cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Fragility in Money Market Funds: Sponsor Support and Regulation

Abstract Money market funds (MMFs), which are crucial to short-term funding markets, rely on voluntary support of fund sponsors to maintain stable share values. I develop a general equilibrium model of MMFs to study how sponsor support affects the industry’s fragility and regulation. Adverse asset-quality shocks lead MMFs to liquidate assets. When liquidity in asset markets is limited, asset prices are lower if more funds liquidate. Lower asset prices, in turn, make sponsor support costlier and even more liquidations occur. This feedback leads to complementarities in sponsors’ support decisions. Based on the model’s insights, I derive implications for the regulation of MMFs.
Moral Activism Manqué

Since the 1980s, teachers of professional responsibility have taught law students about the importance (and truth) of "moral activism" - a message that lawyers cannot avoid responsibility for the harms and injustices that their lawful representational activities create. That moral activism teaching, though, seems to have had very little effect on the profession as a whole. Since the 1980s, evidence of lawyers' instrumental advocacy and litigation abuses has increased. This article explores the apparent disconnect between the themes taught within the academy and the quality of lawyers' practice in their law offices and courtrooms.After suggesting and rejecting several possible explanations for moral activism's apparent impotence, the article offers the most plausible account for prevailing lawyer behavior. That account looks not to philosophical questions about ethics or moral standards, or even to the character of individual lawyers, but instead looks to understandings about empirical facts. By the account developed here, lawyers can only (and should only) act in an "activist" fashion if they know satisfactorily that what their work accomplishes causes unjustified harm to others. Because of how little lawyers actually know about the truth of their cases' factual underpinnings, and because of the powerful influence of heuristics and biases in the perception and understanding of facts, lawyers can seldom be certain that what they are doing fits the premises of the activists' arguments. Among others, the powerful cognitive illusion known as the "self-serving bias" influences, and distorts, what lawyers know and believe about their work.The article concludes that lawyers engage in so much seemingly nasty behavior not because they are without souls, but rather because they seldom can believe confidently enough that their clients are engaged in injustice. Those clients may indeed seek to achieve unjust ends, but lawyers can rarely be sure enough about that conclusion to refuse to aid the client, or otherwise to act in an "activist" fashion. If this hypothesis is true, then the way law schools teach students and lawyers about ethics deserves some important reconsideration.
The Uneasy Case for Food Safety Liability Insurance

Foodborne illnesses sicken millions and kill thousands of Americans every year. Our dysfunctional government food safety system appears incapable of protecting us, leading some to look to the private market for solutions to our food safety crisis. One private market approach, food safety liability insurance, is gaining popularity. This Article questions the emerging view that liability insurance can supplement government regulation of food safety. This article takes a more comprehensive approach than previous scholarship by systematically addressing the shortcomings of liability insurance as a regulator of food safety from three distinct perspectives: (1) an economics of information framework, (2) an analysis of the empirical evidence of underdeterrence of foodborne illness by the tort system, and (3) a review of emerging evidence of food suppliers’ cognitive biases with regard to food safety. Combined, these three methodologically distinct approaches strongly suggest that food safety liability insurance is a weak regulator of food safety.
Law, Policy, and Strategies for Affirmative Action Admissions in Higher Education

This essay is based on a presentation made to the American Association of Educational Research and is designed to be accessible to non-law-trained staff in admissions offices throughout a university. It seeks to present the basic legal standards governing admissions and the policy choices that admissions committees must confront regarding diversity. It recommends admissions criteria that value diversity, while a companion essay urges renewed commitment to programs designed to increase the flow of diverse students through the kindergarten to high school (K-12) and college pipeline to higher education.
Representing Injustice: Justice as an Icon of Woman Suffrage

In this Essay, written as part of a symposium on Judith Resnik’s and Dennis Curtis's sumptuously illustrated volume Representing Justice, I offer a historically sensitive interpretation of the figure of Justice in woman suffrage spectacle and propaganda. American suffragists were drawn to Justice as a symbol of women's claim to political and legal rights. Why? Surely one reason is that, as Resnik and Curtis demonstrate, by the early twentieth century Justice had ascended as a distinctively resonant symbol of law and law's legitimacy in a democratic polity. Precisely because Justice was a legible symbol of law's legitimacy, she was ripe for appropriation by suffragists, who wielded Justice's familiar form to declare the illegitimacy of laws enacted by lawmakers who, they contended, had been elected through undemocratic processes. By attending to suffragists' appropriation of Justice in their efforts to secure a federal woman suffrage amendment, I build on the work of constitutional law scholars who, in recent years, have encouraged us to acknowledge the central importance of public agitation -- including protests, parades, and marches -- in the development of constitutional law and meaning. Early twentieth-century suffragists’ deployment of the figure of Justice shows how an iconographic tradition, long used by the state to legitimize the law’s authority, could be repurposed by activists challenging state-sanctioned injustice. In and of itself, that tactic was not novel. For centuries, marginalized groups had used the symbols and rituals of officialdom to contest the legitimacy of governing customs and laws through various modes of appropriation, most notably through parody and inversion. But the suffragists’ appropriation of Justice was unusual in an important respect: They enlisted her in a concerted effort to define and defend a new status for women as recognized participants in the political process.
Securities Fraud in Cyberspace: Reaching the Outer Limits of the Federal Securities Laws

