cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
GENDER MATTERS: TEACHING A REASONABLE WOMAN STANDARD IN PERSONAL INJURY LAw*

"Reasonable care" is, of course, a concept central to any torts class. But what is it? One very standard doctrinal move is to conceptualize reasonable care as that care shown by a "reasonable person" under like circumstances. The next step, logically, is to visualize this reasonable person. Visualization requires some important choices. For example, is the reasonable person old or young? Disabled or not? These are two questions that all the casebooks I have consulted discuss. I But, oddly, no casebook of which I am aware deals with the trait that nearly invariably figures in our description of people: sex. If the casebooks are silent, however, the cases and commentary are not. Judicial opinions frequently used to refer to the "reasonable man" rather than the reasonable person. As stated in the earliest, and one of the most frequently quoted, such articulation, "[n]egligence is the omission to do something which a reasonable man, guided upon those considerations which ordinarily regulate the conduct of human affairs, would do, or doing something which a prudent and reasonable man would not do.,,2 In a famous passage, in 1933, Lord Judge
Libya: a multilateral Constitutional moment?

The Libya intervention of 2011 marked the first time that the UN Security Council invoked the “responsibility to protect” principle (RtoP) to authorize use of force by UN member states. In this comment the author argues that the Security Council’s invocation of RtoP in the midst of the Libyan crisis significantly deepens the broader, ongoing transformation in the international law system’s approach to sovereignty and civilian protection. This transformation away from the traditional Westphalian notion of sovereignty has been unfolding for decades, but the Libyan case represents a further normative shift from sovereignty as a right to sovereignty as a responsibility. This significant normative moment demonstrates how far international law has traveled and also where it has not yet traveled. The Libyan case was propelled by a mass movement in Libya, in the region, and ultimately in the international community, which mobilized Security Council action, relying on RtoP, to protect civilians in the face of brutality. In response to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s threat to slaughter his own people amid the “Arab Spring” of 2011, the Security Council authorized, inter alia, a limited military intervention to protect Libyan civilians, invoking RtoP. The assumption under RtoP is that individual states have primary responsibility for civilian protection and that, as a backstop, the international community has subsidiary responsibility for civilian protection by preventing and rapidly responding to genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Military intervention pursuant to RtoP is, against that background, an option of last resort, when the other, more modest measures preferred as initial steps have failed (as discussed further in part II). Significantly, in the Libyan case, it was the Libyan people — as represented by an opposition movement (including numerous defecting government officials) that was demanding a more representative government — who called for Security Council intervention to mobilize an effective civilian-protection effort.
In the Fair Hearing Room: Resistance and Confrontation in the Welfare Bureaucracy

This article explores how welfare clients use and experience the fair hearing system, the administrative mechanism for challenging denials or reductions of aid in public welfare bureaucracies. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with clients, it explores how old-style procedural protections like fair hearings are being used to challenge new-style welfare reforms. This research found that clients use fair hearings as a form of resistance and self-assertion, hoping that it will protect them from a bureaucracy perceived as arbitrary and capricious. Like many citizens, they are as concerned with being heard by their governmental institutions as they are with the outcome of their case and want to find within the machinery of government a forum where they can obtain recompense and respect. However, the legalistic and rule-bound nature of hearings makes it difficult for clients to present their claims, and meaningful participation is often denied them.
On the impossibility of events of zero probability

A logically consistent way of maintaining the events of probability zero are actually impossible is presented.
Jurisprudence and the Problem of Church Doctrine

Within Mormonism, the concept of church doctrine is frequently invoked in theological discussions. What is meant by this term, however, is not entirely clear. This essay argues that the question what is church doctrine? can be usefully analogized to the question what is the law? It then uses the contemporary philosophy of law to analyze the concept of church doctrine within Mormonism
Takings, Fiscal Illusion, and the Median Voter

Schweizer (2017) provides a powerful and general way of using compensation payments to induce efficient actions. Its application to takings under fiscal illusion, however, is problematic. A better model would assume that the government decides to take property by considering effects on the median voter. Under that assumption, payments based on the market value of land, assuming non-excessive investment, induce efficient action by both landowners and the government.
Tweeting Social Change: How Social Media Are Changing Nonprofit Advocacy

How are nonprofit organizations utilizing social media to engage in advocacy work? We address this question by investigating the social media use of 188 501(c)(3) advocacy organizations. After briefly examining the types of social media technologies employed, we turn to an in-depth examination of the organizations’ use of Twitter. This in-depth message-level analysis is twofold: A content analysis that examines the prevalence of previously identified communicative and advocacy constructs in nonprofits’ social media messages; and an inductive analysis that explores the unique features and dynamics of social media-based advocacy and identifies new organizational practices and forms of communication heretofore unseen in the literature.
The Search Interest in Contract

