cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
ENTICE: Endogenous Technological Change in the DICE Model of Global Warming

Abstract Despite growing empirical evidence of the link between environmental policy and innovation, most economic models of environmental policy treat technology as exogenous. For long-term problems such as climate change, this omission may be significant. In this paper, I modify the DICE model of climate change (Managing the Global Commons: the Economics of the Greenhouse Effect, MIT press, Cambridge, MA, 1994; Warming the World: Economic Models of Global Warming, MIT press, Cambridge, MA, 2000) to allow for induced innovation in the energy sector. Ignoring induced technological change overstates the welfare costs of an optimal carbon tax policy by 9.4%. However, cost savings, rather than increased environmental benefits, appear to drive the welfare gains, as the effect of induced innovation on emissions and mean global temperature is small. Sensitivity analysis shows that potential crowding out of other R&D and market failures in the R&D sector are the most important limiting factors to the potential of induced innovation. Differences in these key assumptions explain much of the variation in the findings of other similar models.
Faculty perspectives on international taxation topics

Abstract This paper presents perspectives of accounting faculty members on the relative importance of topics that should be presented in a one-semester graduate level international taxation course. Understanding of international taxation has become an increasingly critical part of the tax and accounting practices of the big four and other major public accounting firms as well as to U.S. multinational business firms. Therefore, college and universities may find it useful to provide at least some coverage of international taxation topics in a separate course or as part of other courses in their tax and accounting programs. If a separate course is offered, an important consideration of which topics should be covered in the course, since there are more topics than can be reasonably covered in one course. This paper analyzes the responses of members of the American Accounting Association's International Accounting Section to a survey of which topics should be included in a one-semester international tax course. Results are compared with those of prior studies to determine whether and the extent to which perspectives have changed over time and based on the type of survey respondent. Findings of this paper will offer guidance regarding topic selection to the accounting faculty members who are charged with developing an international taxation course. The findings may also be of interest to anyone concerned with international business in general and taxation in particular.
Dimension Reduction for Systems with Slow Relaxation

We develop reduced, stochastic models for high dimensional, dissipative dynamical systems that relax very slowly to equilibrium and can encode long term memory. We present a variety of empirical and first principles approaches for model reduction, and build a mathematical framework for analyzing the reduced models. We introduce the notions of universal and asymptotic filters to characterize ‘optimal’ model reductions for sloppy linear models. We illustrate our methods by applying them to the practically important problem of modeling evaporation in oil spills.
Spatial and temporal heterogeneity of marginal emissions: Implications for electric cars and other electricity-shifting policies

In this paper, we develop a methodology for estimating marginal emissions of electricity demand that vary by location and time of day across the United States. The approach takes account of the generation mix within interconnected electricity markets and shifting load profiles throughout the day. Using data available for 2007 through 2009, with a focus on carbon dioxide (CO2), we find substantial variation among locations and times of day. Marginal emission rates are more than three times as large in the upper Midwest compared to the western United States, and within regions, rates for some hours of the day are more than twice those for others. We apply our results to an evaluation of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). The CO2 emissions per mile from driving PEVs are less than those from driving a hybrid car in the western United States and Texas. In the upper Midwest, however, charging during the recommended hours at night implies that PEVs generate more emissions per mile than the average car currently on the road. Underlying many of our results is a fundamental tension between electricity load management and environmental goals: the hours when electricity is the least expensive to produce tend to be the hours with the greatest emissions. In addition to PEVs, we show how our estimates are useful for evaluating the heterogeneous effects of other policies and initiatives, such as distributed solar, energy efficiency, and real-time pricing.
The Intractable Problem of Bankruptcy Ethics: Square Peg, Round Hole

This article continues my earlier research on conflicts of interest in bankruptcy cases, particularly in chapter 11 cases. It suggests that conflicts in interest in chapter 11 bankruptcy cases should not be handled the same way that conflicts are handled under state ethics rules, and it proposes a new section of the Bankruptcy Code to cover conflicts of interest in cases filed under chapter 11.
A jurisprudence of dysfunction: on the role of "normal species functioning" in disability analysis.

