cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Arm's-Length Intimacy: Employment As Relationship

Two important assumptions shape the law of work: that workers and employers possess interests that are diametrically opposed, and that each makes no investment in the other beyond the immediate exchange of dollars for labor. This article explains how law ignores the realities of interdependence, intimacy and mutual investment at work, committing itself instead to a model of employment as an arm’s length, impersonal cash-for-labor transaction featuring employment-at-will as the default rule. It argues that a contractual framework characterized by the assumption of arms’ length dealing and a default rule of unrestricted unilateral exit with no notice or transitional period offers a flawed lens through which to view the employment relation. This article turns to family law for an alternative legal model that might be more responsive to the realities of the employment relationship. Marriage law is characterized by a status-based framework designed to recognize and protect investment in relationships characterized by interdependence, intimacy, and investment. Notice and waiting periods are standard fare at marital dissolution to ease the transition and encourage couples to salvage marital relationships; temporary support and alimony are available to dependent spouses; and fault is still relevant in many states. Might such a status-based framework be adapted for the employment relationship? The idea of applying legal principles developed for marriage and family seems at first blush preposterous. Marriage is, after all, about love; work is about money. In a powerful book, sociologist Viviana Zelizer described and critiqued the divide between the two spheres, observing that in real life activities undertaken for love and for profit are often commingled, complementary and even interdependent. Drawing on Zelizer’s insights, this essay returns to first principles, challenging the assumptions that justify the differential treatment of waged work and intimate relationships at law, particularly at termination. What difference might it make to think about employment as an intimate relationship characterized by investment and emotion instead of limiting our conceptual frame to an arm’s-length exchange of labor for dollars? The differences might be as simple as requiring notice and transitional assistance (severance pay) linked to longevity and/or investment, as radical as recognizing new common law claims based in property rights for workers (collective rights to trade secrets?), or as straightforward as heeding evidence of emotional harm linked to termination and providing compensation for it. This essay argues that reconceptualizing employment as relationship – as about both money and “love” – is an important first step toward any of these reforms.
Thoughts on Techno-Social Engineering of Humans and the Freedom to Be Off (or Free from Such Engineering)

This Article examines a constitutional problem that largely goes unnoticed and unexamined by legal scholars — the problem of techno-social engineering of humans. After defining terms and explaining the nature of the problem, I explain how techno-social engineering of humans is easily ignored, as we perform constrained cost-benefit analyses of incremental steps without contemplating the path we are on. I begin with two nonfiction stories, one involving techno-social engineering of human emotions and a second involving techno-social engineering of children’s preferences. The stories highlight incremental steps down a path. Then, through plausible fictional extensions, I explore steps further down the path. The Article ends with a fact pattern familiar to every reader. It explains how the electronic contracting environment we experience regularly online is an example of techno-social engineering of humans with the (un)intended consequence of nudging humans to behave like machines — perfectly rational, predictable, and ultimately programmable.
Consumption, asset markets and macroeconomic fluctuations

A broad exploratory data analysis is conducted to assess the promise of a kind of model in which long-term asset prices change through time primarily due to consumption related changes in the rate of discount. Aggregate consumption data are used to infer ex-post marginal rates of substitution. Prices of stocks, bonds, short debt, land and housing are examined for the period 1890 to 1980, Methods are explored of evaluating this kind of model in the absence of accurate data on consumption.
Did President Bush Mislead the Country in His Arguments for War with Iraq

President Bush has been accused by some in the popular press of lying in his arguments for taking the United States to war with Iraq in 2003. This article examines several sets of statements by President Bush and his administration: first, aboust the implication that there was a link between Saddam Htussein, al Qaeda, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11; second, about Iraq's nuclear weapons capacity; and third, about Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons and his ability to deliver them. Although the record at this early date is far from complete, the article concludes that from publicly available evidence, the president misled the country in important ways, potentially undermining the trust of the citizenry. President Bush has been accused by some in the popular press of lying in his arguments for taking the United States to war with Iraq in 2003. But in order to make judgments about the accuracy of the president's statements, the claims must be analyzed separately. This article examines several sets of statements by President Bush and his administration: first, about the implication that there was a link between Saddam Hussein, al Qaeda, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11; second, about Iraq's nuclear weapons capacity; and third, about Saddam's chemical and biological weapons and his ability to deliver them. The possibility that the intelligence process was politicized is also examined. Although the record at this early date is far from complete, the article concludes that from publicly available evidence, the president misled the country in implying that there was a connection between Saddam and 9/11. The administration's claims about
"Behind This Mortal Bone": The (In)Effectiveness of Torture

