cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Rapid toxin sequestration modifies poison frog physiology

Poison frogs sequester chemical defenses from their diet of leaf litter arthropods for defense against predation. Little is known about the physiological adaptations that confer this unusual bioaccumulation ability. We conducted an alkaloid-feeding experiment with the Diablito poison frog (Oophaga sylvatica) to determine how quickly alkaloids are accumulated and how toxins modify frog physiology using quantitative proteomics. Diablito frogs rapidly accumulated the alkaloid decahydroquinoline within 4 days, and dietary alkaloid exposure altered protein abundance in the intestines, liver and skin. Many proteins that increased in abundance with decahydroquinoline accumulation are plasma glycoproteins, including the complement system and the toxin-binding protein saxiphilin. Other protein classes that change in abundance with decahydroquinoline accumulation are membrane proteins involved in small molecule transport and metabolism. Overall, this work shows that poison frogs can rapidly accumulate alkaloids, which alter carrier protein abundance, initiate an immune response, and alter small molecule transport and metabolism dynamics across tissues.
Mating Strategies and Gender Differences in Pro-sociality: Theory and Evidence

This article examines gender differences in pro-sociality using theories from evolutionary psychology and empirical evidence from experimental economics. Although there has been extensive prior research in both fields, there remains a large disconnect between the source of gender differences in pro-sociality and experimental research aimed at informing cooperation and generosity. Thus, the main contribution of our article is to bridge this gap by arguing that differences in male and female motives for pro-sociality stem, at least in part, from gender differences in mating strategies. In particular, we discuss gender differences in: (i) signaling behaviors; (ii) conformance to social norms; and (iii) approaches toward resolving intra- and inter-group dilemmas. This article may be a useful resource for those hoping to gain a better understanding of the foundations of gender differences in pro-sociality; likewise, it draws useful attention to empirical research aimed at promoting charitable giving and enhancing resource allocation efficiency. (JEL codes: D03, D64) Copyright The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Munich. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.
Natural Bacterial Assemblages in Arabidopsis thaliana Tissues Become More Distinguishable and Diverse during Host Development

To study the spatial and temporal dynamics of bacterial colonization under field conditions, we planted and sampled Arabidopsis thaliana during 2 years at two Michigan sites and surveyed colonists by sequencing 16S rRNA gene amplicons. Mosaic and dynamic assemblages revealed the plant as a patchwork of tissue habitats that differentiated with age. Although assemblages primarily varied between roots and shoots, amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) also differentiated phyllosphere tissues. Increasing assemblage diversity indicated that variants dispersed more widely over time, decreasing the importance of stochastic variation in early colonization relative to tissue differences. As tissues underwent developmental transitions, the root and phyllosphere assemblages became more distinct. This pattern was driven by common variants rather than those restricted to a particular tissue or transiently present at one developmental stage. Patterns also depended critically on fine phylogenetic resolution: when ASVs were grouped at coarse taxonomic levels, their associations with host tissue and age weakened. Thus, the observed spatial and temporal variation in colonization depended upon bacterial traits that were not broadly shared at the family level. Some colonists were consistently more successful at entering specific tissues, as evidenced by their repeatable spatial prevalence distributions across sites and years. However, these variants did not overtake plant assemblages, which instead became more even over time. Together, these results suggested that the increasing effect of tissue type was related to colonization bottlenecks for specific ASVs rather than to their ability to dominate other colonists once established.IMPORTANCE Developing synthetic microbial communities that can increase plant yield or deter pathogens requires basic research on several fronts, including the efficiency with which microbes colonize plant tissues, how plant genes shape the microbiome, and the microbe-microbe interactions involved in community assembly. Findings on each of these fronts depend upon the spatial and temporal scales at which plant microbiomes are surveyed. In our study, phyllosphere tissues housed increasingly distinct microbial assemblages as plants aged, indicating that plants can be considered collections of tissue habitats in which microbial colonists-natural or synthetic-are established with differing success. Relationships between host genes and community diversity might vary depending on when samples are collected, given that assemblages grew more diverse as plants aged. Both spatial and temporal trends weakened when colonists were grouped by family, suggesting that functional rather than taxonomic profiling will be necessary to understand the basis for differences in colonization success.
The Effect of Home-Sharing on House Prices and Rents: Evidence from Airbnb

We assess the impact of Airbnb on residential house prices and rents: using a data set of Airbnb listings from the entire United States and an instrumental variables estimation strategy, we show th...
Does Corporate Headquarters Location Matter for Firm Capital Structure