This article considers the proper role of normal species functioning in disability analysis. Failure to consider properly the role of normal functioning has profoundly impacted American disability law by creating divergent outcomes in the application of established United States Supreme Court tests and severely undermining protections for persons with disabilities. This article examines competing, dominant conceptual models of functioning, the Supreme Court's use of these models, and then proposes a novel conceptual framework, which requires a blend of the models as applied to three distinct levels of disability analysis. This article is a discrete and integral part of disability law reform, bearing on the tension between civil rights and social welfare models of disability law.
A stochastic multidimensional unfolding approach for representing phased decision outcomes

This paper presents a stochastic multidimensional unfolding (MDU) procedure to spatially represent individual differences in phased or sequential decision processes. The specific application or scenario to be discussed involves the area of consumer psychology where consumers form judgments sequentially in their awareness, consideration, and choice set compositions in a phased or sequential manner as more information about the alternative brands in a designated product/service class are collected. A brief review of the consumer psychology literature on these nested congnitive sets as stages in phased decision making is provided. The technical details of the proposed model, maximum likelihood estimation framework, and algorithm are then discussed. A small scale Monte Carlo analysis is presented to demonstrate estimation proficiency and the appropriateness of the proposed model selection heuristic. An application of the methodology to capture awareness, consideration, and choice sets in graduate school applicants is presented. Finally, directions for future research and other potential applications are given.
Seeking Shelter: Empirically Modeling Tax Shelters Using Financial Statement Information

ABSTRACT: Using confidential tax shelter and tax return data obtained from the Internal Revenue Service, this study develops and validates an expanded model for inferring the likelihood that a firm engages in a tax shelter. Results show that tax shelter likelihood is positively related to subsidiaries located in tax havens, foreign-source income, inconsistent book-tax treatment, litigation losses, use of promoters, profitability, and size, and negatively related to leverage. Supplemental tests show that total book-tax differences (BTDs) and the contingent tax liability reserve are significantly related to tax shelter usage, while discretionary permanent BTDs and long-run cash effective tax rates are not. Finally, the model is weaker, yet still significant, in the FIN 48 disclosure environment. This research provides investors and policymakers with an extended, validated measure to calculate the presence of extreme cases of corporate tax aggressiveness. Such information could also aid analysts and other ta...
Population Genetics and Economic Growth

This paper builds an age-structured model of human population genetics in which explicit individual choices drive the dynamics via sexual selection. In the model, agents are endowed with a high-dimensional genome that determines their cognitive and physical characteristics. Young adults optimally search for a marriage partner, work for firms, consume goods, save for old age and, if married, decide how many children to have. In accord with the fundamental genetic operators, children receive genes from their parents. An agent's human capital (productivity) is an aggregate of the received genetic endowment and environmental influences so that the population of agents and the economy co-evolve. After calibrating the model, we examine the impact of physical, social, and economic institutions on population growth and economic performance. We find that institutional factors significantly impact economic performance by affecting marriage, family size, and the intergenerational transmission of genes. The principal novel findings are that i) genetic diversity has a nonmonotone causal impact on population size and economic performance; ii) an endogenous population threshold exists which, absent frictions, causes societies with declining populations and output to reverse course and grow; and iii) that the emotion love substantially accelerates economic growth by increasing genetic diversity ‘just enough’, which we term ‘The Goldilocks Principle’.
Economic Rights as Group Rights

This article considers the moral claim that all persons have a human right to the material necessities of life, and that governments are obligated to assure them to individuals who have no other way to obtain them. It assesses that claim by exploring three questions. First, does the redistribution potentially required by even the most minimal economic right violate other rights, as libertarians say it does? Second, if redistribution is not barred by libertarian constraints, is a state obligated to provide a safety net against severe deprivation, or may it elect whether to do so? And finally, if there is a human right to the necessities of life, what are its parameters? I conclude that that there is a human right to material necessities, but that typical formulations of the right misconstrue it. Economic rights are commonly described and promulgated as individual rights analogous to liberty rights. The arguments herein endeavor to show that, on the contrary, an economic right makes moral and practical sense only when framed as a group right by which the worst-off group collectively has a claim to essential resources that, with limited exceptions, prevails over any alternative, non-essential individual or societal use.
Superconducting materials: the w$hole$ story

Ted Geballe has contributed enormously to the knowledge of superconducting materials during an illustrious scientific career spanning seven decades, encompassing groundbreaking discoveries and studies of both so-called conventional and unconventional superconductors. On the year of his 100th birthday, I would like to argue that all superconducting materials that Ted investigated, as well as those he did not, have one thing in common that is not generally recognized: hole carriers. This includes PbTe doped with Tl, for which Ted has proposed that superconductivity is driven by negative-U pairing. I will discuss why hole carriers are necessary for a material to be a superconductor, and the implications of this for the understanding of the fundamental physics of superconductivity.
The right's reasons: constitutional conflict and the spread of woman-protective antiabortion argument.

