cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
How the Biological/Social Divide Limits Disability and Equality

What is disability - a biological or social condition? In the conventional equality frameworks, the division between biology and social identity puts disability at the bottom of the formal equality hierarchy, but at the top of the substantive equality hierarchy. Compared with race and then gender, disability deserves the least protection against formal discrimination, on the theory that disadvantages are based on real and relevant functional differences more than on suspect social judgments. But turning to substantive equality, disability’s supposed greater biological basis justifies affirmative accommodation of difference, compared to the social differences of race, with gender in the middle as a mixture. But for both of these equality scales, the social versus biological division undermines the protection seemingly given to the identity at the top of the hierarchy. By adding sexual orientation to the hierarchy, and by showing how Kenji Yoshino’s analysis of “covering” destabilizes the biological-social division, I further explore the problematic nature of these hierarchies and disability’s position within them. Two contrasting areas of disability law show the limits of this theoretical biological and social divide. Many states’ workers’ compensation systems recently have embraced a biological model of disability benefits that focuses on the American Medical Association’s Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment. On closer examination, the AMA Guides concept of biological “impairment” is thoroughly dependent on social and normative judgments, and serves mainly to reduce protection of disability. In contrast, the Supreme Court interpreted the Americans with Disabilities Act with a social model that rejected “impairment” as the basis for defining disability, but that approach similarly served to rationalize reduced protection for disability. Instead, disability doctrine - and equality law in general - should be re-oriented to reject this central division between biological and social origins.
Monopoly Pricing in the Presence of Social Learning

A monopolist offers a product to a market of consumers with heterogeneous quality preferences. Although initially uninformed about the product quality, they learn by observing past purchase decisions and reviews of other consumers. Our goal is to analyze the social learning mechanism and its effect on the seller’s pricing decision. Consumers follow an intuitive, non-Bayesian decision rule. Under conditions that we identify, we show that consumers eventually learn the product’s quality. We show how the learning trajectory can be approximated in settings with high demand intensity via a mean-field approximation that highlights the dynamics of this learning process, its dependence on the price, and the market heterogeneity with respect to quality preferences. Two pricing policies are studied: a static price and one with a single price change. Finally, numerical experiments suggest that pricing policies that account for social learning may increase revenues considerably relative to policies that do not. This ...
STEMM: A general finite mixture structural equation model

This paper provides a general Structural Equation finite Mixture Model and algorithm (STEMM). Substantively, the model allows the researcher to simul­taneously treat heterogeneity and form groups in the context of a postulated causal (i.e., simultaneous equation regression) structure in which all the observables are measured with error. Methodologically, the model is more general than such sta­tistical methods as cluster analysis, confirmatory multigroup factor analysis, and multigroup structural equation models. In particular the general finite mixture model includes, as special cases, finite mixtures of simultaneous equations with feedback, confirmatory factor analysis, and confirmatory second-order factor models. We describe the statistical theory, present simulation evidence on the per­formance of the EM estimation algorithm, and apply the model to a psychological study on the role of emotion in goal-directed behavior. Finally we discuss several avenues for future research.
The Impact of Hedge Fund Activism on the Target Firm's Existing Bondholders

In contrast to previous studies documenting positive abnormal returns to target shareholders, we find that hedge fund activism significantly reduces bondholders' wealth. The average excess bond return is - 3.9% around the initial 13D filing, and is an additional - 4.5% over the remaining year. Excess bond returns are related inversely to subsequent changes in cash and assets (loss of collateral effects) and directly to changes in total debt. Confrontational campaigns and the acquisition of at least one seat on the target's board elicit more negative bond returns. We also find an expropriation of wealth from the bondholder to the shareholder. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com., Oxford University Press.
Weathering the Storm: Measuring Household Willingness-to-Pay for Risk-Reduction in Post-Katrina New Orleans

The city of New Orleans suffered extensive damage as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Rebuilding involves decisions on investment in protective measures. An exhaustive list of protective measures has been studied in planning documents, with public comment solicited in town hall meetings. In this study we employ a different approach to examine public sentiment toward the selection and investment in protective measures. Our study uses a stated preference choice experiment with a stratified sample to investigate individuals" willingness-to-pay for rebuilding New Orleans's man-made storm defenses, restoring natural storm protection, and improving evacuation options through a modernized transportation system. We target residents of the New Orleans metropolitan area as well as other U.S. citizens. Our results indicate that individuals are willing to pay for increased storm protection for New Orleans, but values differ among residents of the New Orleans metropolitan area and other U.S. citizens.
Empirical Analysis of Limit Order Markets

