cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Anything Goes: Examining the State's Interest in Protecting Children from Controversial Speech

Despite doctrinal requirements that the state establish a compelling interest to justify content-based regulations on speech, Professor Ross argues that courts have routinely taken the government's interest at face value when it argues that it inhibits speech to protect children. The Article examines the Supreme Court's test which requires the state to establish a compelling interest by articulating the precise harm it wishes to address, demonstrating a nexus between that identified harm and the regulated speech, and showing that restriction of the speech will alleviate the harm. The author seeks to reframe the discussion surrounding controversial speech and children by calling on courts to scrutinize the interest asserted by the government. This Article examines the two compelling interests on which the government relies in justifying its efforts to shield children from controversial speech: an interest in reinforcing parental authority and an independent state interest in protecting children from material the government deems unsuitable. The author finds both arguments fatally flawed. Drawing on the literature of family law, Professor Ross offers a heuristic device for measuring the potential of regulations on speech to empower parents. She divides families into three categories: the "idealized normative family," the "imperfect normative family," and the "nonconformist family," which itself manifests a wide range of values. She then demonstrates that no regulatory scheme can accommodate the range of constitutionally protected parental preferences in all three types of families. The state's purported independent interest in shielding children from speech fares no better. In case after case, the government has failed to articulate any specific harm to children that would support such an independent interest, much less the required nexus between the speech and the harm. Even if proponents of particular regulations on speech were to succeed in meeting their burden of proof to demonstrate a compelling interest, a close question would still be presented, as the handful of lower court opinions that have expressly considered the government's asserted interest make clear. Then, and only then, would courts properly analyze whether the specific regulation survives balancing of competing constitutional interests and is narrowly tailored. Because the private market offers numerous mechanisms to respond to a range of parental preferences, it is unclear that government regulation would be necessary to alleviate demonstrable harms, much less the least restrictive alternative, in all but the narrowest of cases.
Analysis of Markovian Competitive Situations Using Nonatomic Games

We study discrete-time dynamic games with effectively identical players who possess private states that evolve randomly. Players in these games are concerned with their undiscounted sums of period-wise payoffs in the finite-horizon case and discounted sums of stationary period-wise payoffs in the infinite-horizon case. In the general semi-anonymous setting, the other players influence a particular player’s payoffs and state evolutions through the joint state–action distributions that they form. When dealing with large finite games, we find it profitable to exploit symmetric mixed equilibria of a reduced feedback type for the corresponding nonatomic games (NGs). These equilibria, when continuous in a certain probabilistic sense, can be used to achieve near-equilibrium performances when there are a large but finite number of players. We focus on the case where independently generated shocks drive random actions and state transitions. The NG equilibria we consider are random state-to-action maps that pay no attention to players’ external environments. Yet, they can be adopted for a variety of real situations where the knowledge about the other players can be incomplete. Results concerning finite horizons also form the basis of a link between an NG’s stationary equilibrium and good stationary profiles for large finite games.
Why Do Managers Diversify Their Firms? Agency Reconsidered

We develop a contracting model between shareholders and managers in which managers diversify their firms for two reasons: to reduce idiosyncratic risk and to capture private benefits. We test the comparative static predictions of our model. In contrast to previous work, we find that diversification is positively related to managerial incentives. Further, the link between firm performance and managerial incentives is weaker for firms that experience changes in diversification than it is for firms that do not. Our findings suggest that managers diversify their firms in response to changes in private benefits rather than to reduce their exposure to risk.
Time-Varying Fund Manager Skill

We propose a new definition of skill as general cognitive ability to pick stocks or time the market. We find evidence for stock picking in booms and market timing in recessions. Moreover, the same fund managers that pick stocks well in expansions also time the market well in recessions. These fund managers significantly outperform other funds and passive benchmarks. Our results suggest a new measure of managerial ability that weighs a fund's market timing more in recessions and stock picking more in booms. The measure displays more persistence than either market timing or stock picking alone and predicts fund performance.
Valuation Approaches and Metrics: A Survey of the Theory and Evidence

Introduction Discounted cash Flow Valuation Liquidation and Accounting Valuation Relative Valuation Directions for New Research Conclusions References
“Evaluative” mediation is an oxymoron

An essential characteristic of mediation is facilitated negotiation wherein the mediator remains neutral throughout the process. Inconsistent with this role is an evaluative mediator who assesses the strengths and weaknesses of legal claims, proposes settlement terms, pushes parties to accept a particular settlement, and predicts court outcomes or the impact of not settling. A mediator’s assessment invariably favors one side over the other and jeopardizes neutrality. This article argues that mediation should stand as a distinct and clear-cut alternative to the evaluative and frequently highly-adversarial adjudicatory processes and that mediators should not evaluate.
Big N Auditors and Audit Quality: New Evidence from Quasi-Experiments

