cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
School Vouchers: The Educational Silver Bullet, or an Ideological Blank Round

On the last day of its 2001 Term, the United States Supreme Court released one of its most anticipated decisions in the school voucher case of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris. The Court’s five conservatives joined in a majority opinion to hold that Ohio’ Pilot Scholarship Program (“Voucher Program”) does not offend the Establishment Clause. They reached this result by dramatically altering the scope of an Establishment Clause neutrality test conservative Justices have aggressively developed and expanded over the last twenty years.
The effects of health facility access and quality on family planning decisions in urban Senegal

Research in developing countries is rarely focused on examining how supply side factors affect family planning decisions due to a lack of facility-level data. When these data exist, analyses tend to focus on rural environments. In this paper, we study the effects that health facility access and quality have on contraceptive use and desired number of children for women in urban Senegal. Unlike related studies focusing on rural environments, we find no evidence that greater access to health facilities and pharmacies increases contraceptive use among urban women. However, we do find that contraceptive use among urban women is higher with greater facility quality. For example, we find that increasing the proportion of pharmacies employing multiple pharmacists from 0% to 50% would increase contraceptive use by 6.0 percentage points, and increasing the proportion of facilities with family planning guidelines/protocols from 50% to 100% would increase use by 2.1 percentage points.
Modeling the World Economic Outlook at the IMF : a historical review

The World Economic Outlook (WEO) exercise at the IMF evolved during the 1980s, partly in response to demands by policymakers in national finance ministries for objective and internationally comparable projections and policy scenarios. The exercise had begun as a staff initiative, encouraged by the Managing Director (Johannes Witteveen). Gradually, the Executive Board, the Interim Committee, the Group of Seven, and others came to view the discussion of the WEO documents as an important element in their efforts to keep abreast of world economic developments and prospects. Direct and indirect feedback from those discussions informed the staff as to how the exercise should be improved. Driven by this policy relevance, the WEO evolved from a decentralized project that was only haphazardly model-based into a more rigorous and coordinated exercise.
Herbert Wechsler, Legal Process, and the Jurisprudential Roots of the Model Penal Code

Herbert Wechsler shepherded the Model Penal Code to completion during the same decade (1952-1962) in which he wrote many of the canonical texts of Legal Process jurisprudence. Yet the connection between Wechsler’s work in criminal law and his Legal Process philosophy has received relatively little scholarly attention. In fact, as this article details, Wechsler’s approach to criminal law reform reflected all the core themes of Legal Process theory and accounts for both the Code’s overall structure and many of its doctrinal innovations. Seeing the Model Penal Code as a product of Legal Process jurisprudence helps clear away significant misconceptions about the Model Penal Code and also recasts conventional understandings of Legal Process theory itself. Though the Model Penal Code has been caricatured as overly ambitious, thoroughly utilitarian, and technocratic-elitist, the Code actually represented the modest aims, value pluralism, and democratic commitments of Wechsler and the Legal Process School. Wechsler was committed to producing both a principled rationalization of criminal law and a prudent piece of social legislation. The healthy tension in the Code between principle and prudence — the two watchwords of Legal Process theory — account for the Code’s unparalleled impact on American criminal law.
Poverty, Islamist Extremism, and the Debacle of Doha Round Counter-Terrorism: Part One of a Trilogy - Agricultural Tariffs and Subsidies

Please refer to SSRN for a full-text version of this paper: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2162624
Modeling Sovereign Yield Spreads: A Case Study of Russian Debt

We construct a model for pricing sovereign debt that accounts for the risks of both default and restructuring, and allows for compensation for illiquidity. Using a new and relatively efficient method, we estimate the model using Russian dollar-denominated bonds. We consider the determinants of the Russian yield spread, the yield differential across different Russian bonds, and the implications for market integration, relative liquidity, relative expected recovery rates, and implied expectations of different default scenarios. THIS PAPER DEVELOPS A MODEL of the termstructure of credit spreads on sovereign bonds that accommodates: (i) Default or repudiation: The sovereign announces that it will stop making payments on its debt; (ii) Restructuring or renegotiation: The sovereign and the lenders ‘‘agree’’ to reduce (or postpone) the remaining payments; and (iii) A‘‘regime switch,’’ such as a change of government or the default of another sovereign bond that changes the perceived risk of future defaults.We build on the framework of Duffie and Singleton (1999), showing that cash flows promised by a sovereign bond can be discounted using a default-adjusted short-termdiscount rate that reflects the m ean arrival rate, and associated losses in market value upon arrival, of each of the aforementioned types of credit events. Since a sovereign credit event is often not a ‘‘liquidation event,’’ the model allows for continued trading (and pricing) of a sovereign instrument through credit events, possibly after writedowns in face value or cash distributions to creditors on credit event dates. Additionally, we accommodate the possibility that bonds issued by the same sovereign, of exactly the same type but possibly of different maturities, may be priced in the market using different discount factors. Reasons for this may include: (i) Bond covenants may not include cross-default clauses that would force, upon the default of one bond, the simultaneous default of other bonds of the same type, but of a different maturity. For various strategic reasons related to internal
Serious Mischiefs: Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Allapattah Services, Inc. Supplemental Jurisdiction, and Breaking the Promise of Finley

