cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Accelerated Depreciation—Tax Expenditure or Proper Allowance for Measuring Net Income?

Since the 1950s, it has become fashionable to attack various provisions of the Internal Revenue Code by calling them subsidies rather than proper means of measuring taxable income. These subsidies through Code provisions have come to be referred to as tax expenditures, a term coined by Professor Stanley Surrey. This Article studies the extent to which accelerated depreciation accurately reflects net income. It does so by reference to the traditional yardsticks against which we must scrutinize all cost recovery methods: the goal of measuring an individual's ability to pay the costs of government and the constraints accepted as essential to our tax system, including the doctrine of realization and the cash method of accounting. The thesis of this Article is that some amount of accelerated depreciation (although not necessarily the full amount allowable under all of the provisions of the Code) is a proper deduction in determining net income and provides a more accurate statement of net income than straight line or decelerated depreciation methods.
Strict Products Liability at 50: Four Histories

This article offers four different perspectives on the strict products-liability “revolution” that climaxed a half-century ago. One of these narratives relates the prevailing assessment of how this innovation coalesced and spread across the states. The three alternative histories introduced by this article both challenge and complement the standard account by viewing the shift toward strict products liability through populist, practical, and contingent lenses, respectively. The first of these narratives considers the contributions that plaintiffs and their counsel made toward this change in the law. The second focuses upon how certain types of formerly common, but now moribund, products cases framed the argument for strict products liability as a superior alternative to negligence. The third examines why tort law eclipsed warranty as the principal doctrinal forum for products-liability reform. These non-canonical accounts have been obscured, this article concludes, due to blind spots and biases that recur across descriptions of doctrinal development in tort law.
L p Solutions of Backward Stochastic Differential Equations with Jumps

Given p ∈ (1, 2), we study Lp solutions of a multi-dimensional backward stochastic differential equation with jumps (BSDEJ) whose generator may not be Lipschitz continuous in (y, z, u). We show that such a BSDEJ with a p−integrable terminal data admits a unique Lp solution by approximating the monotonic generator by a sequence of Lipschitz generators via convolution with mollifiers and using a stability result.
Designing the Tax Treatment of Litigation-Related Costs

Defendants often deduct for income tax purposes their litigation-related costs, such as attorney fees and payments to settle claims or satisfy judgments. The result is often a large gap between the sticker price of settlements or judgments and their after-tax cost—what defendants really pay out of pocket. The problem: For every dollar that a defendant avoids in tax liability by, for example, deducting the damage awards it pays, the civil justice system falls that much short of its corrective-justice or optimal-deterrence goals in that case. For this reason, the entire civil justice system should care about this question: How should income tax law treat litigation-related costs? This Article identifies the critical tax-design choices that must be faced but that prior commentary has largely ignored: How to attribute litigation-related costs to an income-producing activity; whether to treat liability insurer payments made on a defendant’s behalf as income to that defendant; whether to coordinate the tax treatment of a payor’s damages payments with the tax treatment of those receipts to the payee; and whether litigation-related costs should be treated as capital expenditures. Then, the Article offers a new default rule for settlement agreements: Unless a settlement agreement expressly indicates otherwise, a settling defendant promises not to seek an allowable tax deduction for litigation-related costs. In so doing, this Article reveals the issues that lawyers, judges, and scholars must no longer ignore when they argue over how an income tax system could or should treat litigation-related costs.
The Effects of Reporting Complexity on Small and Large Investor Trading

ABSTRACT: This study examines the effects of financial reporting complexity on investors’ trading behavior. I find that more complex (longer and less readable) filings are associated with lower overall trading, and that this relationship appears due to a reduction in small investors’ trading activity. Additional evidence suggests that the association between report complexity and lower abnormal trading is driven by both cross-sectional variation in firms’ disclosure attributes and variations in disclosure complexity over time. Given regulatory concerns over plain English disclosures and the trend toward more disclosure, my investigation into the effects of reporting complexity on small and large investors should be of interest to regulators concerned with reporting clarity and leveling the playing field across classes of investors.
Unemployment Insurance, Recall Expectations, and Unemployment Outcomes