This article discusses the increasing use of the Internet for securities transactions, the growth of securities fraud perpetrated through that medium and the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) enforcement program initiated to combat it. The author critiques the position taken by the SEC that the existing anti-fraud provisions of the federal securities laws can be stretched to cover Internet fraud. Using an enforcement action brought by the SEC against an online stock trading guru named Tokyo Joe as an example of the confused jurisprudence that results when pre-cyberspace law is applied to securities fraud in cyberspace, the author proposes a different regulatory model for online investment advisers like Tokyo Joe that takes the differences between the online world and the world of conventional communications media into account. The author proposes a new source of fiduciary duty in the online context, namely the formation of virtual stock trading communities, which duty would include good faith and fair dealing with investors over the Internet.
The Honor of Private Law

While combativeness is central to how our culture both experiences and conceptualizes litigation, we generally notice it only as a regrettable cost. This Article offers a less squeamish vision, one that sees in the struggle of people suing one another a morally valuable activity: The vindication of insulted honor. This claim is offered as a normative defense of a civil recourse approach to private law. According to civil recourse theorists, tort and contract law should be seen as empowering plaintiffs to act against defendants, rather than as economically optimal incentives or as a means of enforcing duties of corrective justice. The justification of civil recourse must answer three questions. First, under what circumstances – if any – is one justified in acting or retaliating against a wrongdoer? Second, under what circumstances does the state have reasons for providing a mechanism for such action? Finally, how are the answers to these questions related to the current structure of our private law? This Article offers the vindication of wronged honor as an answer to these three questions. First, I establish the historical connection between honor and litigation by looking at the quintessential honor practice, dueling. Then I argue that the vindication of honor is normatively attractive. I do this by divorcing the idea of honor from unsavory associations with violence and aristocracy, showing how it can be made congruent with certain core modern concerns. In particular, when insulted parties act against wrongdoers, they reestablish the position of respect and equality that the insult upset. I then show how having the state provide plaintiffs with a means of vindicating their honor avoids making the political community complicit in the humiliation of its citizens and provides those citizens with a means of exercising their agency in ways that provide a foundation for self-respect. Finally, I show those areas of private law where honor operates most powerfully as a justification for providing recourse through the courts while acknowledging that it operates less powerfully as a reason in other areas.
Delaware's Non-Waivable Duties

INTRODUCTION 701 I. THE DELAWARE GENERAL ASSEMBLY AND FIDUCIARY DUTIES: THE JUDICIAL EMBRACE 705 II. EQUITY’S ORIGINS AND ROLE 709 III. IRREPRESSIBLE EQUITY 713 A. The Attempted Legislative Incursion 713 B. The Chancery Court’s Continuing Constitutional Authority Over Fiduciary Duties 716 C. Ongoing Judicial Discretion 718 CONCLUSION 724
The accuracy of hospital merger screening methods

This paper analyzes the accuracy of various prospective hospital merger screening methods used by antitrust agencies and the courts. The qualitative and quantitative predictions of the screening methods calculated with pre-merger data are compared with the actual post-merger price changes of 26 hospital mergers measured relative to controls. The evaluated screening methods include traditional structural measures (e.g., Herfindahl-Hirschman Index associated with various market definitions), measures derived from hospital competition models (e.g., diversion ratios, Willingness-to-Pay, and the Logit Competition Index), and hospital merger simulation. Diversion ratios, Willingness-to-Pay, and the Logit Competition Index are found to be more accurate at predicting post-merger price effects than traditional methods.
Climate Change Adaptation: Existential Threat, Welfare States and Legal Management

