cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Two-phase flash for tight porous media by minimization of the Helmholtz free energy

Abstract Thermodynamic modeling of phase behavior is one of the most fundamental components in the study of enhanced oil recovery by gas injection. Robust algorithms exist for multiphase equilibrium problems with no capillary pressure as commonly used in compositional reservoir simulation. However, various convergence problems have been reported even for simple two-phase split problems in the presence of capillary pressure by using the traditional algorithm based on minimization of the Gibbs free energy. In this research, the phase-split problem with capillary pressure is formulated by using the Helmholtz free energy for a given temperature and total volume. The algorithm is based on the successive substitution (SS) for updating K values, which is coupled with the volume update by using the pressure constraint equation. The robustness of the SS algorithm is improved by using the convexity information of the Helmholtz free energy and using an under-relaxation method. Case studies present phase-split problems with capillary pressure by using the developed algorithm and highlight several advantages of using the Helmholtz free energy over the Gibbs free energy. The improved robustness comes mainly from the involvement of a single energy surface regardless of the number of phases. The pressure variability that occurs during the phase-split calculation with capillary pressure is inherent in the Helmholtz free energy in volume space.
Structural signatures for thermodynamic stability in vitreous silica: Insight from machine learning and molecular dynamics simulations

The structure-thermodynamic stability relationship in vitreous silica is investigated using machine learning and a library of 24 157 inherent structures generated from melt-quenching and replica exchange molecular dynamics simulations. We find that the thermodynamic stability, i.e., enthalpy of the inherent structure $({e}_{\mathrm{IS}})$, can be accurately predicted by both linear and nonlinear machine learning models from numeric structural descriptors commonly used to characterize disordered structures. We find that short-range features become less indicative of thermodynamic stability below the fragile-to-strong transition. On the other hand, medium-range features, especially those between 2.8 and $\ensuremath{\sim}6$ \AA{}, show consistent correlations with ${e}_{\mathrm{IS}}$ across the liquid and glass regions, and are found to be the most critical to the stability prediction in this study among features from different length scales. Based on the machine learning models, a set of five structural features that are the most predictive of the silica glass stability is identified.
Status and the demand for visible goods: experimental evidence on conspicuous consumption

Some economists argue that consumption of publicly visible goods is driven by social status. Making a causal inference about this claim is difficult with observational data. We conduct an experiment in which we vary both whether a purchase of a physical product is publicly visible or kept private and whether the income used for purchase is linked to social status or randomly assigned. Making consumption choices visible leads to a large increase in demand when income is linked to status, but not otherwise. We investigate the characteristics that mediate this effect and estimate its impact on welfare.
Assess the Impacts of Human Mobility Change on COVID-19 Dynamics in Arizona, U.S.: A Modeling Study Incorporating Google Community Mobility Reports

In June 2020, Arizona, U.S., emerged as one of the world’s worst coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spots after the stay-at-home order was lifted in the middle of May. With the decisions to reimpose restrictions, the number of COVID-19 cases has been declining, and Arizona is considered to be a good model in slowing the epidemic. In this paper, we aimed to examine the COVID-19 situation in Arizona and assess the impact of human mobility change. We constructed the mobility integrated metapopulation susceptible-infectious-removed model and fitted to publicly available datasets on COVID-19 cases and mobility changes in Arizona. Our simulations showed that by reducing human mobility, the peak time was delayed, and the final size of the epidemic was decreased in all three Arizona regions. Our analysis suggests that rapid and effective decision making is crucial to control human mobility and, therefore, COVID-19 epidemics. Until a vaccine is available, reimplementations of mobility restrictions in response to the increase of new COVID-19 cases might need to be considered in Arizona and beyond. Funding: N.Y. was partially supported by Nishihara Cultural Foundation. H.W. was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation (#1737861) Declaration of Interest: None to declare
Is the Public Utility Holding Company Act a Model for Breaking Up the Banks that are Too-Big-To-Fail

During the financial crisis of 2007–08 and the debates on regulatory reform that followed, there was general agreement that the “too-big-to-fail” principle creates unacceptable moral hazard. Policy makers divided, however, on the solutions to this problem. Some argued that the banking behemoths in the United States should be broken up. Others argued that dismantling the big banks would be bad policy because these banks would not be able to compete with universal banks in the global capital markets, and in any event, breaking up the banks would be impossible as a practical matter. Therefore, better regulation was the right solution. This approach was generally followed in the financial reform legislation that was passed.
Regulation NMS and Market Quality

