cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Mortgage Modification, Equitable Subordination, and the Honest But Unfortunate Creditor

Mortgage foreclosures are at an all-time high and property values in many parts of the country have declined precipitously. Yet bankruptcy, which is often a last resort for individuals in financial distress, provides little relief to a homeowner who finds that her mortgage debt exceeds the value of her home. The reason for bankruptcy’s inadequacy in this regard is the Bankruptcy Code’s prohibition on the modification of home mortgages, a prohibition that became part of bankruptcy law in 1978, when most home mortgage loans were 30-year fixed rate loans made by savings and loan associations. While most secured loans can be stripped down in bankruptcy, reflecting the payment that the lender would receive if it were forced to foreclose on the collateral, a home mortgage loan must be paid in full, giving the lender more than it would receive under state law. In recent years, abusive mortgage practices have proliferated. These abusive practices, which have prevented homeowners from building equity in their homes, harm not only the debtor, but also the debtor’s other creditors. Despite their behavior, however, home mortgage lenders who engage in these practices continue to receive favorable treatment in bankruptcy. In this paper, I argue that creditors should be denied special treatment in bankruptcy unless they behave in an “honest but unfortunate” manner. Judges can deny this special treatment by using a time-honored bankruptcy principle, the principle of equitable subordination, to subordinate the unsecured portion of a home mortgage loan to all secured and priority claims. While equitable subordination, by itself, will not solve the foreclosure crisis, it may, by reducing the claims of abusive mortgagees, deter abusive lending practices in the future.
Emerging equity market volatility

Abstract Understanding volatility in emerging capital markets is important for determining the cost of capital and for evaluating direct investment and asset allocation decisions. We provide an approach that allows the relative importance of world and local information to change through time in both the expected returns and conditional variance processes. Our time-series and cross-sectional models analyze the reasons that volatility is different across emerging markets, particularly with respect to the timing of capital market reforms. We find that capital market liberalizations often increase the correlation between local market returns and the world market but do not drive up local market volatility.
Double Effect and the Criminal Law

American criminal law is committed to some version of the doctrine of double effect (“DDE”). In this paper, I defend a new variant of the agent-centered rationale for a version of DDE that is of particular relevance to the criminal law. In particular, I argue for a non-absolute version of DDE that concerns the relative culpability of intending a bad or wrongful state of affairs as opposed to bringing it about merely knowingly. My aim is to identify a particular feature of the former in virtue of which it is pro tanto more culpable than the latter. Providing an agent-centered argument of this kind for a culpability version of DDE, I argue, is an especially attractive route to take for those who are interested in vindicating the way the criminal law actually encodes DDE. © 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Efficient Online Learning for Cognitive Radar-Cellular Coexistence via Contextual Thompson Sampling

This paper describes a sequential, or online, learning scheme for adaptive radar transmissions that facilitate spectrum sharing with a non-cooperative cellular network. First, the interference channel between the radar and a spatially distant cellular network is modeled. Then, a linear Contextual Bandit (CB) learning framework is applied to drive the radar’s behavior. The fundamental trade-off between exploration and exploitation is balanced by a proposed Thompson Sampling (TS) algorithm, a pseudo-Bayesian approach which selects waveform parameters based on the posterior probability that a specific waveform is optimal, given discounted channel information as context. It is shown that the contextual TS approach converges more rapidly to behavior that minimizes mutual interference and maximizes spectrum utilization than comparable online learning algorithms. Additionally, it is shown that the TS learning scheme results in a favorable SINR distribution compared to other online learning algorithms. Finally, the proposed TS algorithm is compared to a deep reinforcement learning model. Simulation results show that the TS algorithm maintains competitive performance with a more complex Deep Q-Network (DQN).
Optimal Taxation in Theory and Practice

The optimal design of a tax system is a topic that has long fascinated economic theorists and flummoxed economic policymakers. This paper explores the interplay between tax theory and tax policy. It identifies key lessons policymakers might take from the academic literature on how taxes ought to be designed, and it discusses the extent to which these lessons are reflected in actual tax policy. We begin with a brief overview of how economists think about optimal tax policy, based largely on the foundational work of Ramsey (1927) and Mirrlees (1971). We then put forward eight general lessons suggested by optimal tax theory as it has developed in recent decades: 1) Optimal marginal tax rate schedules depend on the distribution of ability; 2) The optimal marginal tax schedule could decline at high incomes; 3) A flat tax, with a universal lump-sum transfer, could be close to optimal; 4) The optimal extent of redistribution rises with wage inequality; 5) Taxes should depend on personal characteristics as well as income; 6) Only final goods ought to be taxed, and typically they ought to be taxed uniformly; 7) Capital income ought to be untaxed, at least in expectation; and 8) In stochastic dynamic economies, optimal tax policy requires increased sophistication. For each lesson, we discuss its theoretical underpinnings and the extent to which it is consistent with actual tax policy. To preview our conclusions, we find that there has been considerable change in the theory and practice of taxation over the past several decades—although the two paths have been far from parallel. Overall, tax policy has moved in the y N. Gregory Mankiw is Professor of Economics, Matthew Weinzierl is Assistant Professor of Business Administration, and Danny Yagan is a Ph.D. candidate in economics, all at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their e-mail addresses are ngmankiw@
Discouraging Election Contests

