cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Illuminating Secrecy: A New Economic Analysis of Confidential Settlements

Even the most hotly contested lawsuits typically end in a confidential settlement forbidding the parties from disclosing their allegations, evidence, or settlement amount. Confidentiality draws fierce criticism for harming third parties by concealing serious misdeeds like discrimination, pollution, defective manufacturing, and sexual abuse. Others defend confidentiality as a mutually beneficial pay-for-silence bargain that facilitates settlement, serves judicial economy, and prevents frivolous copycat lawsuits. This debate is based in economic logic, yet most analyses have been surprisingly shallow as to how confidentiality affects incentives to settle. Depicting a more nuanced, complex reality of litigation and settlement, this Article reaches several conclusions that are quite different from the economic conventional wisdom and absent from the existing literature. First, contrary to the conventional wisdom that banning confidentiality would inhibit settlement, a ban could promote early settlements. No ban could effectively cover settlements reached before litigation, so any ban would incentivize parties to settle confidentially prefixing and such early settlements save more litigation costs. Second, a ban would affect highand low-value cases differently, depending on whether publicity-conscious defendants worry more about one big settlement or several small ones. Third, more settlement data would decrease litigation uncertainty, helping parties settle and deterring frivolous lawsuits. Fourth, more data would also reveal unlawful practices, yielding more efficient decisions by consumers, workers, and investors who otherwise engage in over-avoidance when unable to distinguish hazardous from safe goods. Contrary to the traditional economic story, we cannot predict the net effect of all these competing effects. Economics thus does not counsel against a confidentiality ban. This analysis typifies the schism between traditional economic analyses, which reach definite conclusions by simplifying complex realities, and many contemporary economic analyses, which are realistically nuanced but do not yield categorical conclusions. The latter brand of economics is sounder and still can clarify important matters such as parties' incentives, rules' costs and benefits, and the tradeoffs and competing effects of a policy like a confidentiality ban.
Calling it a Leg Doesn't Make it a Leg: Doctors, Lawyers and Tort Reform

It has long been a truism that doctors hate lawyers. This article explores some of the reasons for this phenomenon, as well as some areas for reform that might help to promote a better relationship between the professions.
Is market fragmentation harming market quality

Abstract We examine how fragmentation is affecting market quality in US equity markets. We use newly available trade reporting facilities (TRFs) data to measure fragmentation, and we use a variety of empirical approaches to compare execution quality and efficiency of stocks with more and less fragmented trading. We find that fragmentation affects all stocks; more fragmented stocks have lower transactions costs and faster execution speeds; and fragmentation is associated with higher short-term volatility but greater market efficiency, in that prices are closer to being a random walk. Our results that fragmentation does not appear to harm market quality are consistent with US markets being a single virtual market with multiple points of entry.
Parents, Religious Convictions, and Public School Curricula

This article discusses the inclusion of LGBT families in public school curricula, focusing on some of the difficulties created when parents suggest that such materials undermine their sincerely held religious convictions. The article concludes that the inclusion of such materials should not depend upon whether a state affords official recognition to LGBT relationships and that children should be taught in age-appropriate ways about the world in which they live even when that means discussing subjects that do not have a religious stamp of approval.
Markets and institutions in financial intermediation: National characteristics as determinants

Abstract Given the importance of financial intermediation and the rise of globalization, there is little prior research on how national preferences for financial intermediation (markets versus institutions) are determined by cultural, legal, and other national characteristics. Using panel analysis for data on a recent 8-year period for 30 countries, this paper documents that national preferences for market financing increase with political stability, societal openness, economic inequality, and equity market concentration, and decreases with regulatory quality and ambiguity aversion. We confirm with robustness tests that our result for regulatory quality is independent of differences in national wealth and that our result for political stability is independent of both wealth and political legitimacy. These results should be of much interest to managers, scholars, regulators, and policy makers.
Anti-Discrimination, Accommodation and Universal Mandates - Aren't They All the Same

Employment mandates are cross-employee distributional tools and should be evaluated on this basis, regardless of the title they carry. The impact of a mandate, how it operates and affects real life labor markets, determines the nature of the mandate. There is no meaningful distinction between anti-discrimination and accommodation mandates, just as there is no meaningful distinction between accommodation mandates and universal mandates. All mandates are situated on a continuum and their labor market outcomes are governed by three parameters of their design: coverage, cost, and valuation distribution by different groups of employees. The endeavor to catalog employment mandates according to formal distinctions must be replaced with a substantive measure of these mandates.
The Treatment of Isolationist Minorities

