cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Dangerous Law of Biological Race

The idea of biological race—a conception of race that postulates that racial groups are distinct, genetically homogenous units—has experienced a dramatic resurgence in popularity in recent years. It is commonly understood, however, that the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the idea that races are genetically uniform groupings of individuals. Almost a century ago, the Court famously appeared to recognize the socially constructed nature of race. Moreover, the jurisprudence since then appears to reaffirm this disbelief: within law, race is understood to be a social construction, having no biological truth to it at all. Yet upon closer examination, the Court’s apparent disbelief of racial biology is revealed to be as mythical as racial biology itself. This Article argues that the Court treats “race” as a legal term of art, using the term in a “technical,” legal way to reference populations of people who are not presumed to be biologically or genetically homogenous. In treating race as a legal term of art, however, the Court essentially hedges its bets by leaving open the possibility that race, in its “scientific” usage, describes persons who are united by biology or genotype. In other words, while the Court has rejected racial biology in law, it has never rejected the possibility that, outside of law, race is actually a biological entity. By not shutting the door completely to biological race, the Court, and the law more generally, is complicit in the resuscitation of one of the most dangerous inventions of the modern era.
Preference externalities: An empirical study of who benefits whom in differentiated-product markets

Theory predicts that in markets with increasing returns, the number of differentiated products, and the tendency to consume, will grow in market size. I document this phenomenon across 247 U.S. radio markets. By a mechanism that I term "preference externalities," an increase in the size of the market brings forth additional products valued by others with similar tastes. But who benefits whom? I document sharp differences in preferences between black and white, and between Hispanic and non-Hispanic, radio listeners. As a result, preference externalities are large and positive within groups, and they are much smaller and nonmonotonic across groups. Copyright 2003 by the RAND Corporation.
Is the Independent Director Model Broken

At common law, an interested director was barred from participating in corporate decisions in which he had an interest, and therefore “disinterested” directors became desirable. This concept of the disinterested director developed into the model of an “independent director” and was advocated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC or Commission) and court decisions as a general ideal in a variety of situations. The SEC’s policy preference for independent directors was embodied in the Investment Company Act of 1940 1 and highlighted in some early cases. 2 Although the term “independent director” is often used rather loosely, it should be understood to mean a director without any general conflict of interest with the corporation. An interested director, by contrast, is a director who has a conflicting interest in a particular transaction. The SEC’s view of the need for independent directors should be understood in the context of Adolph Berle’s theory of the 1930s. It posits that shareholders had abdicated control of public corporations to corporate managers, and fiduciary duties needed to be imposed upon corporate boards to compensate for this loss of shareholder control. 3 Berle’s writings laid the foundation for shareholder primacy as the theory of the
Troublesome Tidings? Investors’ Response to a Wells Notice

While the SEC has issued Wells notices for many decades, scant evidence has amassed about how such notices might affect stock prices. This study fills that void and finds significantly negative excess stock returns over the three days around first-time Wells disclosures in company 8-K filings. For first-time 8-K disclosures that involve timely subsequent litigation, stock prices fall sharply, resulting in a cumulative average three-day excess stock return of -4.5 percent. In addition, we observe no significant price response for companies that may wait to disclose their first-time Wells disclosure in a 10-K or 10-Q, which raises the possibility that some managers choose the potentially less ethical option of disclosing on a delayed basis in a 10-K or 10-Q to avoid or mute the initial 8-K effect. Our results also imply that research on SEC or shareholder litigation or restatement events may have understated investors’ response to those events by not considering the earlier Wells notice response.
Framing world monetary system reform: Fritz Machlup and the Bellagio Group conferences

This paper explores the influence of Fritz Machlup and the Bellagio Group on world monetary reform. After an examination of the literature, the paper addresses research into Machlup’s framing of the problem of world monetary reform, his method, his selection of economists to join the Bellagio Group, his close working relationship with the treasury and central bank officials who were the deputies of the Group of Ten, and his creation of a broad platform of joint conferences, papers and books to promote their work. Taking an historico-biographical approach, this paper draws on the archives and published works of Fritz Machlup, Robert Triffin and their contemporaries. JEL Codes: B22, B31, F31, F33 Keywords: world monetary system, Fritz Machlup, Bellagio Group
The Outrageous God: Emotional Distress, Tort Liability, and the Limits of Religious Advocacy

When Matthew Snyder died fighting for his country, his memory was celebrated, and his loss mourned. The Westboro Baptist Church conducted a celebration of a different kind by picketing near Matthew’s funeral service. The church held signs that read, “You are going to hell,” “God hates you,” “Thank God for dead soldiers,” and “Semper fi fags.” In the weeks following the funeral, the church posted on its
Institutions and concentration