This Essay addresses the theoretical debate on torture in an empirical way. It urges that as part of our evaluation of the merits of torture, we take a shrewd look at the quality of information brutal interrogations produce. The Essay identifies widespread belief in what the author identifies as the “torture myth”—the idea that torture is the most effective interrogation practice. In reality, in addition to its oft-acknowledged moral and legal problems, the use of torture carries with it a host of practical problems which seriously blunt its effectiveness. This Essay demonstrates that contrary to the myth, torture and the closely related practice, torture “lite” do not always produce the desired information and, in the cases in which it does, these practices may not produce it in a timely fashion. In the end, the Essay concludes, any marginal benefit the practice offers is low because traditional techniques of interrogation may be as good, and possibly even better at producing valuable intelligence.
Aligned major axes in a planetary system without tidal evolution: the 61 Virginis example

Tidal damping of one of the orbits in a planetary system can lead to aligned major axes (the so-called ‘fixed-point’ condition), but currently aligned major axes do not necessarily imply such a history. An example is the nominal orbital solution for the 61 Virginis system where two orbits librate about alignment, but evaluation of the eigenmodes of the secular theory shows it could not be the result of tidal damping but rather of initial conditions. The amplitudes of the eigenmodes suggest that, at most, this system may have undergone some modest degree of tidal damping.
The Future of Business Groups in Emerging Markets: Long-Run Evidence From Chile

We demonstrate variation in the extent to which firms benefited from their affiliation with Chilean business groups in the 1988−96 period. The net benefits of unrelated diversification were positiv...
Liquidity Dynamics in Commercial Real Estate

Executive Summary.This paper examines private real estate market liquidity dynamics using the recently introduced family of Transactions-Based Indices (TBIs) calculated from the NCREIF database. Th...
What can we learn about country performance from conditional comparisons across countries

There have been many attempts to infer latent performance attributes of governments (or other institutions) from conditional comparisons that control for observed variables. Success in doing do could greatly improve government performance. The author critically reviews the econometric foundations of the methods used. He argues that latent heterogeneity remains a fundamental, but unresolved problem. Locating a benchmark for measuring performance, adds a further problem. Current methods do not yield a consistent estimate of even the mean latent performance attribute. An assessment of country performance by these methods could well be wildly wrong.
Toward an Epistemology of ISP Secondary Liability

At common law, contributory infringement for copyright infringement requires “knowledge” of the infringing activity by a direct infringer before secondary liability can attach. In the USA, the “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that shield Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from secondary copyright liability, are concomitantly available only to ISPs that lack the common law knowledge prerequisites for such liability. But this leads to the question of when a juridical corporate entity can be said to have “knowledge” under the statute. Legal institutions have well-established processes for inferring the knowledge state of natural persons, but corporations are complex sociotechnical networks of human and non-human elements whose information state does not map well onto such inferential methods. This question is of course not unique to copyright liability; corporate entities may be responsible for “knowing” actions under a variety of applicable legal provisions, and the question of corporate knowledge is generally under theorized. But consideration of ISP “knowledge” in this context points the way to consideration of corporate epistemology that must be foundational to determining corporate responsibility in copyright protection.
Value impact of debt issuances by targets of withdrawn takeovers

Abstract An existing finance theory predicts that managers of takeover targets will increase leverage to enhance managerial control which can, in turn, allow target managers to thwart a takeover attempt altogether. We find that targets significantly increase leverage, not only by issuing more debt, but also by repurchasing more equity. We also find that debt issuances by poorly performing target managers made between takeover announcement and withdrawal result in significantly negative abnormal returns at the time of the issuance, consistent with the entrenchment role of debt. On the other hand, debt issued by high-performing target managers is not found to result in these same negative returns. Additionally, we document that debt-increasing, poorly performing targets experience significantly more negative returns at withdrawal announcement, also followed by significantly negative post-withdrawal stock performance, while these negative effects are offset for high-performing targets. Overall, our findings suggest that managerial motivations to block takeover attempts with increased debt issuance differ and that these differences in motivation are recognized by the market.
Fear of China: Is There a Future for Manufacturing in Latin America?