This Note examines what may be the most radical challenge posed by religious subcultures to the liberal politics of modern industrial nations - that of isolationist, nonliberal (or even illiberal) religious minorities. These subcultures do not seek to integrate with mainstream society or gain power within it, but to withdraw in order to maintain norms widely discrepant from those that are socially dominant. They often seek to place restrictions upon their own members' freedom or activities, in part to maintain the group's differences from the greater society. These cultures, characterized by features as distinctive as collective property ownership, pacificism, and the rejection of the separation of church and state, pose a serious challenge to liberalism's self-understanding and the norms of liberal tolerance.
Mark Blaug on the Normativity of Welfare Economics

This article examines Mark Blaug's position on the normative character of Paretian welfare economics in general, and also specifically with respect to his debate with Pieter Hennipman over this question during the 1990s. The article also clarifies some of the confusions that emerged within the context of this debate, and provides as a conclusion some additional arguments supporting Mark Blaug's position, which he himself did not provide.
Are All Spillovers Created Equal? A Network Perspective on IT Labor Movements.

This study aims to understand how characteristics of a labor flow network affect firm productivity using an inter-firm hiring network constructed from individual job histories. We separate IT-labor from non-IT labor and use the network measures constructed from the two types of labor flow to evaluate how they affect firm performance. We find that hiring IT workers from a diverse set of firms can substantially improve firm productivity, which is likely due to the diverse and nonredundant information provided in a network with high diversity. Interestingly, we find that the opposite is true for hiring non-IT labor. Having a cohesive network of non-IT labor hires allows frequent and repeated exposure to a common knowledge base is instrumental for implementing complementary organizational practices that are often complex and tacit. Together, these results demonstrate the importance of incorporating a network perspective in understanding the full impact of spillover effects from organizational hiring activities.
“If Torture Is Wrong, What About 24?” Torture and the Hollywood Effect:

Since 9/11, entertainment media has focused on depictions of terrorism and counterterrorism. How do dramatic depictions of counterterrorism practices—specifically torture—affect public opinion and ...
Inflationary equilibrium in a stochastic economy with independent agents

Abstract We prove the existence of stationary monetary equilibrium with inflation in a “Bewley” model with constant aggregate real variables but with idiosyncratic shocks to the endowments of a continuum of individual agents, when a central bank stands ready to borrow or lend fiat money at a fixed nominal rate of interest and the agents face borrowing constraints. We also find that, in the presence of real micro uncertainty about individual endowments, the rate of inflation is higher (equivalently, the real rate of interest is lower) than it would be in a “certainty-equivalent economy”; to wit, one in which every agent’s endowment is replaced by its expected value. Thus, underlying microeconomic uncertainty and borrowing constraints are shown to generate additional inflation.
Leveraging Auxiliary Information on Marginal Distributions in Nonignorable Models for Item and Unit Nonresponse

Often, government agencies and survey organizations know the population counts or percentages for some of the variables in a survey. These may be available from auxiliary sources, for example, administrative databases or other high quality surveys. We present and illustrate a model-based framework for leveraging such auxiliary marginal information when handling unit and item nonresponse. We show how one can use the margins to specify different missingness mechanisms for each type of nonresponse. We use the framework to impute missing values in voter turnout in a subset of data from the U.S.\ Current Population Survey (CPS). In doing so, we examine the sensitivity of results to different assumptions about the unit and item nonresponse.
Computing the Veracity of Information through Crowds: A Method for Reducing the Spread of False Messages on Social Media

Twitter and other social media allow people to post their experiences and opinions online. This information can be useful for making informed decisions. However, people can unintentionally spread false information. The work reported here focused on examining how to reduce the spread of inaccurate information on social media. In particular, we examined the effect of collective opinion on information forwarding in social media environments through an experiment with crowds. In Twitter, an indicator of collective opinion is the number of people who have retweeted a message. The results showed that displaying both retweet counts and collective truthfulness ratings could reduce the spread of inaccurate health-related messages. This finding suggests that collecting and displaying the truthfulness ratings of crowds in addition to their forwarding decisions can reduce the spread of false information on social media.
The Most Persuasive Frankfurt Example, and What It Shows: Or Why Determinism Is Not the Greatest Threat to Moral Responsibility

In this paper I argue that even if the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) is satisfied, moral responsibility is more seriously threatened if the Principle of Alternative Possible Reasons (PAPR) is not satisfied. Nor, I argue, is it clear how it could be satisfied. Finally, I suggest that not only moral responsibility, but also normativity itself, is threatened by the failure to satisfy PAPR.
Category theory and set theory as theories about complementary types of universals

