cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Property Rights & the Demands of Transformation

The conception of property that a transitional state adopts is critically important because it affects the state’s ability to transform society. The classic conception of property gives property rights a certain sanctity that allows owners to have near absolute control of their property. But, the sanctity given to property rights has made land reform difficult and can serve as a sanctuary for enduring inequality. This is particularly true in countries where ownership is contested and land reform is essential due to pervasive past property theft. Oddly, the classical conception is flourishing in transitional states, like South Africa and Namibia, where transformation of the property status quo is essential. The specific question this Article addresses is: for states where past property dispossession threatens to destabilize the current state, is the classical conception appropriate or do these states require an alternative conception of real property? In this Article, I develop the transformative conception of real property to explore how the exigent need for societal transformation should inspire us to rethink property rights.
Learning from Peers: Knowledge Transfer and Sales Force Productivity Growth

We study how peers impact worker productivity growth among salespeople in the cosmetics department of a department store. We first exploit a shift assignment policy that creates exogenous variation in salespersons' peers each week to identify and quantify sources of worker learning. We find that peer-based learning is more important than learning-by-doing for individuals, and there is no evidence of forgetting. Working with high-ability peers substantially increases the long-term productivity growth of new salespeople. We then examine possible mechanisms behind peer-based learning by exploiting the multiple colocated firms in our setting that sell products with different task difficulties and compensate their sales forces using either team-based or individual-based compensation systems. The variation in incentives to compete and cooperate within and across firm boundaries, combined with variation in sales difficulty for different product classes, allows us to suggest two mechanisms behind peer-based learning: observing successful sales techniques of peers and direct teaching. Our paper advocates the importance of learning from one another in the workplace and suggests that individual peer-based learning is a foundation of both organizational learning curves and knowledge spillovers across firms.
Translating the Constitution

Lawrence Lessig's recent book, Fidelity and Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2019), restates and expands his important and influential theory of interpretive fidelity as translation. This book review is in three parts. Part One explains why, although Lessig's theory is based on fidelity to original meaning, his originalism is unlike most contemporary versions. Indeed, despite his metaphor of translation, Lessig is not really a textualist at all. Unlike most contemporary originalists, he pays relatively little attention to parsing the words of constitutional text, or to their history. Instead, he is a purposivist and structuralist, who argues that fidelity to purpose and structure in changed contexts may sometimes justify departing from the text or adding things to the text. Part Two examines Lessig’s use of the concept of social meaning to explain and justify many of the Supreme Court’s most famous liberal decisions, including Brown v. Board of Education, the sex equality cases, the reproductive rights cases, and the gay rights cases. Lessig's concept of "social meaning" actually refers to changes in elite consensus among the relatively small groups of elites who form the audience for Supreme Court Justices. Lessig's arguments are an imaginative restatement of the American Legal Process tradition, but using a different vocabulary. In an age of polarized elites like today, however, Lessig's social meaning account threatens to break down, as Lessig himself recognizes. Part Three considers whether a purely internalist theory of constitutional change like Lessig’s is adequate to explain the growth and development of the American Constitution. It argues that Lessig’s account of change relies too much on how the world looks to the Justices, rather than on how the world actually changes; it also relies too much on winner's history. His account could be made stronger by focusing on the role of political parties, social movements, and state-building in constitutional change; and the long-term construction of judicial review by the political branches. The result would no longer be purely internalist. But it might be a more powerful account of the complicated processes of constitutional change.
The role of academic research in policy debates: a 1990 survey of student responses to the 150‐hour rule

Abstract Accounting professionals have been disappointed in the 150-hour rule’simpact on attracting high quality students to the accounting professionand directing them to the appropriate type of preparation for entry levelpositions. Rather than attracting good students to the accounting profes-sion, the rule is viewed as a barrier to entry and students are encouragedto specialize too early in their career rather than get the broad educationalbackground envisioned by its proponents. This paper presents a surveythat indicated these negative consequences were possible, but it was notpublished by accounting journals. Journal editors may have been inﬂu-enced by the AICPA’s and AAA’s campaign to implement the 150-hour ruleand were hesitant to publish ﬁndings that cast doubt on realizing the ben-eﬁts touted by proponents. The lesson to be learned is that academic jour-nals should provide research that supports debate of controversial issuesand not skew the outcome of the debate by allowing only research thatfavors one position to be published.
12 New Galactic Wolf-Rayet Stars Identified via 2MASS + Spitzer/GLIMPSE

