cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Why So Contrived? Fourth Amendment Balancing, Per Se Rules, and DNA Databases After Maryland v. King

In Maryland v. King, 133 S. Ct. 1958 (2013), the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the constitutionality of routine collection and storage of DNA samples and profiles from arrestees. In doing so, it stepped outside the usual framework that treats warrantless searches as per se unconstitutional unless they fall within specified exceptions to the warrant and probable cause requirements. Instead, the Court balanced various individual and state interests. Yet, as regards the state interests, the Court confined this direct balancing analysis to the perceived value of using DNA to inform certain pretrial decisions. Oddly, it avoided relying directly on DNA’s more obvious value in generating investigative leads in unsolved crimes. This Article suggests that this contrived analysis resulted from the structure of existing Fourth Amendment case law (and perhaps a desire to avoid intimating that a more egalitarian and extensive DNA database system also would be constitutional). It demonstrates that the opinion does not support a “no lines” system of ad hoc judgments about the reasonableness of every search using the totality of the circumstances. Recognizing that the existing framework of categorical exceptions to the warrant requirement diverges from an older “warrant preference” rule that demands a warrant whenever feasible, the Article shows that King leaves the current per se framework largely intact.
Jury Service as an Invitation to Citizenship: Assessing the Civic Value of Institutionalized Deliberation

When considering the merits of deliberative democracy, it is important to look into the experience of the American jury system. The jury has demonstrated the potential for citizen deliberation to play a central role in longstanding governmental institutions, but it has also played an unrecognized role in promoting civic engagement. Building on previous research demonstrating how jury service spurs increased electoral participation after jury service, we present results from a three-wave panel survey that show that a subjectively rewarding jury experience can spur broader civic engagement beyond voting. Given the value of the jury as both a model of deliberation and an engine of civic spirit, we consider the potential value of creating citizen juries to improve the initiative process, which currently lacks the citizen deliberation that is essential for any effective direct democratic processes.
An Alternative View of Finance, Saving, Deficits, and Liquidity

This article contrasts the orthodox approach with an alternative view on finance, saving, deficits, and liquidity, with the goal of shedding light on the current global financial crisis. It first briefy summarizes the orthodox view according to which global savings financed the U.S. speculative boom. Excessive growth of U.S. indebtedness was unsustainable, and matters were made worse by Fed monetary ease. The alternative view is based on Keynes's approach to finance and liquidity preference, integrated with the "modern money" view of currency sovereignty. It is argued that investment, budget deficits, and current account deficits create saving; on this view it is more revealing to think of U.S. current accounts as financing global dollar savings. Finally, an alternative interpretation of the causes of, and solutions to, the global financial crisis are offered.
Choking Out Local Community Service Organizations: Rising Federal Tax Regulation and Its Impact on Small Nonprofit Entities

Small community nonprofit and charitable organizations are a vital component of American life and culture. These organizations encourage community collaboration and are in-tune with the acute needs of their respective local populations. In the face of pressure to downsize government and reduce federal, state, and local spending, small nonprofits have become integral to delivering basic human and social goods and services to the public. These groups endure almost solely on donations of time and money and do not have cash reserves or extensive assets that will allow them to hire legal or other professional counsel to assist in business and legal compliance matters. Obtaining and maintaining Internal Revenue Code (IRC) § 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status allows the balance of these groups to operate as viable entities by opening the door to vast grant and donation opportunities with which to fund their programs. Gaining tax-exempt status requires in-depth business and financial planning and a complex application process, which many small nonprofits complete without the benefit of counsel. Until recently, small nonprofit organizations were subject to modest federal regulatory compliance measures in excess of compliance with the tax code under which they gained exemption. Over the past decade, in the name of strengthening transparency, accountability, and governance, Congress and the IRS have increased federal regulation of nonprofit and charitable entities, which includes many measures that were otherwise within the purview of state rule, and have not spared small nonprofits in this effort. New regulations of significant interest to small nonprofit groups include the 2004 revision of the federal application for tax-exempt status, which now includes extensive governance provisions, and the new annual reporting requirement for small nonprofits and revocation of tax-exempt status for consecutive non-filing, pursuant to the Pension Protection Act of 2006. This increase in regulation creates a certain “federalization” of nonprofit law that has overly burdensome consequences on valuable small nonprofit organizations with limited resources. This Article begins by identifying and describing the unique and essential roles of, and challenges that face, small nonprofit tax-exempt organizations and their leaders. This Article then reviews the promulgation of new and heightened federal regulatory requirements that most concern small nonprofit groups and the impact and implications of these regulations. Informed by the theoretical models of Responsive Regulation and New Governance, this Article concludes by offering a reasonable regulatory approach as it relates to the restoration of federal tax-exempt status for small nonprofits facing revocation of tax exemption for failure to file consecutive annual returns.
Developments in Section Two of the Sherman Act