This paper studies the impact of corporate headquarters location on capital structure policies. We show that firms exhibit conformity in their financing policies to those of geographically proximate firms and that the location of corporate headquarters helps explain the cross-sectional variation of capital structure in the United States. The location effect is robust to local credit market conditions and to state laws on corporate takeover and payout restrictions. The results suggest that noneconomic factors, such as local culture and social interactions among corporate executives, play a significant role in influencing corporate financial policies of firms headquartered in the same metropolitan area.
Needles in the Haystack: Finding New Legal Movements in Casebooks

Part of a symposium on the relation between legal scholarship and teaching, this article examines the rate at which legal casebooks incorporate new legal scholarship and ideas in several emerging areas, including law and economics, critical legal studies, feminist legal theory, critical race theory, and gay/lesbian jurisprudence. Because legal casebooks serve a canonical function by structuring the content of classroom teaching and assignments, the exclusion of certain viewpoints is a serious barrier to reform. My findings are that most casebooks resist mentioning new, critical points of view, with the sole exception of law and economics, which has made major inroads. I conclude with a few observations on why this might be so and what outsider scholars may do about it.
Divergent Interests: Union Representation of Individual Employment Discrimination Claims

This short essay, written for a symposium, argues that if unions agree to arbitrate employment discrimination claims (as newly permitted by 14 Penn Plaza LLC v. Pyett), there is a high risk that a union’s duty to protect and advance the collective interests of all members will diverge from the particular interests of an employee asserting a discrimination claim. The essay identifies three potential risks. The first is simply that union leaders may themselves hold discriminatory biases and accordingly fail to support individual employees adequately in the grievance and arbitration process. The more subtle — and probably more significant — risks stem from the fact that employment discrimination claims are likely to be valued significantly more highly by a discrete minority of union members than by the majority. Accordingly, a union acting entirely in good faith might bargain away the right to litigate in court in return for employer concessions that are valued more highly by the membership as a whole. A union might also value pursuing antidiscrimination claims less highly than other potential grievances. Additionally, supporting a member’s discrimination claim will often directly disadvantage other members. At least as traditionally understood, a union’s duty of fair representation would offer inadequate recourse in these scenarios. In Pyett, the Court cavalierly dismissed concerns of potential conflicts as an attack on collective bargaining more generally. This improperly ignores a key distinction. Since most benefits secured by unions are not mandated by employment laws, labor relations law generally takes away from individual employees only the speculative potential that they might have made a better deal bargaining individually. But the right to bring an employment discrimination claim in court is guaranteed by statute — and accordingly individual employees stand to lose significant rights that they would otherwise enjoy.
Health and Social Justice

4 years into the new millennium the health of the world’s citizens is remarkably uneven. A child born today in Japan for example can expect to live to age 82 years on average whereas it is unlikely that a newborn infant in Zimbabwe will reach his or her 34th birthday. Over several decades scientific progress has expanded our ability to improve human health and many regions of the world have achieved significant health gains. Yet extreme deprivation in health is still widespread. Resolving this predicament of major health improvement in the midst of deprivation is one of the greatest global challenges of the new millennium. These health disparities exist in a world that is becoming more closely linked in all domains including health. The rapid spread and quick containment of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) demonstrates the interconnectedness of our world as well as any recent health phenomenon. The same trend can be seen with HIV/AIDS and the potential to link solutions and best practices studied in one part of the globe with persistent health problems in another. (excerpt)
The Effects of Different Forms of Risk Communication on Judicial Decision Making

When mental health experts provide information to courts on the results of a risk assessment conducted on a defendant or patient, they engage in “risk communication.” We examined the effects of four different forms of risk communication (prediction, categorical, risk factors/risk management, or hybrid) on judges' (n = 253) perceptions of risk assessment evidence introduced in a case where they must decide whether to release from the hospital an individual found not guilty by reason of insanity. Judges who received information in the risk factors/risk management form were more likely to release the patient than were those who received prediction-based or categorical risk information. Judges with greater experience hearing cases involving risk assessment evidence were also more likely to release. Moreover, judges who had positive attitudes towards risk assessment and social science evidence in general, were more likely to find the risk assessment evidence introduced in the particular case to be understandab...
Lessons from the Subprime Meltdown

This student of Hyman Minsky uses the late economist's analysis to document the history of the current credit crisis. It amounts to a strong case against deregulation and a thorough understanding of the limits of markets. The author presents recommendations for future public policy.
Rangeland management using cell grazing: a dynamic and stochastic analysis of the optimal temporal control