This paper contrasts knowledge frames for climate change and displacement. First the paper explains the abstract human rights arguments about displacement in climate change and disaster. In contrast, management and claims under lawsuits about climate change and displacement are place-based. The paper then draws on data about knowledge and management strategies in a particular place in the United States, and on a close reading of legal reasoning in a post-disaster domestic housing case in the United States. The paper relies on interpretive methods. Although legal reasoning is often represented as distinctive in how it transforms stories into decisions, it shares characteristics with other forms of policy reasoning. Institutional reasoning transforms the “existential threat” of climate change into managed parts. The paper argues that intervening concerning climate change and displacement requires shifting from broad claims in the drama of climate change and rights to following tactics logical within particular institutions. Este articulo realiza un contraste entre marcos de conocimiento para el cambio climatico y el desplazamiento de la poblacion. Primero, explica los argumentos abstractos sobre derechos humanos; por contra, la gestion y las reclamaciones judiciales sobre cambio climatico y desplazamiento se basan en el lugar. A continuacion, se parte de datos sobre estrategias de conocimiento y gestion en un lugar concreto, y de una cuidadosa lectura del razonamiento juridico en un caso sobre vivienda post-desastre. Nos basamos en metodos interpretativos. A pesar de que a menudo se presenta como rasgo distintivo del razonamiento juridico el transformar historias en decisiones, comparte caracteristicas con otros tipos de razonamiento de politicas. El razonamiento institucional transforma la “amenaza existencial” del cambio climatico en partes gestionadas. Se argumenta que, para intervenir sobre el cambio climatico y el desplazamiento, es necesario pasar de reclamaciones generales a tacticas logicas dentro de instituciones concretas. Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1064
The Moderating Effects of Acquisition Premiums in Private Corporations: An Empirical Investigation of Relative S Corporation and C Corporation Valuations

SYNOPSIS: This paper presents the results of a moderated multiple regression analysis to show that, all else held equal, a positive premium exists in the valuation of S corporations over C corporations from January 2000 to November 2006. The results of the regression show that the magnitude of the “S corporation premium” indeed depends on the level of interactions of several independent variables. In particular, the results of this study reveal that (1) the premium depends positively on net sales; (2) the premium is higher for the cases in which the transaction is done through asset sales (rather than stock sales); and (3) the premium is higher for the cases in which firms are bought by private buyers (rather than public buyers).
Estimating Price Paths for Residential Real Estate

Several approaches have been used to estimate and adjust for price movements in residential real estate; however, weaknesses remain in current systems. This study incorporates a different way of me...
The Return of the Rogue

The “rogue trader”—a famed figure of the 1990s—recently has returned to prominence due largely to two phenomena. First, recent U.S. mortgage market volatility spilled over into stock, commodity, and derivative markets worldwide, causing large financial institution losses and revealing previously hidden unauthorized positions. Second, the rogue trader has gained importance as banks around the world have focused more attention on operational risk in response to regulatory changes prompted by the Basel II Capital Accord. This Article contends that of the many regulatory options available to the Basel Committee for addressing operational risk it arguably chose the worst: an enforced selfregulatory regime unlikely to substantially alter financial institutions’ ability to successfully manage operational risk. That regime also poses the danger of high costs, a false sense of security, and perverse incentives. Particularly with respect to the low-frequency, high-impact events—including rogue trading—that may be the greatest threat to bank stability and soundness, attempts at enforced selfregulation are unlikely to significantly reduce operational risk, because those financial institutions with the highest operational risk are the least likely to credibly assess that risk and set aside adequate capital under a regime of enforced self-regulation.
Text Mining to Identify Customers Likely to Respond to Cross-Selling Campaigns: Reading Notes from Your Customers

This paper reports on the results of extracting useful information from text notes captured within a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to segment and thus target groups of customers likely to respond to cross-selling campaigns. These notes often contain text that is indicative of customer intentions. The results indicate that the notes are meaningful in classifying customers who are likely to respond to purchase multiple communication devices. A Naive Bayes classifier outperformed a Support Vector Machine classifier for this task. When combined with structured information, the classifier performed only marginally better. Thus, customer service notes can be an important source of predictive data in CRM systems.
Tax reform, the informal economy, and bank financing of capital formation

This paper develops a model that relates businesses’ entry into the underground economy to tax rates and the need to access the banking system. The model uses a dynamic approach in which both firms and banks optimize and in which the benefits to a firm of accessing the banking system are endogenous. A firm compares the return to capital with the marginal tax rate on capital income and uses the difference to determine how much of the tax to pay. At the same time, banks use a firm’s capital tax payments, combined with the capital tax rate to obtain an estimate of the firm’s minimum capital value. If the firm pays at least some taxes then it will have access to the banking system, which will allow it to finance investment. If the firm pays no taxes, then it cannot access the banks and cannot invest. We compare the equilibria resulting from tax compliance and tax evasion. We calibrate the model to a highly stylized version of the Russian economy, and analyze the effect of potential tax changes on the underground economy. We compute a dynamic equilibrium for our model, and note that it tracks the path of certain macroeconomic variables of the Russian economy (GDP, budget and trade balances, price level and interest rate) with some accuracy for the years 2001–2008. We are unable to track the underground economy, as this data is unobservable. We then carry out a series of counterfactual simulations, first asking if non-capital intensive firms have an incentive to evade taxes under existing value added tax rates. We find that they do, and that the incentive would have been greatly reduced if the value added tax rate had been selectively reduced for the non-capital intensive sectors. We then ask what the effect would be if the corporate tax rate were raised on capital intensive sectors. The simulations indicate that the capital intensive sectors would not increase their entry into the underground economy.
Law as Fact and as Reason for Action: A Response to Robert Alexy on Law’s “Ideal Dimension”