Abstract In a new dataset of 1.3 million firms from over 100 countries, I establish a number of regularities in cross-country differences in economic concentration. Concentration of sales and employment is substantially higher in smaller countries and in less-developed countries; these two factors alone explain roughly half the cross-country variation in concentration. Nevertheless, a number of institutional factors offer additional explanatory power for concentration. Concentration is higher in countries with higher entry costs for new firms, in countries with weaker antitrust policy, in countries with less financial development, in countries with weaker rule of law, and in countries with more burdensome regulation. Weak institutions are associated with higher concentration especially in industries that do not have naturally high levels of concentration. In addition, the relationships between institutions and concentration are more pronounced in nontradable and investment-intensive industries, suggesting that natural barriers to competition facilitate the monopolization of sectors especially when institutions are weak.
Iterative Alpha Expansion for estimating gradient-sparse signals from linear measurements

We consider estimating a piecewise‐constant image, or a gradient‐sparse signal on a general graph, from noisy linear measurements. We propose and study an iterative algorithm to minimize a penalized least‐squares objective, with a penalty given by the “l0‐norm” of the signal’s discrete graph gradient. The method uses a non‐convex variant of proximal gradient descent, applying the alpha‐expansion procedure to approximate the proximal mapping in each iteration, and using a geometric decay of the penalty parameter across iterations to ensure convergence. Under a cut‐restricted isometry property for the measurement design, we prove global recovery guarantees for the estimated signal. For standard Gaussian designs, the required number of measurements is independent of the graph structure, and improves upon worst‐case guarantees for total‐variation (TV) compressed sensing on the 1‐D line and 2‐D lattice graphs by polynomial and logarithmic factors respectively. The method empirically yields lower mean‐squared recovery error compared with TV regularization in regimes of moderate undersampling and moderate to high signal‐to‐noise, for several examples of changepoint signals and gradient‐sparse phantom images.
Resources as an Input of Production in a Two-Sector Economy

This paper extends models of renewable resources to an economy with two sectors, resource extraction and production. In contrast to one sector models, we show that the optimal strategies in the single-firm model are essentially different from those in the two-player model. In the single-player model, the optimal strategy is to keep the resource extraction a constant multiple of production labor. In the two-player model, the optimal strategy for each player is to keep extracting labor a constant multiple of production labor. It is also shown that the extraction-to-production labor ratio is increasing with the wage and the interest rate and is decreasing with the production TFP, the extraction TFP, and the stock level in the single-player model, but not in the two-player model. Finally, I show that another way for each firm to maximize profit is to raise its zero-profit stock level by maximizing its geometric average TFP.
The evolution of science-based business: innovating how we innovate

Science has long been connected to innovation and to business. As early as the late 19th century, chemical companies, realizing the commercial potential of science, created the first industrial research laboratories. During much of the 20th century, large-scale business enterprises like DuPont, GE, Westinghouse, IBM, Kodak, Xerox (PARC), and AT&T (Bell Laboratories) created in-house labs capable of first-rate basic scientific research. In recent decades, however, the connection between science and business has begun to change in important ways. While the corporate lab declined, new "science-based businesses" in sectors like biotech, nanotech, and energy emerged. Universities also became active players in the commercialization of science. In short, science has become a business. This essay examines the institutional and organizational challenges created by this convergence of science and business through a Chandlerian lens. It highlights three fundamental challenges of science-based businesses: (i) managing and rewarding long-term risk, (ii) integrating across technical disciplines, and (iii) learning. Whereas these challenges were once managed inside the boundaries of corporate R&D labs--under the auspices of Chandler's visible hand--today the invisible hand of markets increasingly governs them. An assessment of this form of governance against the requirements of science-based businesses suggests a gap and a need for organizational innovation. Copyright 2010 The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Associazione ICC. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.
It pays to have friends

Abstract Currently, a director is classified as independent if he or she has neither financial nor familial ties to the CEO or to the firm. We add another dimension: social ties. Using a unique data set, we find that 87% of boards are conventionally independent but that only 62% are conventionally and socially independent. Furthermore, firms whose boards are conventionally and socially independent award a significantly lower level of compensation, exhibit stronger pay-performance sensitivity, and exhibit stronger turnover-performance sensitivity than firms whose boards are only conventionally independent. Our results suggest that social ties do matter and that, consequently, a considerable percentage of the conventionally independent boards are substantively not.
Lessons from Hurricane Katrina: Prison Emergency Preparedness as a Constitutional Imperative

Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst natural disasters ever to strike the United States, in terms of casualties, suffering, and financial cost. Often overlooked among Katrina's victims are the 8,000 inmates who were incarcerated at Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) when Katrina struck. Despite a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, these men and women, some of whom had been held on charges as insignificant as public intoxication, remained in the jail as the hurricane hit, and endured days of rising, toxic waters, a lack of food and drinking water, and a complete breakdown of order within OPP. When the inmates were finally evacuated from OPP, they suffered further harm, waiting for days on a highway overpass before being placed in other correctional institutions, where prisoners withstood exposure to the late-summer Louisiana heat and beatings at the hands of guards and other inmates. Finally, even as the prison situation settled down, inmates from the New Orleans criminal justice system were marooned in correctional institutions throughout the state, as the judicial system in New Orleans ceased to function.The resulting effects were both tragic and unconstitutional, as the suffering at OPP could have been prevented. This Article asserts that prison administrators have a constitutional duty to plan for emergencies, and argues that the failures of New Orleans officials to do so violated prisoners' Sixth and Eighth Amendment rights, as well as internationally recognized human rights standards. With the wealth of training and planning materials available to prison officials and the knowledge of possible emergencies, it is unconscionable for prisons to have nonexistent or inadequate plans. Assessing change through litigation and legislation, this Article advocates a mixed approach, using judicial and legislative remedies for the abhorrent violations of well-established prisoners' rights. The Article recommends that states develop mechanisms, such as emergency courts, to enable the administration of justice to resume promptly following serious natural or man-made disasters. Prisons and courts should internalize the lessons of Hurricane Katrina, which demonstrated the consequences of inadequate preparation and planning for prisoners' safety during and after a major emergency.
Feasibility of U.S. renewable portfolio standards under cost caps and case study for Illinois

Abstract Recently enacted state renewable portfolio standards (RPSs) collectively require that U.S. electricity generation by non-hydro renewables more than double by 2025. These goals are not certain to be met, however, because many RPSs apply cost caps that alter requirements if costs exceed targets. We analyze here the 2008 Illinois RPS, which is fairly typical, and find that at current electricity prices, complete implementation will require significant decreases in renewables costs even given the continuation of federal renewables subsidies. Full implementation is possible but not assured. The statutory design raises additional concerns about unintended potential consequences. The fact that windpower and solar carveouts fall under a single cost cap means that in failure mode, a less cost-effective technology can curtail deployment of a more cost-effective one. Adjacent-state provisions mean the bulk of the RPS can be met by existing wind facilities, and that new wind builds will likely occur in Iowa. The Illinois RPS, like that of many other states, appears to combine objectives inherently in conflict: preferences for local jobs, for specific technologies, for environmental benefits, and for low costs. Revisiting the legislation may be needed to make legislative success likely and to ensure that failure modes do not compromise goals.
Graph Coarsening with Neural Networks

As large scale-graphs become increasingly more prevalent, it poses significant computational challenges to process, extract and analyze large graph data. Graph coarsening is one popular technique to reduce the size of a graph while maintaining essential properties. Despite rich graph coarsening literature, there is only limited exploration of data-driven method in the field. In this work, we leverage the recent progress of deep learning on graphs for graph coarsening. We first propose a framework for measuring the quality of coarsening algorithm and show that depending on the goal, we need to carefully choose the Laplace operator on the coarse graph and associated projection/lift operators. Motivated by the observation that the current choice of edge weight for the coarse graph may be sub-optimal, we parametrize the weight assignment map with graph neural networks and train it to improve the coarsening quality in an unsupervised way. Through extensive experiments on both synthetic and real networks, we demonstrate that our method significantly improves common graph coarsening methods under various metrics, reduction ratios, graph sizes, and graph types. It generalizes to graphs of larger size (more than 25× of training graphs), adaptive to different losses (both differentiable and non-differentiable), and scales to much larger graphs than previous work.
Asymmetric information and liquidity constraints: A new test