We analyze the temporal control choice problem faced by a manager who uses cell grazing to manage a parcel of rangeland. Specifically, we first delineate the relevant dynamic and stochastic features of a stylized parcel of rangeland. Next, we use a renewal theoretic framework to derive the manager’s long run expected net cost (LRENC) of management operations per unit time. Finally, we demonstrate that the optimal temporal control is the solution to the manager’s LRENC minimization problem.
Jump and Cojump Risk in Subprime Home Equity Derivatives

Mizrach analyzes the jump frequency in the MarketABX.HE Index of subprime home equity credit default swaps and CME housing futures. Jumps began to appear prior to 2007. The jumps are more pronounced in housing futures than in the ABX index. He explains nearly 85% of the jumps from news and housing futures.A 20-point slope in the housing futures curve leads to an expected jump of -1.4% in the BBB– ABX index.
There Are No Penalty Default Rules in Contract Law

In an influential article, Ian Ayres and Robert Gertner introduced the concept of the “penalty default rule,” a rule that fills a gap in an incomplete contract with a term that would not be chosen by a majority of parties similarly situated to the parties to the contract in question. Ayres and Gertner argued that such a rule might be efficient in a model in which contracting parties have asymmetric information. However, Ayres and Gertner did not provide any persuasive examples of penalty default rules; their best example is the Hadley rule, but this rule is probably not a penalty default rule. It turns out that there are no plausible examples of penalty default rules that solve the information asymmetry problem identified by Ayres and Gertner. The penalty default rule is a theoretical curiosity that has no existence in contract doctrine. Ayres and Gertner’s influential article, Filling Gaps in Incomplete Contracts: An Economic Theory of Default Rules, introduced the concept of the “penalty default rule,” which is a rule that fills a gap in a contract with a term that would not be chosen by a majority of parties similarly situated to the parties to the contract in question. The purpose of penalty default rules, Ayres and Gertner argued, is to force parties to reveal private information, which enables their counterparts to perform more efficiently than they would if left uninformed. At the time Ayres and Gertner wrote their article, many law and economics scholars believed that default rules should reflect the preferences of a majority of similarly situated parties. Ayres and Gertner showed that this view is not necessarily correct if parties have private information when they bargain with each other prior to entering a contract. If they do, and if various other assumptions hold, then penalty rather 1 University of Chicago Law School. Thanks to Omri Ben-Shahar, Ariel Porat, and Alan Schwartz for comments, Charlie Floyd for research assistance, and the Russell Baker Scholars Fund for financial support. 2 Ian Ayres & Robert Gertner, Filling Gaps in Incomplete Contracts: An Economic Theory of Default Rules, 99 Yale L.J. 87 (1989) [hereinafter Ayres & Gertner, Filling Gaps]. 3 Although several scholars had identified the information-forcing benefits of nonmajoritarian default rules such as Hadley v. Baxendale, 156 Eng. Rep. 145 (1854), the case that was the focus of Ayres and Gertner’s article. See Ian Ayres & Robert Gertner, Strategic Contractual Inefficiency and the Optimal Choice of Legal Rules, 101 Yale L.J. 729, 735 n.24 (1992) [hereinafter Ayres & Gertner, Strategic Contractual Inefficiency]. Earlier papers with this insight include Charles J. Goetz & Robert E. Scott, Enforcing Promises: An Examination of the Basis of Contract, 89 Yale L.J. 1261, 1299–1300 (1980), and John H. Barton, The Economic Basis of Damages for Breach of Contract, 1 J. Legal Stud. 277 (1972).
Graph-Based Proprioceptive Localization Using a Discrete Heading-Length Feature Sequence Matching Approach

Proprioceptive localization refers to a new class of robot egocentric localization methods that do not rely on the perception and recognition of external landmarks. These methods are naturally immune to bad weather, poor lighting conditions, or other extreme environmental conditions that may hinder exteroceptive sensors such as a camera or a laser ranger finder. These methods depend on proprioceptive sensors such as inertial measurement units and/or wheel encoders. Assisted by magnetoreception, the sensors can provide a rudimentary estimation of vehicle trajectory which is used to query a prior known map to obtain location. Named as graph-based proprioceptive localization, we provide a low cost fallback solution for localization under challenging environmental conditions. As a robot/vehicle travels, we extract a sequence of heading-length values for straight segments from the trajectory and match the sequence with a preprocessed heading-length graph (HLG) abstracted from the prior known map to localize the robot under a graph-matching approach. Using the information from HLG, our location alignment and verification module compensates for trajectory drift, wheel slip, or tire inflation level. We have implemented our algorithm and tested it in both simulated and physical experiments. The algorithm runs successfully in finding robot location continuously and achieves localization accurate at the level that the prior map allows (less than 10 m).
Numerical Formats within Risk Disclosures and the Moderating Effect of Investors' Concerns about Management Discretion