This paper empirically examines the importance of explicitly accounting for the layoff-rehire process in the analysis of unemployment outcomes in the United States. We find that the spells of individuals' who initially expect to be recalled account for much more of the unemployment of unemployment insurance (UI) recipients than do spells actually ending in recall. Our results indicate that the recall and new job escape rates from unemployment have quite different time patterns and are often affected in opposite ways by explanatory variables. We also find that the probability of leaving unemployment both through recalls and new job finding increases greatly around the time that UI benefits lapse. Over the past fifteen years many studies have empirically analyzed the determinants of individual unemployment spell durations in the United States.' Much of this literature has used a job search framework in which the unemployed are viewed as permanently displaced workers who are unattached to jobs. The possibility of recall to a former job, a process not requiring search, has been omitted from explicit consideration in the majority of these studies.2 An explicit treatment of the layoff-rehire process is necessary for a proper understanding of the determinants of unemployment durations and of the impacts of unemployment policies in the United States for at least three reasons. First, temporary layoffs in which workers are often rehired by their original employers are a quantitatively quite important feature of the U. S. labor market.3 Second, expectations concerning the likelihood of recall are likely to affect the responses of employers and unemployed workers to labor market interventions such as reemployment bonuses and subsidies
Strengthening Charity Law: Replacing Media Oversight with Advance Rulings for Nonprofit Fiduciaries

This Article considers three urgent challenges facing the charitable community and its state regulators: too little fiduciary duty law for nonprofits, the rise of media enforcement of wrongdoing in charities, and an inherent tension in the state’s dual role as enforcer and protector of the nonprofit sector. It analyzes whether the scarcity of law is really a problem by comparing nonprofit organizations with business organizations and concludes that charities lack the self-enforcement mechanisms of businesses and therefore need more government guidance. It evaluates whether the media has made governmental supervision obsolete and expresses skepticism about the press displacing state oversight. The solution presented, an advance-ruling procedure for fiduciary duty questions, proposes that states shift their focus from better enforcement against wrongdoers ex post to better charity governance ex ante by devoting more attention and resources to assisting well-meaning charity directors in carrying out their fiduciary obligations.
Clash of the Titans: Does Internet use Reduce Television Viewing?

Abstract We examine the impact of the Internet on the leading American recreation activity: watching television. We run a panel regression using television viewing, Internet penetration, and socioeconomic variables for a large number of American cities starting before the birth of the Web. We find that the Internet's effect on television viewing varies by age group, reducing it by a moderate amount for the youngest Americans but having no impact on the viewing of the oldest Americans. We hypothesize that the overall effect is likely to increase over time as older age groups have more experience with the Internet's recreational opportunities.
Legal Obligations and the Internal Aspect of Rules

Some philosophers approach their project of philosophizing with aspirations to edify, to bring about social change, or to construct a grand theoretical synthesis. H.L.A. Hart’s aspirations, on first blush, were more modest. Like many of his British predecessors and contemporaries, he aimed to preserve common sense. Hart believed that there was a commonsensical approach to the law exemplified by citizens in a modern municipal legal system.1 On this approach, a citizen regards it as a contingent question whether, with regard to a proposed or possible piece of conduct, there is a valid and applicable legal rule that forbids, requires, or permits that conduct. If the citizen comes to believe there is a valid legal rule forbidding the conduct, then he regards himself as under a certain kind of obligation to refrain from the conduct. If the citizen comes to believe that there is a valid legal rule requiring that conduct, then she regards herself as under an obligation of a certain sort to engage in that conduct. To regard oneself as being under an obligation to engage in certain conduct is to see oneself as being enjoined, required, and expected to behave that way—as being held up to a standard of what one is really supposed to do. The preservation of this basic idea of legal obligation in the face of jurisprudential theories mounted by many of Hart’s predecessors turned out to be extraordinarily challenging. Much of this essay is an effort to explain how Hart utilized the notion of the internal point of view—and, in particular, the notion of the internal aspect of rules—to preserve a philosophically tenable analysis of legal obligation that did not distort common sense. Ultimately, however, the Hart analysis in this essay is a vehicle for a larger goal: to begin to sketch a theory of legal obligation that can help to reorient questions about the alleged duty to obey the law, about lawyers’ roles in counseling their clients, and about a variety of matters within substantive legal theory.
Ethical Decisions and Response Mode Compatibility : Weighting of Ethical Attributes in Consideration Sets Formed by Excluding Versus Including Product Alternatives

Abstract Across four studies, including one involving an actual monetary decision, the authors demonstrate that forming a product consideration set by excluding versus including alternatives induces consumers to place more weight on ethical attributes, such as company labor practices and animal testing. This nonnormative difference reflects a compatibility between exclusion and ethics, and it holds regardless of attribute framing or consumer emotion. The authors also find that consumers judge others' behavior more negatively for excluding ethical products than for including ethical products. These results have implications for the marketing of ethical products, both specifically (e.g., it is important to encourage exclusion modes) and generally (e.g., the failure to consider ethical products may reflect seemingly minor contextual issues guiding the decision process and not consumer disinterest in ethical issues).
Modeling multivariate sequential dyadic interactions