After Finley v. United States threatened to eviscerate the doctrines of supplemental jurisdiction, Congress hastily passed a law intended to overturn Finley's result. But this statute raised new questions of its own, which plagued the federal courts of appeals for fifteen years and led to a deep circuit split. When it agreed to hear Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Allapattah Services, the Supreme Court had an opportunity to remain true to its promise in Finley to apply clear interpretive rules upon which it said Congress could rely. In its decision, the Court settled one of the most contentious issues arising from the supplemental jurisdiction statute, but in doing so, it compromised the clear interpretive rules it had committed to use. The Court thus broke its Finley promise  ironically, while interpreting the very statute that had been passed in Finley's wake. This Note explores the serious mischiefs that evolved out of the divergent line of jurisdictional cases, became codified in § 1367, and were reborn in Allapattah. Part I examines the narrow limits the Supreme Court has placed on inferior federal courts through its interpretation of congressional grants of jurisdiction, the much more expansive doctrine it developed in order to permit courts to hear supplemental claims despite the lack of statutory authorization, and the Court's reasoning in Finley, in which the mischiefs were laid bare and the Court called upon Congress to act. Part II describes the congressional attempt to overturn the result in Finley and codify the prior practice, mischiefs and all, as well as the new set of serious mischiefs resulting from the effect of the language [Congress] adopt[ed]. Part III then thoroughly analyzes the Court's opinion in Allapattah, using the Court's treatment of the complete diversity rule to reveal its abandonment not only of the Finley promise, but also of the very rationale the Court employed to decide the case. Finally, Part IV examines the feasibility of various possible solutions to the problem of authorizing supplemental jurisdiction while simultaneously limiting the reach of federal judicial power, concluding that, regardless of the specific legislative fix, if the Court will not honor its commitment to provide clear interpretive rules for Congress, then Congress should provide clear statutory rules for the Court.
The excess co-movement of commodity prices

MIT's Center for Energy Policy Research and National Science Foundation, SES-8618502 and SES-8619004
The 'New' Privacy and the 'Old': Is Applying the Tort Law of Privacy Like Putting High-Button Shoes on the Internet?

New communication technologies—particularly the Internet—have drastically complicated the problem of preserving privacy. As a result, a multitude of solutions for this increasingly complex area of the law have been put forth in recent years. This essay concludes, however, that changes in technology do not warrant altering the underlying constitutional balance that was arrived at decades ago in the tort law of privacy. The free speech limits on privacy law were imposed for good reason, and steps to protect the interest in the new online environment should not be ones that upset that careful balance.
Implication of gasb statement no. 34 for reporting and accountability: the georgia experience

Financial reporting is the cornerstone of financial management. In 1999, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) ratified unanimously GASB Statement No. 34. In this paper, using the Georgia Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) and interviews with practitioners, we examine the implication of GASB 34 for the linkage between reporting and accountability. The research findings show that Statement 34 introduces significant impacts on reporting. However, its implications for accountability and better financial management are yet to be as significant as hoped.
If It Looks Like a Vessel: The Supreme Court’s “Reasonable Observer” Test for Vessel Status

What is a vessel? In maritime law, important rights and duties turn on whether something is a vessel. In Stewart v. Dutra Construction Co. (2005), the United States Supreme Court held that a vessel need only be "practically capable" of maritime transport. But Stewart left open an important question: Should courts consider the owner's intended use for the structure in determining whether it counts as a vessel under the statute? Earlier this Term, in Lozman v. City of Riviera Beach (2013), the Supreme Court answered that question and held that courts should consider only objective facts about the structure's design and activities. In the process, the Court announced a new test for vessel status based on the concept of the reasonable observer. This Comment begins by outlining the case's facts and procedural history, then pulls back to survey the law of vessel status. Against this background, this Comment discusses the Supreme Court's decision, and criticizes the Supreme Court’s new test for vessel status as misguided and unworkable.
Tightening credit standards: the role of accounting quality

