cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Social Learning and Peer Effects in Consumption: Evidence from Movie Sales

Using box-office data for all movies released between 1982 and 2000, I quantify how much the consumption decisions of individuals depend on information they receive from their peers, when quality is ex ante uncertain. In the presence of social learning, we should see different box-office sales dynamics depending on whether opening weekend demand is higher or lower than expected. I use a unique feature of the movie industry to identify ex ante demand expectations: the number of screens dedicated to a movie in its opening weekend reflects the sales expectations held by profit-maximizing theatre owners. Several pieces of evidence are consistent with social learning. First, sales of movies with positive surprise and negative surprise in opening weekend demand diverge over time. If a movie has better than expected appeal and therefore experiences larger than expected sales in Week 1, consumers in Week 2 update upward their expectations of quality, further increasing Week 2 sales. Second, this divergence is small for movies for which consumers have strong priors and large for movies for which consumers have weak priors. Third, the effect of a surprise is stronger for audiences with large social networks. Finally, consumers do not respond to surprises in first-week sales that are orthogonal to movie quality, like weather shocks. Overall, social learning appears to be an important determinant of sales in the movie industry, accounting for 32% of sales for the typical movie with positive surprise. This implies the existence of a large “social multiplier” such that the elasticity of aggregate demand to movie quality is larger than the elasticity of individual demand.
Redlines and Greenspace: The Relationship between Historical Redlining and 2010 Greenspace across the United States.

Introduction: Redlining, a racist mortgage appraisal practice of the 1930s, established and exacerbated racial residential segregation boundaries in the United States. Investment risk grades assign...
Agricultural Liberalisation and the Least Developed Countries: Six Fallacies

Today, agriculture remains the most distorted sector of the world economy. Therefore, agricultural liberalization in the Doha negotiations is rightly the top priority. But the public-policy discourse on the subject remains fogged by a number of fallacies. These fallacies probably originated with the leadership of the World Bank but have now been embraced by the IMF, OECD, Oxfam and the leading academic critics of globalization. The paper identifies six fallacies and offers evidence and analysis to debunk them: (1) Agricultural border protection and subsidies are largely a developedcountry phenomenon. (2) Developed-country agricultural subsidies and protection hurt the poorest developing countries most. (3) Developed-country subsidies and protection hurt the poor, rural households in the poorest countries. (4) Developed-country agricultural protection and subsidies constitute the principal barrier to the development of the poorest developing countries. (5) Agricultural protection reflects double standard and hypocrisy on the part of the developed countries. (6) What the donor countries give with one hand (aid), they take away with the other (farm subsidies).
The Savers-Spenders Theory of Fiscal Policy

The macroeconomic analysis of fiscal policy is usually based on one of two canonical models--the Barro-Ramsey model of infinitely-lived families or the Diamond-Samuelson model of overlapping generations. This paper argues that neither model is satisfactory and suggests an alternative. In the proposed model, some consumers plan ahead for themselves and their descendants, while others live paycheck to paycheck. This model is easier to reconcile with the essential facts about consumer behavior and wealth accumulation, and it yields some new and surprising conclusions about fiscal policy.
FDI IN SPACE: SPATIAL AUTOREGRESSIVE RELATIONSHIPS IN FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT

Abstract There are a number of theoretical reasons why foreign direct investment (FDI) into a host country may depend on the FDI in proximate countries. Such spatial interdependence has been largely ignored by the empirical FDI literature, with only a couple recent papers accounting for such issues in their estimation. This paper conducts a general examination of spatial interactions in empirical FDI models using data on US outbound FDI activity. We find that estimated relationships of traditional determinants of FDI are surprisingly robust to inclusion of terms to capture spatial interdependence, even though such interdependence is estimated to be significant. However, we find that both the traditional determinants of FDI and the estimated spatial interdependence are quite sensitive to the sample of countries one examines.
Female Justices, Feminism, and the Politics of Judicial Appointment: A Re-Examination