ABSTRACT Whether Big N auditors provide higher audit quality than non-Big N auditors remains a debate. We add new evidence to this debate by utilizing the setting of Big N auditors' acquisitions of...
Multilateral Climate Change Mitigation

THE EARTH'S CLIMATE is a public good.' A single country does not benefit from investing in climate protection unless doing so becomes a collective effort.2 Society's inability to reach consensus on climate change mitigation has resulted in the tragedy of the commons. 3 Humanity was able to overcome a similar crisis through an international cooperative effort to reduce the ozone hole.4 International chlorofluorocarbon protocols addressed the over-exploitation of the global commons. 5 As Tom Tietenberg notes, "[t] he atmosphere is but one of many commons and climate change is but one example of over-exploitation of the commons." 6 The World Bank predicts warmer temperatures, more variable precipitation, and an increased incidence of extreme climatic events. When coupled with sea level rise, this will adversely impact agriculture, water resources, human settlements, human health, and ecological systems and will
The relation between corporate financing activities, analysts’ forecasts and stock returns

Abstract We develop a comprehensive and parsimonious measure of corporate financing activities and document a negative relation between this measure and both future stock returns and future profitability. The economic and statistical significance of our results is stronger than in previous research focusing on individual categories of corporate financing activities. To discriminate between risk versus misvaluation as explanations for this relation, we analyze the association between our measure of external financing and sell-side analysts’ forecasts. Consistent with the misvaluation explanation, our measure of external financing is positively related to overoptimism in analysts’ forecasts.
Designing free software samples: a game theoretic approach

We develop a vertical differentiation game-theoretic model that addresses the issue of designing free software samples (shareware) for attaining follow-on sales. When shareware can be reinstalled, cannibalization of sales of the commercial product may ensue. We analyze the optimal design of free software according to two characteristics: the evaluation period allotted for sampling (potentially renewable) and the proportion of features included in the sample. We introduce a new software classification scheme based on the characteristics of the sample that aid consumer learning. We find that the optimal combination of features and trial time greatly depends on the category of software within the classification scheme. Under alternative learning scenarios, we show that the monopolist may be better off not suppressing potential shareware reinstallation.
Standard Setting, Patents, and Access Lock-In: RAND Licensing and the Theory of the Firm

Many leading voluntary standard-setting organizations (SSOs) have adopted intellectual property (IP) policies under which participants must promise to license any patents on technology that they contribute to a standard, and to do so on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms (RAND). The standard setting literature includes a substantial focus on the widespread use of this RAND promise. A common refrain in these analyses of the RAND promise is that its meaning is dysfunctionally uncertain. We know more about the RAND promise, however, than the existing literature suggests. I show that we already know the RAND promise's core meaning, and why it remains attractive to SSOs. Specifically, I demonstrate that, although framed by reference to patent rights, the RAND promise's core function is to achieve a business organization goal that all SSOs confront - namely, removing the threat of post-adoption hold-up, thus inducing group production of a viable standards-based technology platform. One can solve the organizational problem by transferring a property right from threatener to threatenee(s). Corporate law scholars have shown that the corporate form enables group production of complex goods by giving contributors a way to lock in their capital to a separate property-holding entity, precluding both subsequent withdrawal and hold-ups from threatened withdrawal. In the IP domain, for example, patent pools usually form new companies to hold patent licensing rights centrally. Similarly, in the standards context, SSOs enable production of a standards-based technology platform by conditioning contributors' participation on making the RAND promise, i.e., on granting the whole of the adopter community a property-like access right to contributors' patented contributions to the standard. This access lock-in, whereby participants cast themselves into a common venture, makes possible post-standardization, mutually-beneficial bargaining over patent license terms by precluding both subsequent patent-based shutouts and holdups from threatened shutouts. In other words, every participating patent owner has, by making the RAND licensing promise, irrevocably waived its right to seek that most traditional of intellectual property law remedies, a court injunction against unauthorized access. The only relief a frustrated patent owner can seek against an adopter thereafter is the reasonable royalty expressly contemplated. Moreover, the RAND promise must run with the patent if the patent is sold to another party; only in this way does the RAND promise ensure that the standard can flourish without hold-up for as long as the market supports the technology.
Estimating flexible distributions of ideal-points with external analysis of preferences