Abstract This study explores two methods for analyzing sociometric data measured on several relations observed at several points in time. The multirelational, sequential data may be represented in a four-dimensional actors × partners × relations × time points super-sociomatrix. One current means of analyzing such data would be the multivariate, sequential model extensions of log-linear models for relational data. These methods are briefly reviewed in this paper. Because super-sociomatrices can be quite large, these methods are not always practical. In this paper, we seek alternative methods for analyzing such complicated data sets that may be more feasible. In particular, we explore two methods. The first method proposed as an alternative to analyzing such super-socio-matrices is an application of a four-mode eigenvector model. The second proposed alternative method is an analysis of variance applied to parameter estimates from simple log-linear network models. These methods are described in detail and then applied to two real data sets: the relations in a monastery (Sampson 1968), and the friendship ties among a set of college students (Newcomb 1963).
Market Prices and Food Aid Local and Regional Procurement and Distribution: A Multi-Country Analysis

Summary To date, no research has rigorously addressed the concern that local and regional procurement (LRP) of food aid could affect food prices and food price volatility in food aid source and recipient countries. We assemble spatially and temporally disaggregated data and estimate the relationship between food prices and their volatility and local food aid procurement and distribution across seven countries for several commodities. In most cases, LRP activities have no statistically significant relationship with either local price levels or food price volatility. The few exceptions underscore the importance of market monitoring.
Constitutional Transplants and the Mutation Effect

This paper is concerned with legal transplantation, that is, the borrowing of legal institutions from foreign jurisdictions. Constitutional trans-plants are a species of legal transplants. By constitutional transplants, I mean both the borrowing of constitutional texts from foreign jurisdictions and the borrowing of judicial doctrines espoused in precedents from foreign supreme courts or constitutional courts. In general, borrowing of precedents is more likely when there has been a prior transplantation of constitutional texts, though this is by no means necessary.
ESOPs and earnings management: An empirical note

This study seeks to ascertain the impact of employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) on earnings management. The empirical evidence shows that firms with larger ESOP ownership exhibit a lower degree ...
Designing Fiscal Policy to Address the External Costs of Energy

This paper first reviews the conceptual case for, and appropriate design of, fiscal policies to address major externalities associated with energy use — global warming, local air pollution, and various side effects (e.g., congestion) from motor vehicles. Techniques for (roughly) estimating the magnitude of these externalities, and corrective energy taxes, on a country-by-country basis are then described. The implications for reforming energy taxes, and the potential environmental, health, and fiscal benefits from reform, are then illustrated for different countries. A key theme of the paper is the critical role of finance ministries in administering tax reforms and ensuring efficient use of revenues.
The Priority of God: A Theory of Religious Liberty

Professor Paulsen argues that religious freedom only makes entire sense as a constitutional arrangement on the premise that God exists, that God makes actual demands on human loyalty and conduct, and that those demands precede and are superior in obligation to those of the State. Religious freedom exists to protect the exercise of plausibly true understandings of God's actual commands, as against state power, and to disable state power to proscribe -- or prescribe -- religious exercise. The article explores four possible stances of society toward religious freedom, depending on whether society and state embrace the idea of religious truth (or not) and whether society and state embrace the idea of religious tolerance (or not). It then argues that America's Constitution's religion clauses, in their original conception, are predicated in a belief in the possibility of religious truth and the imperative of religious tolerance so that the state does not interfere with private individuals' and groups' pursuit of truth. This perspective illuminates many of the issues that have plagued interpretation of the First Amendment religion clauses.
Double auction dynamics: structural effects of non-binding price controls

In competitive equilibrium, non-binding price controls (that is, price floors below and ceilings above the equilibrium) should not affect market outcomes, but in laboratory experiments they do. We build a simple dynamic model of double auction markets with “zero-intelligence” (ZI) computer traders that accounts for many, though not all, of the discrepancies between the data and the Walrasian tatonnement predictions. The success of the model in organizing the data, and in isolating various consequences of price controls, shows that the simple ZI model is a powerful tool to gain insights into the dynamics of market institutions.
Endogenous Entry in Markets with Unobserved Quality

Markets for experience and credence goods can suffer from adverse selection. The negative implication for trading and welfare poses the question of how such markets originate. We consider entry in markets in which each seller's quality becomes private information. Entry lowers prices, which can trigger adverse selection. The anticipated price collapse limits entry so that high prices are sustained, resulting in above normal profits. The analysis suggests that rather than observing the canonical market collapse, markets with asymmetric information about quality may have above normal profits and less entry than would be expected even when there is low concentration.
A Stochastic Programming Duality Approach to Inventory Centralization Games