ABSTRACT: We report the results of two experiments that provide evidence that investors' risk judgments are affected by the numerical format used to describe outcomes within accounting disclosures. Consistent with prior research in psychology, investors assess higher risk in response to dollar-formatted disclosures than to equivalent percentage-formatted disclosures. Consistent with the Persuasion Knowledge Model (Friestad and Wright 1994), this effect is moderated when investors have both (1) awareness that management has discretion over format, and (2) sufficient cognitive capacity to consider its implications. Our results provide insight about the effects of current disclosure formats and suggest implications for managers who choose formats, investors who interpret formatted information, and regulators who consider whether to further prescribe the formats that are used in financial disclosures.
Professional Investor Relations within the Firm

ABSTRACT: This paper investigates the effect of investments in internal investor relations (IR) departments on firm outcomes. We find that companies initiating internal professional IR experience increases in disclosure, analyst following, institutional investor ownership, liquidity, and market valuation relative to a matched sample of control firms. We also examine the differential impact the exogenous shock of Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) had on firms with an established professional IR department. We find these IR firms more than doubled their level of public disclosure post-Reg FD. Despite IR firms losing a potential communications channel following Reg FD adoption, we find they did not suffer adversely and instead show a post-Reg FD increase in analyst following, institutional investors, and liquidity relative to a control sample of similar non-IR firms. This implies that the effectiveness of professionalized internal IR increased post-Reg FD consistent with IR firms being relatively better po...
Conflicts of Jurisdiction Between the United States and Latin America in the Context of Forum Non Conveniens Dismissals

Explores the current status of forum non conveniens dismissals affecting lawsuits brought by Latin American plaintiffs in U.S. courts against American corporate defendants.
Living "Off-Stage": The Semiotic Potential of Narrative in Paula Johnson's Inner Lives: Voices of African-American Women in Prison

I didn't understand that my life-style was an act. I was on stage until I was almost fifty years old. I was really on stage being an image that somebody else had built me up to be. It wasn't what I really wanted to be, and I learned to come offstage. I'm offstage now. (Johnson, p. 139) In the above excerpt from Paula Johnson's important new book, Bettie Gibson describes what it means to live as a representation: the Black female criminal. The hopelessness and hopefulness in the voices of the women profiled in Inner Lives exemplify a semiotic response to the racism that permeates the criminal justice and prison systems in the United States. This article asks how, in the telling of their stories and living of their lives, the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women profiled in the book engage in a working semiotics. The extraordinary thing about the narratives collected by Johnson is that they describe how women who have been placed at the very bottom of the American social consciousness are successfully constructing their own image-repertoires rather than accepting the ones given to them by society, often in the most depressing of settings.
On the economics of trials: adversarial process, evidence, and equilibrium bias

The adversarial provision of evidence is modeled as a game in which two parties engage in strategic sequential search. An axiomatic approach is used to characterize a court's decision based on the evidence provided. Although this process treats the evidence submissions in an unbiased way, the equilibrium outcome may still exhibit bias. Bias arises from differences in the cost of sampling or asymmetry in the sampling distribution. In a multistage model, a prodefendant bias arises in the first stage from a divergence between the parties' stakes. Finally, the adversarial process generates additional costs that screen out some otherwise meritorious cases. Copyright 2000 by Oxford University Press.
Externalities of public firm presence: Evidence from private firms' investment decisions

Abstract Public firms provide a large amount of information through their disclosures. In addition, information intermediaries publicly analyze, discuss, and disseminate these disclosures. Thus, greater public firm presence in an industry should reduce uncertainty in that industry. Following the theoretical prediction of investment under uncertainty, we hypothesize and find that private firms are more responsive to their investment opportunities when they operate in industries with greater public firm presence. Further, we find that the effect of public firm presence is greater in industries with better information quality and in industries characterized by a greater degree of investment irreversibility. Our results suggest that public firms generate positive externalities by reducing industry uncertainty and facilitating more efficient private firm investment.
INEQUALITY, ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AND GROWTH

Why do Scandinavian countries perform better in terms of environmental protection than other European Union countries? In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that societies characterised by low income inequality (such as the nordic European countries) generate political-economic equilibria where environmental policy is more stringent. We model an overlapping-generations economy in which individuals differ in skills to address the question to what extent in modern democracies, income distribution influences the stringency of environmental policy and consequently the growth of a country. Individuals work when they are young and own capital when they are old. Pollution externalities are present due to the use of a polluting factor. The government uses the revenue from a capital-income tax and a pollution tax for a lump-sum transfer to the old generation. The fiscal decision at each point in time is taken by a majority elected representative. In politico-economic equilibrium, the lower the skill of the median individual is relative to the average, the smaller the pollution tax and the capital stock are, and the greater the capital income-tax and the relative use of the polluting factor. We perform both steady-state analysis and examine the transition path. Subsequently, we present an empirical analysis for two panels of seven and ten industrialised countries from the late seventies to late nineties. Our framework is able to explain the stylised facts regarding inequality, environmental protection, and growth.
The House of the Law

