cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Are Children "Normal"?

Abstract We examine Becker's (1960) contention that children are “normal.” For the cross-section of non-Hispanic white married couples in the United States, we show that when we restrict comparisons to similarly educated women living in similarly expensive locations, completed fertility is positively correlated with the husband's income. The empirical evidence is consistent with children being “normal.” In an effort to show causal effects, we analyze the localized impact on fertility of the mid-1970s' increase in world energy prices, an exogenous shock that substantially increased men's incomes in the Appalachian coal-mining region. Empirical evidence for that population indicates that fertility increases with men's income..
Regime Type and Bilateral Treaty Formalization: Do Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup?

How does domestic regime type affect bilateral cooperation, and one of its most visible manifestations, bilateral treaties? This article explains how domestic political regime affects bilateral cooperation and, contrary to the expectations of some scholars, why autocracies should be expected to be more likely than democracies to enter into bilateral treaties. If the preferences of a pair of states are not identical, the sets of agreements that each party would consent to (win-sets) need to overlap for a bilateral treaty to be acceptable. Because additional domestic constraints reduce the size of a country’s win-set, autocracies should have broader win-sets than democracies. Therefore, autocratic dyads should be more likely to formalize bilateral treaties than other pairs of states. Based on an original data set, I present empirical evidence showing that pairs of autocracies are more likely than other pairs of states to enter into agreements formalizing bilateral cooperation.
Tarasoff, duty to warn laws, and suicide

Abstract Confidentiality has long been considered a necessary provision of effective mental health treatment. State mandated breaches of confidentiality required of psychologists when a patient makes a credible threat to the life of another have, many argue, compromised the entire administration of mental health services. In this context, there are two possible effects through which these laws could affect mental health services. The first is an effect that directly changes how mental health professionals and patients interact spawning from a credible threat of reporting. The second is an indirect effect that could arise in the general delivery of mental health services. Using teen suicides as a measure of the direct effect, and adult suicides as the indirect effect, I estimate the impact of these laws on mental health services and find that states with these laws experience an increase in teen suicides of about 9% but that no such effect exists among adult suicides.
An Impact Analysis of Microfinance in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Summary This paper applies the financing constraints approach to study whether microfinance institutions improved access to credit for microenterprises in Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to this approach, microenterprises with improved access to credit rely less on internal funds for their investments. Thus, we compare investment sensitivity to internal funds of microenterprises in municipalities with significant presence of MFIs to that of microenterprises in municipalities with no (or limited) presence of MFIs using Living Standards Measurement Survey and MFI branch location data. Results indicate that MFIs alleviated microbusinesses’ financing constraints. This approach is applicable to evaluating microfinance impact in other countries.
Using accounting information for consumption planning and equity valuation

This article develops a consumption-based valuation model that treats earnings and cash flow as complementary information sources. The model integrates three ideas that do not appear in traditional valuation models: (i) earnings provide information about future shocks to cash flow; (ii) earnings contain indiscernible transient accruals; and (iii) investors use cash flow and earnings to make allocation and consumption decisions and set price. Accordingly, the quality of earnings affects production and consumption as well as price. Among other implications, the model reveals that a valuation coefficient is not just a capitalization factor; it is the product of a capitalization factor and a structural factor reflecting earnings quality and accounting bias.
Rabinowitz Floer homology and mirror symmetry

We define a quantitative invariant of Liouville cobordisms with monotone filling through an action-completed symplectic cohomology theory. We illustrate the non-trivial nature of this invariant by computing it for annulus subbundles of the tautological bundle over $\mathbb{C} P^1$ and give further conjectural computations based on mirror symmetry. We prove a non-vanishing result in the presence of Lagrangian submanifolds with non-vanishing Floer homology.
The Impact of Local Knowledge on Banking

We use firm-level data to study how local knowledge impacts the wage and profitability of commercial banks. Using a novel regulatory and competitive environment as a natural experiment, we find that restrictions on the mobility of local knowledge negatively impact the incidence of new bank charters. Also consistent with expected theory, we also find no impact on banks formed through mergers or acquisition where the acquiring bank can simply purchase the local knowledge available. We also find that restrictions on the mobility of local knowledge decrease labor expenses. This supports the hypothesis that such mobility restrictions enable employers to extract rents from workers who lack bargaining power arising from a potential job change to a local rival. We also find that increases in labor restrictions are positively correlated with profitability, benefiting established banks because it restricts competitive with potential new banks that could potentially exploit local knowledge more effectively.
A Class of Elliptic Equations with Interior Degeneration