This brief article offers a few proposals for discouraging losing candidates from contesting the certified result of an election. Our system encourages – or at least does not dissuade – the filing of post-election contests in close races. But election contests are often bad for our democracy, as they can harm the ideals of finality, certainty, and legitimacy of the election process – with little tangible benefit given that most election contests fail, at least at the federal and statewide level. The article suggests three possible disincentives to initiating post-election litigation: we could eliminate any possibility for a candidate to challenge the certified result, require a large monetary filing fee or the posting of a high bond, or impose a public stigma on candidates who contest an election and lose. In the end, the goal of this article is to promote a broader discussion of the propriety of post-election litigation and what we can do to curtail it.
Earnings Management and the Post‐earnings Announcement Drift

We posit that the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD) is related to earnings management. Accordingly, we find that firms with large negative (positive) changes in operating cash flows manage accruals upward (downward). Most importantly, we find that PEAD is concentrated largely among those firms that are most likely to have smoothed their reported earnings and is generally associated with discretionary accruals as opposed to nondiscretionary accruals. There is no evidence of a positive (negative) PEAD for those firms with large positive (negative) earnings changes that are least likely to have managed earnings downward (upward).
SPATIAL CONFINEMENT OF THE IBEX RIBBON: A DOMINANT TURBULENCE MECHANISM

The narrow ribbon of enhanced energetic neutral atom flux observed by the Interstellar Boundary Explorer spacecraft has prompted numerous ideas to explain its structure and properties. One of these ideas is the "neutral solar wind" scenario, which identifies the source particles as pickup protons in the local interstellar medium originating in solar wind charge-exchange interactions. This scenario has been thought to require unrealistically weak pitch-angle scattering of the pickup protons to explain the narrow structure. Recently, Schwadron & McComas suggested that this structure could result from a spatial retention of the pickup protons, rather than from a restricted pitch-angle distribution. Here, we present a physically motivated, quantitative mechanism to produce such a spatial configuration. This mechanism is based on the "dominant turbulence" assumption, which can be applied where the production of new pickup protons is slow, and has been used to successfully explain the level of turbulent heating observed in the outer solar wind. This formalism predicts a pickup isotropization process which adds or subtracts energy from the ambient turbulent fluctuations, depending on the initial pitch angle of the pickup protons. We show that a simple model of this process can yield a ribbon structure in qualitative agreement with the observations. The results of this simple model are not yet quantitatively satisfactory, but we suggest several improvements which may reduce the quantitative discrepancy.
Differential Use of Implicit Negative Evidence in Generative and Discriminative Language Learning

A classic debate in cognitive science revolves around understanding how children learn complex linguistic rules, such as those governing restrictions on verb alternations, without negative evidence. Traditionally, formal learnability arguments have been used to claim that such learning is impossible without the aid of innate language-specific knowledge. However, recently, researchers have shown that statistical models are capable of learning complex rules from only positive evidence. These two kinds of learnability analyses differ in their assumptions about the distribution from which linguistic input is generated. The former analyses assume that learners seek to identify grammatical sentences in a way that is robust to the distribution from which the sentences are generated, analogous to discriminative approaches in machine learning. The latter assume that learners are trying to estimate a generative model, with sentences being sampled from that model. We show that these two learning approaches differ in their use of implicit negative evidence - the absence of a sentence - when learning verb alternations, and demonstrate that human learners can produce results consistent with the predictions of both approaches, depending on how the learning problem is presented.
The President: Lightning Rod or King?

