cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
May the President Appropriately Invoke God? Evaluating the Embryonic Stem Cell Vetoes

President George W. Bush twice vetoed measures to provide federal funds for embryonic stem cell research requiring the destruction of human embryos. Each veto was premised in part upon his religious beliefs. President Bush’s reliance upon his faith provoked a strong negative reaction. This essay argues that this criticism is baseless. The essay demonstrates that important political leaders spanning three centuries— including Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr.—have invoked religious beliefs in explaining their positions. The principle of “separation of church and state,” properly understood, is not a persuasive basis for criticizing this religious heritage. President Bush, in relying upon his faith to justify his vetoes, acted in accord with well-established national tradition. The essay also examines various arguments that religious discourse in the public square is normatively inappropriate and thus should be excluded. All of these critiques fail. Anyone genuinely committed to diversity and to democratic ideals should support a rich array of disputants in public policy controversies, including religious believers openly proclaiming their faith-based values.
Best Practices for Service Organisations

Services represent the single largest opportunity for revenue - and profit - growth for many companies. Yet, says Hans Brechbuhl, some organisations still view activities such as product support and after-sales services as unavoidable overhead and approach new service opportunities the same way. Increasingly, consumers want to save time in every facet of their lives. So when they buy a product, they want their local electronic, clothing or other retailer to offer complete solutions that include services ranging from installing products to no-questions-asked return departments with short queues. Consumers are looking for a comprehensive purchasing, use and support experience that is pleasant and meets a need or solves a problem quickly and efficiently. And in many cases, they are willing to pay for such value-added services - they just have to be asked to do so.
Banknotes And Economic Growth

Modern paper currency contributes little to productive investment. This shortcoming is not inherent to paper money. It stems from the fact that currency today is monopolistically supplied by public monetary authorities that are poor intermediaries. Commercial banknotes may, in contrast, support efficient intermediation, just as private bank deposits do. We demonstrate this advantage in an endogenous growth model, and use the model to simulate, for a sample of developing countries, steady-state growth-rate gains from various degrees of banknote deregulation. The simulated gains are generally large compared with those from conventional forms of financial liberalization.
Customer Satisfaction for Financial Services: the Role of Products, Services, and Information Technology

In this paper, we study the drivers of customer satisfaction for financial services. We discuss a full Bayesian analysis based on data collected from customers of a leading financial services company. Our approach allows us to explicitly accommodate missing data and enables quantitative assessment of the impact of the drivers of satisfaction across the customer population. We find that satisfaction with product offerings is a primary driver of overall customer satisfaction. The quality of customer service with respect to financial statements and services provided through different channels of delivery, such as information technology enabled call centers and traditional branch offices, are also important in determining overall satisfaction. However, our analysis indicates that the impact of these service delivery factors may differ substantially across customer segments. In order to facilitate managerial action, we discuss how specific operational quality attributes for designing and delivering financial services can be leveraged to enhance satisfaction with product offerings and service delivery. Our approach and findings have significant implications for managing customer satisfaction in the financial services industry.
The Morality of Risk Modeling

This article applies the concept of prudence to develop the characteristics of responsible risk-modeling practices in the insurance industry. A critical evaluation of the risk-modeling process suggests that ethical judgments are emergent rather than static, vague rather than clear, particular rather than universal, and still defensible according to the discipline’s established theory, which will support a range of judgments. Thus, positive moral guides for responsible behavior are of limited practical value. Instead, by being prudent, modelers can improve their ability to deal with the ethical and technical complexity of the risk-modeling process. While the application of prudence to resolve ethical challenges in risk modeling, an issue of practical importance to managers, is a first in the literature, the practice of applying an ethical lens to issues of pragmatic importance for managers is well established in Maak and Pless (J Bus Ethics 66:99–115, 2006a; Responsible leadership, 2006b) among others.
Regulation of International Transactions Under the Commodity Exchange Act