A class of linear degenerate elliptic equations inspired by nonlinear diffusions of image processing is considered. It is characterized by an interior degeneration of the diffusion coefficient. It is shown that no particularly natural, unique interpretation of the equation is possible. This phenomenon is reflected in the behavior of numerical schemes for its resolution and points to similar issues that potentially affect its nonlinear counterpart.
Holmes on Law and Morality

This article explores Justice Holmes' position on the relationship between law and morality, and discusses some of the mistaken interpretations of that position. Commentators' claims to the contrary notwithstanding, Holmes 'predictive theory of law and his discussion of the "bad man" do not illustrate the separation between law and morality but merely that lawful actions need not be performed for morally praiseworthy reasons and that positive law and morality do not always coincide. He suggested that the conflation of law and morality might be reduced by changing legal terminology so that moral and legal terms would not overlap, a proposal with possible drawbacks that Holmes did not seem to appreciate. That said, however, detractors overestimate the extent to which Holmes asserted that law and morality should be distinguished, thereby distorting both Holmes' views and the value of his insights.
Minimum Wages and Employment: Reply

The results of my study (Leigh 2003, 2004) on the effect of minimum wages on employment have been brought into question by Watson (2004), which raises some potential methodological concerns. Careful reanalysis of the Western Australian minimum wage experiment demonstrates that this critique is not well founded. Further checks show that the results are robust to a number of alternative specifications, in addition to those presented in the original article.
Commercial Buildings Capital Consumption and the United States National Accounts

Commercial buildings are a major asset class, over 30% of the value of the stock of all produced assets according to the BEA. Yet, US commercial buildings depreciation has not been comprehensively studied since the highly influential work of Hulten and Wykoff almost 40 years ago. This paper’s major contributions include: (i) More flexible and precise estimation of the net depreciation value/age profile, allowing much finer characterization of the building life cycle; (ii) Explicit quantification of the land value component of commercial property value, enabling net depreciation to be quantified as a fraction of remaining structure value; (iii) Inclusion of capital improvement expenditures, allowing estimates of “gross depreciation” (total capital consumption); and (iv) Application and implications of the paper’s findings to and for the national accounts.
Infrared parallaxes of young field brown dwarfs and connections to directly imaged gas‐giant exoplanets

We have measured high-precision infrared parallaxes with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope for a large sample of candidate young (≈10–100 Myr) and intermediate-age (≈ 100–600 Myr) ultracool dwarfs, with spectral types ranging from M8 to T2.5. These objects are compelling benchmarks for substellar evolution and ultracool atmospheres at lower surface gravities (i.e., masses) than most of the field population. We find that the absolute magnitudes of our young sample can be systematically offset from ordinary (older) field dwarfs, with the young late-M objects being brighter and the young/dusty mid-L (L3–L6.5) objects being fainter, especially at J band. Thus, we conclude the “underluminosity” of the young planetary-mass companions HR 8799b and 2MASS J1207–39b compared to field dwarfs is also manifested in young free-floating brown dwarfs, though the effect is not as extreme. At the same time, some young objects over the full spectral type range of our sample are similar to field objects, and thus a simple correspondence between youth and magnitude offset relative to the field population appears to be lacking. Comparing the kinematics of our sample to nearby stellar associations and moving groups, we identify several new moving group members, including the first free-floating L dwarf in the AB Dor moving group, 2MASS J0355+11. Altogether, the effects of surface gravity (age) and dust content on the magnitudes and colors of substellar objects appear to be degenerate. (© 2013 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
China's Stealth Urban Land Revolution

Both supporters and critics of China’s urban land use regime use the language of state ownership to describe it. But significant reforms have taken place to that regime since the early 1990s — so much so that over much of China’s urban land area, de facto re-privatization has already occurred. This is because the long-term use rights granted over urban land are economically and legally very similar to full private ownership, and indeed can be found in other jurisdictions where nobody doubts the existence of a private land ownership regime. Although some uncertainties remain, this is because the cost of maintaining them is low whereas the cost of resolving them is high; as that cost balance changes over time, there is reason to believe that they will be resolved before they become a drag on economic development. The analysis presented here applies not only to China, but to any jurisdiction where something less than full fee simple ownership (or its equivalent) is the dominant form of land tenure.
Public Housing in New Orleans Post Katrina: The Struggle for Housing as a Human Right

This article reflects on the post-Katrina demolition of public housing communities in New Orleans and associated loss of affordable apartments with a focus on the Columbia Parc redevelopment. Some key issues regarding displacement, race, gender, and public housing policies are referenced throughout. A concluding discussion of advocacy efforts to frame housing as a human right highlights a central, unmet movement demand: one for one replacement of all demolished public housing.
Integrating law and social epidemiology.