We report new results from our effort to identify obscured Wolf-Rayet stars in the Galaxy. Candidates were selected by their near-infrared (Two Micron All Sky Survey; 2MASS) and mid-infrared (Spitzer/GLIMPSE) color excesses, which are consistent with free-free emission from ionized stellar winds and thermal excess from hot dust. We have confirmed 12 new Wolf-Rayet stars in the Galactic disk, including nine of the nitrogen subtype (WN), and three of the carbon subtype (WC); this raises the total number of Wolf-Rayet stars discovered with our approach to 27. We classify one of the new stars as a possible dust-producing WC9d + OBI colliding-wind binary, as evidenced by an infrared excess resembling that of known WC9d stars, the detection of OBI features superimposed on the WC9 spectrum, and hard X-ray emission detected by XMM-Newton. A WC8 star in our sample appears to be a member of the stellar cluster Danks 1, in contrast to the rest of the confirmed Wolf-Rayet stars that generally do not appear to reside within dense stellar clusters. Either the majority of the stars are runaways from clusters, or they formed in relative isolation. We briefly discuss prospects for the expansion and improvement of the search for Wolf-Rayet stars throughout the Milky Way Galaxy.
The market for new issues of municipal bonds: The roles of transparency and limited access to retail investors

Abstract I examine how transparency and interdealer trading affects prices investors pay in municipal bond offerings. Real-time trade reporting for municipal bonds started January 31, 2005. The dispersion of purchase prices fell sharply at that time. There was little impact on average markups for most trades, but they increased for purchases of more than $100,000. Bonds often pass through a series of dealers before being placed with a buy-and-hold investor. As the interdealer trades progress, trade sizes decline and trade prices rise. Markups on investor purchases increase with the amount of interdealer trading before the trade.
Failures to Deliver, Short Sale Constraints, and Stock Overvaluation

Studying a large sample of publicly available data on failures to deliver, we find that stocks reaching threshold levels of failures become significantly overvalued. Where short sale constraints are especially binding, we report extreme overpricing and subsequent reversals. These findings support the overvaluation hypothesis, although the mispricing is likely to be difficult to arbitrage because of extreme shorting costs. In addition, threshold stocks with low short interest become more overvalued than threshold stocks with high short interest. This suggests that the level of short interest reflects supply-side effects when the examination conditions on the difficulty of borrowing shares.
Discarding Facts: the Economics of Caste

In contrast with previous modeling by Akerlof, the author develops a model of a caste system which utilizes the stylized facts that caste occupations are hereditary, compulsory, and endogamous. Some implications of the model are tested with data from the Census of India.
Knowledge goods, ordinary goods, and the effects of trade between leading and lagging regions

Abstract We study the effects of trade in knowledge and ordinary goods on the income and welfare gap between a leading and a lagging region. Knowledge goods are invented and produced in the leading region only. In contrast, ordinary goods can be produced in both regions. Our analysis sheds light on four salient questions. First, we determine the equilibrium wage ratio between the leading and the lagging regions. Second, we show that increasing the rate at which the lagging region copies the technology for producing knowledge goods narrows the income and welfare gap between the leading and the lagging regions. Third, we find the steady state level of welfare in the leading region. Finally, we note that an increase in the rate at which the lagging region copies the technology for producing knowledge goods may make the leading region worse off.
Determinants of Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions

The vast majority of cross-border mergers involve private firms outside of the United States. We analyze a sample of 56,978 cross-border mergers between 1990 and 2007. We find that geography, the quality of accounting disclosure, and bilateral trade increase the likelihood of mergers between two countries. Valuation appears to play a role in motivating mergers: firms in countries whose stock market has increased in value, whose currency has recently appreciated, and that have a relatively high market-to-book value tend to be purchasers, while firms from weaker-performing economies tend to be targets. THE VOLUME OF CROSS-BORDER acquisitions has been growing worldwide, from 23% of total merger volume in 1998 to 45% in 2007. Conceptually, cross-border mergers occur for the same reasons as domestic ones: two firms will merge when their combination increases value (or utility) from the perception of the acquiring firm’s managers. However, national borders add an extra element to the calculus of domestic mergers because they are associated with an additional set of frictions that can impede or facilitate mergers. For example, cultural or geographic differences can increase the costs of combining two firms. Governance-related differences across countries can motivate a merger if the combined firm has better protection for target-firm shareholders because of higher governance standards in the country of the acquiring firm. Perhaps more importantly, imperfect integration of capital markets across countries can lead to a merger in which a higher-valued acquirer purchases a relatively inexpensive target following changes in exchange rates or stock market valuations in local currency. In this paper, we evaluate the extent to which these international factors influence the decision of firms to merge. Using a sample of 56,978 cross-border mergers occurring between 1990 and 2007, we estimate the factors that affect the likelihood that firms from any pair of countries merge in a particular year.
Architecture, attention, and adaptation in the multibusiness firm: General electric from 1951 to 2001