Parties often do not negotiate for contract terms. Instead, parties search for the products, terms, and contractual counterparties they desire. The traditional negotiation-centered view of contract leads courts to try to determine the meaning of the parties where no meaning was negotiated and to waste time determining the benefits of bargains that were never struck. Further, while courts have ample tools to validate specifically negotiated contract terms, they lack the tools to respond to searched-for terms. Although the law and literature have long recognized that there is a disconnect between the legal fictions of negotiation and the reality of contracting practice, no theory has emerged to replace fictional negotiation. Therefore, this Article develops a new search-oriented theory of contract and shows that search theory can explain contracting behavior where the fictions of negotiation fail. This Article then applies search theory to the common law of contract, the Uniform Commercial Code, and the growing world of Internet searches and electronic contracting. I. INTRO DU CTIO N 1240 II. THE THEORYOF SEARCH 1242 A. A TAXONOMY OF SEARCH 1242 1. Location of Search Costs Within the Larger Universe of T ransaction C osts 1244 2. Unilateral and Bilateral Costs 1245 3. Objects of Search: Features, Contractual Terms, and C ounterparties 1247 B. THE ORIGINS OF SEARCH THEORYINPROPERITLAW 1248 * Associate Professor of Law, Indiana University School of Law, Bloomington. Thanks to Tom Merrill, Avery Katz, Margaret Jane Radin, Richard Epstein, Philip Hamburger, Ken DauSchmidt, Jeff Stake, Gene Shreve, Eric Rasmusen, Timothy Jost, Lee Fennell, Leandra Lederman, Amitai Aviram, and Adam Mossoff for comments at crucial junctures. Special thanks to Ted Castronova and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, James Pfander and the faculty at the University of Illinois College of Law at Urbana-Champaign, and to all the faculty participants in the Big Ten scholarship conference for the opportunity to present these ideas. Thanks to Matthew Lawless and Michael Ott for their thoughtful research.
A Triple Play for the Public Domain: Delaware Lottery to Motorola to C.B.C.

A trilogy of cases decided by federal courts over the past 30 years correctly holds that game scores, real-time game accounts, and player statistics are in the public domain. There is a consistent thread in these federal cases, based on sound legal, public policy and economic analysis, which justifies judicial rejection of state law claims by sports leagues and players asserting exclusive rights to this purely factual information. The creation of a collateral product incorporating merely public domain information about a sports event or athletes' performances, including fantasy league games, is not (and should not be) infringing absent copyright or patent infringement in violation of federal law, or a likelihood of consumer confusion regarding its origin, endorsement, or sponsorship in violation of the Lanham Act, which provides a federal statutory right to prevent trademark infringement and unfair competition. These courts implicitly recognize the need for a uniform national standard to determine the nature and scope of one's rights to use this nationally distributed and available public information for commercial purposes without authorization.
The house doesn’t always win: Evidence of anchoring among Australian bookies

Abstract We examine Australian horseracing bookmakers’ responses to late scratches, instances in which a horse is abruptly withdrawn after betting has commenced. Our observed bookies exhibit anchoring on the original odds and fail to re-adjust odds fully on the remaining horses after a scratch, thereby earning lower profit margins and occasionally creating nominal arbitrage opportunities for bettors. We also examine which horses’ odds bookies adjust after a scratch and demonstrate diminished profit margins even after controlling for these endogenous adjustments. Our results indicate that bookies’ adjustments recover approximately 80% of lost profit margin but that bookies forgo the remaining 20% due to systematic under-adjustments.
System response time operator productivity, and job satisfaction

This study examines the impact of on-line system response time on CRT operator productivity and job satisfaction. It was predicted that increase in response time would affect total transaction volume and total errors adversely, that is, total transaction volume would decrease with longer response times and total errors would increase. Total productive transactions, the difference between total transactions and total errors, was expected to decrease as response time increased. Operator job satisfaction was also expected to decrease.The study confirmed the prediction with regard to total transactions and productive transactions: both decreased as response time increased. Total errors actually decreased as response time increased, up to times of 12 seconds. When response time exceeded 12 seconds, errors increased. The impact of response time on productivity suggests nearly all transactions should be completed in 12 seconds or less. Beyond this level, the organization in the study suffered severe penalties in lost productivity. A relationship was also found between increased response times and reduced job satisfaction.
Household Electricity Demand, Revisited

