cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Rear Visibility and Some Unresolved Problems for Economic Analysis (With Notes on Experience Goods)

In 2014, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration finalized its rear visibility regulation, which requires cameras in all new vehicles, with the goal of allowing drivers to see what is behind them and thus reducing backover accidents. In 2018, the Trump administration embraced the regulation. The rear visibility rule raises numerous puzzles. First, Congress’ grant of authority was essentially standardless – perhaps the most open-ended in all of federal regulatory law. Second, it is not easy to identify a market failure to justify the regulation. Third, the monetized costs of the regulation greatly exceeded the monetized benefits, and yet on welfare grounds, the regulation can plausibly be counted as a significant success. Rearview cameras produce a set of benefits that are hard to quantify, including increased ease of driving, and those benefits might have been made a part of “breakeven analysis,” accompanying standard cost-benefit analysis. In addition, rearview cameras significantly improve the experience of driving, and it is plausible to think that in deciding whether to demand them, many vehicle purchasers did not sufficiently anticipate that improvement. This is a problem of limited foresight; rearview cameras are “experience goods.” A survey conducted in 2019 strongly supports this proposition, finding that about 56 % of consumers would demand at least $50.) These conclusions have general implications for other domains in which regulation has the potential to improve social welfare, even if it fails standard cost-benefit analysis; the defining category involves situations in which people lack experience with a good whose provision might have highly beneficial welfare effects.
The Human and Economic Dimensions of Altruism: The Case of Organ Transplantation

Abstract This paper analyzes three issues critical to understanding the chronic shortage of organs. Section 2 develops a simple economic model of altruism that helps explain how markets with altruistic participants operate like ordinary economic markets but produce an equilibrium position in which more organs are transferred at lower cash prices. Section 3 examines and rejects the various arguments used to undermine the neoclassical arguments in the first section. Section 4 looks at ways to expand the supply of organs: directed donations within families and among friends, solicited organs via MatchingDonors.com, donor‐recipient pairs, and LifeSharers.
The Legitimacy of Labor Unions

Labor unions do not have a well-understood rationale, as do capitalist enterprises, strictly voluntary associations, and democratic states. They are nonprofit associations, but also coercive economic agents; working-class communities, but also powerful special interests; embodiments of rights, but also incompatible with certain individual freedoms. These tensions result in an ambivalent legal status. For instance, unions may collect fees from (and negotiate contracts for) certain employees without obtaining their individual consent, yet no one can be required to belong to a union. Unions are exempt from antitrust laws and may restrain competition, but only in particular ways. We cannot assess these rules unless we have a convincing philosophical justification of unions in hand. This justification must answer utilitarian arguments that unions undermine social welfare by hampering the efficiency of markets; libertarian objections that unions override individual rights of expression and contract; and democratic complaints that unions (being economic “special interests”) are less legitimate than elected governments. This article argues that unions are valuable parts of civil society and are morally legitimate as economic and political actors. Indeed, it would be desirable to ease certain obstacles to union growth by reforming labor law.
Information Disclosure and Market Quality: The Effect of SEC Rule 605 on Trading Costs

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted Rule 605 (formerly Rule 11 Acl 5) on November 15, 2000. The Rule requires market centers to make monthly public disclosure of execution quality. The Rule is intended to achieve a more competitive and efficient national market system by increasing the visibility of execution quality. The ef fective and quoted spreads for our study sample of NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ stocks declined significantly after implementation of the Rule. The decline cannot be attributed to a secular trend in spreads, concurrent changes in stock attributes, or the effect of decimal pricing. Although the quoted depth of NYSE stocks also declined, overall market qual ity is higher after implementation of the Rule. Based on these results, we conclude that the SEC's goal to improve execution quality through more transparent markets has been achieved.
Information, insurance and the sustainability of sovereign debt

Abstract In an influential paper, Bulow and Rogoff (1989) prove that in a competitive financial market, the threat of credit exclusion alone cannot sustain repayment of sovereign debt, as the defaulting government can still enter cash-in-advance insurance contracts. However, their result relies on an important assumption: symmetric information. This paper shows that if a debtor government has some private information about the underlying distribution of future economic shocks, then debt repayment is sustainable in equilibrium. This is true even if there is only one period with private information, and even if default does not have a spillover effect to any other relationship. The intuition is that a default is a signal of a bad distribution of future shocks, leading to higher risk premia on future financial contracts.
House Appropriations After the Republican Revolution