There is an idea current in the land today that presidential power has grown to the point where it is a threat to democracy. The New York Times editorial page writers and leading Democrats regularly accuse President George W. Bush of acting like a king or seeking kingly powers. In the academic community, Professor Bruce Ackerman has written powerfully about what he sees as the danger that presidential power poses to democracy itself. In this Symposium Issue, Professors Bill Marshall and Jenny Martinez argue that the presidency has become too powerful. Marshall goes so far as to argue for reducing presidential power by separately electing the Attorney General. In this Commentary, we suggest that when political power is examined more broadly, Presidents and their parties generally have less power in the
Examined Lives: Informational Privacy and the Subject as Object

In the Uni t ed S ta te s , p roposa l s fo r in format iona l pr i vacy pro tec t ion have proved enormous ly con t rover s ia l . On a po l i t i ca l l eve l , such proposa l s t h rea ten power fu l da ta process ing in te res t s . On a theore t i ca l l eve l , da ta processors and o ther da ta pr i vacy opp o n e n t s a r g u e t h a t i m p o s i n g r e s t r i c t i o n s o n t h e c o l l e c t i o n , u s e , a n d e x c h a n g e o f p e rsona l da ta wou ld ignore e s tab l i shed unders tand ings o f p roper t y , l im i t i nd iv idua l f reedom o f choice , v io la te pr inc ip les o f ra t ional in format ion use , and in f r inge da ta processors ’ f reedom o f speech . In th i s ar t i c l e , Pro fessor Ju l i e Cohen exp lores these theore t i ca l cha l l enges to in format iona l pr ivacy pro tec t ion . She conc ludes tha t ca tegor i ca l a rgumen t s f rom proper t y , cho ice , “ t ru th ,” and speech lack we igh t , and mask f unda menta l l y po l i t i ca l cho ices about the a l loca t ion o f power over in format ion , cos t , and oppor tun i t y . Each deba te , a l though couched in a rhe tor ic o f ind iv idua l l iber ty , e f f ect i ve l y reduces ind iv idua l s to ob jec t s o f cho ices and t rades made by o thers . Pro fes sor C o h e n a r g u e s , i n s t e a d , t h a t t h e d e b a t e a b o u t d a t a p r i v a c y p r o t e c t i o n s h o u l d b e grounded in an apprec ia t ion o f t he cond i t i ons neces sary f o r i nd i v idua l s t o deve lop and exerc i se au tonomy in f ac t , and tha t mean ing fu l au tonomy requ i re s a degree o f f r eedom from moni tor ing , scru t iny , and ca tegor i za t ion by o thers . The ar t i c l e conc ludes by ca l ling for the des ign o f bo th l ega l and t echno log ica l too l s fo r s t rong da ta pr i vacy pro tect i o n .
Change detection using deep learning approach with object-based image analysis

Abstract In their applications, both deep learning techniques and object-based image analysis (OBIA) have shown better performance separately than conventional methods on change detection tasks. However, efforts to investigate the effect of combining these two techniques for advancing change detection techniques are unexplored in current literature. This study proposes a novel change detection method implementing change feature extraction using convolutional neural networks under an OBIA framework. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we compare the proposed method against benchmark pixel-based counterparts on aerial images for the task of multi-class change detection. To thoroughly assess the performance of our proposed method, this study also for the first time compared three common feature fusion schemes for change detection architecture: concatenation, differencing, and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The proposed method was also tested on simulated misregistered images to evaluate its robustness, a factor that plays an important role in compromising change detection accuracy but has not been investigated for supervised change detection methods in the literature. Finally, the proposed change detection method was also tested using very high resolution (VHR) satellite images for binary class change detection to map an impacted area caused by natural disaster and the result was evaluated using reference data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). With the experimental results from these two sets of experiments, we showed that (1) our proposed method achieved substantially higher accuracy and computational efficiency when compared to pixel-based methods, (2) three feature fusion schemes did not show a significant difference for overall accuracy, (3) our proposed method was robust in image misregistration in both testing and training data, (4) we demonstrate the potential impact of automation to decision making by deploying our method to map a large geographic area affected by a recent natural disaster.
Originalism: Lessons From Things That Go Without Saying

After setting the originalism "stage" and discussion of some of its tribulations, the article turns to the problem of constitutional silences. These come in many shadings, and the article concentrates on three that illustrate different sorts of problems: 1) the failure of the Guarantee Clause to provide a more precise definition of a "republican form of government"; 2) the deafening silence about any role for political parties in the nation's politics and governance; and 3) the absence of guidance about "discretion" to be exercised by presidential elections, which surfaces these days as the problem of the "faithless elector," one who votes in the electoral college contrary to pre-election commitment. These help illustrate how scant are the resources originalism will often bring to the enterprise of constitutional interpretation. The article is an adaptation of the 2008 Nathaniel L. Nathanson Memorial Lecture at the University of San Diego Law School.
From Bibles to Biomarkers: The Future of the DSM and Forensic Psychiatric Diagnosis