Robert Alexy's 2013 Natural Law Lecture, published in vol. 58 of this journal, presents law as having two dimensions, ideal and real, and thus a dual nature, to be elucidated by a conceptual analysis distinguishing between the observer's and the participant's perspective. It argues on this basis for a "non-positivist" theory of law that is "inclusive" in that it classifies some unjust laws as laws, but not all (and is thus not "super-inclusive"); it rejects the "exclusive non-positivism" that would treat every injustice in a law's making or content as excluding it from the class of valid laws. Gustav Radbruch's famous post-War formula-extreme injustice invalidates lawadopted in the jurisprudence of Germany's higher courts, is thus to be defended as expressing the inclusive non-positivism that articulates the best concept of law that can be constructed and defended as expedient. Alexy's 2013 article classifies the theory in Natural Law and Natural Rights as super-inclusive, but sees hopeful signs of inclusive non-positivism in some recent writings of its author. The present article argues that Natural Law and Natural Rights defends, in a sense, all three "non-positivist" positions, each in its proper place as a truth about unjust law: it is (from an observer's perspective) a fact; it is (from a participant's perspective) deprived by any significant injustice of law's generic and presumptive status (legal-moral validity) as a reason for action; and it is (from the perspective of particular participants in their circumstances) sometimes, despite its injustice and legal-moral invalidity, a source (by virtue of both the foregoing truths taken with other moral responsibilities and needs) of collateral obligations the extent of which is likely, often, to track, approximately, the results of applying the Radbruch formula. The article argues against Alexy's theoretical procedures both of conceptual analysis and of concept construction, regrets the "non-positivist/positivist" labeling, raises doubts about speaking of duality of dimensions and nature, and notes the significance of the 2013 article's further thesis that any injustice in a law impairs ("qualifies") its legal status.
Young Lawyers and Work in the Public Interest

Much of the discussion of the bar's “public interest” effort has centered on the apparent unwillingness of lawyers, including young lawyers, to pursue public interest rather than traditional careers. To the extent that it is agreed that public interest work should be increased, the problem has been viewed as one of supply of lawyers rather than one of demand for their services. In this paper, just the opposite is argued; a variety of evidence is brought forth to suggest that the current public interest effort is limited mainly by the number of jobs available in that sector. In this light, various methods of increasing the funding of the public interest sector, and hence the number of jobs, are reviewed.
Seigniorage, Operating Rules, and the High Inflation Trap

There may be both a high and a low inflation equilibrium when the government finances the deficit through seigniorage. Under rational expectations the high inflation equilibrium is stable, and the low inflation equilibrium unstable; under adaptive expectations or lagged adjustment of money balances with rational expectations, the low inflation equilibrium may be stable. Adding bond financing, dual equilibria remain if the government fixes the real interest rate, but a unique equilibrium is attained when the government sets a nominal anchor for the economy. The existence of dual equilibria is thus a result of the government's operating rules.
On the undesirability of commodity taxation even when income taxation is not optimal

Abstract An important result due to Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976) [Atkinson, A.B., Stiglitz, J.E., 1976. The design of tax structure: Direct versus indirect taxation. Journal of Public Economics 6, 55–75.] is that differential commodity taxation is not optimal in the presence of an optimal nonlinear income tax (given weak separability of utility between labor and all consumption goods). This article demonstrates that this conclusion holds regardless of whether the income tax is optimal. In particular, given any commodity tax and income tax system, differential commodity taxation can be eliminated in a manner that results in a Pareto improvement. Also, differential commodity taxation can be proportionally reduced so as to generate a Pareto improvement. In addition, for commodity tax reforms that neither eliminate nor proportionally reduce differential taxation, a simple efficiency condition is offered for determining whether a Pareto improvement is possible.
Self-consistent Fokker-Planck treatment of particle distributions in astrophysical plasmas