The issues raised in this Symposium are of great interest and timeliness. During the 1940s and 1950s, the Supreme Court explored the role of section 2 of the Sherman Act as an essential element in the antitrust regime. As was true with antitrust generally, courts expanded the reach of section 2, frequently concluding that the complained-of conduct constituted unlawful monopolization or attempts to monopolize, and approving injunctions forbidding the continuation of exclusionary or predatory practices and orders leading to the breakup of the monopoly itself. However, after the Grinnell decision in 1966, and the Otter Tail case almost a decade later, the Supreme Court seemed to strike section 2 from its agenda. Finally, in the Aspen Skiing case in 1985 and the Matsushita decisions this year, the Court has resumed grappling with some of the thorny issues raised by section 2.
Lawyers Keep Out: Why Attorneys Should Not Participate in Negotiating Critical Financial Numbers Reported by Public Company Clients

In response to the financial scandals at the turn of the century, Sarbanes-Oxley and related reforms radically changed the relationship between accountants and the companies they audit. As a result, auditors exert greater power in the negotiations with management that produce critical numbers in company financial statements. That power provides auditors with newfound ability to resist pressure to certify financial statements that are overly favorable to company stock prices. With the best of intentions, some now urge that company attorneys should expand their efforts to police clients’ financial statements. But the introduction of lawyers into the bargaining between management and an auditor would likely reverse the benefits of the recent reforms. Attorneys today suffer from the very biases in favor of management that plagued auditors before the reforms. Lawyers’ client-focused ethos reinforces that bias. Their necessarily meager accounting knowledge, and the absence of any systematic review of lawyers’ input to such negotiations, mean that attorney bias will have free rein. Adding lawyers to the mix will therefore more likely hinder financial reporting than help.  William O. Fisher is an assistant professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. He thanks Patrick Thompson, Matthew Jones, Berkeley Horne, Lindsay Builder, Christopher Lucas, Jed Donaldson, Siri Kalburgi, Jonathan Goodrich, Angela Carrico, Kevin Gold and others at Analysis Group for their research and checking. He also thanks Professors Corinna Lain, James Gibson, and Jonathan Stubbs of the University of Richmond School of Law, Professor Therese Maynard of Loyola Law School Los Angeles, and Professor Joe Ben Hoyle of the University of Richmond Robins School of Business for their very helpful comments. DO NOT DELETE 2/1/2011 6:41 PM BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW 201
Naïve Cronyism and Neutral Competence: Patronage, Performance, and Policy Agreement in Executive Appointments

Much of the bureaucratic literature suggests that, when staffing the bureaucracy, executives want agents who are both responsive to their political needs and possess the competence needed to fulfill their directives. However, institutional barriers — such as the requirement for legislative confirmation — exist that may make pursuing a strategy of responsive competence difficult, if not impossible. Here, I examine a model of bureaucratic appointments that allows for informationally imperfect agencies. I show that when legislative assent is required, tradeoffs between ideology and either patronage or agency performance — or both — are often required to ensure legislative confirmation. The same dynamics are not present for unilateral appointments. Finally, using a dataset that incorporates the ideologies of federal program managers, the performance of federal programs, and whether program managers were patronage appointees, I conduct a series of empirical tests that support the model’s predictions.
Arthur Lewis’ Contribution to Development Thinking and Policy

Arthur Lewis's seminal 1954 paper and its emphasis on dualism appeared at a time when neither the work of Keynes and Harrod–Domar nor the later neoclassical production function of Solow seemed relevant for developing countries. As a consequence, his model, rooted in the classical tradition, plus its many extensions, generated an extensive literature at the center of development theory. The approach also encountered increasingly strong criticism, some of the ‘red herring’ variety. Some, spearheaded by neoclassical microeconomists like Rosenzweig, raised serious challenges and focused especially on its labor market assumptions. This paper reviews this landscape and asks what theoretical or policy relevance the Lewis model retains for today's developing countries.
Living Trusts in the Unauthorized Practice of Law: a Good Thing Gone Bad

An elderly man recently lost his wife and visits the lawyer's office for assistance in the administration of her estate. After the attorney expresses her condolences, she asks if his wife had a will. The client reaches into a brown shopping bag and retrieves a two-and-a-half inch black binder containing several trusts. The elderly gentleman and his deceased wife were told this would eliminate the expensive legal nightmare of probate. Unfortunately, like many others, this couple was victimized by a trust mill.
Silencing Grand Jury Witnesses