Instead of the half-century old foundational feud between set theory and category theory, this paper argues that they are theories about two different complementary types of universals. The set-theoretic antinomies forced naive set theory to be reformulated using some iterative notion of a set so that a set would always have higher type or rank than its members. Then the universal u F = {x | F(x)} for a property F(.) could never be self-predicative in the sense of u F ∈ u F . But the mathematical theory of categories, dating from the mid-twentieth century, includes a theory of always-self-predicative universals – which can be seen as forming the “other bookend” to the never-self-predicative universals of set theory. The self-predicative universals of category theory show that the problem in the antinomies was not self-predication per se, but negated self-predication. They also provide a model (in the Platonic Heaven of mathematics) for the self-predicative strand of Plato’s Theory of Forms as well as for the idea of a “concrete universal” in Hegel and similar ideas of paradigmatic exemplars in ordinary thought.
Can Private Money Buy Public Science? Disease Group Lobbying and Federal Funding for Biomedical Research

Private interest groups lobby politicians to influence public policy. However, little is known about how lobbying influences the policy decisions made by federal agencies. We study this through examining lobbying by advocacy groups associated with rare diseases for funding by the National Institutes of Health NIH, the world's largest funder of biomedical research. Disease group lobbying for NIH funding has been controversial, with critics alleging that it distorts public funding toward research on diseases backed by powerful groups. Our data reveal that lobbying is associated with higher political support, in the form of congressional "soft earmarks" for the diseases. Lobbying increases with disease burden and is more likely to be associated with changes in NIH funding for diseases with higher scientific opportunity, suggesting that it may have a useful informational role. Only special grant mechanisms that steer funding toward particular diseases, which comprise less than a third of the NIH's grants, are related to earmarks. Thus, our results suggest that lobbying by private groups influences federal funding for biomedical research. However, the channels of political influence are subtle, affect a small portion of funding, and may not necessarily have a distortive effect on public science. This paper was accepted by Bruno Cassiman, business strategy.
Criminal Defense Lawyering at the Edge: A Look Back

This Article is an attempt to reconstruct the story of a New York City lawyer’s professional death and resurrection. In particular, this is the story of John Palmieri’s defense of John J. Delane in the year 1915, a time in the history of the legal profession when the bounds of zealous representation, particularly in criminal cases, were blurry and in transition. This is also the story of what followed the Delane trial: the efforts of prosecutorial, disciplinary, and judicial authorities to resolve factual and legal uncertainties about Palmieri’s conduct and intentions in defending his client, their efforts to locate the line between a permissibly zealous defense and an improperly overzealous one, and their efforts to determine whether Palmieri’s conduct fell out of bounds. And this is, of course, an attempt to draw some lessons for today from the partially reconstructed story of a criminal defense lawyer who advocated “at the edge” (if not over it) close to a century ago. The story’s broad outlines are simple. Palmieri’s client, John Delane, is tried for receiving the proceeds of prostitution from one Jeannette Annette, based principally on the testimony of two prostitutes associated with her. Annette is not called to testify against Delane because the prosecutor cannot find her. But in the middle of the defense case, Annette makes an entrance, suitcase in hand. She says that she had been living in upstate New York where no one knew how to reach her;
The Output Contributions Of Computer Equipment And Personnel: A Firm-Level Analysis

This paper examines the output contributions of capital and labor deployed in information systems (IS) at the firm level during the period 1988–91 throughout the business sector, using two different sources of data on these inputs. Our production function estimates suggest that there are substantial excess returns to both IS capital and IS labor. Computer capital and labor jointly contribute, or account for, about 21 percent of output, although only about 10% of both capital and labor income accrue to IS factors. Although IS employees accounted for a very small share of total employment by 1986, IS employment growth is estimated to have made a larger contribution to 1976–86 output growth than non-IS employment, due to the very rapid growth (16% per annum) of IS employment. The estimated marginal rate of substitution between IS and non-IS employees is 6: one IS employee can be substituted for six non-IS employees without affecting output.
Theistic Legal Realism and Normative Principles of Law

This Article, which reflects an explicitly Christian perspective, focuses on the proper substantive basis for legal norms. Part II explains moral realism, which provides the foundation for the philosophy I label "theistic legal realism." Parts III and IV explain the core principles of theistic legal realism and why this theory provides the proper methodology for discerning and applying foundational normative legal principles. Parts V and VI critique theonomy and natural law, explaining how those theories differ from theistic legal realism.
Corruption, Regulation, and Growth: An Empirical Study of the United States