respond to price changes. This paper develops a model for evaluating the effects of alternative tariff designs on electricity use. The model concurrently addresses several interrelated difficulties posed by nonlinear pricing, heterogeneity in consumer price sensitivity, and consumption aggregation over appliances and time. We estimate the model using extensive data for a representative sample of 1300 California households. The results imply a strikingly skewed distribution of household electricity price elasticities in the population, with a small fraction of households accounting for most aggregate demand response. We then estimate the aggregate and distributional consequences of recent tariff structure changes Recent efforts to restructure electricity markets have renewed interest in electricity demand and pricing. This interest reflects a broad desire to improve the efficiency of electricity markets, and policy-makers' concerns over the impact of price changes on consumers. How new pricing mechanisms would affect households' consumption and expenditures is a matter of considerable uncertainty, however. This uncertainty has provoked controversy and debate in the regulatory policy arena, hampering market reforms. Using econometric methods to assess the effects of electricity price changes presents several challenges. These include the nonlinear structure of tariff schedules, aggregation of metered consumption behaviour over time and appliances, and the interdependence of energy use with longer-term household decisions over appliance ownership and dwelling characteristics. The first two issues introduce complex simultaneity problems between marginal prices and consumption. The third issue imposes high data requirements (information on household-specific appliance holdings and residence features), and creates heterogeneity in consumption responses related to the characteristics of these durable goods. When the researcher's objective is to develop a model for simulating the effects of prospective tariff changes, ignoring these issues will provide an incomplete assessment of demand responses and potentially misleading predictions of a new tariff's consumption and revenue consequences. In this paper, we estimate a model of household electricity demand that can be used
Umpires as Legal Realists

During his confirmation hearings, then-judge John Roberts analogized the role of a judge to the role of a baseball umpire. Roberts argued that umpires do not make the rules; they simply apply them. Legal scholars have criticized Roberts from a legal realist perspective because the analogy misconstrues the nature of judging as formalistic. I believe Roberts also misconstrued the nature of umpiring as formalistic. Like judges, umpires must rely on their experience, rather than logic, because the rules of baseball are sometimes incomplete, indeterminate, and contradictory. On occasion, umpires even ignore the rulebook (justifiably). The judges-as-umpires analogy thus illustrates the differences between legal formalism and legal realism in a way that students can more easily understand.
Pricing American-style options by Monte Carlo simulation: alternatives to ordinary least squares

We investigate the performance of the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression method in Monte Carlo simulation algorithms for pricing American options. We compare OLS regression against several alternatives and find that OLS regression underperforms methods that penalize the size of coefficient estimates. The degree of underperformance of OLS regression is greater when the number of simulation paths is small, when the number of functions in the approximation scheme is large, when European option prices are included in the approximation scheme, and when the number of exercise opportunities is large. Based on our findings, instead of using OLS regression we recommend an alternative method based on a modification of Matching Projection Pursuit.
Assembling Class Actions

Five times in the past few years, the Supreme Court has engaged the propriety of class actions. 1 Taken together, these cases revisit certain core issues in class action law, all turning on the need and justification for grouping individuals as part of a collective entity for litigation purposes. When examined from the perspective of legal treatment of individuals as part of a collective—assembling the class action, in the terminology of the title—three distinct aspects of class organization stand out. First, the existence of a litigation entity requires that someone be in charge, and that in turn raises the problem of how to ensure the faithfulness of the appointed agent. Second, the decision to forge a litigation entity necessarily empowers one side of the dispute relative to the other side, and that requires some justification. And, finally, even when litigation entities exist, class action law must come to terms with the range of individual autonomy that should still be recognized, including the ability to contract out of collective representation. As developed in the difficult recent class action cases, the questions of leadership, underwriting, and autonomy help define how modern class action practice endeavors to provide equality of treatment and predictability in the interaction between the individual insults of aggrieved citizens and the undiscriminating consequences of mass society.
Duty and Discretion in International Arbitration

After a long arbitration in New York, a Canadian company wins substantial damages against a British multinational, only to see a federal court vacate the award.1 Two grounds are given for vacatur: the arbitrator was biased, and the arbitrator manifestly disregarded the applicable law. Not deterred, the winning claimant seeks to enforce the award against the defendant’s London bank accounts. What effect (if any) should a court in England give the American award? Should an English court ignore the arbitrator’s decision or the federal judge’s order? Should the English court make its own investigation into the legitimacy of the vacatur?
Lesser Evils and Justification: A Less Close Look