Over the latest 20 years, the average credit rating of U.S. corporations has trended down. Blume et al. (1998, Journal of Finance, 53, 1389–1413.) attribute this trend to a tightening of credit standards by agencies. We reexamine the observed decreases in credit ratings in several ways. First, we show that this downward trend does not apply to speculative-grade issuers. Second, our analysis of investment-grade issuers suggests that the apparent tightening of standards can be attributed primarily to changes in accounting quality over time. After incorporating changing accounting quality, we find no evidence that rating agencies have tightened their credit standards.
Estimating Default Probabilities Implicit in Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities (CMBS)

This paper uses a structural credit risk model, providing an analytical formula to estimate default probabilities implicit in commercial mortgage backed security prices. Empirical studies of CMBS default have focused on the probability of default depending on loan characteristics at the origination and market indices. Recent studies show that unobservable current loan-to-value (LTV) ratio is a key state variable driving default. We update this variable using Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) property-type indices over time. Later, we employ first passage time approach to study CMBS default using implied LTV.
Financial Literacy among the Young

We examined financial literacy among the young using the most recent wave of the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We showed that financial literacy is low; fewer than one-third of young adults possess basic knowledge of interest rates, inflation and risk diversification. Financial literacy was strongly related to sociodemographic characteristics and family financial sophistication. Specifically, a college-educated male whose parents had stocks and retirement savings was about 45 percentage points more likely to know about risk diversification than a female with less than a high school education whose parents were not wealthy.
Crime, Legitimacy, and Testilying

Crime, Legitimacy, and Testilying draws upon Tom Tyler's highly influential legitimacy theory (that perceptions of legitimacy play a crucial role in inducing voluntary compliance with the law) to make the novel but utilitarian argument that more policing of the police - by holding officers accountable for sanctionable and criminal conduct - is likely to have the counter-intuitive effect of reducing crime in the general population. The Article makes this argument by following Mari Matsuda's suggestion and looking to the bottom, i.e., adopting the perspective of those in minority and poor communities. From this (disad)vantage point, police actions that are normally associated with over-enforcement, such as racial profiling and the use of excessive force, also signal a type of under-enforcement. Except in the most egregious cases, law enforcement officers can engage in otherwise sanctionable conduct usually without fear of consequences; in short, officers themselves often operate in and benefit from a zone of under-enforcement. This in turn undermines police legitimacy and induces non-compliance with the law. As a case in point, the Article turns its focus on "testilying" (the name given to police perjury), the paucity of prosecutions, and the resulting legitimacy failure. The Article then proposes reforms to reduce the occurrence of "testilying" and punish its offenders. The Article's conclusion, which should be acceptable to civil libertarians and law and order advocates alike, is that the collateral benefits of such increased policing of the police far outweigh the drawbacks. In fact, increased policing of the police would not only have the collateral consequence of reducing crime across the board. It would also benefit the police themselves by leading to safer and better policing.
Toward a Heterodox Property Law and Economics

This essay reflect comments made at the 2015 Property Section meeting at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. Considering that, properly conceived, property law creates frameworks and constitutes the infrastructure within which the allocation of valued resources takes place, the essay suggests that introducing heterodox -- alternative, critical -- economic perspectives into the law and economics of property law has the potential to bridge divides between "traditional" and progressive approaches to the field.
Pedagogy in Translation: Teaching Animal Law in China

This essay reflects on the didactic process of teaching a course on Animal Law in Mainland China and surveys the opportunity for Chinese and other Asian legal students and scholars to contribute to this emerging academic field. The author first clarifies his pedagogical ambitions in crafting a curriculum centred on a comparative approach to animal law. He notes the variable successes of his teaching strategies, offering techniques to better contextualize this at times foreign material for international students. The author then considers the unique ‘structural’ characteristics of animal law that make it an empowering vehicle in legal education, such as its signature ability to connect trans-legal theoretical frameworks to new, unanswered questions and its inherent practical connection to the individual’s development as an actualized citizen. In the final section of his essay, the author highlights areas of substantive animal law that could benefit from revision by non-Western thinkers. Areas particularly ...
Percolation and disorder-resistance in cellular automata

We rigorously prove a form of disorder-resistance for a class of one-dimensional cellular automaton rules, including some that arise as boundary dynamics of two-dimensional solidification rules. Specifically, when started from a random initial seed on an interval of length L, with probability tending to one as L→∞, the evolution is a replicator. That is, a region of space–time of density one is filled with a spatially and temporally periodic pattern, punctuated by a finite set of other finite patterns repeated at a fractal set of locations. On the other hand, the same rules exhibit provably more complex evolution from some seeds, while from other seeds their behavior is apparently chaotic. A principal tool is a new variant of percolation theory, in the context of additive cellular automata from random initial states.
Japanese Structural Adjustment and the Balance of Payments

Sachs, JefRey, and Boone, Peter-Japanese Structural Adjustment and the Balance of Payments This paper presents a simulation model to evaluate the effect of the abolition of agricultural protection on the external balances of the Japanese economy. The result shows counterintuitively that it may indeed increase Japanese trade balances. This arises because agricultural land is more likely to be owned by the old in Japan, and the resultant decline in land prices implies a wealth transfer from the old, who normally have lower saving rates, to the young, who normally have high saving rates,
Are Investors Confused by Restatements after Sarbanes-Oxley?