High-energy, multicomponent plasmas in which pair creation and annihilation, lepton-lepton scattering, lepton-proton scattering, and Comptonization all contribute to establishing the particle and photon distributions are present in a broad range of compact astrophysical objects. The different constituents are often not in equilibrium with each other, and this mixture of interacting particles and radiation can produce substantial deviations from a Maxwellian profile for the lepton distributions. Earlier work has included much of the microphysics needed to account for electron-photon and electron-proton interactions, but little has been done to handle the redistribution of the particles as a result of their Coulomb interaction with themselves. The most detailed analysis thus far for finding the exact electron distribution appears to have been done within the framework of nonthermal models, where the electron distribution is approximated as a thermal one at low energy with a nonthermal tail at higher energy. Recent attention, however, has been focused on thermal models. Our goal here is to use a Fokker-Planck approach in order to develop a fully self-consistent theory for the interaction of arbitrarily distributed particles and radiation to arrive at an accurate representation of the high-energy plasma in these sources. We derive Fokker-Planck coefficients for an arbitrary electron distribution and correct an earlier expression for the diffusion coefficient used by previous authors. We conduct several tests representative of two dominant segments of parameter space. For high source compactness of the total radiation field, l ~ 102, we find that although the electron distribution deviates substantially from a Maxwellian, the resulting photon spectra are insensitive to the shape of the exact electron distribution, in accordance with some earlier results. For low source compactness, l ~ few, and an optical depth 0.2, however, we find that both the electron distribution and the photon spectra differ strongly from what they would be in the case of a Maxwellian distribution. In addition, for all values of compactness, we find that different electron distributions lead to different positron number densities and proton equilibrium temperatures. This means that the ratio of radiation pressure to proton pressure is strongly dependent on the lepton distribution, which might lead to different configurations of hydrostatic equilibrium. This, in turn, may change the compactness, optical depth, and heating and cooling rates and therefore lead to an additional change in the spectrum. An important result of our analysis is the derivation of useful, approximate analytical forms for the electron distribution in the case of strongly non-Maxwellian plasmas.
Judging the Voting Rights Act

The Voting Rights Act has radically altered the political status of minority voters and dramatically transformed the partisan structure of American politics. Given the political and racial salience of cases brought under the Act, it is surprising that the growing literature on the effects of a judge's ideology and race on judicial decisionmaking has overlooked these cases. This Article provides the first systematic evidence that judicial ideology and race are closely related to findings of liability in voting rights cases. Democratic appointees are significantly more likely than Republican appointees to vote for liability under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. These partisan effects become even more prominent when judges appointed by the same president sit together on panels. Moreover, a judge's race appears to have an even greater effect on the likelihood of her voting in favor of minority plaintiffs than does her political affiliation: minority judges are more than twice as likely to favor liability. This finding contrasts starkly with prior studies of judicial decisionmaking - studies finding that, across a range of legal questions, a judge's race has only a weak effect, if any, on the resolution of cases. As with partisanship, the so-called panel effects of race are strong, as white judges become substantially more likely to vote in favor of liability when they sit with minority judges. These findings have significant implications for a number of controversies, including debates about which institutions are best situated to protect minority voting rights and disputes about the role of diversity within the federal judiciary.
Principles-Based versus Rules-Based Accounting Standards: The Influence of Standard Precision and Audit Committee Strength on Financial Reporting Decisions

ABSTRACT: Recent accounting scandals have resulted in regulatory initiatives designed to strengthen audit committee oversight of corporate financial reporting and have led to a concern that U.S. GAAP has become too rules-based. We examine issues related to these initiatives using two experiments. CFOs in our experiments exhibit more agreement and are less likely to report aggressively under a less precise (more principles-based) standard than under a more precise (more rules-based) standard. Our results also indicate that CFOs applying a more precise standard are less likely to report aggressively in the presence of a strong audit committee than a weak audit committee. We find no effect of audit committee strength when the standard is less precise. Finally, we find support for a three-path mediating model examining mechanisms driving the effect of standard precision on aggressive reporting decisions. These results should be of interest to U.S. policymakers as they continue to contemplate a shift to more p...
Assessing Dynamic Efficiency: Theory and Evidence

The issue of dynamic efficiency is central to analyses of capital accumulation and economic growth. Yet the question of what characteristics should be examined to determine whether actual economies are dynamically efficient is unresolved. This paper develops a criterion for determining whether an economy is dynamically efficient. The criterion, which holds for economies in which technological progress and population growth are stochastic, involves a comparison of the cash flows generated by capital with the level of investment. Its application to the United States economy and the economies of other major OECD nations suggests that they are dynamically efficient.
The Militant Challenge in Pakistan

note u The author would like to thank the external reviewers whose extremely thorough review of the preliminary draft helped significantly improve the article. The author is also thankful to Professor Barry Posen for inviting her to present this work at MIT’s Security Studies Program Seminar Series during the fall 2010 semester. The comments and questions posed by Professor Posen and the attendees also provided input that motivated important revisions. The Militant Challenge in Pakistan
This time is different: An example of a giant, wildly speculative, and successful investment mania

