer was granted the right to purchase certain valuable assets, or crown jewels, of the target corporate family in the event the merger did not close. After both state and federal courts questioned the validity of these lock-ups in the 1980s, lock-ups lost their luster and dealmakers stopped using them. But as the saying goes, “everything old becomes new again,” and crown jewel lock-ups have made a return in recent transactions. This time around, dealmakers have been quick to distinguish the modernized crown jewel lock-ups from their predecessors. Although there has been limited case law addressing the validity of these lock-ups, courts appear more likely to uphold the lock-up if the lock-up can be attributed to a business purpose other than the merger and if the lock-up could be a standalone agreement, separate and apart from the merger. This Article argues, however, that today’s lock-ups are not significantly different from their predecessors. Practitioners and courts should not lose sight of the 1980s jurisprudence that closely scrutinized the sale process preceding the lock-up as well as the deterrent effects of the lock-up on potential bidders. Failing to consider these factors and not giving these factors proper weight potentially results in companies and their shareholders being fleeced of their corporate family jewels and their value. At the same time, however, dealmakers should not be as quick to shy away from lock-ups as they have done in the past. As the 1980s jurisprudence made clear, lock-ups can be used to enhance shareholder value. In particular, this Article argues that dealmakers may use lock-ups after an extensive sale process to incentivize bidders and extract additional value for shareholders.
A New Way Forward: A Response to Judge Weinstein

This short essay responds to Judge Jack Weinstein's essay, Preliminary Reflections on Administration of Complex Litigations, 2009 Cardozo De Novo 1. In so doing, it also provides a condensed version of my earlier article, Litigating Groups, which analyzes group dynamics within nonclass aggregation. By drawing on the literature of moral and political philosophy as well as social psychology, I contend that, in the face of hard cases, of instability and disunity, plaintiffs who have made promises and assurances to one another can invoke social norms of promise-keeping, social agglomeration, compatibility, and the desire for means-end coherence to achieve consensus, mitigate client-client conflicts, and re-tether their attorney to their needs. Thus, using groups to overcome the problems in nonclass aggregation not only makes sense from a group responsibility perspective, it may also harmonize with wealth maximization and individual autonomy goals.
Protecting Nominative Fair Use, Parody, and Other Speech-Interests by Reforming the Inconsistent Exemptions from Trademark Liability

Federal trademark law exempts certain communicative uses of a trademark from liability so that the public can freely use a trademark to comment on the markowner or to describe its products. These exemptions for “speech-interests” are badly flawed because their scope is inconsistent between infringement and dilution law, and because the cost and difficulty of claiming their protection varies significantly from court to court. Many speech-interests remain vulnerable to the chilling threat of litigation even though they are “protected” by current law. This Note proposes a simple statutory reform that will remedy this inconsistency by creating an express safe harbor for speech-interests in the Lanham Act. This reform will give full effect to the policy behind these exemptions: that if they apply, the public ought to be able to freely use a trademark in discourse. This reform also furthers the Lanham Act’s purpose of establishing a uniform system of nationwide trademark protection by endorsing the simple principle that a given use of a trademark should be either consistently protected from or vulnerable to suit in every court and under every cause of action.
How good is the GFE? How truthful is the TILA? Comparing mortgage loan disclosures to settlement documents

Prior to 2010 regulatory changes, lenders faced few penalties for disclosing inaccurate mortgage closing costs to borrowers during the mortgage application process. Given this policy context, lenders might have intentionally understated closing costs in order to lure unsuspecting borrowers into mortgages with greater true costs than initially disclosed. Further, lenders might have been more likely to understate closing costs for borrowers perceived to be less financially capable. The extent to which lenders’ estimates actually deviate from final closing costs has not been extensively studied. Based on an analysis of 600 loan applications from the National Mortgage Data Repository, the Good Faith Estimate (GFE) slightly overestimates total closing costs by $359, or by 3.9 percent of the mean initial estimate. Broker fees for brokered loans, however, were underestimated by 11.7 percent on the GFE. It does not appear that borrower demographics predict differences between initial GFE estimates and actual clos...
By Eminent Domain or Some Other Name: A Tribal Perspective on Taking Land