This contribution to a symposium issue on justification and excuse in the criminal law comments on an article by Larry Alexander. That article raises a host of important and challenging questions about that paradigmatic justification known both as the "lesser evils" defense and as the defense of necessity. Most centrally, it identifies three conceptions of the justificatory class of defenses: (1) that a justification simply reflects a permission - extended for whatever reason - to do what the criminal law otherwise forbids; (2) that a justification applies to conduct that realizes a lesser evil, or avoids a greater evil, than would have occurred had the defendant complied with the law; and (3) that a defense is a justification if and only if the conduct to which it applies may be aided by a third party. Although the first view - the "permission" conception - will likely strike many readers as common wisdom, Alexander's own ruminations about the proper shape of the necessity defense are actually premised on the second and third conceptions. This essay defends the permission conception of justifications against its competitors and teases out implications of this conception for the way that the necessity defense should accommodate defendants' actual beliefs and motivations.
Global patterns of power sector reform, 1982–2013

Abstract A reliable supply of electricity is essential for economic development, and developing countries across the world have implemented reforms to improve their power sector performance. We publish a dataset of power sector reforms in 142 developing countries from 1982 to 2013 and use the data to describe patterns of variation. We find that privatization and liberalization of competition continue to lag behind other reforms, such as allowing independent power producers and establishing electricity regulators. However, this gap is only wide for relatively poor and authoritarian countries with low institutional capacity. Hybrid power markets remain a reality, but economic growth and democratization can move power sectors in emerging economies to a different direction. If developing economies continue to expand their economies, build state capacity, and move toward democratic political institutions, then we may see more private electric utilities and competition for profits in the future.
Settling Multidefendant Lawsuits: The Advantage of Conditional Setoff Rules

In cases involving multiple defendants, each defendant's incentive to settle is influenced by the setoff rule enforced in the relevant jurisdiction. This article suggests that the effect of a setoff rule depends on whether the setoff is conditional on a finding that the settling defendant or defendants were legally liable. Previous research, which assumed that the setoff was unconditional, found that the two principal rules applied by modern courts--the pro tanto and proportionate share rules--often discourage settlement when the plaintiff's probabilities of prevailing against each defendant are not perfectly correlated. This article shows that the disincentive to settlement can be reduced or eliminated by making the setoff conditional on the liability of the settling defendant or defendants. The conditional setoff rules are of practical as well as theoretical interest because several states currently apply them.
Adam Smith, not J M Keynes or Frank Knight, was the First Scholar to make the Uncertainty –Risk Distinction Explicitly and Apply it Rigorously

Adam Smith was the first academic in history to make an explicit, detailed Uncertainty –Risk distinction and apply it clearly in a number of worked out examples and applications consistently in his analysis of decision making in the Wealth of Nations on occupational choice, businesses such as mining and fishing ,taxation, and foreign trade. Other possible claimants will be covered briefly. Only an author’s published works will be considered in making an evaluation. G. Boole, with his indeterminate (uncertainty) –determinate (risk-calculatable probabilities) approach of his 1854 The Laws of Thought, will be ranked second. Joseph Schumpeter, with his 1911 Theory of Economic Development contribution, is ranked third, while Keynes with his 1921 A Treatise on Probability, will be ranked fourth on tie breaks over Knight, with his 1921 Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit ,given that Keynes’s unpublished Fellowship dissertations of 1907 and 1908 are substantially earlier than Knight’s unpublished doctoral dissertation of 1916.G L S Shackle ‘s approach is a non probabilistic approach which ignored the much earlier work of Smith, Boole,and Keynes.
The dark side of shareholder litigation: Evidence from corporate takeovers

Exploiting the staggered adoption of universal demand (UD) laws by 23 states between 1989 and 2005 as quasi-natural experiments, we show that reduced shareholder litigation threat improves corporate takeover efficiency. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that acquirers from states that adopt UD laws experience significantly higher abnormal announcement returns and better long-run post-merger operating performance. The results suggest that the threat of litigation destroys value ex ante as acquirers make suboptimal deals to reduce the risk of being sued.
DNA Probabilities in People v. Prince: When are racial and ethnic statistics relevant?

When a defendant's DNA matches a sample found at a crime scene, how compelling is the match? To answer this question, DNA analysts typically use relative frequencies, random-match probabilities or likelihood ratios. They compute these quantities for the major racial or ethnic groups in the United States, supplying prosecutors with such mind-boggling figures as ``one in nine hundred and fifty sextillion African Americans, one in one hundred and thirty septillion Caucasians, and one in nine hundred and thirty sextillion Hispanics." In People v. Prince, a California Court of Appeals rejected this practice on the theory that only the perpetrator's race is relevant to the crime; hence, it is impermissible to introduce statistics about other races. This paper critiques this reasoning. Relying on the concept of likelihood, it presents a logical justification for referring to a range of races and identifies some problems with the one-race-only rule. The paper also notes some ways to express the probative value of a DNA match quantitatively without referring to variations in DNA profile frequencies among races or ethnic groups.
‘So Foul A Deed’: Infanticide in Montreal, 1825–1850