This article applies the theory of “conditional party government” (CPG) to the interaction between the majority party and the Appropriations Committee in the period following the Republican Revolution of 1995. We extend the analysis of Aldrich and Rohde (2000b) by examining how actions within the committee have changed over time and analyzing whether behavior and outcomes continue to match the expectations of CPG theory, particularly with respect to the times in which power in Congress switched from the Republicans to the Democrats and back. The conditions of the CPG theory continued to be met so that we can continue to test the theory's predictions. We show that following the Republican Revolution, the role of the party remained paramount and the party leadership maintained its influence over the direction of policy. While in the majority, both parties used the Appropriations Committee as a vehicle for policy change and the party leadership monitored committee actions, either by blocking policy shifts aw...
The Strategic Fitness Process: A Collaborative Action Research Method for Developing and Understanding Organizational Prototypes and Dynamic Capabilities

Organizations underperform and sometimes fail because their leaders are unable to learn the unvarnished truth from relevant stakeholders about how the design and behavior of the organization is misaligned with its goals and strategy. The Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) was designed to enable leaders to overcome organizational silence about the misalignment with the environment and chosen strategy. By enabling an honest, organization-wide and public conversation, senior management teams, working collaboratively with scholar-consultants and organizational members, have access to valid data (the unvarnished truth), can conduct a valid diagnosis, and can develop a valid plan to change the structure, processes, and behavior of an organization while at the same time developing commitment that ensures execution. SFP is also a research method. By applying SFP iteratively to new and challenging situations, scholar-consultants can invent new organizational prototypes as well as learn if a standardized and institutionalized organizational learning process like SFP can enhance dynamic capabilities. The SFP model is illustrated with an application to Hewlett-Packard’s Santa Rosa Systems Division.
Optical disassembly of cellular clusters by tunable ‘tug-of-war’ tweezers

Bacterial biofilms underlie many persistent infections, posing major hurdles in antibiotic treatment. Here we design and demonstrate 'tug-of-war' optical tweezers that can facilitate the assessment of cell-cell adhesion-a key contributing factor to biofilm development, thanks to the combined actions of optical scattering and gradient forces. With a customized optical landscape distinct from that of conventional tweezers, not only can such 'tug-of-war' tweezers stably trap and stretch a rod-shaped bacterium in the observing plane, but, more importantly, they can also impose a tunable lateral force that pulls apart cellular clusters without any tethering or mechanical movement. As a proof of principle, we examined a Sinorhizobium meliloti strain that forms robust biofilms and found that the strength of intercellular adhesion depends on the growth medium. This technique may herald new photonic tools for optical manipulation and biofilm study, as well as other biological applications.
Targets Missed and Targets Hit: Critical Tax Studies and Effective Tax Reform

Medieval alchemy is popularly associated with attempts to become rich by transmuting base elements into gold. Such attempts were less than universally successful. Yet, alchemy yielded great benefits in other areas. For instance, alchemy was one of the sources of modem sciences such as pharmacology and metallurgy. Also, the rich and profound symbology of alchemy has influenced modem psychology.
Sovereign default, private sector creditors, and the IFIs

Abstract The data reveal that emerging market sovereign borrowing from International Financial Institutions (IFIs) is small, intermittent and countercyclical compared to that from private sector creditors. The IFI loan contracts offered to sovereigns differ from the private ones in that they are more enforceable and have conditionality arrangements attached to them. Taking these contractual differences as given, this paper builds a quantitative model of a sovereign borrower and argues that better enforceability of IFI loan contracts is the main institutional feature that explains the size and cyclicality while conditionality accounts for the intermittency of borrowing from the IFIs.
The Relationship Between Domestic Protest and Oppositional Political Terrorism in Connection with the Gulf Conflict

The author quantitatively tests eight interrelated hypotheses about the relationship between protests against the allies' participation in the Gulf War and the use of oppositional political terrorism connected to this crisis. Both visual inspection of the data and quantitative analysis supports the relationship between non-Gulf Conflict related terrorism, protest connected to the Gulf Conflict and Gulf-related terrorism. Characteristics of protests, such as number of protesters and presence of violence, however, make negligible contributions to Gulf-specific terrorism. However, these variables in combination with the number of days the coalition forces were in the Gulf account for a moderate amount of the variance. There is also a significant relationship between protest and terrorism as a function of the period of conflict. Whereas protests are high and terrorism is low in period one, the reverse is true for the last period.
Entrepreneurial Opportunities for Wind-Energy Markets in Three Emerging Economies