In this paper, we present a unified approach to study a class of cooperative games arising from inventory centralization. The optimization problems corresponding to the inventory games are formulated as stochastic programs. We observe that the strong duality of stochastic linear programming not only directly leads to a series of recent results concerning the nonemptiness of the core of such games, but also suggests a way to find an element in the core. The proposed approach is also applied to inventory games with concave ordering cost. In particular, we show that the newsvendor game with concave ordering cost has a nonempty core. Finally, we prove that it is NP-hard to determine whether a given allocation is in the core of the inventory games even in a very simple setting.
The Google Shortcut to Trademark Law

Trademark distinctiveness—the extent to which consumers view a mark as identifying a particular source—is the key factual issue in assessing whether a mark is protectable and what the scope of that protection should be. But distinctiveness is difficult to evaluate in practice: assessments of “inherent distinctiveness” are highly subjective, survey evidence is expensive and unreliable, and other measures of “acquired distinctiveness” such as advertising spending are poor proxies for consumer perceptions. But there is now a simpler way to determine whether consumers associate a word or phrase with a certain product: Google. Through a study of trademark cases and contemporaneous search results, I argue that Google can generally capture both prongs of the test for trademark distinctiveness: if a mark is strong—either inherently distinctive or commercially strong—then many top search results for that mark relate to the source it identifies. The extent of results overlap between searches for two different marks can also be relevant for assessing the likelihood of confusion of those marks. In the cases where Google and the court disagree, I argue that Google more accurately reflects how consumers view a given mark. Courts have generally given online search results little weight in offline trademark disputes. But the key factual questions in these cases depend on the wisdom of the crowds, making Google’s “algorithmic authority” highly probative.
Determining the Number of Priced State Variables in the ICAPM

Suppose the ICAPM governs asset prices and there is a total of S state variables that might be of hedging concern to investors. Can we determine which state variables are, in fact, of hedging concern? What does it mean to say that these state variables are priced, that is, that they give rise to special risk premiums in expected returns? The goal of this paper is to formulate this problem clearly and show when it can and cannot be solved. Ignoring estimation problems, it is possible to find the set of priced state variables when the state variables are identified (named). When we know the number of state variables, but not their names, confident conclusions about even the number of them that produce special risk premiums are probably impossible, unless the number is zero, so the ICAPM collapses to the CAPM.
Using a Dual-Sourcing Option in the Presence of Asymmetric Information About Supplier Reliability: Competition vs. Diversification

We study a buyer's strategic use of a dual-sourcing option when facing suppliers possessing private information about their disruption likelihood. We solve for the buyer's optimal procurement contract. We show that the optimal contract can be interpreted as the buyer choosing between diversification and competition benefits. Better information increases diversification benefits and decreases competition benefits. Therefore, with better information the buyer is more inclined to diversify. Moreover, better information may increase or decrease the value of the dual-sourcing option, depending on the buyer's unit revenue: for large revenue, the buyer uses the dual sourcing option for diversification, the benefits of which increase with information; for small revenue, the buyer uses the dual sourcing option for competition, the benefits of which decrease with information. Surprisingly, as the reliability of the entire supply base decreases, the buyer may stop diversifying under asymmetric information (to leverage competition), whereas it would never do so under symmetric information. Finally, we analyze the effect of codependence between supply disruptions. We find that lower codependence leads the buyer to rely less on competition. Because competition keeps the information costs in check, a reduction in supplier codependence increases the buyer's value of information. Therefore, strategic actions to reduce codependence between supplier disruptions should not be seen as a substitute for learning about suppliers' reliabilities.
Federalism, federal regulation, or free market? An examination of mandated health benefit reform

Every state regulates the substance of health insurance contracts issued to its residents, requiring the coverage of certain treatments, services, and providers. These state mandated health benefit laws apply only to insured health plans, while self-insured plans (typically sponsored by a large employer) are exempt. The disparate application of state mandated benefit laws is criticized as contributing to an unjust and expensive system of health care in the United States. As a result, state mandated benefit laws are under attack and the subject of numerous federal reform efforts. This article explores three possible approaches to mandated benefit reform: (1) exclusive state regulation of mandated benefits, (2) deregulation of mandated benefits, and (3) positive federal regulation of mandated benefits. The article concludes that there are compelling arguments against both exclusive state regulation and deregulation. While federal regulation is far from perfect, it has significant advantages over the status quo and represents the best way forward for mandated benefit reform. Current and proposed mandated benefit reforms are analyzed in light of these conclusions. The article exposes these reform efforts as coordinated movements toward deregulation, an option that, while respecting individual rights, will harm the sick while improving the position of the healthy.
Underground Gun Markets