Social epidemiology has made a powerful case that health determined not just by individual-level factors such as our genetic make-up, access to medical services, or lifestyle choices, but also by social conditions, including the economy, law, and culture. Indeed, at the level of populations, evidence suggests that these “structural” factors are the predominant influences on health. Legal scholars in public health, including those in the health and human rights movement, have contended that human rights, laws, and legal practices are powerfully linked to health. Social epidemiology and health-oriented legal scholarship are complementary in their focus and their research needs. Legal scholarship has identified plausible ways in which legal and human rights factors could be influencing health, but empirical evidence has been limited.
On the optimal target curbside parking occupancy rate

Donald Shoup, following Vickrey, has long advocated cashing out free and underpriced parking. How should this be implemented for curbside parking in practice, considering the stochasticity of curbside parking vacancies? Shoup has proposed adjusting meter rates such that, for each block and time period, a target (average) curbside parking occupancy rate of 85% is achieved. This paper develops a simple structural model of stochastic steady-state curbside parking in an isotropic space, solving for the surplus-maximizing occupancy rate and the corresponding meter rate. By increasing curbside occupancy, a curbside parker imposes a curbside parking externality. The optimal meter rate internalizes this externality. The central comparative static result is that, ceteris paribus, the optimal occupancy and meter rates are higher, the higher is demand relative to curbside parking capacity. This suggests that, in practice, the occupancy rate should be higher in more trafficked locations and at busier times of the day.
On the Legitimacy of International Institutions

In the draft paper I prepared before coming to grand old Heidelberg to participate in this conference, I began by taking the position that the word “legitimate” was hopelessly ambiguous. It seemed to be trying to occupy a space between “lawful” and “unlawful”, yet that space is hard to measure or even imagine. Of course the ambiguity can be removed by eliminating the space — by stipulating that “lawful” and “legitimate” are synonymous. Black’s Law Dictionary tells us simply that “legitimate” is that which is “lawful, legal, recognized by law, or according to law.” Simple, but not helpful.
LIQUIDITY PROVISION VS. DEPOSIT INSURANCE: PREVENTING BANK PANICS WITHOUT MORAL HAZARD

In this paper I ask whether a central bank policy of providing liquidity to banks during panics can prevent bank runs without causing moral hazard. This kind of policy has been widely advocated, most notably by Bagehot (1873). I show a particular central bank liquidity provision policy can prevent bank panics without moral hazard problems. I also show that a deposit insurance policy, while preventing runs, can create moral hazard problems.
Guarding the Gate to the Courthouse: How Trial Judges Are Using Their Evidentiary Screening Role to Remake Tort Causation Rules

The article looks at what trial judges are actually doing in toxic tort cases in the post-Daubert world; it reviews and critiques cases in which judges have in effect adopted a new rule of causation law that requires plaintiffs to rely on epidemiology, and in particular epidemiology that demonostrates an increase in relative risk of 2.0 or greater; the article considers the substantive as well as the normative implications of this legal treatment of epidemiology.
IT Shields: Technology Adoption and Economic Resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic

We study the economic effects of information technology (IT) adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data on IT adoption covering almost three million establishments in the US, we find that technology adoption can partly shield the economy from the impact of the pandemic. In areas where firms adopted more IT the unemployment rate rose less in response to social distancing. Our estimates imply that if the pandemic had hit the world 5 years ago, the resulting unemployment rate would have been 2 percentage points higher during April and May 2020 (16% vs. 14%), due to the lower availability of IT. Local IT adoption mitigates the labor market consequences of the pandemic for all individuals, regardless of gender and race, except those with the lowest level of educational attainment.
Racially Polarized Voting

Whether voting is racially polarized has for the last generation been the linchpin question in vote dilution cases under the core, nationally applicable provision of the Voting Rights Act. The polarization test is supposed to be clear-cut (“manageable”), diagnostic of liability, and free of strong racial assumptions. Using evidence from a random sample of vote dilution cases, we argue that these objectives have not been realized in practice, and, further, that they cannot be realized under current conditions. The roots of the problem are twofold: (1) the widely shared belief that polarization determinations should be grounded on votes cast in actual elections, and (2) normative disagreement, often covert, about the meaning of racial vote dilution. We argue that the principal normative theories of vote dilution have conflicting implications for the racial polarization test. We also show that votes are only contingently related to the political preferences that the polarization inquiry is supposed to reveal, and, further, that the estimation of candidates’ vote shares by racial group from ballots cast in actual elections depends on racial homogeneity assumptions similar to those the Supreme Court has disavowed. Our analysis casts serious doubt on the notion — promoted in dicta by the Supreme Court and supported by prominent commentators — that courts should establish bright-line, vote-share cutoffs for “legally significant” racial polarization. The courts would do better to screen vote dilution claims using evidence of preference polarization derived from surveys, or non-preference evidence of minority political incorporation.
Localised and Biased Technologies: Atkinson and Stiglitz's New View, Induced Innovations, and Directed Technological Change