In this study, we analyze how the organizational architecture of a multibusiness firm affects the adaptation of its constituent business units. Using an inductive analysis of GE's governance system from 1951 to 2001, we examine how the integration of corporate and business unit attention occurs within and across the firm's governance channels. Our theory identifies an unexplored aspect of the M-form's architecture: collective vertical interactions between the corporate office and business units through cross-level channels. Overall, we articulate three types of channel integration—cross-level, cross-functional, and channel coupling—and examine their effects on responsiveness to threats and opportunities. We find that despite an elaborate organizational architecture, there were periods when GE's governance system did not allow for coordination of corporate and business unit agendas. Our theory proposes that the temporal coupling of specialized, cross-level channels creates an organizational architecture that is both differentiated and integrated. This architecture integrates levels and issues simultaneously, yet focuses attention sequentially, providing more effective conditions for joint attention and coordination between the corporation office and the business unit and adaptive change at the business unit level. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
On Multidimensional Indices of Poverty

The contribution of recent “multidimensional indices of poverty” may not be as obvious as one thinks. There are two issues in assessing that contribution: whether one believes that a single index can ever be a sufficient statistic of poverty, and whether one aggregates in the space of “attainments,” using prices when appropriate, or “deprivations,” using weights set by the analyst. The paper argues that we should aim for a credible set of multiple indices rather than a single multidimensional index. Partial aggregation will still be necessary, but ideally the weights should be consistent with well-informed choices by poor people.
Fitting observed inflation expectations

Abstract The paper provides evidence on the extent to which inflation expectations generated by a standard Christiano et al. (2005) / Smets and Wouters (2003) -type DSGE model are in line with what observed in the data. We consider three variants of this model that differ in terms of the behavior of, and the public's information on, the central banks' inflation target, allegedly a key determinant of inflation expectations. We find that (i) time-variation in the inflation target is needed to capture the evolution of expectations during the post-Volcker period; (ii) the variant where agents have Imperfect Information is strongly rejected by the data; (iii) inflation expectations appear to contain information that is not present in the other series used in estimation, and (iv) none of the models fully capture the dynamics of this variable.
Underwriter Spread, Underwriter Reputation, and IPO Underpricing: A Simultaneous Equation Analysis

This paper studies the relationships between underwriter reputation, underwriter spread, and IPO underpricing. We consider the information content of underwriter spread and find that it conveys information pertinent to IPO quality. Because underwriter spread is endogenous, underpricing and underwriter spread are jointly determined in a simultaneous equation system. Also, we examine the IPO market for evidence of segmentation, and our results suggest some market segmentation. Underwriter spread impacts initial underpricing for a group of medium-reputation underwriters, while underpricing affects underwriter spread for groups of low- and high-reputation underwriters. Consequently, high-risk IPOs may not be priced the same way as low-risk IPOs. We attribute this finding to regulation, competition, and/or market segmentation.
What Do Courts Have to Do With It?: The Judiciary's Role in Making Federal Tax Law

The Internal Revenue Code is an important source of federal tax law, but it is not the only source. The U.S. Department of the Treasury and Internal Revenue Service issue important guidance, and federal courts interpret all of these authorities. This essay provides an overview of federal tax litigation, at both the trial and appellate levels, and discusses the interplay among Congress, the Treasury, and the judiciary in developing federal tax law.
Internationalization Strategy of MNEs from Emerging Economies: The Case of Huawei

With the current rise of multinational enterprises (MNEs) from emerging economies (EE), more attention is now being directed to EE MNEs and what drives the internationalization of these companies. In this article we aim to provide more insights into the strategies and development of EE MNEs by conducting an in‐depth study of a Chinese high‐tech company in the communications equipment industry: Huawei. Our case study proposes that EE MNEs (1) tend to nurture their capability in the domestic market as a base before internationalization; (2) prefer to enter markets with fewer barriers in cultural, technological, economic, and institutional distances to accumulate experience and move up the value curve; and (3) use inward and outward linkages to complement their strengths and offset their weaknesses in the global market. Our study on the internationalization patterns of EE MNEs enriches and broadens current MNE theory.
Beyond the information technology agreement : harmonization of standards and trade in electronics