In recent years, feminists in the United States have consistently advocated for the appointment of more female justices to the Supreme Court. Given the records of Justices O’Connor and Ginsburg on the Court and broader empirical findings below the Supreme Court level showing a relationship between a judge’s gender and her voting behavior, feminists have argued that, from a feminist perspective, the appointment of new female justices to the Court is likely to offer significant substantive, as well as symbolic, benefits. This Article challenges such feminist orthodoxy by showing that it is based on a mistaken view of existing empirical data on judicial behavior and its likely future predictive value. The article shows how, from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective, the current literature on judicial behavior in fact reveals little if any meaningful connection between a judge’s gender and her pro-feminist views, in a jurisprudential sense. By drawing on comparative experience in Canada, which between 2005 and 2008 had a female majority on its Supreme Court, the Article also shows how any femalefeminist connection previously evident in the United States, particularly at a Supreme Court level, is unlikely to endure in the future, given changes in the kind and degree of discrimination experienced by female justices prior to appointment. Consequently, the Article also calls for a change in strategy on the part of feminists to focus more directly on the demonstrated jurisprudential commitments, rather than on the gender, of future judicial nominees. *Assistant Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School. The author wishes to thank Ori Aronson, Mary Anne Case, Tom Ginsburg, Richard Holden, Alison LaCroix, Saul Levmore, Richard McAdams, Anup Malani, Adam Muchmore, Martha Nussbaum, Eric Posner, Laura Rosenbury, Margo Schlanger, Hila Shamir, Lior Strahilevitz, and participants in the University of Chicago Workshop on the Regulation of Family, Sex and Gender for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks are also due to Galina Fomenkova, Lauren Nelson, Krista Swip and Emily Tancer for excellent research assistance. All errors remain those of the author. 1 Adam Liptak, O’Connor Leap Moved Women up the Bench, N.Y. TIMES, July 5, 2005 (quoting Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority Foundation). Kim Gandy, One is Not Enough, NOW News, May 7, 2009, http://www.now.org/news/note/050709.html.
Catholics in Public Life: Judges, Legislators, and Voters

Does the desire to avoid culpable cooperation in moral evil make the conscientious Catholic judge unfit for judicial service in a constitutional system that will inevitably bring before the judge cases that implicate a host of issues as to which the Church offers moral teaching? Confused answers to this question reflect a larger confusion which often accompanies contemporary discussion of questions related to Catholic participation in public life. The confusion stems in large part from a failure to recognize that Catholics participate in public life in different ways that give them different sorts of public roles. This Essay tries to bring clarity to the confusion by focusing attention on one of those public roles, that of the judge. The analytical framework for exploring possible conflicts between the demands of the law and the demands of the judge's conscience is provided by the principle of cooperation with evil. Applying that traditional principle of moral theology, I conclude that there are not likely to be many situations in which a Catholic Supreme Court justice's fidelity to his or her conscience might require the justice to refuse to fulfill their judicial duties in a particular case. Indeed, it is more likely to be trial court judges who will face the most difficult questions of cooperation with moral evil.
Forming an Agenda--Ethics and Legal Ethics

The law profession is unique in the scope of the mandate it gives those within it to intervene in other people's affairs. As a result of this unique power of intervention, lawyers encounter a number of unique problems. This paper elucidates upon, and applies, the moral standards and intuitions to be used in approaching these problems. It argues that we should form our consciences in dialogue with our clients and that once they are formed we must follow them and limit our representation accordingly. If lawyer and client cannot agree on an agenda with which both are comfortable, the lawyer should withdraw. In any event, no client has the right to the assistance of a lawyer- or anyone else- in perpetrating an injustice.
Interpretable classifiers using rules and Bayesian analysis: Building a better stroke prediction model

We aim to produce predictive models that are not only accurate, but are also interpretable to human experts. Our models are decision lists, which consist of a series of if…then…statements (e.g., if high blood pressure, then stroke) that discretize a high-dimensional, multivariate feature space into a series of simple, readily interpretable decision statements. We introduce a generative model called Bayesian Rule Lists that yields a posterior distribution over possible decision lists. It employs a novel prior structure to encourage sparsity. Our experiments show that Bayesian Rule Lists has predictive accuracy on par with the current top algorithms for prediction in machine learning. Our method is motivated by recent developments in personalized medicine, and can be used to produce highly accurate and interpretable medical scoring systems. We demonstrate this by producing an alternative to the CHADS$_{2}$ score, actively used in clinical practice for estimating the risk of stroke in patients that have atrial fibrillation. Our model is as interpretable as CHADS$_{2}$, but more accurate.
Third-Degree Price Discrimination, Consumption Externalities and Social Welfare

This paper analyses monopolistic third-degree price discrimination in the presence of consumption externalities within two separate markets. Assuming linear inverse demands, we investigate an associated change in social welfare (the sum of the consumers' surpluses and the producer's profit) with the regime change from uniform pricing to price discrimination when both markets are open under either regime. It is shown that social welfare can improve even if total output is unaffected by the regime change. Moreover, it is possible that the sum of the consumers' surpluses also increases.
Exclusion and Property Rules in the Law of Nuisance