The time is ripe to take a critical look at what federal courts are doing to our house of the law. My view will be that of an insider; it will be through a jaundiced eye. It will be the focus of one who is in his twenty-fifth year as a judge on both the state and federal benches. It is through the eyes of a student of the judicial process, of one who concentrates not so much on the nuances of substantive or procedural law, but on the tools of decision-making. What these eyes see, in short, is this: a system in which there is too much pettifogging about gingerbread and encrustation in the trimmings of our hosue. What Henry Maine once said of the infiltration of Roman law into Western thought also may describe our house: "nearly buried in a parasitical overgrowth of modern speculative doctrine." It is a house in no danger of collapse, yet one to which the lawyers and the judges must turn a hand to make it more attractive, if not more secure. In the final analysis, the housekeeping and the appearance of our house are in our hands, not those of Congress.
Middle-Income Traps : A Conceptual and Empirical Survey

The term "middle-income trap" has entered common parlance in the development policy community, despite the lack of a precise definition. This paper discusses in more detail the definitional issues associated with the term. It also provides evidence on whether the growth performance of middle-income countries (MICs) has been different from other income categories, including historical transition phases in the inter-country distribution of income. A transition matrix analysis and an exploration of cross-country growth patterns provide little support for the existence of a middle-income trap.
Can investor-paid credit rating agencies improve the information quality of issuer-paid rating agencies?

Abstract This paper examines how the information quality of ratings from an issuer-paid rating agency (Standard and Poor's) responds to the entry of an investor-paid rating agency, the Egan-Jones Rating Company (EJR). By comparing S&P's ratings quality before and after EJR initiates coverage of each firm, I find a significant improvement in S&P's ratings quality following EJR's coverage initiation. S&P's ratings become more responsive to credit risk and its rating changes incorporate higher information content. These results differ from the existing literature documenting a deterioration in the incumbents' ratings quality following the entry of a third issuer-paid agency. I further show that the issuer-paid agency seems to improve the ratings quality because EJR's coverage has elevated its reputational concerns.
Lotteries, public good provision and the degree of rivalry

Under the standard summation technology, pure public goods can be provided via the direct contributions mechanism, even in an arbitrarily large group. However, if the public good exhibits any degree of rivalry, individual consumption of the public good will fall to zero as group size grows large. Thus, the direct contributions mechanism is not robust to the introduction of rivalry. By contrast, Morgan’s (Review of Economic Studies 67:761–784, 2000) lottery mechanism is robust to the introduction of rivalry when the lottery prize is proportional to group size. The lottery mechanism can provide public goods in a large group when the public good exhibits a degree of rivalry, provided that the degree of rivalry is not too high. This suggests that the lottery mechanism can provide a broader range of public goods in a large group than the direct contributions mechanism.
Earnings Management? Erroneous Inferences Based on Earnings Frequency Distributions

A vast literature following Hayn [1995] and Burgstahler and Dichev [1997] attributed the so-called “discontinuities” in earnings distributions around zero to earnings management. Despite recent evidence that these discontinuities are likely caused by other factors, researchers and teachers continue to point to the shapes of these distributions as evidence of earnings management. We provide three sets of further evidence that these discontinuities are likely caused by factors other than earnings management: (1) we provide, as an example, a detailed analysis of the severe effects of sample selection in a recent study; this study erroneously concludes that the shape of an earnings distribution is evidence of earnings management, (2) we provide a simple explanation for the shape of the earnings distribution that is most often cited as evidence of earnings management; the relation between earnings and prices differs with the magnitude and the sign of earnings, and (3) we provide further examples that support the main point of our paper; evidence beyond the mere shape of a distribution must be brought to bear before researchers can draw conclusions regarding the presence/absence of earnings management.
The DevelopmenT of Social SecuriTy in america

This article examines the historical origins and legislative development of the U.S. Social Security program. Focusing on the contributory social insurance program introduced in title II of the Social Security Act of 1935, the article traces the major amendments to the original program and provides an up-to-date description of the major provisions of the system. The article concludes with a brief overview of the debate over the future of the program, and it provides a summary assessment of the impact and importance of Social Security as a central pillar of the U.S. social welfare system.
These Spaces in Between: The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and Its Role in Transitional Justice