In Gonzales v. Carhart, the Supreme Court upheld the PartialBirth Abortion Ban Act, emphasizing that government may regulate the methods employed to perform an abortion “to show its profound respect for the life within the woman” and to vindicate the interest in protecting potential life first recognized in Roe v. Wade. Carhart discussed an additional justification for restricting abortion—to protect women as well as the unborn:
Judicial Ideology and the Transformation of Voting Rights Jurisprudence

=912299 (visited Aug 29, 2008) (estimating ideology parameters for judges using data from asylum and sex discrimination cases). File: 04 Cox-Miles Final Created on: 10/13/2008 12:26:00 PM Last Printed: 12/2/2008 12:18:00 PM 2008] Rules, Standards, and Ideology 1517 3. Doctrinal data: this includes information about whether each judge voted for or against § 2 liability, as well as information about whether and how the judge applied the Gingles framework. This dataset for the first time makes it possible to evaluate the way in which lower federal courts have evaluated liability under § 2, as well as permitting us to trace changes in the courts’ doctrinal treatment of § 2 cases over time. Moreover, this assessment is made much richer by the fact that we have judge-level, rather than just case-level, information about the treatment of § 2 claims. Thus, when a claim is resolved by an appellate court or a trial panel of three judges, we have three data points rather than just one. This expands our dataset from 296 judicial decisions to 588 judge votes. And because cases are randomly assigned to judges within districts and circuits, we are able to interpret causation as flowing from judicial characteristics to judge votes.
The Justification of Positive Law in Plato

This article argues that Platonic legal philosophy views positive law as justified only because of the problems inherent in human nature, and not, contra natural law thinkers, because of its rationality.
New firm formation: Dynamics and determinants

Empirical studies of determinants of new firm formation to date have tended to yield diverse and even contradictory results. Three primary reasons for this have been advanced: (1) the paucity of suitable micro-level data (2) the failure to control for amorphous time- and place-specific influences that defy specification, and (3) the use of estimation techniques that do not handle adequately the effects of heteroscedasticity. This paper addresses all of these shortcomings by employing a unique data set composed of annual data on localized firm entry, exit and a variety of predictor variables that has been analyzed to yield heteroscedasticity-corrected estimates while controlling for unspecified place- and period-specific influences. We test a variety of models seeking to explain patterns of new firm formation in terms of macroeconomic, demographic, and labor market processes, patterns of industrial restructuring, availability of local financial capital, and local public sector spending. Our results suggest that regional patterns of new firm formation can be explained by variation in unemployment change rates, mean establishment size, prior firm entry and exit dynamics, and the availability of local financial capital. We find no evidence of influence attributable to population or income dynamics, unemployment level, or local government spending.
The Personal Politics of Same‐Sex Marriage

Research on attitudes toward gay people and same-sex marriage finds that individuals who know a gay person in their immediate personal network are not only more likely to view gay people positively but also support same-sex marriage. Here we examine whether this result extends to an individual's stance toward specific ballot measures regarding same-sex marriage across different social and political climates ranging from the conservative South to the liberal Pacific Northwest. Using survey data collected in three states that considered banning or approving same-sex marriage during the 2012 election cycle, we analyze the hypothesis that a personal relationship with a gay person affects an individual's vote choice on a ballot measure with actual policy consequences. In the end, we find mixed results across the three states. Our results suggest the importance of state-level variation in the social climate that may temper the effect of contact. Related Articles Barth, Jay, and Janine Parry. 2009. “2 > 1 + 1? The Impact of Contact with Gay and Lesbian Couples on Attitudes about Gays/Lesbians and Gay Related Policies.” Politics & Policy 37 (1): 31-50. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2007.00160.x/abstract Bramlett, Brittany. 2012. “The Cross-Pressures of Religion and Contact with Gays and Lesbians, and Their Impact on Same-Sex Marriage Opinion.” Politics & Policy 40 (1): 13-42. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2011.00337.x/abstract Skipworth, Sue Ann, Andrew Garner, and Bryan J. Dettrey. 2010. “Limitations of the Contact Hypothesis: Heterogeneity in the Contact Effect on Attitudes toward Gay Rights.” Politics & Policy 38 (5): 887-906. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2010.00262.x/abstract Related Media Cotner, Ben, and Ryan White. “The Case against Eight.” HBO Documentary. http://thecaseagainst8.com/ NCSL.org. 2015. “Same-Sex Marriage Laws.” http://www.ncsl.org/research/human-services/same-sex-marriage-laws.aspx
Grades as incentives