The investigations of local police officers for causing the deaths of unarmed civilians in Ferguson, Missouri and Staten Island, New York have generated significant national discourse about the fairness and transparency of grand jury proceedings. This article addresses one crucial aspect of this ongoing debate; that is, whether witnesses before the grand jury should be allowed to talk to each other and to the media about the contents of their testimony. In the federal system and in the majority of states that still employ the grand jury as an investigative and charging tool, obligations of grand jury secrecy do not extend to the witnesses themselves. Only persons performing an “official function” before the grand jury are typically covered by the oath of secrecy. Absent a contract or court order, grand jury witnesses are free to talk with each other and to the media. Nevertheless, prosecutors often seek to handcuff grand jury witnesses in talking to others about their testimony by drafting one-sided cooperation agreements that impose obligations of confidentiality on grand jury witnesses in exchange for charging or sentencing concessions. Courts on occasion also impose gag orders on grand jury witnesses as part of formal immunity orders. In this article, the author argues that such efforts by prosecutors and courts to impose secrecy obligations on grand jury witnesses violate attorney discipline rules and the First Amendment. As importantly, they impede the target’s access to information essential to enable him to marshal a defense, thus undermining the grand jury’s historic function as a shield against unfounded prosecutions.
Idea Generation and the Role of Feedback: Evidence from Field Experiments with Innovation Tournaments

In many innovation settings, ideas are generated over time and managers face a decision about if and how to provide in-process feedback to the idea generators about the quality of submissions. In this article, we use design contests allowing repeated entry to examine the effect of in-process feedback on idea generation. We report on a set of field experiments using two online contest websites to compare the performance of three different feedback treatments—no feedback, random feedback, and directed feedback (i.e., in-process feedback highly correlated with the final quality rating of the entry). We posted six logo design contests for consumer products and accepted submissions for 1 week. We provided daily feedback during the contest period using one of the three treatments. We then used a panel of target consumers to rate the quality of each idea. We find that directed feedback is associated positively with agent participation. For outcome, while directed feedback benefits the average quality of entries submitted, we don't find that relationship for the best entries—indeed, no feedback or random feedback may produce better top-end entry quality. We also find that, under directed feedback, the variance in quality declines as the contest progresses.
The Broken Buck Stops Here: Embracing Sponsor Support in Money Market Fund Reform

Since the 2008 financial crisis, in which the Reserve Primary Fund “broke the buck,” money market funds (MMFs) have been the subject of ongoing policy debate. Many commentators view MMFs as a key contributor to the crisis because widespread redemption demands during the days following the Lehman bankruptcy contributed to a freeze in the credit markets. In response, MMFs were deemed a component of the nefarious shadow banking industry and targeted for regulatory reform. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) misguided 2014 reforms responded by potentially exacerbating MMF fragility while potentially crippling large segments of the MMF industry. Determining the appropriate approach to MMF reform has been difficult. Banks regulators supported requiring MMFs to trade at a floating net asset value (NAV) rather than a stable $1 share price. By definition, a floating NAV prevents MMFs from breaking the buck but is unlikely to eliminate the risk of large redemptions in a time of crisis. Other reform proposals have similar shortcomings. More fundamentally, the SEC’s reforms may substantially reduce the utility of MMFs for many investors, which could, in turn, affect the availability of short term credit. The shape of MMF reform has been influenced by a turf war among regulators as the SEC has battled with bank regulators both about the need for additional reforms and about the structure and timing of those reforms. Bank regulators have been influential in shaping the * Perry Golkin Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School. I am grateful to Jeff Gordon, Laura Merianos, Heidi Stam, David Skeel, Jennifer Taub and participants at Georgetown’s Financial Regulatory Camp for helpful comments on earlier drafts.
Informational Size and Efficient Auctions