1 National human rights institutions (NHRIs) play an instrumental role in defining the human rights culture of their respective countries through their monitoring function, auditing laws, instituting human rights education and making recommendations to governments to improve human rights conditions. In countries that have experienced large-scale human rights atrocities, NHRI mandates sometimes include working to establish processes to seek accountability for war crimes. The involvement in transitional justice matters raises a new set of challenges for these institutions regarding their independence, their role in creating space for local voices and their capacity to serve as a bridge between the government and national and international actors. Using as a case study the experience of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), the author identifies several key areas within which this particular NHRI has had to negotiate the tensions between the political and the legal, and the local and the international. A close examination of each of these areas reveals the common challenges NHRIs face in taking on a transitional justice mandate, as well as the particular strengths and limitations of the AIHRC and its creativity and resolve in working in extremely difficult circumstances to seek accountability for the past.
Autonomy and End of Life Decision Making: Reflections of a Lawyer and a Daughter

As a law professor, I spend much of my time educating future lawyers about the law’s approach to end of life decision making. This issue basically arises at two different times: (1) at the planning stage, when an individual is healthy and competent and in a position to state his wishes and (2) when a person is in a compromised state, such that he cannot make or express wishes for himself, but health care decisions must be made. Although these situations are vastly different, the operating model is the same. In both situations, the law is concerned with maintaining the autonomy of the individual. The question of how one accommodates the needs of the family is ignored as the family’s preference is largely irrelevant within this legal model.1
Household Debt and House Prices-at-Risk: A Tale of Two Countries

To identify and quantify downside risks to housing markets, we apply the house price-at-risk methodology to a sample of 37 cities across the United States and Canada using quarterly data from 1983 to 2018. This paper finds that downside risks to housing markets in the United States have seemingly fallen over the past decade, while having increased in Canada. Supply-side drivers, valuation, household debt, and financial conditions jointly play a key role in forecasting house price risks. In addition, capital flows are found to be significantly associated with future downside risks to major housing markets, but the net effect depends on the type of flows and varies across cities and forecast horizons. Using micro-level data, we identify households vulnerable to potential housing shocks and assess the riskiness of household debt.
Understanding the Impact of Electoral Systems on Women's Representation

The study of electoral systems is a key area of research within political science. In part, the attention paid to electoral systems reflects their importance to democratic political systems. Electoral systems define “what constitutes” a vote, establish “a rule for how votes are totaled,” and create a mechanism for “translating vote share into seat allocations” for representative institutions (Bawn 1993, 966). These roles mean that electoral systems impact not only how interests are represented, but also how accountability is structured.
Do Tasting Notes Add Value? Evidence from Napa Wines

This paper evaluates whether tasting notes—the brief testimony that describes the sensory properties of wines—add value. The analysis is based on a sample of over 2700 recent-vintage cabernet sauvignon wines evaluated by Wine Spectator . I estimate a dynamic wine price model to evaluate the marketing effect of the note, controlling for quality measures as well as other wine characteristics. The results indicate that the length of the tasting note exerts a strong positive influence on the wine's price, even after controlling for quality. A 10 percent increase in the number of characters in the tasting note (about 23 additional characters) contributes about two to four dollars to the price of the wine. Further analysis reveals that the value of the tasting note does not come from the “analytical” words contained in the note but rather, from the more subjective component of it. (JEL Classification: L66, L11, C23)
The Costs of Low Birth Weight

Birth weight has emerged as the leading indicator of infant health and welfare and the central focus of infant health policy. This is because low birth weight (LBW) infants experience severe health and developmental difficulties that can impose enormous costs on society. But would the prevention of LBW generate equally sizable cost savings and health improvements? Estimates of the return to LBWprevention from cross-sectional associations may be biased by omitted variables that cannot be influenced by policy, such as genetic factors. To address this, we compare the hospital costs, health at birth, and infant mortality rates between heavier and lighter infants from all twin pairs born in the United States. We also examine the effect of maternal smoking during pregnancy – the leading risk factor for LBW in the United States – on health among singleton births after controlling for detailed background characteristics. Both analyses imply substantially smaller effects of LBW than previously thought, suggesting two possibilities: 1) existing estimates overstate the true costs and consequences of LBW by at least a factor of four and by as much as a factor of 20; or 2) different LBW-preventing interventions have different health and cost consequences, implying that policy efforts that presume a single return to reducing LBW will necessarily be suboptimal.
Graphical techniques in debiasing: an exploratory study