The collapse of an investment mania usually reminds people that the phrase "This time is different" is dangerous. Recollections of this mantra then typically either state outright or at least imply that "It is never different." However, there is at least one counterexample to this cautious view, a giant and wildly speculative investment episode that was profitable for investors. The British railway mania of the 1830s involved real capital investment comparable, as a fraction of GDP, to about $2 trillion for the U.S. today. It faced with- ering skepticism and criticism, much of it very reasonable, as its supposedly rosy prospects were based on extrapolation from the brief experience of just a couple of successful early railways. Yet by the mid-1840s, it was seen as a great investment success. The example of the railway mania of the 1830s serves as a useful antidote to claims that bubbles are easy to detect or that all large and quick jumps in asset valuations are irrational. This episode also suggests the need to reexamine much of the work on business cycles and diffusion of technologies. The standard literature in this area, starting from Juglar, and continuing through Schumpeter to more recent authors, almost uniformly ignores or misrepresents the large investment mania of the 1830s, whose nature does not fit the stereotypical pattern.
Hot-Get-Richer Network Growth Model

Under preferential attachment (PA) network growth models late arrivals are at a disadvantage with regard to their final degrees. Previous extensions of PA have addressed this deficiency by either adding the notion of node fitness to PA, usually drawn from some fitness score distributions, or by using fitness alone to control attachment. Here we introduce a new dynamical approach to address late arrivals by adding a recent-degree-change bias to PA so that nodes with higher relative degree change in temporal proximity to an arriving node get an attachment probability boost. In other words, if PA describes a rich-get-richer mechanism, and fitness-based approaches describe good-get-richer mechanisms, then our model can be characterized as a hot-get-richer mechanism, where hotness is determined by the rate of degree change over some recent past. The proposed model produces much later high-ranking nodes than the PA model and, under certain parameters, produces networks with structure similar to PA networks.
Are Mutual Funds Active Voters

Mutual funds vary greatly in their reliance on proxy advisory recommendations. Over 25% of funds rely almost entirely on Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) recommendations, while other funds place little weight on them. Funds with higher benefits and lower costs of researching the items up for vote are less likely to rely on ISS. These actively voting funds are less likely to vote in a �one-size-fits-all� manner, and they earn higher alphas, consistent with benefits from this allocation of resources. For the underlying firms, the presence of actively voting funds mitigates the influence of ISS and helps sway shareholder votes toward value-maximizing outcomes.
The President’s Role in the Partisan Congressional Arena

Models of presidential success have sometimes focused on the importance of political capital and sometimes looked at the partisan environment of Congress. We develop time-series models of success that refine and integrate these perspectives while reframing the matter in terms of research on congressional parties. Measures of the ideological and partisan makeup of Congress are used to explain presidential success from 1953 to 2006 but the approval of the president’s base is important as well. We also show the electoral consequences to congressional parties of presidential success—congressional parties gain and lose seats based on the battles won and lost by the president. This gives legislators (not) of his party an incentive to see his agenda implemented (defeated). Studying both the causes and consequences of presidential success in Congress is meant to integrate theories of the two institutions along with extant theories of party behavior.
Soft Law as Delegation

This article examines one of the most important trends in international legal governance since the end of the Cold War: the rise of “soft law,” or legally non-binding instruments that are given legal effect through domestic law or internationally binding agreements such as treaties. Scholars studying the design of international agreements have long puzzled over why states use soft law. The decision to make an agreement or obligation legally binding is within the control of the states negotiating the content of the legal obligations. Basic contract theory predicts that parties to a contract would want their agreement to be as credible as possible, to ensure optimal incentives to perform. It is therefore odd that states routinely enter into agreements establishing international rules and regulatory standards in a wide range of subject areas, from banking to arms control to the environmental protection, that are not legally binding. I begin by proposing a new definition of soft. Although previous definitions have often distinguished soft law from hard law on the basis that only the latter is legally binding, no one has explained what distinguishes soft law from purely political arrangements. By contrast, this article defines soft law as those obligations that, while not legally binding, are given some legal effect through separate legal instruments. I then argue that states use soft law as a way to delegate authority over the content of legal rules and regulations to states that possess a particularly strong interest in those rules. Making an agreement non-binding lowers the penalty associated with deviating from the existing legal rules, and thus encourages states with a significant interest in the content of legal rules to unilaterally innovate. This oligopolistic approach to the evolution of legal rules can, under certain circumstances, lead to more efficient legal rules by avoiding the hold-up problem involved in renegotiating contracts in which every state effectively exercises a veto over potentially efficient amendments. As such, the choice between soft law and hard law implicates a tradeoff between the procedural equity inherent in the doctrine of sovereign equality, and the efficiency of legal rules. Soft law privileges the latter over the former. SOFT LAW AS DELEGATION
Efficient Ramsey equilibria