This study revisits the important ideas proposed by Atkinson and Stiglitz's seminal 1969 paper on technological change. After linking these ideas to the induced innovation literature of the 1960s and the more recent directed technological change literature, it explains how these three complementary but different approaches are useful in the study of a range of current research areas – though they may also yield different answers to important questions. It concludes by highlighting several important areas where these ideas can be fruitfully applied in future work.
On Hart's Category Mistake

This essay concerns Scott Shapiro's criticism that H.L.A. Hart's theory of law suffers from a “category mistake.” Although other philosophers of law have summarily dismissed Shapiro's criticism, I argue that it identifies an important requirement for an adequate theory of law. Such a theory must explain why legal officials justify their actions by reference to abstract propositional entities, instead of pointing to the existence of social practices. A virtue of Shapiro's planning theory of law is that it can explain this phenomenon. Despite these sympathies, however, I end with the suggestion that Shapiro's criticism of Hart, as it stands, is incomplete. Careful attention to Hart's notion of the internal point of view indicates that he was aware that legal justification ends with abstract objects, not practices, and that he offered his own explanation of this phenomenon.
Conflicts in managed care.

Managed care changes traditional indemnity insurance and fee-for-service practice by integrating the financing and delivery of medical services, with the aim of controlling costs and improving qual...
Cross-Sectional Profitability of Namibian Formal Small-Scale Mining Firms in 1990

Namibia considers formal small-scale mining firms (FSSMFs) as an important part of the solution to the problems of high unemployment, poverty, and the diminishing role of large-scale mining firms facing the country. However, to be a solution FSSMFs must be profitable first. This paper examines and presents simple estimates and tests of the probability of 25 Namibian SSMFs being profitable. The results suggest that in terms of productivity, specialization, size and structure, small is not as beautiful as generally presented. The findings recommend capital formation and competitive diversification of production and products.
Estimating the market risk premium

Abstract This paper provides a method for estimating the market risk premium that accounts for shifts in investment opportunities by explicitly modeling the underlying process governing the level of market volatility. I find that approximately 50% of the measured risk premium is related to the risk of future changes in investment opportunities. Evidence of a structural shift in the underlying volatility process suggests that the simple historical average of excess market returns may substantially overstate the magnitude of the market risk premium for the period since the Great Depression.
Dying to Know: A Demand for Genuine Public Access to Clinical Trial Results Data

Four years ago at the age of 34, I heard the awful words "I'm sorry, but you have breast cancer" coming from my doctor. After the initial shock of the diagnosis wore off, I like many others who have faced life-threatening diseases began to work with a team of physicians to develop an appropriate treatment plan, which included contemplating enrollment in a clinical trial. Quite unexpectedly, my position as an intellectual property professor whose scholarship focuses primarily on information control, my role as a member of my university's Institutional Review Board that oversees studies involving human subjects, and my newly acquired status of "cancer patient" converged. While researching various investigative study options for confronting my own disease, I soon became aware of an unacceptable and unnecessary risk directly shouldered by study participants, but also indirectly borne by patients generally.Each year approximately 10,000 clinical trials are conducted in the United States, with more than two million individuals enrolling in these studies on an annual basis. Individuals register to take part in such trials for a multiplicity of reasons. Often this includes the hope that they will potentially benefit from the offered treatment if they happen to be in the arm of the trial that receives the therapy under investigation. An additional rationale for most participants, is the belief that the information obtained from the study will contribute to the body of scientific knowledge, ultimately assisting future patients. Participating in a clinical trial is not, however, without risk. While it is impossible to completely eliminate all of the conceivable safety threats associated with enrollment in a clinical trial, patients are routinely exposed to a significant hazard of which they are not only unaware, but even more disturbing, one that is for the most part avoidable.Historically, results from previous clinical studies have not been required to be made public and the pharmaceutical industry has generally been exceptionally resistant to such disclosure. Drug companies have taken the position that if they are funding the research, the data produced should consequently be deemed their property, protectable through trade secret, contract, and patent law. Additionally, the Food and Drug Administration ("FDA") has generally supported this view and the courts have by and large similarly agreed. Accordingly, only a small fraction of trial outcomes areeventually made publicly available, usually through publication of articles concerning the study in medical journals.
Vote trading with and without party leaders