Summary China’s emergence has raised pointed questions about the future of manufacturing in Latin America. This paper looks at this challenge and its implications. It begins by asking: Does manufacturing still matter for Latin America? It argues that the region cannot afford to turn its back to a well-proven road to development. It then moves on to show that endowments, productivity, scale and the government’s role, all work together to make China a formidable competitor. The importance of this challenge is confirmed by an analysis of the trade data, which suggests a small impact so far, but a disquieting trend.
Producers and Predators

This paper explores a series of general-equilibrium models in which people can choose to be either producers or predators, and in which producers can allocate their resources either to production or to guarding their production against predators. The analysis shows how the ratio of predators to producers and the social cost of predation depend on the technology of predation, on the interpersonal distribution of productive resources, and in a fundamental way on whether the decision to allocate resources to guarding against predators is made individually or collectively.
HART'S EXPRESSIVISM AND HIS BENTHAMITE PROJECT

In a 1973 article, H.L.A. Hart says the following about Jeremy Bentham's achievements in the philosophy of law: Bentham was certainly not the first to define law as a command: Hobbes, for example, had anticipated him in that, and even the despised Blackstone's definition of municipal law was in terms of command. But Bentham differed from Hobbes and, as far as I know, from all previous social theorists in insisting that we must not so define our terms in legal or political theory as to make the practical conclusions which we favour follow from them. Such definitions have been aptly called ‘persuasive definitions’ and among Bentham's many claims to be an innovator none is better founded nor, I think, more important than his insistence on a precise and so far as possible a morally neutral vocabulary for use in the discussion of law and politics. This insistence, though it may seem a merely linguistic matter, was the very centre, and I would say the sane and healthy centre, of the legal positivism of which Bentham may be regarded as the founder. It accounts for many important themes in his general theory including the form of his own definition of law. The terms that Bentham uses to define law are all flatly descriptive and normatively neutral. (1973, 28)
Health Insurance Mandates, Mammography, and Breast Cancer Diagnoses

We examine the effects of state health insurance mandates requiring coverage of screening mammograms. We find evidence that mammography mandates significantly increased mammography screenings by 4.5-25 percent. Effects are larger for women with less than a high school degree in states that ban deductibles, a policy similar to a provision of federal health reform that eliminates cost-sharing for preventive care. We also find that mandates increased detection of early stage in-situ pre-cancers. Finally, we find a substantial proportion of the increased screenings were attributable to mandates that are not consistent with current recommendations of the American Cancer Society.
TAX-HAVEN INCORPORATION FOR U.S.-HEADQUARTERED FIRMS: NO EXODUS YET

U.S. income tax rules may encourage a U.S.-headquartered multinational corporation (MNC) to adopt a structure with a tax haven parent. We study data from firms that conducted initial public offerin...
The Shadow of Professor Kingsfield: Contemporary Dilemmas Facing Women Law Professors

This essay discusses the predicament of women law professors in an era when the representation of women on law faculties has reached a "critical mass." It explores three mechanisms for reproducing gender inequality: (1) self-fulfilling stereotypes, (2) gender-specific comparison groups, and (3) the accumulation of small disadvantages. Chamallas uses stories from her own and colleagues' experiences to illustrate contemporary forms of bias.
Why is it a Crime to Stomp on a Goldfish? - Harm, Victimhood and the Structure of Anti-Cruelty Offenses

In the article it is argued that, contrary to what prominent animal law scholars such as Gary Francione claim, we have decided to criminalize harm to animals primarily because we are concerned about the wellbeing of such creatures, not because doing so furthers some other human interest. I do so in four parts. Part I provides a brief historical analysis of animal cruelty laws that will show that, although many of these statutes were originally enacted as a way to protect private property, there has been a marked trend, specially in recent times, to punish animal cruelty regardless, and some-times despite, the property interests involved. In Part II, the notions of harm, victimhood and consent will be explored in order to lay the groundwork for the claims that will be put forth in the remainder of the article. In light of the issues that animal cruelty statutes raise, particular attention will be paid to discussing John Stuart Mill's and H.L.A. Hart's conception of the harm principle. Part III examines five different theories that might be advanced in order to explain the interest that we seek to promote by punishing acts that are harmful to animals, namely: (1) protection of property, (2) protection against the infliction of emotional harm to those who have ties to the injured animal, (3) prevention of future harm to humans, (4) enforcement of a moral principle, and (5) protection of the animals themselves. In Part IV, I will try to explain why it is not necessarily the case, as many animal law scholars have argued, that because animal cruelty statutes allow for the infliction of harm to animals as a result of hunting, scientific and farming activities, the interest primarily sought to be protected by these laws is something other than the protection of animals. This argument is ultimately flawed because it is premised on a misunderstanding of the structure of criminal offenses in general and of anti-cruelty statutes in particular. Properly understood, the existence of privileges that allow people to infringe the prima facie norm against harming animals merely reveals that society (rightly or wrongly) believes that there are countervailing reasons that justify harming the interest sought to be protected by the offense, not that the prohibitory norm was not really designed to protect animals in the first place.
Water Security, Fear Mitigation and International Water Law (symposium)

