cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Does Weak Governance Cause Weak Stock Returns? An Examination of Firm Operating Performance and Investors' Expectations

We investigate Gompers, Ishii, and Metrick’s (2003) finding that firms with weak shareholder rights exhibit significant stock market underperformance. If the relation between poor governance and poor returns is causal, we expect that the market is negatively surprised by the poor operating performance of weak governance firms. We find that firms with weak shareholder rights exhibit significant operating underperformance. However, analysts’ forecast errors and earnings announcement returns show no evidence that this underperformance surprises the market. Our results are robust to controls for takeover activity. Overall, our results do not support the hypothesis that weak governance causes poor stock returns. WHETHER CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AFFECTS FIRM PERFORMANCE is a matter of much study and debate. In an important and widely cited recent paper, Gompers, Ishii, and Metrick (GIM, 2003) find for the period 1990 to 1999 that firms with strong shareholder rights have risk-adjusted stock returns that are 8.5% higher per year than those of firms with weak shareholder rights. A puzzling feature of the paper is that the authors find persistent stock market underperformance for firms with weak shareholder rights, but they do not find significant underperformance in firm operating performance, which they measure with accounting
Effects of accounting conservatism on investment efficiency and innovation

Abstract We study how biases in financial reporting affect managers' incentives to develop innovative projects and to make appropriate investment decisions. Conservative reporting practices impose stricter verification standards for recognizing good news, and reduce the chance that risky innovations will lead to favorable future earnings reports. Holding all else constant, more conservative reporting therefore weakens the manager's incentive to work on innovative ideas, consistent with informal arguments in the extant literature. However, all else does not stay constant because the manager's pay plan will change in response to changes in the accounting system. We show that under optimal contracting, more conservative accounting does not stifle innovation in organizations, but rather increases incentives for innovation, as long as conservatism reduces the risk of an overstatement.
Raman study of Fano interference in p-type doped silicon

As the silicon industry continues to push the limits of device dimensions, tools such as Raman spectroscopy are ideal to analyze and characterize the doped silicon channels. The effect of inter-valence band transitions on the zone center optical phonon in heavily p-type doped silicon is studied by Raman spectroscopy for a wide range of excitationwavelengths extending from the red (632.8 nm) into the ultra-violet (325 nm). The asymmetry in the one-phonon Raman lineshape is attributed to a Fano interference involving the overlap of a continuum of electronic excitations with a discrete phonon state. We identify a transition above and below the one-dimensional critical point (E1 = 3.4 eV) in the electronic excitation spectrum of silicon. The relationship between the anisotropic silicon band structure and the penetration depth is discussed in the context of possible device applications.
Behavioral biases and investor performance

Research indicates that individual investors trade excessively and underperform the market indices, Barber and Odean 2000). The purpose of this paper is to help explain which behavioral biases, if any, can explain this result using a simulation approach. Results indicate that putting too much weight on the current environment, anchoring, is the largest factor in explaining individual investor underperformance. In addition, loss aversion is the largest factor to explain excessive trading. When these two biases are combined trading activity and underperformance are heightened.
Ornamental Repugnancy: Identitarian Islam and the Iraqi Constitution

For nearly six years after the enactment of Iraq’s final constitution, the Federal Supreme Court of Iraq did not render a single ruling respecting the conformity of any law to the “settled rulings of Islam” despite being empowered to do precisely that under Article 2 of the Iraqi Constitution. While since then there has been more activity along these lines, the effect of the so-called repugnancy clause is on that is swiftly devolving from a matter that was of some importance during constitutional negotiations into one that is more symbolic than real – an assertion of identity, primarily of the Islamic variety (though when combined with Article 92, to some extent of the Shi’i Islamic variety) – more than a phrase of legal substance. Iraqis appear to have reached a careful, unspoken consensus, that irrespective of the extent to which Islam or Islamic law is to be relevant in Iraq, the judiciary is not the institution best equipped to address questions of Islamicity of law, and thus Article 2, and indeed the very notion of repugnancy, is, at best, marginal in terms of its legal effect. The purpose of this Article is to explain how this came to be.
Variance trading and market price of variance risk

This paper develops a new approach for variance trading. We show that the discretely-sampled realized variance can be robustly replicated under very general conditions, including when the price can jump. The replication strategy specifies the exact timing for rebalancing in the underlying. The deviations from the optimal schedule can lead to surprisingly large hedging errors. In the empirical application, we synthesize the prices of the variance contract on S&P 500 index over the period from 01/1990 to 12/2009. We find that the market variance risk is priced, its risk premium is negative and economically very large. The variance risk premium cannot be explained by the known risk factors and option returns.
A note on the use of Markov chains to analyze the off‐peak season provision of guided tours to tourists