Two groups of voters of known sizes disagree over a single binary decision to be taken by simple majority. Individuals have different, privately observed intensities of preferences and before voting can buy or sell votes among themselves for money. We study, theoretically and experimentally, the implication of such trading for outcomes and welfare when trades are coordinated by the two group leaders and when they take place anonymously in a competitive market. The theory has strong predictions. In both cases, trading falls short of full efficiency, but for opposite reasons: with group leaders, the minority wins too rarely; with market trades, the minority wins too often. As a result, with group leaders, vote trading improves over no-trade; with market trades, vote trading can be welfare reducing. The theoretical predictions are strongly supported by the experimental data.
Measuring Municipal Borrowing Costs: How Missing Cost Information Biases Interest Rate Calculations

State and local governments issue billions of dollars’ worth of municipal bonds every year. At the same time, no single comprehensive measure has been available for debt managers to apply that fully captures their borrowing costs. In this article we compare a comprehensive measure called the internal financing rate with true interest cost (TIC), applying both to bond sales in Oregon in 1999. We find that the two measures produce statistically and practically different results and conclude that TIC typically understates the real cost of borrowing experienced by issuers. TIC is therefore a flawed measure for reporting results to administrators, elected officials, and the public. It is also an inappropriate measure for evaluating the performance of public debt managers.
Making fair ML software using trustworthy explanation

Machine learning software is being used in many applications (finance, hiring, admissions, criminal justice) having huge social impact. But sometimes the behavior of this software is biased and it shows discrimination based on some sensitive attributes such as sex, race etc. Prior works concentrated on finding and mitigating bias in ML models. A recent trend is using instance-based model-agnostic explanation methods such as LIME[36] to find out bias in the model prediction. Our work concentrates on finding shortcomings of current bias measures and explanation methods. We show how our proposed method based on K nearest neighbors can overcome those shortcomings and find the underlying bias of black box models. Our results are more trustworthy and helpful for the practitioners. Finally, We describe our future framework combining explanation and planning to build fair software.
A Fragment on Cnutism with Brief Divagations on the Philosophy of the Near Miss

This fragment is taken, mid-sentence as it were, from a longer discourse. It is plucked in process from a discussion of friendship for ideas. It is part of a longer journey through the annals of amity. The fragment also examines a fragment, a gloss on a text, a marginal comment, a handwritten note, which is taken to constitute the modern origin of Cnutism.
Can't Anyone Here Play This Game? Judging the FTC's Critics

The conventional wisdom is that the FTC was the governmental equivalent of a leper colony prior to 1969, and its credibility and reputation were restored only by the adoption of the wise recommendations in the 1969 ABA Report. There is no question that the FTC deserves plenty of criticism for its pre-1969 performance. It is also beyond doubt that there has been a dramatic turn-around in the intervening forty-five years, as the FTC adopted the recommendations in the 1969 Report. But, before we simply genuflect at the wisdom of those responsible for the ABA Report and the inherent virtue of their recommendations, it is worth noting that those recommendations also placed the FTC’s continued existence at risk as well—and did so for an entirely new set of reasons than had been the case pre-1969. Indeed, the last forty-five years of the FTC’s history (which are assuredly an improvement on the first fifty-five) are still a testament to the unintended consequences that can accompany even the best of reform proposals.
Homage to Clio, or, Toward an Historical Philosophy for Evolutionary Biology

Discussions of the theory and practice of systematics and evolutionary biology have heretofore revolved around the views of philosophers of science. I reexamine these issues from the different perspective of the philosophy of history. Just as philosophers of history distinguish between chronicle (non-interpretive or non-explanatory writing) and narrative history (interpre- tive or explanatory writing), I distinguish between evolutionary chronicle (cladograms, broadly construed) and narrative evolutionary history. Systematics is the discipline which estimates the evolutionary chronicle. Explanations of the events described in the evolutionary chronicle are not of the covering-law type described by philosophers of science, but rather of the how-possibly, continuous series, and integrating types described by philosophers of history. Pre-evolutionary explanations of states (in contrast to chroniclar events) are still widespread in "evolutionary" biology, however, because evolutionary chronicles are in general poorly known. To the extent that chronicles are known, the narrative evolutionary histories based on them are structured like conventional historical narratives, in that they treat their central subjects as ontological individuals. This conventional treatment is incorrect. The central subjects of evolutionary narratives are clades, -branched entities which have some of the properties of individuals and some of the properties of classes. Our unconscious treatment of the subjects of evolutionary narratives as individuals has been the cause of erroneous notions of progress in evolution, and of views that taxa "develop" ontogenetically in ways analogous to individual organisms. We must rewrite our narrative evolutionary histories so that they properly represent the branching nature of evolution, and we must reframe our evolutionary philosophies so that they properly reflect the historical nature of our subject. (Evolution; philosophy; systematics.)
The Property Platform in Anglo-American Law And The Primacy of the Property Concept