In recent years there has been increasing governmental interest in foreign commercial participation in commodity futures contracts, traded on United States contract markets, and in other related transactions. This interest has been aroused because deceptive and manipulative practices in trading futures contracts can be employed as effectively by foreign participants as by domestic participants, and such acts may directly affect the United States economy. As principal objective of the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) is to preclude such practices, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the agency which presently administers the CEA, has issued regulations designed to assure strict federal control of trading in commodity futures contracts. It is no always clear, however and to what extent the CEA and CFTC regulations apply to international transactions. Shortly after its creation, the CFTC established several advisory committees to recommend appropriate policies in a number of areas. One of these advisory committees concluded that futures markets possess much of their current utility because they are, in effect, world markets, and that the price discovery processes of futures trading can only be carried out in a worldwide context. This committee also expressed the view that, while foreign trading entities should have the broadest possible access to United States markets, nevertheless foreign traders must be bound by the same rules as domestic traders in terms of reporting positions, the requirement for orderly markets, and in all other aspects. The CFTC’s current view on foreign trader policy is that there should be parity of treatment between foreign and domestic traders. The theoretical notion of parity creates problems in application. The CFTC Commissioner has questioned whether parity treatment requires foreign traders to maintain records in the United States, or whether it means that they should be permitted to maintain the required records in their domiciles or places of incorporation. This parity of treatment concept, while not universally applied, has been adopted by the CFTC as a basis for determining appropriate regulatory requirements for international transactions. This Article examines the scope of the CFTC regulation of foreign involvement in commodity trading affecting the United States.
Do Organic Results Help or Hurt Sponsored Search Performance

We study the impact of changes in the competitors’ listings in organic search results on the performance of sponsored search advertisements. Using data from an online retailer’s keyword advertising campaign, we measure the impact of organic competition on both click-through rate and conversion rate of sponsored search advertisements. We find that an increase in organic competition leads to a decrease in the click performance of sponsored advertisements. However, organic competition helps the conversion performance of sponsored ads and leads to higher revenue. We also find that organic competition has a higher negative effect on click performance than does sponsored competition. Our results inform advertisers on how the presence of organic results influences the performance of their sponsored advertisements. Specifically, we show that organic competition acts as a substitute for clicks, but has a complementary effect on the conversion performance.
Patent law and the sociology of innovation

Francis Bacon stressed centuries ago that innovation is inevitably influenced by mental and social constraints. It is only by exposing and understanding these constraints, Bacon argued, that society can fully benefit from scientific innovation. But while historians and sociologists of science and technology have long appreciated how institutional norms shape the course, pace, and content of innovation, legal scholarship on patent law has all but ignored this insight. In this Article, I seek to complement traditional law and economic analyses of patent law by developing a sociological and historical approach that focuses in concrete detail on the ways in which scientific knowledge, and thus innovation, is made, maintained, and modified. Rather than focus on individuals and their cognitive abilities as the drivers of innovation, a sociological view of innovation emphasizes the central role of communities of practice in which individual inventors are embedded. Interactions across and within communities of practice influence the speed of innovation. Innovative delay often arises when vested community interests in particular research tools, approaches, and questions block the migration of tools and ideas across communities. Within each community, reliance on interpersonal relationships of trust and authority to determine which research programs and methodologies are legitimate and interesting can also lead to innovative delay. Similarly, periods of fast innovative activity often have sociological explanations. For example, a particular line of research long ignored may become a “hot” topic of research when backed by a high-status intellectual actor.This socio-historical approach is responsive to recent Supreme Court patent law jurisprudence, exemplified by KSR v. Teleflex, that directs courts to take a flexible approach to patentability by considering “the circumstances surrounding the origin of the invention.” Understanding why some scientific innovations take a long time to develop or be endorsed by the scientific community provides an opportunity to reshape patent law as a policy lever to mitigate such delays. Conversely, understanding why other types of innovation occur rapidly and spark swift follow-on innovation calls attention to circumstances in which broad patent rights may impose particularly high social costs. By teasing out social factors that influence the pace of innovation, I offer a framework for taking such considerations into account in the design and application of patent law. I also propose specific changes to patent law doctrine that flow from this framework.
Who Gives Foreign Aid to Whom and Why