In this note, we provide answers to two hitherto unstudied questions in the tourism literature. Specifically, we first show how the theory of discrete-time Markov Chains (DTMCs) can be used to effectively model and analyze the problem of providing guided tours to tourists during the off-peak season. Next, we model the existence of a capacity constraint and then show how DTMC theory can be used to derive a metric of interest to an optimizing tour providing firm, namely, the long run fraction of tourists to whom the firm under study is unable to provide tours. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
BANKS' PRECAUTIONARY CAPITAL AND CREDIT CRUNCHES

This paper develops a bank model to study supply-driven contractions in credit or credit crunches. In the model, the bank is affected by financial frictions in raising external funds. These frictions imply that the bank repairs its balance sheet only gradually following a negative shock that weakens the bank's capital position. Consequently, there is persistency in the response of bank lending even when the original shock (productivity or interest rate) is i.i.d. The nonlinear nature of these financial frictions also generates (i) a precautionary motive even with risk-neutral shareholders: the bank increases its desired level of capital if risk increases; (ii) an asymmetric response of lending: negative disturbances can have a bigger impact than positive ones; and (iii) volatility clustering in risk spreads and the bank's share price.
Toward a Lockean Moral Justification of Legal Protection of Intellectual Property

In this Article, I attempt to show the legitimacy of intellectual property protection by articulating a new formulation of what I call an argument from investment. The argument proceeds in Lockean fashion by identifying something of moral significance that the content creator has invested into creating new content. I then attempt to identify morally significant interests of other people in content created by someone else. Next I attempt to weigh the comparative importance of these various moral interests, arguing that the interests of content-creator wins in at least one case -- content wanted for entertainment. The two other more difficult cases I consider are content needed to survive or minimally compete in a global economy created by the affluent world and content needed by persons to thrive in all the ways that human beings ought to thrive. I then make an argument that legal protection of intellectual property is, as a matter of political morality, justified in cases of content wanted for entertainment and in many cases of content needed to thrive or flourish in morally significant ways.
Are all analysts created equal? Industry expertise and monitoring effectiveness of financial analysts ☆

Abstract We examine whether analysts’ prior industry experience influences their ability to serve as effective external firm monitors. Our analyses of firms’ financial disclosure quality, executive compensation and CEO turnover decisions portray a consistent picture that related pre-analyst industry experience is of critical importance for analysts to play an effective monitoring role. Coverage by analysts with such experience is associated with reduced earnings management, lower probability of committing financial misrepresentation, less CEO excess compensation, and higher performance sensitivity of CEO turnover. We also provide evidence on several plausible mechanisms through which industry expert analysts exert monitoring efforts and limit managerial opportunism.
Homeownership in the immigrant population

Abstract This paper analyzes the determinants of homeownership in immigrant households over the 1980–2000 period. The study finds that immigrants have lower homeownership rates than natives and that the homeownership gap widened significantly during that period. The differential location decisions of immigrant and native households, as well as the changing national origin mix of the immigrant population, helps explain much of the homeownership gap. The evidence also indicates that the growth of ethnic enclaves in major American cities could become an important factor in increasing immigrant demand for owner-occupied housing in many metropolitan areas.
A Contractual Approach to Shareholder Oppression Law

According to standard law and economics, minority shareholders in closely held corporations must bargain against opportunism by controlling shareholders before investing. Put simply, you made your bed, now you must lie in it. Yet, most courts offer a remedy for shareholder oppression, often premised on the notion that controlling shareholders owe fiduciary duties to the minority or must honor the minority’s reasonable expectations. Thus, law and economics, the dominant mode of corporate law scholarship, appears irreconcilably opposed to minority shareholder protection, a defining feature of the existing law of close corporations. This Article contends that a more nuanced theory of contract - freed from the limiting assumptions of standard law and economics - offers a persuasive justification for judicial protection of vulnerable minority shareholders. Moreover, although courts often describe the shareholder relationship in fiduciary terms, contract theory provides a more coherent explanation of current doctrine. The “contractarian” objection to shareholder protection poses a false choice between fairness and autonomy: by enforcing the implicit contractual obligations of good faith and fair dealing, courts protect minority shareholders from oppression and, at the same time, advance the values of private ordering.
Contract Law's Inefficiency