We develop an auction model for the case of interdependent values and multidimensional signals in which agents' signals are correlated. We provide conditions under which a modification of the Vickrey auction which includes payments to the bidders will result in an ex post efficient outcome. Furthermore, we provide a definition of informational size such that the necessary payments to bidders will be arbitrarily small if agents are sufficiently informationally small. The efficiency of market processes has been a central concern in economics since its inception. Auction mechanisms constitute a very important class of market processes, yet the analysis of auctions has typically focused on their revenue generating properties rather than their efficiency properties. This is partly due to the fact that, for many of the problems typically studied, efficiency is trivial. When bidders have private values, a standard Vickrey auction guarantees that the object will be sold to the buyer with the highest value for the object. In the case of pure common values-that is, when all buyers have the same value for the object-any outcome that with probability one assigns the object to some bidder will be efficient. The intermediate case in which bidders' values are not identical but may depend on other bidders' signals is more problematic. When bidders' values are interdependent in this way, any single bidder's value may depend on the information of other agents and, hence, he may not even know his own value. It is not clear what it would mean for an agent to bid his "true" value, even before we ask if it is optimal for him to do so. Several papers have studied efficient auctions with interdependent values and independent types.1 While this is a natural place to begin, the independence assumption is not compelling for many problems. A prototypical problem is one in which an object is to be sold, and individual bidders have private information about the object (say the quantity or quality of oil in a tract to be sold) that affects other agents' values for the object. When bidders' types include information about objective characteristics of the object being sold, their types will typically not be independent. When agents' types are statistically dependent, we show that there exist efficient auction mechanisms for interdependent value auction problems that are essentially Vickrey auctions augmented by payments to (not from) the agents. Most importantly, we link the
The Mereology of Digital Copyright

Among the most controversial of current information technology projects on the Internet is the Google Book Search project. Google, owner and operator of a leading Internet search engine, has contracted with a variety of libraries to scan the contents of the books held in these libraries, many of which are under current copyright. From the scanned images, Google uses search engine technology to map the relationship of words in the scanned text to the other words in the text. Access to this index is provided via an online interface. However, Google has not sought the permission of copyright holders, and book publishers through their professional association have sued Google for copyright infringement, charging that the scanning process creates unauthorized digital copies of many copyrighted works. While Google has asserted a defense to these claims under the doctrine of fair use, a far more difficult and more far-reaching issue for database technologies is the legal status of the index created by Google, which maps the positions of the words in the books. This metadata is not technically a “copy” of the books in question, but the books can be recreated from such metadata. The ownership and control of such metadata is becoming an increasingly contested question in database construction, and the resolution of this question presents a difficult but critically important problem of copyright doctrine and policy in the United States and around the world.
Values, Objectivity, and Relationalism

The twin diseases of value subjectivity and Humean instrumental rationalityhave infected moral theory and left in their wake a discipline that underminesits own importance. What remains is an ethical view that has opened up aseemingly unbridgeable divide between facts and values, reduces moral valueto the status of mere desires or affections, and banishes rationality from play-ing anything but a peripheral role. Philippa Foot charges that the problem ofderiving values from facts gained prominence because of a mistake that hasinfected moral theory over the past few decades. The mistake was subjectiv-ism and non-cognitivism.What all these theories tried to do, then, was to give the
Leveraging organizational resources to adapt models to new data modalities

As applications in large organizations evolve, the machine learning (ML) models that power them must adapt the same predictive tasks to newly arising data modalities (e.g., a new video content launch in a social media application requires existing text or image models to extend to video). To solve this problem, organizations typically create ML pipelines from scratch. However, this fails to utilize the domain expertise and data they have cultivated from developing tasks for existing modalities. We demonstrate how organizational resources, in the form of aggregate statistics, knowledge bases, and existing services that operate over related tasks, enable teams to construct a common feature space that connects new and existing data modalities. This allows teams to apply methods for data curation (e.g., weak supervision and label propagation) and model training (e.g., forms of multi-modal learning) across these different data modalities. We study how this use of organizational resources composes at production scale in over 5 classification tasks at Google, and demonstrate how it reduces the time needed to develop models for new modalities from months to weeks or days.
What Can We Hope For from Law

What can a lawyer of faith hope for, and expect from, law? This Essay, based on the 2008 Louis Brandeis Lecture given at Pepperdine University, discusses why and how this question matters not just as a matter of theory but to our real-world lawyering journeys. The Essay discusses two of the frameworks that can shape our answer to the question: a natural law viewpoint and what the Essay calls a “Lutheran” view. After explaining how these two perspectives might lead to different expectations about the effects of law, the Essay discusses whether either of these approaches is more sustaining or explanatory over the long run.
Citation-based accounting education publication rankings

Abstract We extend prior accounting education research by ranking accounting education publications based on citation counts. We collect publications in two accounting education specialty journals, Issues in Accounting Education and Journal of Accounting Education , and 11 other high-quality journals included in the Summers and Wood (2015a) database. We aggregate rankings by institution and by individuals for both traditional publications (including “instructional-resource” papers that are not case-based) and cased-based publications. We also provide citation-based benchmarking data for accounting education scholarship. We present our results in time windows of the most recent 6 years (i.e., 2008–2013, inclusive), 12 years (i.e., 2002–2013, inclusive), and since 1990 to show changes in citation-based rankings over time. These rankings allow institutions and individuals who specialize and excel in accounting education publications to track and to receive recognition for their performance.
Seeping in slowly: how human rights concerns are penetrating the WTO

