cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Asymmetric Effects of Oil Price Shocks on the Canadian Economy

A threshold vector autoregression (TVAR) is estimated to study the effects of oil price shocks on Canadian output and price level. While much of the literature has investigated potential asymmetric effects of positive and negative oil price shocks within a linear vector autoregression (VAR), we do so within a nonlinear VAR. Further, we extend the analysis to consider the correlation between asymmetries associated with the business cycle phase and size/sign asymmetries. Positive oil price shocks are found to have a stronger effect on output than negative oil price shocks. This asymmetry is significant in recessions, but lessened during expansions. The results also suggest that the reduction in inflation due to a negative oil price shock is larger than the increase in inflation following a positive oil price shock, especially during periods of low output growth. Yet, neither inflation nor output growth seems to vary disproportionately with the size of the oil price shock. In general, the results are robust to the ordering of the variables in the VAR process and to the time window over which the net oil price change is computed. Keywords: Net Oil Price Increase, Asymmetry, Vector Threshold Autoregressions, Nonlinear Impulse Response Functions JEL Classifications : C32, E32, Q43
Very Like a Whale: Analogy and the Law

Analogical reasoning is common in legal writing, just as analogies are a part of everyday life. Indeed, they may be inescapable features of human cognition. Used well, analogies illuminate the writ...
Sprawl and Blight

Abstract The objective of this paper is to show how the same market failures that contribute to urban sprawl also contribute to urban blight. The paper develops a simple dynamic model in which new suburban and older central-city properties compete for mobile residents. The level of housing services generated by older properties depends on current maintenance or reinvestment expenditures. In this setting, market failures that reduce the cost of occupying suburban locations, thus leading to excessive suburban development, also depress central-city housing prices and undermine maintenance incentives, leading to deficient levels of central-city reinvestment. Corrective policies that shift population from the suburbs to the center result in higher levels of reinvestment in central-city housing, therefore reducing blight.
Innovation Waves, Investor Sentiment, and Mergers !

We develop a theory of innovation waves, investor sentiment, and merger activity based on uncertainty aversion. Investors must typically decide whether or not to fund an innovative project with very limited knowledge of the odds of success, a situation that is best described as iKnightian uncertainty.i We show that uncertainty-averse investors are more optimistic on an innovation if they can also make contemporaneous investments in other innovative ventures. This means that uncertainty aversion makes investment in innovative projects strategic complements, which results in innovation waves. We also show that innovation waves may be sparked by favorable technological shocks in one sector, and then spill over to other contiguous sectors. Thus, innovation waves ripple through the economy amid strong investor sentiment. Finally, we argue that an active M&A market promotes innovative activity and leads to greater innovation rates and Orm valuations.
Doing Affirmative Action

Based on the two years I worked in the Admissions Office at Princeton University, I argue that many opponents of racial preferences misunderstand how selective universities evaluate applicants and, as a result, their policy arguments are weaker than generally believed. More specifically, I rebut three major critiques put forth by skeptics of affirmative action. First, I claim that racial preferences are less robust than most critics imagine. Second, I argue that affirmative action imposes fewer costs on both whites and blacks than critics indicate. Finally, I show that racial preferences have less weighty moral consequences than critics believe. In fact, an attack on affirmative action — divorced from a larger project of increasing fairness in college admissions — amounts to an attack on black social mobility.
Entrepreneurial Optimism in the Market for Technological Inventions

How do potentially optimistic entrepreneurs attract prospective investors? We investigate an entrepreneur's decision to pursue either disclosure---where investors inspect the invention---or a contingent payment scheme (CPS) offer (e.g., salary deferral, royalty-based license)---where an invention's value is inferred from the entrepreneur's willingness to make her pay contingent on the invention's success. Using a parsimonious model, we highlight the role of optimism and demonstrate that it only affects CPS ex post. As a result, a novel trade-off unfolds ex ante: In choosing an action that maximizes the valuation of the invention, a moderately wealthy entrepreneur weighs optimism discount (affecting CPS) versus imitation discount (affecting disclosure). More broadly, the paper advances a view of entrepreneurs as optimists, thus departing from the prevailing approach, which characterizes entrepreneurs as opportunistic individuals who consciously pursue self-serving goals.
Information in the Term Structure: A Forecasting Perspective

The existing literature finds that information not captured by traditional term structure factors helps predict excess bond returns. When estimating no-arbitrage affine term structure models, align...
Intrinsic quality factor extraction of multi-port cavity with arbitrary coupling