This Article offers a theory of nuisance law based on information costs. Like trespass, much of the law of nuisance relies on a strategy of exclusion in which rights are defined using low-cost signals like boundary crossings that are only indirectly tied to particular uses. Nuisance law also supplements and fine-tunes this Blackstonian package of entitlements by means of a governance strategy, which relies on signals more directly tailored to particular uses. The information-cost advantage of strategies close to the exclusion end of the spectrum helps explain why, despite repeated calls for more balancing, nuisance law focuses on who caused invasions of whose land. Also consistent with an exclusion strategy are the staying power of traditional nonreciprocal notions of causation and the virtual nonexistence in nuisance of Rule 4 liability rules, under which plaintiffs would be permitted to invoke the law to force the polluter either to abate or shut down upon payment of the polluter's damages. Applying Hohfeldian analysis, the Article shows that the common law gives polluters at most a privilege to pollute and that Rule 4 does not refine the basic exclusion regime but rather undermines it. The general question becomes when to soften exclusion with governance and the Article concludes by arguing that, in situations such as oil and gas fields and Boomer-style pollution cases with numerous victims, only small judicial governance-style safety valves are necessary, especially if legislative and administrative solutions are forthcoming. More generally, the information-cost theory of nuisance brings the utilitarian and corrective justice approaches to nuisance closer together. Nuisance law is not a mess or mystery but does contain within it the inflection point between exclusion and governance.
Too much pay-performance sensitivity?

Abstract We examine the relation between pay-performance sensitivity (PPS), the convexity of managerial compensation (Vega), and future stock risk and returns for a large sample of firms between 1992 and 2004. Higher PPS and Vega are both associated with lower future stock returns. Part of this negative relation can be explained by risk-averse managers decreasing equity risk in response to increases in PPS and Vega. However, even after correcting for lower future risk, future stock returns are negatively associated with the magnitude of option sensitivity. This finding is consistent with previous studies that link high option compensation to manager-owner agency problems.
The Humanity of Advocacy.

This paper considers three ways in which advocacy is related to what it means to be "human." The first is grounded in the nature of legal disputes, and in our expectations as a society of how those disputes are to be resolved in a way that is fair and just. The second arises from the fundamentally human character of the lawyer-client relationship, and the act of sharing expert legal knowledge, judgment and advice with another human being in need of those things. The third way advocacy has to do with humanity relates to the activity itself, which has to do with persuasion. Whether in a legal context or not, persuasion is a quintessentially human activity. It is this third aspect that forms the focus of the paper's exploration of the ways in which legal advocacy has to do with what it is to be human.
REGULATING FOR RATIONALITY

Traditional consumer protection law responds with various forms of disclosure to market imperfections that are the consequence of consumers being imperfectly informed or unsophisticated. This regulation assumes that consumers can rationally act on the information that it is disclosure’s goal to produce. Experimental results in psychology and behavorial economics question this rationality premise. The numerous reasoning defects consumers exhibit in the experiments would vitiate disclosure solutions if those defects also presented in markets. To assume that consumers behave as badly in markets as they do in the lab implies new regulatory responses. This Essay sets out the novel and difficult challenges that such “regulating for rationality” -- intervening to cure or to overcome cognitive error -- poses for regulators. Much of the novelty exists because the contracting choices of rational and irrational consumers often are observationally equivalent: both consumer types prefer the same contracts. Hence, the regulator seldom can infer from contract terms themselves that reasoning errors produced those terms. Rather, the regulator needs a theory of cognitive function that would permit him to predict when actual consumers would make the mistakes that laboratory subjects make: that is, to know which fraction of observed contracts are the product of bias rather than rational choice. The difficulties exist because the psychologists lack such a theory. Hence, cognitive based regulatory interventions often are poorly grounded. A particular concern is that consumers suffer from numerous biases, and not every consumer suffers from the same ones. Current theory cannot tell how these biases interact within the person and how markets aggregate differing biased consumer preferences. The Essay then makes three further claims. First, regulating for rationality should be more evidence based than regulating for traditional market imperfections: in the absence of a theory the regulator needs to see what actual people do. Second, when the facts are unobtainable or ambiguous regulators should assume that bias did not affect the consumer’s contracting choice because the assumption is autonomy preserving, administerable and coherent. Third, disclosure regulation can ameliorate some reasoning errors. Hence, abandoning disclosure strategies in favor of substantive regulation sometimes would be premature.
Does regulation substitute or complement governance

Abstract We examine whether firms utilize governance systems and increased monitoring mechanisms when information asymmetry and managerial discretion are limited. Given that such monitoring is costly, we expect regulated firms to use less monitoring if regulation substitutes for governance. Using data from initial public offerings, we document that regulated firms have greater proportions of monitoring directors and larger boards as well as use similar amounts of equity-based compensation as non-regulated firms. Further, regulated and unregulated firms are analogous in terms of observed trade-offs between traditional monitoring mechanisms and insider ownership. Finally, regulated firms appear to decrease monitoring following a period of deregulation. These findings support the hypothesis that regulation and governance are complements and are consistent with the notion that regulators pressure firms to adopt effective monitoring structures.
Reverse Broken Windows