This paper examines how grade incentives affect student learning across a variety of courses at two universities, using for identification the discrete rewards offered by the standard A–F letter-grade system. We develop and test five predictions about the provision of study effort and the distribution of numerical course averages in the presence of the thresholds that separate these discrete rewards. Surprisingly, all are rejected in our data. There is no evidence that exam performance is improved for those students that stand to gain the most from additional study.
Consumer benefits from increased competition in shopping outlets: Measuring the effect of Wal‐Mart

Non-traditional retail outlets, including supercenters, warehouse club stores, and mass merchandisers, have nearly doubled their share of consumer food-at-home expenditures in the U.S. from 1998 to 2003. Wal-Mart supercenters have had the biggest impact on food retailing as they compete most closely with traditional supermarkets and offer many identical food items at an average price about 15%–25% lower than traditional supermarkets. We consider consumer benefits from this market share growth and estimate the effect on consumer welfare of entry and expansion into new geographic markets. We calculate the compensating variation that arises from both the direct variety effect of the entry of supercenters and the indirect price effect that arises from the increased competition that supercenters create and find the average effect of the total compensating variation to be 25% of food expenditures. Since we find that lower income households tend to shop more at these lower priced outlets, a significant decrease in consumer surplus arises from restricting entry and expansion of supercenters into new geographic markets. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
When Is Employee Retaliation Acceptable at Work? Evidence from Quasi‐Experiments

When is employee retaliation acceptable in the workplace? We use a quasi-experimental design to study the acceptability of several forms of retaliatory behavior at work, gathering data in this untested area. Consistent with hypotheses from theories of fairness, we find that employee retaliation in the workplace is perceived to be more acceptable if it is an act of omission instead of an act of commission. We do not find that a more damaging retaliatory act is significantly less acceptable than a less damaging one, suggesting a qualitative rather than a quantitative relationship. We also find individual differences: Respondents who are older, female, politically conservative, and managers typically show less tolerance for retaliation, while union members are a bit more accepting than average.
What is the Internal Point of View

John Austin famously claimed that the idea of sanctions is “the key to the science[] of jurisprudence.”1 Thus, he held legal rules to be threats backed by sanctions and statements of legal obligations as predictions that the threatened sanctions will be carried out. And before The Concept of Law was published in 1961, the concept of sanctions was central to every other positivistic theory of law as well. Although Hans Kelsen sought to explain legal rules and obligations in terms of norms, he understood these norms to be directives to courts requiring that sanctions be applied. Splitting the difference between Austin and Kelsen, Alf Ross conceived of legal rules as norms addressed to courts directing the use of sanctions and statements of legal validity as predictions that these norms will be followed. In The Concept of Law, H.L.A. Hart showed that sanction-centered accounts of every stripe ignored an essential feature of law. This feature he termed “the internal point of view.” Seen from the internal point of view, the law is not simply sanction-threatening, -directing, or -predicting, but rather obligation-imposing. Though the internal point of view is perhaps Hart’s greatest contribution to jurisprudential theory, this concept is also often and easily misunderstood. This is unfortunate, not only because these misreadings distort Hart’s theory, but, more importantly, because they prevent us from appreciating the true infirmities of sanction-centered theories and the compelling reasons why they ought to be rejected. In this essay, I try to address some of these confusions. What, exactly, is the internal point of view? What role (or roles) does it play in Hart’s theory? And how does an adequate appreciation for the centrality of the internal point of view lead to the rejection of sanction-centered theories? Briefly, my answers will be as follows. The internal point of view is the practical attitude of rule acceptance—it does not imply that people who accept the rules accept their moral legitimacy, only that they are disposed to guide and evaluate conduct in accordance with the rules.
On the distribution and swim pressure of run-and-tumble particles in confinement

The spatial and orientational distribution in a dilute active suspension of non-Brownian run-and-tumble spherical swimmers confined between two planar hard walls is calculated theoretically. Using a kinetic model based on coupled bulk/surface probability density functions, we demonstrate the existence of a concentration wall boundary layer with thickness scaling with the run length, the absence of polarization throughout the bulk of the channel, and the presence of sharp discontinuities in the bulk orientation distribution in the neighbourhood of orientations parallel to the wall in the near-wall region. Our model is also applied to calculate the swim pressure in the system, which approaches the previously proposed ideal-gas behaviour in wide channels but is found to decrease in narrow channels as a result of confinement. Monte Carlo simulations are also performed for validation and show excellent quantitative agreement with our theoretical predictions.
Ecological determinants of divorce: a structural approach to the explanation of Japanese divorce.