ABSTRACT: Regulators have expressed concern that investors are confused by the large number and questionable materiality of accounting restatements since passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). This study looks for evidence of investor confusion by examining stock returns and trading volume. I find that the initial price reaction to restatement announcements becomes significantly less negative after SOX, even after controlling for the less egregious nature of post-SOX restatements. To assess whether the less negative reaction represents under-reaction, I test whether stock prices drift negatively over the months and years after the initial reaction. I find no evidence of statistically negative drifts unique to the post-SOX period. In fact, I find that post-SOX drifts are statistically less negative than pre-SOX drifts, suggesting that price efficiency actually improves after SOX. Finally, I find no evidence that post-SOX restatements have higher trading volume after controlling for contemporaneous return...
A Meta - Analysis of the Effect of Environmental Contamination and Positive Amenities on Residential Real Estate Values

This paper addresses the effects of environmental contamination and positive amenities on proximate residential real estate property values in the United States. Contamination sources include leaki...
Economic reconstruction amidst conflict: Insights from Afghanistan and Iraq

Economic reconstruction typically takes place after the end of war. Yet recently, economic reconstruction has been viewed as a means to ‘win hearts and minds’ during ongoing conflict. Drawing on a variety of reconstruction experiences from Afghanistan and Iraq, we identify four ‘reconstruction traps’ that result from the incentives and constraints faced by actors involved in economic reconstruction during ongoing conflict. These traps include: 1. the credible commitment trap, 2. the knowledge trap, 3. the political economy trap, and 4. the bureaucracy trap. Avoiding these traps is critical for successful economic reconstruction; and we discuss potential strategies for doing so.
Money and the rule of law

Contemporary monetary systems permit those in positions of authority to exercise discretionary power in the pursuit of monetary policy objectives. We argue there are strong prima facie reasons why this is normatively problematic. Engaging the literature on the rule of law, we argue that a general and nondiscriminatory rule ought to apply to monetary institutions for the same reasons such a rule ought to apply to other important institutions. We recognize that this prima facie case may be overcome by sufficiently strong consequentialist concerns, but show that these concerns are ungrounded: discretionary monetary authorities, both in theory and practice, perform poorly. We thus affirm the importance of the rule of law for monetary policy as a requisite for both non-arbitrary governance and macroeconomic stability.
Beneficial and Unusual Punishment: An Argument in Support of Prisoner Participation in Clinical Trials

Currently, approximately 1.8 million people are incarcerated in the United States at any given time. A disproportionately large percentage of the prisoner population has serious illnesses, such as AIDS and tuberculosis. Prisoners most often, however, are barred from participation in clinical trials, even when conventional therapy has failed, and experimental treatment might provide them with their only hope of survival. Much of the reluctance to include prisoners in biomedical research is based on history. In the past, prisoners have been severely abused and even tortured in medical studies conducted in the Nazi death camps, Japanese prisoner camps, and correctional facilities in the United States. By 1969, eighty-five percent of new drugs were tested on incarcerated persons in forty-two American prisons. In the 1970s regulations regarding the use of biomedical experimentation on prisoners were issued by the federal government, designed to provide rigorous review of research protocols involving prisoners and to protect inmates from abuse in the research context. Abuse of prisoner subjects in clinical studies can lead to violations of their constitutional rights. The author argues, however, that prohibiting seriously ill prisoners from participating voluntarily in clinical research may constitute an equivalent contravention of their constitutional rights under the Eighth Amendment and the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses. The article reviews the history of prisoner participation in biomedical research, analyzes the relevant constitutional issues, and encourages the inclusion of prisoners in clinical studies involving potentially beneficial experimental treatment for life-threatening diseases.
Career Concerns and Ambiguity Aversion

Why do people have ambiguity aversion, preferring, a gamble with a 50% chance of success to one whose expected probability of success is 50% but where that 50% is an unbiased estimate? The answer modelled here, in the spirit of the career concerns literature, is learning: a risk-averse person does not wish observers to learn whether he is good or bad at estimating probabilities. He therefore prefers a gamble with objective probabilities.
How Quantitative Easing Works: Evidence on the Refinancing Channel