1. A Tale of Two Reports On March 4, 2015, the Department of Justice released two reports related to Michael Brown’s death at the hands of Ferguson, Missouri, police offi cer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014. Brown’s death produced two waves of violent protests, one immediately after the shooting, lasting a few weeks, and another beginning on November 24, 2014, after a grand jury declined to indict Wilson. One 86-page report 1 meticulously detailed all of the evidence about Brown’s shooting, concluding that evidence would not support a federal prosecution for unreasonable use of deadly force. A 105-page report, 2 however, revealed a great number of racial disparities in the practices of the Ferguson police department and municipal court, including (a) a focus on extracting revenue from, rather than supplying protection to, its citizenry; (b) widespread violation of the reasonable-suspicion requirement for stops and frisks; (c) arrests in retaliation for expressions of contempt for the police; (d) racially disparate and unnecessary use of dogs and Tasers to arrest African-American defendants; (e) a lower rate of drug possession among black citizens searched by police, despite a much higher rate of being searched if stopped. This very brief essay will consider some of the implications of the Ferguson Report for how we understand the Brown Report, particularly the amazing number of witnesses initially claiming to have seen spectacular police misconduct. In short, it seems quite likely that police misbehavior over relatively low-level issues, like stop-and-frisk and arrest practice, led huge parts
Contract is Not Promise; Contract is Consent

In the 1980s, Charles Fried was right to focus on what was missing from both the “death of contract” and “law and economics” approaches to contract law: the internal morality of contract. But he focused on the wrong morality. Rather than embodying the morality of promise-keeping, the enforcement of contracts can best be explained and justified as a product of the parties’ consent to be legally bound. In this essay, I observe that, in Contract as Promise, Fried himself admits that the “promise principle” cannot explain or justify two features that are at the core of contract law: the objective theory of assent and the content of most “gap fillers” or default rules of contract law. After summarizing how consent to contract accounts for both of these features, I explain that, whereas the morality of promise-keeping is best considered within the realm of ethics or “private” morality, legally enforcing the consent of the parties is a requirement of justice or “public” morality.
The Interbellum Constitution: Federalism in the Long Founding Moment

Today, the mechanism of the spending power drives the gears of the modern federal machine. But early nineteenth century constitutional debates demonstrate that the spending power is essentially a workaround, and a recent one at that – a tool by which Congress achieves certain political and legal ends while respecting the formal boundaries set by Article I and the Tenth Amendment. This “interbellum” period was enormously significant for American constitutional law, in particular the constellation of related doctrines concerning congressional power that we now place under the general heading of “federalism”: the spending power, the enumerated powers of Article I, and the anticommandeering principle of the Tenth Amendment. As a historical matter, political and legal actors in the early nineteenth century believed themselves to be living in what this Article argues was a long founding moment, in which the fundamental terms of the federal-state relationship were still open to debate. Constitutional scholars have mistakenly overlooked the constitutional creativity of the period. As a normative matter, I argue for an approach to millennial constitutional interpretation that recognizes the ever-changing nature of the landscape of constitutional permissibility, and that offers documentary evidence of the precise contours of that change. Studying the evolution of the spending power over time, especially where the text itself remains constant, demonstrates that ideas about federal structure are not fixed. Therefore, constitutional federalism itself is not fixed – a particularly important insight in an area of constitutional doctrine that is dominated by originalist approaches.
German Interests in European Monetary Integration

This article explores the sources of the German govermnent’s position on European monetary integration since the first attempt at monetary union. I argue that German policy on European monetary integration was, until after EMU, driven by German foreign policy elites’ perception that integration could be used to achieve their primary geo-political goal, embedding Germany in European institutions to dismantle the security dilemma with its European neighbours, particularly with France. After the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, this situation was reversed, as domestic economic interests and state financial authorities have taken the lead in shaping Germany’s policy on European monetary integration, with foreign policy elites playing a secondary role. Thus German policy has come to resemble more the policies of other European monetary union member states, in that domestic economic concerns have taken precedence over geo-political interests in the making of policy on European monetary integration.
Frequent issuers' influence on long-run post-issuance returns.