Ideal-points are widely used to model choices when preferences are single-peaked. Ideal-point choice models have been typically estimated at the individual-level, or have been based on the assumption that ideal-points are normally distributed over the population of choice makers. We propose two probabilistic ideal-point choice models for the external analysis of preferences that allow for more flexible multimodal distributions of ideal-points, thus acknowledging the existence of subpopulations with distinct preferences. The first model extends the ideal-point probit model for heterogeneous preferences to accommodate a mixture of multivariate normal distributions of ideal-points. The second model assumes that ideal-points are uniformly distributed within finite ranges of the attribute space, leading to a more simplistic formulation and a more flexible distribution. The two models are applied to simulated and actual choice data, and compared to the ideal-point probit model.
Staggered updating in an artificial financial market

Abstract We consider an environment in which traders search for trading opportunities and update their forecast rules at random intervals by OLS. The staggering of this updating process across traders allows differences in opinion to persist over time, generating nontrivial price dynamics. The nature of these dynamics is sensitive to the degree of overparameterization of forecast rules relative to market fundamentals.
Asset Fire Sales by Banks: Evidence from Commercial REO Sales*

I study asset fire sales by commercial banks during the financial crisis. Specifically, I find that banks with lower liquidity levels post lower asking prices, receive lower sale prices, and are less likely to sell REO properties to natural buyers. Further analysis shows that the results are unlikely to be driven by omitted variables related to local conditions, property characteristics, or bank characteristics. To establish causality, I use the losses banks incur due to house price drops as the instrument for bank liquidity and find similar results in two-stage least-squares instrumental variable regressions.
Equilibrium Bidding without the Independence Axiom: A Graphical Analysis

In this paper we examine optimal bidding without the independence axiom in a unified framework which allows for a clear graphical representation. Thus, we can show very simply the independence axiom to be a necessary and sufficient condition on preferences for strategical equivalence of the two first-price and second-price auctions, respectively, and for the second-price sealed-bid auction to be demand revealing. The analysis reveals that the betweenness property is necessary and sufficient for the ascending-bid auction to be demand revealing while optimal bids exceed (are less than) bidders' valuations, iff preferences are quasiconcave (quasiconvex). Furthermore, it can be shown that fanning out (fanning in) leads to a higher (lower) selling-price in open than in sealed-bid auctions.
Steam power, establishment size, and labor productivity growth in nineteenth century American manufacturing

Abstract We use establishment-level data from the 1850–1880 censuses of manufacturing to study the relationships among establishment size, steam power use, and labor productivity. Large establishments, measured here by employment, were much more likely to use steam power than smaller establishments. By 1880, slightly more than half of all manufacturing workers were employed in establishments using steam power, compared with 17 percent in 1850 and we show that, after controlling for various establishment characteristics, steam-powered establishments had higher labor productivity than establishments using other sources of power. Moreover, this productivity differential was increasing in establishment size.
Migration of Firms, Home Bias and Economic Growth

This study analyzes the effects of government policies on the short-run and long-run movement of locally owned firms from a developed country to a less-developed country and on the output and growt...
The Supreme Court's Misconstruction of a Procedural Statute-A Critique of the Court's Decision in Badaracco

When a taxpayer files an honest' federal income tax return for a taxable year, section 6501(a) of the Internal Revenue Code2 limits the period of time during which the Government can assess a tax for that year to a three-year period commencing with the date that the return was filed. The three-year limitations period is extended for an additional three years by section 6501(e)(l)(A) if the taxpayer's return omits properly includible gross income in an amount in excess of twenty-five percent of the gross income that was reported. If a taxpayer fails to file a return for a taxable year or files a fraudulent return, sections 6501(c)(l) and (c)(3) permit the tax for that year to be assessed at any time; in other words, there is no limitation on the time available to the Government to assess or collect the tax.
Theorizing regulatory governance within its ecology: the structure of management in an age of globalization

This article examines regulatory governance (‘RG’) within its own ecology. It considers RG as an ideology of governance, as its own set of techniques to that end, and as a methodology and psycholog...
Estimating Loan-to-Value and Foreclosure Behavior

We develop and estimate a unified model of house prices, loan-to-value ratios (LTVs), and trade and foreclosure behavior. House prices are only observed for traded properties, and trades are endogenous, creating sample-selection problems for traditional estimators. We develop a Bayesian filtering procedure to recover the price path for each individual property and produce selection-corrected estimates of historical LTVs and foreclosure behavior, both showing large unprecedented changes since 2007. Our model reduces the index revision problem by nearly half, and has applications in economics and finance (e.g., pricing mortgage-backed securities).
The Impact of Switching Regimes and Monetary Shocks: An Empirical Analysis of REITs