Neoclassical economic theory seems to aptly characterize contract law’s essence. Contracts enable two parties to reach a mutually beneficial agreement, thereby facilitating economically efficient transactions. It would seem to follow that the achievement of economic efficiency serves as contract law’s major goal.This article, however, examines an alternative hypothesis, that contract law is about enforcing inefficient bargains in order to provide enough security to facilitate cooperation among economic actors over long periods of time. On this account, contract law manages change over time, rather than achieves static efficiency. While recognizing that parties execute contracts in order to realize an efficient exchange, this article argues that contract law exists largely to enforce bargains that have become inefficient over time. It argues that inefficient contract law performs important macroeconomic functions in stimulating economic growth. The analysis developing this tension between efficient contracting and inefficient contract law casts some doubt on a major rationale for making efficiency the dominant goal for contract law. It also adds an important dimension to the existing explanation of the scholarly literature’s many inconsistencies in conclusions about the efficiency of contract rules. Finally, it helps explains the major exceptions to the rule that courts enforce inefficient contracts found in doctrines of impossibility and impracticability. This article endorses an economic dynamic approach to contact law in light of the tension between efficient contracting and inefficient contract law and describes the components of an economic dynamic analysis rooted in institutional economics. It shows that some of our leading scholars have already tacitly employed this approach effectively to shed new light on contract law.
When and How to Defer to the FDA: Learning from Michigan's Regulatory Compliance Defense

Should FDA approval of a drug affect products liability litigation? This remains one of the most debated questions in the law. Although the Supreme Court recently held that state tort law is not forced to defer to the FDA's finding that a drug is safe through preemption, states remain free to defer to the FDA by providing a regulatory compliance defense in state substantive law. Michigan made exactly such a choice in enacting the only complete defense for FDA-approved drugs. Compliance with FDA regulations conclusively establishes a lack of products liability under Michigan law. With preemption seemingly off the table after Wyeth v. Levine, advocates of greater deference to the FDA may use Michigan as a model for legislation in other states. Much can be learned from examining Michigan's law. Michigan's regulatory compliance defense properly recognizes that an FDA-approved drug carrying an FDA-approved label should not be considered defective. However, the statute's absolute immunity provides no compensation for injured parties in any circumstance, including situations where the FDA process has failed to protect consumers. This Note examines the question of FDA approval in state tort actions, discusses Michigan's answer to that question, and offers a proposal that would block most private actions against FDA-approved drugs (as Michigan has done), but would allow a state attorney general to bring suits in certain circumstances. The state attorney general model detailed in this Note stakes out a middle ground in the debate over the significance of FDA approval. The proposal recognizes the primacy of the FDA, but also recognizes the need for a back-up that can provide deterrence and compensation in the few cases that slip through the FDA's regulatory cracks.
Mark-to-market accounting and systemic risk: evidence from the insurance industry

One of the most contentious issues raised during the recent crisis has been the potentially exacerbating role played by mark-to-market accounting. Many have proposed the use of historical cost accounting, promoting its ability to avoid the amplification of systemic risk. We caution against focusing on the accounting rule in isolation, and instead emphasize the interaction between accounting and the regulatory framework. First, historical cost accounting, through incentives that arise via interactions with complex capital adequacy regulation, does generate market distortions of its own. Second, while mark-to-market accounting may indeed generate fire sales during a crisis, forward-looking institutions that rationally internalize the probability of fire sales are incentivized to adopt a more prudent investment strategy during normal times which leads to a safer portfolio entering the crisis. Using detailed, position- and transaction-level data from the U.S. insurance industry, we show that (a) market prices do serve as ‘early warning signals’, (b) insurers that employed historical cost accounting engaged in greater degrees of regulatory arbitrage before the crisis and limited loss recognition during the crisis, and (c) insurers facing mark-to-market accounting tend to be more prudent in their portfolio allocations. Our identification relies on the sharp difference in statutory accounting rules between life and P&C companies as well as the heterogeneity in implementation of these rules within each insurance type across U.S. states. Rather than promoting a shift away from market-based information, our results indicate that regulatory simplicity may be preferred to the complexity of risk-weighted capital ratios that gives rise, through interactions with accounting rules, to distorted risk-taking incentives and potential build-up of systemic risk.
Risky business : The allocation of capital

In models of the firm a mean-preserving spread in the price of output increases the expected value of profits and frequently the firm's demand for capital. These results seem to contradict the conventional wisdom from financial asset pricing models where an increase in an asset's risk decreases the demand for that asset. This paper shows that in general equilibrium an increase in exogenous risk usually increases expected output in that technology (the result from the theory of the firm), but it may also increase the risk of that technology (the results from finance). An increase in exogenous risk always reallocates capital toward less risky businesses.
Cointegration And The Causality Between Stock Prices And Exchange Rates Of The Korean Economy