Water lawyers, courts, and others in the water community are fond of quoting the quip attributed to Mark Twain, "whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over." Not only is there no evidence that Twain ever uttered these words, but the quote has taken on a life of its own which grossly distorts the nature of water competition disputes, especially state to state competition. Both whiskey and water are for human benefit and exist in sufficient quantities throughout the world to satisfy present and future demand. Meeting these demands will be challenging because water must be managed to counter the problems of mal-distribution in certain places. Nonetheless, the idea that water conflict can and will lead to violence is so powerful that the term "war" is often applied to intense but nonviolent conflicts over the use of water. The war metaphor implies that water conflicts are irresolvable unless one party totally prevails over the other. In reality, water violence happens; when it does, it is generally localized, although water facilities have been military targets. This said, many water disputes, especially international ones, simmer unresolved for decades. Festering disputes are cause for concern because the ultimate driver in many water conflicts, both peaceful and potentially violent, is the fear of drought.
Debt and taxes in the theory of public finance

If a specified amount of government spending must be financed, how should that finance be divided between taxes and government borrowing? In the case of a temporary increase in government spending, it has been argued that debt finance is optimal because the small increments in all future tax rates to finance interest payments involves a smaller excess burden than the single large tax rate increase that would be required to avoid an initial increase in the national debt. This argument ignores the excess burden of debt finance that results if the initial capital stock is smaller than optimal (e.g., because of taxes or capital income).The first section of the present paper shows how the debt-finance advantage of a small increase in tax rates can be explicitly balanced against the disadvantage of the excess burden that arises from additional debt. The analysis shows that, with plausible parameter values, the excess burden of debt finance is likely to outweigh the advantage of avoiding a large single tax change and therefore that financing a temporary increase in government spending by an immediate tax increase is likely to be preferable to debt financing.The second section examines the appropriate response to a permanent increase in government spending and shows that such spending cannot be financed by a permanent increase in government debt. Moreover, whenever the golden rule level of capital intensity is an optimality condition independent of the level of government spending, any increase in government spending should be matched by an equal increase in tax revenue.
The cost of capital in Japan: Recent evidence and further results

We extend our recent work measuring the cost of capital in Japan and the United States by considering several questions that such results raised. Among our findings are: (1) The small firm - large firm distinction appears to be more significant in Japan, not in the United States; (2) Correcting Japanese accounting statements for cross-holding raises the estimated Japanese cost-of-capital by about 1 percentage point; (3) Correcting Japanese accounting statements for unmeasured returns to land has a significantly more important effect: the most conservative correction we attempt raises the implied Japanese return to capital to parity with the United States during the mid-1980's.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
Dodd-Frank as Maginot Line.

INTRODUCTION On May 10, 1940 the German Army opened a massive offensive aimed at France.1 Five weeks later, on June 14, 1940, the Germans occupied Paris and essentially knocked the French out of World War II.2 The French defense strategy relied upon a system of fixed fortifications on the French frontier known as the Maginot Line, which ran from Switzerland to Luxembourg.3 The Germans countered the Maginot Line with a new form of mechanized warfare that allowed them to fly over and drive around the fixed fortifications with airplanes and armored vehicles, through the unfortified Ardennes Forest.4 The enginedriven warfare of World War II displaced the trench warfare of World War I and rendered the Maginot Line strategically irrelevant. Indeed, the Maginot Line drew massive resources from the French military elsewhere, engendered an illusory sense of security, and enabled the Germans to craft a strategy in full view of the primary French defense deployments.5 While the Maginot Line would have helped the French effort to win a war like World War I (a catastrophe for all concerned), it did little to prevent France’s more catastrophic defeat in World War II, and even hastened the French defeat.6 The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank Act or Dodd-Frank)7 may prove as ineffective as the Maginot Line. It will likely foreclose a
Cumulative Harm and Resilient Liability Rules for Product Markets