This article provides an economic analysis of underground gun markets, drawing on interviews with gang members, gun dealers, professional thieves, prostitutes, police, public school security guards and teenagers in the city of Chicago, complemented by results from government surveys of recent arrestees in 22 cities, plus administrative data for suicides, homicides, robberies, arrests and confiscated crime guns. We find evidence that transactions costs are considerable in the underground gun market in Chicago, and to some extent in other cities as well. The most likely explanation is that the underground gun market is both illegal and ‘thin’– relevant information about trading opportunities is scarce due to illegality, which makes search costly for market participants and leads to a market thickness effect on transaction costs.
The Check Tax: Fiscal Folly and the Great Monetary Contraction

The monetary contraction of the early 1930s involved a massive switch from bank deposits to currency. Although bank failures and fallen real income and interest rates deserve the lion's share of blame for the contraction, fiscal policy also played a part. In June 1932 the federal government imposed, as part of its effort to balance its budget, a two-cent tax on bank checks, equivalent to about 30 cents per check in today's money. By giving the public another motive for switching from deposits to currency, the tax substantially deepened the money stock's already deep slump. According to the estimates made here, this now-forgotten measure, which most monetary historians have overlooked, accounted-ceteris paribus-for about a 15 percent increase in the currency-demand deposit ratio, and about a 12 percent decline in the MI money stock. When the check tax was first proposed, legislators realized that a major monetary crisis was in progress. They heard the testimony of dozens of witnesses who argued that the tax would promote a large-scale switch to currency-based payments and that the already crippled banking system could ill afford the extra strain such a switch would place on it. Yet the tax found its way into the 1932 Revenue Act and, despite dozens of bills and joint resolutions calling for its early repeal, remained in effect through December 1934.
Disappearing Legal Black Holes and Converging Domains: Changing Individual Rights Protection in National Security and Foreign Affairs

This Essay attempts to describe what is distinctive about the way the protection of individual rights in the areas of national security and foreign affairs has been occurring in recent decades. Historically, the right to protection under the U.S. Constitution and courts has been sharply limited by categorical distinctions based on geography, war, and, to some extent, citizenship. These categorical rules carved out domains where the courts and Constitution provided protections and those where they did not. The institutional design and operating rules of the national security state tracked these formal, categorical rules about the boundaries of protection. There have been many “legal black holes” historically, domains where legal protections did not exist for certain people. Foreign affairs and national security have historically been areas defined by their legal black holes.In recent years, legal black holes are disappearing, and previously distinct domains are converging. The importance of U.S. citizenship to protection under the Constitution and courts is decreasing, formal barriers to legal protection and judicial review based on geography and war are dissolving, and the dissolution of these categorical boundaries is changing the design and operation of the national security state. National security and foreign affairs law is being domesticated and normalized, as rights protections available in ordinary, domestic, peacetime contexts are extended into what were previously legal black holes. The jurisprudence of categorization and boundary-marking is fading away.The core of this Essay identifies, names, and discusses these trends, seeking to give a vocabulary and conceptual and historical coherence to current discussions of individual rights protection in national security and foreign affairs contexts. Secondarily, this Essay suggests some factors that might be driving convergence and closing of legal black holes today. Because most of these potential causal drivers are still exerting their force on the shape of the law, this Essay concludes that the future of national security law will likely see more convergence and fewer black legal holes and then offers several specific predictions.
Violence and migration: evidence from Mexico’s drug war

The effect of violence on people’s residential choice remains a debated topic in the literature on crime and conflict. We examine the case of the drug war in Mexico, which dramatically increased the number of homicides since late 2006. Using data from the Mexican Census and labor force surveys, we estimate the impact of violence on migration at the municipal and state levels. To account for the endogeneity of violence, we use kilometers of federal highways interacted with cocaine supply shocks from Colombia as an instrument for the annual homicide rate. We argue that highways are good measures of pre-existing drug distribution networks, and the interaction with supply shocks arising in Colombia captures the time-variant nature of the value of these routes. After controlling for observed and unobserved area level heterogeneity, we find little evidence that increases in homicides have led to out-migration, at the domestic level. We also find little evidence of international migration at the municipal level, but some evidence of it at the state level. Our results show a muted migration response that is incompatible with a story of wide-scale displacement from the violence. JEL Classification O12, K42, O54, J11
Predictable Risk and Returns in Emerging Markets