This paper demonstrates that the effects of unanticipated monetary policy changes (shocks) on real estate investment trust (REIT) returns are asymmetric between the high- and low-variance regimes. ...
A radial basis function (RBF) finite difference method for the simulation of reaction–diffusion equations on stationary platelets within the augmented forcing method

SUMMARY We present a computational method for solving the coupled problem of chemical transport in a fluid (blood) with binding/unbinding of the chemical to/from cellular (platelet) surfaces in contact with the fluid, and with transport of the chemical on the cellular surfaces. The overall framework is the augmented forcing point method (AFM) (L. Yao and A.L. Fogelson, Simulations of chemical transport and reaction in a suspension of cells I: An augmented forcing point method for the stationary case, IJNMF (2012) 69, 1736–52.) for solving fluid-phase transport in a region outside of a collection of cells suspended in the fluid. We introduce a novel radial basis function–finite difference (RBF-FD) method to solve reaction–diffusion equations on the surface of each of a collection of 2D stationary platelets suspended in blood. Parametric RBFs are used to represent the geometry of the platelets and give accurate geometric information needed for the RBF-FD method. Symmetric Hermite-RBF interpolants are used for enforcing the boundary conditions on the fluid-phase chemical concentration, and their use removes a significant limitation of the original AFM. The efficacy of the new methods is shown through a series of numerical experiments; in particular, second-order convergence for the coupled problem is demonstrated. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Should investors invest in hedge fund-like mutual funds? Evidence from the 2007 financial crisis

Abstract This study empirically examines the value added for investors during the 2007–2009 financial crisis from hedge fund-like equity mutual funds, including 130/30, market neutral, and long/short equity funds. We find that based on the information ratio, all market neutral funds, top 90% of long/short funds, and top 25% of 130/30 funds outperform a long-only passive index fund over the crisis period. However, we find little evidence of abnormal performance by the average and median funds in our sample, based on either unconditional or conditional four-factor alphas. The reason for the overall under-performance in the crisis period is that while short positions taken by these funds do generate alpha, the gain from their short positions is not sufficiently large to offset the loss from their long positions. Finally, the abnormal performance of short positions is found to be attributable to managers’ characteristic-adjusted and industry-adjusted stock selection skills. One implication of this study is that even though market neutral and long/short funds on average may not generate alpha, investors can benefit from holding these funds, especially the former, that can provide a hedge against down markets due to their low betas and that can be useful for asset allocation.
Asymptotics of implied volatility to arbitrary order

In a unified model-free framework that includes long-expiry, short-expiry, extreme-strike, and jointly-varying strike-expiry regimes, we generate implied volatility and implied variance approximations, with rigorous error estimates asymptotically smaller than any given power of L, where L denotes the exogenously given absolute log of an option price that approaches zero. Our results, therefore, sharpen to arbitrarily high order of accuracy (and, moreover, extend to general extreme regimes) the model-free asymptotics of implied volatility. We then apply these general formulas to particular examples: Heston (using a previously known L expansion) and Levy (using saddlepoint methods to derive L expansions).
Responders ' Responsibility: Liability and Immunity in Public Health Emergencies

Many experts predict the advent of a public health emergency resulting from a flu pandemic or bioterrorism attack in the foreseeable future. At the same time, many health care providers express significant concern about liability arising from emergency response activities, because it is unlikely that they would be able to provide optimal care in crisis conditions. They also state that this concern will likely influence their willingness to be involved in response activities. This article addresses issues that have received little attention in the legal literature: liability and immunity in public health emergencies. The article provides a first-of-its-kind comprehensive analysis of the different theories of liability that might be used by plaintiffs and the sources of immunity that are currently available to public health emergency responders. I will argue that the existing immunity scheme is a patchwork that leaves many gaps and unanswered questions. In particular, it largely excludes paid individual and corporate health care providers who may bear the greatest burden during a public health emergency as hundreds or thousands of patients simultaneously seek medical treatment. The specter of liability may induce these parties to refuse to participate in emergency response efforts, and thus, the unavailability of immunity could significantly compromise public welfare. Moreover, the risk of liability raises questions of justice because those that, unlike their more risk-averse counterparts, do treat patients, perhaps at great risk to their own health, would face potential liability rather than being rewarded for their altruism or professionalism. Consequently, the Article will craft recommendations for statutory reforms to remedy the piecemeal and deficient liability protection system that applies to health care providers responding to public health emergencies.
Strategic Activism and Nonmarket Strategy