Base rate and conjunction fallacies are consistent biases that influence decision making involving probability judgments. The authors develop simple graphical techniques and test their efficacy in correcting for these biases. Preliminary results suggest that graphical techniques help to overcome these biases and improve decision making. The authors examine the implications of incorporating these simple techniques in Executive Information Systems. >
Critical Essay: Musings on the Need to Convince Some People with Disabilities That End-of-Life Decision-Making Advocates Are Not out to Get Them

I felt a real connection to Kristen when I met her outside Woodside Hospice . . . . I liked Kristen. Sure didn’t want her to be afraid of me. “I am not a cabbage, an onion, nor[sic] a cob of corn. I am a child of God, sister of Jesus, with purpose just like Terri. Just like you,” read a sign in front of where Kristen lay. Her sister, Tracey, said she wrote the message because Kristen’s hands are curled tight and she’s practically immobile. But it’s what Kristen wanted to write down. Just as it was Kristen who told Tracey to head to Woodside Hospice. . . . The [Theresa Marie] Schiavo case, as the sign showed, had Kristen worried. Which is a shame. Because Kristen has nothing to worry about. She suffered residual brain damage as a result of viral encephalitis in 1976 . . . . She’s alert. And although I can’t make out her words, Kristen’s clearly communicating. Wish I could make her understand that she has nothing to worry about. That the people who fought legislative intrusion denying Schiavo the right to die would fight just as hard to make sure some politician didn’t deny Kristen her right to live – if that was her choice.
Leasing and Secondary Markets: Theory and Evidence from Commercial Aircraft

I develop a model of costly capital reallocation to understand how leasing reduces trading frictions. Leased assets trade more frequently and produce more output than owned assets because (1) high-volatility firms are more likely to lease than low-volatility firms and (2) firms shed leased asssets faster than owned assets amid productivity shocks because of lower transaction costs. Commercial aircraft data show that leased aircraft have holding durations 38 percent shorter and fly 6.5 percent more hours than owned aircraft. These differences arise primarily because when profitability declines, carriers keep owned aircraft and return leased aircraft, which lessors redeploy to more productive operators.
The Legitimacy of the Collective Authority of the Security Council

The ideal, once it is embodied in an institution, ceases to be an ideal and becomes the expression of a selfish interest, which must be destroyed in the name of a new ideal. This constant interaction of irreconcilable forces is the stuff of politics. Every political situation contains mutually incompatible elements of utopia and reality, of morality and power. E. H. Carr [T]he crucial question is not what principle is acknowledged but who is accepted as the authoritative interpreter of the principle or, to put it in institutional terms, how the process of legitimization works. Inis Claude, Jr. At this pivotal point in history, a fundamental and oft-raised issue is “international governance.” Means of effective governance are seen as necessary to more complex arrangements of world order. But achieving effective governance ultimately will mean the existence of institutions that legislate, that is, institutions that make decisions binding on the whole. As a general matter, states have been skeptical of, if not hostile toward and consequently unwilling to accept, such governance. The United Nations Security Council is a notable exception; in the sometimes broad, sometimes narrow, area of international peace and security, the Security Council has taken decisions in the name of, and binding upon, the entire international community.
Eliminating the Outside Good Bias in Logit Models of Demand with Aggregate Data

The logit model is the most popular tool in estimating demand for differentiated products. In this model, the outside good plays a crucial role because it allows consumers to stop buying the differentiated good altogether if all brands simultaneously become less attractive (e.g. if a simultaneous price increase occurs). But practitioners lack data on the outside good when only aggregate data are available. The currently accepted procedure is to assume a “market potential” that implicitly defines the size of the outside good (i.e. the number of consumers who considered the product but did not purchase); in practice, this means that an endogenous quantity is approximated by a reasonable guess thereby introducing the possibility of an additional source of error and, most importantly, bias. We provide two contributions in this paper. First, we show that structural parameters can be substantially biased when the assumed market potential does not approximate the outside option correctly. Second, we show how to use panel data techniques to produce unbiased structural estimates by treating the market potential as an unobservable in both the simple and the random coefficients logit demand model. We explore three possible solutions: (a) controlling for the unobservable with market fixed effects, (b) specifying the unobservable to be a linear function of product characteristics, and (c) using a “demeaned regression” approach. Solution (a) is feasible (and preferable) when the number of goods is large relative to the number of markets, whereas (b) and (c) are attractive when the number of markets is too large (as in most applications in Marketing). Importantly, we find that all three solutions are nearly as effective in removing the bias. We demonstrate our two contributions in the simple and random coefficients versions of the logit model via Monte Carlo experiments and with data from the automobile and breakfast cereals markets.
Paper Walls Are Easier to Tear Down: Passport Costs and Legal Barriers to Emigration