This paper investigates whether the costs of corruption are conditional on the extent of government intervention in the economy. We use data on corruption convictions and economic growth between 1975 and 2007 across the US states to test this hypothesis. Although no state approaches the level of government intervention found in many developing countries, we still find evidence for the “weak” form of the grease-the-wheels hypothesis. While corruption is never good for growth, its harmful effects are smaller in states with more regulation.
Preferences with taste shock representations: Price volatility and the liquidity premium

Abstract If price volatility is caused in some part by taste shocks, then it should be positively correlated with the liquidity premium. Our argument is based on Krishna and Sadowski (2014), who provide foundations for a representation of dynamic choice with taste shocks, and show that volatility in tastes corresponds to a desire to maintain flexibility. To formally connect volatile tastes to price volatility and preference for flexibility to the liquidity premium, we analyze a modified simple Lucas tree economy with two otherwise identical assets, where one provides more liquidity because its output can be traded on an auxiliary international market, and where the representative agent is uncertain about his degree of future risk aversion. We show that a representative agent with a higher degree of uncertainty about his future risk aversion implies a higher liquidity premium (ie, a higher price for the more liquid asset) and more price volatility.
Real Effective Exchange Rate and the Constant Elasticity of Substitution Assumption

Abstract The real effective exchange rate (REER) is an aggregation of several bilateral real exchange rates assuming constant elasticity of substitution (CES) between goods from different countries. We investigate the validity of the CES assumption by estimating manufacturing export equations for 56 countries over 26 years. Under the CES assumption, splitting the REER into two components should not increase the fit in an export equation and the coefficients on the two REERs should be equal. We reject both these implications and find that the export equations with two REERs—vs. OECD and vs. nonOECD countries—perform better than the traditional ones.
Learning about match quality and the use of referrals

Abstract The firmʼs decision to use referrals as a hiring method is studied in a theoretical model of the labor market. The labor market is characterized by search frictions and uncertain quality of the match between a worker and a job. Using referrals increases the arrival rate of applicants and provides more accurate signals regarding a workerʼs suitability for the job. Consistent with the data, referred workers are predicted to have higher wage, higher productivity and lower separation rates and these differentials decline with tenure. The model is extended by introducing heterogeneity in firm productivity and allowing the endogenous determination of signal accuracy. High productivity firms are predicted to invest more in increasing signal accuracy and use referrals to a lesser extent.
Changing corporate effects on US business performance since the 1970s

A simmering debate in strategic management pits two conflicting views on the impact of corporate-level factors on affiliated business units. 'Mainstream' proponents hold that corporate effects on business performance are substantial, while 'revisionist' proponents hold that corporate effects are insubstantial compared to the impact of industry-related and macroeconomic factors shaping business performance. We provide a basis for reconciling these opposing views. With a broad sample of operating returns for US firms, we estimate corporate and other variance components of business performance in 17 successive four-year moving windows from 1979 to 1997. Corporate variance components of business performance shift from modest (5%) in the early-1980s as proposed by revisionists to quite substantial (33%) by the mid- 1990s as proposed by mainstream proponents. We conjecture that new theoretical insights on and practices developing the strategic capabilities of corporations through more focused diversification have promoted this evolution and reinvigorated the corporate strategy field.
Reconciliation with the Utility of Chance by Elaborated Outcomes Destroys the Axiomatic Basis of Expected Utility Theory

Expected utility theory does not directly deal with the utility of chance. It has been suggested in the literature (Samuelson, 1952, Markowitz, 1959) that this can be remedied by an approach which explicitly models the emotional consequences which give rise to the utility of chance. We refer to this as the elaborated outcomes approach. It is argued that the elaborated outcomes approach destroys the possibility of deriving a representation theorem based on the usual axioms of expected utility theory. This is shown with the help of an example due to Markowitz. It turns out that the space of conceivable lotteries over elaborated outcomes is too narrow to permit the application of the axioms. Moreover it is shown that a representation theorem does not hold for the example.
Exchange rate-based stabilization with endogenous fiscal response

Abstract This paper studies the dynamics of inconsistent exchange rate-based stabilization policy —a policy that fixes the exchange rate without an underlying fiscal adjustment to ensure that the exchange rate policy is sustainable in the long run—in a model where the perception that exchange rate policy temporarily leads to an initial expansion in consumption that generates an increase in tax revenues large enough to eliminate the ex-ante fiscal deficit. Therefore an ex-ante inconsistent stabilization program displays, ex-post, all the features of a fiscally consistent one; i.e., a fixed exchange rate and no fiscal deficit. In contrast to the standard results, where the inconsistency between fiscal and exchange rate policy leads to a steady loss of international reserves and culminates in a ‘Krugman type’ balance of payments crisis, this model predicts that along the path towards the balance of payments crisis the economy displays no fiscal deficit and enjoys increasing international reserves.
International Comparisons of Real Estate E-nformation on the Internet