We show that both the quoted and effective spreads increased, the quoted depth decreased, and the market quality index decreased after the implementation of Regulation National Market System (NMS) (Reg NMS). We also find an increase in the price impact of trades and the dispersion of the pricing error after Reg NMS. The order execution speed is slower, the order fill rate is lower, and the order cancellation rate is higher for most trades after Reg NMS. Hence, contrary to the Securities and Exchange Commission's belief, Reg NMS has proven to be detrimental to most traders. NASDAQ provided faster and more reliable executions than the NYSE/AMEX, and NASDAQ gained market shares from the NYSE/AMEX and other trading venues after Reg NMS.
Punishing free-riders: How group size affects mutual monitoring and the provision of public goods

Because costly punishment is not credible, subgame perfection suggests that punishment will not deter free riding, regardless of the size or structure of groups. However, experiments show that people will punish free riders, even at considerable cost. To examine the implications of agents who punish, we simulate an environment populated with behavioral strategies seen in the lab and use the simulation to develop hypotheses about why group size should matter when punishment is allowed. We test these hypotheses experimentally and examine whether the effect of group size is purely due to the number of group members or if information about other group members is what is important. We find that large groups contribute at rates no lower than small groups because punishment does not fall appreciably in large groups. However, hindrances to monitoring do reduce the provision of the public good.
Too Big to Fail and Too Big to Save: Dilemmas for Banking Reform:

‘Too big to fail’ traditionally refers to a bank that is perceived to generate unacceptable risk to the banking system and indirectly to the economy as a whole if it were to default and be unable to fulfill its obligations. Such a bank generally has substantial liabilities to other banks through the payment system and other financial links, which can be sources of ‘contagion’ if a bank fails. The main objectives in this paper are to identify the different dimensions of too big to fail and evaluate various proposed reforms for dealing with this problem. In addition, we document the various dimensions of size and complexity, which may contribute to or reduce a bank's systemic risk. Furthermore, we provide an assessment of economic and political factors shaping the future of too big to fail.
Introduction: What Does Oakley Tell Us About the Failures of Constitutional Decision-Making?

The Wisconsin Supreme Court's decision in State v. Oakley, in which the court upheld a probation order prohibiting Mr. Oakley from fathering additional children until he could support them, is a compelling example of a troubling flaw in our constitutional jurisprudence. Absent the countervailing check perhaps provided by the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions, each path of doctrinal analysis, considered separately, arguably leads to the conclusion that the probation order is valid. This is so even though a number of institutional, structural, and process-based considerations converge to render the order's constitutionality highly suspect. The prevailing doctrinal approach is to disaggregate the case into distinct lines of argument. Do the poor constitute a "discrete and insular minority"? The articles by Professors Richard Cole, David Papke, and Bruce Miller take up the challenge of considering historical, legal, and cultural approaches to poverty. Are probation conditions subject to heightened scrutiny? Professor Jennifer Levi argues, in part, that even a radical change in the standard of review would not change the outcome of either the majority or dissenting opinions. Is this a case involving discrimination based on sex? Professor Jennifer Martin considers the impact that the Oakley decision may have on women, especially those subject to domestic violence.
The underpricing of private targets

Abstract We examine acquisitions of private firms with valuation histories and find a positive relation between acquirer announcement returns and target valuation revisions. Similar to other studies, acquirer announcement returns are positive, on average. However, positive acquirer announcement returns are mainly driven by targets that are acquired for more than their prior valuation. This relation is consistent with pricing effects associated with target valuation uncertainty and behavioral biases in negotiation outcomes.
The Road Not Yet Taken: How Law Student Information Literacy Standards Address Identified Issues in Legal Research Education and Training

Legal research education has been slow to adopt information literacy as a framework, despite the demonstrated utility of this framework when applied to library instruction and assessment. This article defines law student information literacy (LSIL), analyzes how LSIL standards address existing and identified deficits in the current state of legal research education, and offers a copy of the draft LSIL standards. The recently approved AALL Law Student Research Competencies and Information Literacy Principles are appended to the article.
The Influence of Product Variety on Brand Perception and Choice

We propose that the variety a brand offers often serves as a quality cue and thus influences which brand consumers choose. Specifically, brands that offer a greater variety of options that appear compatible and require similar skills tend to be perceived as having greater category expertise or core competency in the category, which, in turn, enhances their perceived quality and purchase likelihood. Six studies support this proposition and demonstrate that compared to brands which offer fewer products, a brands which offer increased compatible variety are perceived as having higher quality; b this effect is mediated by product variety's impact on perceived expertise; c the higher perceived quality produces a greater choice share of the higher variety brand, even among consumers who select options that multiple brands offer and d product variety also impacts post-experience perceptions of taste. The findings suggest that in addition to directly affecting brand choice share through influencing the fit with consumer preferences, product line length can also indirectly affect brand choice through influencing perceived brand quality.
Imitation Learning of Neural Spatio-Temporal Point Processes