Abstract This paper examines the ecological determinants of contemporary Japanese divorce rates on the prefectural level. LISREL and computer‐generated graphics are the analytic methods used. The aggregate level of analysis demands the use of the ecological model which posits that demographic changes, economic activities, migration patterns, and the level of urbanization are significant predictors of divorce rate. Our analysis demonstrates that sex ratio, female labor force participation, female in‐migration patterns, population increase, and net household income all play a significant role in affecting the divorce rate. Our findings also confirm the well‐supported hypothesis that both population density and modernization positively influence modern Japan's divorce rates. The residual analysis also points out that in order to account for the large proportion of the unexplained variance of Japanese divorce, behavioral‐related variables and island‐ or prefecture‐specific dimensions need to be included in th...
Rethinking the Constitution-treaty relationship: A reply to Remy Z. Levin & Paul Chen

In Rethinking the Constitiution-Treaty Relationship, Remy Z. Levin and Paul Chen provide a valuable reexamination of the legal relationship between the US Constitution and treaties to which the United States is a party. The authors marshal historical evidence showing that the relationship is a more nuanced process of “mutual adjustment” between treaties and the Constitution than is commonly understood. The contemporary conventional wisdom is that constitutional provisions always trump treaty obligations. The authors contend that characterizing this relationship in absolutist terms is inaccurate and misleading: while the Constitution does sometimes override treaty obligations, international law and domestic constitutional law sometimes interact in a dialogic manner, with treaty obligations and constitutional norms operating to inform or “adjust” one another. This Reply makes two primary points in seeking to further the conversation the authors have so ably begun. First, as a descriptive matter, this Reply will argue that it is imprecise to speak of treaties adjusting “the Constitution.” Rather, what the authors have described is actually a process of treaties adjusting various constitutional actors’ constitutional interpretation, not the Constitution itself. While this difference may at first appear to be merely pedantic, I believe that speaking of this interaction as involving the adjustment of some free-standing constitutional meaning obscures important issues regarding separation of powers and judicial review. Second, this Reply will briefly discuss the tension between the authors’ thesis and Supreme Court precedent in a related area. If constitutional actors indeed do “adjust” constitutional meaning in light of treaties, it raises similar separation of powers concerns as those at issue in the Supreme Court’s cases holding that Congress cannot, in seeking to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment’s individual rights provisions, alter constitutional meaning.
Reconcilable Differences: Momentum Trading by Institutions

A growing literature evaluates the relation between lag returns and demand by institutional investors. Given that lag returns and institutional ownership are directly observable, it is surprising that previous tests yield dramatically different conclusions. This study examines differences across studies and finds that four factors account for these discrepancies: (1) value-weighting versus equal-weighting across stocks, (2) averaging versus aggregating over managers, (3) disagreement in the signs of measures of institutional demand, and (4) correlation between current capitalization and both lag returns and measures of institutional demand. Controlling for these factors, the results across different methods are remarkably uniform.
The capital market implications of the frequency of interim financial reporting: an international analysis

This study examines empirically the extent to which the frequency of interim financial reporting affects stock price volatility over the course of the fiscal year in four countries with different interim reporting regimes: the United States and Canada with quarterly reporting, and Great Britain and Australia with semi-annual interim reporting. It is hypothesized that, in the tradeoff between timeliness and predictive value of the interim reports, semi-annual interim reporting will lead to lesser price volatility after accounting for other potential influences. These expectations are supported in the results found. Moreover, additional tests conducted on American ADRs of British and Australian companies show that those firms have higher volatility than comparable purely domestic firms on their home stock exchanges.
Battering, Forgiveness, and Redemption

Introduction 921 I. Why Talk About Forgiveness and Redemption? 926 II. Principles Underlying a Model Based on Forgiveness and Redemption 931 III. Alternative Models for Addressing Domestic Violence ........ 934 A. The Mediation Model 934 B. The Restorative Justice Model 937 C. The Truth Commission Model 942 D. The Religious Model 945 IV. Indigenous Models of Dispute Resolution 949 A. The Ho’oponopono Process – Native Hawaiian Healing..... 950 B. Navajo Peacemaking 951 C. Gacaca – A Rwandan Experiment in Justice and Reconciliation 954 Conclusion 960
The market microstructure of central bank intervention

Abstract How quickly do central bank intervention operations impact the foreign exchange market? And, do intra-daily market conditions influence the effectiveness of central bank interventions? This paper uses high-frequency intra-daily data to examine the relationship between the efficacy of intervention operations and the “state of the market” at the moment that the operation is made public. The results indicate that some traders typically know that the Fed is intervening at least 1 h prior to the public release of the information in newswire reports. Also, the evidence suggests that the timing of intervention operations matters—interventions that occur during heavy trading volume, that are closely timed to scheduled macro announcements, and that are coordinated with another central bank are the most likely to have large effects.
THE INTERSECTION OF POETIC AND IMPERIAL AUTHORITY IN PHAEDRUS' FABLES