Activist NGOs have increasingly foregone public politics and turned to private politics to change the practices of firms and industries. This paper focuses on private politics, activist strategies, and nonmarket strategies of targets. A formal theory of an encounter between an activist organization and a target is presented to examine strategies for lessening the chance of being a target and for addressing an activist challenge once it has occurred. The encounter between the activist and the target is viewed as competition. At the heart of that competition is an activist campaign, which is represented by a demand, a promised reward if the target meets the demand, and a threat of harm if the target rejects the demand. The model incorporates target selection by the activist, proactive measures and reputation building by a potential target to reduce the likelihood of being selected as a target, fighting a campaign, and credible commitment.
Not a Problem: A Downside of Humorous Appeals

Public service announcements (PSAs) are traditionally designed to elicit negative emotions that spur problem-solving behavior. However, in order to improve their reach, some social marketers are forgoing traditional strategy by creating PSAs that are humorous. Because of humorâs positivity and association with non-serious situations, we hypothesized that humorous appeals can decrease problem perception and problemsolving behavior. Study 1 examined problem perceptions using matched pairs of humorous and non-humorous PSAs. Respondents judged a social issue as less important to solve after viewing the humorous version of the pair. Study 2 examined problem-solving behavior through a partnership with a non-profit organization seeking to improve young adultsâ sexual health knowledge. Humorous PSAs were less effective than a non-humorous version at spurring people to search for health information. The inquiry revealed a previously unaddressed tradeoff: using humor to benefit a messageâs reach creates a potential cost to solving a personal or societal problem.
Do sexy mouthwash ads leave a bad aftertaste? The interaction of sexual self-schema and brand positioning fit on female-targeted sexual advertising efficacy

We explore females’ reactions to a sexually themed advertising with regard to a key personality variable, sexual self-schema (SSS). In extant research, SSS has largely had a positive impact on females’ reactions to sexual advertisements. We further explore this dynamic by considering the role of female sexual self-schema (SSS) on attitudes and purchase intent for products with brand positions that differ with regard to fit with sexual themes. Informed by our study and extant literature, we also offer areas for further SSS-based advertising research, particularly in another unexplored area: the role of SSS in identification and resultant attitude formation in sexual, but less explicit, advertising.
Reasoning serves argumentation in children

Abstract The argumentative theory of reasoning ( Mercier & Sperber, in press-c ) claims that reasoning evolved for argumentation: to find and evaluate arguments in dialogic contexts. The theory has drawn most of its supportive evidence from work with adults, leaving open the possibility that argumentive features of reasoning are in fact entirely learned. Evidence is reviewed here suggesting that the special relation between reasoning and argumentation holds at all ages. More specifically, it is argued that (a) children possess at least rudimentary argument skills, (b) they are able to reap the benefits of social reasoning from very early on, (c) confirmation bias is present as soon as they start to argue, and (d) children can be victims of the same biases that affect adults when they use reasoning in the wrong contexts. These claims strengthen the argumentative theory of reasoning and support a call for more research on the interactive features of reasoning in both adults and children.
Estimating the marginal willingness to pay function without instrumental variables

Abstract The hedonic model of Rosen (1974) has become a workhorse for valuing the characteristics of differentiated products despite a number of well-documented econometric problems, including a source of endogeneity that has proven difficult to overcome. Here we outline a simple, likelihood-based estimation approach for recovering the marginal willingness-to-pay function that avoids this endogeneity problem. Using this framework, we find that marginal willingness-to-pay to avoid violent crime increases by sixteen cents with each additional incident per 100,000 residents. Accounting for the slope of the marginal willingness-to-pay function has significant impacts on welfare analyses.
The Enduring Legacy of Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon

To mark the ninetieth anniversary of the decision, Pace University School of Law sponsored a Symposium, The Enduring Legacy of Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, to reconsider the case and to appreciate the accomplishments of Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, who as Lucile, became one of the twentieth century's most innovative fashion designers. The Symposium brought together leading contracts scholars from as far away as Australia and England as well as experts on Lucile from the worlds of fashion, museums and fashion scholarship.The Symposium examined legal issues raised by the decision through panels that focused upon: implication, interpretation and default terms; the context of the case; implication and best efforts in the employment context; and Wood v. Lucy as a teaching vehicle. This introduction to Pace Law Review's Symposium Issue discusses Lady Lucy's career and offers a precis of the papers herein.
Capital structure and product markets interactions: evidence from business cycles