We present a novel Neural Embedding Spatio-Temporal (NEST) point process model for spatio-temporal discrete event data and develop an efficient imitation learning (a type of reinforcement learning) based approach for model fitting. Despite the rapid development of one-dimensional temporal point processes for discrete event data, the study of spatial-temporal aspects of such data is relatively scarce. Our model captures complex spatio-temporal dependence between discrete events by carefully design a mixture of heterogeneous Gaussian diffusion kernels, whose parameters are parameterized by neural networks. Thus, our model can capture intricate spatial dependence patterns and yet still lead to interpretable results as we examine maps of Gaussian diffusion kernel parameters. The imitation learning model fitting for the NEST is more robust than the maximum likelihood estimate. It directly measures the divergence between the empirical distributions between the training data and the model-generated data. Moreover, our imitation learning-based approach enjoys computational efficiency due to the explicit characterization of the reward function related to the likelihood function; furthermore, the likelihood function under our model enjoys tractable expression due to Gaussian kernel parameterization. Experiments based on real data show our method's good performance relative to the state-of-the-art and the good interpretability of NEST's result.
Protecting the Innocent from False Confessions and Lost Confessions--And from Miranda

Criminal procedure scholarship has spent little time discussing the guiltless and much discussing the guilty. Recent attempts to correct this problem have led to discussions of the plight of an innocent person who confessed to a crime he did not commit. These discussions call for still more regulation of police interrogations without attempting to quantify the problem. Such a focus is incomplete because the innocent are at risk not only when police extract untruthful confessions but also when police fail to obtain truthful confessions from criminals. It is possible that more regulation aimed at reducing false confessions may produce such a substantial drop in truthful confessions as to pose a greater risk to the innocent. The aim of this empirical essay is to think more carefully about “the numbers” – that is, to try and place the risk to the innocent from false confessions, lost confessions, and lost convictions into some perspective. Part I attempts to quantify the dimensions of the false confession problem. Part II then turns to an assessment of the relative risk to the innocent from false confessions versus lost confessions. False confessions are a relatively infrequent cause of wrongful convictions while truthful confessions are perhaps the most frequent way in which miscarriages of justice are uncovered. Finally, Part III provides an escape from these tradeoffs by suggesting videotaping of police interrogation as a substitute for the restrictive Miranda rules.
A Theoretical Comparison of the Economic Impact of Large and Small Events

In response to the increasing debate on the relative worth of small events compared to large events, we create a theoretical model to determine whether smaller events are more likely to create positive economic impact. First, event size and city size are rede fined as continuums of resources. The concepts of event resource demand (ERD) and city resource supply (CRS) are introduced, allowing for a joint analysis of supply and demand. When local economic conditions are brought into the analysis, the frame work determines how a city resource deficiency or surplus affects the economic impact of an event. This resource-based approach assists public officials and event organizers in making more rational decisions for hosting events when they pursue positive economic impacts. Specifically, we find small events have a higher potential for positive economic impact and hosting multiple smaller-sized events is a better strategy than hosting a big event.
Political Externalities, Nondiscrimination, and a Multilateral World

During the past half century, multilateral trade liberalization has reduced tariffs to historically low levels. The “Received Theory” of multilateral trade agreements, based solely on terms-of-trade externalities between national governments, offers an explanation that has become the conventional wisdom. But it is dramatically inconsistent with actual trade agreements. This paper offers an alternative explanation, based on intergovernmental political externalities, consistent with what we actually observe. With remarkably little necessary formal structure—in particular, no formal bargaining model—this framework (chosen to parallel actual experience) gives an immediate and transparent role to the basic characteristics of contemporary trade agreements: gradual liberalization, reciprocity, nondiscrimination, and multilateralism.
Siting Green Infrastructure: Legal and Policy Solutions to Alleviate Urban Poverty and Promote Healthy Communities