Abstract Using a novel measure of the degree of information asymmetry across firms, this study shows that information-related financial market imperfections do matter for a firm’s access to external finance. Prior studies of the importance of liquidity constraints faced by nonfinancial firms have suffered from a glaring weakness. They have been based on a sample of publicly traded firms, omitting precisely those firms most likely to be liquidity constrained. Furthermore, they have tended to rely on indirect measures of the degree of information asymmetry, such as firm size. We overcome these limitations by focusing on the banking sector. Unlike the nonfinancial sector, the banking sector has balance sheet and income data available for all firms, whether or not they are publicly traded. This allows the use of a superior measure of the degree of information asymmetry across firms by distinguishing between publicly traded and non-publicly traded banks. We focus on changes in monetary policy that represent exogenous (to the banks) changes in the financing constraints they face. We find that publicly traded banks, which exhibit a lower degree of information asymmetry, are better able to overcome information-based financial market frictions, compared to the relatively opaque non-publicly traded banks, when monetary policy is tightened. Lending by the more transparent publicly traded banks is less affected by a monetary policy tightening in large part due to their relative advantage in raising external funds by issuing uninsured large time deposits. These results are obtained controlling for bank (and bank holding company) size, a dimension commonly used in the literature as the measure of the degree of firm access to external finance. Moreover, we show that the distinction between publicly traded and non-publicly traded banks dominates bank size as an indicator of the degree of access to external funds.
Exodus and the Struggle for Deliverance: Guatemalan Refugees in Mexico

The plight of refugees, for example, the Vietnamese, the Sudanese and the Nicaraguans, has received much attention in recent years. Mostly one reads of communal degeneration and squalid living conditions in refugee camps and a seemingly universal desire of refugees to emigrate to the United States, Canada and Europe, in search of a better standard of living. One refugee group that has remained virtually unnoticed, however, is the Guatemalan Indians in southern Mexico. While in exile they have nurtured and developed their communities, in the hope of returning someday to rebuild the devastated villages they left behind.
Throwing Dirt on Doctor Frankenstein’s Grave: Access to Experimental Treatments at the End of Life

All U.S. federal research funding triggers regulations to protect human subjects known as the Common Rule, a collaborative government effort that spans seventeen federal agencies. The Department of Health and Human Services has been in the process of re-evaluating the Common Rule comprehensively after decades of application and in response to the jolting advancement of biopharmaceutical science. The Common Rule designates specific groups as “vulnerable populations”—pregnant women, fetuses, children, prisoners, and those with serious mental comprehension challenges—and imposes heightened protections of them. This article addresses a question at the cornerstone of regulations to protect human subjects as biopharmaceutical research and development increasingly commingles clinical research and clinical care—as patients and physicians routinely reach into the drug development pipeline for treatment options. Given the vulnerabilities of those who confront end-of-life decision making, should the regulatory standard be raised to more effectively protect the terminally ill from additional suffering and the loss of quality time with family and friends, and to increase recognition of the opportunity to die with priority placed on comfort care and dignity? Alternatively, where death is the only existing option under standard of care, should the regulations be relaxed to promote access to experimental treatment alternatives? What importance should be placed on the overall advancement of biopharmaceutical research and development (R&D) in addressing these human health issues? This article proposes modifying the Common Rule to enhance human subject protection of the terminally ill, which the U.S. standard of care generally recognizes as a diagnosis of life expectancy of six months or less.
A cognitive and social psychological analysis of disclosure laws and call for mortgage counseling to prevent predatory lending.

The federal government’s primary method of protecting consumers from “predatory lending” has been to enact disclosure laws that were supposed to enable consumers to make informed decisions. This article contends that notwithstanding these disclosure laws, unscrupulous mortgage brokers and lenders have been able to take advantage of certain described cognitive and social psychological phenomena to induce borrowers to enter into predatory loans, and argues that disclosures alone - even the recently revised disclosure forms - are inadequate. To better empower consumers to make informed decisions on their home loans, this article proposes and details a mortgage counseling intervention that contains both “in-person” and interactive computer training as a necessary supplement to disclosure laws. Designed properly, such an intervention would more effectively address the cognitive and social psychological barriers to rational decision-making than disclosure alone. The article also examines the likely costs and benefits of the proposed mortgage counseling intervention in light of Illinois experience with mortgage counseling and urges policymakers to consider not only the costs of implementing mortgage counseling, but also the costs of not providing for this counseling.
THE PRACTICALITY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Must principles of justice be practical? Some political philosophers, the “implementers,” say yes. Others, the “idealists,” say no. Despite this disagreement, the implementers and idealists agree on what “practical” means, subscribing to the “implementation-prediction” (IP) conception of practicality. They also seem to agree that principles of so-called “ideal theory” need not be (and often are not) IP-practical. The implementers take this as a reason to reject ideal theory as an approach to principles of justice, while the idealists do not. In this paper, I argue that we should reject the IP conception of practicality. The implementers make a mistake, then, by requiring principles of justice to be IP-practical. But the idealists make a mistake, too, by rejecting in general the requirement that principles of justice be practical. For there is a plausible alternative conception of practicality that political philosophers should accept: the “experimentation-learning” (EL) conception. EL-practicality makes for a more realistic and epistemically accessible standard of practicality, and thus should be welcomed by the realistically-inclined implementers. It also preserves a crucial role for ideal theory, so should be welcomed by the idealists, too.
Cephalon, Inc.: Taking Risk Management Theory Seriously