Phaedrus wrote two fables featuring Roman emperors. In Fable 2.5 we find Emperor Tiberius giving a busybody his deserved come-uppance, and in Fable 3.10 Augustus miraculously solves a murder-suicide case. Yet couched among so many of Phaedrus’ fables that criticize authority figures, these positive portrayals of the emperors come as a surprise to the reader and present a significant problem of interpretation. In exploring the different possible readings of the two poems, this paper follows Phaedrus through a complex interpretive maze and shows how the fabulist’s own self-portrayal intersects with and colors his portrayal of the first two Roman emperors.
A comparative analysis of education costs and outcomes: The United States vs. other OECD countries

Abstract In this paper we confirm the universality of steadily rising education expenditures among OECD nations, as predicted by “Baumol and Bowen's cost disease”, and show that this trajectory of costs can be expected to continue for the foreseeable future. However, we find that while the level of education costs in America is significantly higher than that of all other OECD countries, education spending per student in the United States is increasing about as quickly as it is in many other countries—perhaps even less quickly . Although these cost increases undoubtedly will contribute to each nation's fiscal problems, we conclude that effective education contributes to improvement of the economic performance of each country and can mitigate resulting financial pressures by spurring growth in overall purchasing power.
Dynamic supernetworks for the integration of social networks and supply chains with electronic commerce: modeling and analysis of buyer--seller relationships with computations

In this paper, we develop a dynamic supernetwork framework for the modeling and analysis of supply chains with electronic commerce that also includes the role that relationships play. Manufacturers are assumed to produce a homogeneous product and to sell it either through physical or electronic links to retailers and/or directly to consumers through electronic links. Retailers, in turn, can sell the product through physical links to consumers. Increasing relationship levels in our framework are assumed to reduce transaction costs as well as risk and to have some additional value for both sellers and buyers. Establishing those relationship levels incurs some costs that have to be borne by the decision-makers in the supernetwork, which is multilevel in structure and consists of the supply chain and the social network. The decision-makers, who are located at distinct tiers in the supernetwork, try to optimize their objective functions and are faced with multiple criteria including relationship-related ones and weight them according to their preferences. We establish the optimality conditions for the manufacturers, retailers, and consumers, derive the equilibrium conditions, and provide the variational inequality formulation. We then present the projected dynamical system, which describes the disequilibrium dynamics of the product transactions, relationship levels, and prices on the supernetwork, and whose set of stationary points coincides with the set of solutions of the variational inequality problem. We also illustrate the dynamic supernetwork model through several numerical examples, for which the explicit equilibrium patterns are computed.
Valuing Money and Things: Why a $20 Item Can Be Worth More and Less Than $20

The study of risky decision making has long used monetary gambles to study choice, but many everyday decisions do not involve the prospect of winning or losing money. Monetary gambles, as it turns out, may be processed and evaluated differently than gambles with nonmonetary outcomes. Whereas monetary gambles involve numeric amounts that can be straightforwardly combined with probabilities to yield at least an approximate “expectation” of value, nonmonetary outcomes are typically not numeric and do not lend themselves to easy combination with the associated probabilities. Compared with monetary gambles, the evaluation of nonmonetary prospects typically proves less sensitive to changes in the probability range (inside the extremes of certainty and impossibility), which, among other things, can yield preference reversals. Generalizing on earlier work that attributed similar findings to the role of affect in the evaluation process (Rottenstreich, Y., C. K. Hsee. 2001. Money, kisses, and electric shocks: An affective psychology of risk. Psych. Sci.12(3) 185--190), we attribute the observed patterns to a fundamental difference in the evaluation of monetary versus nonmonetary outcomes. Potential pitfalls in the use of monetary gambles to study choice are highlighted, and implications and future directions are discussed.
African American Student Enrollment and Law School Ranking