Wind power is currently perceived as an important source of clean renewable energy and a viable way of decreasing the levels of greenhouse gas emissions. This paper gives an overview of the opportunities and challenges for the emerging wind energy markets in Brazil, China, and South Africa. The specific information on cultural and legal system as well as economic condition in these emerging countries is reviewed briefly. The data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the World Bank, the Global Wind Report, and other public online sources are applied to this study. A practical framework is constructed to explore the relationships among entrepreneurial opportunities of wind energy businesses and their benefits, costs, and risks in these countries. The purpose of this study is to review a practical model that positions the benefits, costs, and risks as well as opportunities and challenges in the three emerging countries. This study begins by exploring the three selected countries in the efficiency-driven economies. Then, this study attempts to compare the wind energy markets in the three countries and highlighting the importance of benefits, costs, and risks for these emerging markets. Furthermore, the discussions for characteristics of opportunities and challenges are performed for the three selected nations. Finally, conclusions and implications are generated for the further study. From this research, it is concluded that there are different perspectives of wind energy business development in Brazil, China, and South Africa. Also, enhancing entrepreneurial opportunities is a good way to overcome the challenges for new business development in the emerging economic markets.
Does Bogart Still Get Scale? Rights of Publicity in the Digital Age

Perhaps within the next decade, the technology of "reanimation" will allow film producers to cast any actor, living or dead, in any role. In this respect, there will soon be no difference between Humphrey Bogart and Mickey Mouse. Soon a sequel to the Maltese Falcon can star Bogart as he was in 1940. The legal rules that will operate in this environment are still being shaped. The discussion to date has centered on the need to ensure that intellectual property rights are shaped in such a way that preserves a large public domain. Such rights should not limit the ability of new artists and producers to create new work. This paper suggests that the existing debate misses the mark. Legal rules ought to take account of the way in which our cultural icons are both finite and privately owned. They need to be shepherded. Rights of publicity and other intellectual property rights are like any other scarce resource. We count on those who own them to manage them well. As with every property regime, what matters most is for rights to be defined clearly and their transfer easy.
Security analysts, cash flow forecasts, and turnover

Abstract We examine the relationship between security analyst turnover and the relative accuracy of their annual earnings and cash flow forecasts. Controlling for self-selection in an analyst’s decision to issue a cash flow forecast, we find that relatively more accurate earnings and cash flow forecasts reduce the probability of turnover. Relative earnings forecast accuracy decreases the probability of turnover more than relative cash flow forecast accuracy. We conduct two cross-sectional tests. We find that relative cash flow forecast accuracy is more important in the analyst’s career outcome when cash flow forecasts are potentially more useful to investors. We find that relative cash flow forecast accuracy is more heavily weighted in the career outcome when the number of other analysts providing cash flow forecasts for the firm is larger. This finding is consistent with economic intuition that relative performance evaluation is more effective when larger groups of individuals are compared.
Enron/Andersen: Crisis in U.S. Accounting and Lessons for Government

Accounting and auditing play a key role in the belief of ordinary taxpayers and investors in their institutions. This is equally true of the private and governmental sectors. The Enron/Andersen scandal, regrettably, is not an isolated case, but rather merely indicative of underlying, structural flaws in our financial systems. Moreover, there is evidence that some of these flaws may be present in governmental accounting and auditing. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is an attempt to address these problems in the private sector, but does not address concerns in the public sector. Public sector accounting issues that need to be addressed and monitored include substandard audit work and related liability issues, the appropriate funding of GASB so as to ensure its independence, auditor fees, and auditor independence questions including protection of elected and appointed state auditors.
Threats without Binding Commitment

This paper explores the power of threats in the absence of binding commitment. The threatener cannot commit to carry out the threat if the victim refuses payment, and cannot commit not to carry out the threat if payment is made. An important assumption of the model is that once the threat is carried out it cannot be repeated. If exercising the threat is costly to the threatener, then the threat cannot succeed in extracting money from the victim. If exercising the threat would benefit the threatener, however, then the threat's success depends upon whether the threat may be repeated after a payment is made. In the equilibrium of a finite-period game, the threat is carried out and the victim makes no payments. In an infinite-horizon game, however, it is an equilibrium for the victim to make a stream of payments over time. The expectation of future payments keeps the threatener from exercising the threat.
Industry conditions, growth opportunities and market reactions to convertible debt financing decisions