Abstract Prior studies conclude that firms’ equity underperforms following many individual sorts of external financing. These conclusions naturally raise significant questions about market efficiency and/or about the techniques used to measure long-run “abnormal returns.” Rather than concentrating on a single security type or issuance, we examine long-run performance following any and all sorts of security issuances. Initial financing events do not associate with underperformance; however, subsequent financings do. Our results suggest that negative post-issuance returns have nothing to do with the specific type of security issued, and everything to do with the number of types of securities issued.
Exploiting the Implementation Gap: Policy Divergence and Industrial Upgrading in China's Wind and Solar Sectors

This article argues that manufacturing policies of Chinese local governments have provided an important corrective to some of the weaknesses inherent in the central government's indigenous innovation framework, most importantly its inattention to the importance of advanced manufacturing capabilities for innovation. Based on an original dataset of over one hundred executive interviews conducted with 43 Chinese wind and solar firms, I identify both central government R&D funding and continued local government support for manufacturing as critical factors in enabling innovation among China's renewable energy firms. In particular, this article shows that firms have utilized a combination of both central and local government policies to establish unique engineering capabilities required for innovation in commercialization and scale-up to mass production. The findings suggest that continued local government support for the manufacturing economy has not undermined central government innovation policies, but has (1) broadened the range of resources available to entrepreneurial firms and (2) enabled new options for industrial upgrading that are outside the conceptualization of innovation underlying the central government's indigenous innovation framework.
Positive Law as an Ethic: Illustrations of the Ascent of Positive Law to Ethical Status in the Commercial Sector

This article begins with four situations, the first three of which are common to many businesspeople and persons in the United States today and the fourth, unfortunately, is growing: Setting the minimum level at which workers are paid; going bankrupt to avoid paying for credit card purchases, claiming a questionable deduction in calculating one's federal income tax liability, and violating the law in every state by a major U.S. corporation.
The Lichnerowicz–Obata theorem for the Kohn Laplacian in three dimensions

Abstract We prove rigidity for the Lichnerowicz-type eigenvalue estimate for the Kohn Laplacian on strictly pseudoconvex three-manifolds with nonnegative CR Paneitz operator and positive Webster curvature.
A direct test of the homevoter hypothesis

Abstract We propose a methodology that facilitates a direct test of the homevoter hypothesis, which posits that homeowners vote in favor of public projects they perceive increase residential property values and against those that do not. First, we estimate how pre-referendum events that signal a higher probability that the public project will be undertaken impact local residential property values before the referendum is held. These pre-referendum impacts are considered noisy signals to homeowners about the market's assessment of the net marginal benefits of the project. Second, we aggregate these market signals to the precinct level and relate them to precinct-level voting results concerning the proposed project. We apply this two-step approach to the 2004 referendum in Arlington, Texas, for a publicly subsidized stadium for the NFL Dallas Cowboys. The analysis supports the homevoter hypothesis and establishes a possible methodology for future evaluations in this small but growing empirical literature.
Valence uncertainty and the nature of the candidate pool in elections

Political parties in US politics are becoming increasingly polarized, with a growing number of extreme candidates entering electoral races. Why would extremists challenge more moderate opponents, s...
Judicial Independence and Accountability in an Age of Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments

Selection of American judges is one of the battle fields in the contemporary culture war, primarily due to judicial involvement in contentious issues such as abortion, pornography, the death penalty, racial discrimination, the role of religion in public life, and the definition of marriage. As a result, the organized bar and many leaders in the judiciary gravely warn that judicial independence is “in jeopardy,” while social conservatives caution that judicial accountability is greatly diminished or non-existent and the “end of democracy” has arrived or is fast approaching.The relative value and relationship (if any) of judicial independence and accountability have been debated since the inception of this nation. While this is a profoundly interesting and important debate, it is not the purpose of this article to join that debate directly. The aim of this article is more modest – to explore the impact of an increasingly common legal argument – that there can be an “unconstitutional constitutional amendment” – on judicial independence and accountability.The first section of this article provides an overview of the different processes for amending a constitution. The second section of this article discusses procedural review of constitutional amendments, while substantive review is examined in the third section. Both of these sections explore the issues related to judicial review in particular. This article concludes that judicial review of the procedural regularity of the amendment process is appropriate, but that substantive review should be limited to post-passage cases and rarely undertaken.
EU Accession to the ECHR: Competence, Procedure and Substance

INTRODUCTION 1115 I. COMPETENCE 1116 A. Competence and Process 1116 B. Competence and Need 1118 II. PROCEDURE 1119 A. Choice and Consequence for Claimants 1120 B. Constraints on Claimant Choice: Determination of the Respondent 1122 C. Constraints on Claimant Choice: The Routing of a Case to the Strasbourg Court 1123 D. Implications of Schema for Claimants: The Problem of Delay 1130 III. SUBSTANCE 1133 A. The Bosphorus Ruling post Accession 1133 B. Autonomous Interpretation post Accession 1140 1. An Autonomous Legal Order 1140 2. A Distinctive Legal Order 1141 3. Autonomous Interpretation of EU Law 1143 C. Convention and Charter post Accession 1144 1. Multiple Rights-Based Claims 1144 2. Charter Rights that “Correspond” to Convention Rights 1145 3. Same Meaning and Scope 1146 CONCLUSION 1147
Social Deprivation as Tempting Fate