We provide empirical restrictions of a model of optimal order submissions in a limit order market. A trader’s optimal order submission in our model depends on the trader’s valuation for the asset and the trade os between order prices, execution probabilities and picking o risks. The optimal order submission strategy is a monotone function of a trader’s valuation for the asset. We use the monotonicity restriction to test if the traders follow the optimal order submission strategy in our sample, using the order prices, execution probabilities and picking o risks of the orders chosen by the traders in the sample. We compute a semiparametric test using a sample of order submissions from the Stockholm Stock Exchange. We do not reject the monotonicity restriction for buy orders or sell orders separately, but do reject the monotonicity restriction when we combine buy and sell orders. The expected payos from submitting limit orders away from the quotes are too low relative to the expected payos from submitting limit orders close to the quotes to rationalize all the observed order submissions in our sample.
Consumption Over the Life Cycle

This paper estimates a structural model of optimal life-cycle consumption expenditures in the presence of realistic labor income uncertainty. We employ synthetic cohort techniques and Consumer Expenditure Survey data to construct average age-profiles of consumption and income over the working lives of typical households across different education and occupation groups. The model fits the profiles quite well. In addition to providing reasonable estimates of the discount rate and risk aversion, we find that consumer behavior changes strikingly over the life cycle. Young consumers behave as buffer-stock agents. Around age 40, the typical household starts accumulating liquid assets for retirement and its behavior mimics more closely that of a certainty equivalent consumer. Our methodology provides a natural decomposition of saving and wealth into its precautionary and life-cycle components.
A Multiple Ideal Point Model: Capturing Multiple Preference Effects from Within an Ideal Point Framework

Abstract Previous research has suggested that households and individuals may possess multiple preferences for a given product category. These multiple preferences may be the result of multiple individuals in a household, different uses and usage occasions, and/or variety seeking. As such, single ideal point models that assume a single invariant ideal point may be operating from a false and misleading assumption. We propose a multiple ideal point model to capture these multiple preference effects. The basic premise of the model is that consumers may possess a set of ideal points, each of which represents a distinct preference. At any given purchase occasion, one of these points is “activated” with some probability, and choices are made with respect to its characteristics. In this article, the authors assess the multiple ideal point model and an associated estimation procedure with respect to the model’s ability to recover a true choice structure. The authors then empirically test the model on Information R...
A Behavioral Approach To Stock Pricing

Recent literature in behavioral finance has contradicted the notion of efficiency of markets. Greater emphasis on how psychological biases influence both the behavior of investors and asset prices has led to a strong debate among proponents of behavioral finance and neoclassical finance. This has created the need to study how psychology affects financial decisions in households, markets and organizations. This study conducts a pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) model using the fixed effects estimator to investigate the linkage between investor sentiment and stock prices for 35 firms belonging to three different industries over a time period of 56 years, from 1950 to 2005. The findings suggest that investor sentiment does not significantly affect the stock prices in this sample.
Bias in Quarterly Estimates of Annual Effective Tax Rates and Earnings Management

ABSTRACT: We investigate whether quarterly annual effective tax rate (ETR) estimates are systematically biased in comparison to year-end actual ETRs. We find that estimated annual ETRs in the first, second, and third quarters are systematically higher than year-end ETRs. We then investigate whether firms' overstatement of quarterly ETRs creates slack that is used for earnings management. We find that quarterly ETR increases are more likely to be reversed in subsequent quarters when firms would have missed their analysts' earnings forecast absent the reversal. Finally, we show that in the years subsequent to the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), changes in the ETR continue to be associated with earnings management. These results, documenting patterns of annual ETR estimates and revisions, contribute to research about how earnings management is accomplished. JEL Classifications: H25; M41.
Tracking down distress risk

Abstract This paper shows that exposure to aggregate distress risk is the underlying source of the premiums for the Fama-French size (SMB) and value (HML) factors. Using a unique data set of aggregate business failures of both private and public firms from 1926 to 1997, I build portfolios that track news about future firm failures. These tracking portfolios optimally hedge aggregate distress risk and earn a Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) alpha of approximately −4% a year. Both HML and SMB predict changes in future failure rates. Small stocks have lower returns than large stocks and value stocks have lower returns than growth stocks when the market expects an increase in future failure rates. Finally, a two-factor model with the market and the tracking portfolio for aggregate distress as factors does as well as the Fama-French three-factor model in pricing the 25 size and book-to-market sorted portfolios.
A model with cosmological Bell inequalities