This paper studies the pattern of allocation of foreign aid from various donors to receiving countries. We find considerable evidence that the direction of foreign aid is dictated as much by political and strategic considerations, as by the economic needs and policy performance of the recipients. Colonial past and political alliances are major determinants of foreign aid. At the margin, however, countries that democratize receive more aid, ceteris paribus. While foreign aid flows respond to political variables, foreign direct investments are more sensitive to economic incentives, particularly “good policies” and protection of property rights in the receiving countries. We also uncover significant differences in the behavior of different donors.
Observability and Sorting in a Market for Names

Can firm names be tradeable assets when changes in name ownership are observable? Earlier literature focuses on trading of firm names when trading is not observable to the consumer. Yet, casual empiricism suggests that shifts in name ownership are often publicly known. This paper studies how firm names can be traded even under full observability. In equilibrium, even when consumers see a reputed name being divested they continue to trust it and so, these names are tradeable. I further demonstrate an appealing “sorting” property of these equilibria. Competent firms can separate themselves by buying valuable names, and incompetent firms can give themselves away by using worthless names.
Neither Employees Nor Indentured Servants: A New Amateurism for a New Millennium in College Sports

Amateurism is a controversial concept among academics who study college sports. To its supporters, amateurism represents the best that college sports have to offer: high-quality athletic competition among full-time university students for whom participating in sport is an adjunct to the pursuit of an undergraduate education. To its critics, amateurism is a code word for an exploitative entertainment enterprise that reaps millions of dollars in revenue while denying the athletes who make that revenue possible either a meaningful education or fair compensation. Supporters of amateurism reject the payment of athletes, whom they want to remain students; critics of amateurism advocate making athletes employees of their institutions so they can enjoy the rights attendant to employee status. This Article agrees with the supporters of amateurism that athletes should be students, not employees, but it advocates modernizing amateurism to eliminate the system’s exploitative aspects. The Article offers proposals that will strengthen the bond between sport and higher education, while also recognizing athletes’ financial and psychic contributions to their institutions and enabling them to complete their degrees in modest material comfort.
A Note on Analysts' Earnings Forecast Errors Distribution

Abstract Abarbanell and Lehavy provide evidence that analysts’ forecast errors are not normally distributed exhibiting a high occurrence of extreme negative forecast errors (left-tail asymmetry) and a high occurrence of small positive forecast errors (middle asymmetry). This is important for researchers who rely on techniques that are sensitive to the distributional assumptions of analysts’ forecast errors. Many of the conclusions drawn by Abarbanell and Lehavy, however, are based on visual impressions (as opposed to formal empirical tests) or based on methods that are very sensitive to the empirical methods used (e.g., whether the serial correlation of forecast errors is caused by the left-tail asymmetry).
Strategic Land Use Litigation: Pleading Around Municipal Insurance

Municipal insurance policies inevitably contain a curious exclusion of coverage for regulatory takings claims. Many courts have interpreted this exclusion broadly, applying it to all land-use litigation. Other courts have interpreted the exclusion narrowly. Both interpretations are problematic. The former is at odds with policy language and the normal rule that insurance policies are to be construed against the insurer. The latter creates an opportunity for plaintiffs to craft their pleadings explicitly to trigger or to avoid triggering the municipality’s insurance coverage. Plaintiffs seeking a quick settlement are well advised to plead around the exclusion so as to settle with the insurer. But plaintiffs seeking to have the local government capitulate should avoid the insurance coverage, forcing the local government to bear its own litigation costs and the risk of an adverse judgment. The possibility of such pleading arbitrage is problematic, and this Article argues that states should find ways to extend insurance to cover Fifth Amendment regulatory takings claims.
Decision making and risk aversion in the Cash Cab

Abstract We use the Emmy Award-winning game show Cash Cab to study decision-making in a risky framework. This is a unique environment because, unlike other game shows used to examine risk-aversion, players participate individually or in teams varying in number from two to five. This creates a natural laboratory to measure performance and risk aversion conditional upon the size of the team as well as the characteristics of the team members. Teams are much more likely to complete overall tasks successfully. Most importantly, risk aversion estimates indicate that when participants are part of a group, they focus on the overall size of the dollar amounts that are “at risk”, rather than their “slice of the pie”. The implications of our results span a number of areas where groups are part of the financial decision-making process, including investment analysis and portfolio management, corporate governance, and corporate finance.
Climate Change Strategy: The Business Logic behind Voluntary Greenhouse Gas Reductions