In the traditional unilateral care model of products liability, expected harm is proportional to usage. Thus, all standard liability regimes yield the efficient choice of care by the firm, independent of the level of usage. This implies that liability for harm can be considered independently of market structure and competition. We find that when expected harm is cumulative (i.e., increasing and convex in usage), then different liability regimes produce different outcomes and yield different implications for social efficiency. Since the responsibilities for product and market performance are divided among relevant agencies and institutions, this presents a challenge to the correct design of rules for agents in the market. We argue for selection among alternative liability regimes based upon what we refer to as "resilience." Strict liability is a resilient policy; no liability and negligence are not resilient. Thus, we provide a new argument for strict liability with respect to product-generated harms. (JEL K13, L13, L15)
Fielding a Team for the Fans: The Societal Consequences and Title VII Implications of Race-Considered Roster Construction in Professional Sport

Professional sports organizations' relationships with their players are, like other employer-employee relationships, subject to scrutiny under the antidiscrimination mandates embedded in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Professional sports organizations are, however, unique among employers in many respects. Most notably, unlike other employers, professional sports organizations attract avid supporters who identify deeply with the teams and their players. To the extent an organization racially discriminates, therefore, such discrimination creates the risk that fans will identify with the homogenous or racially disproportionate roster that results. The consequences of such race-based team identification are wide-reaching and potentially tragic. Through engaging the race-considered roster construction phenomenon, with particular attention to the discriminatory histories of Major League Baseball's Boston Red Sox and the National Basketball Association's Boston Celtics, this article explores the societal discord race-considered roster construction breeds and Title VII's role in thwarting it. As the construction of Major League Baseball's 2005 New York Mets suggests, however, race-considered roster construction may favor non-white players, just as it has traditionally favored white players. As such, this article also explores Title VII's application to such race-considered roster construction, the extent to which developing affirmative action jurisprudence might shield this form of race-considered roster construction from Title VII liability, and whether Title VII's inapplicability in this context would result in the aforementioned negative societal consequences.
JOBLESS RECOVERIES: STAGNATION OR STRUCTURAL CHANGE?

Within the existing literature a number of competing explanations for jobless recoveries have emerged. On the one hand there is evidence of dynamic structural change including offshoring/globalization and technological advances that are resulting in the loss of middle‐skill (routine) employment. Other studies emphasize a less dynamic economy with slower growth, reduced labor market fluidity, a decline in startup activity, and even economic stagnation. This study exploits variation among U.S. states to assess the degree that stagnation and/or important structural changes in the economy contribute to the recent phenomenon of jobless recoveries. We find support for both the stagnation and structural change theories of jobless recoveries. On the stagnation side, we find evidence that lower startup rates are a significant predictor of jobless recoveries. We also find evidence that links dynamic structural change to the jobless recovery phenomenon. More specifically states experiencing a long‐run downward trend in the share of routine employment are more likely to experience a jobless recovery. Our results are consistent with the polarization theory where routine‐replacing technological advances permanently reduce demand for middle‐skill labor, thus contributing to jobless recoveries. (JEL E32, E24)
FIXING RISK NEUTRAL RISK MEASURES

In line with regulations and common risk management practice, the credit risk of a portfolio is managed via its potential future exposures (PFEs), expected exposures (EEs), and related measures, the expected positive exposure (EPE), effective expected exposure (EEE), and the effective expected positive exposure (EEPE). Notably, firms use these exposures to set economic and regulatory capital levels. Their values have a big impact on the capital that firms need to hold to manage their risks. Due to the growth of credit valuation adjustment (CVA) computations, and the similarity of CVA computations to exposure computations, firms find it expedient to compute these exposures under the risk neutral measure. Here, we show that exposures computed under the risk neutral measure are essentially arbitrary. They depend on the choice of numeraire, and can be manipulated by choosing a different numeraire. The numeraire can even be chosen in such a way as to pass backtests. Even when restricting attention to commonly used numeraires, exposures can vary by a factor of two or more. As such, it is critical that these calculations be carried out under the real world measure, not the risk neutral measure. To help rectify the situation, we show how to exploit measure changes to efficiently compute real world exposures in a risk neutral framework, even when there is no change of measure from the risk neutral measure to the real world measure. We also develop a canonical risk neutral measure that can be used as an alternative approach to risk calculations.
One share-one vote and the market for corporate control