The emergence of new equity markets in Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Mideast and Africa provides a new menu of opportunities for investors. These markets exhibit high expected returns as well as high volatility. Importantly, the low correlations with developed countries' equity markets significantly reduces the unconditional portfolio risk of a world investor. However, standard global asset pricing models, which assume complete integration of capital markets, fail to explain the cross section of average returns in emerging countries. An analysis of the predictability of the returns reveals that emerging market returns are more likely than developed countries to be influenced by local information. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.
Selection Stories: Understanding Movement Across Health Plans

This study assesses the factors influencing the movement of people across health plans. We distinguish three types of cost-related transitions: adverse selection, the movement of the less healthy to more generous plans; adverse retention, the tendency for people to stay where they are when they get sick; and aging in place, enrollees' inertia in plan choice, leading plans with older enrollees to increase in relative cost over time. Using data from the Group Insurance Commission in Massachusetts, we show that adverse selection and aging in place are both quantitatively important. Either can materially impact equilibrium enrollments, especially when premiums to enrollees reflect these costs.
Dissecting Foreign Bank Lending Behavior During the 2008-2009 Crisis

This paper analyzes the lending behavior of foreign-owned banks during the recent global crisis. Using bank-level panel data for countries in Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Latin America, the paper explores the role of affiliate and parent financial characteristics, host location, as well as the impact of parent geographic origin and reach on foreign banks' credit growth. Overall, the analysis finds robust evidence that foreign banks curtailed the growth of credit relative to other banks, independent of the host region. Banks from the United States reduced loan growth less than other parent banks. Neither the global nor regional reach of parent banks influenced the lending growth of foreign affiliates. However, the funding structure of foreign bank affiliates and the capitalization of parent banks do help explain the lending behavior of foreign banks during the global crisis. Although not the focus of the paper, it also finds that government-owned banks played a countercyclical role in all regions.
Accountability and Responsibility in Corporate Governance

Managers’ accountability to shareholders and corporations’ responsibility to society are two important objectives of corporate governance. Some scholars argue that managers who are accountable to shareholders must neglect society’s interest. But loosening this accountability leaves managers free to serve themselves, thereby increasing agency costs. This article makes three main contributions to the debate on the appropriate roles of accountability and responsibility. First, it shows how modern markets cause managers who are accountable to shareholders also to attend to society’s interests. Second, it shows that the debate is actually less important than it might first appear because the logistics of publicly held corporations substantially free managers from accountability to shareholders irrespective of whether society’s needs should compel that freedom. Third, the paper shows that the debate may be joined over whether partnership-type devices compelling distributions and allowing owner cash-out should be imported into publicly held firms. These devices would provide for more managerial accountability to shareholders, and therefore less flexibility to serve society’s interests, than standard corporate governance mechanisms. The main impediment to use of these devices is the double corporate tax, which provides tax benefits for earnings retention and thereby encourages managerial control over corporate earnings. The future of the corporate tax may depend at least in part on the debate over accountability and responsibility in corporate governance. ACCOUNTABILITY AND RESPONSIBILITY IN CORPORATE GOVERNANCE Larry E. Ribstein, University of Illinois College of Law* Draft of June 20, 2005
Network-Biased Technical Change: How Modern Digital Collaboration Tools Overcome Some Biases but Exacerbate Others

Using three years’ data from more than 1,000 employees at a large professional services firm, we find that adopting an expertise search tool improves employee work performance in billable revenue, ...
An Updated Analysis of Enforcement Actions against Engagement Quality Reviewers

SUMMARY: Engagement quality review (EQR) is designed to be a quality control mechanism for improving the quality of audit engagements. This paper updates the findings of Messier, Kozloski, and Kochetova-Kozloski (2010) on enforcement actions against engagement quality (EQ) reviewers, especially in light of the December 2009 implementation of the new standard on engagement quality review, Auditing Standard No. 7 (AS7). We identified 16 enforcement actions since 2009 that involve some type of sanction against an EQ reviewer. Only two cases involved a Big 4 firm. Thus, the vast majority of cases involved EQRs from smaller public accounting firms. Six cases occurred prior to the implementation of AS7, nine cases occurred after AS7 took effect, and one case involved violations both prior to and after AS7 implementation. All of the pre-AS7 cases involved sanctions resulting from an inadequate EQR. In contrast, all of the post-AS7 cases involved sanctions resulting from a failure to perform an EQR. Our review o...
The Rise of Supermarkets in Africa: Implications for Agrifood Systems and the Rural Poor