Abstract Firms that issue convertible debt have high debt- and equity-related costs of external finance. Existing theories of convertible debt finance differ primarily in their identification of the specific causes of the debt- and equity-related costs of external finance. To assess the theoretical issuance motives separately, we propose a simple framework that characterizes how issuers should design convertible debt to efficiently mitigate specific debt- and equity-related costs of external finance. We provide evidence from 588 security offer announcements that supports the hypotheses that: (1) convertible debt can be designed to mitigate different combinations of debt- and equity-related costs of external finance and (2) share price reactions depend on the security design decisions. The results also illustrate that the relations between firm value, financial leverage, investment opportunities, and the rate of future growth are more complex among convertible debt issuers than situations where firms issue standard financial securities.
Noise infusion as a confidentiality protection measure for graph-based statistics

We acknowledge financial support from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Science Foundation Grants SES-9978093 and SES-0427889 to Cornell University (Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research), the National Institute on Aging Grant R01 AG018854-01, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for LEHD infrastructure support. Abowd acknowledges additional funding through NSF Grants SES- 0922005, SES-1042181, TC-1012593 and SES-1131848.
Does Performance Management Affect Job Turnover Intention in the Federal Government

From a reform strategy that promises to restore citizen confidence in government, to a hydra-headed monster that has produced unintended negative consequences, performance management has indeed bee...
Chinese Political Reform and the Question of "Deputy Quality"

An ongoing debate over criteria for selecting Chinese people's congress deputies casts doubt on the democratic credentials of many reformers. Archival materials and interviews with Chinese legislative leaders, deputies, and staff demonstrate a range of views on how to improve "deputy quality." Some respondents emphasize deputy educational attainment and bureaucratizing congresses while others emphasize social diversity and popularizing congresses. "Democratic" pressures for legislative reform often mask efforts by intellectuals and middle class elements to press group interests at the expense of workers and peasants. Doubts about political equality exist among many intellectual deputies who focus on improving "deputy quality" to increase their representation in state affairs. But staff members and worker and peasant deputies often argue that the "quality" of China's population remains low and the less educated deserve representation, too.
Technology, Commerce, Development, Identity

Traditional paradigms of technology regulation ask how technology-mediated space1 is different from non-technology mediated space. Regulation rarely focuses on how technology makes a user develop differently than she/he otherwise would and what those differences might mean for regulatory approaches. Yet, this is perhaps the most important inquiry regulators should undertake as they grapple with crafting law that guides future generations of technology developers and users. Human development2-centered legislative analyses of new technologies may be rare because a flawed assumption is widely held in the law regarding the nature of human development. Human development has traditionally been conceptualized as a linear proposition—a steady upward trajectory with expected outcomes based on age. We use bright line age restrictions in many contexts, for example, presuming adults are more developed than children.3
CEO Involvement in the Selection of New Board Members: An Empirical Analysis

We study whether CEO involvement in the selection of new directors influences the nature of appointments to the board. When the CEO serves on the nominating committee or no nominating committee exists, firms appoint fewer independent outside directors and more gray outsiders with conflicts of interest. Stock price reactions to independent director appointments are significantly lower when the CEO is involved in director selection. Our evidence may illuminate a mechanism used by CEOs to reduce pressure from active monitoring, and we find a recent trend of companies removing CEOs from involvement in director selection.
Air pollution and infant health: Lessons from New Jersey☆

We examine the impact of three "criteria" air pollutants on infant health in New Jersey in the 1990s by combining information about mother's residential location from birth certificates with information from air quality monitors. Our work offers three important innovations. First, we use the exact addresses of mothers to select those closest to air monitors to improve the accuracy of air quality exposure. Second, we include maternal fixed effects to control for unobserved characteristics of mothers. Third, we examine interactions of air pollution with smoking and other risk factors for poor infant health outcomes. We find consistently negative effects of exposure to carbon monoxide (CO), both during and after birth, with effects considerably larger for smokers and older mothers. Since automobiles are the main source of carbon monoxide emissions, our results have important implications for regulation of automobile emissions.
From Keeping Peace to Building Peace: A Proposal for a Revitalized United Nations Trusteeship Council