To date, the United States has declined to ratify the Kyoto Treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, many companies are taking advantage of the lack of a mandatory U.S. GHG emission reduction program to set targets at their own pace and in ways that complement their own strategic objectives. Currently, as many as sixty corporations, with net revenues of roughly $1.5 trillion, have set voluntary reduction targets. Why are they doing this? Many of these companies are agnostic about the science of climate change or the social responsibility of protecting the global climate. The reasons that they are making these emission reductions are decidedly strategic. They are searching for ways to be prepared for the long term should GHG emission reductions become mandatory, while at the same time attempting to reap near-term economic and strategic benefits should new regulations not emerge.
Charitable Accountability and Reform in Nineteenth Century England: The Case of the Charity Commission

Fraudulent behavior by charitable fiduciaries brings universal condemnation. Such wrongs never have been countenanced, though seemingly, they have always occurred.' However, disapprobation by itself never has translated into an efficient system for the accountability of charitable assets. This Article examines the nineteenth-century struggle to form a charity commission to oversee English charitable endowments. Administrative reform can have an interminable germination as the creation of the Charity Commission demonstrates. A conundrum is that even though the need for reform of charitable administration was long recognized and a consensus reached on the structure of the overseeing body (though not its scope), the resulting agency came under almost immediate criticism and was disliked, disrespected, deprived of resources, and ultimately ineffective.
The lost generation of the Great Recession

Abstract This paper analyzes the effects of the Great Recession on different generations. While older generations suffered the largest decline in wealth due to the collapse in asset prices, younger generations suffered the largest decline in labor income. Potentially, some households may have benefited from the purchase of cheaper assets. To analyze the impact of these channels, I construct an overlapping-generations model with borrowing constraints in which households choose a portfolio of risky and risk-free assets. In response to shocks to labor income and asset markets resembling the Great Recession, young risky asset holders suffer the largest welfare losses, equivalent to a 33 percent reduction in one-period consumption.
The Growth of Global Internet Censorship and Circumvention: A Survey

The Internet has, within a period of twenty years, become the primary medium of information exchange in the world. It is also arguably the primary source of information in the world. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo have made the vast trove of information available and accessible to everybody. Email and social network applications such as Facebook and Twitter have enabled people all over the world to meet, collaborate and participate in joint activities. The Internet has also gradually become a tool of dissidence in repressed nations all over the world to spread information, plan and organize activists and conduct protests. Not surprisingly, repressive regimes see the Internet as a threat. Under the guise of protecting their citizens from the negative effects of the Internet (such as pornography and hate speech), they have, and are, actively curbed Internet use by their citizens by adopting various censorship measures and blockades. In this paper I have surveyed the history of Internet censorship by various countries, starting from 1991. Governments all over the world use various means – legal, political, technical, and coercive – to control and restrict Internet content. Cataloging all such efforts by all the countries would be beyond the scope of this paper. Despite that, I have tried to focus on the various methods of censorship and blockades used by various countries around the world. I have also provided a brief description of recent attempts by Myanmar and Egypt to completely block the Internet, with a discussion of the technique and methods involved. Finally, I have also briefly discussed the push-back efforts by citizens of the world, who are actively and innovatively finding ways to circumvent the most pernicious of these censorship efforts and blockades.
Genetic Diversity and the Origins of Cultural Fragmentation

Despite the importance attributed to the effects of diversity on the stability and prosperity of nations, the origins of the uneven distribution of ethnic and cultural fragmentation across countries have been underexplored. Building on the role of deeply-rooted biogeographical forces in comparative development, this research empirically demonstrates that genetic diversity, predominantly determined during the prehistoric "out of Africa" migration of humans, is an underlying cause of various existing manifestations of ethnolinguistic heterogeneity. Further exploration of this uncharted territory may revolutionize the understanding of the effects of deeply-rooted factors on economic development and the composition of human capital across the globe.
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM COMPARISON BETWEEN CUPRATES AND HE FILMS?: PHASE SEPARATION AND FLUCTUATING SUPERFLUIDITY