Product standards can have a dual impact on production and trade costs. Standards may impose additional costs on exporters as it may be necessary to adapt products for specific markets (cost-effect). In contrast, standards can reduce exporters' information costs if they convey information on industrial requirements or consumer tastes that would be costly to collect in the absence of standards (informational-effect). Using a new World Bank database of European standards for electronic products, the authors examine the impact of internationally-harmonized European standards on European Union imports. They find that European Union standards for electronic products that are harmonized to international standards have a positive and significant effect on trade. The results suggest that efforts to promote trade in electronic products could be complemented by steps to promote standards harmonization. This might include, for example, re-starting talks to extend the Information Technology Agreement to non-tariff measures and commitments to harmonize national standards in electronic products.
Trade Adjustment and Human Capital Investments: Evidence from Indian Tariff Reform

Does trade policy influence schooling and child labor in low-income countries? We examine this question in the context of India's 1991 tariff reforms. While schooling increased and child labor declined in rural India in the 1990s, these trends are attenuated in districts with employment concentrated in industries losing tariff protection. As the loss of protection causes a relative rise in poverty in affected districts, families reduce schooling to save schooling costs. Girls dis proportionately bear the burden of helping their families cope with poverty. (JEL F13, F16,121, J13, J82, 015, 019)
The ASEAN Stock Market Performance and Economic Policy Uncertainty in the United States

This study investigates if the changes of economic policy uncertainty in the U.S. can explain the returns on stock markets of Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. This study also examines how the stock market returns in the five countries respond to the changes in economic policy uncertainty in the U.S. The Granger causality tests are also performed to determine if the changes in economic policy uncertainty cause the returns on the five stock markets. The results, from analysing monthly date from 1985:2 to 2012:2, show that the changes in economic policy uncertainty in the U.S. are negatively linked to the returns on the five ASEAN stock markets. Controlling for the effect of the U.S stock market, only Philippines coefficient becomes insignificant. The vector autoregressive analyses show that returns on the five ASEAN stock markets negatively respond to the changes in economic policy uncertainty immediately. The Granger causality tests reveal that the changes in economic policy uncertainty in the U.S. cause the returns on the Singapore and Malaysia stock markets; the same cannot said for the case of Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand.
Mutual fund portfolio trading and investor flow.

Abstract I estimate the extent to which mutual fund portfolio trading of securities is triggered by investor flows into and out of the funds, and find that this liquidity-induced portfolio trading activity is smaller than previously estimated by Edelen (1999) . I obtain estimates from a much larger and broader sample of funds than Edelen’s (1999) sample. Portfolio managers of international funds trade a smaller fraction of investor flow than do those of domestic funds. Index funds invest a larger fraction. A funds’ usage of futures contracts does not have a statistically significant effect on how it trades in response to investor flows, but the unpredictability of investor flow weakly affects the trading response to flow.
Coproduct technologies: product line design and process innovation

The simultaneous production of dierent outputs (co-products) is observed in the chemical, material, mineral, and semiconductor industries among others. Often, as with microprocessors, the outputs dier in quality in the vertical sense and rms classify the output into dierent grades (products). We analyze product-line design and production for a rm operating a vertical co-product technology. We examine how the product line and prot are inuenced by the production cost and output distribution of the technology. We prove that production cost inuences product line design in a fundamentally dierent manner for co-product technologies
The housing market effects of discrete land use regulations: Evidence from the California coastal boundary zone

Abstract The California coast line borders some of the most beautiful and expensive land in the entire world. The California Coastal Commission was created in 1976 to protect the coast line and to regulate land use within the coastal boundary zone. This well defined regulatory boundary offers a unique opportunity to study the consequences of land use regulation on nearby housing located in the same political jurisdiction. Using two different geocoded data sets, we document gentrification within the boundary and discuss possible explanations for these patterns.
Managerial Incentives and the Choice between Public and Bank Debt

Abstract I propose a simple model with complete and perfect information on the relation between managerial incentive compensation and choice between public and bank debt. The empirical analysis offers considerable support to the model's predictions. I find that managers whose compensation is tied to firm performance prefer bank to public debt. Further, I find a positive relation between cost of public debt and managerial incentive compensation and no relation between loan spreads and incentive compensation. Finally, I find that banks are more likely to include a collateral provision in the debt contract if the CEO's compensation is tied to firm performance.
A theory of entangled political economy, with application to TARP and NRA

The recent financial crisis has provoked a raft of contending claims as to whether the cause of the crisis is better attributed to market failure or political failure. Such claims are predicated on a presumption that markets and polities are meaningfully separate entities. To the contrary, we argue that contemporary arrangements create an entangled political economy that renders theorizing based on separation often misleading. Within this alternative framework of entangled political economy, we illuminate both the recent Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) and the New Deal’s National Recovery Administration (NRA).
Forecasting gasoline prices in the presence of Edgeworth Price Cycles