Since the end of the Cold War, as the focus of the UN has turned from interstate conflict to internal state collapse, the nature and purpose of peacekeeping has shifted. Peace operations now encompass postconflict peacebuilding — action that seeks to rebuild failed states and prevent the resurgence of conflict. Despite this change, the Security Council remains the organ responsible for peace operations. To remedy problems of legitimacy and accountability resulting from Security Council control, this Note proposes split management of peace operations. While the Security Council should continue to manage the military and police aspects of peacekeeping, a revitalized Trusteeship Council should be responsible for the peacebuilding elements of missions. Responding to arguments that trusteeship is both legally and politically unfeasible, this Note proposes a mechanism to overcome the hurdle that Article 78 of the Charter poses to revived trusteeship and explains how changed conceptions of sovereignty and responsibility support revival of trusteeship.
Registered Savings Plans and the Making of Middle-Class Canada: Toward a Performative Theory of Tax Policy

Campaigning politicians and elected governments across Canada’s political spectrum strive to position themselves as defenders of the middle class. This is to be expected given the large proportion of the Canadian population that self-identifies as middle class.2 Since the term lacks precision, it is a claim that can accommodate a wide range of policy proposals. Tax policy serves as a prime vehicle for making this appeal to middle-class voters. Undoubtedly, any tax reform proposal can be examined critically to evaluate its likely distributional impacts and how well these map onto specific definitions of the middle class. This Article attempts, however, a different project. Drawing on the ideas of Judith Butler, it analyzes instead how tax policy produces middle-class identity through the very process of claiming to advance middle-class interests. The case study for this purpose is the rise of tax incentives for saving as a prominent feature of Canadian personal tax policy over the two decades
Topological Data Analysis Approaches to Uncovering the Timing of Ring Structure Onset in Filamentous Networks

In developmental biology as well as in other biological systems, emerging structure and organization can be captured using time-series data of protein locations. In analyzing this time-dependent data, it is a common challenge not only to determine whether topological features emerge, but also to identify the timing of their formation. For instance, in most cells, actin filaments interact with myosin motor proteins and organize into polymer networks and higher-order structures. Ring channels are examples of such structures that maintain constant diameters over time and play key roles in processes such as cell division, development, and wound healing. Given the limitations in studying interactions of actin with myosin in vivo, we generate time-series data of protein polymer interactions in cells using complex agent-based models. Since the data has a filamentous structure, we propose sampling along the actin filaments and analyzing the topological structure of the resulting point cloud at each time. Building on existing tools from persistent homology, we develop a topological data analysis (TDA) method that assesses effective ring generation in this dynamic data. This method connects topological features through time in a path that corresponds to emergence of organization in the data. In this work, we also propose methods for assessing whether the topological features of interest are significant and thus whether they contribute to the formation of an emerging hole (ring channel) in the simulated protein interactions. In particular, we use the MEDYAN simulation platform to show that this technique can distinguish between the actin cytoskeleton organization resulting from distinct motor protein binding parameters.
A Dynamic Network Model of Interbank Lending—Systemic Risk and Liquidity Provisioning

We develop a dynamic model of interbank borrowing and lending activities in which banks are organized into clusters, and adjust their monetary reserve levels to meet prescribed capital requirements...
Shock and awe: the effects of disinformation in military confrontation

This paper analyzes the effects of disinformation in a military conflict. If one army distorts its opponents' perception of its ability, this will create a greater propensity for soldiers on the opposing side to surrender. The sender of disinformation will thus have a greater probability of victory. However, disinformation may also lengthen the battle and increase the total number of casualties. This depends not only on the degree of disinformation but also on whether and to what extent the sender of disinformation is superior to the receiver.
Toward Free Trade in Services: Emerging Insurance Markets in Asia

The insurance industry plays a crucial role in the economy by allowing individuals and businesses to transfer or finance risks at a substantially lower cost than the value of the subject of insurance. As this efficient use of capital, continuity of insurance protection, depends on the industry's ability to meet its shortand long-term contractual obligations, the government, whether in Asia or elsewhere, closely monitors insurance activity, and tends to adopt rules of regulation that preserve the financial security of the industry as well as that of each insurer. For this, the government commonly uses a combination of ex ante and ex post approaches. An ex ante approach refers to the practice of setting, often stringent, rules that insurers must abide by. For example, a government may impose rigid market entry barriers, limit the types of ownership structures, detail the scope of insurer operations and investment, and specify premium rates and policy designs. It may operate state-owned insurers, or monopolize reinsurance business. The government may also function as a guaranty mechanism in case of insurer insolvency. In contrast, an ex post approach focuses on correcting any distortion once a signal leading to such a distortion has been identified in the market. In the country that relies primarily on ex post measures, the regulator sets the minimum entry barriers, but conducts rigorous monitoring of insurer activities. It may allow incumbent insurers to operate and invest freely, but subject them to stringent solvency margins or risk-based capital standards. Self-regulatory approaches such as corporate governance and self-regulation by industry associations are increasingly observed in the markets subject to ex post regulatory measures (Kwon, 2001). Simply adopting an ex post approach for insurance regulation does not guarantee that the market will mature and become competitive. A mature market calls for regulation and supervision of international standards. The market need be served by financially sound and technically robust insurance entities. Well developed infrastructure should exist in the economy for optimal supply of and demand for insurance. When all these elements are found in the market, policyholders' interests can be best protected and a further growth of the insurance industry is expected. Whether recent changes in insurance regulation and
Consumer Returns Policies and Supply Chain Performance