The director of data research for the U.S. News law school rankings, Robert Morse, has initiated discussion about how if at all racial diversity should be included in the U.S. News rankings. This essay explores the relationship between African American student enrollment and U.S. News peer assessment scores of law schools. It explores this first at all ABA-approved law schools, and then within tiers of law schools. It finds a positive, though slight, relationship between African American student enrollment and peer assessment scores for the 26 most elite law schools, a marginally stronger relationship for the top 103 schools, and a slight negative relationship for the remaining schools. These findings are supplemented with data on the relationship between schools' U.S. News peer assessment scores and their proportions of Asian American students, Hispanic students, and minority faculty. * Judge John J. Parker Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina School of Law, 160 Ridge Road, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3380. Contact the author at abrophy@email.unc.edu or 919.962.4128. I would like to thank Leonard Baynes, Daniel M. Filler, Dana A. Remus, Gregg Polsky, Gary Rosin, and Norman Stein for help. 16 JOURNAL OF CIVL RIGH7S & ECONOMJCDEVELOPMENT [Vol. 27:1
Getting the Message Out: Media Context and Global Changes in Attitudes Toward Homosexuality:

Global attitudes involving homosexuality are changing rapidly. Tolerance toward lesbian and gay relationships has increased in almost every continent. More often than not, younger people have been at the forefront of this change. In this article, we explore explanations for this cross-national phenomenon. Specifically, we test to see whether contextual factors, those that allow lesbian women and gay men to freely express themselves or to gain cultural representation in the media, have driven this transformation. The results show that inter-cohort effects, or more liberal attitudes among younger people, are related to the pervasiveness of a nation’s mass media and to the presence of press freedom. This research suggests a strong link between increasing mass support for minority rights and the factors that encourage and allow minorities to express their viewpoints to others. These findings have broad implications, in that they help us understand the growing global acceptance around gay rights.
I Hear America Suing: Music Copyright Infringement in the Era of Electronic Sound

In April of 2012 Guy Hobbs, a photographer from Cape Town, sued Elton John in the United States claiming copyright infringement of Hobbs’s song “Natasha”. Shortly after Hobbs had attempted – without success – in the early 1980s to have “Natasha” published, Elton John, and his lyricist Bernie Taupin, published a recording of their song “Nikita”. “Nikita”, like “Natasha”, shared the conceit of a romantic relationship thwarted by politically established physical barriers like the Berlin Wall. The dispute was reported in the popular press as one between Hobbs and Elton John, yet the infringement claim was based entirely on alleged similarities between Hobbs and Taupin’s lyrics conveying a similar romantic quandary. By suing Elton John, Hobbs attempted to capitalize upon the fact that U.S. copyright law fuses authorship of words and music of songs into a single copyrightable work; even if Elton John contributed nothing to the lyrics of “Nikita”, as a co-author of the work he could be jointly liable for any copyright infringement associated with them . . . .
How many dimensions do we trade in ? product space geometry and latent comparative advantage

This paper proposes a new quantitative implementation of Balassa's idea that export composition and revealed comparative advantage inform the relationship between endowments in domestic factors of production and exports. It proposes that the export composition of countries is close to a low-dimensional manifold or"Product Space"within the space of export composition, which has as many dimensions as product lines. The Product Space corresponds to a few latent endowments explaining the structure of the trade matrix. The model uses non-linear techniques to identify the product space from the 2010 export matrix of 128 countries and 61 products, and to estimate the latent factors of endowments by country. It formalizes a concept of latent comparative advantage, which has practical country specific applications, relevant for"trade competitiveness"policies. Compared with classical revealed comparative advantage, the model assesses how well countries are matching their potential implied by the latent variables, and also identifies products for which the latent advantage is not yet revealed (extensive margin). The data suggests that the degree of overlap between latent and revealed advantage is a metric of"trade competitiveness."
Distilling the reserve for uncertain tax positions: the revealing case of black liquor

We examine the extent to which management discretion affects the reserve for unrecognized tax benefits. We analyze the financial statement disclosures of 19 paper companies that received a total of $6.4 billion in refundable excise taxes during 2009. All of these companies included the refunds in financial income, but 14 excluded all or part of the refunds from taxable income. Despite the magnitude and unprecedented nature of the exclusion, we find that only five of the excluding firms accrued a full reserve for an uncertain tax position, three firms accrued a partial reserve, and six firms did not accrue any reserve. This variation suggests managers enjoy wide latitude in applying the more likely than not standard for determining additions to the reserve. Our findings suggest that financial statement users should exercise caution when comparing tax reserves across companies. In addition, we find some evidence that income-increasing tax accrual decisions are related to characteristics generally associated with weak corporate governance.
Leverage: State Enforcement Actions in the Wake of the Robo-Sign Scandal