How much information should brokers supply on a website? The Internet allows brokers to reduce the cost of providing information to potential buyers. However, brokers may risk disintermediation if ...
Toward a Unified Theory of Professional Ethics and Human Rights

This article begins with a simple empirical claim—that professionals (doctors, lawyers, and psychologists, among others) may either facilitate or prevent human rights violations. They possess this power by virtue of their expertise, access and social status. Building on this claim, I argue that states are dependent upon the assistance of professionals in order to comply with their international human rights obligations. Compliance with these obligations is an essential condition of the legitimacy of states; non-compliance is a matter of global concern and, if systemic, renders the state liable to interference from external agents in the international community. It follows that states are, in this fundamental respect, dependent upon professionals. But professionals are also dependent upon states; their ability to perform their professional functions in full is contingent upon privileges and protections accorded to them by the state. Given this mutual dependence, I advance a contractarian account of the relationship between professionals and the state—one that gives rise to a duty on the part of professionals to assist the state with the performance of its human rights obligations. The content of that duty varies across professions and among professionals, since it depends upon the nature of the professional’s expertise, and the degree of access and social status she possesses. This account offers both theoretical and practical benefits. First, it avoids human rights foundationalism because it ties the ethical obligations of professionals to international legal norms, rather than to human rights conceived as ethical claims. Second, the account offers a further approach for bridging the gap that scholars and advocates have identified between human rights commitments and compliance. The incorporation of human rights norms into domestic law, political institutions and corporate governance may all contribute to this. But the essential role professionals can play in the acculturation of and compliance with human rights has been neglected. The account advanced here has a number of important practical implications—not least, the need for more (and better) human rights education and mentorship for professionals.
The Government's Role in Climate Change Insurance

There are no robust insurance markets for climate change insurance. While these markets would provide valuable loss-mitigation incentives, at the same time giving financial certainty to individuals and businesses that face staggering future liabilities, existing efforts have produced a fragmented set of private and public products that provide only piecemeal coverage. This Article examines the government’s role in providing unified markets for insuring climate change risk. Although innovations in reinsurance markets suggest that private insurers could cover discrete risks associated with climate change, such as flood or wind loss, climate change’s broader systemic risks present problems of scale and scope that public insurance is better positioned to handle. This Article draws lessons from existing insurance programs to show both why purely private insurance would be inappropriate for a robust climate change insurance market, as well as how a nationally provided insurance program could be designed to avoid past problems.
Intertemporal Labor Supply and Human Capital Accumulation

We solve and estimate a dynamic model that allows agents to optimally choose their labor hours and consumption and that allows for both human capital accumulation and savings. Estimation results and simulation exercises indicate that the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is much higher than the conventional estimates and the downward bias comes from the omission of the human capital accumulation effect. The human capital accumulation effect renders the life-cycle path of the shadow wage relatively flat, even though wages increase with age. Hence, a rather flat life-cycle labor supply path can be reconciled with a high intertemporal elasticity of substitution.
Homeless Education: Unveiling the Truth behind Beating the Odds

The McKinney–Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 (hereinafter, the “McKinney Act”) is the first federal legislation to directly mandate the provision of numerous services to homeless youth. It includes a flexible definition of homelessness, prohibits discrimination against homeless youth by public schools, and mandates the provision of various direct services to homeless students. This Article documents my own story of being a homeless youth in Chicago, IL, and further explains how specific provisions of the McKinney Act helped to guarantee my own personal success. This Article also argues that increasing McKinney Act funding to schools nationwide is a necessary step in expanding opportunities available to homeless youth.
Enterprise risk management in financial intermediation

For financial intermediaries, especially those that are public companies, enterprise risk management (ERM) is a paradigm shifting idea. In this paper, I provide an interpretation of ERM that is both historical and analytical. The origins of the idea are examined along with the appropriate definition. A distinction between risk management and risk mitigation is clarified, the value-creating potential of ERM is explained and an ERM paradox is set forth.
The economic value of volatility timing using “realized” volatility ☆

Abstract Recent work suggests that intradaily returns can be used to construct estimates of daily return volatility that are more precise than those constructed using daily returns. We measure the economic value of this “realized” volatility approach in the context of investment decisions. Our results indicate that the value of switching from daily to intradaily returns to estimate the conditional covariance matrix can be substantial. We estimate that a risk-averse investor would be willing to pay 50 to 200 basis points per year to capture the observed gains in portfolio performance. Moreover, these gains are robust to transaction costs, estimation risk regarding expected returns, and the performance measurement horizon.
Reference points, prospect theory, and momentum on the PGA tour.