Abstract Forecasting is a central theme in economics. The ability to forecast prices enables economic agents to make optimal decisions for the present and future. In this article, we investigate if and how gasoline prices can be forecast in retail gasoline markets that are subject to high-frequency, asymmetric price cycles known as Edgeworth Price Cycles. We examine a series of purchase timing decision rules and a series of feasible forecasting algorithms for updating those rules over time. We find that, in the presence of cycles, agents in our five Australian markets can systematically reduce purchase prices below market average the equivalent of 11 to 15 U.S. cents per gallon, using simple decision rules and feasible forecasting algorithms.
Rational bubbles: A test

Abstract This paper presents a robust no rational bubbles restriction for equity markets, tests out the restriction, and examines the power of the test. The restriction does not require a constant discount factor or the specification of a particular asset pricing model. A unit root in the price-dividend ratio violates the no rational bubbles restriction. Augmented Dickey-Fuller (1979) tests cannot reject the unit root null, and local to unity confidence intervals [Stock (1991)] include unity. The Dickey-Fuller tests have excellent power against stationary alternatives generated with driving discounted dividend growth factors that have low serial correlation. The results in this paper indicate that either the price-dividend ratio contains a rational bubble, or the discount factor must be stochastic and contain a large predictable component.
ESTIMATING DYNAMIC DISCRETE CHOICE MODELS WITH HYPERBOLIC DISCOUNTING, WITH AN APPLICATION TO MAMMOGRAPHY DECISIONS

We extend the semiparametric estimation method for dynamic discrete choice models using Hotz and Miller's (Review of Economic Studies 60 (1993), 497–529) conditional choice probability approach to the setting where individuals may have hyperbolic discounting time preferences and may be naive about their time inconsistency. We illustrate the proposed identification and estimation method with an empirical application of adult women's decisions to undertake mammography to evaluate the importance of present bias and naivety in the underutilization of this preventive health care. Our results show evidence for both present bias and naivety.
Estimating Potential Output and the Output Gap in Slovakia

This paper estimates potential output and the output gap for Slovakia, which has enjoyed rapid growth with few signs of economic overheating in recent years. The paper applies two broad sets of approaches: conventional methods, represented by a statistical method and a production function approach; and a multivariate (MV) Kalman filter method. The MV Kalman filter method produces estimates of excess demand that portray the situation in recent years in Slovakia much more sensibly than do the conventional methods because it can use more information to condition the paths of potential output.
Attention Felons: Evaluating Project Safe Neighborhoods in Chicago

This research uses a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the impact of Project Safe Neighborhood (PSN) initiatives on neighborhood-level crime rates in Chicago. Four interventions are analyzed: (1) increased federal prosecutions for convicted felons carrying or using guns, (2) the length of sentences associated with federal prosecutions, (3) supply-side firearm policing activities, and (4) social marketing of deterrence and social norms messages through justice-style offender notification meetings. Using individual growth curve models and propensity scores to adjust for nonrandom group assignment of neighborhoods, our findings suggest that several PSN interventions are associated with greater declines of homicide in the treatment neighborhoods compared to the control neighborhoods. The largest effect is associated with the offender notification meetings that stress individual deterrence, normative change in offender behavior, and increasing views on legitimacy and procedural justice. Possible competing hypotheses and directions for individual-level analysis are also discussed.
Canon 2 of the Code of Judicial Conduct

This Article discusses Canon 2 of the Code of Judicial Conduct ("Code"). It focuses on the diverse parts of Canon 2 and the cases in which courts have explicitly applied those standards. Each section compares the language of the 1972 and 1990 Codes, and the extent to which the states have modified the Code's black-letter language or its Commentary. Following the exposition of Code language, the Article discusses and analyzes the judicial decisions that contravene the norm of Canon 2 judicial decision-making.
Customer relationship management and firm performance: the mediating role of business strategy

As managers and academics increasingly raise issues about the real value of CRM, the authors question its direct and unconditional performance effect. The study advances research on CRM by investigating the role of critical mechanisms underlying the CRM-performance link. Drawing from the sources → positions → performance framework, the authors build a research model in which two strategic postures of firms—differentiation and cost leadership—mediate the effect of CRM on firm performance. This investigation also contributes to the literature by drawing attention to the differential impact of CRM in diverse industry environments. The study analyzes data from in-depth field interviews and a large-scale, cross-industry survey, and results reveal that CRM does not affect firm performance directly. Rather, the CRM-performance link is fully mediated by differentiation and cost leadership. In addition, CRM’s impact on differentiation is greater when industry commoditization is high.
Case Visibility and the Electoral Connection in State Supreme Courts