Abstract This paper analyzes the optimality of the one share-one vote rule. We focus on takeover bids as a mechanism for allocating control. We assume two types of control benefits — benefits to security holders and private benefits to the controlling party. One share-one vote maximizes the importance of benefits to securityholders relative to benefits to the controlling party and hence encourages the selection of an efficient management team. However, one share-one vote does not always maximize the reward to securityholders in a corporate control contest. Sufficient conditions are given for one share-one vote to be optimal overall. The paper also includes a discussion of the empirical evidence.
The Burden of Knowledge and the 'Death of the Renaissance Man': Is Innovation Getting Harder?

This paper investigates a possibly fundamental aspect of technological progress. If knowledge accumulates as technology advances, then successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden. Innovators can compensate through lengthening educational phases and narrowing expertise, but these responses come at the cost of reducing individual innovative capacities, with implications for the organization of innovative activity - a greater reliance on teamwork - and negative implications for growth. Building on this "burden of knowledge" mechanism, this paper first presents six facts about innovator behavior. I show that age at first invention, specialization, and teamwork increase over time in a large micro-data set of inventors. Furthermore, in cross-section, specialization and teamwork appear greater in deeper areas of knowledge while, surprisingly, age at first invention shows little variation across fields. A model then demonstrates how these facts can emerge in tandem. The theory further develops explicit implications for economic growth, providing an explanation for why productivity growth rates did not accelerate through the 20th century despite an enormous expansion in collective research effort. Upward trends in academic collaboration and lengthening doctorates, which have been noted in other research, can also be explained in this framework. The knowledge burden mechanism suggests that the nature of innovation is changing, with negative implications for long-run economic growth.
Dynamic discrete choice and dynamic treatment effects

This paper considers semiparametric identification of structural dynamic discrete choice models and models for dynamic treatment effects. Time to treatment and counterfactual outcomes associated with treatment times are jointly analyzed. We examine the implicit assumptions of the dynamic treatment model using the structural model as a benchmark. For the structural model we show the gains from using cross-equation restrictions connecting choices to associated measurements and outcomes. In the dynamic discrete choice model, we identify both subjective and objective outcomes, distinguishing ex post and ex ante outcomes. We show how to identify agent information sets.
Exchange rate volatility and first-time entry by multinational firms

The model and related empirical examination in this paper demonstrate one reason why previous studies document both positive and negative correlations between exchange rate volatility and observed levels of foreign direct investment. Using a simple model of cross-border mergers and acquisitions, it argues that the source of the volatility is important in resolving the puzzle. An empirical analysis of mergers and acquisitions by individual firms reveal that first-time foreign direct investment is discouraged by monetary volatility originating from the source-country, but can be encouraged by monetary volatility originating in the host country, especially when compared to domestic investment or expansion by existing multinationals. The regressions also reveal a large and positive “euro effect” on the number of first-time cross-border mergers within the European Monetary Union, even when controlling for domestic merger activity.
The Fundamentals of Commodity Futures Returns

Commodity futures risk premiums vary across commodities and over time de- pending on the level of physical inventories. The convenience yield is a decreasing, nonlinear function of inventories. Price measures, such as the futures basis, prior futures returns, prior spot returns, and spot price volatilities reflect the state of inventories and are informative about commodity futures risk premiums. We verify these theoretical predictions using a comprehensive data set on 31 commodity futures and physical inventories between 1971 and 2010. We find no evidence that the positions of participants in futures markets predict risk premiums on commodity futures.
Can You Ever Disclaim an Express Warranty

59 I. Creation of Express Warranties 61 II. Disclaimers of Express Warranties 62 III. Effectiveness of Express Warranty Disclaimers 65 A. Fraud and Misrepresentation 66 B. Unconscionability 67 C. Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Statutes 69 IV. Conclusion 71 “[W]arranties are favored in law, being a part of a man’s assurance.”
Convergence to the Law of One Price Without Trade Barriers or Currency Fluctuations

Using a panel of 51 prices from 48 cities in the United States, we provide an upper bound estimate of the rate of convergence to purchasing power parity. We find convergence rates substantially higher than typically found in cross-country data. We investigate some potentially serious biases induced by i.i.d. measurement errors in the data, and find our estimates to be robust to these potential biases. We also present evidence that convergence occurs faster for larger price differences. Finally, we find that rates of convergence are slower for cities farther apart. However, our estimates suggest that distance alone can only account for a small portion of the much slower convergence rates across national borders.
Political Institutions, Judicial Review, and Private Property: A Comparative Institutional Analysis