Pope and Schweitzer (2011) study predictions of prospect theory for the reference point of par on the current hole in professional golf. We study prospect-theory predictions of three other plausible reference points: par for recent holes, for the round, and for the tournament. A potentially competing force is momentum in quality of play, that is, the hot or cold hand. While prospect theory predicts negative serial correlation in better (worse)-than-average performance across holes, the hot (cold) hand implies the opposite. We find evidence that, for each of the reference points we study, when scores are better than par, hot-hand effects are dominated by prospect-theory effects. These effects can occur via two mechanisms: greater conservatism or less effort. We find evidence that the former (latter) dominates for scores closer to (further from) the reference point. We also find evidence of prospect theory effects (greater risk seeking) when scores are worse than par for the round in Round 1 and of cold-han...
Institutional Investor Preferences for Corporate Governance Mechanisms

ABSTRACT: We examine institutional investors' preferences for corporate governance mechanisms. We find little evidence of an association between total institutional ownership and governance mechanisms. However, using revealed preferences, we identify a small group of “governance-sensitive” institutions that exhibit persistent associations between their ownership levels and firms' governance mechanisms. We also find that firms with a high level of ownership by institutions sensitive to shareholder rights have significant future improvements in shareholder rights, consistent with shareholder activism. Further, we find that factors describing the characteristics of institutions' portfolios are correlated with governance preferences. Large institutions, those holding a large number of portfolio stocks, and those with preferences for growth firms are more likely to be sensitive to corporate governance mechanisms, suggesting those mechanisms may be a means for decreasing monitoring costs and may be more essenti...
Can or should CAP be applied to child research subjects?: A comment on Kim and Appelbaum.

As part of a symposium on Capacity to Consent, this Comment explores the use of CAP - a proposed instrument to measure capacity to appoint a proxy - with child research subjects. As with mentally disordered adults, there is a need for special protection of child subjects in research, especially nontherapeutic research or that involving more than minimal risk. The current federal regulations provide inconsistent protection because they defer to state law regarding minors' legal rights. Model codes and professional guidelines are similarly lacking, where they require "assent" from minor subjects who are capable of giving it, but do not respect a refusal of assent in many instances. Young children who are incapable of informed consent (as a matter of fact or law) may well possess the capacity to choose a proxy-decision-maker. Applying the concept of CAP to children and adolescents may provide a valuable alternative to current extremes of giving one or both parent(s) the power to "volunteer" their child as a research subject or requiring a child to prove to an IRB or a court his capacity for informed consent. The ability to choose a proxy may provide greater protection for the child, especially where the research can be done without the child's subject's assent but not without the proxy's consent.
To Skin a Cat: Qui Tam Actions as a State Legislative Response to Concepcion

The Supreme Court’s decision in Concepcion is widely regarded as heralding the demise of small-claims class actions whenever contracts of adhesion are involved in the transaction—which means for virtually all consumer and employment claims. Amending the Federal Arbitration Act to overturn Concepcion would be a relatively simple exercise in legislative drafting, but in the current political climate such efforts are unlikely to succeed. Thus far, proposed federal corrective legislation has failed to pass, and federal agency regulation of class waivers has been lacking. State legislatures might have the political ability to pass corrective legislation, but virtually all state limitations on class waivers in mandatory arbitration clauses are foreclosed by federal preemption under Concepcion.
Losing the Law War: The Bush Administration’s Strategic Errors