We derived S-parameter based expressions for the intrinsic quality factor of an arbitrary coupled multiport microwave cavity and a non-ideal test fixture. Practical accuracy limitations of the obtained expressions specifically for superconducting accelerator cavities were evaluated both analytically and with the simulation software. The resulting formulas can be used to extract the intrinsic quality factor of normal-conducting and superconducting cavities directly from the calibrated S-parameter measurements.
The Paradox of Counterterrorism Sunset Provisions

Since 9/11, legislators and commentators alike have hailed expiration dates — or “sunset provisions” — as a means to moderate the government’s tendency to curtail individual freedoms in response to security crises. Sunsets’ advocates explain that they provide Congress with an opportunity to reevaluate counterterrorism legislation after the crisis atmosphere has passed, enabling legislators to adjust any policy whose infringement on civil liberties appears, in retrospect, unjustified by its benefits. This article demonstrates that, rather than guarding against the long-term entrenchment of overly robust security measures, sunsets have the opposite effect. The article begins by illustrating that Congress’s high expectations for counterterrorism sunsets have not been borne out by their impact. It then explains that the failure of sunsets to prompt meaningful reevaluation of post-crisis counterterrorism measures stems from two sources. First, optimism over sunsets’ potential relies on several inaccurate assumptions about how the state of the world will change between the time a statute is enacted and its sunset date. And second, it fails to account for the President’s outsized role in counterterrorism policymaking. Finally, the article identifies sunsets’ hidden cost: paradoxically, by insisting on including sunset provisions, legislators concerned about overzealous counterterrorism legislation actually facilitate the enactment of such statutes. And as sunsets do not subsequently correct overzealous policy, they enable the long-term entrenchment of the very policymaking errors they are designed to prevent. The article concludes that citizens and legislators concerned about the civil liberties costs of counterterrorism policy should reject claims that sunsets are an effective answer to those concerns.
Health and Labor Force Participation of Older Men, 1900–1991

I use Body Mass Index (BMI) to investigate how the ralationship between health status and retirement among older men has changed since 1900. Although BMIs for the elderly were much less healthy in 1900 than today, the BMI level that maximizes labor force participation rates has not changed. However, in 1900 the elasticity of nonparticipation with respect to BMI was greater than it is today, suggesting that health is now less important to the retirement decision than in the past. Other factors (especially rising income) are more important than health in explaining the historical changes in retirement rates.
Value creation or destruction? Hedge funds as shareholder activists

Abstract I examine the effects of shareholder activism by hedge funds from 1998–2005. When hedge funds accumulate more than 5% of a firm, they must file a regulatory disclosure with the SEC that indicates whether their investment intentions are active or passive. Firms which are targeted by hedge funds for active purposes earn larger excess stock returns and improvements in operating performance (ROA) than a control group of firms that are targeted by the same hedge funds for passive purposes. These operational improvements appear to be driven by the divestiture of under-performing assets. I examine the organizational structure of the hedge funds and find that funds engaging in activism are more likely to have longer lock-ups and withdrawal notification periods than their non-activist peers; indicating that liquidity concerns may be an important determinant in the efficacy of activism. Finally, I document that the returns to the hedge fund are larger for their active blocks than their passive blocks, indicating that activist shareholders may use higher returns to mitigate the cost of their monitoring effort.
INEQUALITY, MAJORITY VOTING AND THE REDISTRIBUTIVE EFFECTS OF PUBLIC EDUCATION FUNDING

Abstract. This paper documents that in poor countries redistribution in cash is negligible. To the extent that public education funding is redistributive, the lion's share of redistribution in poor countries is through public education budgets. I present a simple model of how inequality determines redistribution through public education spending when funding decisions are made through majority voting. Contrary to T. Persson and G. Tabellini, and contrary to conventional wisdom, in the present model higher inequality leads to less redistribution if the curvature in the utility function is sufficiently high. I argue that large curvature of the utility function is empirically relevant.
The Amphibious Salmon: The Evolution of Ecosystem Management in the Columbia River Basin

The Columbia River is the paradigmatic example of the influence of technology on an ecosystem, having been developed for hydropower, navigation, and flood control throughout the 20th century. The upshot is that the Columbia Basin is now home to the largest interconnected hydroelectric system in the world and a seaport 465 miles inland. The cost has been high, however: near extermination of the basin's salmon runs, once the world's largest. Because the decline of Columbia Basin salmon has had significant adverse effects on cultural, historic, and religious values, since 1980 the region has made efforts to reverse the decline, in what has been termed as the world's largest biological restoration program. This article critically surveys efforts to recover Columbia Basin salmon under the Northwest Power and Endangered Species Acts, the Northwest Forest Plan, and unimplemented plans developed by Columbia Basin tribes with treaty fishing rights and the federal Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project. The article suggests that the proliferation of such plans is a product of the inability (or unwillingness) of the federal agencies managing the Federal Columbia Basin Hydroelectric System - by far the chief cause of salmon mortalities - to appreciably reduce the adverse effects of their operations. Thus, these salmon restoration plans have become amphibious, focusing on upriver habitat issues that might protect salmon spawning, rather than change project operations in the mainstem river, which would increase power costs. The article suggests that this upland focus may produce a significant change in public land management in the Columbia Basin, although the result may not be a material improvement in the plight of the salmon.
A Listener’s Free Speech, A Reader’s Copyright