The practice of eminent domain in the United States hasn’t changed much, only the people groups affected. Mainstream Americans are now realizing what American Indians have known for generations. For centuries, American Indians have seen their lands taken by federal and state governments without consent, and at times, without compensation. Eminent domain laws allow governments to seize land from private individuals and then redistribute the land to other individuals, private or public, who will make better use of the land. Current rhetoric claims governments taking private property from one person so it can be redistributed to another is "un-American." However, this practice is nothing new. In Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823), Justice Marshall claimed, "To leave [the tribes] in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness."While American Indians have watched governments use similar rationales to take their land for centuries, this has only been a recent experience for mainstream Americans. In Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), the Court upheld that taking of private property that was neither crime-ridden nor run-down. The American public displayed outrage after the Kelo decision. Identifying with the homeowners, the public believed the Court’s ruling meant the government could now seize anyone's home. Instead of diverging from precedent, as some have alleged, Kelo affirms a long history that American Indians know all too well. Mainstream Americans are starting to become more familiar with what American Indians have experienced for centuries, and the Kelo decision has brought both Indians and non-Indians closer together in understanding that fee simple title is not absolute.
Community Structure and Market Outcomes: A Repeated Games-in-Networks Approach †

Consider a large market with asymmetric information, in which sellers have the option to “cheat” their buyers, and buyers decide whether to repurchase from different sellers. We model active trade relationships as links in a buyer-seller network and study repeated games in such networks. Endowing sellers with incomplete knowledge of the network, we derive conditions that determine whether a network is consistent with cooperation between every buyer and seller that are connected. Three network features reduce the minimal discount factor sufficient for cooperation: moderate and balanced competition, sparseness, and segregation. Incentive constraints are binding and rule out efficient networks. (JEL C73, D82, D85, Z13)
Game Theory, Conditional Preferences, and Social Influence

Neoclassical noncooperative game theory is based on a simple, yet powerful synthesis of mathematical and logical concepts: unconditional and immutable preference orderings and individual rationality. Although this structure has proven useful for characterizing competitive multi-player behavior, its applicability to scenarios involving complex social relationships is problematic. In this paper we directly address this limitation by the introduction of a conditional preference structure that permits players to modulate their preference orderings as functions of the preferences of other players. Embedding this expanded preference structure in a formal and graphical framework provides a systematic approach for characterizing a complex society. The result is an influence network that allows conditional preferences to propagate through the community, resulting in an emergent social model which characterizes all of the social relationships that exist and which leads to solution concepts that account for both group and individual interests. The Ultimatum game is presented as an example of how social influence can be modeled with conditional preferences.
Stating Preference for the Ethereal but Choosing the Concrete: How the Tangibility of Attributes Affects Attribute Weighting in Value Elicitation and Choice

Marketers routinely make use of stated consumer preferences and the relative attribute-importance weights implied by these preferences when making decisions on issues such as advertising messages and product design. Using this information as a basis for managerial decision making is risky, though, if stated preferences diverge from actual choices. Practical evidence that such a divergence is of concern is provided by the current trend toward the use of stated choice-based conjoint analysis. This article examines differences between the attribute-importance weights consumers use during value elicitation and the attribute weights revealed to influence actual choice. The results of an empirical analysis of automobile stated preference and purchase decisions, and an experiment and subsequent qualitative analysis of wine choice, converge to suggest that consumers’ attribute weightings differ in value elicitation versus choice in a reliable manner. Specifically, we demonstrate a tangibility effect —the tendency for tangible attributes to be weighted relatively more heavily than intangible attributes in choice as compared to in value elicitation. The process underlying the tangibility effect is discussed, as are the implications for researchers and managers.
Four Observations on Modern International Commercial Policy under Floating Exchange Rates

This paper describes the essential similarity between "modern" commercial policy, with its rent-like revenues, and capital transfers. Import barriers are shown to have consequently ambiguous effects on nominal and real exchange rates. The paper also examines some important supply-side welfare Costs and consequences of import barriers through their influence on current asset prices and future capital formation. The model on which the observations are based is an aggregated fixed-endowment, full-employment, general-equilibrium model similar to those used in the pure theory of international trade, with financial capital and foreign exchange markets that are integrated in a manner consistent with the asset/portfolio-balance approach to exchange rates. The model is empirically calibrated to reflect the U.S. and the rest of the world in the early 1980's. In this empirical stylization, U.S. import barriers are shown (1) to reduce national consumption possibilities more significantly than is usually thought to be the case; (ii) to discourage U.S. physical capital formation; and (iii) to have significant yet variable effects on exchange rates, where the variability depends on the distribution between the U.S. and the rest of the world of the rent-like revenues implicit in the import barriers. It is notable that the more favorable this distribution to the U.S. the larger is the dollar depreciation caused by import barriers.
Contracting Around RUAA: Default Rules, Mandatory Rules, and Judicial Review of Arbitral Awards