This short essay analyzes the failures of the Bush's administration legal strategy in the war on terror. The many mistakes had common roots. The first was an ideological focus on bolstering executive power and a consequent lack of pragmatic flexibility in choosing tactics that would maximize the chances of gaining public and judicial acceptance of its framework for detention, interrogation and trial of terrorists as well as surveillance of individuals resident in America. The administration repeatedly failed to recognize that reliance on executive authority alone entailed a high risk of defeat at the hands of the Court. Second, the administration radically underestimated the magnitude of the risk that the Court would curb the President's discretion, because it misunderstood the changed legal environment for litigation in the twenty-first century. Every aspect of American life has been increasingly subject to court made rules. As a result of this trend even discretion in the war on terror would likely be seen through the prism of legalism that applies to domestic criminal law. The third systematic error was a failure to recognize that all administrations tend to lose power as they age, and wars run a high risk of exacerbating that loss as they become progressively less popular. Of course, the scandals at Abu Ghrab and the more general lack of success in Iraq could not have been predicted. But an administration's legal high command must choose strategies that take account of the worst possible outcomes. As a result, the administration would have been well advised to take every step to bolster its legal position as early as practicable. It could have secured from Congress framework legislation for detention, military tribunals, surveillance, and even interrogation. Because citizens are generally most supportive of an administration at the beginning of a conflict, the terms of trade of the administration with Congress would have been likely favorable. This strategy would have avoided delays in war crimes trials. Perhaps more importantly, it would have avoided the appearance of lawlessness which has sapped support at home and abroad for the administration's reasonable objectives in its war against terrorists.
Skeptical Theism, Moral Skepticism, and Divine Commands

Over the last twenty-five years skeptical theism has become one of the leading contemporary responses to the atheological argument from evil. However, more recently, some critics of skeptical theism have argued that the skeptical theists are in fact unwittingly committed to a malignant form of moral skepticism. Several skeptical theists have responded to this critique by appealing to divine commands as a bulwark against the alleged threat of moral skepticism. In this paper we argue that the skeptical theists’ appeal to divine commands fails to rescue their position from the threat of a worrisome form of moral skepticism.
Gender differences in business performance: evidence from the Characteristics of Business Owners survey

Using confidential microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau, we investigate the performance of female-owned businesses, making comparisons to male-owned businesses. Using regression estimates and a decomposition technique, we explore the role that human capital, especially through prior work experience, and financial capital play in contributing to why female-owned businesses have lower survival rates, profits, employment, and sales. We find that female-owned businesses are less successful than male-owned businesses because they have less startup capital, less business human capital acquired through prior work experience in a similar business, and less prior work experience in a family business. We also find some evidence that female business owners work fewer hours and may have different preferences for the goals of their businesses, which may have implications for business outcomes.
Exploring structural embeddedness of product market activities and resources within business units

This article explores the concept of structural embeddedness and proposes a construct, contextual links, which represent coordination mechanisms applied to activities that may embed activities and their underlying resources within their business units. The main argument is that if activities and resources are highly embedded in unit structures, then unit reconfiguration should have an impact on activity reconfiguration, where reconfiguration refers to movement within the firm and retention or deletion from the firm. Specifically, the article argues that if there is a significant structural embeddedness, then removal from the contextual environment within which activities reside will result in their creating less value. Theoretical support is drawn from the dynamic capabilities and organization design literatures. Activity movements are specified as default, linked, or unlinked changes. The article examines, empirically, the simultaneous effects of activity and unit reconfiguration on activity retention to...
Political realignment and democratic breakdown in Argentina, 1916–1930

This article revisits one historical event that has been repeatedly discussed in the literature on democratic breakdown: the rise and fall of Argentine democracy between 1916 and 1930. First, we demonstrate why the claim that demands for drastic redistribution led to democratic breakdown is not a convincing explanation for the 1930 coup. Instead, we contend that the coup was the product of a polarizing political realignment that led to a legitimacy crisis. We evaluate this argument using estimates of Argentine legislators’ latent preferences (ideal points) between 1916 and 1930. Our roll-call data analysis suggests that disputes over socio-economic issues did not precipitate the breakdown of the regime. What mattered was the allocation of political power. These findings support the view that stable democracy requires that all major groups in society have a sufficiently large chance of being in power.
Discretionary disclosure and the market reaction to restatements

This paper presents evidence that management’s disclosure choices related to a restatement are associated with the market reaction at the time the restatement is announced. The two aspects of pre-restatement disclosure choice we examine are the amount of disclosure, hypothesized to reduce information asymmetries, and the tone of disclosure, hypothesized to exacerbate the effect of subsequently-disconfirmed market expectations. Our results provide support for both hypothesized effects, controlling for characteristics that previous research has shown to affect market reaction to restatements—financial attributes of restatements, and concurrent disclosure choices such as prominence of the announcement. We also find that concurrent and prior disclosure characteristics have equivalent and complementary power in explaining market reaction to restatements, while interactive effects indicate that pre-restatement disclosure choices reduce the marginal market impact of concurrent disclosure characteristics.
Starting small: Exploring the origins of successor function knowledge.