The rise of supermarkets in Africa since the mid-1990s is transforming the food retail sector. Supermarkets have spread fast in Southern and Eastern Africa, already proliferating beyond middle class big-city markets into smaller towns and poorer areas. Supplying supermarkets presents both potentially large opportunities -- and big challenges for producers. Supermarkets' procurement systems involve purchase consolidation, shift to specialized wholesalers, and tough private quality and safety standards. To meet these requirements, producers have to make investments and adopt new practices. That is hardest for small producers, who thus risk exclusion from dynamic urban markets increasingly dominated by supermarkets. There is an urgent need for development programmes and policies to assist them in adopting the new practices that the supermarkets' procurement systems demand.
WHY DO WE NEED A LAWYER?: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF DIVORCE CASES

There has been a steady increase in the number of self-represented divorce litigants in recent years. Do divorcing couples just want to save money, or are other factors at play in the decision to go pro se in one’s divorce? This article looks at a random sample of 567 divorce cases in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, where a higher-than-average median income suggests that inability to afford a divorce lawyer is not the only factor in the decision to self-represent.The article examines characteristics of litigants that are associated with proceeding pro se, and examines the length of the divorce process and the incidence of alimony awards in order to address the issue of whether divorce litigants are worse off if they choose to forgo counsel. The article also discusses the role of family lawyers in a system where so many parties to a divorce proceed pro se.
A hierarchy of bounds for stochastic mixed-integer programs

We consider general two-stage SMIPs with recourse, in which integer variables are allowed in both stages of the problem and randomness is allowed in the objective function, the constraint matrices (i.e., the technology matrix and the recourse matrix), and the right-hand side. We develop a hierarchy of lower and upper bounds for the optimal objective value of an SMIP by generalizing the wait-and-see solution and the expected result of using the expected value solution. These bounds become progressively stronger but generally more difficult to compute. Our numerical study indicates the bounds we develop in this paper can be strong relative to those provided by linear relaxations. Hence this new bounding approach is a complementary tool to the current bounding techniques used in solving SMIPs, particularly for large-scale and poorly formulated problems.
Noneconomic Damages, Suffering, and the Role of the Plaintiff's Lawyer

Each year the vast tort engine processes tens of thousands of tort claims that involve pain and suffering. The participants in the tort system evaluate, articulate, investigate, strategize, and bargain over these claims. Whether the plaintiff files a claim that is settled quickly or one that takes years to complete, the legal process will be an overlay onto and will affect how the plaintiff experiences and makes meaning of his or her suffering. This article addresses one key factor in this relationship: the link between the plaintiff’s lawyer’s representation of the plaintiff and the plaintiff’s experience of suffering. The article asks if, and how, a lawyer’s representation can have a positive role, or at least minimize negative effects, as to the plaintiff’s suffering process. The article identifies the key ways in which the personal injury lawyers’ representation may intersect with and possibly influence the client’s suffering and loss process. Having identified these intersections, the article next addresses the key question of competence: is a lawyer competent to identify and to act in ways that are helpful to, or at least not harmful to, the client’s loss process? Because the answer to this is affirmative, the article explores and suggests guidelines about the plaintiff’s lawyer’s actions and counsel. These include: understanding how the representation and lawsuit can overlap with the client’s own meaning-making; respecting the difference between supporting counseling and counseling that crosses into a therapeutic model; and preparatory and explanatory language that allows the client to uncouple legal terms and standards from his or her own understanding of loss and fault.
Stock price reaction to public and private information

Abstract I use Easley and O’Hara's [1992, Journal of Finance 47, 577–604] private information-based trading variable, PIN, together with a comprehensive public news database to empirically measure the effect of private and public information on the post-announcement drift. I show that stocks associated with high PIN, consensus public news surprises, and low media coverage experience low or insignificant drift. Thus not all information acquisition variables have the same effect on the market's efficiency. Whether information is public or private is irrelevant; what matters is whether information is associated with the arrival rate of informed or uninformed traders.
How Does Customary International Law Change? The Case of State Immunity†