The preceding narrative is, in many ways, illustrative of the complex and contradictory phenomenon of infanticide in the district of Montreal during the first half of the nineteenth century. Although notices regarding the finding of infant bodies were frequent, discovery of twin infant bodies was not. This account was also unconventional in its tone: lacking the usual sterile narration typical of newspaper coverage of that topic, it cried out for the apprehension of the “perpetrator of so foul a deed.” Although the call for justice might have appeared strong, infanticide prosecutions were fairly rare and convictions rarer still. The prevalent view might have been to characterize the responsible party as an “unfeeling mother,” but the reality surrounding infanticide was altogether more complicated, yet fully as tragic.
The Quest to Confront Suburban Decline Political Realities and Lessons

The social and economic decline of first-tier suburbs has emerged as an important issue in metropolitan America, yet little is known about the political and policy responses to this problem. An analysis of Baltimore County demonstrates that the local government was able to implement revitalization projects from 1995 to 2005 since it had jurisdiction over its first-tier suburbs. Characteristics such as a large population in both first-tier and outer suburbs, an affluent tax base, and the lack of municipalities allowed Baltimore County to redistribute funds for these projects. I argue that if policymakers and planners are serious about confronting suburban decline, then either a regional growth boundary or a regional zoning tool is necessary to slow the pressures of urban decentralization. The political realities suggest that the will to maintain local autonomy is stronger than the will to eliminate the real barriers to revitalizing first-tier suburbs.
Of Umpires, Judges, and Metaphors: Adjudication in Aesthetic Sports and Its Implications for Law

In his confirmation hearings, Chief Justice Roberts famously described his vision of the judicial role as analogous to that of an umpire. “Judges are like umpires,” he said. “Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them.” The Chief Justice was, of course, hardly the first to draw this analogy, and he will certainly not be the last. The comparison is natural, for both roles require their occupant to “make the call,” or, more formally, to serve as the presumptively final adjudicator of the rights of competing parties.Yet while the “judge as umpire” seems to have naturally captured the imagination of judges, commentators, and laypersons alike, it has also come in for its share of critique, with critics pointing out the various ways in which the comparison is inapt. Perhaps the most frequently mentioned distinction is that judges, unlike umpires, and contrary to the Chief Justice’s suggestion, actually do have to role to play in the creation and refinement of the rules they must apply. Thus, commentators have proposed substitute analogies, including the “justice as commissioner” and “justice as color commentator.”This essay’s goal is not to add to these critiques, but rather to suggest that there is a better analogy — the somewhat less euphonious notion of the “judge as judge.” The best sporting analogy to judges in law may be to their namesakes in sport — the judges who provide the authoritative scoring in what philosophers of sport call “aesthetic sports,” such as gymnastics and figure skating.Judges in aesthetic sports, like their counterparts in law, derive a substantial portion of their authority and legitimacy from the expertise they bring to the position. Both play a significant role in shaping the content of the governing standards and draw, to a considerable degree, on their “tacit knowledge” in shaping and applying the rules. At the same time, however, their reliance on this sort of expertise — which necessarily entails the application of criteria unavailable or at least opaque to the lay observer or even the less expert participant — creates an opening for skepticism. Observers will often be unable to determine for themselves whether judges of either sort have accurately assessed the merits, and their efforts to do so will often lead them to assessments that differ from the judges, likely because the lay observer will not have accounted for all the factors that an expert judge considers. Because these observers cannot access all the factors driving the experts’ decisions and, thus, cannot fully understand them, they can easily conclude that those decisions are being driven by improper factors. Of course, judges in aesthetic sports have been accused, and occasionally found to be guilty, of corruption, as well as less pernicious forms of bias. The same is true of judges in law. Indeed, given the enormous cognitive demands associated with judging aesthetic sports, it is unsurprising that some extraneous factors influence officials’ determinations. That, too, can be said about judging in law.
Foreign Investment and the Privatization of Coercion: A Case Study of the Forza Security Company in Peru

The Spanish version of this paper can be found at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1879915This paper explores the reorganization of security and coercive power in Peru in response to the needs of foreign owned mining companies in an environment of social protest and opposition. It begins with an analytical description of the domestic legal regime that structures security services in Peru. In this context, it undertakes a case study of Forza, one of Peru’s oldest and most powerful private security companies, recently purchased by a transnational security company. Forza’s human rights record is explored through the trajectory of three on-going human rights cases. These cases signal a deep interpenetration of the economic and political power of foreign-owned mining companies, Forza and the Peruvian justice system. The paper then analyzes the Forza case study in terms of the applicable systems of law. At the level of domestic law, the Peruvian system and the investors’ home state legal systems are considered. At the international level, three distinct normative systems are reviewed: public international human rights law, private international foreign investment law, and corporate social responsibility mechanisms. This overview provides some insight into how the “global gap” in the enforcement of domestic law and the asymmetry in the enforcement of international law function together to produce the conditions of impunity in the Forza case study. Using the case study itself as an example, this paper concludes by proposing a methodological approach to international lawyering and legal academic work in relation to social movements.
Coordinating in the Shadow of the Law: Two Contextualized Tests of the Focal Point Theory of Legal Compliance