Green infrastructure is an economically and environmentally viable approach for water management and natural resource protection in urban areas. This Article argues that green infrastructure has additional and exceptional benefits for the urban poor which are not frequently highlighted or discussed. When green infrastructure is concentrated in distressed neighborhoods—where it frequently is not—it can improve urban water quality, reduce urban air pollution, improve public health, enhance urban aesthetics and safety, generate green collar jobs, and facilitate urban food security. To make these quality of life and health benefits available to the urban poor, it is essential that urban leaders remove both legal and policy barriers to implementing green infrastructure projects. This Article argues that overcoming these obstacles requires quantified methods and regulatory reform. Increased public financing and other incentives are also necessary. Furthermore, legal structures that facilitate green solutions must be put in place. Lastly, awareness of green infrastructure solutions among policy makers and * © 2010, Alexandra Dapolito Dunn, Assistant Dean of Environmental Law Programs and Adjunct Professor of Law, Pace University School of Law; J.D., 1994, Columbus School of Law, Catholic University of America; B.A., 1989, James Madison University. I wish to thank Erin Derrington ( J.D. Candidate, Pace School of Law ’11; M.E.M. Candidate, Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies ’11) for her assistance with the research for this Article. I also thank Nancy Stoner, Clean Water Program Director, Natural Resources Defense Council, for her green infrastructure inspiration and ideas. Some of the concepts in this Article regarding green infrastructure and stormwater control were presented in an article entitled Green Light for Green Infrastructure by Alexandra Dapolito Dunn and Nancy Stoner, 24 Environmental Forum 3, 32 (May/June 2007). I also served as a drafter of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s April 2007 Statement of Support for Green Infrastructure, available at http://www.epa.gov/npdes/pubs/gi_intentstatement.pdf, while General Counsel of the National Association of Clean Water Agencies. Since 2007, I have developed these ideas and concepts to connect green infrastructure projects to urban poverty alleviation. I presented many of the themes and ideas in this paper at the Sixth Annual Colloquium of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Academy of Environmental Law, Poverty Alleviation and Environmental Protection, held in Mexico City from November 10 to 15, 2008. 42 Environmental Affairs [Vol. 37:41 the wider public must be enhanced so that our nation's more distressed urban populations may realize the benefits that such solutions yield.
Jurors Believe Interrogation Tactics are Not Likely to Elicit False Confessions: Will Expert Witness Testimony Inform Them Otherwise?

Situational factors – in the form of interrogation tactics – have been reported to unduly influence innocent suspects to confess. This study assessed jurors' perceptions of these factors and tested...
The topology of the federal funds market

Abstract We explore the network topology of the federal funds market. This market is important for distributing liquidity throughout the financial system and for the implementation of monetary policy. The recent turmoil in global financial markets underscores its importance. We find that the network is sparse, exhibits the small-world phenomenon, and is disassortative. Centrality measures are useful predictors of the interest rate of a loan.
Early Emissions Reduction Programs: An Application to CO2 Policy

In the wake of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which if implemented would oblige industrialized countries to meet targets for greenhouse gases (GHGs) In 2008-2012, there have been several proposals to reduce emissions during the interim period. A concern for early reduction also arises in other policy contexts. This paper uses a series of simple models and numerical illustrations to analyze voluntary early reduction credits for GHGs. We examine several issues that affect the economic performance of these policies, including asymmetric information, learning-by-doing, and fiscal impacts, and we compare their performance with that of an early cap-and-trade program. We find that the economic benefits of early credit programs are likely to be limited, unless these credits can be banked to offset future emissions. Such banking was not allowed under the Kyoto Protocol. An early cap-and-trade program can avoid many of the problems of early credits, provided it does not require excessive abatement.
Many-Minds Arguments in Legal Theory

Many-minds arguments claim that in some way or another, groups of decisionmakers tend to make better decisions than individuals. This essay identifies five general and recurring problems with such arguments, as follows: (1) Whose minds? The group or population whose minds are at issue is often equivocal or ill-defined. (2) Many minds, worse minds. The number of minds endogenously influences their quality, often for the worse. More minds can be systematically worse than fewer because of selection effects, incentives for epistemic free-riding, and emotional and social influences. (3) Epistemic bottlenecks. The epistemic benefits of many minds are often diluted or eliminated because the structure of institutions funnels decisions through an individual decision-maker, or a small group of decision-makers, who occupy an epistemic bottleneck or chokepoint. (4) Many minds vs. many minds. The institutional comparisons that pervade legal theory are typically many-to-many comparisons rather than one-to-many. (5) Many minds vs. other values. Epistemic considerations systematically trade off against other goods, such as the costs of decision-making and the expression of moral norms. The epistemic quality of the laws is a good to be optimized, not maximized. 1 John H. Watson Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. For helpful comments, thanks to Jon Elster, Richard Fallon, Don Herzog, Daryl Levinson, Frank Michelman, Martha Minow, Mark Ramseyer, Mark Seidenfeld, Henry Smith, Bill Stuntz, an anonymous referee, participants in a conference on “La Sagesse Collective: Principes et Mecanismes” held at the College de France, May 22-23 2008, and participants in faculty workshops at Harvard Law School and Notre Dame Law School. Thanks to Joel Peters-Fransen and Elisabeth Theodore for helpful comments and research assistance. Winter 2009: Volume 1, Number 1 ~ Journal of Legal Analysis ~ 1 2 ~ Vermeule: Many-Minds Arguments in Legal Theory
Unilateral Carbon Taxes, Border Tax Adjustments, and Carbon Leakage