Cephalon Inc., a biotech firm, bought call options on its own stock to meet its conditional cash flow needs. We analyze this decision by using the cash flow hedging concepts of Froot et al., (1993. Journal of Finance 5, 1629-1658). We identify the managerial analyses necessary to apply this theory and discuss managerial considerations absent from the theory. We find that managers consider deadweight costs of risk management, which theory tends to ignore. Theory provides little guidance in how to measure these and other deadweight costs. Finally, uncertainty about the availability of external financing and accounting considerations are critical considerations by managers.
Can interest rate factors explain exchange rate fluctuations

Abstract The level, slope, and curvature of the yield curve reflect time variation in investors’ risk premia and are known predictors of excess bond returns and economic activity. In this paper, I develop a term structure model under complete markets and no arbitrage to relate these interest rate factors to exchange rate fluctuations. The Gaussian properties of the stochastic discount factors imply non-linearities in exchange rate risk premia that are shown to account for up to half of the in-sample variation in one-year currency returns for different country pairs during the 1980s–2015 period. I find that interest rate factors help explain exchange rate fluctuations in and out of sample, particularly at longer horizons, and yield profitable currency portfolios relative to standard carry trade strategies.
The States as a Laboratory: Legal Innovation and State Competition for Corporate Charters

Corporate law is an arena in which the metaphor of the states as a laboratory describes actual practice, and, for the most part, this is a laboratory that has worked reasonably well. The goal of this paper is to map out over time the diffusion of corporate law reforms across the states. The law-making pattern we observe indicates a dynamic process in which legal innovations originate from several sources, and a period of legal experimentation that tends to identify a statutory formulation that is adopted by the vast majority of states. Delaware and the Model Act quite often work in tandem. But there are occasions when they advance differing legal rules, accounting for some of the diversity in corporation codes that we observe. Prepared for the Conference on Promoting the General Welfare: American Democracy and the Political Economy of Government Performance at the University of Virginia, November 12-13, 2004.
Audit committee compensation and the demand for monitoring of the financial reporting process

Abstract We examine the relation between audit committee compensation and the demand for monitoring of the financial reporting process. We find that total compensation and cash retainers paid to audit committees are positively correlated with audit fees and the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, our proxies for the demand for monitoring. Our results are robust to the inclusion of audit committee quality, measured as the committee chair financial expertise. Our results suggest a recent willingness by firms to deviate from the historically prevalent one-size-fits-all approach to director pay in response to increased demands on audit committees and differential director expertise.
State Saving Behavior: Effects of Two Fiscal and Budgetary Institutions

This paper explores how state saving behavior is affected by two fiscal/budgetary institutions—budget stabilization funds (BSF) and balanced budget requirements (BBR). While adopted for different reasons, BSF and BBR could have significant effects on state savings behavior depending on their design features. We empirically examine the effects of BSF and BBR using a panel data set that covers three business cycles, controlling for budgetary institutions, state economy, social services, politics, and business cycles. The paper finds that adopting BSF and BBR can raise savings by 2 and 3 percentage points, respectively; however, the effects depend crucially on the devices' design.
Organization Theory and the Changing Nature of Science

Dramatic changes in the practice of scientific research over the past half century, including trends towards working in teams and on large projects, as well as geographically distributed and interdisciplinary collaboration, have created opportunities and challenges for scientists. Some of the newer ways of doing science create opportunities and challenges for organization theory. We describe how applying organization theory to science can enhance our knowledge of research organizations and raise questions for theories of coordination, social identity, the knowledge-based view of the firm, social networks, organizational learning, and absorptive capacity. We argue that an organizational perspective on science is critical to understanding the sources of technological innovation, making national policy on R&D investment, and designing successful 21 st -century research organizations.
The Marshall Trilogy and the Constitutional Dehumanization of American Indians

is article argues that the trio of early 19th century opinions written by Chief Justice John Marshall that greatly limited tribal sovereignty should be seen within the context of the Supreme Court’s tendency to periodically play amateur anthropologist and hear cases that require it to determine whether a particular sector of the American population is fully human under our law. Unlike other racial and biological groups the Court has sought to legally dehumanize, the basic holdings of the Marshall Trilogy have never been overturned and the blatant racism at the heart of these cases has never been adequately redressed.
Disciplining the Financial Failure: An Exploration of Bankruptcy Law as an Active Discourse in Market Capitalism