In situations where people have an incentive to coordinate their behavior, law can provide a framework for understanding and predicting what others are likely to do. According to the focal point theory of legal compliance, the law's articulation of a behavior can sometimes create self-fulfilling expectations that it will occur. Existing theories of legal compliance emphasize the effect of sanctions or legitimacy; we argue that, in addition to sanctions and legitimacy, law can also influence compliance simply by making one outcome salient. We tested this claim in two experiments where sanctions and legitimacy were held constant. Experiment 1 demonstrated that a mandatory legal rule operating in a property dispute influenced compliance only when there was an element of coordination. Experiment 2 demonstrated that a default rule in a contract negotiation acted as a focal point for coordinating negotiation decisions. Both experiments confirm that legal rules can create a focal point around which people tend to coordinate.
Presence of drug screening and employee assistance programs: Exclusive and inclusive human resource management practices

Summary Drug screening and employee assistance programs (EAPs) are human resource management practices for addressing substance abuse among employees. The two practices reflect different human resource management strategies and lead to different outcomes for employees and applicants. Drug screening is designed to exclude drug users from the workplace whereas EAPs offer them 'rehabilitation'. Characteristic s of worksites and their surrounding labor market may influence the presence or absence of these personnel practices. The results suggest that, when controlling for number of employees, economic sector, industry, and union presence, worksites with low turnover and in areas with high unemployment rates are more likely to engage in pre-employment drug screening, while worksites with low turnover more often provide an EAP.
An Empirical Model of India's Nifty VIX Index

As implied volatility is essential for pricing options, analyzing derivative strategies and measuring risk in investment portfolios containing derivatives, and understanding variations in implied volatility also becomes vital. Aside from a secular trend, volatility clustering and calendar effects are two commonly occurring sources of such variation. To analyze volatility clusters in India's implied volatility index (Nifty VIX), daily closing levels for the Nifty VIX were gathered covering trading days from January 2010 through January 2014. ARIMA and GARCH models applied to the de-trended Nifty VIX time series were found to be of limited use for describing this data with its episodic clustering and periodic events. However, an alternative modelling approach using Fourier analysis and Butterworth filters successfully split the time series into two logical parts, one with both clusters and periodic behavior and one with near-white noise. The likely origins of major clusters in India's Nifty implied volatility index appeared to be linked to important global financial events external to India during the study period, thereby supporting evidence of temporal spillover into the Indian market. The half-lives of implied volatility clusters were measured and compared with those in the U.S. market. The full range of Nifty VIX behavior for the study period was seen to consist of four distinct elements: trend, periodic events, clusters of volatility, and noise. When combined, these elements provided an empirical model able to produce successful forecasts for 60-day-ahead periods.
Can (and should) Hello Barbie keep a secret

The growing proliferation of connected devices in various environments offers an increasing number of opportunities for minors to create and share personal data. Our analysis looks specifically at the privacy of children interacting with Hello Barbie. Hello Barbie is a new smart toy from Mattel, controversial because of its ability to collect, store, and process the information of children. We assess Hello Barbie across three fronts. First, we de-black box the technology by testing its interactive capabilities – can Hello Barbie keep a secret? Will she respect privacy when asked or suggest otherwise? How is the information presented in the online dashboard for adult oversight? In order to situate Hello Barbie in the larger and ongoing conversation surrounding child privacy, we next discuss Hello Barbie in relation to three other toys designed for children's interaction: Teddy Ruxpin, Elf on the Shelf, and Furby. Finally, we will ask whether Hello Barbie should be able to keep children's information private and why. Based on our discussion, we answer the question as to whether, in the case of products specifically geared toward children, higher or different standards should be established for the collection, safeguard, and use of data.
"It's Snowing Down South": How to Help Mothers and Avoid Recycling the Sameness/Difference Debate

Professor Williams argues that by understanding their history feminists can avoid repeating it. The key disagreement in the destructive sameness! difference debate is not over whether women are the same or different from men, but over whether to empower women in their traditional caregiving role (the 'femme strategy "), or to shift them into socially valued masculine gender performances such as melding personal identity with paid work and off-loading care work (the "tomboy strategy"). Professor Williams argues that, given the profound importance of care work to the identities of the 85 % of women who become mothers, and the structural linkage of motherhood and economic inequality, we need to accept as a given that empowering women requires ending the economic marginalization of mothers. She proposes a "listening tour, " informed by an epistemology that respects all truths as partial, flawed, and situated-allforged in an arena of constraint. The law professor's role is not to pronounce the "One True Way" but to seek points of respectful coalition among people whose truths differ.
On Property Theory