This Article proposes that the property concept, when reduced to its basic principles, is a foundational element and a useful lens for evaluating and understanding the whole of Anglo-American private law even though the discrete disciplines—property, tort, and contract—have their own separate and distinct existence. In this Article, a broad property concept is not focused just on things or on sticks related to things but instead is defined as relating to all things owned. These things may include one’s self and all the key elements associated with this broader set of things owned— including the right to exclude, ownership, dominion, authority, and the sic utere maxim—normally segregated to our discussions of property law, but that should be considered equally necessary to contract and tort law. In examining these property concepts, this Article goes further to contend that ownership in the self has a vital place in the property discussion. Every legal system must decide the level of protection or recognition of property in the self before it can make any decision on what rules to create in relation to real property, tort or contract. The rules in all three develop on their own but each can be measured from their consistency or deviation from a starting base of absolute property ownership in the self. Once we understand that the platform for each of these areas of law is based in the property concept, so too can we then have a metric for discussion to evaluate deviations from pure property principles that develop in each doctrine (or separate * Professor of Law, Chapman University School of Law. B.A., Western Michigan University, 1995, J.D., Cornell Law School, 1998. I appreciate the valuable comments and support of Jennifer Spinella. I also thank Stephen Lewis for research assistance. 454 GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 29:2 discipline) thereby allowing us to also isolate the most unique characteristics attributable only to a discrete subject like contract or tort. But understanding that the property concept is at the base of all three legal species—property, contract and tort—is nonetheless the necessary starting point for an understanding of any of them.
The politics of government financial management: Evidence from state bonds

Abstract In the $3.7 trillion U.S. state-and-local-government-bond market, greater issuance costs (lower issue-prices and greater underwriting fees) benefit financial institutions, while costing taxpayers. Campaign contributions by politically supportive underwriters can be associated with lower issuance costs. Alternatively, contributions can influence a politician to accept greater costs. This paper's evidence suggests that contributions influence politicians: In the absence of an underwriter auction, underpricing increases with the chosen underwriter's contributions relative to others. Moreover, the difference in the fees charged by contributing underwriters and those charged by non-contributing underwriters is 2.9%. In the presence of an underwriter auction, these results are statistically insignificant.
Group diversity and salience: A natural experiment from a television game show

Abstract We take advantage of a naturally occurring experiment in a television game show to study the impact of group characteristics on the group's ability to select salient solutions in a matching game. The Family Feud features families seeking to earn prizes by matching the results of public opinion surveys on various subjects. Our main result is that, controlling for task difficulty, families that are more diverse, as measured by both the intra-family generational gap and the relatedness of their members, are more successful at matching wider ranges of survey responses. This highlights the importance of member diversity in expanding information and decision frames of reference within a group.
Enhancing Perceived and Actual Audit Committee Effectiveness through Financial Expert Certification

SUMMARY: The purpose of this paper is to generate and inform academic, practitioner, and regulatory discussion on means to promote perceived and actual audit committee effectiveness. As one potential method, we propose that the SEC initiate a CPE-driven certification program for audit committee members designated as financial experts. Our proposal addresses many of the challenges that post-SOX audit committees face (cf. Beasley et al. 2009; Cohen et al. 2010) by emphasizing their oversight role, sharing audit committee best practices, enhancing the accountabilities of external auditors, and sending a strong signal to stakeholders that the audit committee owns the audit process.
The State of War Crimes Following the Israeli- Hezbollah War