Ramsey equilibrium models with heterogeneous agents and borrowing constraints are shown to yield efficient equilibrium sequences of aggregate capital and consumption. The proof of this result is based on verifying that equilibrium sequences of prices satisfy the Malinvaud criterion for efficiency.
The splinter in your ear: Noise as the semblance of critique

Noise appears to critique the prevailing cognitive and social habits of modernity by providing concrete and particular art objects that demand attention and jar us from one‐dimensional life. Noise sounds, for a moment, like a true alternative not only to contemporary music but to a whole way of thinking through abstract generalisation and living through commercial mediation. Understood in this way, noise makes sense. Once noise is no longer inscrutable, however, it is assimilated into popular culture and becomes a commercial novelty. The blatant contradiction of the commodification of noise gives rise to a second order of critique wherein noise parades its uselessness and occasions reflection on the tortured existence of art in modernity, the ubiquity of identity thinking, and the relation between use and exchange value. This ironic endgame for noise, however, is itself absorbed by consumer culture and noise lives on as but another cool, extreme product. The cultural reception of noise thereby demonstrate...
Influential Observations and Inference in Accounting Research

ABSTRACT Accounting studies often encounter observations with extreme values that can influence coefficient estimates and inferences. Two widely used approaches to address influential observations ...
When higher productivity hurts: The interaction between overconfidence and capital

Abstract We investigate how the increased availability of a factor of production can make an overconfident agent worse off. In our model, two effects drive this result. First, when a production factor and ability are complements in the production function, the agent may overpay for the production factor. Second, the acquisition of this factor will distort the agent’s choice of what activities to pursue. In contrast, when the factor and ability are substitutes, the agent will undervalue the factor. In a laboratory experiment we find that subjects overpay for ability-complements, and underpay for ability-substitutes. Subjects provided with free ability-complements earn less due to how it distorts the subjects’ perceptions of what activity to pursue.
US Economic Growth in the Gilded Age

Abstract In the immediate postwar period, Moses Abramovitz and Robert Solow both examined data on output and input growth from the first half of the 20th century and reached similar conclusions. In the 20th century, in contrast with the nineteenth, a much smaller fraction of real output growth could be swept back to the growth of inputs conventionally measured. The rise of the residual, they suggested, was an important distinguishing feature of 20th century growth. This paper identifies two difficulties with this claim. First, TFP growth virtually disappeared in the US between 1973 and 1995. Second, TFP growth was in fact quite robust between the end of the Civil War and 1906, as was in fact acknowledged by Abramovitz in his 1993 Economic History Association Presidential address. Developing a revised macroeconomic narrative is essential in reconciling our interpretation of these numbers with what we know about scientific, technological, and organizational change during the gilded age.
Semantics-guided synthesis

This paper develops a new framework for program synthesis, called semantics-guided synthesis (SemGuS), that allows a user to provide both the syntax and the semantics for the constructs in the language. SemGuS accepts a recursively defined big-step semantics, which allows it, for example, to be used to specify and solve synthesis problems over an imperative programming language that may contain loops with unbounded behavior. The customizable nature of SemGuS also allows synthesis problems to be defined over a non-standard semantics, such as an abstract semantics. In addition to the SemGuS framework, we develop an algorithm for solving SemGuS problems that is capable of both synthesizing programs and proving unrealizability, by encoding a SemGuS problem as a proof search over Constrained Horn Clauses: in particular, our approach is the first that we are aware of that can prove unrealizabilty for synthesis problems that involve imperative programs with unbounded loops, over an infinite syntactic search space. We implemented the technique in a tool called MESSY, and applied it to SyGuS problems (i.e., over expressions), synthesis problems over an imperative programming language, and synthesis problems over regular expressions.
Legitimacy, Accountability, and Partnership: A Model for Advocacy on Third World Environmental Issues