We examine the impact of a unilateral carbon tax in developed countries, focusing on the expected size of carbon leakage (an increase in emissions in non-taxing regions as a result of the tax) and the effects on leakage of border tax adjustments. We start by analyzing the problem using a simple two-country, three-good general equilibrium model to develop intuitions. We then simulate the expected size of the effects using a new, open-source, computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. We analyze the extent of emissions reductions from a carbon tax in countries that made commitments under the Kyoto Protocol (Annex B countries), the expected carbon leakage, and the effects of border tax adjustments on carbon leakage, all relative to our baseline projections for emissions. We also perform extensive sensitivity tests on the parameters of the CGE model. Finally, we consider the effects of imperfect border tax adjustments on leakage, such as global or regional schedules of border taxes.
Forging Toward Coexistence

For better or worse, the United States has demonstrated a long history of support for agricultural biotechnology. Justified as necessary to meet the growing demands of our nation’s food demand, federal policies addressing genetic engineering have attempted to balance of set of competing interests to ensure health and safety while also encouraging further innovation and development of technology. The unfortunate effects of these policies are suffered disproportionately by organic and non-GE farmers, as there has been little consideration of how the products of genetic engineering impact this sector. In the midst of regulating biotechnology, the federal government has lost sight of the fact that food production in the United States is not uniform, and each production method has an impact on the other. Recently, USDA Secretary Tom Vilasck reconvened the Advisory Committee on Biotechnology and the 21st Century (“AC21”) to consider, among other things, how to develop a national policy that takes into account the different methods of food production in a more equitable manner. This article argues that, because current federal policies hamper the ability of organic and non-GE farmers to ensure the safety and authenticity of their products, the AC21 needs to meet its charge and reach consensus on USDA supported mechanisms that encourage and facilitate farmers to develop long term, viable solutions that address the interests of all parties to aid farmers in achieving some degree of coexistence.
Detecting Lies Using Demeanor, Bias, and Context

The Supreme Court’s statement in Scheffer reflects the conventional wisdom of the American legal system—courts assume that jurors, by closely observing demeanor, can accurately determine whether a witness is lying.2 The consensus in the legal and social science literature is almost the opposite. “It is considered axiomatic . . . that individuals are at best inaccurate at deception detection.”3 Among legal academics, demeanor is seen as essentially useless in detecting deception, and decisions about lie detection are right no more than half the time.4 The negative legal academic perspective is based largely on two law review articles, both written well over a decade ago. While these articles accurately summarized the literature on deception detection at the time, more recent research provides reason to believe that the academic view is incomplete. Even though demeanor is often unhelpful, in certain situations jurors and law enforcement officers can distinguish true and false stories with substantial accuracy using other methods. More importantly, we can identify situations in which they
Recapitalization of one class of common stock into dual-class: Growth and long-run stock returns

Abstract We study a sample of 178 firms that changed from a one-share one-vote into a dual-class common stock structure during 1979–1998. We find that dual-class recapitalizations are shareholder value enhancing corporate initiatives. Using accounting data, Lehn et al. (1990) [Lehn, K., Netter, J., Poulsen, A., 1990. Consolidating corporate control: dual-class recapitalizations versus leveraged buyouts. Journal of Financial Economics 27, 557–580] provide evidence that dual-class recapitalizing firms grow faster than firms in a control group and undertake secondary equity offerings (SEOs) to finance growth. We show that growth is indeed beneficial to the shareholders. The stockholders, on average, earn significant positive abnormal returns of 23.11% in a period of 4 years following the announcement month. Furthermore, abnormal returns are even larger (52.61%) for the dual-class firms that issue equity. This evidence is especially supportive of the value enhancing hypothesis as it is contrary to the prevailing result that SEOs are generally followed by large negative returns. We do not find any evidence of managerial entrenchment.
Lawyer Lending: Costs and Consequences