United States bankruptcy law and court procedures provide a coherent identity for the individual fiscal failure, the "debtor." In the legal bankruptcy field, a "debtor" is a category in the Bankruptcy Code ("Code"), and an identity in bankruptcy legal practice. The role of a debtor is associated with particular beliefs and activities within the legal field. To assume the identity of a debtor under the Code, an individual must subject himself to controlling and transforming forces of the Code and bankruptcy court. The process of transformation from fiscal failure to "debtor" involves rendering the previously unruly, disorganized, and sometimes messy financial life of an individual into a distinct, coherent, organized, recognizable, linear, and legally comprehensible identity. This coherency of the individual's identity through the Code and process allows him or her to enter the bankruptcy legal field and obtain desired results from the practices found in that field. This article considers the legal categories, structures, processes, and institutions of the bankruptcy legal field as they transform the incoherent fiscal failure into a coherent legal debtor. Part one discusses the definition of a fiscal identity (rational action) and fiscal failure (non-rational action) in American society and culture using theoretical tools from anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. Part two uses the theory of Michel Foucault to describe the disciplinary techniques of bankruptcy law and courts as they work to organize the fiscal failure and realign the fiscal failure with the demands of market utility, efficiency, and productivity. Part three reflects on the results of these practices in the creation of docile bodies for capitalism through the disciplining process found in the Code and bankruptcy court. Part four discusses observations and conclusions about the transformative process.
The Founders and Slavery: Little Ventured, Little Gained

In this article, Professor Finkelman refutes the original intent argument that it was the ultimate goal of the Founders to abolish slavery by creating a strong central government. Rather, Professor Finkelman argues that the Founders worked hard to protect slavery in the constitution and did virtually nothing to rein it in with the goal of a stronger national government at any cost. Professor Finkelman discusses the various places within the constitution that both directly and indirectly protected slavery and concludes that as a result, only war and bloodshed could purge the protections from the constitution.
Reply to Five Critics of Why Tolerate Religion

This is my contribution to a symposium on my book Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton, 2013), in which I respond to essays by Francois Boucher (Montreal) and Cecile Laborde (University College London), Frederick Schauer (Virginia), Corey Brettschneider (Brown), and Peter Jones (Newcastle). I clarify and revise my view of the sense in which some religious beliefs are “insulated from reasons and evidence” in response to the criticisms of Boucher and Laborde (2015), but take issue with other aspects of their critique. I defend most of my original argument against utilitarian and egalitarian objections from, respectively, Schauer and Brettschneider. I also discuss and defend the “No Exemptions” approach to conscientious objection to neutral laws of general applicability against a variety of objections, arguing, in particular, that my view is probably not very different from that of Jones.
Grassroots Regionalism Through Intermunicipal Land Use Compacts

The question raised by this article is whether the statutes and experience of other states provide an opportunity to develop an effective regional approach fitted to the great diversity of New York's regions. It examines first the role local governments play in determining land use and then the statutes that authorize municipalities to cooperate with respect to land use planning and control. The article traces the use of this authority through two phases of evolution revealing ever more complex and potentially effective intermunicipal strategies. It ends with some thoughts as to how the state government could facilitate effective regional processes by providing incentives for speeding this evolution toward effective grassroots regionalism.
Information advantages of large institutional owners

We study the relation between the percentage of outstanding shares held by a firm's largest institutional owner and the bid–ask spread on that firm's shares, a measure of information risk. We find that the greater the percentage of shares held by the largest institutional investor, the greater the bid–ask spread in share prices. In contrast, the percentage of shares held by smaller institutional owners is related to lower bid–ask spreads. The results imply that only the largest of a firm's institutional owners—and no other institutional owner—is perceived to hold an information advantage. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Working on the Weekend: Do Analysts Strategically Time the Release of Their Recommendation Revisions?