Two of the necessary conditions for a legitimate republican government are that each competent citizen have an equal vote and that each voter have access to the inputs needed for autonomous, informed decision-making. This Article assumes that the required inputs must be richer than those currently available in the modern United States and deals only with the issue of how to enrich them without tripping over the United States Supreme Court’s current First Amendment doctrine.
Forces of Federalism, Safety Nets, and Waivers

Inequality is the defining feature of our times. Many argue that it calls for a policy response, yet the most obvious policy responses require legislative action. And if inequality is the defining feature of our times, partisan acrimony and gridlock are the defining features of the legislature. That being so, it is worth considering what role administrative agencies, and administrative law, might play in ameliorating or exacerbating economic inequality. Here, I focus on American safety net programs, many of which are joint operations between federal administrative agencies and state governments. In this context, a central mode of bureaucratic policy innovation comes in the form of administrative waivers, whereby a federal administrative agency waives some statutory requirement that is otherwise binding on state administrators. For example, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently granted waivers to allow several states to impose various “personal responsibility” requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries. Faced with a choice between legislative inactivity and policy innovation through waivers, many scholars and policymakers of both parties have tended to favor waivers. The appeal of waivers as a path around legislative gridlock is compelling. However, I argue that this view has neglected the federal structure of American safety net programs, and does not account for the state politics of implementation. Moreover, scholars have not focused on the severe information problems that federal agencies face when issuing waivers; a permissive waiver regime exacerbates these problems. Focusing on Medicaid implementation, I highlight the risks of waivers for American safety net programs. Before concluding, I discuss possible reforms to administrative procedures, and offer a case study of litigation surrounding one recent waiver application. The case study illustrates many of the theoretical arguments, and further demonstrates the failure of judicial review; it indicates how review might be adjusted to promote more effective use of waivers and diminish their perils.
Poor People Lose: Gideon and the Critique of Rights

A low income person is more likely to be prosecuted and imprisoned post-Gideon than pre-Gideon. Poor people lose in American criminal justice not because they have ineffective lawyers but because they are selectively targeted by police, prosecutors, and law makers. The critique of rights suggests that rights are indeterminate and regressive. Gideon demonstrates this critique: it has not improved the situation of most poor people, and in some ways has worsened their plight. Gideon provides a degree of legitimacy for the status quo. Even full enforcement of Gideon would not significantly improve the loser status of low-income people in American criminal justice.
Must Licenses Be Contracts? Consent and Notice in Intellectual Property

Intellectual property owners often seek to provide access to their patented or copyrighted works while at the same time imposing restrictions on that access. One example of this approach is “field-of-use” licensing in patent law, which permits licensees to use the patented invention but only in certain ways. Another example is open-source licensing in copyright law, where copyright owners typically require licensees that incorporate open-source software in other products to license those other products on an open-source basis as well. Surprisingly, though, the legal requirements for granting restricted access are unclear. The source of this lack of clarity is the ill-defined nature of a “license,” which is the usual means of granting access to intellectual property. Must a license be a contract? If so, then the imposition of restrictions presumably must satisfy the rules of contract formation. Or could a license be merely a unilateral commitment to allow limited access to intellectual property, as many open-source advocates contend? If so, then an intellectual property owner could grant access to its property while imposing restrictions to which a licensee has not consented, and of which the licensee might not even be aware. This Article argues that the weight of judicial authority and sound policy support a contractual approach. A requirement that license restrictions be imposed only by contract ensures that intellectual property owners obtain both the consent of licensees to the restrictions and consideration sufficient to make the contract enforceable. As in contract law more generally, these requirements facilitate certainty, predictability, and care in entering productive relationships. Consent is especially important as intellectual property is passed downstream through the distribution chain, because it ensures that downstream market participants are aware of the limitations on their use of intellectual property. Simple notice, which some have proposed as an alternative to contract, has shortcomings that make it a poor criterion for the establishment of infringement liability. This Article suggests, though, that in some circumstances notice of an upstream violation of a contractual license should indeed be sufficient to establish liability. Specifically, when a downstream user intentionally induces infringement by an upstream supplier, the downstream user should be liable. In such circumstances, the intent element serves as a substitute for the assent of contract law.
Determinants of the consumer bankruptcy decision