In the underdoped, overdoped, Zn-doped or stripe-forming regions of high-Tc cuprate superconductors (HTSC), the superfluid density ns/m* at T→ 0 shows universal correlations with Tc. Similar strong correlations exist between 2-dimensional superfluid density and superfluid transition temperature in thin films of 4He in non-porous or porous media, and 4He/3He film adsorbed on porous media. Based on analogy between HTSC and He film systems, we propose a model for cuprates where: (1) the overdoped region is characterized by a phase separation similar to 4He/3He; and (2) pair (boson) formation and fluctuating superconductivity occur at separate temperatures above Tc in the underdoped region.
Bankruptcy and the Market for Mortgage and Home Improvement Loans

Abstract This paper investigates the relationship between bankruptcy exemptions and the availability of credit for mortgage and home improvement loans. We develop a combined model of debtors' decisions to file for bankruptcy and to default on their mortgages and show that the theory predicts positive relationships between both the homestead and personal property exemption levels and the probability of borrowers being denied mortgage and unsecured loans. We test these predictions empirically and find strong and statistically significant support when evidence from cross-state variation in bankruptcy exemption levels is used. Applicants for mortgages are 2 percentage points more likely to be turned down for mortgages and 5 percentage points more likely to be turned down for home improvement loans if they live in states with unlimited rather than low homestead exemptions. These relationships also hold when we introduce state fixed effects into the model.
Class Actions, Conflict and the Global Economy

In recent years, the class action has emerged as a flashpoint for friction in cross-border civil litigation. Disagreement regarding the function, utility and desirability of class actions is particularly evident in the U.S.-European debate. This brief essay focuses on that debate, discussing the rhetoric of animosity toward the U.S. class action system that frames the process of procedural reform in Europe. It offers an explanation for that animosity that touches on both the internal politics of European reform efforts and the “export” of the U.S. model to Europe. It then identifies the harms that flow from this antagonism, describing the ways in which it interferes with the development of a more contextual understanding of the different legal, procedural and cultural norms observed in different countries.
Exploring the Universe with Metal-Poor Stars

The early chemical evolution of the Galaxy and the Universe is vital to our understanding of a host of astrophysical phenomena. Since the most metal-poor Galactic stars (with metallicities down to \(\mbox{ [Fe/H]} \sim -5.5\)) are relics from the high-redshift Universe, they probe the chemical and dynamical conditions of the Milky Way and the origin and evolution of the elements through nucleosynthesis. They also provide constraints on the nature of the first stars, their associated supernovae and initial mass function, and early star and galaxy formation. The Milky Way’s dwarf satellites contain a large fraction (∼ 30 %) of the known most metal-poor stars that have chemical abundances that closely resemble those of equivalent halo stars. This suggests that chemical evolution may be universal, at least at early times, and that it is driven by massive, energetic SNe. Some of these surviving, ultra-faint systems may show the signature of just one such Pop III star; they may even be surviving first galaxies. Early analogs of the surviving dwarfs may thus have played an important role in the assembly of the old Galactic halo whose formation can now be studied with stellar chemistry. Following the cosmic evolution of small halos in simulations of structure formation enables tracing the cosmological origin of the most metal-poor stars in the halo and dwarf galaxies. Together with future observations and additional modeling, many of these issues, including the reionization history of the Milky Way, may be constrained this way. The chapter concludes with an outlook about upcoming observational challenges and ways forward to use metal-poor stars to constrain theoretical studies.
Of Theory and Practice