This paper develops a model of consumer returns policies. In our model, consumers face valuation uncertainty and realize their valuations only after purchase. There is also aggregate demand uncertainty, captured using the conventional newsvendor model. In this environment, consumers decide whether to purchase and then whether to return the product, whereas the seller sets the price, quantity, and refund amount. Using our model, we study the impact of full returns policies (e.g., using 100% money-back guarantees) and partial returns policies (e.g., when restocking fees are charged) on supply chain performance. Next, we demonstrate that consumer returns policies may distort incentives under common supply contracts (such as manufacturer buy-backs), and we propose strategies to coordinate the supply chain in the presence of consumer returns. Finally, we explore several extensions and demonstrate the robustness of our findings.
Climate treaties and backstop technologies

In this paper I examine the design of climate treaties when there exist two kinds of technology, a conventional abatement technology with (linearly) increasing marginal costs and a backstop technology (“air capture”) with high but constant marginal costs. I focus on situations in which countries can gain collectively by using both technologies. I show that, under some circumstances, countries will be better off negotiating treaties that are not costeffective. When countries prefer to negotiate self-enforcing agreements that are costeffective, the availability of the backstop technology causes cooperation in abatement to increase significantly. JEL-Code: Q54. Scott Barrett School of International and Public Affairs and Earth Institute Columbia University 420 West 118th Street, Room 1427 USA – New York, NY 10027 sb3116@columbia.edu 29 March 2010 This paper was given as a keynote lecture at the CESifo area conference on Energy & Climate Economics, Munich, Germany, 16-17 October, 2009. I am grateful to the participants of this conference for their comments on the paper, and to Michael Hoel for inviting me to give the paper.
THE INFORMATIONAL CONTENT OF BOND RATINGS

This paper explores the risk structure of interest rates. The focus is on whether yields on industrial bonds indicate that market participants base their evaluations of a bond issue's default risk on agency ratings or on publicly available financial statistics. Using a non-linear least squares procedure, the yield-to-maturity is related to Moody's rating, Standard and Poor's (S&P) rating, and accounting measures of creditworthiness such as coverage and leverage. Market yields are found to be significantly correlated with both the ratings and a set of readily available financial accounting statistics. These results indicate (1) that market participants base their evaluations of an issue's creditworthiness on more than the agencies' ratings and (2) that the ratings bring some information to the market above and beyond that contained in the set of accounting variables. The paper also asks whether the market views Moody's and Standard and Poor's ratings as equally reliable measures of risk or whether the market attaches more weight to one agency's ratings than the other. Finally, the hypothesis that the market pays more attention to the accounting measures and less to the ratings if the rating has not been reviewed recently is tested.
Affirmative Action: Has the Election of Barack Obama Changed the Discussion?

With the election of an African American as President, many would think that the question of affirmative action and equal opportunity has been finally laid to rest in the United States. This perception may be true for the proponents of affirmative action, whom over the years believe that the struggle for civil rights and equal opportunity can only be seen to fruition if an African American emerges as President. However, the struggle to eliminate racial discrimination and social inequality cannot be achieved in one swift. It requires consistent policy directions aimed at achieving a balance in the distribution of income. This paper looks back into the origin of affirmative action; from the executive orders of President Kennedy through the decisions of the Supreme Court, and finds that matters of affirmative action have always been controversial on whether racial preferences or class distinction should be the guiding principle. The argument however, is whether the election of Barack Obama as President has reduced the agitation on racial preferences, and placed more emphasis on class distinction, as his economic and social agenda for broadening the middleclass stipulates.
An Equilibrium Theory of Rationing