Qualitative choice models of consumers' decisions to file for bankruptcy and their choice of bankruptcy chapter are estimated jointly, combining choice-based sampling techniques with a nested estimation procedure. Medical and credit card debt are found to be the strongest contributors to bankruptcy, with homeownership playing an important role with respect to both the decision to declare bankruptcy and the choice of bankruptcy alternative. The potential effects of legal changes relating to property exemptions and dischargeable debt categories are found to encourage debt repayment through Chapter 13. ALMOST 5.5 MILLION HOUSEHOLDS FILED for bankruptcy protection during the 1980s. The annual number of filings under Chapters 7 and 13 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code doubled over that decade, compared with an increase of 28 percent in the previous ten years. Net losses to creditors are counted in the tens of billions of dollars, and these losses have grown twice as fast as consumer installment credit since 1980. Research in the area of consumer bankruptcy is largely based on the analysis of aggregate filing data (a set of references is contained in Domowitz and Eovaldi (1993)). There are few general studies of bankruptcy that use data on individual debtors or households.1 Given the importance of this area to banking, the credit industry, and public policy, it is surprising that there is no model quantifying the economic and demographic influences guiding the overall bankruptcy choice. An empirical qualitative choice model of the bankruptcy decision is presented here, using household-level data. The model includes both the decision to file for bankruptcy and the choice between available bankruptcy alternatives under the law. Distinctions between the relative impact of alternative sources of debt, household conditions, asset holdings, and property exemptions are important with respect to debates over extensions of credit and public policy relating to bankruptcy law. The probability of filing for bankruptcy protection is examined in
Is Dislocation Flow Turbulent in Deformed Crystals

Intriguing analogies were found between a model of plastic deformation in crystals and turbulence in fluids. A study of this model provides remarkable explanations of known experiments and predicts fractal dislocation pattern formation. Further, the challenges encountered resemble those in turbulence, which is exemplified in a comparison with the Rayleigh-Taylor instability.
Heap and ternary self-distributive cohomology

Heaps are algebraic structures endowed with para-associative ternary operations, bijectively exemplified by groups via the operation ( x , y , z ) ↦ x y − 1 z . They are also ternary self-distribut...
International bailouts, moral hazard and conditionality

International Bailouts The IMF's role The large international bailouts of the 1990s have been criticized for generating moral hazard at the expense of the global taxpayer. We argue that this criticism is misleading because international bailouts create no, or very few, costs to the international community. Instead, the problem is to ensure that bailouts are not used to facilitate bad domestic policies, thus creating moral hazard at the expense of domestic taxpayers. This may require a shift towards ex ante conditionality, in the sense that the availability and size of official crisis lending need to be conditional on government policies before the crisis. — Olivier Jeanne and Jeromin Zettelmeyer
To What Extent Does the Financial Reporting Process Curb Earnings Surprise Games

Managers play earnings surprise games to avoid negative earnings surprises by managing earnings upward or by managing analysts' earnings expectations downward. We investigate the effectiveness of the financial reporting process at restraining earnings surprise games. Because the annual reporting process is subject to an independent audit and more rigorous expense recognition rules than interim reporting, it provides managers with fewer opportunities to manage earnings upward. We document that, relative to interim reporting, annual reporting reduces the likelihood of income-increasing earnings management and, to a lesser extent, of negative surprise avoidance, but increases the magnitude of downward expectations management. Our findings suggest that regulatory attempts to monitor corporations' internal checks and balances are likely to be more effective at curbing upward earnings management than at mitigating negative surprise avoidance.
The Cyclicality of International Public Sector Borrowing in Developing Countries: Does the Lender Matter?

Abstract The paper shows that international government borrowing from multilateral development banks is countercyclical while international government borrowing from private sector lenders is procyclical. The countercyclicality of multilateral development bank (MDB) lending is mostly driven by the behavior of the World Bank (borrowing from regional development banks tends to be acyclical). The paper also shows that MDB lending to Latin America and East Asia is more countercyclical than MDB lending to other regions. Private sector lending is instead procyclical in all developing regions. While the cyclicality of MDB lending does not depend on domestic or international conditions, private lending becomes particularly procyclical in periods of limited global capital flows. By focusing on both borrower and lender heterogeneity, the paper shows that the cyclical properties of international government debt are mostly driven by credit supply shocks. Demand factors appear to be less important drivers of procyclical international government borrowing. The focus on supply and demand factors is different from the traditional push and pull classification, as push and pull factors could affect both the demand and the supply of international government debt.
The (Un)Constitutionality of Section 632 of the Edge Act: An Analysis under Article III and Theories of Protective Jurisdiction