Two recent discussions concerning punishment of the socially deprived reach conflicting conclusions. Andrew von Hirsch and Andrew Ashworth argue that we should sympathize with the predicament of the poor and therefore mitigate their sentences. Peter Chau disputes von Hirsch and Ashworth’s conclusion, contending that having to face strong temptations is not an appropriate ground for reducing anyone’s punishment for their crimes. I argue that neither von Hirsch and Ashworth’s account nor Chau’s critique of it is persuasive. I then take up the challenge of showing why social deprivation renders punishment problematic. I contend that it establishes a perverse incentive structure that is persistent and powerful, requiring the disadvantaged to exercise self-control on an ongoing basis. Repeated acts of self-control are difficult, especially for youths whose skills at it are not yet fully developed. Also, in a variety of more and less subtle ways, social deprivation reduces the incentives for self-control and may work to stunt its development. In closing, I briefly consider the options for responding to the crimes of the chronically disadvantaged.
The Changing Landscape of Blockbuster Punitive Damages Awards

This article investigates the determinants of the blockbuster punitive damages awards of at least $100 million. As of the end of 2008, there had been one hundred such awards with an average value of $3.0 billion. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in State Farm v. Campbell suggested a single-digit upper bound on the punitive damages/compensatory damages ratio, which reduced the annual number of blockbuster awards, the total annual value of blockbuster awards, and the punitive damages/compensatory damages ratio. Applying the 1:1 ratio from Exxon Shipping Co. et al. v. Baker et al. broadly would eliminate most of the blockbuster awards.
Responding to Nietzsche: The Constructive Power of Destruktion

As a student of Hans-Georg Gadamer, and later a translator and important commentator on Gadamer’s philosophy, P. Christopher Smith is widely acknowledged to be a leading hermeneutical philosopher. In a series of works, Smith has argued that Gadamer provides an important corrective to Nietzsche’s caustic critical challenges, but that Gadamer’s hermeneutics has no relevance for legal theory because law is just the manifestation of will to power. In this paper I argue that Smith misunderstands the nature of legal practice. Starting with a re-reading of the debate between Gadamer and Jacques Derrida about the legacy of Nietzsche’s philosophy, I argue that Gadamer responds to Nietzsche’s challenge in a manner that is exemplified in the critical dimensions of legal practice. Using the example of family law that Smith offers, I contend that Smith underestimates the critical and interpretive elements inherent in legal practice and captured in Gadamer’s philosophy. I conclude that Gadamer offers a persuasive answer to Nietzsche’s challenge. Law, Culture and the Humanities 2007; 3: 127 154 I. Recovering Shades of Gray in Nietzsche’s Shadow More than one hundred years after his death, Nietzsche’s long shadow continues to cloud the self-assurance of legal reasoning to the point of casting legality itself into doubt. There is no convincing demonstration that law can survive Nietzsche’s scathing insights, which are carried forward today through various critical interventions; there is no alleviation of the suspicion that the ‘‘rule of law’’ is yet another modernist fable that conceals the play of power. For the most part, theorists either turn away from the corrosive effects of Nietzschean critique, or they revel in the anarchy seemingly invited by Nietzsche. In this article, I respond to Nietzsche’s formidable challenge more directly by way of confession and avoidance: Even if we accept Nietzsche’s claims in their full radicality, I argue that it is possible to defend both a critical engagement with law and the critical potential of law. I endorse Gadamer’s thesis that Destruktion is
Leveraging a call-put ratio as a trading signal

We examine whether a put-call ratio, derived from a unique set of market data, can be used to predict directional moves in asset prices during various market conditions between March 2005 and Decem...
From the Rule of Law to the Constitutionalist Makeover: Changing European Conceptions of Public International Law

The article identifies major characteristics of how public international law has been endorsed by European legal scholars. Prominent among these is the repeated effort to pinpoint the deficiency of public international law as it stands and to suggest improvements. The article tries to identify a chain of substitutions with regard to what is taken to be the core problem. It can be shown how attempts to overcome one reveal another. The chain of substitution, reconstructed in this article, begins with decentralization and results in the realization that public international law is inadequate from a constitutional point of view. Not surprisingly, the constitutionalization of public international law becomes an issue. However, it turns out that some current ideas regarding the constitutionalization of public international law, rather than taking constitution-making seriously, appear to be idealistic refractions of the real absorption of legality by administrative processes. Rather than offering a solution, they may very well be part of the constitutional deficiency that they claim to resolve.
ASYMMETRIC VOLATILITY AND RISK IN EQUITY MARKETS