This paper examines the relationship between stock prices and exchange rates in Korea. It is found that two time series are cointegrated by the Engle-Granger two-step cointegration test. The results show that domestic currency devaluation has a negative short-run effect on stock prices. It means that there is only one-way temporal linkage from exchange rates to stock prices.
Asymmetric timely loss recognition, adverse shocks to external capital, and underinvestment: Evidence from the collapse of the junk bond market

Abstract Using the collapse of the junk bond market in the early 1990s as an exogenous shock to external capital, I document, in both difference-in-differences and triple difference designs, that speculative-grade firms that recognize economic losses in a timely manner experience a smaller reduction in investment following the collapse. The effect is more pronounced for speculative-grade firms with a low level of asset liquidation value. Using the excess bond premium as a proxy for fluctuations in the supply of capital, I also extend the generalizability of my findings to a broader sample of 84,421 firm-years over the 1972–2011 period.
Fact or Fiction: the Legal Construction of Immigration Removal for Crimes

Thousands of long-term legal permanent residents are deported from the United States each year because they have been convicted of criminal offenses, many quite minor. These deportations occur without any of the constitutional safeguards that generally protect criminal defendants. Immigration authorities rely on cases asserting that such deportations are not punishment for the crime, but merely collateral consequences of the conviction. This article challenges that reasoning. It argues that its factual and doctrinal foundation has completely disintegrated over the last 20 years. Far-reaching changes in immigration law and enforcement have rendered deportation for aggravated felonies a "definite, immediate and largely automatic effect on the range of the defendant's punishment," that is, the direct consequence of a conviction. As such, the state should impose it only subject to the same constitutional protections that apply to criminal prosecutions. One key implication is that non-citizen criminal defendants should be fully and accurately advised of the immigration consequences of any plea agreement. Finally, this article argues that, while deportation has essentially become an additional criminal sanction for non-citizens, it is not a particularly effective or appropriate one. The article thus advocates a deep revision of immigration laws to restore deportation as a sanction imposed in the exercise of discretion on those whose criminal offenses outweigh their ties to the United States community and the hardship they and their community would suffer if they were deported.
Are Observed Capital Structures Determined by Equity Market Timing

Contrary to Baker and Wurgler (2002), I find that the importance of historical average market-to-book ratios in leverage regressions is not due to past equity market timing. Al though equity transactions may be timed to equity market conditions, they do not have sig nificant long lasting effects on capital structure. Debt transactions exhibit timing patterns that are unlikely to induce a negative relation between market-to-book ratios and leverage. I also find that historical average market-to-book ratios have significant effects on current financing and investment decisions, implying that they contain information about growth opportunities not captured by current market-to-book ratios.
No need to toss a coin: conflicting scientific expert testimonies and intellectual due process

This paper focuses on the question of how decision makers with no relevant scientific background can (if at all) legitimately evaluate conflicting scientific expert testimonies and determine their relative reliability. Skeptics argue that non-experts can never reach justifiable conclusions regarding the merits of conflicting expert testimonies because they lack the fundamental epistemic capacity to make such judgment calls. In this paper, I draw on works on epistemology, philosophy of practical reasoning, philosophy of science, science and technology studies, and legal theory in order to scrutinize recent proposals to solve the problem of conflicting scientific expert testimonies. Addressing this question is of ultimate importance due to the idea that immanent in the idea of rule-of-law there is an intellectual due process norm, which articulates that epistemically arbitrary legal decisions are also not legally justified.This paper is divided into two parts. In Part I, I describe the basic philosophical inquiries underlying the debate about expert testimony. In particular, I first elaborate on the philosophy of testimony and its epistemic justifications, then move to the idea of epistemic deference, and finish with philosophical accounts of expertise. Part II presents the problem of conflicting scientific expert testimonies and analyzes recent attempts to solve it as formulated by Ward Jones, Alvin Goldman, and Scott Brewer. I argue that there is no single criterion (or set of criteria) upon which the non-expert could rely in order to make a rationally justified decision in each and every case in which he faces conflicting scientific expert testimonies. The alternative view here defended is to stop looking for an epistemic panacea and accept the idea that testimonial reliability operates differently within different kinds of testimony – and differently within the same kind of testimony at different times.
How Does Popularity Information Affect Choices? A Field Experiment