The “lawyer lending” industry—comprised of lenders who extend capital to plaintiffs’ lawyers to finance personal injury litigation—has blossomed. This industry has taken off, at least in part, because attorneys are permitted to deduct interest on these loans from client recoveries as an additional “expense” of litigation. The cost of the burgeoning lawyer lending industry is thus, in large measure, borne by clients. This Article asks whether personal injury attorneys who choose to take out loans to cover case costs and litigation expenses ought to be allowed to offload associated interest charges. The Article shows this question is important in its own right—with profound implications for the quantity and intensity of tort litigation. And the question is also an ideal point of entree to identify, and begin to remedy, broader deficiencies in three strands of current legal analysis. Examining the propriety of interest pass-throughs first highlights the importance of litigation costs—and the interconnectivity of costs and contingency fees—a topic that has suffered from too little investment in research. Second, by separately considering just lawyer lending (rather than all third-party funding mechanisms simultaneously) and by studying a mechanism’s on-the-ground operation (rather than just its bird’s-eye view impact), the Article attempts to lead by example to reorient future alternative litigation finance (ALF) scholarship. Third, the Article underscores the need to push past bare formalism, and it sketches an alternative theoretical framework that can be employed when confronting certain ethical issues going forward.
Central America's Regional Trends and U.S. Cycles

The economies of Central America share a close relationship with the United States, with considerable comovement of GDP growth over a long period of time. Trade, the financial sector, and remittance flows are all potential channels through which the U.S. cycle could affect the region. But just how dependent is growth in the region on the U.S.? Using the common cycles method of Vahid and Engle (1993), this paper suggests that the business cycle is dominated by the U.S.; region-specific growth drivers tend to be long-lasting shocks, rather than temporary fluctuations. The most cyclically sensitive countries include Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Honduras. JEL codes: E32, F43
Primordial Nucleosynthesis After WMAP

During its early evolution, the hot, dense Universe provided a laboratory for probing fundamental physics at high energies. By studying the relics from those early epochs, such as the light elements synthesized during primordial nucleosynthesis when the Universe was only a few minutes old, and the relic, cosmic microwave photons, last scattered when the protons, alphas, and electrons (re)combined some 400 thousand years later, the evolution of the Universe may be used to test the standard models of cosmology and particle physics and to set constraints on proposals of physics beyond these standard models.
What is International Economic Law

This article attempts to define international economic law and its role in the international legal regime. After describing various options for the definition of international economic law, the article discusses the history of policy developments that led to the creation of international economic law as a field of legal scholarship. The article then discusses the role that various academics have played in the development of scholarship in this area and notes that international economic law garnered high popularity in the early 1980s because of a treatise written by Pieter VerLoren van Themaat. The article concludes by considering the relationship of international economic law to other fields of international law, such as environmental law and labor law.
Boarding a Sinking Ship? An Investigation of Job Applications to Distressed Firms

We use novel data from a leading online job search platform to examine the impact of corporate distress on firms’ ability to attract job applicants. Survey responses suggest that job seekers accurately perceive firms’ financial condition, as measured by companies’ credit default swap prices and accounting data. Analyzing responses to job postings by major financial firms during the Great Recession, we find that an increase in an employer's distress results in fewer and lower quality applicants. These effects are particularly evident when the social safety net provides workers with weak protection against unemployment and for positions requiring a college education.
The SEC rules historical cost accounting: 1934 to the 1970s

Abstract From its founding in 1934 until 1972 the SEC, and especially its chief accountant, disapproved of most upward revaluations and general price-level restatements of fixed assets as well as depreciation charges based thereon. This article is a historical study of the evolution of the SEC's policy on upward revaluations and restatements of non-financial assets. It treats episodes prior to 1972 when the private-sector bodies that established accounting principles sought to gain a degree of acceptance for such revaluations and restatements but were consistently rebuffed by the SEC. The SEC reversed its policy on upward revaluations during the period from 1972 to the end of the 1970s. Throughout the article, the author endeavours to explain the factors that influenced the successive positions taken by the SEC.
Killing in Good Conscience: What's Wrong with Sunstein and Vermeule's Lesser Evil Argument for Capital Punishment and Other Human Rights Violations?