Is a statute that establishes federal question jurisdiction over cases with non-diverse parties and involving purely state law claims constitutional? “The absence of diversity (and any other apparent [A]rticle III1 ground for jurisdiction) looks like an embarrassment to the principle that Congress may not augment the jurisdictional scope of [A]rticle III.”2 Despite this fact, federal courts have tacitly approved Congress’s authority to place all civil suits arising out of “transactions involving international or foreign banking . . . or out of other international or foreign financial operations”3 in the federal courts.4 The Edge Act of 1919 established original federal district court jurisdiction over the two types of suits mentioned above; any defendant named in such a suit may remove the suit from state court to federal
Relationship between least squares Monte Carlo and approximate linear programming

Abstract Least squares Monte Carlo (LSM) is commonly used to manage and value early or multiple exercise financial or real options. Recent research in this area has started applying approximate linear programming (ALP) and its relaxations, which aim at addressing a possible ALP drawback. We show that regress-later LSM is itself an ALP relaxation that potentially corrects this ALP shortcoming. Our analysis consolidates two streams of research and supports using this LSM version rather than ALP on the considered models.
Financial Contracting Theory Meets the Real World: An Empirical Analysis of Venture Capital Contracts

We compare the characteristics of real world financial contracts to their counterparts in financial contracting theory. We do so by studying the actual contracts between venture capitalists (VCs) and entrepreneurs. The distinguishing characteristic of VC financings is that they allow VCs to separately allocate cash flow rights, board rights, voting rights, liquidation rights and other control rights. We describe and measure these rights. We then interpret our results in relation to existing financial contracting theories. We also describe the interrelation and the evolution across financing rounds of the different rights. Query 1 Query 2
The Chandra Deep Field-North Survey. XVI. The X-Ray Properties of Moderate-Luminosity Active Galaxies at z > 4

We present X-ray spectral analyses of the three z > 4 active galactic nuclei (AGNs) thus far spectroscopically identified in the Chandra Deep Field-North Survey, at redshifts of 5.186, 4.424, and 4.137. These analyses are made possible by the extremely deep exposure (≈2 Ms) and the low Chandra background. The rest-frame ≈2.5-40 keV spectra are the first for optically faint (two of the three sources have I > 24) z > 4 AGNs. The z = 5.186 quasar is well fitted by a power-law model with photon index Γ = 1.8 ± 0.3, consistent with those of lower-redshift, unobscured AGNs. The other two AGNs have flatter effective X-ray photon indices (Γ ≈ 1.1-1.5), suggesting the presence of intrinsic absorption (provided their underlying X-ray continua are similar to those of lower redshift AGNs). It is possible that the flat X-ray continuum of the z = 4.424 AGN is partially related to its radio loudness. If the z = 4.137 AGN suffers from X-ray absorption, the implied column density is NH ≈ 2 × 1023 cm-2.
The physics of galactic winds driven by active galactic nuclei

Active galactic nuclei (AGN) drive fast winds in the interstellar medium of their host galaxies. It is commonly assumed that the high ambient densities and intense radiation fields in galactic nuclei imply short cooling times, thus making the outflows momentum conserving. We show that cooling of high-velocity shocked winds in AGN is in fact inefficient in a wide range of circumstances, including conditions relevant to ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs), resulting in energy-conserving outflows. We further show that fast energy-conserving outflows can tolerate a large amount of mixing with cooler gas before radiative losses become important. For winds with initial velocity vin ≳ 10 000 km s−1, as observed in ultraviolet and X-ray absorption, the shocked wind develops a two-temperature structure. While most of the thermal pressure support is provided by the protons, the cooling processes operate directly only on the electrons. This significantly slows down inverse Compton cooling, while free–free cooling is negligible. Slower winds with vin ∼ 1000 km s−1, such as may be driven by radiation pressure on dust, can also experience energy-conserving phases but under more restrictive conditions. During the energy-conserving phase, the momentum flux of an outflow is boosted by a factor ∼vin/2vs by work done by the hot post-shock gas, where vs is the velocity of the swept-up material. Energy-conserving outflows driven by fast AGN winds (vin ∼ 0.1c) may therefore explain the momentum fluxes of galaxy-scale outflows recently measured in luminous quasars and ULIRGs. Shocked wind bubbles expanding normal to galactic discs may also explain the large-scale bipolar structures observed in some systems, including around the Galactic Centre, and can produce significant radio, X-ray and γ-ray emission. The analytic solutions presented here will inform implementations of AGN feedback in numerical simulations, which typically do not include all the important physics.
Should Competition Policy Promote Happiness