There is great anticipation for the RDoC’s neurobiological approach to mental illness to replace the DSM and make everything from research funding to insurance coverage more fair. Whether or not the legal applications of this new system will indeed be an improvement on the DSM depends greatly on how it is used, and what the normative commitments are in that particular legal domain. While the DSM provides one important and useful perspective on what counts as mentally disordered, ultimately for the law this is not a question that science or data can answer. Societies, comprised of people, must grapple with a normative account of when to treat, when to pardon, and when to punish. The DSM cannot decide these questions for us, tempting as it may be to defer to its diagnostic criteria. That we expect it to reveals a deep insecurity about the legal system’s ability to defend its methods and theories of punishment.
The universal valuation of Coxeter matroids

Coxeter matroids generalize matroids just as flag varieties of Lie groups generalize Grassmannians. Valuations of Coxeter matroids are functions that behave well with respect to subdivisions of a Coxeter matroid into smaller ones. We compute the universal valuative invariant of Coxeter matroids. A key ingredient is the family of Coxeter Schubert matroids, which correspond to the Bruhat cells of flag varieties. In the process, we compute the universal valuation of generalized Coxeter permutohedra, a larger family of polyhedra that model Coxeter analogues of combinatorial objects such as matroids, clusters, and posets.
Corporate America Fights Back: The Battle over Waiver of the Attorney-Client Privilege

This Article addresses a topic that is the subject of an on-going and heated contest between the business lobby and its lawyers, on the one side, and the U.S. Department of Justice on the other. The fight is over federal prosecutors' escalating practice of requesting that corporations accused of criminal wrongdoing waive their attorney-client privilege as part of their cooperation with the government. The Department of Justice views privilege waiver as a legitimate and critical tool in its post-Enron battle against white collar crime. The business lobby views it as encroaching on corporations' fundamental right to protect confidential attorneyclient communications. This Article seeks to transcend the feverish rhetoric dominating the debate by undertaking a careful cost-benefit approach to the matter. It concludes that the Department ofJustice's recent policy statement on privilege waiver, contained in Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty's 2006 Memorandum, merits a chance to work-with a number of important caveats that are fleshed out in the text.
Flooded Communities Explaining Local Reactions to the Post-Katrina Migrants

This article uses the post-Katrina migration as an exogenous shock to test theories of racial threat while minimizing concerns about selection bias. Drawing in part on a new survey of 3,879 respond...
Lucas and Hume on Monetary Non-Neutrality: A Tension between the Logic and the Technique of Economics

Economists lost a valid theory of monetary non-neutrality, which relates to how new money enters the economy at different points and in the process changes relative prices. This theory was introduced by David Hume, among others, but it has since disappeared from the leading conversations. The disappearance was not caused by any theoretical or empirical weakness, however. Using Robert Lucas’s Nobel lecture as a case study, I argue that the theory might have disappeared because it did not fit into the popular technical frameworks’ modeling constraints, which view money as inherently neutral and introduce non-neutrality only through external frictions.
The Directors' and Officers' Insurance Premium: An Outside Assessment of the Quality of Corporate Governance

() Using a sample of directors’ and officers’ D & O premiums gathered from the proxy statements of Canadian companies, this article examines the D & O premium as a measure of ex ante litigation risk. I find a significant association between D & O premiums and variables that proxy for the quality of firms’ governance structures. The association between the proxies for governance structure quality and D & O premiums is robust to a number of alternative specifications. This article provides confirmatory evidence that the D & O premium reflects the quality of the firm’s corporate governance by showing that measures of weak governance implied by the D & O premium are positively related to excess CEO compensation. The overall results suggest that D & O premiums contain useful information about the quality of firms’ governance.
Estimating dynamic panel models in corporate finance

Abstract Dynamic panel models play a natural role in several important areas of corporate finance, but the combination of fixed effects and lagged dependent variables introduces serious econometric bias. Several methods of counteracting these biases are available and these methodologies have been tested on small datasets with independent, normally-distributed explanatory variables. However, no one has evaluated the methods' performance with corporate finance data, in which the dependent variable may be clustered or censored and independent variables may be missing, correlated with one another, or endogenous. We find that the data's properties substantially affect the estimators' performances. We provide evidence about the impact of various data set characteristics on the estimators, so that researchers can determine the best approach for their datasets.
Eliminating mental disability as a legal criterion in deprivation of liberty cases: The impact of the Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities on the insanity defense, civil commitment, and competency law.