An Equilibrium Theory of Rationing Richard J. Gilbert; Paul Klemperer The RAND Journal of Economics, Vol. 31, No. 1. (Spring, 2000), pp. 1-21. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0741-6261%28200021%2931%3A1%3C1%3AAETOR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J The RAND Journal of Economics is currently published by The RAND Corporation. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/rand.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Sun Aug 19 13:29:51 2007
Cultivating constructive discourse over economics and public policy

This paper addresses the demand for a pluralistic methodological approach to the science of economics. In responding to Robert Garnett’s artful criticism of an earlier statement of mine, I agree with him that understanding one’s intellectual opponent’s framework leads to greater scientific advancement than simply dismissing it entirely. Being able to see and appreciate the perspectives of others is an important scholarly virtue to cultivate. Competition amongst and challenges of competing ideas is what spurs innovation in economic science. So, strongly held positions are to be expected and, in fact, encouraged, but as Garnett persuasively argues, the process of scientific progress is more likely to lead to advancement if the process is Smithian rather than the Mandevillean approach my earlier statement seemed to imply.
Best case, worst case, and the golden mean in political economy: An introduction to a symposium on Tim Besley’s principled agents? The political economy of good government

Tim Besley’s Principled Agents is a conceptually challenging work to both traditional welfare economics and the public choice approach identified with James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. Besley’s argumentative strategy is to first admit the cogency of the public choice critique of market failure theory and traditional welfare economics and then to argue that the public choice critique goes too far in its pessimism. Instead, Besley argues that based on knowledge from public choice theory, institutional selection mechanisms can be designed in politics to select for both politician motivation and for politician competence. With such a mechanism in place, good government can result. Besley’s book has great strengths and is recommended to all modern students of political economy. One of the great strengths is Besley’s deep affinity for the work of James Buchanan in public finance and public choice. In this sense, Besley’s work is an immanent critique of public choice, and a construction of a golden mean type argument in political economy against the naive best case theorizing of Samuelsonian welfare economics, and the overly pessimistic worst case theorizing of Buchanan and Tullock. We have assembled a group of leading public choice scholars to respond to Besley’s challenging book. The responses all reflect a different slice of the argument on why the selection mechanism in politics might not work to produce the motivational and competence characteristics desired in politicians to get “good government.” Robert Tollison discusses the merits of the principal or agent framework that Besley deploys for future research in public choice. Geoffrey Brennan discusses the important qualification to the Hume dictum that in modeling
The Overlooked French Influence on the Intellectual Property Clause

The Intellectual Property Clause (“IP Clause”) of the US Constitution has long been a puzzle for courts and commentators. It authorizes Congress to secure exclusive property rights for authors and inventors, but it does not use the terms “patent” or “copyright,” and its objects of “Science” and “useful Arts” do not cleanly map onto the subject matter of current patent and copyright systems. As the Supreme Court has noted, under popular usage of the terms “arts” and “science,” one would expect patents to promote science and copyrights to promote arts, yet we know from the historical record that exactly the opposite is the case. Other terms, such as “progress” and “discoveries,” remain contested. IP Clause interpretations to date rely exclusively on British legal and intellectual antecedents. I argue that the great French Encyclopedie project—a landmark of the mid-eighteenth-century Enlightenment—provides crucial context to the IP Clause. James Madison, a drafter of the IP Clause, owned and approvingly cited the work. Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were enthusiastic advocates of the Encyclopedie. The Encyclopedie has as its twin goals the promotion of progress in science and in mechanical (useful) arts. I argue that the reliance of early courts and commentators on British antecedents to interpret the federal patent and copyright statutes led to an improperly narrow sense of the context of the IP Clause. Using entries from the Encyclopedie on “art,” “science,” “discoveries,” “inventions,” “writers/authors,” and other relevant topics, I propose a new interpretation of the IP Clause that is more coherent and compelling than existing accounts.
It's the Thought (and the Effort) That Counts: How Customizing for Others Differs from Customizing for Oneself

Abstract While interest in customization is growing among consumers and academics, researchers have focused on consumers designing products for themselves. Many customization firms, however, are successfully positioning themselves as key sources for unique gifts. In this research, the authors examine whether factors under the firm's control (i.e., the level of design support provided and the presence of a strong brand) are differentially effective when consumers design products for themselves or as gifts for others. Using participants drawn from the relevant target market, they report two studies involving real customization tasks undertaken on fully functioning customization websites. The findings lead to the surprising conclusion that design support is less effective for consumers designing products intended as gifts rather than for themselves, raising expectations without a corresponding rise in evaluations. However, the results offer some good news to firms targeting gift-giving consumers. Both Studie...
The Law and Economics of Stop-and-Frisk