Since Madison, jurists of all ideological stripes have more or less casually presumed that constitutional judicial review is absolutely necessary to protect private property rights against over-regulation by political bodies. During the twentieth century, this presumption led directly to the institution of regulatory takings doctrine. Recently, the economist William Fischel and the legal scholar Neil Komesar have raised important questions about, respectively, the utility and the sufficiency of constitutional judicial review for protecting private property. This article supports their arguments with theoretical and historical evidence that constitutional judicial review (1) is not strictly necessary for protecting private property rights, and (2) may have substantially less marginal social utility than most jurists presume. The theoretical evidence comes from positive politicaleconomic theories of property rights, according to which political institutions can be expected to substantially protect property ...
Investors' Responses to Reported Earnings when Management Issues Goal versus Expectation Earnings Guidance: An Experimental Investigation

ABSTRACT We investigate whether nonprofessional investors' responses to a company's reported earnings differ when management earnings guidance is presented as a goal or an expectation. We present 6...
Biodefense: who's in charge?

The recent anthrax attacks demonstrated more than what any number of scholarly articles could describe about our lack of organizational and federalism considerations for responding to a domestic biological attack. In 2000, The National Commission on Terrorism, a Congressional commission, concluded that the Department of Defense should be the lead agency rather than the FBI or FEMA, the current federal agency leaders in a terrorist attack, writing that the Pentagon’s “ability to command and control vast resources for dangerous, unstructured situations is unmatched by any other department or agency.” Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Prize Recipient for discovering genetic recombinant DNA techniques and the organization of genetic material of bacteria, was asked in Spring 2001, “If you could suggest one thing to the government that it should focus on, or one thing that needs improving, what would that be?” He responded, “Coordination of the different response agencies. At this point, structure is all important. There are lots of resources available or could be made available if [the government] could develop some concerted cooperative effort, but it is still fragmented.”
Physical and Synthetic Exchange-Traded Funds: The Good, the Bad, or the Ugly?

This article focuses on the replication process of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). It compares the tracking ability of ETFs based on physical replication of their benchmark indexes to those of synthetic ETFs. Synthetic ETFs rely on derivatives such as swaps. For ETFs listed at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, we show that both categories of ETFs suffer from high tracking errors. Contrary to conventional wisdom, synthetic equity ETFs are not different in terms of tracking errors from their physical counterparts. However, synthetic fixed-income ETFs have lower tracking errors than physical fixed-income ETFs. Thus, synthetic ETFs have as good or better tracking errors than physical ETFs. We identify different factors influencing tracking errors.
What Happens When Dirty Harry Becomes an [Expert] Witness for the Prosecution?

Although many may suspect that police experts play a crucial role in obtaining convictions, few realize that police officers and federal agents are the most common prosecution experts. Police experts play an especially significant role in narcotics prosecutions where expert interpretations of a defendant's drug behavior or drug jargon abound. This Article attempts to reconcile the post-Daubert goal that judges consistently scrutinize the validity of expert evidence with the fact that, in practice, prosecutors consistently gain an unfair advantage when judges cede control of their courtrooms to the expert who arrives with a badge and gun. The assumptions that underlie this type of police expert testimony are frequently flawed or undisclosed. Thus, the Article proposes specific inquiries that could be adopted by the judiciary and defense bar to ensure that police experts' methods are valid and their conclusions are reasonable.
Corporate governance myths: Comments on Armstrong, Guay, and Weber

Abstract This paper argues that academics, politicians, and the media have six commonly held but misguided beliefs about corporate governance. While Armstrong et al. (2010) discuss some of these misconceptions, a wider recognition that these beliefs are actually “myths” is important. They include: (1) a common definition of “corporate governance” exists; (2) a useful distinction is “internal” versus “external” governance mechanisms; (3) outside directors perform two separable roles: to advise and monitor managers; (4) research has identified “good” and “bad” governance practices; (5) a “good” governance index can be constructed; and (6) corporate governance “best practices” can be deduced from peer data.
Intuition versus Algorithm: The Case of Forensic Authorship Attribution