Increased attention to the development potential of international migration has led to calls for greater global cooperation and for industrial countries to consider temporary worker programs and other options for increasing the number of immigrants admitted. But less attention has been devoted to policies that migrant-sending countries pursue that impact on the ability of people to emigrate under the existing system. This paper documents the existence and impact of two such policies: passport costs and legal restrictions on emigration. New data collected on passport costs in 127 countries reveals enormous variation in the cost of a passport from one country to the next. One in every 10 countries in the sample is found to have passport costs exceeding 10 percent of annual per capita income. High passport costs are found to be associated with poor governance, especially in terms of the quality of the bureaucracy, and with lower levels of migration. Countries that place legal restrictions on the rights of women to emigrate are also found to have lower migration rates than countries with similar income and population levels. These findings suggest there is scope for some developing countries to receive greater benefits from migration by tearing down the paper walls they place around their own citizens.
Anchoring the sentencing scale: A modest proposal

This article proposes a partial solution to the anchoring problem in sentencing theory. I advance what I term the ‘commensurate harms principle’, according to which the losses and deprivations imposed on convicted offenders as punishment should be kept commensurate with the ‘standard’ harms (Von Hirsch and Jareborg, 1991: 4) their crimes cause victims. The principle is defended as an aid to setting sentences for core criminal offense types. Intelligent application of the principle requires us to gain an informed understanding of both the harms caused by crimes and the harms done by criminal sanctions, particularly imprisonment. Various objections to the principle are addressed, including claims that victim and penal harms cannot be compared and that the harms produced by crimes and criminal sanctions extend beyond victims and offenders. I contend that the commensurate harms principle would counsel the sparing use of imprisonment and often support less harsh sentences than are the norm in many countries.
Confirmation Bias in the United States Supreme Court Judicial Database

We ask whether the widely used direction of decision and direction of vote variables in the United States Supreme Court Judicial Database (USSCJD) are contaminated by confirmation bias, or have been affected by expectations about the likely effects of judicial preferences on case outcomes. Using a sample of generally comparable cases, we find evidence that the assignment of issue codes to these cases, codes that govern the subsequent assignment of "direction" to the Court's judgments, is conditional on both case disposition and the known preferences of the deciding court, in the direction predicted by the hypothesis of confirmation bias. We also find that the USSCJD direction variables overstate the effect of judicial preferences and understate the effect of congressional preferences on case outcomes, relative to objectively coded measures of the Court's judgments. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Yale University. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.
Shaming tax delinquents

Abstract Many federal and local governments rely on shaming penalties to achieve policy goals, but little is known about how shaming works. Such penalties may be ineffective, or even backfire by crowding out intrinsic motivation. In this paper, we study shaming in the context of the collection of tax delinquencies. We sent letters to 34,334 tax delinquents who owed a total of half a billion dollars in three U.S. states. We randomized some of the information contained in the letter to vary the salience of financial penalties, shaming penalties, and peer comparisons. We then measured the effects of this information on subsequent payment rates. We found that increasing the visibility of delinquency status increased compliance by individuals who have debts below $2500, but had no significant effect on individuals with larger debt amounts. Financial reminders had a positive effect on payment rates independent of the size of the debt, while information about the delinquency of neighbors had no effect on payment rates.
Whistle-Blowing: Target Firm Characteristics and Economic Consequences

ABSTRACT: We document the first systematic evidence on the characteristics and economic consequences of firms subject to employee allegations of corporate financial misdeeds. First, compared to a control group that avoided public whistle-blowing allegations, firms subject to whistle-blowing allegations were characterized by unique firm-specific factors that led employees to expose alleged financial misdeeds. Second, on average, whistle-blowing announcements were associated with a negative 2.8 percent market-adjusted five-day stock price reaction; this reaction was especially negative for allegations involving earnings management (−7.3 percent). Third, compared to a control group that exhibits similar characteristics, firms subject to whistle-blowing allegations were associated with further negative consequences including earnings restatements, shareholder lawsuits, and negative future operating and stock return performance. Finally, whistle-blowing targets exposed by the press were more likely to make sub...
The Model of Plans and the Prospects for Positivism

In Legality, Scott Shapiro builds his case for legal positivism on a simple premise: laws are plans. Recognition of that fact leads to legal positivism, Shapiro says, because the content of a plan is fixed by social facts. In this essay, I argue that Shapiro’s case for legal positivism fails. Moreover, I argue that we can learn important lessons about the prospects for positivism by attending to the ways in the argument fails. As I show, the flaws in Shapiro’s argument reveal structural problems with a family of prominent positivist views, including the one defended by Joseph Raz.