Abstract This paper provides firm- and industry-level evidence of the effects of capital structure on product market outcomes for a large cross-section of industries over a number of years. The analysis uses shocks to aggregate demand as surrogates for exogenous changes in the product market environment. I find that debt financing has a negative impact on firm (relative-to-industry) sales growth in industries in which rivals are relatively unlevered during recessions, but not during booms. In contrast, no such effects are observed for firms competing in high-debt industries. At the industry level, markups are more countercyclical when industry debt is high. The cyclical dynamics I find for firm sales growth and for industry markups are consistent with Chevalier and Scharfstein's (American Economic Review (1996)) prediction that firms which rely heavily on external financing are more likely to cut their investment in market share building in response to negative shocks to demand and that the competitive outcomes resulting from such actions depend on the financial structures of their industry rivals.
Salvage Awards on the Somali Coast: Who Pays for Public and Private Rescue Efforts in Piracy Crises?

This paper, a contribution to the "Troubled Waters: Combating Modern Piracy with the Rule of Law" symposium, explores the question of who pays for rescue efforts associated with maritime piracy. The paper explores the availability of admiralty law's salvage awards to governmental and non-governmental actors who intervene to rescue vessels and crew from pirates. Such awards provide an unusual incentive to rescue, traditionally unavailable for land-based rescue, but may raise complicated questions of policy and international law. The paper concludes by comparing salvage awards to a recent trend in American states to adopt "Search and Rescue" expense statutes allowing governments to charge those rescued from land-based wilderness perils for the costs associated with intervention.
The Crucial "Corrupt Intent" Element in Federal Bribery Laws

This article focuses on the word "corruptly" found in many bribery statutes, including 18 U.S.C. § 201. I argue that the adverb constitutes an independent element of the crime, and its presence requires the jury to summon its moral intuition to determine whether the behavior that satisfies the other elements of the statutory crime was performed with evil intent. I pay special attention to the problem of campaign contributions as bribes.It is unfortunate that many courts have effectively read the word "corruptly" out of the statute. The culprit is the Supreme Court’s opinion in Sun-Diamond. In that case, the Court distinguished bribery from illegal gratuities, and explained that the difference between the two was that bribery entailed a specific quid pro quo agreement. I argue that the Sun-Diamond Court’s silence on the corrupt intent element does not mean that the corrupt intent element is satisfied by the mere existence of a quid pro quo.Instead, I focus on the Supreme Court’s stated preference in Sun-Diamond and Skilling that federal anti-corruption laws should be narrowly construed. Bribery laws must be read narrowly because they threaten to capture a great deal of benign political activity, such as logrolling, vote-trading, and campaign contributions by special interest groups. The corrupt intent element functions to effectively narrow these potentially overinclusive anti-corruption laws by requiring the jury to find that the defendant acted with an evil mind. Although the precise contours of moral corruption will vary case-by-case, the corrupt intent element requires prosecutors to argue a theory of why a given quid pro quo was corrupt and therefore illegal. To add more meat to the bones of corrupt intent, I make a brief detour through political theory to note how one’s political philosophy will affect one’s determination of whether a given quid pro quo (especially one involving a campaign contribution) is corrupt. I also explain that because bribery is effectively a lesser-included offense of Hobbs Act extortion and "honest services" mail or wire fraud, the corrupt intent element should carry over into these crimes.
The illusion of predictability: A call to action

The commentary recommends a plot of the probability of a positive outcome as a tool for improving the interpretation of regression models in a forecasting context.
Transparency of Information and Coordination in Economies with Investment Complementarities

How do public and private information affect equilibrium allocations and social welfare in economies with investment complementarities? And what is the optimal transparency in the information conveyed, for example, by economic statistics, policy announcements, or news in the media? We first consider an environment where the complementarities are weak so that the equilibrium is unique no matter the structure of information. An increase in the precision of public information may have the perverse effect of increasing aggregate volatility. Nevertheless, as long as there is no value to lotteries, welfare unambiguously increases with an increase in either the relative or the absolute precision of public information. Hence, full transparency is optimal. This is because more transparency facilitates more effective coordination, which is valuable from a social perspective. On the other hand, when complementarities are strong enough that multiple equilibria are possible, more transparency permits the market to coordinate more effectively on either the bad or the good equilibrium. In this case, constructive ambiguity becomes optimal if there is a high risk that more transparency will lead to coordination failures.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
Audit committee composition and effectiveness: a review of post-SOX literature