Critics traditionally portray state Supreme Court elections as low-information events that fail to accomplish the stated goal of engendering accountability to the public. Recent changes in the inte...
Engineering a Principle: 'End-to-End' in the Design of the Internet

The term ‘end-to-end’ has become a familiar characterization of the architecture of the Internet, not only in engineering discourse, but in contexts as varied as political manifestos, commercial pr...
Do Consumer Price Subsidies Really Improve Nutrition

Many developing countries use food-price subsidies or controls to improve nutrition. However, subsidizing goods on which households spend a high proportion of their budget can create large wealth effects. Consumers may then substitute towards foods with higher non-nutritional attributes (e.g., taste), but lower nutritional content per unit of currency, weakening or perhaps even reversing the subsidy's intended impact. We analyze data from a randomized program of large price subsidies for poor households in two provinces of China and find no evidence that the subsidies improved nutrition. In fact, it may have had a negative impact for some households. (JEL I38; O12; Q18).
The higher price of cleaner fuels: Market power in the rail transport of fuel ethanol

This paper provides evidence of market power in the transportation of ethanol used in reformulated gasoline and alternative transportation fuels. I estimate a reduced form model for railroad route-level prices. My identification strategy instruments for railroad entry, controls for selection and explicitly models capacity constraints. A detailed understanding of this industry is important because U.S. environmental policies seek to substantially expand ethanol use. Evidence of market power may alter the types of policies pursued by lawmakers. I find that ethanol shipment prices are lower for more competitive routes. I also find evidence that railroads price discriminate based on environmental regulation at route destinations. Monopolist prices for shipments to carbon monoxide non-attainment areas are 3% higher than shipments to other destinations. This price premium falls sharply with increased competition. This suggests a perverse result where environmental regulation increases the price of a clean input.
Forest Carbon Projects and International Law A Deep Equity Legal Analysis

Northern citizens, governments, and businesses are investing billions of dollars in the vast, imperiled forests of the South. In a forest carbon project, a developer plants trees to reforest a degraded ecosystem or preserves a forest that would have otherwise been degraded or felled. The developer can then sell the carbon, now sequestered in the trees and underground biomass, for a contracted period of time. Forest carbon projects are legally problematic. In this article, I introduce the elements of forest carbon projects and the legal debates they engender. I introduce the notion of “deep equity,” the concept that provides an aegis for my analysis. I then briefly describe the entwined problems of global climate change and deforestation. I review the legal regime formulated to ameliorate these problems. I explain forest carbon schemes under both international treaties and the voluntary market. I then examine principles of equity, drawn from multilateral environmental agreements, customary international environmental law, and international human rights law obligations that are implicated in forest carbon investments. After introducing each right or principle, I explain how forest carbon projects may or may not advance the right and propose a set of standards for what an ideal project – one that maximizes deep equity – would include. I briefly analyze how international law is currently ill-equipped to regulate these projects, as many of the important actors elude legal control, in part because they are not explicitly named as duty bearers or because neither home nor host countries are able or willing to enforce legal requirements that do exist. I conclude by discussing how international law should be reformed so that forest carbon investments cleave to legal standards that promote genuine adaptation through deep equity, i.e. sustainable individual, community, and ecological health and potential.
The empirical risk–return relation: A factor analysis approach ☆

Existing empirical literature on the risk-return relation uses a relatively small amount of conditioning information to model the conditional mean and conditional volatility of excess stock market returns. We use dynamic factor analysis for large datasets to summarize a large amount of economic information by few estimated factors, and find that three new factors - termed “volatility,” “risk premium,” and “real” factors - contain important information about one-quarter-ahead excess returns and volatility not contained in commonly used predictor variables. Our specifications predict 16-20 % of the onequarter-ahead variation in excess stock market returns, and exhibit stable and statistically significant out-of-sample forecasting power. We also find a positive conditional riskreturn correlation.
Theocrats Living under Secular Law: An External Engagement with Islamic Legal Theory*