Abstract A number of laws that are associated with deprivations of liberty, including the insanity defense, civil commitment, guardianship of the person and numerous competency doctrines in the criminal context, require proof of mental disability as a predicate. The Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities commands signatory states to eliminate that predicate. Summarizing principles set out in my book Minding Justice: Laws That Deprive People With Mental Disability of Life and Liberty, I explain how this seemingly radical stance can be implemented. Specifically, this article proposes adoption of an “integrationist defense” in the criminal context, an “undeterrability requirement” when the state seeks preventive detention outside of the criminal process, and a “basic rationality and self-regard test” for incompetency determinations. None of these proposals requires proof of a mental disorder as a predicate condition.
Negligence Liability's Role in Changing Pharmacotherapy Responsibilities

Negligence liability has failed to keep up with the changing divisions of labor between physicians and pharmacists. Based on factual assumptions regarding the relative competencies and responsibilities of these health professionals, the courts have shouldered physicians with the greatest treatment responsibility and have accordingly relegated pharmacists to the role of pill counters except in especially serious circumstances. These rules now exist alongside an emerging health care industry standard in which pharmacists command greater expertise of drugs than doctors do and in which doctors have taken on too many duties in light of their own competencies. Many commentators have advocated for greater collaboration between physicians and pharmacists in light of these issues, and such change is coming. To account for these changes and keep malpractice liability current, the courts should do away with many of the doctrinal limits on these professionals’ tort duties and instead adopt an overall reasonableness test.
Toward Enhancing the Quality and Quantity of Marketing Majors

This article reports the findings of a survey of undergraduate students designed to examine the key factors involved in selecting a marketing major. A discussion follows, dealing with the initiatives undertaken by marketing departments at various universities in an attempt to enhance the quality and quantity of marketing majors.
An Internally Consistent Approach To Common Stock Valuation

A modern corporate finance curriculum typically extends the one-stage Gordon (1962) dividend discount model into a multi-stage environment. In such instances, each regime of constant dividend growth defines a distinct stage. The rate of sustainable dividend growth in each stage is typically determined by specifying the firm’s return on asset (ROA) and plowback (PB) ratios in each stage, and then computing the implied dividend growth rate as g = ROA·PB. In a two-stage problem, current convention typically advocates that the first dividend in the second stage should equal the last dividend in the first stage, multiplied by 1 + g2, where g2 is the growth rate of dividends in the second stage. We show that the dividend stream generated with this methodology is inconsistent with the ROA and plowback assumptions used previously to compute g2. The implication is that the conventional pricing methodology results in stock valuations that are inconsistent with ROA and PB assumptions. For a common textbook problem, we demonstrate pricing errors on the order of 30%. In order to address the issue, we provide an alternative pricing methodology that results in valuations that are consistent with underlying assumptions. Pedagogically, when the proposed approach is contrasted with the traditional approach, the student is forced to develop a deeper fundamental understanding of how stock valuation relates to (i) operational efficiency, (ii) dividend policy, and (iii) the economic environment in which the firm competes.
The Positive Effects of Biased Self-Perceptions in Firms ∗

We study a firm in which the marginal productivity of agents' effort increases with the effort of others. We show that the presence of an agent who overestimates his marginal productivity may make all agents better off, including the biased agent himself. This Pareto improvement is obtained even when compensation contracts are set endogenously to maximize firm value. We show that the presence of a leader improves coordination, but self-perception biases can never be Pareto-improving when they affect the leader. Self-perception biases are also shown to affect job assignments within firms and the likelihood and value of mergers.
Post-It® Note Persuasion: A Sticky Influence

Four studies examine the influence of attaching a seemingly insignificant Post-it ® note to a survey packet on the likelihood of completing the survey. Participants who received a packet with an affixed Post-it note request had significantly higher return rates than participants who received the identical survey with (a) no sticky note, (b) the same message written on the cover sheet but without a Post-it, or (c) a blank Post-it with no message provided. Furthermore, they returned the materials more promptly with higher quality responses. A more personalized Post-it appeal increased returns when the survey was long and time consuming but was no more effective than a nonpersonalized Post-it when the survey was easy to complete. Results suggest that the Post-it leads the request to be interpreted as a solicitation for a personal favor, facilitating a normative compliance response.
Currency Prices, the Nominal Exchange Rate, and Security Prices in a Two-Country Dynamic Monetary Equilibrium

This paper examines a continuous-time two-country dynamic monetary equilibrium in which countries with possibly heterogeneous tastes and endowments hold their own money for the purpose of transaction services formulated via money in the utility function. Given a price system, no-arbitrage pricing results are provided for the price of each money and the nominal exchange rate. Characterizations are provided for equilibrium prices for general time-additive preferences and non-Markovian exogenous processes. Under a Markovian structure of model primitives, the currency prices are shown to solve a bivariate system of partial differential equations. Assuming that each country is endowed with heterogeneous separable power utility and the exogenous quantities all follow geometric Brownian motions, an equilibrium is shown to exist and additional characterization is provided. A further example of nonseparable Cobb–Douglas preferences is investigated. The additional features over the customary environment of homogeneous logarithmic preferences are emphasized.
Pregnancy Denied, Pregnancy Rejected in Stephanie Daley:

This article offers a reading of Hilary Brougher’s film Stephanie Daley (2006), in which a teen is accused of murdering her newborn (neonaticide). Brougher depicts a “phenomenology of unwanted preg...
On the existence of mock injective modules for algebraic groups

Let G be an affine algebraic group scheme over an algebraically closed field k of characteristic p>0, and let Gr denote the rth Frobenius kernel of G. Motivated by recent work of Friedlander, the authors investigate the class of mock injective G-modules, which are defined to be those rational G-modules that are injective on restriction to Gr for all r⩾1. In this paper, the authors provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of non-injective mock injective G-modules, thereby answering a question raised by Friedlander. Furthermore, the authors investigate the existence of non-injective mock injectives with simple socles. Interesting cases are discovered that show that this can occur for reductive groups, but will not occur for their Borel subgroups.
Flexible scheduling in public accounting

Abstract Recently, many major public accounting firms have implemented flexible scheduling programs in order to improve their retention and promotion of female professionals. This case, which is based on interviews with Human Resources and Auditing personnel at a major firm, provides students with the opportunity to examine the costs and benefits of such a program. It highlights the importance of judgment, ethics and decision-making skills in situations where the financial impact is difficult to measure, and complements more traditional cases in the “special decisions” sections of the cost and managerial accounting courses.
Takeover defenses: Entrenchment and efficiency

Abstract This paper explores the potential role of anti-takeover provisions (ATPs) in long-term value creation. Using a change in the legal environment in Delaware as an exogenous event, we document that a subset of firms with a relatively longer term focus (innovative firms) benefit from ATPs. Particularly, these firms experience an increase in Tobin's Q following a state law change in Delaware that increases the effectiveness of ATPs in defending against hostile takeovers. This increase is greater than that for non-innovative firms in Delaware as well as for innovative firms outside Delaware. Furthermore, the innovative firms in Delaware experience a stronger positive market reaction around the state law change dates, relative to other firms. Finally, in a cross-sectional setting we find that innovative firms with above-average takeover protection outperform other firms and are less likely to engage in harmful real earnings management. Taken together, these results provide empirical evidence of potential benefits of ATPs and help explain why such protection continues to be prevalent in the United States.
Some Realism About Legal Certainty in the Globalization of the Rule of Law

An earlier version of this chapter was published in 31 Houston Journal of International Law 27 (Fall, 2008).
An Archival Chandra and XMM-Newton Survey of Type 2 Quasars

In order to investigate obscuration in high-luminosity type 2 active galactic nuclei (AGNs), we analyzed Chandra and XMM-Newton archival observations for 71 type 2 quasars detected at 0.05 100 eV in the rest frame) and we detect this line in the other sources through a joint fit (spectral stacking). The correlation between the Fe Kα and [O III] fluxes and the inverse correlation of the equivalent width of the Fe Kα line with the ratio of hard X-ray and [O III] fluxes is consistent with previous results for lower luminosity Seyfert 2 galaxies. We conclude that obscuration is the cause of the weak hard X-ray emission rather than intrinsically low X-ray luminosities. We find that about half of the population of optically selected type 2 quasars are likely to be Compton thick. We also find no evidence that the amount of X-ray obscuration depends on the AGN luminosity (over a range of more than three orders of magnitude in luminosity).
Dicta and the Rule of Law

The rule of law stands as a fundamental property, or at least ideal, of American law. Hard to define and even harder to attain, the standard has captivated a generation of scholars. Dicta, on the other hand, has received only intermittent scholarly attention. While dicta is an indispensable ingredient of practically all judicial opinions, it is often derided by advocates and dismissed by jurists — and for good reason; it represents no binding authority.Despite this essential quality, those same lawyers and judges also treat dicta as authority. This inconsistent usage of dicta raises serious rule-of-law concerns. Dictum must be defined both consistently and according to a working standard if the case law is to yield the predictability demanded by the rule of law. Further, the conflation of dictum and holding strips the common law method of protections long thought to be necessary if judges are to make retroactive law and apply it to the cases before them.Courts should seek, where possible, to take incremental steps toward reaching the rule of law ideal. Accordingly, judges would do well to clarify the definition of dictum and distinguish it carefully from holding.
An economic analysis of tax amnesties