We discuss the possibility of devising cosmological observables which violate Bell's inequalities. Such observables could be used to argue that cosmic scale features were produced by quantum mechanical effects in the very early universe. As a proof of principle, we propose a somewhat elaborate inflationary model where a Bell inequality violating observable can be constructed.
VPIN and the flash crash

Abstract The Volume-Synchronized Probability of Informed trading (VPIN) metric is introduced by Easley, Lopez de Prado, and O'Hara (2011a) as a real-time indicator of order flow toxicity. They find the measure useful in monitoring order flow imbalances and conclude it may help signal impending market turmoil, exemplified by historical high readings of the metric prior to the flash crash. More generally, they show that VPIN is significantly correlated with future short-term return volatility. In contrast, our empirical investigation of VPIN documents that it is a poor predictor of short run volatility, that it did not reach an all-time high prior, but rather after, the flash crash, and that its predictive content is due primarily to a mechanical relation with the underlying trading intensity. We also investigate a later incarnation of VPIN, stemming from Easley, Lopez de Prado, and O'Hara (2012a) , and reach similar conclusions. In general, we stress that adoption of any specific metric for order flow toxicity should be contingent on satisfactory performance relative to suitable benchmarks, exemplified by the analysis we undertake here.
Competing with menus of tariff options

The nature of numerous strategies of firms is often discrete or countable. This adds difficulty to measuring and testing for the existence of complementarities among several strategies. This paper introduces a generalized multivariate count data model that allows estimating correlations of any sign among the pricing decisions of competing firms in a manner that is robust to the existence of unobserved heterogeneity leading to either over- and underdispersion of the distribution of counts. Thus, it is possible to overcome a major challenge in testing whether two decisions are strategic complements or substitutes, namely, dealing with the effect of unobserved heterogeneity. I study how firms actually compete in nonlinear tariffs by analyzing the interrelation between the incumbent and entrant's decisions to offer a given number of tariff options. Results document the existence of complementarity among tariff options regardless of whether they are dominated or not. This result supports the view that the implementation of nonlinear tariffs by means of a menu of self-selecting two-part tariffs has some strategic competitive value. (JEL: C35, D43, M21)
Overseers or the Deciders – The Courts in Administrative Law

For the second time in a short period, Professors Miles and Sunstein have brought powerful tools of statistical analysis and diligent coding of circuit court of appeals opinions together to demonstrate what the Realists long ago taught us to suspect, that significant elements of judging can be explained in terms of the jurist’s political world view—that the tension between law and politics is alive in judicial work as elsewhere and that it is only an aspiration to seek a world of laws and not of men. Elements of their work, though, appear as if in criticism of contemporary doctrine rather than as confirmation of human nature. Without for a moment wishing to deny that we are better served by judges who do not permit themselves the freedom to enact personal politics, 1 and that the “tenacity of a taught tradition” 2 and appropriately framed legal propositions purporting to constrain such preferences serve us well, I want to suggest that in targeting two notable Supreme Court cases, each approaching its silver anniversary (Chevron U.S.A. Inc v NRDC 3 and Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association v State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co 4 ), they may mistake the context in which the inevitable presently appears for its cause. The issues these cases address are not new. And the cases establish a more reasonable framework for the appropriate relationship between executive and judicial action than Professors Miles and Sunstein suggest.
Financing Risk and Innovation

We provide a model of investment in new ventures that demonstrates why some places, times, and industries should be associated with a greater degree of experimentation by investors. Investors respond to financing risk, a forecast of limited future funding, by modifying their focus to finance less innovative firms. In equilibrium, financing risk disproportionately impacts innovative ventures with the greatest real option value by creating a trade-off between protecting the firm from financing risk and maximizing its real option value. We propose that extremely novel technologies may need “hot” financial markets to get through the initial period of discovery or diffusion. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance.
Lessons of the Financial Crisis for the Design of National Pension Systems

The recent financial crisis and the historical record suggest important lessons about the design of national pension systems. First, wide fluctuations in asset returns make it hard for well-informed savers to select a saving rate or a sensible investment strategy for defined-contribution (DC) pensions. Workers who follow identical investment strategies but who retire a few years apart can receive DC pensions that are startlingly unequal. Second, it is hard for ordinary workers, as opposed to optimal planners, to make sensible choices about portfolio allocation. Their investment errors mean that actual returns fall short of the theoretical returns that could be earned by well-informed, disciplined investors. (JEL codes: G01, G11, H55 and J26) Copyright The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Munich. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.
Strategic silence, insider selling and litigation risk ☆