We document the transmission of large-scale asset purchases by the Federal Reserve to the real economy using rich borrower-linked mortgage-market data and an identification strategy based on mortgage market segmentation. We find that central bank QE1 MBS purchases substantially increased refinancing activity, reduced interest payments for refinancing households, led to a boom in equity extraction, and increased aggregate consumption. Relative to QE-ineligible jumbo mortgages, QE-eligible conforming mortgage interest rates fell by an additional 40 bp and refinancing volumes increased by an additional 56% during QE1. We estimate that households refinancing during QE1 increased their durable consumption by 12%. Our results highlight that the transmission of unconventional monetary policy to the real economy depends crucially on the composition of assets purchased and the degree of segmentation in the marke
Local media ownership and media quality

Abstract The Federal Communications Commission regulates local media ownership to promote competition, diversity and the provision of local programming. This study investigates how local media cross-ownership, co-ownership and ownership diversity are associated with media market outcomes. Cross-sectional regressions indicate that television station ownership consolidation is associated with increased local TV news production but lower news ratings. However, panel estimation finds that changes in local media ownership are uncorrelated with local media usage or programming, producing confidence intervals that are tightly centered around zero.
Creativity and Inequality: The Dual Path of China's Urban Economy?

Utilizing Chinese data for the years of 1998, 2000, 2005, and 2008, this research traces the growth of the creative economy and the enlarging income inequality in China's urban economy. While the creative sector now makes up close to 30 percent of China's urban private employment, industry-based earnings disparity has also increased substantively. Provinces with larger creative economy also tend to have higher level of wage inequality among workers of the creative sector, the working sector, and the service sector. Several other factors, especially internal migration flow, size of manufacturing, and ownership structure in local economy, are found to be significantly linked to inequality as well.
Monetary policy and credit cards: Evidence from a small open economy

Abstract This paper uses a unique monthly data set that covers the overall credit card usage in a small-open economy, Turkey, to investigate a possible credit channel of monetary policy transmission through credit cards. A reduced-form vector autoregression analysis is employed, where the forecast error variance decompositions are calculated for three-year windows over the period 2002–2009. It is shown that, during the recent financial crisis that has started in 2007, the monetary policy of Turkey has shifted toward focusing on output volatility and interest rate smoothing through setting short-term interest rates, while the inflation rate has been mostly affected by exchange rate movements and inflation inertia. Credit card usage has an increasing effect on inflation rates through time, requiring more policy emphasis on the credit channel through credit cards. When the effects of the credit view and the money view are compared, the former seems to be more effective on the real side of the economy, independent of the level of inflation.
The responsibility to protect: paradigm or pastiche?

1 Professor of International Law, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University (USA). I have no idea whether Tom Hadden, to whom this volume is dedicated, would endorse the ideas or approach of this article, but I am confident that he would analyse “R2P” with the same blend of legal rigour and political pragmatism that has always characterised his work. Tom might never describe a glass as “half full” or “half empty”; instead, he would simply tell us how much water was in the glass and proceed to offer innovative ideas about how to fill it or empty it, depending on one’s goal. 2 The journal, Global Responsibility to Protect, appeared in 2009 and is published by Martinus Nijhoff. 3 The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect was founded in February 2008 and is housed at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Initial funding for the centre was provided by the governments of Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, The Netherlands, Norway, Rwanda, and the United Kingdom; the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation; the Open Society Institute, and Scott Lawlor. Its International Advisory Board is co-chaired by former ICISS co-chairs Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun. See http://globalr2p.org/about.html. NILQ 60(2): 135–45
Feng Shui and the restructuring of the hospital corporation: a call for change in the face of the medical error epidemic.

Feng Shui is the eastern art and science of being in harmony with your environment. Feng shui is a structural system designed to align an internal environment with the outside world. The concept of feng shui can be applied to institutions, as there is a need for an organization to be properly structured to meet internal and external objectives. In particular, the American hospital has undergone significant structural changes to both facilitate internal operations and to meet the demands of external constituencies. While the average hospital is now far more complex than in the past, the fundamental corporate model, the so-called "three legged stool," board, administration and medical staff, has remained much the same for many years. This essay considers the continuing viability of the basic legal structure of hospitals - the three legged stool - and to determine whether or not this legal framework retains its effectiveness in the current environment in which acute care institutions must function. The article considers whether hospitals can respond to pressures in the areas of patient safety and quality if they are locked into the traditional triad corporate legal model. The question can be framed as an analysis of whether the three legged stool allows hospitals to achieve the necessary internal efficiencies to face the external pressures being placed on the hospital. The discussion will examine major trends in hospital law that relate to quality of care concerns, and the ways hospitals have responded to quality pressures. The article will explore the implications of medical errors on hospital operations, and will consider the inadequacies of the three legged stool. The article will end with a consideration of how the hospital corporate legal model might be altered to improve current and future quality of care challenges.
Book Review of In the Opinion of the Court