This article uses the day to day operations of the WTO (trade negotiations, trade waivers, acessions, trade policy reviews) to discuss how human rights issues are seeping into the work of the WTO. The author also discusses how the WTO may promote particular human rights such as public participation, property rights, and due process rights.
REVISITING GLADWELL'S HOCKEY PLAYERS: INFLUENCE OF RELATIVE AGE EFFECTS UPON EARNING THE PHD

We examine the influence of relative age effects (RAE) upon specific factors related to earning a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD): age at degree, time to degree, and salary upon completion. Drawing on the 2010 Survey of Earned Doctorates, we find no significant influence of RAE. Specifically, when controlling for discipline-specific variation, we find no influence of RAE on the age of people earning the PhD and no influence on post-graduate salary. However, we estimate a relative salary loss due to redshirting of over $138,000 in lifetime earnings for individuals who earn the PhD. To the extent that earning the PhD is considered an outstanding achievement, our findings support the view that redshirting is unnecessary and costly. (JEL D01, D12, I20, I28, J24, J44)
Incorporating Writing Into An Introductory Business And Economics Statistics Course: A Practical Approach

Writing across the curriculum (WAC) has become a guiding principle at many institutions of higher education. Unfortunately for many students of economics and business the standard vehicles of WAC do not adequately prepare them for the type of writing appropriate for the audience they are expected to address upon graduation. We describe a method of implementing writing into the introductory statistics courses that are required by many programs in economics and business. This method addresses the shortcomings of the standard vehicles of WAC while at the same time providing instructors with a feasible solution to do so in light of the multiple constraints faced by many instructors of this type of course. (JEL A22)
Efficient estimation in models with independence restrictions

Abstract Unconditional and conditional independence restrictions are used in many econometric models to identify their parameters. However, there are few results about efficient estimation procedures for finite-dimensional parameters under these independence restrictions. This paper computes the efficiency bound for finite-dimensional parameters under independence restrictions, and proposes an estimator that is consistent, asymptotically normal and which achieves the efficiency bound. The estimator is based on a growing number of zero-covariance conditions that are asymptotically equivalent to the independence restriction. The results are illustrated with examples, including an instrumental variables regression model and partially linear regression models. A small Monte Carlo study is performed to investigate the estimator’s small sample properties and to quantify the efficiency gains that can be made by using the proposed efficient estimator.
Can Information Technology Revive Economic Development in East Asia? The Role of Human and Technical Resource Policy

Development of IT/e-business is a centerpiece of renewed economic growth in most countries of East Asia. This paper considers the challenges for policy focusing on the acquisition of knowledge and its utilization. While many countries in East Asia are well along the way toward upgraded production of IT related products, the softer aspects of IT and e-business are a greater challenge. They will call for policies that provide the needed infrastructure, and, particularly, they will pose a challenge in developing human capital.
Reconsidering Flood v. Kuhn

Within the academia, two very different groups of legal scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to Flood v. Kuhn. Those specializing in sports law have either attached Flood as a ridiculous decision that improperly distinguished between baseball and other professional sports, or have praised it for waging guerrilla warfare on the idea that Section 1 of the Sherman Act should apply to intra-league arrangements by owners of the professional sports teams. Those viewing Flood through the lens of statutory interpretation perceive the decision as adhering rigidly to the principle of stare decisis; this rigidity has been both praised and criticized, and Flood has also been attacked for unjustifiably relying on legislative inaction to infer congressional support for earlier precedents.In this Article, an alternative theory is sketched. Although Justice Blackmun's majority opinion in Flood was eminently sensible in 1972, as a matter of both judge-created sports law doctrine and the legisprudential application of stare decisis, this is no longer the case. In 1972, Justice Blackmun and his colleagues in the majority were justifiably concerned that applying the Sherman Act to professional baseball might ruin our "National Pastime." However, a brief look at subsequent developments in baseball and in antitrust law clearly demonstrates that the situation has changed. Read in its full context, rather than mechanically, the majority opinion in Flood applies a fact-based legisprudential standard to questions of stare decisis, not the formalistic approach that some have attributed to it. Flood represents neither an unthinking invocation of the dead weight of precedent, nor an unsophisticated and unwarranted deference to a congressional failure to overturn the Court's prior decisions. Rather, its holding is much more limited. Flood reveals that the Court will adhere to a precedent where it perceives that reliance interests are strong and that the public interest is better served by preserving the precedent. Under this reconsidered view of Flood, the Supreme Court today should reach the opposite result and subject baseball to antitrust scrutiny.
Border Crossings: NAFTA, Regulatory Restructuring and the Politics of Place