INTRODUCTION 369 I. LEGAL BACKGROUND 371 II. ECONOMIC CONTRIBUTIONS 372 III. CURRENT APPROACHES TO FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT ANALYSIS 374 IV. PRELIMINARY SUGGESTIONS FOR FOURTH AMENDMENT ANALYSIS 375 V. RECENT EVALUATIONS IN PHILADELPHIA AND NEW YORK CITY .... 377 QUESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH 379
CORPORATE CONSCIENCE AND THE CONTRACEPTIVE MANDATE: A DWORKINIAN READING

When this essay appears in print, it will be two years since the death of legal philosopher and constitutional law scholar Ronald Dworkin. One recurring reminder of the magnitude of that loss is the absence of Dworkin's regular, insightful essays for the New York Review of Books analyzing significant US Supreme Court decisions. Thus, when, last term, a closely divided (5–4) Court released its much-anticipated decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, upholding a challenge by three for-profit corporations to the contraceptive coverage provisions (the so-called contraceptive mandate) of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), sadly missing in the flurry of commentary was Dworkin's assessment of the case. Readers of this journal may perhaps appreciate the allusion when I say that the decision prompted me to wonder, “What would Dworkin do?” That same question arose again when, on July 3, 2014, in Wheaton College v. Burwell, over a strong dissent by Justices Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Kagan, the Court granted the emergency request of Wheaton College to be relieved from complying with the ACA's accommodation procedure for religious nonprofit organizations that object to contraceptive coverage on religious grounds, even before the lower courts had ruled on the merits of the college's claim.
Practice Makes Perfect? An Empirical Study of Claim Construction Reversal Rates in Patent Cases

This Article examines whether U.S. district court judges improve their skills at patent claim construction with experience, including the experience of having their own cases reviewed by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In theory, higher courts teach doctrine to lower courts via judicial decisions, and lower courts learn from these decisions. This Article tests the teaching-and-learning premise on the issue of claim construction in the realities of patent litigation. While others have shown that the Federal Circuit reverses a large percentage of lower court claim constructions, no one has analyzed whether judges with more claim construction appeal experience fare better on subsequent appeals. Surprisingly, the data do not reveal any evidence that district court judges learn from prior appeals of their rulings. There is no suggestion of a significant relationship between experience and performance. The lack of evidence that Federal Circuit review aids district court judges is disconcerting. The Article explores three possible explanations for the lack of evidence: (1) that the nature of claim construction is indeterminate; (2) that district court judges are incapable of or not interested in learning how to perform claim construction; and (3) that Federal Circuit decisions do a poor job of teaching district court judges how to construe claims. These results shed critical light on the functioning of the patent system. Moreover, the results are relevant to a broader understanding of the relationship between higher and lower courts in general.
Tax Expenditures, Principal Agent Problems, and Redundancy

This paper considers tax expenditures from two related perspectives. First, it analyzes how the incentives on Congress to use a tax expenditure change when principal agent problems are considered. For example, it considers whether tax expenditures can reduce moral hazard or adverse selection problems created by delegations to expert agencies. Second, it considers the condition under which tax expenditures should be expected to be redundant with direct expenditures, as many are. The two, principal agent problems and redundancy, are related because redundancy is often seen as a solution to the principal agent problem. The paper concludes that both principal agent concerns and redundancy might lead to an increase in the use of tax expenditures, although the circumstances in which we should expect this are relatively narrow. The paper then examines the example of the low income housing tax credit, concluding that the credit should be replaced with a direct expenditure in the form of increased tenant vouchers.
Consequences of GAAP Disclosure Regulation: Evidence from Municipal Debt Issues

We compare characteristics of municipal debt issues in states that mandate GAAP for municipalities with issues in states that impose no annual financial disclosure requirements. Cross‐sectional comparisons indicate that the use of public (versus private) debt is greater, and municipal debt costs are 14 to 25 basis points lower, in states where GAAP is mandated. Moreover, municipalities in states that impose the GAAP requirement realize lower debt costs following the effective date of the regulation. These results suggest that GAAP requirements reduce municipal borrowing costs. More generally, the evidence indicates that financial reporting regulation reduces contracting costs between borrowers and lenders.