t Assistant Professor of Law, Washington and Lee University; former Senior Attorney and Co-Director of International Programs, Natural Resources Defense Council, Washington, D.C. This work was supported by a research grant from the Frances Lewis Law Center of Washington and Lee University and through the author's appointment as a scholar-in-residence at the Rockefeller Foundation's Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. The author thanks Frederic L. Kirgis, Jr., and Judith A. McMorrow for their comments on previous drafts and gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Eric L. Christensen, Jon C. Cooper, Lalanath de Silva, Kelly L. Faglioni, and Glenn T. Prickett. 1. One of the World Bank's principal functions is "to promote economic development, increase productivity and thus raise standards of living in the less-developed areas of the world . . . in particular by providing finance to meet their important developmental requirements ...." Articles of Agreement of the International Development Association, Jan. 26, 1960, art. I, I 1 U.S.T. 2284, 2285-86, T.I.A.S. No. 4607, at 2-3, 439 U.N.T.S. 249, 252 [hereinafter IDA Articles of Agreement]. The World Bank Group comprises three "windows," each of which technically is a separate international organization: the International Development Association, see id.; the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, see Articles of Agreement of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Dec. 27, 1945, 60 Stat. 1440, T.I.A.S. No. 1502, 2 U.N.T.S. 134, amended Dec. 16, 1965, 16 U.S.T. 1942, T.I.A.S. No. 5929 [hereinafter IBRD Articles of Agreement]; and the International Finance Corporation, see Articles of Agreement of the International Finance Corporation, May 25, 1955, 7 U.S.T. 2197, T.I.A.S. No. 3620, 264 U.N.T.S. 117. As of early 1991, 155 countries were members of the Bank. The principal mechanism by which the Bank
The NLRA Defamation Defense: Doomed Dinosaur or Diamond in the Rough?

Excerpt] This Article explores an underappreciated and promising NLRA protection of collective activity. It elaborates the NLRA’s role as a defense in state defamation cases. Specifically, this Article explains how the “NLRA defamation defense” frees defendants from some forms of defamation liability when the allegedly defamatory statements are made during labor disputes. The defense has no effect on defamation liability in what this Article refers to as “more egregious” state defamation law cases. However, the defense forecloses liability in “less egregious” state defamation law cases. It makes it harder for defamation plaintiffs to win their cases because it requires them to satisfy a heightened standard of proof. In this way, the NLRA defamation defense limits the ability of defamation lawsuits to serve as “a powerful weapon for shutting up those with whom [one] disagree[s]” in the labor context. In other words, it reduces the likelihood that state defamation law will chill the free flow of speech and collective activity with the threat of monetary awards, sometimes in the millions of dollars. While all parties to labor disputes who face defamation claims can take advantage of the NLRA defamation defense, this Article focuses on the use of the defense by employees and both traditional and non-traditional worker organizations to highlight an important aspect of the NLRA’s protection of collective activity.
Selection in Teams: An Exploration of the Teamwork Knowledge, Skills, and Ability Test

In 1994, Stevens and Campion introduced the Teamwork Knowledge, Skills, and Ability test (teamwork KSA test) for selecting employees for team–based organizations. Using experimental data from 57 ad hoc student teams (N = 227), we examined this test's relationship with both the behavior of the assigned leader in a team and the behavior of the other team members, respectively. We found that the teamwork KSA test successfully predicted individual team member behavior as indexed by external raters (r= .31) and peers (r= .34) such that higher scores on the teamwork KSA test related to greater individual effectiveness within the team. The teamwork KSA test was unrelated to the behavior of the assigned leader in the teams studied. Self–efficacy for teamwork was not related to individual behavior in teams, nor did it moderate the relationship between the teamwork KSA test and individual performance in teams. Limitations as well as directions for future research in team selection are discussed.
Translating Commons-Based Peer Production Values into Metrics: towards Commons-based Crypto-Currencies

Commons-based peer-production (CBPP) constitutes today an important driver for innovation, social and cultural development, both online and offline, through the establishment of an alternative, commons-based ecosystem, relying on peer-production and collaboration amongst peers contributing towards a common good. Yet, to the extent that it operates outside of the market economy, the value of CBPP cannot be understood by relying exclusively on traditional market mechanisms (such as pricing). Based on empirical research on emerging value forms in the context of CBPP, we seek to achieve a better understanding of the value produced by CBPP communities, so as to come up with an alternative, universal, denominator of value that could act as an interface between the commons-based ecosystem and the market economy.
Machine Learning Methods for Data Association in Multi-Object Tracking

Data association is a key step within the multi-object tracking pipeline that is notoriously challenging due to its combinatorial nature. A popular and general way to formulate data association is as the NP-hard multi-dimensional assignment problem. Over the past few years, data-driven approaches to assignment have become increasingly prevalent as these techniques have started to mature. We focus this survey solely on learning algorithms for the assignment step of multi-object tracking, and we attempt to unify various methods by highlighting their connections to linear assignment and to the multi-dimensional assignment problem. First, we review probabilistic and end-to-end optimization approaches to data association, followed by methods that learn association affinities from data. We then compare the performance of the methods presented in this survey and conclude by discussing future research directions.