Professor Buchanan begins her paper by questioning whether recent economic and political shifts towards notions of "globalization" (e.g., the NAFTA) have failed to consider the politics or economics of change in particular places. Her prime example of a "place" where integration is illogically forced against a background of differentiation is the U.S.-Mexico border region. Through the scope of a "regulatory complex" (a complex of legal institutional regulatory, and social orderings), she departs from the common view of the NAFTA as a productive tool of North American integration, and instead views the NAFTA as exacerbating "differences between localities, industries, and labor markets." She argues that the debate over the NAFTA underemphasized its different local, sectoral, and regional impacts. In places such as the U.S.-Mexico border region, the various forces of labor, capital, and regulation interact in complex ways; the complexities (and realities) of these interactions were perhaps overlooked during the NAFTA debates. The author briefly examines this growing region, focusing primarily on the social and economic aspects of the maquiladora industry, including labor migration into the United States and the potential for increased migration because of the NAFTA. She concludes by arguing for a shift in perspective from the outdated, territorial concept of "borders " to the richer, more complex concept of "borderlands. "
A Defense of the Authority of Church Doctrine

This paper provides a philosophical analysis of the concept of "church doctrine" within Mormon theology and practice. Building on an earlier essay that analyzed "church doctrine" within Mormonism using the philosophy of law, this paper turns to the way in which it functions as an authority within Mormon discussions.
Thinking about the politics of inclusive development: towards a relational approach

Moving beyond the mantra that ?politics matters?, a range of conceptual approaches have recently emerged within international development thinking that seek to capture the specific ways in which politics shapes development. This paper critically assesses whether these approaches, including work on ?limited access orders? and ?political settlements?, can underpin research into how developmental forms of state capacity and elite commitment emerge and can be sustained. It suggests that these new approaches offer powerful insights into certain elements of this puzzle, particularly through a focus on the relational basis of elite behaviour and institutional performance. However, these approaches are also subject to serious limitations, and insights from broader and (in particular) more critical forms of political theory are also required in order to investigate how the politics of development is shaped by ideas as well as incentives, popular as well as elite forms of agency, transnational as well as national factors, and in dynamic as well as more structural ways. The paper proposes an initial conceptual framework that can be operationalized and tested within a programme of primary research to be established by the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre.
Economic consequences of SEC disclosure regulation: evidence from the OTC bulletin board

Abstract This paper examines the economic consequences of a regulatory change mandating OTCBB firms to comply with reporting requirements under the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. This change substantially increases mandated disclosures for firms previously not filing with the SEC. We document that the imposition of disclosure requirements results in significant costs for smaller firms, forcing them off the OTCBB. SEC regulation also has significant benefits. Firms previously filing with the SEC experience positive stock returns and permanent increases in liquidity, suggesting positive externalities from disclosure regulation. Newly Compliant firms exhibit significant increases in liquidity consistent with improved disclosure reducing information asymmetry.
Citizenship under Fire: the Forging of the New Americans

This essay reviews and critiques two new books on the debate over immigration and citizenship, Anna O. Law, The Immigration Battle in American Courts, and Ediberto Roman, Citizenship and Its Exclusions: A Classical, Constitutional, and Critical Race Critique. Law’s book takes a procedural approach to unraveling the complex immigration cases emanating from the U.S. courts of appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court. This essay challenges some of Law’s conclusions and suggests methodological alterations that may strengthen her key arguments. Roman’s book is distinct from Law’s in that it takes on a much broader historical and procedurialist view of the idea of citizenship. He explores the roots of the present day American citizenship construct through a personal and philosophical approach to exploring the citizenship construct as it exists in the U.S. today, incorporating significant historical influences. This essay commends Roman’s contribution to the study of immigration law and the concept of citizenship but also recognizes the eternal struggles in making meaningful and lasting progress in this area of law.
Estimation error in mean returns and the mean-variance efficient frontier

Abstract In this paper, we build estimation error in mean returns into the mean-variance (MV) portfolio theory under the assumption that returns on individual assets follow a joint normal distribution. We derive the conditional sampling distribution of the MV portfolio along with its mean and risk return when the sample covariance matrix is equal to the population covariance matrix. We use the mean squared error (MSE) to characterize the effects of estimation error in mean returns on the joint sampling distributions and examine how such error affects the risk-return tradeoff of the MV portfolios. We show that the negative effects of error in mean returns on the joint sampling distributions increase with the decision maker's risk tolerance and the number of assets in a portfolio, but decrease with the sample size.
A Strategy to Prevent Losses in Local Government Investment Pools