Abstract Tax amnesties have frequently been justified as politically popular ways to generate increases in government revenue. This paper examines the circumstances under which amnesties are likely to have a beneficial impact on revenue collections. It concludes that, while in general it may be correct to impose a reduced penalty on individuals who voluntarily disclose tax evasion, shortlived amnesties of the type most frequently observed in practice are unlikely to generate genuinely additional revenue, particularly when judged against the potential danger of reducing future tax compliance.
Civil Rights, Federalism, and the Administrative Process: Favorable Outcomes by Federal, State, and Local Agencies in Housing Discrimination Complaints

Some theorists argue that cooperative intergovernmental relations are critical to policy implementation in the United States. This assertion is explored in the context of fair housing enforcement by comparing favorable administrative outcomes in fair housing complaints at the federal, state, and local levels from 1989 to 2004. What conclusions can be drawn from this systematic comparison of intergovernmental enforcement in one policy area over an extended period of time? First, cooperative federalism works well in fair housing enforcement. Second, of special significance, state civil rights agencies resolve complaints in favor of complainants nearly as often as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and localities sometimes do so even more frequently.
Context and Institutional Structure in Attorney Regulation: Constructing an Enforcement Regime for International Arbitration

The question that looms large over the future of international arbitration is: How much should states yield to the international arbitration system? This Article attempts to answer the question as it applies to the specific context of regulating attorney conduct.
Content and Quality of Legal Information and Data on the Internet with a Special Focus on the United States

In the United States today, digital versions of current decisions, bills, statutes, and regulations issued by federal and state governments are widely available on publicly accessible Web sites. Worldwide, official (defined as "authoritative," or "the official" word of the law) legal information issued by international organizations and foreign governments is also becoming available on the Web. However, there are currently no standards for the production and authentication of digital documents. Moreover, the information is sometimes available only for a short time and then disappears from the site. No guidelines exist either to promote a uniform way to cite to digital legal materials. This article examines the contents of legal data and information on the Internet, with a special focus on the United States. It then evaluates the quality of the data, its impact on legal research and access to legal information, and addresses some issues raised by the digital medium, such as its reliability and permanent access concerns.
Weak-Form Judicial Review and American Exceptionalism

Recent Commonwealth rights charters, various scholars have argued, represent a new “weaker” model of constitutional rights protection than the U.S. constitutional model: unlike the U.S. Bill of Rights, they give legislatures broad formal power to override rights, and therefore also court decisions. The article argues, however, that in practice such powers have rarely if ever been used by Commonwealth legislatures, and therefore, that if judicial review is in fact weaker in Commonwealth countries, compared to the U.S., it is only because Commonwealth courts have been more willing than the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold ordinary legislative attempts to override court decisions. While this may be connected to the greater availability of a formal power of legislative override in the Commonwealth, it also far from given response by Commonwealth courts to the existence of such powers. This more limited – and contingent – view of the difference between Commonwealth and U.S. constitutionalism in this context also has clear practical implications for processes of constitutional “borrowing” across countries.
How Internal Constraints Shape Interest Group Activities: Evidence from Access-Seeking PACs

Interest groups contribute much less to campaigns than legally allowed. Consequently, prevailing theories infer these contributions must yield minimal returns. I argue constraints on PAC fundraising may also explain why interest groups give little. I illuminate one such constraint: access-seeking PACs rely on voluntary donations from affiliated individuals (e.g., employees), and these PACs alienate donors with partisan preferences when giving to the opposite party. First, difference-in-differences analysis of real giving shows donors withhold donations to access-seeking PACs when PACs contribute to out-partisan politicians. Next, an original survey of corporate PAC donors demonstrates they know how their PACs allocate contributions across parties, and replicates the observational study in an experiment. Donors’ partisanship thus limits access-seeking PACs’ fundraising and influence. This provides a new perspective on why there is little interest group money in elections, and has broad implications for how partisan preferences and other internal constraints shape interest group strategy.
Ethical Failures in Regulating and Supervising the Pursuit of Safety-Net Subsidies

This paper traces the financial-institution crisis of 2007–2008 to a breakdown in the incentives of regulators, supervisors, managers and investors to perform adequate due diligence on securitised investments. Investors allowed their trust in the reputations of credit-rating firms and the giant financial firms that manufactured highly rated tranches of securitised loan pools to blind them to the casino ethics of these firms’ managers and line employees.
Flawed Assumptions: A Corporate Law Analysis of Free Speech and Corporate Personhood in Citizens United