The idea of a divinely revealed Law1 has long been central to Muslim identity. As Islam developed and flourished for the vast majority of its history as the public religion of state power, doctrines of public law and political obligation, no less than matters of worship and ritual, have always been objects of intense practical concern. On this conception of religious morality, a political order is legitimate to the extent that it approximates an ideal legal order as expressed in the idea of shari’a, just as for a political liberal a political order is legitimate to the extent it approximates the terms of social cooperation as would be endorsed by parties contracting in ideal circumstances, whether something like the Original Position or an ideal speech situation.
Internet-Based Collaborations and Their Political Significance

Abstract In recent years, we have witnessed the notable accomplishments of numerous Internet-based large-scale collaborations, which typically rely on small contributions by many participants. In the first part of the paper we highlight the political relevance and significance of such collaborations, and we argue that Internet-based collaboration is turning into an important organizing principle for the production of a variety of goods by a range of political actors. In the second part, we analyze why the Internet is conducive for such collaborations and we focus on a number of factors, most significantly on the reduced costs of both individual contributions and the social organization of production, and on the large and excessive number of potential contributors attracted to focal collaborations.
No News Is News: Do Markets Underreact to Nothing?

As illustrated in the tale of �the dog that did not bark,� the absence of news and the passage of time often contain information. We test whether markets fully incorporate this information using the empirical context of mergers. During the year after merger announcement, the passage of time is informative about the probability that the merger will ultimately complete. We show that the variation in hazard rates of completion after announcement strongly predicts returns. This pattern is consistent with a behavioral model of underreaction to the passage of time and cannot be explained by changes in risk or frictions.
The effect of accuracy motivation on anchoring and adjustment: Do people adjust from provided anchors?

Increasing accuracy motivation (e.g., by providing monetary incentives for accuracy) often fails to increase adjustment away from provided anchors, a result that has led researchers to conclude that people do not effortfully adjust away from such anchors. We challenge this conclusion. First, we show that people are typically uncertain about which way to adjust from provided anchors and that this uncertainty often causes people to believe that they have initially adjusted too far away from such anchors (Studies 1a and 1b). Then, we show that although accuracy motivation fails to increase the gap between anchors and final estimates when people are uncertain about the direction of adjustment, accuracy motivation does increase anchor‐estimate gaps when people are certain about the direction of adjustment, and that this is true regardless of whether the anchors are provided or self-generated (Studies 2, 3a, 3b, and 5). These results suggest that people do effortfully adjust away from provided anchors but that uncertainty about the direction of adjustment makes that adjustment harder to detect than previously assumed. This conclusion has important theoretical implications, suggesting that currently emphasized distinctions between anchor types (self-generated vs. provided) are not fundamental and that ostensibly competing theories of anchoring (selective accessibility and anchoring-and-adjustment) are complementary.
A new International Law of citizenship

Will international law colonize the last bastion of sovereign discretion? As a matter of traditional doctrine, international law has had little to say about the citizenship practices of states and the terms on which states determine the boundaries of their memberships. Through much of the Westphalian era, states have been essentially unconstrained with respect to who gets citizenship and on what terms. Historically, citizenship status has been considered a matter of national self-definition, jealously insulated more as a matter of reflex than justification. Nationality has been equated with identity, in most cases coinciding with ethnic, religious, or other sociocultural community markers, which, in turn, have more or less mapped onto territorial spaces.
Activist arbitrage in M&A acquirers

Abstract A relatively understudied activist investor strategy is to purchase shares in the acquirer after an M&A announcement and exercise shareholder rights to change deal terms, or even to block the deal, through public campaigns. We provide new evidence on how the strategy affects target firms and activists’ returns. Activists tend to target deals involving defense mechanisms, and smaller acquirers with a history of low returns on invested capital. By blocking some deals and pushing other acquirers to lower their bids, such an “activist arbitrage” strategy yields significant returns and serves as a governance antidote to value-destroying acquisitions.
The Effect of Social Factors on User-Generated Content Productivity: Evidence from Flickr.com

User-generated content (UGC) is a valuable information resource on social media. However, we currently know little about why people are constantly producing digital content. In an effort to gather more contents, many UGC service providers are trying to help users improve their social experience. Through the lens of social network theories, our study illustrates that social influence and social interaction between users will motivate users to contribute contents on UGC platforms. We hence design an empirical study to discover the social factors influencing users’ productivity. By collecting data from Flickr.com, we expect to support that individuals’ perception of “social comparison” and “social identity” will positively influence users’ behavior of content generation. We also assume that social interaction, in terms of tie strength, will increase users’ productivity of content.
Toward Comprehensive Reform of America's Emergency Law Regime