The Sarbanes–Oxley act (SOX) was enacted to strengthen corporate governance practices in the United States; since SOX enactment, the audit committee has received increasing emphasis in accounting research. The main objective of this study is to review and synthesize the growing volume of audit committee literature in the post-SOX era. While summarizing the post-SOX literature, this study also focuses on selected pre-SOX studies to compare the research issues and findings of pre- and post-SOX literature and to show how governance reforms shape the literature’s domain. The extant audit committee literature reflects an enormous body of knowledge. Pre-SOX literature documents that audit the committee composition criteria play a significant role in determining the effectiveness of the audit committee. Like the pre-SOX literature, post-SOX literature establishes the notion that independent and expert audit committees enhance the effectiveness of the audit committee monitoring processes and improve the overall quality of financial reporting and auditing. These findings supplement the scholarly support for SOX requirements. In the post-SOX era, researchers have focused on those issues driven by SOX. However, other issues that are not addressed by SOX have also emerged during the post-SOX period, including audit committee compensation and the social ties of committee members with the chief executive officer as well as the supervisory or other expertise of audit committee members. However, for some issue, the findings are not conclusive. For example, post-SOX researchers have documented inconsistent findings regarding the association between the audit committee monitoring process and the different forms of compensation for audit committee members. Moreover, both the pre- and post-SOX literature contain predominantly experimental research. So, there remains ample room for future empirical research that can shed further light on the more theoretical issues. Future researchers can investigate unanswered questions by establishing an implicit understanding of existing findings and developing theories in this area.
Do Strong Fences Make Strong Neighbors

Many features of U.S. tax policy towards multinational fi rms — including the governing principle of capital export neutrality, the byzantine system of expense allocation, and anti-inversion legislation — refl ect the intuition that building “strong fences” around the United States advances American interests. This paper examines the interaction of a strong fences policy with the increasingly important global markets for corporate residence, corporate control and corporate equities. These markets provide opportunities for entrepreneurs, managers, and investors to circumvent a strong fences policy. The paper provides simple descriptive evidence of the growing importance of these markets and considers the implications for U.S. tax policy.
Financial Misrepresentation: Antecedents and Performance Effects:

This doctoral thesis examines the influence of relative performance and managerial incentives on corporate financial misrepresentation, and then tests the relationship between misrepresentation and subsequent operating performance, including the moderating effects of change in board composition and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) turnover. Using a hand-collected data set from several archival sources of company records, the study includes a combination of estimation techniques, including categorical dependent variable and fixed-effect methods, all conducted using a matched sample of misrepresenting and nonmisrepresenting firms. The author draws several important conclusions from the empirical analyses. First, CEO incentive pay and poor relative performance increase the likelihood of misrepresentation. Second, misrepresentation impairs subsequent operating performance, although this negative effect can be partially offset by CEO replacement and increased board independence. The study advances our academic un...
Social Entrepreneurship: Beyond the Hype

pists, donor organizations, the not-for-profit sector, international organizations, academia, the media, and the public at large. Business schools in particular find the concept of social entrepreneurship very appealing, given its combination of social virtue and business acumen. Numerous business schools have established centers dedicated to social entrepreneurship, including the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, Duke, the University of British Columbia, INSEAD, Oxford, and the National University of Singapore. The list of business schools offering research or teaching on social entrepreneurship without having created a center specifically dedicated to the topic is much longer. This popularity has brought significant resources to social entrepreneurship in the form of both talent and money. However, it is not clear precisely what social entrepreneurship is. Gregory Dees, a prominent scholar in this field, wrote in 1998, “Though the concept of ‘social entrepreneurship’ is gaining in popularity, it means different things to different people. This can be confusing.” Ten years later the definitional dispute continues, and it has taken a toll. After an extensive in-depth survey in 2008, the Center for Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship reports, “Even our most knowledgeable informants did not agree on a definition of social entrepreneurship. Definition is one of the biggest problems in the field” (emphasis in the original). Proponents of social entrepreneurship disagree about issues such as whether it includes only not-for-profit or also for-profit ventures, whether the focus should be on individuals or on organizations, whether the change involved must be systemic or can be incremental, and whether to include only successful ventures or also failed attempts. Some argue about the term itself and suggest that “social innovation” is a better choice. One way to avoid the disputes would be to have a defi-
Babysitting Terrorists: Should States Be Strictly Liable for Failing to Prevent Transborder Attacks