By specifying that its provisions generally are default rules and listing particular exceptions, the Revised Uniform Arbitration Act (“RUAA”) provides much needed certainty and avoids unnecessary litigation, at least compared to the Federal Arbitration Act, which does not always identify which of its provisions are default rules. In one important respect, however, RUAA jettisons that valuable certainty. The RUAA drafters left open (or at least sought to leave open) the question whether parties can contract to expand the grounds for judicial review of arbitration awards beyond those set out in the statute. In other words, the drafters purported not to resolve the extent to which judicial review standards are default rules under RUAA. This article argues that parties may be able to obtain court review of arbitral errors of law under RUAA by defining legal errors as beyond the scope of the arbitrators’ authority. A court then can vacate an award on the basis of legal error under the statutory ground that the arbitrators exceeded their authority. If so, then the RUAA standards for judicial review are default rules (at least in part), and parties can contract around those standards even though RUAA does not clearly so provide.
The Cultural Defense

Because of immigration in the West, increased cultural diversity poses a variety of problems for the criminal justice system. This paper examines whether a so-called “cultural defense” ought to be allowed as a freestanding defense to a criminal charge. Such a defense would “negate or mitigate criminal responsibility where acts are committed under a reasonable good-faith belief in their propriety, based on the actor's cultural heritage or tradition.” The cultural defense, as a formal defense, and the use of cultural evidence in order to buttress one of the traditional defenses, are distinguished. Three cases are discussed to illustrate the issues. The possible similarity of the cultural defense to an ignorance or mistake of law defense is then considered. The latter is accepted by such theorists as Gunther Arzt and George P. Fletcher and also apparently in German law, but it is rejected by Jerome Hall on the ground that it undermines the objectivity of the criminal law. The similarity, however, is shown not to hold. It is concluded that a freestanding cultural defense should not be allowed.
EVENT STUDIES AND THE LAW: PART II - Empirical Studies of Corporate Law

This article is the second part of a review of the event study methodology, which has proved to be one of the most successful uses of econometrics in policy analysis. In this part we focus on the methodology's application to corporate law and corporate governance issues. Event studies have played an important role in the making of corporate law and in corporate law scholarship. The reason for this input is twofold. First, there is a match between the methodology and subject matter: the goal of corporate law is to increase shareholder wealth, and event studies provide a metric for measurement of the impact upon stock prices of policy decisions. Second, because the participants in corporate law debates share the objective of corporate law, to adopt policies that enhance shareholder wealth, their disagreements are over the means to achieve that end. Hence, the discourse can be empirically informed. The article concludes by sketching the methodology's use in evaluating the economic effects of regulation. While event studies' usefulness for policy analysis is by now familiar in the corporate law setting, we hope that our two-part review will suggest appropriate applications to other fields of law. Copyright 2002, Oxford University Press.
Gender Bias, Credit Constraints and Time Allocation in Rural India

This paper examines the impact of a child's gender on the time allocation of rural Indian households for the five-year period subsequent to its birth. A theoretical model generates predictions for the effect of the birth of a boy relative to a girl (i.e., the gender shock) on household behaviour when the household is liquidity constrained and when it is not. The results from the empirical analysis are consistent with the case in which poorer households are liquidity constrained and less poor households are not. The interpretation of the finding that women in both groups of households work less subsequent to the birth of a boy relative to a girl differs in these two cases.
Liberty Without Capacity: Why States Should Ban Adolescent Driving

The Center for the Study of Young Drivers at the Highway Safety Research Center of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently conducted a study on teenage drivers. The study revealed that the main issue that leads to car accidents for teenagers is not "teenage irresponsibility," but lack of driving experience in different road conditions. A 2014 *Georgia Law Review* Article by Vivian E. Hamilton assessed adolescent driving in the United States. Citing that car crashes kill more teenagers each year than any other cause, and that the United States is the earliest-licensing nation in the developed world, Hamilton argued that states should ban adolescent driving altogether.
THE MOBILIZING POWER OF GRIEVANCES: APPLYING LOSS AVERSION AND OMISSION BIAS TO SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