In a recent article, Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that capital punishment is morally required if it will deter more killings than it inflicts. They claim that the state9s duty is to minimize the incidence of murder, and that recent deterrence research shows that state executions, even if deemed murders themselves, can do so. If these findings are true, they argue, the state is morally obligated to undertake such "life-life tradeoffs." The logic of Sunstein and Vermeule9s argument justifies not only state executions, but any state-perpetrated injustice that promises to reduce the incidence of similar injustices overall, as the authors acknowledge in a comment about torture. Recently such lesser evil arguments have indeed been invoked to justify state torture, detention without trial, and other human rights violations. In this essay, I identify problems that are common to all of these arguments, as illustrated by the well-developed example Sunstein and Vermeule have provided. My aim is to demonstrate that, however valid the lesser evil approach may be in some domains, it fails when invoked to defend state violations of the right to life and other fundamental human rights.
Accounting for Risk Aversion in Derivatives Purchase Timing

We study the problem of optimal timing to buy/sell derivatives by a risk-averse agent in incomplete markets. Adopting the exponential utility indifference valuation, we investigate this timing flexibility and the associated delayed purchase premium. This leads to a stochastic control and optimal stopping problem that combines the observed market price dynamics and the agent’s risk preferences. Our results extend recent work on indifference valuation of American options, as well as the authors’ first paper (Leung and Ludkovski, SIAM J. Fin. Math., 2011). In the case of Markovian models of contracts on non-traded assets, we provide analytical characterizations and numerical studies of the optimal purchase strategies, with applications to both equity and credit derivatives.
Will TLAC regulations fix the G-SIB too-big-to-fail problem?

The efficacy of the Financial Stability Board's proposed requirement for minimum “total loss absorbing capacity” (TLAC) at global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) is assessed using a stylized model of a bank holding company and an equilibrium asset pricing model to value financial claims. I identify a number of G-SIB strategies that satisfy minimum TLAC requirements but fail to reduce implicit safety net subsidies that accrue to G-SIB shareholders or increase the resources available to recapitalize a failing G-SIB subsidiary. To meet the FSB's stated goals, TLAC requirements must impose minimum TLAC at all subsidiaries and restrict how TLAC funds can be invested. An equivalent, but much simpler solution is to significantly increase regulatory capital requirements on systemically important bank subsidiaries.
Best Practices: What First-Year Law Students Should Learn in a Legal Research Class

Legal research instructors seldom have adequate class time to teach students the print and online sources needed to complete a research task successfully. However, there are core principles that first-year students should learn in a legal research class. The author discusses best practices in teaching the legal research process, along with the important research sources, including judicial opinions and reporters, digests and finding cases, statutes, administrative publications, citators for updating research, and secondary sources.
Victorious Transsexuals in the Courtroom: A Challenge for Feminist Legal Theory

Transsexual and transgendered people, despite their exclusion from most civil rights laws, nonetheless occasionally prevail as plaintiffs in litigation. What should feminist legal theorists make of these victories? The theory one uses to win has implications for future conceptions of gender and sexuality in the law as well as for understanding contemporary conflicts and alliances among sex and gender theorists, lawyers, and activists. Conflicting theories of how to ground law's liberation claims abound, however. Evidence suggests that transsexuals secure legal victories only through a disheartening process of medicalization, normalization, and demonstration of traditional sex and gender role adherence. Recent cases, however, reveal some interesting destabilizations in law's account of the transsexual, and they provide critical legal scholars with a new perspective on rights-claiming as a liberation strategy. Attention to the diversity of transsexual and transgendered priorities as well as to the properties of the legal process shows feminist legal theorists how to navigate the problems of identity construction and legal protection raised here sympathetically but unromantically.
Looking for Local Labor Market Effects of NAFTA

Using US Census data for 1990 and 2000, we estimate eects of the NAFTA agreement on the US wages. We look for any indication of eects of the agreement on (i)
Marginalization and Myth: The Corporatist Roots of France's Forgotten Elective Judiciary

When American lawyers think of the French judiciary they imagine a system radically different from their own - a system, in short, of bureaucratized justice. Indeed, the French system is widely viewed as typifying the European judicial model - made perhaps most famous through John Langbein’s much cited article on The German Advantage in Civil Procedure. But while this bureaucratized model of the French judiciary is, insofar as it extends, accurate, it is also woefully incomplete and thus misleading. To depict the French judicial system in these terms is to ignore a vital component of the system (including especially the commercial and labor courts) that, while very different from the American model, is also premised on an elective judiciary. In this other, ignored component of the French judicial system, judges lack formal judicial (and usually legal) training of any kind and are elected mid-career to serve temporary terms of office. Those thus elected to office belong to the particular professional (and social) groups whose disputes they will resolve and which, in turn, are responsible for electing them. As a result, such judges are expected to have the substantive expertise (and social and political legitimacy) necessary effectively to resolve disputes among group members. Strikingly, while France’s commercial and labor courts play a fundamentally important role in the contemporary French legal system, they have been marginalized not only within the comparative literature (largely written by American scholars), but also within standard French textbook descriptions of the French judiciary. This article provides the first account of this remarkable erasure of the French elective judiciary from the (transatlantic) scholarly literature and then addresses how this strange set of affairs came to pass. Tracing the roots of France’s elective judiciary to a set of Old Regime institutions described by contemporaries as “extraordinary courts,” the article shows that these courts were originally understood to be a form of administrative or regulatory institution, and thus to serve a clear function within the broader judicial framework. But for a variety of interrelated reasons - all stemming from the revolutionary turn against corporatism - nineteenth-century jurists ended up largely ignoring them, resulting in their marginalization within the standard account of the French judiciary. The ongoing inability to acknowledge the corporatist roots of these institutions helps explain the awkward, embattled position that they currently occupy within the French judicial landscape - including, in particular, the repeated calls for their abolition. At the same time, the failure to come to grips with history has contributed to an unfortunate narrowing of self-reflective and critical vision on the part of American comparative legal scholars, even while helping to generate a myth of the French judiciary that has shaped the professional identities of generations of lawyers, judges, and jurists on both sides of the Atlantic.
Social interventions, health and wellbeing: The long-term and intergenerational effects of a school construction program