Prior work finds that managers beneficially time their purchases, but not sales, prior to forecasts. Focusing on if (as opposed to when) a forecast is given, we link insider selling to silence in advance of earnings disappointments. This raises the question of whether the absence of incriminating trading drives reductions in litigation risk potentially attributed to warnings. We find that the absence of a warning combined with the presence of selling exacerbates the consequences associated with the individual behaviors. Yet, selling prior to a warning typically does not offset all of the warning׳s benefit. In so doing, we supply the first robust evidence of a litigation benefit associated with warning.
Organization Design for Business Ecosystems

The modern corporation has long been the central focus of the field of organization design. Such firms can be likened to nation-states: they have boundaries that circumscribe citizen-employees, and they engage in production and trade. But individual corporations are no longer adequate to serve as the primary unit of analysis. Over the years, systems of distributed innovation – so-called business ecosystems – have become increasingly prevalent in many industries (Adner & Kapoor, 2010; Iansiti & Levien, 2004; von Hippel, 1988). Ecosystems generally encompass numerous corporations, individuals, and communities that might be individually autonomous but related through their connection with an underlying, evolving technical system. In the future, I believe the key problem for organization design will be the management of distributed innovation in such dynamic ecosystems. Specifically, how should diverse entities be integrated into a coherent network that generates goods in the present and new designs for the future? To answer that question, organization designers must think about how to distribute property rights, people, and activities across numerous self-governing enterprises in ways that are advantageous for the group (ecosystem) as well as for the designer’s own firm or community.
Good Times or Bad Times? Investors' Uncertainty and Stock Returns

This paper investigates empirically the dynamics of investors’ beliefs and Bayesian uncertainty about the state of the economy as state variables that describe the time-variation in investment opportunities. Using measures of uncertainty constructed from the state probabilities estimated from two-state regime-switching models of aggregate market return and of aggregate output, I find a negative relationship between the level of uncertainty and asset valuations. This relationship shows substantial cross-sectional variation across portfolios sorted on size, book-to-market, and past returns, especially conditional on the state of the economy. I show that a conditional model with investors’ beliefs and an uncertainty risk factor is remarkably successful in explaining a large part of the cross-sectional variation in average portfolio returns. The uncertainty risk factor retains its incremental explanatory power when compared to other conditional models such as the conditional CAPM. (JEL G12, G14 and D80) Uncertainty is a central tenet of finance. Investors often do not have perfect knowledge of the processes associated with macro-level variables or stock dividends but instead must make intelligent estimates on key state variables using whatever information is available to them. As more data gradually become available, existing beliefs are revised into posterior beliefs that take into account the new information. This paper argues that when investors learn in this way, with each piece of new information over time changes in the variance of their own beliefs, or their Bayesian uncertainty, introduces a new source of
IMF Conditionality and Program Ownership : A Case for Streamlined Conditionality

Program conditionality and ownership are important considerations in the International Monetary Fund's current rethinking of program design. This paper contributes to the literature by developing a theory of program conditionality and ownership on the basis of Cumulative Prospect Theory. The policymaker may value a set of programs, each with fewer conditions, more than an extended program with as many conditions. This valuation bias is greater in ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty) than under uncertainty. If greater valuation of a program engenders more explicit and implicit ownership, then programs with fewer conditions may have a better chance of success. Less is more.
Stock Return Predictability: Is it There?

We examine the predictive power of the dividend yields for forecasting excess returns, cash flows, and interest rates. Dividend yields predict excess returns only at short horizons together with the short rate and do not have any long-horizon predictive power. At short horizons, the short rate strongly negatively predicts returns. These results are robust in international data and are not due to lack of power. A present value model that matches the data shows that discount rate and short rate movements play a large role in explaining the variation in dividend yields. Finally, we find that earnings yields significantly predict future cash flows. (JEL C12, C51, C52, E49, F30, G12)
Child Prostitute or Victim of Trafficking