What, if anything, are the implications of the happiness economics literature on competition policy? This Article first examines whether competition policy should promote (or at least not impede) citizens’ opportunities to increase well-being. It next surveys the happiness literature on five key issues: (i) What constitutes well-being; (ii) How do you measure well-being; (iii) What increases well-being; (iv) Do people want to be happy; and (v) Can and should the government promote total well-being? Although the happiness literature does not provide an analytical framework for analyzing routine antitrust issues, this does not mean that competition officials should discount or ignore the literature altogether. The findings of the happiness literature, as this Article argues, offer some helpful insights on the current debate over antitrust’s goals. The literature suggests that competition policy in a post-industrial wealthy country would get more bang (in terms of increased well-being) in promoting economic, social, and democratic values, rather than simply promoting a narrowly defined consumer welfare objective.
A Reexamination of Tunneling and Business Groups: New Data and New Methods

One of the most rigorous methodologies in the corporate governance literature uses firms' reactions to industry shocks to characterize the quality of governance. This methodology can produce the wrong answer unless one considers the ways firms compete. Because macro-level shocks reverberate differently at the firm level depending on whether a firm has a cost structure that requires significant adjustment, the quality of governance can only be elucidated accurately analyzing a firm's business strategy and their corporate governance. These differences can help one determine whether the fruits of a positive macro-level shock have been expropriated by insiders. Using the example of Indian firms, we show that an influential finding is reversed when these differences are considered. We further argue that the conventional wisdom about tunneling and business groups will need to be reformulated in light of the data, methodology, and findings presented here. The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com., Oxford University Press.
When Is Bad News Really Bad News

We examine whether the price response to bad and good earnings shocks changes as the relative level of the market changes. The study is based on a complete sample of annual earnings announcements during the period 1988 to 1998. The relative level of the market is based on the difference between the current market P/E and the average market P/E over the prior 12 months. We find that the stock price response to negative earnings surprises increases as the relative level of the market rises. Furthermore, the difference between bad news and good news earnings response coefficients rises with the market. ONE OF THE LONGEST RUNNING empirical debates in finance regards the relative pricing of"value" and "glamour" stocks. Beginning with early work by Basu (1983) and Stattman (1980), evidence has accumulated that excess returns on value stocks-that is, the issues of companies for which the ratio of earnings, cash flow, or book value per share is large relative to stock price-are greater than returns on glamour stocks, for which these ratios are small. On one side, Fama and French (1992, 1993, 1995, 1996) argue that the observed differential between the returns on value and glamour stocks represents a risk premium. The alternative view, articulated by Lakonishok, Shleifer, and Vishny (1994), is that the market fails to efficiently price value and glamour stocks. Extending Lakonishok et al. (1994), recent work in behavioral finance by, for example, Barberis, Shleifer, and Vishny (BSV, 1998) and Daniel, Hirshleifer, and Subrahmanyam (1998) argues that the value/glamour effect is the result of investor psychology. In particular, the model in BSV allows for investor underreaction (in the intermediate term) to single shocks and investor overreaction (in the longer term) to a series of shocks. This model also implies an asymmetry in the returns to value and glamour stocks following a news shock. Following a string of positive shocks observed in, say, glamour stocks, the investor in this model expects another positive shock, that is, he expects the earnings to trend. If good news is announced, the market re
A market without the ‘right’ property rights

While Vietnam's reforms provided some of the weakest legal private property rights amongst the transitions countries, cities like Ho Chi Minh City have booming domestic real estate markets. Interestingly, while most properties in 2001 did not have legal title, those on the market did advertise a variety of property rights claims. Employing a hedonic price model to analyse the pattern of prices at which sellers offer properties in Ho Chi Minh City, this study examines how this market values property rights. The findings show that multiple forms of property rights, enforced by highly decentralized state institutions, are operational in this market. Furthermore, legal title itself is not the most valuable form of property right. These findings suggest that the value of property rights emanates from where it is enforced within the particular institutional context of a market.
Barriers to investment by Russian firms: Property protection or credit constraints?