Popularity information is usually thought to reinforce existing sales trends by encouraging customers to flock to mainstream products with broad appeal. We suggest a countervailing market force: popularity information may benefit niche products with narrow appeal disproportionately, because the same level of popularity implies higher quality for narrow-appeal products than for broad-appeal products. We examine this hypothesis empirically using field experiment data from a website that lists wedding service vendors. Our findings are consistent with this hypothesis: narrow-appeal vendors receive more visits than equally popular broad-appeal vendors after the introduction of popularity information. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.
General Equilibrium of an Ecosystem

Abstract Ecosystems and economies are inextricably linked: ecosystem models and economic models are not linked. Consequently, using either type of model to design policies for preserving ecosystems or improving economic performance omits important information. Improved policies would follow from a model that links the systems and accounts for the mutual feedbacks by recognizing how key ecosystem variables influence key economic variables, and vice versa. Because general equilibrium economic models already are widely used for policy making, the approach used here is to develop a general equilibrium ecosystem model which captures salient biological functions and which can be integrated with extant economic models. In the ecosystem model, each organism is assumed to be a net energy maximizer that must exert energy to capture biomass from other organisms. The exerted energies are the “prices” that are paid to biomass, and each organism takes the prices as signals over which it has no control. The maximization problem yields the organism's demand for and supply of biomass to other organisms as functions of the prices. The demands and supplies for each biomass are aggregated over all organisms in each species which establishes biomass markets wherein biomass prices are determined. A short-run equilibrium is established when all organisms are maximizing and demand equals supply in every biomass market. If a species exhibits positive (negative) net energy in equilibrium, its population increases (decreases) and a new equilibrium follows. The demand and supply forces in the biomass markets drive each species toward zero stored energy and a long-run equilibrium. Population adjustments are not based on typical Lotka–Volterra differential equations in which one entire population adjusts to another entire population thereby masking organism behavior; instead, individual organism behavior is central to population adjustments. Numerical simulations use a marine food web in Alaska to illustrate the model and to show several simultaneous predator/prey relationships, prey switching by the top predator, and energy flows through the web.
Does Heavy Drinking by Adults Respond to Higher Alcohol Prices and Taxes? A Survey and Assessment

Abstract: Higher alcohol prices and taxes are frequently proposed as a policy tool to deal with abusive consumption and adverse alcohol-related outcomes. Its success depends on price responsiveness of drinkers, especially heavy drinkers. This survey examines empirical studies of the price responsiveness of heavy-drinking adults. Additionally, the survey examines the relationship between alcohol prices and mortality due to liver cirrhosis. A review is conducted of 19 individual-based studies that examine price responses by heavy-drinking adults and nine studies of prices and cirrhosis mortality. The review finds only two studies of heavy drinking with a significant and substantial negative price response. For cirrhosis mortality, only two studies find a significant negative price response. Overall, the role of price and taxes as a significant deterrent to heavy drinking by adults is uncertain.
The Outcome Effect and Professional Skepticism

ABSTRACT: Despite the importance placed on professional skepticism by the accounting profession and regulators, the failure of auditors to exercise an appropriate level of skepticism continues to be a global issue. We experimentally test a potential barrier to skepticism. We find that outcome knowledge biases supervisors' evaluations of skeptical behavior. Holding a staff member's skeptical judgments and acts constant, superiors on the engagement team evaluate the staff's skeptical behavior based on whether the staff's investigation of an issue ultimately identifies a misstatement. Our evidence suggests that evaluators penalize auditors who employ an appropriate level of skepticism, but do not identify a misstatement. Although consultation with their superiors while exercising skepticism improved staff auditors' performance evaluations, consultation did not effectively mitigate the outcome effect on their evaluations. Last, we observe that auditors in the field anticipate that their superiors will be infl...
What’s In a Name? How Nations Define Terrorism Ten Years After 9/11

Ten years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it almost goes without saying that the acts of grotesque violence committed on that day have had enormous effects on national security law and policy worldwide. To be labeled a terrorist, or to be accused of involvement in an act of terrorism, carries far more severe repercussions now than it did ten years ago. This is true under international law and under domestic law in nations that have dealt with serious national security concerns for many years. Given the U.N.’s global mandate to combat terrorism and that being defined as a terrorist can have widespread legal implications, this Article seeks to address how legal definitions are shaped and analyzes the lack of a globally accepted definition of terrorism in the context of domestic counterterrorism obligations. This Article addresses a significant historical gap in examining the interplay between international obligations and domestic definitions, the previously overlooked history and evolution of those definitions, and the potential rule of law issues arising from the definitions in their current form.
The Changing of the Boards: The Impact on Firm Valuation of Mandated Female Board Representation