A grant from the National Science Foundation helped support this research (award number 1102555).
Has the Quest to Quelch Piracy Gone Too Far?: Government Overreach in Forfeiture of Linking Websites

Recently, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has been seizing domain names as part of its “Operation: In Our Sites” initiative to combat online piracy. The procedure allows seizure based on a warrant asserting probable cause that copyright infringement is facilitated on these sites. The sites may be administratively forfeited if the domain owner does not contest the seizure. If the domain owner does contest the seizure, the government must file a judicial forfeiture action. Recently, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren has proposed a reevaluation of the procedures used in seizing domain names. While the First Amendment and Due Process implications of civil forfeiture procedures have been thoroughly debated, the specific topic this paper addresses is whether the government can sufficiently allege a cause of action justifying forfeiture of domain names of linking websites under the copyright infringement statutes, 17 U.S.C. § 506 and 18 U.S.C. § 2319. Particularly, this paper looks at the case of Rojadirecta, one of the rare cases of a domain owner filing a petition for the release of its seized domain name. Rojadirecta was a linking website, meaning that it does not directly infringe upon copyrights but merely serves as a place where direct infringers can post links to their sites. Eventually, the government voluntarily dismissed its case and returned the domain to Rojadirecta, but this paper argues that, under applicable copyright law, the government could not have succeeded in using civil forfeiture to take down linking websites. This paper concludes by looking at proposed copyright law reform and suggesting how new laws could affect the merits of a civil forfeiture action.
Countercyclical Regulation and Its Challenges

Following the 2008 financial crisis, countercyclical regulation emerged as one of the most promising breakthroughs in years to halting destructive cycles of booms and busts. This new approach to systemic risk posits that financial regulation should clamp down during economic expansions and ease during economic slumps in order to make financial firms more resilient and to prick asset bubbles before they burst. If countercyclical regulation is to succeed, however, then policymakers must confront the institutional and legal challenges to that success. This Article examines five major challenges to robust countercyclical regulation – data gaps, early response systems, regulatory inertia, industry capture, and arbitrage – and discusses a variety of techniques to defuse those challenges. + Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor, Boston College Law School, and former Assistant Director for Mortgage Markets, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Evidence of purchasing power parity for the floating regime period

Abstract This paper investigates the PPP hypothesis within industrialized countries for the post-Bretton Woods period via two panel unit root tests, the DF–GLS–SUR and the ADF–SUR tests, respectively developed by Lopez [A panel unit root with good power in small samples. Econometric Reviews, in press] and Levin et al. [2002. Unit root tests in panel data: asymptotic and finite-sample properties. Journal of Econometrics 108 (1), 1–24]. Both approaches allow for data specific serial and contemporaneous correlation. While both tests provide PPP evidence for the post-1973 period, the more powerful DF–GLS–SUR test demonstrates consistently stronger results, especially for the 1973–1998 period.
The Determinants of REIT CEO Compensation

Executive compensation has garnered much attention in the last decade from both academicians and practitioners. We examine the relationship between increase in CEO compensation, industry-specific performance measures, and stock return for the years 1993–1999 in the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) industry. We find evidence that compensation evaluation is related to stock returns, and to changes in Real Estate Investment and Funds from Operation for the years 1997, 1998, and 1999. Furthermore, we document a negative relation between CEO raise and age. We find no link between compensation and earnings per share, whether the REIT is self-managed, or type of property in which the REIT specializes.
Contrived Conflicts: The Supreme Court Versus the Basics of Intellectual Property Law