Abstract We examine whether financial analysts strategically time the announcement of their recommendation revisions consistent with their incentives to maintain relations with management. We provide evidence that investor and media attention to recommendation revisions is reduced on weekends, which analysts can exploit to strategically time the release of their revisions. We find that downgrades are a higher proportion of weekend revisions than weekday revisions and that analysts with characteristics that suggest they possess the strongest incentives to maintain favor with management are more likely to downgrade on the weekend. In contrast, analysts absent these characteristics are more likely to release downgrades during the week, consistent with these analysts being driven primarily by other incentives, such as the timely release of their recommendation and garnering media attention. We also present evidence suggesting that strategic disclosure of recommendation downgrades is associated with greater access to management on public earnings conference calls.
Adding Uncertainty to the Virtual Shopping Cart: Antitrust Regulation of Internet Minimum Advertised Price Policies

Online retail has fundamentally changed how consumers shop and products are distributed. As a result, manufacturers impose Internet Minimum Advertised Price (IMAP) policies, prohibiting Internet retailers from advertising prices below a fixed amount. Consumers often encounter these policies through website instructions such as “see price in cart,” “to view price, add to your shopping cart,” and “price unavailable – click to see more.” Manufacturers argue that IMAP policies are non-price vertical restraints that do not run afoul of antitrust laws because they regulate only advertising. However, IMAP policies can and do impact resale pricing, resulting in higher prices and unjustifiable limitations on consumer choice. Recent jurisprudence regarding price fixing, general uncertainty around the legality of resale price maintenance (RPM) under state and federal antitrust statutes, and high pleading standards have led to nearly insurmountable barriers for plaintiffs who raise antitrust challenges to IMAP policies. The Supreme Court held in 2007 that RPM may have procompetitive justifications, and should thus be analyzed using the rule of reason when challenged under federal antitrust law. This Note examines the analysis of IMAP policies in the context of recent antitrust jurisprudence. After a discussion of the relevant antitrust law and an analysis of recent IMAP litigation, this Note concludes that IMAP policies are sufficiently anticompetitive to justify per se prohibition and should be treated as such in state and federal courts.
The relation between audit fee cuts during the global financial crisis and earnings quality and audit quality

Abstract The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) presents a unique opportunity to study how auditors respond to an exogenous shock to the clients' operating environment. Also, due to the GFC, auditors were under pressure from clients to cut audit fees during the crisis. Regulators were concerned that lower audit fees could result in lower audit effort, and more importantly, impair audit quality. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of multiple attributes of client firms' earnings quality and audit quality. Collectively, our findings indicate that there is no significant difference in earnings quality between client firms that received a fee cut during the GFC and control firms consisting of firms that did not receive a fee cut and firms that received a fee cut before the GFC. Further, there is no significant difference in the likelihood of a going concern opinion or a financial restatement, our proxies for audit quality, between client firms that received a fee cut during the GFC and control firms. Our findings contribute to understanding the role of auditors during the GFC.
Did the Slaves Author the Thirteenth Amendment? An Essay in Redemptive History

American constitutional interpretation is deeply traditionalist, and privileges original intent. The difficulty with thus authorizing the past in interpreting the Thirteenth Amendment is that it purports to abolish custom and tradition as unjust. This essay argues that, given the Amendment’s denunciation of the polity that enacted it as illegitimate, its questionable formal pedigree, and the agency of the slaves in precipitating, defining, and resolving the crisis that enabled it, the slaves have a moral claim to status as its authors. It follows that the original intent guiding interpretation should be that of the slaves themselves.
Testing for Information Asymmetries in Real Estate Markets

In housing markets, neighborhood characteristics are a key source of information heterogeneity: sellers are usually better informed about neighborhood values than buyers are, but some sellers and buyers are better informed than their peers are. Consistent with predictions from a new framework for analyzing such markets with heterogeneous assets and differentially informed agents, we find that changes in the composition of sellers toward more informed sellers and sellers with a larger supply elasticity predict subsequent house price declines. This effect is larger for houses with more price exposure to neighborhood characteristics, and smaller for houses bought by buyers that are more informed
Proceduralism and Popular Threats to Democracy

Do pure procedural theories of democracy forbid the active defense of democratic regimes? Pure proceduralists take all democratic decisions, regardless of their content, to be authoritative. Accordingly, most political theorists argue that proceduralism requires individuals to comply with the outcome of a democratic procedure, even if that outcome is substantively undemocratic. In this essay, I challenge this contention. Proceduralists can defensibly disobey authoritative democratic decisions. By reflecting on the example of a procedural democrat in an undemocratic regime, we can see that for the proceduralist, democracy is not merely a method for making decisions - it is also a highly valuable end. Though representative institutions are not created democratically, the proceduralist has good reasons to participate in the establishment of a democratic regime. The same reasons give the proceduralist grounds to disobey authoritative decisions that threaten representative institutions. As I show, proceduralism provides a distinctive framework for thinking about the strategies democrats should employ to defend democracy.
A note on bundling budgets to achieve management control