This article examines the state of “war crimes” today by thinking through why the prosecution of war crimes has been frustrated for the 2006 Israeli - Hezbollah War in Lebanon. Even though the international machinery for trying war crimes has been set up - above all, the ICC - and the means of documenting and publicizing such crimes have expanded and become widely accessible globally, it is now nearly impossible to prosecute major geopolitical perpetrators on the world stage. The article focuses on legal issues regarding the conduct of war (jus in bello): how the threat of prosecution due to the use of excessive violence might affect the different tactical and strategic “self - interests” of the belligerents. Finally, it makes an argument in favour of when principles of proportionality (that the violence deployed was excessive and disproportionate to the threat) may trump principles of equity (that both parties deserving of punishment must be prosecuted), and assesses the political effi cacy of prosecutions in this case. This analysis brings to light several paradoxes in the fi eld of international justice generally, or international humanitarian law more specifi cally, and suggests why there is a certain contemporary impasse in the prosecution of war crimes. Cet article examine l’etat actuel des «crimes de guerre» en examinant en detail pourquoi la poursuite pour crimes de guerre a ete frustree pour la guerre Israeli - Hezbollah de 2006 au Liban. Quoique le mecanisme international pour faire le proces de crimes de guerre soit en place – surtout, la Cour penale internationale – et que les moyens de documenter et de rendre publics de tels crimes aient ete augmentes et soient devenus largerment accessibles globalement, il est maintenant presque impossible de poursuivre les auteurs de crimes geopolitiques sur la scene mondiale. L’article concentre sur des questions legales relatives a la conduite d’une guerre (jus in bello) : comment la menace de poursuite pour l’utilisation excessive de violence peut affecter les divers «interets propres» tactiques et strategiques des belligerants. En dernier lieu, il presente un argument pour quand les principes de proportionnalite (que la violence perpetree etait excessive et disproportionnee par rapport a la menace) peuvent l’emporter sur les principes d’equite (que les deux parties qui meritent d’etre punis doivent etre poursuivies) et evalue l’effi cacite politique de poursuites dans un tel cas. Cette analyse met en lumiere plusieurs paradoxes dans le domaine de la justice internationale en general, ou plus precisement le droit humanitaire international, et suggere qu’il y a une certaine impasse contemporaine quant a la poursuite pour crimes de guerre.
A framework for the analysis of financial reforms and the cost of official safety nets

Abstract The paper builds a multiperiod, general equilibrium framework for analyzing the macroeconomic effects of financial reforms in developing countries and the costs of maintaining official safety nets. When the creditworthiness of the non-financial sector is weak, the efficiency gains from financial liberalization may be countered by an increase in expected deposit insurance funding obligations, even when prudential supervision is strong. Moreover, given the distortions in a repressed financial system, attempts to reduce risk exposures by increasing bank capital/asset ratios may increase the funding obligations associated with deposit insurance, particularly when the debt-servicing capacity of non-financial firms is low.
An Overview of United States Corporate Governance in Publicly Traded Corporations

The paper was prepared as a national report for the 18th International Congress of Comparative Law to be held in Washington in July 2010. It is an overview of the legal rules and mechanisms designed to protect shareholders and allow manages to effectively run publicly traded corporations in the United States. The particular influences of the focus of corporate governance, federalism (particularly the role of financial scandals) and types of shareholder ownership are discussed. Another reporter deals with fiduciary duty and its enforcement under state law. An edited version of this report will appear in a future edition of the American Journal of Comparative Law.
An anarchist's reflection on the political economy of everyday life

James Scott has written a detailed ethnography on the lives of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia who choose to escape oppressive government by living at the edge of their civilization. To the political economist the fascinating story told by Scott provides useful narratives in need of analytical exposition. There remains in this work a "plea for mechanism"; the mechanisms that enable social cooperation to emerge among individuals living outside the realm of state control. Social cooperation outside the formal rules of governance nevertheless require "rules" of social intercourse and techniques of "enforcement" to ensure the disciplining of opportunistic behavior.
The Impact of Objective and Empathic Dispositions on Local Government Budget Analysts' Spending Preferences

The spending preferences of local government budget analysts are based on individual decision modes; how individuals attend to, encode, and process information. While academicians and practitioners tend to assume that a budget analyst's disposition to act leads to specific spending preferences, that assumption is rarely tested empirically. This study draws on two theoretical constructs derived from social psychology, rationality (objectivism), and emotions (empathy). Leary and his colleagues demonstrate that objectivism predisposes one toward rational decision making in a variety of settings, while Eisenberg and her colleagues show that highly empathic individuals are predisposed toward helping and prosocial behavior. Results of this study suggests that empathic budget analysts, those scoring higher on the empathy scale, have distinctly different spending preferences than those budget analysts scoring higher on the objectivism scale; empathic budget analysts are disposed toward humanitarian criteria in decision making while objective budget analysts are disposed toward quantifiable cost-benefit considerations.
Towards Self-Organizing, Smart Business Networks: Let’s Create ‘Life’ from Inert Information

In this chapter, we review three different theories that can inform how researchers can determine the performance of smart business networks, to include: (1) the Theory of Evolution, (2) the Knowledge-Based Theory of the Firm, and (3) research insights into computers and cognition. We suggest that each of these theories demonstrate that to be generally perceived as smart, an organism needs to be self-organizing, communicative, and tool-making. Consequentially, to determine the performance of a smart business network, we suggest that researchers need to determine the degree to which it is self-organizing, communicative, and tool-making. We then relate these findings to the Internet and the idea of smart business networks.
Foreign exchange risk and the cross-section of stock returns