It appears that volatility in equity markets is asymmetric: returns and conditional volatility are negatively correlated. We provide a unified framework to simultaneously investigate asymmetric volatility at the firm and the market level and to examine two potential explanations of the asymmetry: leverage effects and volatility feedback. Our empirical application uses the market portfolio and portfolios with different leverage constructed from Nikkei 225 stocks. We reject the pure Ž. leverage model of Christie 1982 and find support for a volatility feedback story. Volatility feedback at the firm level is enhanced by strong asymmetries in conditional covariances. Conditional betas do not show significant asymmetries. We document the risk premium implications of these findings.
IQ and alcohol consumption : International data

Abstract There is evidence at the individual level that alcohol consumption and IQ are positively related: individuals with higher IQ scores tend to consume relatively more alcohol than those with lower IQs. This paper empirically tests whether this relationship holds at the national level. Using national IQ measures and data on per capita alcohol consumption, we test whether higher-IQ countries on average also have higher levels of per capita beer and wine consumption. Based on regression analysis for a sample of 99 countries, the data do not reject the hypothesis that, other factors held constant, higher IQ predicts higher levels of per capita alcohol consumption at the national level.
Meta-Learning with Neural Tangent Kernels

Model Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) has emerged as a standard framework for meta-learning, where a meta-model is learned with the ability of fast adapting to new tasks. However, as a double-looped optimization problem, MAML needs to differentiate through the whole inner-loop optimization path for every outer-loop training step, which may lead to both computational inefficiency and sub-optimal solutions. In this paper, we generalize MAML to allow meta-learning to be defined in function spaces, and propose the first meta-learning paradigm in the Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) induced by the meta-model's Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK). Within this paradigm, we introduce two meta-learning algorithms in the RKHS, which no longer need a sub-optimal iterative inner-loop adaptation as in the MAML framework. We achieve this goal by 1) replacing the adaptation with a fast-adaptive regularizer in the RKHS; and 2) solving the adaptation analytically based on the NTK theory. Extensive experimental studies demonstrate advantages of our paradigm in both efficiency and quality of solutions compared to related meta-learning algorithms. Another interesting feature of our proposed methods is that they are demonstrated to be more robust to adversarial attacks and out-of-distribution adaptation than popular baselines, as demonstrated in our experiments.
Discreteness and integrality in Conformal Field Theory

Various observables in compact CFTs are required to obey positivity, discreteness, and integrality. Positivity forms the crux of the conformal bootstrap, but understanding of the abstract implications of discreteness and integrality for the space of CFTs is lacking. We systematically study these constraints in two-dimensional, non-holomorphic CFTs, making use of two main mathematical results. First, we prove a theorem constraining the behavior near the cusp of integral, vector-valued modular functions. Second, we explicitly construct non-factorizable, non-holomorphic cuspidal functions satisfying discreteness and integrality, and prove the non-existence of such functions once positivity is added. Application of these results yields several bootstrap-type bounds on OPE data of both rational and irrational CFTs, including some powerful bounds for theories with conformal manifolds, as well as insights into questions of spectral determinacy. We prove that in rational CFT, the spectrum of operator twists $$ t\ge \frac{c}{12} $$ is uniquely determined by its complement. Likewise, we argue that in generic CFTs, the spectrum of operator dimensions $$ \Delta >\frac{c-1}{12} $$ is uniquely determined by its complement, absent fine-tuning in a sense we articulate. Finally, we discuss implications for black hole physics and the (non-)uniqueness of a possible ensemble interpretation of AdS3 gravity.
Average of Dirichlet coefficients of cuspidal representations related to GL(2)

Let $$\pi $$ be a cuspidal representation on $${{\,\mathrm{GL}\,}}(2,\mathbb {A}_{\mathbb {Q}}).$$ We give nontrivial lower and upper bounds for average of absolute values of Dirichlet coefficients associated to $$\pi ;$$ and nontrivial upper bound in the case of $${\text {Sym}}^k\pi ,$$ $$k=2, 3.$$ These bounds generalize the known estimates in holomorphic case to Maass forms, without assuming the Ramanujan–Petersson conjecture.
Penny Ingestion: Can We Really Manage Expectantly?

We present a case to open discussion on the guideline regarding the management of coin ingestion in children. A 2-year-old female presented to the ED after mother witnessed her swallowing a penny. An abdominal radiograph showed a round metallic 19 mm object at the left upper quadrant, confirming a penny in the stomach. Given no symptoms and normal physical exam, the family was instructed to observe for abdominal signs, to strain stool, and repeat an abdominal radiograph in two weeks. Over the following two weeks, the patient developed intermittent abdominal pain with decreased appetite. Serial abdominal radiographs …
Variational system identification of the partial differential equations governing microstructure evolution in materials: Inference over sparse and spatially unrelated data