Is child prostitution a crime committed by minors, or against them? Federal laws on trafficking consider the prostitution of children to be akin to the crime of human trafficking, which raises questions about how states categorize child prostitution. At present, most jurisdictions' prostitution statutes fail to distinguish between adult and child prostitutes. Given the recent rise in state legislation geared toward punishing traffickers and protecting child victims of trafficking, it appears counterintuitive to retain state statutes that punish child prostitutes when the federal anti-trafficking stat- utes could protect those same minors. Highlighting the dichotomy between criminal and protected treatment of children who are prostituted, this article identifies gaps in both the law and social services and assesses public policy solutions designed to aid this vulnerable and growing population of commercially sexually abused children. The article argues that state legislation criminalizing child prostitution should change in light of trafficking legislation that treats children who are prostituted as victims of crime. Moreover, states should divert available anti-trafficking resources toward the rehabilitation and care of prostituted children regardless of their immigration status. Is prostitution a crime committed by minors, or against them? Is it both? These questions cut to the heart of this paper. In almost all fifty U.S. states, a minor's selling of him or herself for sex, or prostitution, is a criminal offense. By contrast, the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) considers all minors engaged in commercial sex acts as victims of trafficking.3 This inconsistency presents a problem because at the same time, federal and state statutes regarding prostitution do not distinguish be- tween adult and child prostitution and criminalize both. Given the recent rise in state legislation geared toward punishing traffickers and protecting child victims of trafficking, there is now a deep tension between prostitu- tion statutes and anti-trafficking statutes--at least as they pertain to the treatment of minors. This inconsistency is important because any particular outcome could be contingent upon which regime a law enforcement agency adopted. Keywords: Human trafficking Language: en
Accelerating option risk analytics in R using GPUs

Broadly, a major prerequisite for analytics applications is robustness to modeling idiosyncrasies. As a result, there is a demand for comprehensive model exploration and validation in high level statistical programming environments such as R. Many financial applications require on-demand processing, which in turn requires fast modeling and calibration computations. In this paper we describe our work on speeding up the calibration of a Heston stochastic volatility model, a financial application, on GPUs. The Heston volatility model is used extensively across the capital markets to price and measure the market risk of exchange traded financial options. However, a typical R based implementation of the Heston model calibration on a CPU does not meet the performance requirements for sub-minute level trading, i.e. mid to high frequency trading. The calibration of a Heston model is performed over M option data points which remains fixed during the calibration computation. The most computation intensive part of this computation is the ErrorFunction() which estimates the error between market observed and model option prices.We have implemented the ErrorFunction() using a MapReduce design pattern leading to efficient implementation on various architectures including GPUs. In this paper, we describe the implementation of a GPU optimized kernel for this computation that can be called by the R script performing the calibration process. For M = 1024 we demonstrate a factor of 760x improvement in the overall calibration time over the R sequential implementation by off-loading ErrorFunction() on a system with an Intel Core i5 processor and NVIDIA Tesla K20c (Kepler architecture) consisting of 2496 cores. Note that not all the performance gain is due to the GPU- partly it is due to the reduction in the overhead of R for the Heston model calculation. For comparison we also implemented the calibration code using C/C++. We observed a speed up of 230x for the GPU based implementation over the C/C++ indicating that a factor of 3.4x improvement is due to avoiding the R overhead for the Heston model calculation. However, the overall calibration time using R based optimization routines combined with the GPU off-loaded ErrorFunction() is comparable to a C/C++ GPU based calibration code.
The Community Income Theory of the Charitable Contributions Deduction

The charitable contributions deduction, a longstanding yet controversial feature of the Internal Revenue Code, has been justified under subsidy theories and tax-base theories. Focusing on the latter, this Article presents and explains a new tax-base theory in support of the charitable contributions deduction - the community income theory. This theory posits that some income, designated as community income, is properly excluded from the personal tax income base because it is more naturally attributed to the community than to the individual members of the community. Adopting the presumption that the community generally should be treated as a tax-exempt entity, this Article argues that both the charity income tax exemption and the charitable contributions deduction may be defended on the basis that they reflect the theoretically correct taxation of community income.
Disaster on the horizon: The price effect of sea level rise

Abstract Homes exposed to sea level rise (SLR) sell for approximately 7% less than observably equivalent unexposed properties equidistant from the beach. This discount has grown over time and is driven by sophisticated buyers and communities worried about global warming. Consistent with causal identification of long-horizon SLR costs, we find no relation between SLR exposure and rental rates and a 4% discount among properties not projected to be flooded for almost a century. Our findings contribute to the literature on the pricing of long-run risky cash flows and provide insights for optimal climate change policy.
Feedback and Motivation in Dynamic Tournaments