Abstract We examine the relation between the cross-section of US stock returns and foreign exchange rates during the period from 1973 to 2002. We find that stocks most sensitive to foreign exchange risk (in absolute value) have lower returns than others. This implies a non-linear, negative premium for foreign exchange risk. Sensitivity to foreign exchange generates a cross-sectional spread in stock returns unexplained by existing asset-pricing models. Consequently, we form a zero-investment factor related to foreign exchange-sensitivity and show that it can reduce mean pricing errors for exchange-sensitive portfolios. One possible explanation for our findings includes Johnson's [2004. Forecast dispersion and the cross-section of expected returns. Journal of Finance, 59, 1957–1978] option-theoretic model in which expected returns are decreasing in idiosyncratic cashflow volatility.
The challenges of regulating warez trading

This article analyzes the policy challenges of legally conforming the behavior of warez traders. The article discusses the motivations for warez trading, how criminalizing the behavior may counterproductively encourage it, and why legislators and prosecutors continue to target warez trading despite the counterproductive effects.
The Smuggling of Art, and the Art of Smuggling: Uncovering the Illicit Trade in Cultural Property and Antiques †

We empirically analyze the illicit trade in cultural property and antiques, taking advantage of different reporting incentives between source and destination countries. We generate a measure of illicit trafficking in these goods by comparing imports recorded in United States' customs data and the (purportedly identical) trade recorded by customs authorities in exporting countries. This reporting gap is highly correlated with corruption levels of exporting countries. This correlation is stronger for artifact-rich countries. As a placebo test, we do not observe any such pattern for US imports of toys. We report similar results for four other Western country markets. (JEL F14, K42, Z11, Z13)
Domestic Debt Markets in Sub-Saharan Africa

This study discusses the role of domestic debt markets in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) based on a new dataset covering 27 SSA countries during the 20-year period 1980-2000. The study finds that domestic debt markets in these countries are generally small, highly short-term in nature, and often have a narrow investor base. Domestic interest payments present a significant burden to the budget, despite much smaller domestic than foreign indebtedness. The use of domestic debt is also found to have significantly crowded out private sector lending. Finally, the study identifies significant differences between the size, cost, and maturity structure of domestic debt markets in HIPCs and non-HIPCs.
Democracy and Development: Cruel Dilemma or Symbiotic Relationship?

The paper dissects the hypothesis that democracy is inimical to economic development. The historical origin of this perspective is presented and its key theoretical and empirical assumptions are examined and assessed. The chief conclusion is that there is no necessary tradeoff between democracy and development. When compared to authoritarian regimes, democracy is more likely to foster an environment that facilitates the innovative and entrepreneurial process so essential for sustained development. On the other hand, democracy is better for development only when accompanied by an expansion of markets and competition. Democracy without markets is unlikely to deliver significant growth. In this context, liberalized international trade can act in a productive symbiosis with democratic institutions to promote development by facilitating bilateral flows of ideas, knowledge, goods, services, and technology.
Finding a mediocre player

Abstract Consider a totally ordered set S of n elements; as an example, a set of tennis players and their rankings. Further assume that their ranking is a total order and thus satisfies transitivity and anti-symmetry. Following Frances Yao (1974), an element (player) is said to be ( i , j ) -mediocre if it is neither among the top i nor among the bottom j elements of S . Finding a mediocre element is closely related to finding the median element. More than 40 years ago, Yao suggested a very simple and elegant algorithm for finding an ( i , j ) -mediocre element: Pick i + j + 1 elements arbitrarily and select the ( i + 1 ) -th largest among them. She also asked: “Is this the best algorithm?” No one seems to have found a better algorithm ever since. We first provide a deterministic algorithm that beats the worst-case comparison bound in Yao’s algorithm for a large range of values of i (and corresponding suitable j = j ( i ) ) even if the current best selection algorithm is used. We then repeat the exercise for randomized algorithms; the average number of comparisons of our algorithm beats the average comparison bound in Yao’s algorithm for another large range of values of i (and corresponding suitable j = j ( i ) ) even if the best selection algorithm is used; the improvement is most notable in the symmetric case i = j . Moreover, the tight bound obtained in the analysis of Yao’s algorithm allows us to give a definite answer for this class of algorithms. In summary, we answer Yao’s question as follows: (i) “Presently not” for deterministic algorithms and (ii) “Definitely not” for randomized algorithms. (In fairness, it should be said however that Yao posed the question in the context of deterministic algorithms.)