We analyze the long-run and intergenerational effects of a large-scale school building project (INPRES) that took place in Indonesia between 1974 and 1979. Specifically, we link the geographic rollout of INPRES to longitudinal data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey covering two generations. We find that individuals exposed to the program have better health later in life along multiple measures. We also find that the children of those exposed also experience improved health and educational outcomes and that these effects are generally stronger for maternal exposure than paternal exposure. We find some evidence that household resources, neighborhood quality, and assortative mating may explain a portion of our results. Our findings highlight the importance of considering the long-run and multigenerational benefits when evaluating the costs and benefits of social interventions in a middle-income country.
Building Trust: Public Policy, Interpersonal Trust, and Economic Development

Zak & Knack (2001) demonstrate that interpersonal trust substantially impacts economic growth, and that sufficient interpersonal trust is necessary for economic development. To investigate the ability of policy-makers to affect trust levels, this paper builds a formal model characterizing public policies that can raise trust. The model is used to derive optimal funding for trust-raising policies when policy-makers seek to stimulate economic growth. Policies examined include those that increase freedom of association, build civic cultures, enhance contract enforcement, reduce income inequality, and raise educational levels. Testing the model's predictions, we find that only freedom, redistributive transfers, and education efficiently and robustly stimulate prosperity. They do this by strengthening the rule of law, reducing inequality, and by facilitating interpersonal understanding, all of which raise trust.
Capital Allocation in Financial Firms

This paper develops a theory of capital allocation in financial intermediaries where the cost of “risk capital” is a critical consideration. The implication for capital budgeting is that financial firms should use a modified NPV rule in which projects are valued by calculating the NPV of cash flows using marketdetermined discount rates and then subtracting a deadweight cost of capital that reflects the project's marginal contribution to firm-wide risk. By taking account of deadweight costs—mainly monitoring and moral hazard costs associated with having too little equity capital as well as “free cash flow” agency costs and higher taxes associated with having too much—the capital allocation model predicts that financial firms will diversify across businesses with similar deadweight costs. Such diversification reduces the cost of risk capital for the individual businesses, thereby creating more profitable investment opportunities at the margin and enabling the businesses to operate on a larger scale. The authors note that their model has similarities to but also important differences from the standard applications of RAROC models.
Structuring Criminal Codes to Perform Their Function

Almost exactly three years ago, I stood here giving a paper for a conference on federal criminal code reform sponsored by the Center. My goal was to provide a “top ten” list of needed reforms. My approach was to suggest five lessons that the federal criminal code could learn from the Model Penal Code and five lessons that both codes could learn. It seemed useful at the time, but now it leaves me as having already said—in this very location— most of what I wanted to say about what is good and bad about the Model Penal Code. But there was one of those items, the tenth, that I could only mention in barest outline. So I’m pleased to have the opportunity today to lay out in greater detail what I could not say back then about the item at the top of my “top ten” list. How should a criminal code be structured to best perform its functions? A criminal code of today must perform two very different functions: (1) It must perform the ex ante function of announcing the rules of conduct that are to govern the conduct of all persons within the code’s jurisdiction; and (2) it must perform the ex post function of establishing
Exit time moments and eigenvalue estimates

We give upper bounds on the principal Dirichlet eigenvalue associated to a smoothly bounded domain in a complete Riemannian manifold; the bounds involve L1-norms of exit time moments of Brownian motion. Our results generalize a classical inequality of Polya. We also prove lower bounds for Dirichlet eigenvalues using invariants that arise during the examination of the relationship between the heat content and exit time moments.