This student work reviews William Domnarski, In the Opinion of the Court (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
Do Investors Integrate Losses and Segregate Gains? Mental Accounting and Investor Trading Decisions*

I test whether investors’ trading decisions are influenced by their preferences for framing gains and losses. I find that investors are more likely to bundle sales of losers than sales of winners on the same day, consistent with the hedonic editing hypothesis (Thaler 1985) that individuals prefer integrating losses and segregating gains. In addition, the extent to which mixed sales of winners and losers are consistent with the hedonic editing hypothesis is greater than what would be expected under random sales of stocks. These results suggest that mental accounting is likely to play a significant role in investors’ trading decisions.
The Role of Patent Law in Knowledge Codification

Berkeley Technology Law Journal Volume 23 Issue 3 Summer Article 1 February 2014 The Role of Patent Law in Knowledge Codification Dan L. Burk Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/btlj Recommended Citation Dan L. Burk, The Role of Patent Law in Knowledge Codification, 23 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1009 (2008). Available at: http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/btlj/vol23/iss3/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals and Related Materials at Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Berkeley Technology Law Journal by an authorized administrator of Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact jcera@law.berkeley.edu.
The Importance of the Raw Idea in Innovation: Testing the Sow's Ear Hypothesis

How important is the original conception of an idea—the “raw” idea— to an innovation's success? In this article, the authors explore whether raw ideas judged as “better” fare better in the market and also determine the strength of that relationship. The empirical context is Quirky.com, a community-driven product development company for household consumer products. The data include descriptions of the raw ideas as originally proposed, the ultimate product designs that resulted from those ideas, and sales figures. In addition, they contain two measures of idea quality: those from online consumer panelists and those from expert evaluators. The authors note the following findings: First, online consumer panels are a better way to determine a “good” idea than are ratings by experts. Second, predictions with samples as small as 20 consumers are reliable. Third, there is a stronger predictive link between raw ideas and consumers' purchase intent of final product designs than there is between those intentions and...
Playing it Safe? Managerial Preferences, Risk, and Agency Conflicts *

Abstract This article examines managers’ incentive to play it safe. We find that, after managers are insulated by the adoption of an antitakeover law, they take value-destroying actions that reduce their firms’ stock volatility and risk of distress. To illustrate one such action, we show that managers undertake diversifying acquisitions that target firms likely to reduce risk, have negative announcement returns, and are concentrated among firms with managers who gain the most from reducing risk. Our findings suggest that instruments typically used to motivate managers, such as greater financial leverage and larger ownership stakes, exacerbate risk-related agency challenges.
A plain English measure of financial reporting readability

Abstract We propose a new measure of readability, the Bog Index, which captures the plain English attributes of disclosure (e.g., active voice, fewer hidden verbs, etc.). We validate this measure using a series of controlled experiments and an archival-based regulatory intervention to prospectus filing readability. We also demonstrate the importance of understanding the underlying drivers of quantity-based measures of readability. In particular, we caution researchers that a vast amount of the variation in Form 10-K file size over time is driven by the inclusion of content unrelated to the underlying text in the 10-K (e.g., HTML, XML, PDFs).
Edge versus center: finding common ground in the capitalization debate

Abstract A continuing debate questions whether capitalization of taxes and public services into house price occurs. The current study argues for an inverse relationship between housing supply elasticity and capitalization rates. A sample is split into houses on the interior and edge of the urban area. Capitalization of schooling and crime occurs everywhere, but it is weaker toward the edge of an urban area where housing supply elasticities and developer activity are greater. Tax results are less robust, but the capitalization rates of crime and school quality are roughly twice as strong on the interior than on the urban fringe.
Financial Development and Wage Inequality: Theory and Evidence

We argue that financial market development contributed to the rise in the skill premium and residual wage inequality in the US since the 1980s. We present an endogenous growth model with imperfect credit markets and establish how improving the efficiency of these markets affects modes of production, innovation and wage dispersion between skilled and unskilled workers. The experience of US states following banking deregulation provides empirical support for our hypothesis. We find that wages of college educated workers increased by between 0.5 - 1.2% following deregulation while those of workers with a high school diploma fell by about 2.2%. Similarly, residual (or within-group) inequality increased. The 90-50 percentile ratio of residuals from a Mincerian wage regression and their standard deviation increased by 4.5% and 1.8%, respectively.
Pursuing Preservation of Pre-Bankruptcy Entitlements: Corporate Bankruptcy Law's Self-Executing Mechanisms