Abstract By its very nature, management control research can be complex and difficult to understand, and hence challenging to introduce into the classroom. Nevertheless, it is important for accounting instruction to retain a connection between teaching and research. This note provides guidance on how recent findings in the theory of management control can be introduced into the classroom. The general approach is to present findings in the academic literature using a combination of numerical examples and classroom experiments. We use this two-pronged approach to illustrate that the bundling of budget proposals mitigates management they in a setting where control issues arise because subordinates are privately informed and self-interested. In our experience this approach stimulates student interest and increases the likelihood of successful implementation in undergraduate and graduate classes.
A Theoretical Framework for Symbolic Quick Error Detection

Symbolic quick error detection (SQED) is a formal pre-silicon verification technique targeted at processor designs. It leverages bounded model checking (BMC) to check a design for counterexamples to a self-consistency property: given the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the design, executing an instruction sequence twice on the same inputs must always produce the same outputs. Self-consistency is a universal, implementation-independent property. Consequently, in contrast to traditional verification approaches that use implementation-specific assertions (often generated manually), SQED does not require a full formal design specification or manually-written properties. Case studies have shown that SQED is effective for commercial designs and that SQED substantially improves design productivity. However, until now there has been no formal characterization of its bug-finding capabilities. We aim to close this gap by laying a formal foundation for SQED. We use a transition-system processor model and define the notion of a bug using an abstract specification relation. We prove the soundness of SQED, i.e., that any bug reported by SQED is in fact a real bug in the processor. Importantly, this result holds regardless of what the actual specification relation is. We next describe conditions under which SQED is complete, that is, what kinds of bugs it is guaranteed to find. We show that for a large class of bugs, SQED can always find a trace exhibiting the bug. Ultimately, we prove full completeness of a variant of SQED that uses specialized state reset instructions. Our results enable a rigorous understanding of SQED and its bug-finding capabilities and give insights on how to optimize implementations of SQED in practice.
The Value of Information in Monotone Decision Problems

Abstract We study the information preferences and information demand of decision-makers facing uncertainty. We focus on monotone decision problems in which the posterior beliefs induced by the decision-maker’s information can be ordered so that higher actions are chosen in response to higher signal realizations. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for decision makers with different classes of payoff functions to prefer one information structure to another. We also provide conditions under which two decision-makers in a given class can be ranked in terms of their information demand. Applications and examples are given.
Exchange Rate Policy Attitudes: Direct Evidence from Survey Data

Analyses of the political economy of exchange rate policy posit that firms and individuals in different sectors of the economy have distinct policy attitudes toward the level and stability of the exchange rate. Most such approaches hypothesize that internationally exposed firms prefer more stable currencies and that producers of tradables prefer a relatively depreciated real exchange rate. As sensible as such expectations may be, there are few direct empirical tests of them. This paper offers micro-level, cross-national evidence on sectoral attitudes about the exchange rate. Using firm-level data from the World Bank's World Business Environment Survey, we find systematic patterns linking sector of economic activity to exchange rate policy positions. Owners and managers of firms producing tradable goods prefer greater stability of the exchange rate: in countries with a floating currency, manufacturers are more likely to report that the exchange rate causes problems for their business. With respect to the level of the exchange rate, we find that tradables producers—particularly manufacturers and export producers—are more likely to be unhappy following an appreciation of the real exchange rate than are firms in nontradable sectors (services and construction). These findings confirm theoretical expectations about the relationship between economic position and currency policy preferences.
Multilateral Bargaining in Political Science Experiments: A Survey

The political science literature has long been concerned with the behavioral properties of alternative bargaining institutions. The focus of most of this research has been on the way in which committees make decisions, but there has been some interest in legislative and electoral processes. From the outset this literature has concerned itself primarily with multilateral bargaining setting, as distinct from the economics literature which has displayed an odd reluctance to go beyond the bilateral bargaining setting.
Inflation, financial development, and growth: A trilateral analysis

Abstract A large body of evidence links financial development to economic growth, yet the channels through which inflation affects this relationship and its stability have been less thoroughly explored. We take an econometric and graphical approach to examining these channels, and find that higher levels of financial development, combined with low-inflation, are related to higher rates of economic growth, especially in lower income countries, but that financial development loses much of its explanatory power in the presence of high-inflation. In particular, small increases in the price level seem able to wipe out relatively large growth effects of financial deepening when the annual rate of inflation lies between 4% and 19%, whereas the operation of the finance–growth link is less affected by inflation rates above this range. Growth is generally much lower, however, in such high-inflation settings where financial development is typically repressed.