Although most U. S. children can accurately count sets by 4 years of age, many fail to understand the structural analogy between counting and number - that adding 1 to a set corresponds to counting up 1 word in the count list. While children are theorized to establish this Structure Mapping coincident with learning how counting is used to generate sets, they initially have an item-based understanding of this relationship, and can infer that, e.g, adding 1 to "five" is "six", while failing to infer that, e.g., adding 1 to "twenty-five" is "twenty-six" despite being able to recite these numbers when counting aloud. The item-specific nature of children's successes in reasoning about the relationship between changes in cardinality and the count list raises the possibility that such a Structure Mapping emerges later in development, and that this ability does not initially depend on learning to count. We test this hypothesis in two experiments and find evidence that children can perform item-based addition operations before they become competent counters. Even after children learn to count, we find that their ability to perform addition operations remains item-based and restricted to very small numbers, rather than drawing on generalized knowledge of how the count list represents number. We discuss how these early item-based associations between number words and sets might play a role in constructing a generalized Structure Mapping between counting and quantity.
Are Resource Booms a Blessing or a Curse? Evidence from People (not Places)

We provide the first estimates of the long-run income effects of temporary resource booms on people, rather than places, focusing on the U.S. oil boom and bust of the 1980s. Using household-level longitudinal data, we find positive effects during the boom period and negative effects during the bust period. The cumulative effect through 2012 was arguably negative when restricting the sample to prime working years (<55) and unambiguously positive otherwise because the boom delayed retirement. The evidence suggests the boom was ultimately a curse for the average household. It failed to generate net income gains during prime age and its volatility caused costly income-smoothing later in life.
Are newborn outcomes different for term babies who were exposed to antenatal corticosteroids

Background Antenatal corticosteroids improve newborn outcomes for preterm infants. However, predicting which women presenting for threatened preterm labor will have preterm infants is inaccurate, and many women receive antenatal corticosteroids but then go on to deliver at term. Objective This study aimed to compare the short-term outcomes of infants born at term to women who received betamethasone for threatened preterm labor with infants who were not exposed to betamethasone in utero. Study Design We performed a retrospective cohort study of infants born at or after 37 weeks’ gestational age to mothers diagnosed as having threatened preterm labor during pregnancy. The primary neonatal outcomes of interest included transient tachypnea of the newborn, neonatal intensive care unit admission, and small for gestational age and were evaluated for their association with betamethasone exposure while adjusting for covariates using multiple logistic regression. Results Of 5330 women, 1459 women (27.5%) received betamethasone at a mean gestational age of 32.2±3.3 weeks. The mean age of women was 27±5.9 years and the mean gestational age at delivery was 38.9±1.1 weeks. Women receiving betamethasone had higher rates of maternal comorbidities (P Conclusion Compared with women evaluated for preterm labor who did not receive betamethasone, women receiving betamethasone had infants with higher rates of neonatal intensive care unit admission and small for gestational age. Although the benefits of betamethasone to infants born preterm are clear, there may be negative impacts for infants delivered at term.
Priming of MSCs with inflammation-relevant signals affects extracellular vesicle biogenesis, surface markers, and modulation of T cell subsets

Abstract Although considerable evidence exists supporting the use of mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) for treating immune diseases, successful clinical translation has been challenging and has led researchers to investigate cell-free alternatives. MSC-derived extracellular vesicles (MSC-EVs) have been shown to mediate a significant portion of the observed therapeutic effect, including immunosuppression. MSCs have been shown to respond to different aspects of the injury microenvironment such as inflammatory cytokines and hypoxia, although acidosis has not been investigated and different conditions have not been assessed in terms of their effects on MSC-EV function. This study investigated the effects of acidosis, hypoxia, and inflammatory cytokine priming on MSCs and MSC-EVs. We cultured MSCs in the presence of acidosis, hypoxia, or inflammatory cytokines (Interferon-gamma and Tumor Necrosis Factor-alpha) and compared the characteristics of their EVs as well as their uptake by and suppression of different T cell subsets. MSCs showed a greater effect on suppressing activated CD4+ and CD8+ T cells than MSC-EVs. However, MSC-EVs from MSCs primed with acidosis increased CD4+ and CD8+ regulatory T cell frequency in vitro. This functional response was reflected by MSC-EV uptake. MSC-EVs from acidosis-primed MSCs were the only EV group to be taken up significantly by CD4+ and CD8+ regulatory T cells. These data suggest that a simple low-cost alteration in MSC culture conditions, acidosis, can generate extracelluar vesicles that have a desirable influence on anti inflammatory T cell subtypes.