A multitude of explanations for low investment by Russian firms have been offered: high inflation, high interest rates, falling production, falling GDP, an underdeveloped banking system, a confiscatory tax regime, calls for the re-nationalization of industry, excessive regulations, and an underdeveloped legal system, among others. This paper’s basic premise is that investment in Russia will not occur if firms are unable to ensure the security of their property and property rights; that is, if the risk of destruction or expropriation is high. Nor will investment occur if access to investment funds is limited. Data collected from 264 Russian firms in the spring and fall 2001 are used to construct a security index and credit index in order to evaluate the relative importance of property protection and access to financing on the investment activities of manufacturing, retail, and other service sector firms in Moscow, Rostov, Taganrog, and Vladivostok. For the firms participating in this survey, the reported percentage of profit reinvested is significantly higher among firms which responded positively to questions about the effectiveness of police and courts in protecting their property and property rights, and significantly lower among firms which made above-average payments (official and unofficial) for property protection. Unofficial payments alone lower investment by 20%. Firms with access to credit reported reinvesting a significantly greater share of their profits. All other things equal, firms in Moscow, and firms in food processing and food distribution reinvested a significantly greater share of their profits. Manufacturing firms reported reinvesting a significantly smaller share of their profits in comparison to retail shops or other service sector companies. These results do not vary with the amount of collateral a firm has; that is, whether the firm owns or leases its premises.
Innovation by entrants and incumbents

We extend the basic Schumpeterian endogenous growth model by allowing incumbents to undertake innovations to improve their products, while entrants engage in more “radical” innovations to replace incumbents. Our model provides a tractable framework for the analysis of growth driven by both entry of new firms and productivity improvements by continuing firms. The model generates a non-degenerate equilibrium firm size distribution driven by entry of new firms and expansion exit of existing firms. When there is also costly imitation preventing any sector from falling too far below the average, the stationary firm size distribution is Pareto with an exponent approximately equal to one (the so-called “Zipf distribution”).
Empirical tests of information aggregation

Abstract This paper proposes tests to empirically examine whether auction prices aggregate information away from the limit. These tests are applied to a unique data set containing winning bids and measures of the value and dispersion of information signals in eBay auctions for computers. Results suggest that prices partially aggregate information but do not converge to the common value. Even away from the limit, more bidders and stronger information have a significant effect on the convergence of prices and information aggregation. Even partial information aggregation may represent a potential efficiency gain over one-to-one trade of used goods with uncertain common values.
The Virtues of Thinking Small

Death penalty scholars have at times extolled the virtues of thinking small when considering the death penalty’s future — it may be that a single blockbuster event leads to the collapse of the death penalty, they say, but the more likely scenario is a cauldron of micro-factors that simply make it too politically and economically costly to maintain. In this symposium contribution, I take up the charge to think small about the death penalty, examining how individual actors (some small, some large) are impacting the administration of the death penalty in the United States. I first discuss a few noteworthy examples of thinking small. Then I discuss the substantial impact these actions have had on the death penalty in practice, and how that impact has fundamentally changed America’s death penalty debate. I then conclude with my own take — one that celebrates the virtues of thinking small about the death penalty but laments the need to do so.
A bivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity‐in‐mean study of the relationship between return variability and trading volume in international futures markets

The authors would like to thank Linda Allen, John Barkoulas, Jae-Won Lee, Kishore Tandon, and Joel Rentzler for their helpful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are our own responsibility. *Correspondence author, Department of Economics and Finance, the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, Box E-0621, 17 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10010. 1This issue is less contentious in equity markets, where the lognormal distribution has been found to be a reasonable approximation, at least relative to speculative markets (Mandelbrot, 1963).
A Modest Proposal: The Aged of Death Row Should be Deemed too Old to Execute

The United States has a growing elderly death row population; they are beginning to trickle into the execution chamber. This Article will consider the prospects for relief for the elderly condemned from death row confinement and continued threat of execution. The Supreme Court has several times rebuffed efforts to gain Eighth Amendment protection from execution for the long serving condemned irrespective of their age, denying certiorari to the so-called Lackey claim. The Lackey claim deserves recognition on its merits. Its chilly reception by the Supreme Court is best explained not by lack of merit but rather by the devastating impact its recognition would have on capital punishment. Execution in the United States follows condemnation on average by more than a dozen years. Hundreds of death row inmates have not had their cases finally resolved twenty and thirty years after sentence was pronounced. The ranks of the very long serving are steadily growing. Recognizing the Lackey claim would take the United States a long way down the road to abolition. The Supreme Court has been inhospitable to total abolition but willing to reform capital punishment by trimming back the types of crimes and criminals eligible for capital punishment. Unlike the general Lackey claim, Lackey-for-the-Elderly is another such modest reform. Lackey-for-the-Elderly is therefore more likely to succeed than the wider claim. Its adoption would bring an end to a practice the Eighth Amendment ought not to tolerate. It would spare the United States the spectacle of the elderly being carried or wheeled to the execution chamber after decades of growing old in death row confinement.
Punitive Damages in Cyberspace: Where in the World is the Consumer?