In 2003, a new law required that 40% of Norwegian firms' directors be women--at the time only 9% of directors were women. We use the prequota cross-sectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the quota. We find that the constraint imposed by the quota caused a significant drop in the stock price at the announcement of the law and a large decline in Tobin's Q over the following years, consistent with the idea that firms choose boards to maximize value. The quota led to younger and less experienced boards, increases in leverage and acquisitions, and deterioration in operating performance. Copyright 2012, Oxford University Press.
Localism and Involuntary Annexation: Reconsidering Approaches to New Regionalism

"Involuntary" annexation - the ability of cities to expand their territory unilaterally by extending their boundaries - is one of the most controversial devices in land use law. It is under attack in virtually every state where it exists. Involuntary annexation is a direct threat to "localism," the belief in small, autonomous units of government as the optimum forum for expressing democratic freedom, fostering community, and organizing local government. Localism has been justifiably faulted with spurring metropolitan fragmentation and the attendant challenges it creates for regional governance. This critique is at the center of "New Regionalism," a movement of scholars and policy makers focused on promoting regional governance structures that respect the cultural draw of localism while correcting for its deficiencies. New Regionalism emphasizes bottom-up, voluntary governance structures and dismisses approaches like involuntary annexation as politically infeasible. Both types of approaches face considerable political challenges, but there are arguably more examples of well-functioning involuntary annexation regimes than there are successful models of New Regionalism. While involuntary annexation has been critical to the success of metropolitan regions in Texas and North Carolina, many regard it as a violation of the liberty and freedom that comes with property rights. Property rights are rooted in instinctive and culturally reinforced notions of personal identity and the inviolability of ownership. Localism extends this logic to municipal identity. The hostility toward involuntary annexation, therefore, can be understood as a response to the taking of a person's perceived right to express individual identity, group identity, status, and ownership through municipal identity. This notion of municipal identity as property threatens to undermine both existing involuntary annexation regimes as well as future New Regionalist proposals. While New Regionalism has well-reasoned justifications for focusing on more-voluntary, bottom-up governance structures, involuntary annexation remains a potent tool for facilitating regional governance and is worthy of defense and preservation.
The State of U.S. Corporate Governance: What's Right and What's Wrong?

The U.S. corporate governance system has recently been heavily criticized, largely as a result of failures at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and some other prominent companies. Those failures and criticisms, in turn, have served as catalysts for legislative change (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002) and regulatory change (new governance guidelines from the NYSE and NASDAQ). In this paper, we consider two questions. First, is it clear that the U.S. system has performed that poorly; is it really that bad? Second, will the changes lead to an improved U.S. corporate governance system? We first note that the broad evidence is not consistent with a failed U.S. system. The U.S. economy and stock market have performed well both on an absolute basis and relative to other countries over the past two decades. And the U.S. stock market has continued to outperform other broad indices since the scandals broke. Our interpretation of the evidence is that while parts of the U.S. corporate governance system failed under the exceptional strain of the 1990s, the overall system, which includes oversight by the public and the government, reacted quickly to address the problems. We then consider the effects that the legislative, regulatory, and market responses are likely to have in the near future. Our assessment is that they are likely to make a good system better, though there is a danger of overreacting to extreme events.
Representing the Forbidden

This essay investigates the special problems that a speech taboo imposes on people who decide that they are going to talk about the very speech that the taboo forbids. The taboo on pornography is the point of departure and primary focus. Porn is the richest and most controversial context within which to evaluate the working parts of speech taboos. These days, it is hard to go anywhere without running into porn or bumping into its various retainers and hangers-on. For purposes of the essay, the range of pertinent (impertinent?) speakers is broad. They include artists and artists manque; students and scholars of law, literature, history, social science, philosophy, and political theory; actors within the legal domain, who range from legislators to criminal investigators to litigants to lawyers to judges and jurors; priests, penitents, and secular counterparts; censors and would-be censors, their supporters and support staff, as well as the various characters who then feel compelled to criticize what the censors are up (or down) to. Almost all of these speakers want to be Nice ones, in the sense that their conscious objective is to describe, not do, that which is forbidden. The Nice Writer doesn't want to write porn; she wants to write about porn. What vocabulary, what textual and rhetorical strategies, if any, will secure this objective? The essay identifies and evaluates a handful of the textual strategies available to and employed by pornography scholars, and it speculates about the connections among representation and experience, prohibition and transgression, disgust and desire.
Propaganda as Signaling