9/11 changed the world forever: a phrase that is now considered cliche but nonetheless accurate with regard to international law. The 2001 military campaign in Afghanistan equally shocked the legal community and propelled the issue of international state responsibility to the forefront of academic debate. Since 9/11, much has been written on the legality of U.S. action in Afghanistan, with particular emphasis on the parameters of the use of force and the corresponding shift in the law of jus ad bellum. Unfortunately, the precise question of indirect state responsibility for failing to prevent terrorist attacks remains somewhat elusive to this day. In this article, I purport to delineate the parameters of this specific regime of indirect responsibility, given that the literature and jurisprudence are far from dispositive on the matter. Although little consensus has been achieved on this issue, it is widely recognized that host-states have a categorical obligation to prevent terrorist attacks emanating from their territory. However, the contours of this obligation of prevention are far more problematic, both in terms of legal content and policy. My analysis commences with a brief overview of the direct/indirect responsibility dichotomy, along with a presentation of the concept of attribution in international law. The first objective of the article is to trace the modern evolution of indirect state responsibility vis-a-vis terrorism, especially since the Beirut raid. In doing so, Professor Bowett's work on Israeli reprisals and use of force in the 1960s, along with several historical accounts, are considered as a starting point. Secondly, I identify a significant shift in international law towards a model of indirect state responsibility, evidenced by recent Security Council and state practice. Three pivotal developments assist me in ascertaining this evolution: the post-Beirut raid jurisprudence, which includes the Nicaragua, Tehran, and Tadic decisions, the ILC's adoption of the Draft articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts in 2001, and the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan. Finally, I conclude that the concept of attribution should be excised altogether from the equation of state responsibility in the context of modern terrorism. After analogizing the domestic products liability paradigm to the war on terror, I propose the implementation of a two-tiered strict liability model in assessing the responsibility of sanctuary states. The discussion, which is pervaded by a tension between upholding sovereignty and combating terrorism efficiently, ultimately leads to the exploration of the obligation of prevention.
Beating a moving target: Optimal portfolio strategies for outperforming a stochastic benchmark

We consider the portfolio problem in continuous-time where the objective of the investor or money manager is to exceed the performance of a given stochastic benchmark, as is often the case in institutional money management. The benchmark is driven by a stochastic process that need not be perfectly correlated with the investment opportunities, and so the market is in a sense incomplete. We first solve a variety of investment problems related to the achievement of goals: for example, we find the portfolio strategy that maximizes the probability that the return of the investor's portfolio beats the return of the benchmark by a given percentage without ever going below it by another predetermined percentage. We also consider objectives related to the minimization of the expected time until the investor beats the benchmark. We show that there are two cases to consider, depending upon the relative favorability of the benchmark to the investment opportunity the investor faces. The problem of maximizing the expected discounted reward of outperforming the benchmark, as well as minimizing the discounted penalty paid upon being outperformed by the benchmark is also discussed. We then solve a more standard expected utility maximization problem which allows new connections to be made between some specific utility functions and the nonstandard goal problems treated here.
Ex post lobbying

Nearly half of all lobbying activity targeting specific bills between 1998 and 2012 happened after the Congress passed legislation, yet existing theories of lobbying generally fail to account for lobbying that occurs after a bill is passed. I argue that ex post lobbying aims to influence the distribution of particularistic benefits that will arise from legislation by targeting regulatory rule-making processes. I develop a model that describes lobbying as a collective action problem among interest groups, who must trade off between spending money to lobby for a bill’s passage and spending money to lobby over the details of its implementation. The implications of the model suggest that bills with high proportions of particularistic provisions draw more ex post lobbying and that trade associations and larger firms bear a disproportionately large share of the ex ante lobbying burden. Empirical analysis of lobbying reports is consistent with these predictions.
Security transaction taxes and market quality

We examine nine changes in the New York State Security Transaction Taxes (STT) between 1932 and 1981. We find that imposing or increasing an STT results in wider bidask spreads, lower volume, and increased price impact of trades.
Who monitors the monitor? The use of special committees by target firms in corporate takeovers

Abstract This paper extends the corporate governance literature such as Alchian and Demsetz (1972) by analyzing the use of special committees of disinterested directors by target firms during corporate takeovers. Our sample spans post Sarbanes–Oxley from 2003 through 2007, under which boards of directors are subject to increased scrutiny and additional regulatory mandates. This period is also characterized by a high level of management buyout activity that can exacerbate conflicts. Our results show that special committee use is positively related to conflicts and negatively related to factors and situations where insider knowledge is particularly valuable. Moreover, the propensity to form a committee is negatively related to the board's overall independence; hence special committees substitute for the monitoring not found in the overall board composition. Special committees, on average, are formed well in advance of the merger agreement, employ additional financial advisors, and are more likely to run an auction process. Target returns in deals with special committees are no different than deals without special committees. The evidence indicates that special committees enable target boards to adapt to situational conflicts, which helps explain when independent directors matter for corporate governance.