Customary international law (CIL) is a fundamental source of international law. But scholars lack a clear understanding of customary international law, as well as systematic statistical analyses of its workings. Existing theories posit that CIL is a cooperative equilibrium that can be sustained through reciprocity. Yet, CIL lacks institutional features that facilitate reciprocity and is commonly understood to apply universally, even to states that defect or reject a norm. Because the continued existence of CIL depends on state practice, the potential precedential effect of defection encourages cooperation as long as states value the cooperative norm. Consequentially, a state's decision to apply a CIL norm should be a function of the extent to which the norm is practiced in the community of states it interacts with rather than the past behavior of the specific state in an interaction. We test the implications with newly-collected data documenting if and when 121 states switched from absolute to restrictive foreign state immunity. We find no evidence of direct reciprocity. States that most valued absolute immunity and whose defection would most affect others were least likely to defect, but states became more likely to defect as the states whose practice most affected them defected.
The growth of massive black holes in galaxy merger simulations with feedback by radiation pressure

We study the growth of massive black holes (BHs) in galaxies using smoothed particle hydrodynamic simulations of major galaxy mergers with new implementations of BH accretion and feedback. The effect of BH accretion on gas in its host galaxy is modelled by depositing momentum at the rate of ~ τL/c into the ambient gas, where L is the luminosity produced by accretion on to the BH and τ is the wavelength-averaged optical depth of the galactic nucleus to the AGN's radiation (a free parameter of our model). The accretion rate on to the BH is relatively independent of our subgrid accretion model and is instead determined by the BH's dynamical impact on its host galaxy: BH accretion is thus self-regulated rather than 'supply limited'. We show that the final BH mass and total stellar mass formed during a merger are more robust predictions of the simulations than the time dependence of the star formation rate or BH accretion rate. In particular, the latter depend on the assumed interstellar medium physics, which determines when and where the gas fragments to form star clusters; this in turn affects the fuel available for further star formation and BH growth. Simulations over a factor of ~30 in galaxy mass are consistent with the observed M BH -σ relation for a mean optical depth of τ ~ 25. This requires that most BH growth occur when the galactic nucleus is optically thick to far-infrared radiation, consistent with the hypothesized connection between ultraluminous infrared galaxies and quasars. We find tentative evidence for a shallower M BH -σ relation in the lowest-mass galaxies, σ ≲ 100 km s -1 . Our results demonstrate that feedback-regulated BH growth and consistency with the observed M BH -σ relation do not require that BH feedback terminate star formation in massive galaxies or unbind large quantities of cold gas.
Human rights from the grassroots up: Vermont's campaign for universal health care.

In 2008, the Vermont Workers' Center launched the "Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign," a grassroots campaign to secure the creation of a universal health care system in Vermont. Campaign organizers used a human rights framework to mobilize thousands of voters in support of universal health care. In response to this extraordinary grassroots effort, the state legislature passed health care legislation that incorporates human rights principles into Vermont law and provides a framework for universal health care. The United States has often lagged behind other nations in recognizing economic, social, and cultural (ESC) rights, including the right to health. Nonetheless, activists have begun to incorporate ESC rights into domestic advocacy campaigns, and state and local governments are beginning to respond where the federal government has not. Vermont serves as a powerful example of how a human rights framework can inform health care policy and inspire grassroots campaigns in the United States. This three-part article documents the Vermont Workers' Center campaign and discusses the impact that human rights activity at the grassroots level may have on attitudes towards ESC rights in the United States. The first part describes the Vermont health care crisis and explains why the center adopted international human rights principles for their campaign. The article then goes on to discuss the three-year campaign and analyze the health care reform bill that the Vermont legislature passed. Finally, the article discusses the campaign's local and national impact.
Delay-Efficient and Reliable Data Relaying in Ultra Dense Networks using Rateless Codes

We investigate the problem of delay-efficient and reliable data delivery in ultra-dense networks (UDNs) that constitute macro base stations (MBSs), small base stations (SBSs), and mobile users. Considering a two-hop data delivery system, we propose a partial decode-and-forward (PDF) relaying strategy together with a simple and intuitive amicable encoding scheme for rateless codes to significantly improve user experience in terms of end-to-end delay. Simulation results verify that our amicable encoding scheme is efficient in improving the intermediate performance of rateless codes. It also verifies that our proposed PDF significantly improves the performance of the decode-and-forward (DF) strategy, and that PDF is much more robust against channel degradation. Overall, the proposed strategy and encoding scheme are efficient towards delay-sensitive data delivery in the UDN scenarios.
Who's Monitoring the Monitor? Do Outside Directors Protect Shareholders' Interests?

The corporate governance literature is rich with empirical tests of the relation between board composition and firm performance. We consider the effect of board composition on a different measure of performance, the probability a firm will be sued by shareholders. We find firms that are defendants in securities litigation have higher proportions of insiders and of gray directors and have smaller boards than a matched group of firms that are not sued, even when controlling for firm value and industry. The results suggest that boards with higher proportions of outside directors do a better job of monitoring management.