Why do authoritarian governments engage in propaganda when citizens often know that their governments are propagandizing and therefore resist or ignore the messages? This paper proposes that propaganda is often not used for indoctrination of pro-regime values and attitudes, as is traditionally understood, but rather to signal the government’s strength in maintaining social control and political order. Consistent with the theory, analysis of a unique dataset shows that Chinese college students with more exposure to state propaganda in the form of ideological and political education are not more satisfied with China’s government system, but are more likely to believe that the regime is strong in maintaining social control, and less willing to participate in political dissent. Additional evidences supporting the theory are also briefly discussed. *Assistant professor of political science, University of California, Merced (email: hhuang24@ucmerced.edu). I am grateful to Li Zhi for help with the data collection. I would also like to thank John James Kennedy, Susan Shirk, Daniela Stockmann, Kharis Ali Templeman, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.
Social Norms in the Courts of Ancient Athens

Ancient Athens was a remarkably peaceful and well-ordered society by both ancient and contemporary standards. Scholars typically attribute Athens’ success to internalized norms and purely informal enforcement mechanisms. This article argues that the formal Athenian court system played a vital role in maintaining order by enforcing informal norms. This peculiar approach to norm enforcement compensated for apparent weaknesses in the state system of coercion. It mitigated the effects of under-enforcement in a private prosecution system by encouraging litigants to uncover and punish their opponents’ past violations. Court enforcement of extra-statutory norms also permitted the Athenians to enforce a variety of social norms while maintaining the fictions of voluntary devotion to military and public service and of limited state interference in private conduct.
Openness in International Adoption

After a long history of secrecy in domestic adoption in the United States, there is a robust trend toward openness. That is, however, not the case with international adoption. The recent growth in international adoption has been spurred, at least in part, by the desire of adoptive parents to return to closed, confidential adoptions where the identity of the birth mother is secret and there is no ongoing contact with her. There is, however, an emergent interest in increased openness in international adoption, spurred by the success of domestic open adoptions, health concerns when an adoptee's genetic history is important, psychological issues relating to identity in adoptees, and concern that the international adoption might have been corrupt. International adoptive families who were once happy to avoid birth parent involvement have begun to seek them out. Increased openness in international adoption is mandated by international human rights and, in particular, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-Operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption. In addition, a growing body of research demonstrates that open adoptions are in the best interests of children as they grow and develop a sense of identity. The transparency of open adoption can also serve to ameliorate fraud and corruption in adoption. Therefore, countries involved in international adoption, and the international human rights community, need to take adopted children's right to identity
Conspecific negative density dependence and why its study should not be abandoned

Recent studies showing bias in the measurement of density dependence have the potential to sow confusion in the field of ecology. We provide clarity by elucidating key conceptual and statistical errors with the null-model approach used in Detto et al. (2019). We show that neither their null model nor a more biologically-appropriate null model reproduces differences in density-dependent recruitment between forests, indicating that the latitudinal gradient in negative density dependence is not an artefact of statistical bias. Finally, we suggest a path forward that combines observational comparisons of density dependence in multiple fitness components across localities with mechanistic and geographically-replicated experiments.
Remedies A Course Fit for Civil Procedure Teachers

John Godfrey Saxe, the nineteenth century lawyer and poet who wrote “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” might have appreciated the challenge of teaching Remedies. Foremost among the challenges of teaching the course is that there is a wide variety of material. Few have the background to feel entirely comfortable teaching all of it, at least to start. As discussed elsewhere in this symposium, the typical range of the course requires the teacher to cover damages, equity, and restitution. The material derives from a wide variety of other substantive fields, including contracts, torts, real and intellectual property, civil rights, and constitutional law. Casebooks focus on different aspects of those topics, depending on the interests and predilections of the casebook authors. In a previous essay elsewhere, I have addressed how the course in Remedies can be taught effectively from a public law perspective. For this Essay, I thought I would touch another part of the elephant. I will briefly describe some examples of how those with a background in the course in Civil Procedure, like myself, can use that experience in teaching at least portions of
Can districts keep good teachers in the schools that need them most

Abstract This study investigates how school demographics and their interactions with policies affect the mobility behaviors of public school teachers with various human capital characteristics. Using data from North Carolina from 1995 to 2006, it finds that teachers’ career stage and human capital investments dominate their decisions to leave public school teaching and school demographic characteristics play a dominant role in intra-system sorting. Schools serving at-risk children struggle to attract and retain teachers with desirable observable characteristics. We find evidence to suggest that across-the-board school-based pay-for-performance policies have small but significant associations with mobility decisions and appear to exacerbate inequities in the distribution of teacher qualifications.
What cycles? Data detrending in DSGE models