Asked by conference organizers to consider the impact of the Supreme Court on intellectual property this millennium, this essay offers the view that the Supreme Court’s intellectual property decisions by its present members generally are premised upon what may be viewed as contrived conflicts among bodies of law. Proceeding from this faulty foundation, the Court’s efforts to resolve those conflicts subsequently have generated bodies of judge-made law that frustrate in important ways the basic statutory framework of intellectual property law. Examples of cases employing this problematic approach include Bonito Boats, Dastar, Warner-Jenkinson, Festo, TrafFix, and Holmes. Avoiding the † Kieff is Associate Professor and 2003-04 Israel Treiman Faculty Research Fellow at Washington University School of Law and 2003-04 W. Glenn Campbell & Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and Robert Eckles Swain National Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. The author gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Hoover Institution and the Washington University School of Law, as well as from organizers of the 2004 William Mitchell Law Review Intellectual Property Law Conference “The Impact of the Supreme Court on Intellectual Property Law this Millennium” held April 24, 2004, in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Progress & Freedom Foundation and the Tech Center at George Mason University School of Law for jointly sponsoring the conference “Promoting Markets in Creativity: Copyright in the Internet Age,” June 10, 2003 in Washington, D.C., where portions of this paper were first presented. The author also gratefully acknowledges intellectual contributions from participants in those conferences, in addition to more detailed comments provided by Michael Abramowicz, John Barton, Richard Epstein, Jeffrey Gram, Paul Goldstein, Wendy Gordon, Bruce Kobayashi, Marshall Leaffer, Stanley Liebowitz, Charles McManis, Michael Meurer, R. Carl Moy, Mark Lemley, Ruth Gana Okediji, Troy Paredes, Kenneth Port, Pam Samuelson, Sharon Sandeen, Niels Schaumann, David Welkowitz, and John Witherspoon. JEL Classifications: K11, K20, K21, K29, K39, O31, O33, O34. Correspondence may be sent to fskieff.91@alum.mit.edu (permanent address). 1 Kieff: Contrived Conflicts: The Supreme Court versus the Basics of Intel Published by Mitchell Open Access, 2004 KIEFF-CX.DOC 7/30/2004 4:59:10 PM 1718 WILLIAM MITCHELL LAW REVIEW [Vol. 30:5 contrivances not only would have left intact congressional action that the Court has not held to have been improper in its own right, but it also would have better promoted the normative goals these regimes were designed to achieve. Far from suggesting any particular business outcome in any of these cases, the essay proceeds from a comparative institutional analysis to show how decisional frameworks different from the ones the Court used would better achieve the basic goals and institutions of the particular statutory regimes of intellectual property law at issue in these cases.
Initial Retention of External Accountants in Startup Ventures

This study investigates the determinants of the initial retention of external accountants by new US startups. We test several arguments related to agency and credibility needs, financial activity and complexity, and accounting support and advice. Consistent with financial activity and complexity arguments, we find that intended scale and bank account activity are positively associated with both the actual and intended retention of an accountant. Comparing the decision to retain an accountant with the retention of another professional service, retaining a lawyer, we find many of the same factors to be significant. However, we find that lawyers are more likely to be retained during heightened uncertainty, primarily given the role of lawyers with patent and intellectual property assistance. Overall, these results suggest that some of the determinants of external accountant retention contrast with the determinants of internal accounting resource adoption, which are primarily related to decision-making needs a...
The framing of financial windfalls and implications for public policy

Governments, employers, and companies provide financial windfalls to individuals with some regularity. Recent evidence suggests that the framing (or description) of these windfalls can dramatically influence their consumption. In particular, income described as a positive departure from the status quo (e.g., as a bonus) is more readily spent than objectively identical income described as a return to the status quo (e.g., as a rebate). Such findings are consistent with psychological accounts of decision making and should supplement existing economic models. These results have important implications for the marketing of such windfalls, and discussion focuses particularly on implications for government tax policies.
Heterogeneity and Stability: Bolster the Strong, Not the Weak

We first study a stylized model of self-fulfilling panic among agents with differing fragilities to strategic risk and show that depending on the severity of coordination problems, the panic trigger threshold can depend only on one type's fragility. We then present a model of systemic panic among financial institutions with heterogeneous fragilities to financial spillovers. Concerns about potential spillovers generate strategic interaction, triggering a pre-emption game in which one tries to exit the market before others to avoid spillovers. Although financial contagion originates in weaker institutions, systemic risk can critically depend on financial health of stronger in the contagion chain. In this case, bolstering the strong, rather than the weak, more effectively enhances systemic stability.
How Can Accounting Researchers Become More Innovative

SYNOPSIS: This essay is based on a presentation at the American Accounting Association Strategy Retreat in May 2011 on the assertion “Accounting research as of 2011 is stagnant and lacking in significant innovation that introduces fresh ideas and insights into our scholarly discipline.” It poses the question “How can accounting researchers become more innovative?” and discusses why accounting researchers may have become less innovative. It also outlines some changes in incentive structures and editorial processes needed to achieve greater innovation in accounting research. JEL Classifications: A11; A12; B23; C12; I23; J44; M4; O31.