In the wake of the January, 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, special interest groups, citizens, and politicians alike have engaged in a rigorous debate about the role of corporate speech within our democratic process. The First Amendment issues raised in Citizens United - to that extent do corporations have a constitutionally protected right to participate in and influence our elections through expenditures - evoke larger questions about the roles, rights, and responsibilities of corporations within our society. This article concludes that the Supreme Court did not reference corporate law principles when analyzing the fundamental First Amendment debate in Citizens United and therefore rested its reasoning upon five flawed assumptions: (1) economic motivation of corporate speech, even corporate political speech, deserves no discount, (2) presence of a singular corporate voice, (3) insignificant threat of compelled speech, (4) lack of regulated speech, based solely on the identity of the corporate speaker, and (5) inapplicability of the equalization rationale to corporate speech. By examining the constitutional questions evoked in Citizens United through a corporate law lens, these assumptions are shown to be false. These flawed assumptions underlying the Court’s reasoning undermine the Court’s conceptualization of corporations and its holding that corporate political speech cannot and should not be treated differently from individual political speech.
Crowdfunding's Impact on Start-Up IP Strategy

“Crowdfunding” has been heralded as a revolutionary and democratic way to connect ordinary individuals with innovative projects they would like to support. Congress endorsed this concept by including the CROWDFUND Act in the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (“JOBS Act” or “Act”) of 2012. The statute was not directed at well-known crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo—sites that facilitate “project crowdfunding” through a lightly regulated donation model. Rather, the JOBS Act provides a mechanism for ordinary investors and start-ups to use “enterprise crowdfunding,” in which the start-ups can offer and sell their stock widely through the Internet. These activities were effectively prohibited under pre-JOBS Act securities laws. While the JOBS Act was credited with creating a legal pathway for enterprise crowdfunding, start-ups cannot avail themselves of it until the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) promulgates the rules mandated under the Act.2 At the same time, the Act mandates other changes in securities regulations which may make enterprise crowdfunding less appealing than other private financing options. The Act generally relaxed mandatory information disclosure requirements and the ability to use the Internet to solicit investment under these other options, even as it erected
“A Most Mild and Equitable Establishment of Religion”: John Adams and the Massachusetts Experiment

Massachusetts was the last of the original 13 American states to disestablish religion, having been founded in the early seventeenth century as a bastion of Puritanism. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 moved part way toward disestablishment by guaranteeing freedom and equality to all peaceable private religions but also retaining what leading constitutional draftsman John Adams called a “mild and equitable establishment of religion.” This consisted of (1) a ceremonial establishment, reflected in public religious language, symbols, rituals, and oaths supported by the state; (2) a moral establishment, reflected in the virtues and values to be taught in state schools and universities and exemplified by elected officials and other public figures; and (3) an institutional establishment, reflected in mandatory tithe payments, required Sunday worship, and other supports for Congregational churches. Adams advocated this balance of a tempered religious freedom and a slender religious establishment as the best political compromise between hardline establishmentarians and radical separationists in the state. But this view also reflected Adams’ own political and religious philosophy that too little religious freedom is a recipe for hypocrisy and impiety, while too much religious freedom is an invitation to depravity and license. Too firm a religious establishment breeds coercion and corruption, while too little religious establishment allows secular prejudices to become constitutional prerogatives. Somewhere between these extremes, Adams believed, a society must find its balance. This was a strikingly different view of religious freedom than the strict separation of church and state views advocated by Adams’ long time friendly rival, Thomas Jefferson. The balance between freedom and establishment that Adams advocated was reflected in the 1780 Massachusetts constitution and was defended in a series of famous state cases authored by Chief Justice Theophilus Parsons. But in 1833, Massachusetts amended its constitution to outlaw the institutional establishment of religion, notably the state tithing system, even though the state retained its ceremonial and moral establishments.
Propensity to consume and the optimality of Ramsey–Euler policies

In a general one-sector optimal stochastic growth model where the production technology may be globally unproductive or allow for unbounded growth, we outline readily verifiable sufficient conditions for optimality that do not require checking the transversality condition. An interior policy function satisfying the Ramsey–Euler condition may not be optimal even if consumption and investment are continuous and increasing in output; our conditions for optimality require that the policy function must also satisfy a lower bound on the propensity to consume. For the case of production functions with multiplicative shocks, the consumption propensity needs to be bounded away from zero; a similar condition is sufficient for more general production functions if the utility function belongs to a restricted class.
Capital Market Regulation in Developing Countries: A Proposal

The flow of capital to developing countries is important to the welfare of billions of people, and a lack of capital continues to be one of the major obstacles to development around the world. Development countries, aware of the importance of capital, are eager to attract this sort of investment from international markets. This article considers how developing countries can make portfolio investment in their country more attractive to both local and foreign investors.