It is widely-known that different methods of detrending data yield different business cycle features. The choice of the detrending method, however, is usually arbitrarily made. This paper aims at revealing potential pitfalls of different detrending methods for the estimation of a standard medium-scale DSGE model. By comparing nine popular detrending methods, we find that model parameter estimates, variance decompositions, optimal monetary policies, and out-of-sample forecasting performances of the model are all sensitive to how the data are detrended. We also discuss some possible criteria to choose among different methods.
Financial Statement Disaggregation Decisions and Auditors' Tolerance for Misstatement

ABSTRACT : Current IFRS requires significant disaggregation of income statement numbers while such disaggregation is voluntary and much less common under U.S. GAAP. We examine whether voluntary disaggregation of income statement numbers increases the reliability of income statement subtotals because auditors permit less misstatement in the disaggregated numbers. In our experiment, experienced auditors require correction of smaller errors in disaggregated numbers. Auditors also believe that greater disaggregation will increase SEC scrutiny of uncorrected financial statement errors in the disaggregated numbers. However, the effects are substantially reduced if the disaggregated numbers are presented in the notes. Furthermore, there is significant disagreement among participants on whether disaggregated numbers are relevant materiality benchmarks, and on what current auditing guidance requires. These results suggest a potential deficiency in current audit guidance, which traditionally has been aimed at promo...
Cyborg geographies: towards hybrid epistemologies

As a mode of critique, the cyborg is often separated from its role as a figuration. This article reviews Donna Haraway's cyborg theory to restate the importance of the cyborg as a figuration in critical methodology. Figuration is about opening knowledge-making practices to interrogation. I argue that the cyborg enables this inquiry through epistemological hybridization. To do so, cyborg figurations not only adopt a language of being or becoming, but narrate this language in the production of knowledges, to know hybridly. The epistemological hybridization of the cyborg includes four strategies: witnessing, situating, diffracting and acquiring. These are modes of knowing in cyborg geographies. To underline the importance of this use of cyborg theory, I review selected geographic literatures in naturecultures and technosciences, to demonstrate how geographers cite the cyborg. My analysis suggests these literatures emphasize an ontological hybridity that leaves underconsidered the epistemological hybridizatio...
Managing Our Microbial Mark: What We Can Learn about Pay for Performance from Ebola's Arrival at Our Shores

The narrative of Ebola's arrival in the United States has been overwhelmed by our fear of a West African-style epidemic. The real story of Ebola's arrival is about our healthcare system's failure to identify, treat, and contain healthcare associated infections. Having long been willfully ignorant of the path of fatal infectious diseases through our healthcare facilities, this paper considers why our reimbursement and quality reporting systems made it easy for this to be so. West Africa's challenges in controlling Ebola resonate with our own struggles to standardize, centralize, and enforce infection control procedures in American healthcare facilities.
The structure and performance consequences of equity grants to employees of new economy firms

Abstract The paper examines the determinants and performance consequences of equity grants to senior-level executives, lower-level managers, and non-exempt employees of “new economy” firms. We find that the determinants of equity grants are significantly different in new versus old economy firms. We also find that employee retention objectives, which new economy firms rank as the most important goal of their equity grant programs, have a significant impact on new hire grants, but not subsequent grants. Our exploratory performance tests indicate that lower than expected grants and/or existing holdings of options are associated with poorer performance in subsequent years.
Manolescu invariants of connected sums

We give inequalities for the Manolescu invariants α,β,γ under the connected sum operation. We compute the Manolescu invariants of connected sums of some Seifert fiber spaces. Using these same invariants, we provide a proof of Furuta's Theorem, the existence of a Z∞ subgroup of the homology cobordism group. To our knowledge, this is the first proof of Furuta's Theorem using monopoles. We also provide information about Manolescu invariants of the connected sum of n copies of a three-manifold Y, for large n.
Thinking about the Commons

This article explores current developments in theoretical thinking about the commons. It keys off contemporary reconsiderations of Garret Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” and Elinor Ostrom’s response to Hardin in Governing the Commons and later work. Hardin’s idea of a “tragedy” has received much criticism, especially from Ostrom herself; but Ostrom’s own work has also raised some questions in more recent commons literature. The key issue that emerges from this reconsideration revolves around the understanding of commons on the one hand as limited common regimes, central to Ostrom’s work, or on the other hand as open access, as espoused by more recent advocates of widespread access to information and communications networks.