A theory of property needs to give an account of the whole lifecycle of a property right: How it is initiated, transferred, and terminated. Economics has focused on the transfers in the market and almost completely neglected the question of initiation and termination of property in normal production and consumption (not in some original state or in the transition from common to private property). The institutional mechanism for the normal initiation and termination of property is an invisible hand function of the market — the market mechanism of appropriation. Does this mechanism satisfy an appropriate normative principle? The standard normative juridical principle is to assign or impute legal responsibility according to de facto responsibility. It is given a historical tag of being "Lockean," but the basis is contemporary jurisprudence, not historical exegesis. Then, the fundamental theorem of the property mechanism is proven, which shows that if "Hume's conditions" (no transfers without consent and all ...
The Desperation Argument for Geoengineering

Geoengineering has been roughly defined as “the intentional manipulation of planetary systems at a global scale” (Keith 2000; Schelling 1996). This definition is neither as precise nor as informative as some would like. Nevertheless, we can fix ideas by focusing on the most prominent current proposal, which is to inject sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to deflect incoming radiation and so cool the Earth's surface. This is a paradigm case: if anything counts as geoengineering, stratospheric sulfate injection (hereafter SSI) does.
Effective field theory approach to open heavy flavor production in heavy-ion collisions

We develop a version of Soft Collinear Effective Theory (SCET) which includes finite quark masses, as well as Glauber gluons that describe the interaction of collinear partons with QCD matter. In the framework of this new effective field theory, labeled SCETM,G, we derive the massive splitting functions in the vacuum and the QCD medium for the processes Q → Qg, Q → gQ and $$ g\to Q\overline{Q} $$ . The numerical effects due to finite quark masses are sizable and our results are consistent with the traditional approach to parton energy loss in the soft gluon emission limit. In addition, we present a new framework for including the medium-induced full splitting functions consistent with next-to-leading order calculations in QCD for inclusive hadron production. Finally, we show numerical results for the suppression of D- and B-mesons in heavy ion collisions at $$ \sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=5.02 $$ TeV and 2.76 TeV and compare to available data from the LHC.
Incidents of police misconduct and public opinion

Highly publicized incidents of police misconduct have adverse effects not only on the victims of abuse but also on public perceptions of the police departments implicated in the incident. Yet the magnitude and longevity of such effects have rarely been investigated. This article examines the impact of several celebrated incidents of perceived police misconduct in Los Angeles and New York City over a fairly lengthy time span, including the most recent scandal involving the Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the killings of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond in New York City. The analysis tracks public attitudes toward the police before and after each incident, and examines similarities and differences in the opinions of Whites, African Americans, and Hispanics. The often dramatic increase in unfavorable attitudes toward the police in the wake of highly publicized events suggests that such incidents have a pronounced effect on public opinion. Policy implications are discussed, drawing on citizens' attitudes toward measures that might prevent or reduce the frequency of future incidents of misconduct.
IS INTERNATIONAL LAW IMPARTIAL

The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest among philosophers in the core questions of ethics and justice on the international plane. Issues once discussed primarily in the response to the major global debates of the 1960s and 1970s—the Vietnam War and the North-South economic imbalance—have returned to the domain of philosophers. This engagement has taken place in two distinct but related debates. First, philosophers have devoted attention to the ethical significance of nationality and patriotism, asking whether an impartial morality permits disparate treatment of an individual's co-nationals. Second, scholars have revisited issues of international justice in great detail, including works on human rights as well as just war theory. These works ask, as Brian Barry put it, “given a world that is made up of states, what is the morally permissible range of diversity among them?” One impetus for renewed work on these ideas was the publication of John Rawls's The Law of Peoples.
The Thin Blue Line: Art or Trial in the Fact-Finding Process?