We investigate the choice of organizations to conduct interim performance evaluations in a dynamic tournament model. When workers do not dier in ability or ability does not in‡uence the marginal bene…t of eort, the choice between a full feedback and a no feedback policy depends on the shape of the cost of eort function. However, when eort and abil- ity are complementary, feedback policies have two competing eects: they inform workers about their relative position in the tournament (evaluation eect) as well as their relative productivity (motivation eect). In addition, performance appraisals create signal-jamming incentives for workers to exert eort prior to performance evaluation in order to in‡uence the inference process of their competitors in the tournament. The choice of the optimal feedback policy therefore depends on the relative strength of the evaluation, motivation and signal-jamming eects. The interplay of these eects also suggests a fundamental trade-oof interim performance evaluations between evaluation and motivation which is in accordance with both organizational behavior research and performance appraisal practices.
Pursuing a Single Mission (or Something Closer to It) for the IRS

It is often said that taxes are the lifeblood of government. As the nation’s tax collector, the IRS serves a critical function without which the federal government would cease to function. Yet the IRS is an agency in crisis — mired in scandal, chronically underfunded, overreliant on automation, and failing to provide taxpayers with the support they need to comply with the tax laws and pay their taxes. This Essay argues that a major contributor to the IRS’s woes is Congress’s penchant in recent decades for utilizing the IRS to administer social welfare and regulatory programs that are only tangentially related to the IRS’s traditional revenue raising mission. This Essay examines the consequences of that choice and calls for reforming the IRS’s organizational structure to segregate the revenue collection function from the biggest and most politically fraught social welfare and regulatory programs that currently fall within the IRS’s jurisdiction. To that end, this Essay suggests giving serious consideration either to spinning off several non-revenue raising programs from IRS oversight or to splitting up the IRS altogether and distributing its many functions among other new or existing agencies.
Of Truth, in Science and in Law

In 1966, the United States Supreme Court averred that “the basic purpose of a trial is the determination of truth.” In 1993, in the landmark ruling in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., that set new standards for the admissibility of expert scientific testimony, Justice Blackmun was a bit more cautious, writing that “there are important differences between the quest for truth in the courtroom and the quest for truth in the laboratory.” In my view, however, a trial—even a trial at which the main issue is a matter of fact, such as whether it was the defendant or someone else who pulled the trigger, or whether it was the drug in question or something else that caused the injury—isn’t exactly a “search for truth.” Rather, a trial is better described as a late stage of a whole process of determining a defendant’s guilt or liability: the stage at which, under the legal guidance of the court, advocates for each side present evidence in the light most favorable to their case, and the finder of fact sifts through it and assesses whether it establishes guilt or liability to the required degree of proof
Formal knowledge in accounting studies

This article draws on Pepper’s World Hypotheses to describe four different approaches to obtaining formal knowledge in accounting studies. These approaches are: formism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism.
Retributivism, moral education, and the liberal state

What is the connection between punishment and immorality? Deterrence theorists maintain that punishment scares people away from immorality. Retributive theorists claim that punishment makes sure that wrongdoers suffer in proportion to their moral iniquity and thereby give up any unfair advantage over others their wrongdoing may have won them.1 Moral education theorists—who seem to be dominating philosophical discussion these days—maintain that punishment functions to teach people what is wrong by, in Robert Nozick’s phrase, “connecting them with correct values.“2
Sophisticated Investors and Market Efficiency: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Abstract We study how sophisticated investors, when faced with shocks to information environment, change their information acquisition and trading behavior, and how these changes in turn affect market efficiency. We find that, after exogenous reductions of analyst coverage due to closures and mergers of brokerage firms, hedge funds scale up information acquisition, trade more aggressively, and earn higher abnormal returns on the affected stocks. The hedge fund participation also mitigates the impairment of market efficiency caused by coverage reductions. Overall, in a causal framework, our findings suggest a substitution effect between sophisticated investors and public information providers in facilitating market efficiency.
Revisiting truth or triviality: The external validity of research in the psychological laboratory.

Anderson, Lindsay, and Bushman (1999) compared effect sizes from laboratory and field studies of 38 research topics compiled in 21 meta-analyses and concluded that psychological laboratories produced externally valid results. A replication and extension of Anderson et al. (1999) using 217 lab-field comparisons from 82 meta-analyses found that the external validity of laboratory research differed considerably by psychological subfield, research topic, and effect size. Laboratory results from industrial-organizational psychology most reliably predicted field results, effects found in social psychology laboratories most frequently changed signs in the field (from positive to negative or vice versa), and large laboratory effects were more reliably replicated in the field than medium and small laboratory effects.
Converging to the lowest common denominator in physical health.