The Internet offers American consumers a global marketplace open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. By 2004, online commerce is projected to account for nearly seven trillion dollars.1 Currently, there are 262.3 million English-speaking Internet users with 280 million projected for 2004.2 The worldwide online population is projected to be between 709 and 945 million.3 In the United States there are 182.1 million people online, accounting for 65% of that population.4 iWith the ability to reach millions of Internet users simply by establishing a website, tens of thousands of companies are expected to take advantage of electronic commerce, eredefining and restructuring the distribution of goods and services.ii5
Tuning the Magnetic Properties of Two-Dimensional MXenes by Chemical Etching

Two-dimensional materials based on transition metal carbides have been intensively studied due to their unique properties including metallic conductivity, hydrophilicity and structural diversity and have shown a great potential in several applications, for example, energy storage, sensing and optoelectronics. While MXenes based on magnetic transition elements show interesting magnetic properties, not much is known about the magnetic properties of titanium-based MXenes. Here, we measured the magnetic properties of Ti3C2Tx MXenes synthesized by different chemical etching conditions such as etching temperature and time. Our magnetic measurements were performed in a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) vibrating sample. These data suggest that there is a paramagnetic-antiferromagnetic (PM-AFM) phase transition and the transition temperature depends on the synthesis procedure of MXenes. Our observation indicates that the magnetic properties of these MXenes can be tuned by the extent of chemical etching, which can be beneficial for the design of MXenes-based spintronic devices.
A Concentration of Measure Approach to Correlated Graph Matching

The graph matching problem emerges naturally in various applications such as Web privacy, image processing and computational biology. In this article, graph matching is considered under a stochastic model, where a pair of randomly generated graphs with pairwise correlated edges are to be matched such that given the labeling of the vertices in the first graph, the labels in the second graph are recovered by leveraging the correlation among their edges. The problem is considered under various settings and graph models. In the first step, the Correlated Erdos-Renyi (CER) graph model is studied, where all edge pairs whose vertices have similar labels are generated based on identical distributions and independently of other edges. A matching scheme called the typicality matching scheme is introduced. The scheme operates by investigating the joint typicality of the adjacency matrices of the two graphs. New results on the typicality of permutations of sequences lead to necessary and sufficient conditions for successful matching based on the parameters of the CER model. In the next step, the results are extended to graphs with community structure generated based on the Stochastic Block Model (SBM). The SBM model is a generalization of the CER model where each vertex in the graph is associated with a community label, which affects its edge statistics. The results are further extended to matching of ensembles of more than two correlated graphs. Lastly, the problem of seeded graph matching is investigated where a subset of the labels in the second graph are known prior to matching. In this scenario, in addition to obtaining necessary and sufficient conditions for successful matching, a polynomial time matching algorithm is proposed.
Tunable-spin-model generation with spin-orbit-coupled fermions in optical lattices

The authors explore a method to use ultracold atoms in lattices as quantum simulators of tunable spin models.
Animated Cassie: A Dynamic Relatable Robotic Character

Creating robots with emotional personalities will transform the usability of robots in the real-world. As previous emotive social robots are mostly based on statically stable robots whose mobility is limited, this paper develops an animation to real-world pipeline that enables dynamic bipedal robots that can twist, wiggle, and walk to behave with emotions. First, an animation method is introduced to design emotive motions for the virtual robot’s character. Second, a dynamics optimizer is used to convert the animated motion to dynamically feasible motion. Third, real-time standing and walking controllers and an automaton are developed to bring the virtual character to life. This framework is deployed on a bipedal robot Cassie and validated in experiments. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is one of the first to present an animatronic dynamic legged robot that is able to perform motions with desired emotional attributes. We term robots that use dynamic motions to convey emotions as Dynamic Relatable Robotic Characters.
Differentiated Government Control for Conformity: Government-NGO Relations in China

A central theme in contemporary China scholarship is the state-society relations, in particular, the government-NGO relations. However, despite the understanding that the government plays an important role in NGO development and differentiates its relations with NGOs, we still don’t know why and how. This paper adopts the critical discourse analysis approach to examine the foundation mission statements. The finding of distinct patterns of “harmony” and “obeying the law” allows the author to construct a two-dimensional control mechanism composed of government’s intention to co-opt or restrict a foundation. Through multinomial logistic regression, the paper finds that foundation funding sufficiency leads to government’s strong intention to co-opt and weak intention to restrict. That is, resource dependence can break certain institutional constraints such as government ties and issue sensitivity. It proves the Chinese government can adapt to the socioeconomic conditions and impose calculated control over foundations accordingly.