In the first half of the 1990s, some local government investment pools (LGIPs) suffered losses from derivatives investments. Although the losses came from derivatives, the actual cause of the losses was the violation of public-fund prudent investment practices. This article provides a strategy to prevent future losses for LGIPs’ participants by looking at the pattern of return on investment of the pools. Our proposal is that rates of return on state pools that co-move with market rates are generally an indication of adherence to prudent investment practices. We demonstrate the viability of this proposal by using co-integration methodology. The implication is that if rates of return on a state pool do not co-move with market rates, they may indicate the violation of prudent investment practices.
Environmental Law as a Legal Field: An Inquiry in Legal Taxonomy

This Article examines the classification of the law into legal fields, first by a general survey of legal taxonomy and then by specific examination of environmental law. We classify the law into fields to find and create patterns, which render the law coherent and understandable. A legal field is a group of situations unified by a pattern or set of patterns that is both common and distinctive to the field. We can conceptualize a legal field as the interaction of four underlying constitutive dimensions of the field: (1) a factual context that gives rise to (2) certain policy trade-offs, which are in turn resolved by (3) the application of values and interests to produce (4) legal doctrine. An organizational framework for a field identifies the field’s common and distinctive patterns, which may arise in any of these underlying constitutive dimensions. The second part of the Article applies this general analytical approach to the field of environmental law, proposing a framework for understanding environmental law as a field of legal study and analysis. Two core factual characteristics of environmental problems are, in combination, both common and distinct to environmental law: physical public resources and pervasive interrelatedness. Numerous and varied use demands are placed on environmental resources, thereby creating conflicts. These use conflicts define the policy trade-offs that frame environmental lawmaking, forming the basis for a use-conflict framework for conceptualizing environmental lawmaking. A use-conflict framework for environmental lawmaking carries significant analytical advantages over other models for conceptualizing environmental law as a legal field.
Opting Out of Spam: A Domain Level Do-Not- Spam Registry

Though everyone loves to hate spam, there is desirable spam that users read and even buy from. Because law uniquely changes the marginal cost of spamming, blanket measures to reduce spam are inefficient. Federal spam legislation is intentionally underinclusive to target only the worst kinds of spam, fraud and messages with confirmed negative utility. This law is the best tailored and enforced in the world. Further targeted laws such as domain-level (e.g. hotmail.com) Do-Not-Spam list or criminal prosecution for buying illegal products from spam (i.e. Viagra) would also help stop the worst kinds of spam.
In With the New, Out With the Old: Has the Technological Revolution Eliminated the Traditional Job Search Process?

A study was designed to compare the number of jobs found as well as the perceptions toward job search tools when employing internet-based tools versus traditional tools (e.g., print media). Sixty participants were randomly assigned to one of five search tools (i.e., Monster.com, Hotjobs.com, General Internet, Open, and Print Media Searches) and instructed to search for job openings in the accounting industry. Results indicated that the number of jobs found were clearly greater in the internet-based conditions than in the traditional search condition. Impressions of the job search method were positively related to the perceived quality of information gathered and perceptions of job search success.
A review of the empirical disclosure literature: discussion ☆

Healy and Palepu, J. Account. Econ. (2001), this issue, provide a broad review of the empirical disclosure literature. This discussion focuses on the empirical voluntary disclosure literature, and assumes firms’ disclosure policies are endogenously determined by the same forces that shape firms’ governance structures and management incentives. This provides not only a more focused view of the literature, but also alternative explanations for some of the results discussed in Review and specific suggestions for future research.
A MIDAS approach to modeling first and second moment dynamics

Abstract We propose a new approach to predictive density modeling that allows for MIDAS effects in both the first and second moments of the outcome. Specifically, our modeling approach allows for MIDAS stochastic volatility dynamics, generalizing a large literature focusing on MIDAS effects in the conditional mean, and allows the models to be estimated by means of standard Gibbs sampling methods. When applied to monthly time series on growth in industrial production and inflation, we find strong evidence that the introduction of MIDAS effects in the volatility equation leads to improved in-sample and out-of-sample density forecasts. Our results also suggest that model combination schemes assign high weight to MIDAS-in-volatility models and produce consistent gains in out-of-sample predictive performance.
Sourcing from Multiple Suppliers for Price‐Dependent Demands