Objective: This research examines how access to information on peer health behaviors affects one’s own health behavior. Methods: We report the results of a randomized field experiment in a large corporation in which we introduced walkstations (treadmills attached to desks that enable employees to walk while working), provided employees with feedback on their own and their coworkers’ usage, and assessed usage over 6 months. We report how we determined our sample size, and all data exclusions, manipulations, and measures in the study. Results: Walkstation usage declined most when participants were given information on coworkers’ usage levels, due to a tendency to converge to the lowest common denominator—their least-active coworkers. Conclusion: This research demonstrates the impact of the lowest common denominator in physical activity: people’s activity levels tend to converge to the lowest-performing members of their groups. This research adds to our understanding of the factors that determine when the behavior of others impacts our own behavior for the better—and the worse.
To Achieve Biodiversity Goals, the New Forest Service Planning Rule Needs Effective Mandates for Best Available Science and Adaptive Management

The U.S. Forest Service and other federal agencies often face tough choices about how to reconcile competing congressional mandates for multiple use and environmental protection of public lands. The balance they achieve will determine the long-term health of many of our nation’s ecosystems and the sustainability of the invaluable services they perform. Providing agency scientists and managers with the flexibility and systemic incentives to intelligently address the questions they face is therefore crucial. As the Forest Service actively reworks its planning rule, past failures provide valuable lessons about where improvements to biodiversity protections are needed and what forms they should take. The 2010 decision by the Ninth Circuit in Native Ecosystems Council v. Tidwell highlights some of the problems inherent in the current system, including a management indicator species mandate that lacks scientific support, front-loaded environmental analysis which fails to facilitate learning and perpetuates unsuccessful practices, and a lack of transparency in Forest Service decision making that can render the National Forest Management Act’s biodiversity mandate judicially unenforceable. The new planning rule should address these deficiencies with strong requirements for native species viability, use of the best available science (including full disclosure of uncertainties), and a truly adaptive management framework based on ongoing monitoring, frequent reevaluation, and changed practices when failures occur. While the draft rule issued in February 2011 takes tentative steps in this direction, it does not achieve the meaningful, enforceable changes needed.
The Dynamics of the Management-Shareholder Conflict

This article investigates the distribution of equity ownership between entrenched management and dispersed outsiders when management has the ability to manipulate the cash flows and when it is costly for equity holders to prove managerial wrongdoing in court. Management chooses the distribution of equity ownership so as to maximize private benefits against the risk of potential control challenges. When shareholders are long-term oriented, then outside shares trade at a premium over the value to management, and management is inclined to sell off its equity stake to dispersed outsiders. When shareholders are short-term oriented, then outside shares trade at a discount below their value to management, and disciplinary pressure can be substantially reduced via strategic share purchases. Changes in the cost of capital drive a wedge between entrenched management's and dispersed outsider's valuation of shares. Management exercises its option to buy (sell) shares when the option is in the money: when management values shares more (less) than outsiders do. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.
Cost Stickiness and Core Competency: A Note*

Using data from Ontario hospitals, we investigate the conjecture that the stickiness of costs would be greater for functions that relate to an organization's core competency. We find operating costs for the hospital as a whole are sticky. Moreover, we find higher stickiness in costs pertaining to patient care relative to costs in other functions. Indeed, there is no evidence of stickiness in the operating costs of support departments that are peripherally related to the hospital's mission.
The Generalized Excess Burden of Taxation

A generalized measure of the excess burden of a tax system is proposed which integrates the distribution of taxes, along with standard efficiency and compliance costs, as a source of excess burden. In the absence of compliance and efficiency costs, the generalized excess burden measures the excess burden of regressive taxation, and provides a useful index for ranking the regressivity of different tax systems. Data from standard tax incidence studies are used to calculate and illustrate the generalized excess burden. Also, illustrative calculations of the generalized excess burden where taxes distort the choice between goods and leisure demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed measure.
Natural Resources, Congestion, and the Feminist Future: Aspects of Frischmann's Theory of Infrastructure Resources