Abstract Pattern formation is a widely observed phenomenon in diverse fields including materials physics, developmental biology and ecology, among many others. The physics underlying the patterns is specific to the mechanisms, and is encoded by partial differential equations (PDEs). With the aim of discovering hidden physics, we have previously presented a variational approach to identifying such systems of PDEs in the face of noisy data at varying fidelities (Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 356:44–74, 2019). Here, we extend our variational system identification methods to address the challenges presented by image data on microstructures in materials physics. PDEs are formally posed as initial and boundary value problems over combinations of time intervals and spatial domains whose evolution is either fixed or can be tracked. However, the vast majority of microscopy techniques for evolving microstructure in a given material system deliver micrographs of pattern evolution over domains that bear no relation with each other at different time instants. The temporal resolution can rarely capture the fastest time scales that dominate the early dynamics, and noise abounds. Furthermore, data for evolution of the same phenomenon in a material system may well be obtained from different physical specimens. Against this backdrop of spatially unrelated, sparse and multi-source data, we exploit the variational framework to make judicious choices of weighting functions and identify PDE operators from the dynamics. A consistency condition arises for parsimonious inference of a minimal set of the spatial operators at steady state. It is complemented by a confirmation test that provides a sharp condition for acceptance of the inferred operators. The entire framework is demonstrated on synthetic data that reflect the characteristics of the experimental material microscopy images.
Deep Learning Based Covert Attack Identification for Industrial Control Systems

Cybersecurity of Industrial Control Systems (ICS) is drawing significant concerns as data communication increasingly leverages wireless networks. A lot of data-driven methods were developed for detecting cyberattacks, but few are focused on distinguishing them from equipment faults. In this paper, we develop a data-driven framework that can be used to detect, diagnose, and localize a type of cyberattack called covert attacks on smart grids. The framework has a hybrid design that combines an autoencoder, a recurrent neural network (RNN) with a Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) layer, and a Deep Neural Network (DNN). This data-driven framework considers the temporal behavior of a generic physical system that extracts features from the time series of the sensor measurements that can be used for detecting covert attacks, distinguishing them from equipment faults, as well as localize the attack/fault. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method through a realistic simulation study on the IEEE 14-bus model as a typical example of ICS. We compare the performance of the proposed method with the traditional model-based method to show its applicability and efficacy.
Minimax Rate Optimal Adaptive Nearest Neighbor Classification and Regression

$k$ Nearest Neighbor (kNN) method is a simple and popular statistical method for classification and regression. For both classification and regression problems, existing works have shown that, if the distribution of the feature vector has bounded support and the probability density function is bounded away from zero in its support, the convergence rate of the standard kNN method, in which $k$ is the same for all test samples, is minimax optimal. On the contrary, if the distribution has unbounded support, we show that there is a gap between the convergence rate achieved by the standard kNN method and the minimax bound. To close this gap, we propose an adaptive kNN method, in which different $k$ is selected for different samples. Our selection rule does not require precise knowledge of the underlying distribution of features. The proposed adaptive method significantly outperforms the standard one. We characterize the convergence rate of the proposed adaptive method, and show that it matches the minimax lower bound.
Labor Market Frictions and Moving Costs of the Employed and Unemployed

This paper examines the role of labor market frictions and moving costs in explaining the migration behavior of US workers by employment status. Using data on low-skilled workers from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), I estimate a dynamic model of individual labor supply and migration decisions. The model incorporates a reduced-form search model and allows for migration for non-market reasons. My estimates show that moving costs are substantial and that labor market frictions primarily inhibit migration of the employed. I use the model to study migration responses to local labor market shocks and to a moving subsidy. Workers' preferences for non-market amenities, coupled with substantial moving costs and employment frictions, grant market power to incumbent employers. Large moving costs also likely affect employers' recruiting behavior.
Predicting orientation-dependent plastic susceptibility from static structure in amorphous solids via deep learning.

It has been a long-standing materials science challenge to establish structure-property relations in amorphous solids. Here we introduce a rotationally non-invariant local structure representation that enables different predictions for different loading orientations, which is found essential for high-fidelity prediction of the propensity for stress-driven shear transformations. This novel structure representation, when combined with convolutional neural network (CNN), a powerful deep learning algorithm, leads to unprecedented accuracy for identifying atoms with high propensity for shear transformations (i.e., plastic susceptibility), solely from the static structure in both two- and three-dimensional model glasses. The data-driven models trained on samples at one composition and a given processing history are found transferrable to glass samples with different processing histories or at different compositions in the same alloy system. Our analysis of the new structure representation also provides valuable insight into key atomic packing features that influence the local mechanical response and its anisotropy in glasses. Predicting a priori local defects in amorphous materials remains a grand challenge. Here authors combine a rotationally non-invariant structure representation with deep-learning to predict the propensity for shear transformations of amorphous solids for different loading orientations, only given the static structure.