Much analogous to corporate law, the core problem of which could be described as the agency problem, corporate bankruptcy law's nucleus problem is the Problem of Preservation: attempting to prevent inasmuch as possible unnecessary alteration of pre-bankruptcy entitlements. Pursuing preservation, however, is of course only a second order goal. Corporate bankruptcy law was not created as a means to accomplish preservation, but rather to deliberately alter pre-bankruptcy entitlements in order to pursue a first order goal-effectively help firms in financial distress. Thus, it becomes apparent that corporate bankruptcy law cannot rely on the decisions of a single regulator (i.e., the bankruptcy judge) to prevent excessive alteration of prebankruptcy entitlements, because attaining preservation inherently-and blatantly-conflicts with bankruptcy 's first order goals. Consequently, corporate bankruptcy law must also employ other mechanisms in order to truly support a policy of preservation. It is argued here that corporate bankruptcy law demonstrates its commitment to preservation by deploying specially crafted self-executing mechanisms. At least three types of such mechanisms can be identified in corporate bankruptcy settings: internal mechanisms that monitor against excessive redistribution; discretion-limiting mechanisms; and external monitoring and enforcement market mechanisms. The line of reasoning presented in this Article supplies a new point of view from which to explain certain corporate bankruptcy doctrines, and the structure of corporate bankruptcy law in general. Moreover, analyzing the bankruptcy phenomenon from the perspectives of the preservation problem and self-executing mechanisms leads to important normative conclusions. First, lawmakers ought to consider several additional preservation mechanisms, some of which are easily available. Second, future research ought to contemplate whether corporate bankruptcy law is indeed successful in preventing excessive alteration of pre-bankruptcy entitlements by deploying its specified selfexecuting mechanisms. More importantly, research should examine the relative efficacy of the various types of mechanisms. tAssistant Professor, Ramat-Gan Law School. I thank Zohar Goshen, Yuval Procaccia and participants in the faculty colloquium at the Ramat Gan Law School for their comments on an earlier version of the article. Berkeley Business Law Journal Vol. 5.1, 2008
Kenya’s Piracy Prosecutions

Kenya became a primary destination for the prosecution of pirates captured off the coast of Somalia from late 2008 to late 2009. Yet none of the pirates being tried in Kenya as of April 2010 were captured by Kenyan armed forces but, rather, by non-Kenyan forces whose countries had signed agreements with Kenya for it to conduct such trials. In Resolution 1851 of December 16, 2008, the United Nations Security Council had urged states and regional organizations to enter into such agreements. Kenya accordingly concluded agreements on prosecuting suspected pirates with the United Kingdom, the United States, the European Union, and Denmark. According to media reports, and as Kenya recently acknowledged, two others were negotiated, with China and Canada. Only the EU-Kenya agreement has been published. The British foreign secretary told the House of Commons that Kenya did not want its agreement with the United Kingdom to be made public. Consequently, it may well be that a Kenyan preference for secrecy prevented the public release of information on the other agreements signed by Kenya.
Conceptualizing Constitutional Litigation as Anti-Government Expression: A Speech-Centered Theory of Court Access

This Article proposes a speech-based right of court access. First, it finds the traditional due process approach to be analytically incoherent and of limited practical value. Second, it contends that history, constitutional structure, and theory all support conceiving of the right of access as the modern analogue to the right to petition government for redress. Third, the Article explores the ways in which the civil rights plaintiff 's lawsuit tracks the behavior of the traditional dissident. Fourth, by way of a case study, the essay argues that recent restrictions notably, a congressional limitation on the amount of fees counsel for prisoners may recover violates the right of access to the courts.
Jeopardy, non-public information, and insider trading around SEC 10-K and 10-Q filings

Abstract Evidence contrasting U.S. insider trades in high- and low-jeopardy periods and across firms at high and low risk for 10b-5 litigation indicates that insiders condition their trades on foreknowledge of price-relevant public disclosures, but avoid profitable trades when the jeopardy associated with such trades is high, such as immediately before earnings announcements. Insiders avoid profitable trades before quarterly earnings are announced and sell (buy) after good (bad) news earnings announcements. Insiders trade most heavily after earnings announcements and profit from foreknowledge of price-relevant information in the forthcoming Form 10-K or 10-Q filing.
Automatic Head and Neck Tumor Segmentation in PET/CT with Scale Attention Network.