Brett Frischmann has developed an intriguing general theory of fundamental infrastructure resources, arguing that they should be managed through open and nondiscriminatory access, with no private property-based right to exclude. He relies on the difficulty of developing accurate demand side signals for resources that are reused for nonrival and partially nonrival goods. The theory seems insightful as to information and the internet; but is significantly incomplete when applied to natural resources and environmental services, a third category which Frischmann includes in his theory. Natural resources and environmental services are typically congestible from normal uses that are centrally important. Consequently, open, nondiscriminatory access must be combined with other management strategies. The essay uses New Jersey's public trust doctrine as applied to beach access to demonstrate this point. The essay explores two other useful consequences of Frischmann's theory. It suggests that whatever promise there is in cultural environmentalism as a direction for intellectual property, it is unlikely to include quantification of the type being attempted with environmental services. As Frischmann argues, we cannot quantify the future value of these resources. Frischmann's theory is also applicable to the issue, in environmental policy, of intergenerational obligations. Here again, while short term quantification is plausible, it become problematic in the more distant future. The essay shows parallels between Frischmann's theory and arguments by Eva Feder Kittay on caregiving and Greg Alexander on communtarian obligations inherent in property, and suggests that Frischmann's theory, applied intergenerationally, sheds new light on moral arguments for stewardship obligations for the environment.
Do Saving Rules Influence Self‐Employed Households' Participation in Tax‐Deferred Retirement Plans?

Tax-deferred retirement (TDR) plans, including Simplified Employee Pensions, Savings Incentive Match Plan for Employees (SIMPLEs), and solo 401(k) plans, are examples of the tax advantaged plans the federal government has developed to encourage retirement savings among the self-employed. The Survey of Consumer Finances was used to determine if families with a self-employed worker who uses savings rules are more likely to contribute to TDR saving accounts. The analysis reveals savings rules have a positive effect on the likelihood of making retirement contributions, even after controlling for other known associated factors. Use of a financial planner, higher marginal tax rates, retirement savings motives, financial assets, and age until retirement are positively related to tax-deferred contributions. Greater liquidity constraints and future income uncertainty are negatively related to tax-deferred contributions. Establishing specific savings rules could help families of self-employed workers have the tools needed for retirement preparation.
The political advantage of soft budget constraints

Abstract Why do soft budget constraints persist in many post-socialist economies? We submit that the explanation may be to serve the political purpose of hiding the incumbent government's inability to promote job creation. We present a voting model with adverse selection in which politicians who are unable to implement productivity-enhancing reforms resort to firm subsides to decrease the rate of job destruction. We characterize the equilibrium size of subsidies and its composition into explicit and implicit subsidies. The equilibrium size and composition of subsides depend, among other things, on government rents, political transparency, political expectations, and firms' labour unit costs.
Economic Uncertainty, Aggregate Debt, and the Real Effects of Corporate Finance

To explore the real effects of corporate leverage on aggregate risk and welfare, I develop a tractable general equilibrium model with endogenous capital structure driven by time-varying economic uncertainty. Fitting the model leads to interesting insights as to the shortcomings of the standard paradigm. Contrary to the trade-off version, the empirical relation between uncertainty and aggregate leverage is positive. This association is not attributable to supply-side constraints or adjustment costs. An alternative formulation in which debt incentives rise with uncertainty can account for the observed dynamics of uncertainty, credit spreads and leverage. This version, unlike the trade-off model, implies that the real effects of debt on the equilibrium can become severely negative.
Hierarchical Methodology Approach to SOC Design: A Comprehensive Look

The design scale of a chip has increased many folds in the last few years and shows a continuous exponential trend. This is made possible by the reduction in transistor size and an evolving process technology. As a result, it is possible to move to SoC technology (System on Chip-A single die consisting of multiple subsystems) rather than a traditional ASIC. This has obviously resulted in an increase in the instance/gate count and the functionality of the chip resulting in a multi core subsystems based designs. Hence software scalability is needed to support the increasing complexity in the function of the chip and the related timing analysis and operations based on it. Originally for small ASICS flat implementation was sufficient and was most accurate. For SoC’s it is replaced with a modular approach in handling designs which is now is further improved for accuracy using the concept of Interface Models that have various degrees of edit ability and accompanying flows. This paper starts with flat description ‘of flow implementation traditionally used by EDA tool companies and then go on to comprehensively describes hierarchical implementation flows and their artifacts like, models, post assembly ECO, context views, feasibility flows among others. We are also going to look at advances in the tool technology of timing graph reduction and physical data reduction that enables new flow implementations and can be applied to both hierarchical and flat methodologies.