Unbenownst to most Americans, the United States is presently under thirty presidentially declared states of emergency. They confer vast powers on the Executive Branch, including the ability to financially incapacitate any person or organization in the United States, seize control of the nation’s communications infrastructure, mobilize military forces, expand the permissible size of the military without congressional authorization, and extend tours of duty without consent from service personnel. Declared states of emergency may also activate Presidential Emergency Action Documents and other continuity-of-government procedures, which confer powers on the President—such as the unilateral suspension of habeas corpus—that appear fundamentally opposed to the American constitutional order. Although the National Emergencies Act, by its plain language, requires Congress to vote every six months on whether a declared national emergency should continue, Congress has done so only once in the nearly forty-year history of the Act.
How Environmental Review Can Generate Car-Induced Pollution: A Case Study

The National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) requires federal officials to draft an environmental impact statement (“EIS”) describing the environmental impact of proposed federal actions that significantly affect the environment, as well as analyze the environmental impacts of alternatives to the proposed action. Almost two dozen states have adopted “little NEPA” statutes imposing similar requirements upon state and/or local governments.This article focuses on one of the strictest little NEPA statutes: New York's State Environmental Quality Review Act (“SEQRA”). While most little NEPA statutes cover only government projects,SEQRA also covers private sector projects requiring municipal permits. Furthermore, SEQRA requires the government to consider both environmental and social impacts of its actions, unlike NEPA and about half of the existing little NEPA statutes.This article contends that the stringencies of SEQRA occasionally have harmful environmental consequences because SEQRA can easily be used to delay “infill development” -- that is, development in already-developed areas such as cities and older suburbs. When this occurs, development may shift from older areas to “greenfields,” newer suburbs that tend to be more dependent on automobiles and thus to produce more pollution.
Fertility, Female Labor Force Participation, and the Demographic Dividend

We estimate the effect of fertility on female labor force participation in a panel of countries using abortion legislation as an instrument for fertility. We find that removing legal restrictions on abortion significantly reduces fertility and estimate that, on average, a birth reduces a woman’s labor supply by almost 2 years during her reproductive life. Our results imply that behavioral change, in the form of increased female labor supply, contributes significantly to economic growth during the demographic transition when fertility declines.
A Quiet Faith? Taxes, Politics, and the Privatization of Religion

The government exempts religious associations fi'om taxation and, in return, restricts their putatively political expression and activities. This exemption-and-restriction scheme imites government to interpret and categorize the means by which religious communities live out their vocations and engage the world. But government is neither well-suited nor to be trusted with this kind of line-drawing. What's more, this invitation is dangerous to authentically religious consciousness and associations. When government communicates and enforces its oun view of the nature of religion-i.e., that it is a private matter-and of its proper place-i.e., in the private sphere, not in politics-it tempts both believers and faith communities to embrace this view. The result is a privatized faith, re-shaped to suit the vision and needs of government, and a public square evacuated of religious associations capable of mediating between persons and the state and challenging prophetically the government's claims and conduct. Tlwse who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not knout what religion means.1 Religion is not the church a man goes to, but the cosmos he lives in.2
Why Do Countries Adopt Constitutional Review

In recent decades, there has been a wide-ranging global movement towards constitutional review. This development poses important puzzles of political economy: Why would self-interested governments willingly constrain themselves by constitutional means? What explains the global shift toward judicial supremacy? Though different theories have been proposed, none have been systematically tested against each other using quantitative empirical methods. In this article, we utilize a unique new dataset on constitutional review for 204 countries for the period 1781–2011 to test various theories that explain the adoption of constitutional review. Using a fixed-effects spatial lag model, we find substantial evidence that the adoption of constitutional review is driven by domestic electoral politics. By contrast, we find no general evidence that constitutional review adoption results from ideational factors, federalism, or international norm diffusion. (JEL: K00, K19, K49)
More Lessons Learned from the Holocaust - Towards a Complexity-Embracing Approach to Why Genocide Occurs

Why do genocides occur? This paper applies qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to revisit this question, and analyses 139 cases of genocide and non-genocide. The paper demonstrates the importance of both priming, contextual conditions which provide a political opportunity structure conducive to genocide, as well as triggering, more proximate conditions which constitute immanent motivations. Most centrally, sufficiency is demonstrated for genocide occurrence when an autocratic regime and the salience of an elite's ethnicity are present, and are combined with either an exclusionary ideology or political upheaval. As such, the autocratic nature of the state provides an opportunity structure allowing genocide to occur, while the salience of elite ethnicity can serve as a motivation. Finally, the ideology and the political upheaval serve as an additional motivation or opportunity structure, respectively. While political upheaval can play a part in causing genocide, its role is much more understated than is suggested in previous literature.