Automatic segmentation is an essential but challenging step for extracting quantitative imaging bio-markers for characterizing head and neck tumor in tumor detection, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment planning and assessment. The HEad and neCK TumOR Segmentation Challenge 2020 (HECKTOR 2020) provides a common platform for comparing different automatic algorithms for segmentation the primary gross target volume (GTV) in the oropharynx region on FDG-PET and CT images. We participated in the image segmentation challenge by developing a fully automatic segmentation network based on encoder-decoder architecture. In order to better integrate information across different scales, we proposed a dynamic scale attention mechanism that incorporates low-level details with high-level semantics from feature maps at different scales. Our framework was trained using the 201 challenge training cases provided by HECKTOR 2020, and achieved an average Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 0.7505 with cross validation. By testing on the 53 testing cases, our model achieved an average DSC, precision and recall of 0.7318, 0.7851, and 0.7319 respectively, which ranked our method in the fourth place in the challenge (id: deepX).
Opacity from Loops in AdS

We investigate how quantum dynamics affects the propagation of a scalar field in Lorentzian AdS. We work in momentum space, in which the propagator admits two spectral representations (denoted “conformal” and “momentum”) in addition to a closed-form one, and all have a simple split structure. Focusing on scalar bubbles, we compute the imaginary part of the self-energy ImΠ in the three representations, which involves the evaluation of seemingly very different objects. We explicitly prove their equivalence in any dimension, and derive some elementary and asymptotic properties of ImΠ. Using a WKB-like approach in the timelike region, we evaluate the propagator dressed with the imaginary part of the self-energy. We find that the dressing from loops exponentially dampens the propagator when one of the endpoints is in the IR region, rendering this region opaque to propagation. This suppression may have implications for field-theoretical model-building in AdS. We argue that in the effective theory (EFT) paradigm, opacity of the IR region induced by higher dimensional operators censors the region of EFT breakdown. This confirms earlier expectations from the literature. Specializing to AdS5, we determine a universal contribution to opacity from gravity.
Conformal Strongly Coupled Magnetic Resonance Systems with Extended Range

In this paper, a novel design for extending the range of Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) systems is presented. The proposed system is based on a simple and planar loop resonator known as the U-loop. A 60 mm radius U-loop is placed between transmitting (TX) and receiving (RX) elements of a Conformal Strongly Coupled Magnetic Resonance (CSCMR) system. The measured results show that a CSCMR system with U-loop is able to extend the range of optimal performance from 60 mm to 120 mm, which is equivalent to the diameter of the U-loop, while maintaining a Power Transfer Efficiency (PTE) of 73% that is suitable for charging electronic devices.
The numerical unified transform method for initial-boundary value problems on the half-line

We implement the Unified Transform Method of Fokas as a numerical method to solve linear partial differential equations on the half-line. The method computes the solution at any x and t without spatial discretization or time stepping. With the help of contour deformations and oscillatory integration techniques, the method's complexity does not increase for large x,t and the method is more accurate as x,t increase. Our goal is to make no assumptions on the functional form of the initial or boundary functions while maintaining high accuracy in a large region of the (x,t) plane.
Agnostic Learning with Unknown Utilities.

Traditional learning approaches for classification implicitly assume that each mistake has the same cost. In many real-world problems though, the utility of a decision depends on the underlying context x and decision y; for instance, misclassifying a stop sign is worse than misclassifying a road-side postbox. However, directly incorporating these utilities into the learning objective is often infeasible since these can be quite complex and difficult for humans to specify. We formally study this as agnostic learning with unknown utilities: given a dataset S = {x_1, …, x_n} where each data point x_i ∼ 𝒟_x from some unknown distribution 𝒟_x, the objective of the learner is to output a function f in some class of decision functions ℱ with small excess risk. This risk measures the performance of the output predictor f with respect to the best predictor in the class ℱ on the unknown underlying utility u^*:𝒳×𝒴↦ [0,1]. This utility u^* is not assumed to have any specific structure and is allowed to be any bounded function. This raises an interesting question whether learning is even possible in our setup, given that obtaining a generalizable estimate of utility u^* might not be possible from finitely many samples. Surprisingly, we show that estimating the utilities of only the sampled points S suffices to learn a decision function which generalizes well. With this insight, we study mechanisms for eliciting information from human experts which allow a learner to estimate the utilities u^* on the set S. While humans find it difficult to directly provide utility values reliably, it is often easier for them to provide comparison feedback based on these utilities. We show that, unlike in the realizable setup, the vanilla comparison queries where humans compare a pair of decisions for a single input x are insufficient. We introduce a family of elicitation mechanisms by generalizing comparisons, called the k-comparison oracle, which enables the learner to ask for comparisons across k different inputs x at once. We show that the excess risk in our agnostic learning framework decreases at a rate of O (1/k) with such queries. This result brings out an interesting accuracy-elicitation trade-off - as the order k of the oracle increases, the comparative queries become harder to elicit from humans but allow for more accurate learning.