In the fall of 2010, in one of the largest scandals to ever hit the American court system, information gathered from lawsuits across the country revealed that tens of thousands of foreclosure filings were likely fraudulent—if not outright criminal. These revelations sparked a nation-wide investigation by all 50 state attorneys general to assess not only the extent of the scandal and its potential impacts but also potential legal and policy responses to such behavior. One of the tools at the state attorneys general’s disposal that might rein in this behavior includes each state’s Unfair and Deceptive Acts and Practices (UDAP) laws. Such laws typically prohibit “unfair” and “deceptive” practices and often give consumers, as well as state attorneys general, the ability to bring affirmative litigation to rein in practices that violate their terms. UDAP laws serve a critical consumer protection function by filling in gaps in the law where other, more targeted statutes might not cover practices that have a harmful impact on consumers. Since their inception, UDAP laws have been used to rein in abusive practices in such areas as used car sales, telemarketing and even the sale of tobacco products. This article explores the availability of UDAP laws and the remedies they provide to rein in the range of practices revealed in the so-called “Robo-Sign Scandal.” It concludes that such practices—the false affidavits, reckless claims and improper notarizations—all violate the essence of most state UDAP laws; accordingly, the remedies available under such laws may be wielded by state attorneys general to halt abusive foreclosure practices throughout the nation. Such remedies include civil penalties, actual and punitive damages, attorney’s fees and injunctions. What’s more, UDAP actions in light of robo-sign abuses could help chart a path towards a more robust mortgage modification regime, one that would result in ∗ Assistant Professor of Law, Albany Law School. The author would like to thank Elizabeth Renuart for her thoughtful and insightful editorial assistance with parts of this essay. Carolyn Carter of the National Consumer Law Center also contributed helpful comments. Meghan McDonough was, as always, a remarkable, efficient and effective research assistant, for which I am grateful. Fredd Brewer and Theresa Colbert provided essential support as well, for which I am grateful. Any errors or omissions are exclusively mine, however.
Timeshare Exchange Mechanisms

This paper focuses on the timeshare industry, where members own timeshare “weeks” and can exchange these weeks among themselves without a medium of exchange (such as money). Timeshare exchanges allow for the weeks to be redistributed among members to better match their preferences and thus increase efficiency. As such, the problem falls within the domain of matching problems, which have recently gained much attention in academia. We demonstrate theoretically that the two major timeshare exchange mechanisms used currently (deposit-first mechanism and request-first mechanism) can cause efficiency loss. We propose an alternate exchange mechanism, the top trading cycles chains and spacebank (TTCCS) mechanism, and show that it can increase the efficiency of the timeshare exchange market because TTCCS is Pareto efficient, individually rational, and strategyproof. We test the three exchange mechanisms in laboratory experiments where we simulate exchange markets with networked “timeshare members.” The results of the experiments are robust across four different environments that we construct and strongly support our theory. The research focuses on an industry not studied earlier within academia and extends theoretical work on mechanism design to cases where supply of resources is dynamic, but resources can be stored.
Does the Use of Financial Derivatives Affect Earnings Management Decisions

I present evidence consistent with managers using derivatives and discretionary accruals as partial substitutes for smoothing earnings. Using 1994–1996 data for a sample of Fortune 500 firms, I estimate a set of simultaneous equations that captures managers' incentives to maintain a desired level of earnings volatility through hedging and accrual management. These incentives include increasing managerial compensation and wealth, reducing corporate income taxes and debt financing costs, avoiding underinvestment and earnings surprises, and mitigating volatility caused by low diversification. After controlling for such incentives, I find a significant negative association between derivatives' notional amounts and proxies for the magnitude of discretionary accruals.
Thinking Like a Research Expert: Schemata for Teaching Complex Problem-Solving Skills

The difference between expert and novice problem solvers is that experts have organized their thinking into schemata or mental constructs to both see and solve problems. This article demonstrates why schemata are important, arguing that they need to be made explicit in the classroom. It illustrates the use of schemata to understand and categorize complex research problems, map the terrain of legal research resources, match appropriate resources to types of problems, and work through the legal research process. The article concludes by calling upon librarians and research instructors to produce additional schemata and develop a common hierarchical taxonomy of skills, a “Bloom's Taxonomy,” which would define legal research problem-solving skills more precisely and set benchmarks for assessment.
Civic Engagement with an International Focus: The Western Carolina Microfinance Project

Recent trends in political science include civic engagement and experiential education pedagogy, but this has been notably absent from courses on international relations and comparative politics. This article discusses how I designed an international civic engagement experience for students—without leaving campus. I echo other scholars' claim that civic engagement pedagogy can and should be used in courses with an international focus, and I provide one example of how to go about that task.
Terrorism Damage Exchange Rates: Quantifying Defender Disadvantage

Sources of funding, cost of attack and defense, damage exchange rates and some myths of terrorist activities are considered.