Part I of this Commentary objectively analyzes the film The Thin Blue Line, focusing on its monologues, dramatizations, and exhibits. The film's organizational structure roughly parallels the stages of the criminal justice process, from the investigation and arrest of Adams to his trial, conviction, sentence, and post-conviction litigation. The prologue and epilogue unify the story. Part II attempts to explain the bizarre judicial result, focusing on the prosecutor's dominant role in the criminal justice process. It concludes, as does the film, that one of the fundamental features of our legal system - the intrinsic ability of the adversary process to discover the truth - cannot function when weighed down by prosecutorial misconduct. Part III analyzes the film's epistemological conclusion that although ultimate truth is unknowable, the artist's version of the truth can be superior to the official version arrived at by law. Part IV offers a brief conclusion and brings the case up-to-date.
A game-theoretic rendering of promises and threats

Abstract The paper formalizes several of the ideas about commitment set out by Thomas Schelling in The Strategy of Conflict. Using a game-theoretic framework we formalize and interpret ‘promise’ and ‘threat’ as different species of commitment. We also distinguish the ‘pure promise’, the ‘pure threat’, and the ‘hybrid’. Using examples we discuss the friendliness of promises and the unfriendliness of threats.
The Growth of Government: Sources and Limits

Theories of the size of government focus on either the demandfor government or the supply of tax revenues. Demand sidetheories such as those of Peltzman, Meltzer and Richard,Husted and Kenny, and Lott and Kenny are essentially politicaltheories. They emphasize the role of voters or interest groupsin expanding government. Supply side theories such as those ofKau and Rubin, Baumol, West, and Ferris and West emphasize theability of government to collect taxes. In this paper, wecombine both demand and supply side theories. For demand, weuse the Poole-Rosenthal time series data on the ideology ofCongress, on the theory that all political forces mustultimately express themselves in voting which is measured byideology. For supply, we use the Kau-Rubin measures of theability of government to collect taxes as a function of thedeadweight costs of tax collection and ability of individualsto hide revenues. We find that female labor forceparticipation and the associated ability to tax femaleproductivity is the most important factor associated withgovernment, and it alone explains about 60% of the actualgrowth of government. The ideology of the Senate is alsosignificant, but has a small effect. This paper may be thefirst to examine the influence of ideology on the time path ofa policy; other research examining ideology (including ours)has been cross sectional. Further research on the role ofideology in changing policies over time is clearly warranted.
The Class Differential in Privacy Law

Many Americans are willing to divulge personal information and even sacrifice civil liberties for the benefits of a wired world. They will turn over their spending habits for the convenience of shopping on-line, submit to body scanners and suitcase searches to travel by air, and tolerate Facebook selling their personal information to third parties in order to network with friends.1 These sorts of surveillance bargains are rarely struck by the poor. Low-income Americans travel more often by bus than plane, they lack money to shop at Amazon.com, and they are less likely to have a computer that makes social networking possible in the first place.2 This digital and economic divide does not mean, however, that the poor are insulated from privacy intrusions. On the contrary, they endure a barrage of
Sales and price spikes in retail scanner data

Abstract Price filters used by macroeconomists place strong restrictions on “regular price” series. I propose a new price filter and show that, while many pricing facts are robust to filter specification, implications for price duration depend on the choice of filter.
Cohomological equation and cocycle rigidity of discrete parabolic actions in some higher-rank Lie groups

Let $$\mathbb{G}$$ denote a higher-rank ℝ-split simple Lie group of the following type: SL(n, ℝ), SOo(m, m), E6(6), E7(7) and E8(8), where m ≥ 4 and n ≥ 3. We study the cohomological equation for discrete, abelian parabolic actions on $$\mathbb{G}$$ via representation theory. Specifically, we characterize the obstructions to solving the cohomological equation and construct smooth solutions with Sobolev estimates. We prove that global estimates of the solution are generally not tame, and our non-tame estimates in the case $$\mathbb{G}$$ = SL(n, ℝ) are sharp up to finite loss of regularity. Moreover, we prove that for general $$\mathbb{G}$$ the estimates are tame in all but one direction, and as an application, we obtain tame estimates for the common solution of the cocycle equations. We also give a sufficient condition for which the first cohomology with coefficients in smooth vector fields is trivial. In the case that $$\mathbb{G}$$ = SL(n, ℝ), we show this condition is also necessary. A new method is developed to prove tame directions involving computations within maximal unipotent subgroups of the unitary duals of SL(2, ℝ) ⋉ ℝ2 and SL(2, ℝ) ⋉ ℝ4. A new technique is also developed to prove non-tameness for solutions of the cohomological equation.
Time is money: The effect of clock speed on seller's revenue in Dutch auctions

We study the role of timing in auctions under the premise that time is a valuable resource. When one object is for sale, Dutch and first-price sealed bid auctions are strategically equivalent in standard models, and therefore, they should yield the same revenue for the auctioneer. We study Dutch and first-price sealed bid auctions in the laboratory, with a specific emphasis on the speed of the clock in the Dutch auction. At fast clock speeds, revenue in the Dutch auction is significantly lower than it is in the sealed bid auction. When the clock is sufficiently slow, however, revenue in the Dutch auction is higher than the revenue in the sealed bid auction. We develop and test a simple model of auctions with impatient bidders that is consistent with these laboratory findings.