We analyze a model that integrates demand shaping via dynamic pricing and risk mitigation via supply diversification. The firm under consideration replenishes a certain product from a set of capacitated suppliers for a price-dependent demand in each period. Under deterministic capacities, we derive a multilevel base stock list price policy and establish the optimality of cost-based supplier selection, that is, ordering from a cheaper source before more expensive ones. With general random capacities, however, neither result holds. While it is optimal to price low for a high inventory level, the optimal order quantities are not monotone with respect to the inventory level. In general, a near reorder-point policy should be followed. Specifically, there is a reorder point for each supplier such that no order is issued to him when the inventory level is above this point and a positive order is placed almost everywhere when the inventory level is below this point. Under this policy, it may be profitable to order exclusively from the most expensive source. We characterize conditions under which a strict reorder-point policy and a cost-based supplier-selection criterion become optimal. Moreover, we quantify the benefit from dynamic pricing, as opposed to static pricing, and the benefit from multiple sourcing, as opposed to single sourcing. We show that these two strategies exhibit a substitutable relationship. Dynamic pricing is less effective under multiple sourcing than under single sourcing, and supplier diversification is less valuable with price adjustments than without. Under limited supply, dynamic pricing yields a robust, long-term profit improvement. The value of supply diversification, in contrast, mainly comes from added capacities and is most significant in the short run.
The use of placebos in clinical trials: responsible research or unethical practice?

Developments in medical research have been occurring at a rapidly increasing rate during the past two decades. Expanding budgets, augmented computer capabilities, and new research tools have all dramatically enhanced research technology. Accompanying the proliferation of medical research are increasing concerns about research risks. This article focuses on placebo-controlled clinical trials. The use of placebos enables clinical investigators to compare results from subjects taking an experimental intervention to results from a group that is receiving an inactive substance, such as a sugar pill, in order to determine the efficacy of the new medication. In recent years, some surgeons have also conducted clinical trials involving sham operations, the equivalent of placebos in the surgical arena. Placebo-controlled trials are of particular concern because of the possible adverse consequences for study participants who could otherwise benefit from receiving active treatment. Some critics of placebo-controlled clinical trials contend that it is always unethical to deprive patients of available therapy. By contrast, proponents of placebos argue that placebo-controlled studies are cheaper, easier to interpret, and provide more definitive results than other study designs. The use of placebo controls raises profound questions regarding the ethical principle of beneficence, that is, the responsibility of physicians to avoid harming patients and to maximize benefits while minimizing risks for human subjects. Other troubling questions relate to personal autonomy and the ability of individuals to provide meaningful consent to participation in research that might require them to forgo beneficial therapy. This article analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of placebo controls as well as the many ethical dilemmas associated with their use. It suggests guidelines that elucidate the circumstances in which utilization of placebo controls is appropriate and the factors that militate against their inclusion in studies in particular instances.
Normative Ethics after Pragmatic Naturalism

Philip Kitcher presents an ambitious account of pragmatic naturalism that incorporates an explanatory story of the emergence and development of ethics, a metaethical perspective on progress, and a normative stance for moral theorizing. This article contends that Kitcher's normative stance is incompatible with the explanatory and metaethical components of his project. Instead, prag- matic naturalists should endorse a normative ethics that is experimental, grounded in practice, and acutely aware of cognitive and informational limitations. In particular, the ethical project would benefit from endorsing empirical work on participatory democracy for the identification of mechanisms to guide us on deep moral conflicts. In The Ethical Project (2011), Philip Kitcher seeks to show how humans have invented and continued to refine ethics over time in response to human problems. The task of moral philosophy is not to identify an ethical reality or to articulate a valid procedure for identifying basic moral principles. Instead, Kitcher reframes ethics using an analogy to technol- ogy. This analogy supports a functional account of moral progress: ethics is a process of inventing mechanisms, institutions, and techniques for more effectively overcoming altruism failures. Kitcher articulates an important research project, but his normative theory clashes with his metaethical and explanatory accounts of ethics. My purpose in this article is to show that his normative ethics is incompatible with pragmatic natu- ralism and to suggest that a better path forward draws on empirical work on participatory democracy that provides a promising research frame- work for the identification of mechanisms to guide us when confronted with moral conflicts. In the first section, I outline the structure of Kitcher's analytic history. Second, I turn to his metaethical account of progress and raise the concern that apparent moral progress is "mere change." The third section presents Kitcher's normative ethics, and the fourth section criticizes it on the grounds that it is inconsistent with his analytic and metaethical theories. bs_bs_banner