On November 6, 2012, Barack Obama was reelected President of the United States, having defeated his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney. The vote in the Electoral College—the official body that votes on a state-by-state basis—was decisive: 332–206. Obama also won the national popular vote by a margin of about 4,850,000 votes (50.9% to 47.1%). But Obama’s winning by a comfortable margin is not what many of the pundits on television were predicting. Some announced that Romney would win the election, including predictions that he
Rationalist Experiments on War

Private information and the commitment problem are central to the rationalist theory of war, but causal evidence is scarce, as rationalist explanations for war are difficult to test with observational data. I design laboratory experiments to isolate the effects of private information and the commitment problem on the risk of conflict. I find that the commitment problem sharply increases the incidence of conflict, but there is no significant difference in conflict incidence with or without private information in the shadow of shifting power. I also investigate the realism of the positive experimental results with a case study of Japan’s decisionmaking on the eve of the Pacific War. The permutation of formal, experimental and historical methods applies the strength of one method to compensate for the weakness of another. Convergent results from the different methods strengthen the causal inference.
Self- and Other-Referent Criteria of Career Success.

Subjective career success is typically measured relative to self-referent criteria, such as a person's career goals and aspirations. Part-time MBA students were asked to evaluate their “career succ...
The Seeds of Change: Popular Protests as Constitutional Moments

Bruce Ackerman’s influential theory of “dualist democracy” posits that in American history some extraordinary moments of constitution-making are “constitutional moments,” distinguishable from other periods of ordinary lawmaking. What is missing from the Ackermanian account of constitutional moments, however, is a deeper appreciation of the nature of popular protests, specifically that they may sometimes constitute the core of a constitutional moment, but on other occasions, they may serve as a very different inflection point in the evolution of a constitutional democracy. Up until now, the legal literature has not devoted much attention to such application of Ackerman’s theory. In this Article, I refine the theory of constitutional moments by drawing from some relevant mass protests around the world — “Occupy Wall Street” in the United States in 2011, the “Indignados” in Spain in 2011, “The Protests of May” in France in 1968, and especially “The Protests of June 2013” during the FIFA Confederations Cup in Brazil — to expose the paradoxical nature of constitutional precommitments and how social uprisings form, and sometimes fail, to try to remake them. As the seeds of change, this Article concludes that those popular protests are constitutional moments, but not those constitutional moments the legal literature is so fascinated by.
Lenders’ Response to Peer and Customer Restatements

We investigate whether restatements announced by economically related firms influence the contract terms a borrower receives from lenders. A restatement by a major customer firm increases the loan spread of a borrower by 11 basis points, on average. The contagion effects of customer restatements are higher (45 basis points) when a borrower's switching costs are high. Restatements by peer firms in the same industry also increase a borrower's loan spread, and this increase occurs regardless of restatement severity. Moreover, the sensitivity of loan spread to peer restatements is significantly greater when the restating peer firms are also in the bank's lending portfolio, suggesting that a lender's personal experience with restatements in an industry makes it more attuned to the potential implications of these restatements for the borrowing firm. Finally, our results suggest that lenders utilize information from peer restatements to anticipate future restatements by the borrowing firm. Les auteurs se demandent si les retraitements des etats financiers annonces par des societes ayant un lien economique avec une societe emprunteuse influent sur les conditions contractuelles que cette derniere obtient des preteurs. Un retraitement des etats financiers d'une importante societe cliente accroit le differentiel de taux d'une societe emprunteuse de 11 points de base, en moyenne. Les effets de contagion des retraitements des etats financiers de societes clientes sont plus importants (45 points de base) lorsque les couts d'un changement de client sont eleves pour la societe emprunteuse. Les retraitements des etats financiers de societes comparables exercant leurs activites dans le meme secteur entrainent egalement une hausse du differentiel de taux d'une societe emprunteuse, et cela peu importe la gravite des problemes que visent a corriger les retraitements. De plus, la sensibilite du differentiel de taux aux retraitements des etats financiers de societes comparables est beaucoup plus grande lorsque les societes comparables procedant a ces retraitements figurent aussi dans le portefeuille de prets de la banque, ce qui laisse croire que l'experience du preteur en matiere de retraitements dans un secteur d'activite accroit l'attention qu'il porte aux consequences potentielles de ces retraitements pour la societe emprunteuse. Enfin, les resultats de l’etude semblent indiquer que les preteurs utilisent l'information relative aux retraitements des etats financiers des societes comparables pour anticiper les retraitements ulterieurs des etats financiers de la societe emprunteuse.