Much has been written about theory and practice in the law, and the tension between practitioners and theorists. Judges do not cite theoretical articles often; they rarely "apply" theories to particular cases. These arguments are not revisited. Instead the Essay explores the working and interaction of theory and practice, practitioners and theorists. The Essay starts with a story about solving a legal issue using our intellectual tools - theory, practice, and their progenies: experience and "gut." Next the Essay elaborates on the nature of theory, practice, experience and "gut." The third part of the Essay discusses theories that are helpful to practitioners and those that are less helpful. The Essay concludes that practitioners theorize, and theorists practice. They use these intellectual tools differently because the goals and orientations of theorists and practitioners, and the constraints under which they act, differ. Theory, practice, experience and "gut" help us think, remember, decide and create. They complement each other like the two sides of the same coin: distinct but inseparable.
Optimal Financing of a Corporation Subject To Random Returns

We consider the problem of finding an optimal financing mix of retained earnings and external equity for maximizing the value of a corporation in a stochastic environment. We formulate the problem as a singular stochastic control for a diffusion process. We show that the value function satisfies a free-boundary problem. We characterize the value function and show that the optimal policy can be characterized in terms of two threshold parameters. With asset level below the lower threshold, optimal policy is to finance the firm's growth by retaining all earnings and raising the required external equity financing. With asset level above the higher threshold, optimal policy is to pay all retained earnings as dividends and to bring in no new equity. Between the two thresholds, the optimal policy is to retain all earnings but not raise any external equity. We obtain an explicit solution for the value function when there is no brokerage commission in floating external equity. We provide economic interpretations of the results obtained in the paper.
The Money Blind: How to Stop Industry Bias in Biomedical Science, without Violating the First Amendment:

The pharmaceutical and medical device industries use billions of dollars to support the biomedical science that physicians, regulators, and patients use to make healthcare decisions—the decisions that drive an increasingly large portion of the American economy. Compelling evidence suggests that this industry money buys favorable results, biasing the outcomes of scientific research. Current efforts to manage the problem, including disclosure mandates and peer reviews, are ineffective. A blinding mechanism, operating through an intermediary such as the National Institutes of Health, could instead be developed to allow industry support of science without allowing undue influence. If the editors of biomedical journals fail to mandate that industry funders utilize such a solution, the federal government has several regulatory levers available, including conditioning federal funding and direct regulation, both of which could be done without violating the First Amendment.
Judicial Activism: An Empirical Examination of Voting Behavior on the Rehnquist Natural Court

This paper attempts to quantify one of the most deeply contested terms in constitutional law: "judicial activism". 1 Most discussions of "judicial activism" define activism either in reference to a particular political ideology (such as complaints about "liberal activist judges") or a particular method of constitutional interpretation (such as assertions that a decision was "activist" because it was not based on the original meaning of the Constitution). 2 This paper sidesteps those debates, focusing in-
Does corruption affect income inequality and poverty

This paper provides evidence that high and rising corruption increases income inequality and poverty. An increase of one standard deviation in corruption increases the Gini coefficient of income inequality by about 11 points and income growth of the poor by about 5 percentage points per year. These findings are robust to use of different instruments for corruption and other sensitivity analyses. The paper discusses several channels through which corruption may affect income inequality and poverty. An important implication of these findings is that policies that reduce corruption will most likely reduce income inequality and poverty as well.
The Reach and Persuasiveness of Viral Video Ads

Many video ads are designed to go viral so that the total number of views they receive depends on customers sharing the ads with their friends. This paper explores the relationship between the number of views and how persuasive the ad is at convincing consumers to purchase or to adopt a favorable attitude towards the product. The analysis combines data on the total views of 400 video ads, and crowd-sourced measurement of advertising persuasiveness among 24,000 survey responses. Persuasiveness is measured by randomly exposing half of these consumers to a video ad and half to a similar placebo video ad, and then surveying their attitudes towards the focal product. Relative ad persuasiveness is on average 10% lower for every one million views that the video ad achieves. The exceptions to this pattern were ads that generated views and large numbers of comments, and video ads that attracted comments that mentioned the product by name. Evidence suggests that such ads remained effective because they attracted views due to humor rather than because they were outrageous.
A Defense of Embryonic Stem Cell Research

INTRODUCTION 1204 I. SOME DEFINITIONS AND NOMENCLATURE 1207 A. INITIAL STAGES OF EMBRYONIC DEVELOPMENT AND EMBRYONIC SOURCES FOR STEM CELLS 1208 B. OTHER SOURCES OF STEM CELLS 1209 II. THE SCIENCE AND METHODS OF EMBRYO PRODUCTION AND STEM CELL HARVESTING 1212 A. CREATION OF EMBRYOS IN A LABORATORY ENVIRONMENT: THE IVF PROCESS 1212 B. THE FATE OF LABORATORY-CREATED EMBRYOS 1213 C. HARVESTING THE STEM CELLS FROM EMBRYOS 1215 III. FIRST PRINCIPLES: THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE AND THE RIGHT TO CREATE EMBRYOS IN VITRO 1218 A. THE RIGHT TO PROCREATE 1218 B. THE RIGHT TO EFFECTIVE IVF TREATMENT 1220 IV. TERMINATING LIFE-SUPPORTING EXTRAORDINARY MEDICAL TREATMENT ....... 1222 A. MORALITY OF REFUSAL OF LIFE-SUPPORTING TREATMENT BY A COMPETENT ADULT 1222 B. SUBSTITUTED CONSENT: WHO SPEAKS FOR AN INCOMPETENT INDIVIDUAL? ... 1226 C. FROZEN EMBRYOS AS CHILDREN ON LIFE SUPPORT 1231 D. WHO IS A “PARENT”? 1235 V. ORGAN DONATION AND ITS APPLICATION TO EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH .... 1236 A. ORGAN DONATION BY ADULTS AND CHILDREN 1236 B. STEM CELL DONATION BY EMBRYOS 1239 VI. THE OBJECTIONS AND A RESPONSE 1241 A. THE “CONSENT” OBJECTION 1241 B. THE “CREATION” OBJECTION 1245 C. THE “SNOWFLAKE” AND ADOPTION OBJECTION 1248 D. THE “REPROGRAMMING” AND “BIOPSY” OBJECTIONS 1252 VII. DIFFERENTIATING STEM CELL RESEARCH FROM ELECTIVE ABORTION 1254 CONCLUSION 1256
Benefits of Publicity

We investigate whether corporate board members with media expertise influence firms’ media coverage and media slant. We find that firms with a media professional on the board of directors receive m...
After the Deluge: Do Fixed Exchange Rates Allow Inter‐temporal Volatility Tradeoffs?

This paper addresses the issue of whether regimes of fixed exchange rates are a mechanism for shifting volatility inter-temporally. Using a panel of data covering twenty industrialized countries from 1959 through 1993, I examine the volatilities of a host of real and monetary variables. Graphical and statistical examination of the periods around 33 flotations and 81 devaluations reveals little evidence of significant increases in volatility following these events. Copyright @ 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Hobby Lobby and the Zero-Sum Game

In a zero-sum game, one person’s gain is another person’s loss. Some claims under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act present such zerosum circumstances in that easing the claimant’s religious burden increases someone else’s burden. This Commentary explores the effect of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores on such zero-sum claims using a paradigmatic example: RFRA claims challenging the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. This inquiry reveals that Hobby Lobby did not open the door for cases involving true zero-sum games, including those under the Eagle Act and some under the anti-discrimination laws. In such cases, granting the requested religious accommodation merely shifts the claimant’s burden onto a third party. RFRA provides for easing burdens, not transferring them to others. Hence, even after Hobby Lobby, such zero-sum claims should fail.
Finding Room for Fairness in Formalism--The Sliding Scale Approach to Unconscionability

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 3 I. THE EVOLUTION OF UNCONSCIONABILITY: THREE APPROACHES ........ 6 A. The Conventional Approach 8 1. Procedural Unconscionability 9 2. Substantive Unconscionability 10 3. Procedural and Substantive Unconscionability Together ... 11 B. The Sliding Scale Approach 12 1. The Procedural Prong 13 2. The Substantive Prong 16 3. The Two Prongs in Tandem 17 C. The Single-Prong Approach 19 1. Substantive Unconscionability Alone 19 2. Procedural Unconscionability Alone 21 3. Justifications for the Single-Prong Approach 22 D. The Promise of the Sliding Scale 25 II. SOLVING THE DILEMMA OF ASSENT 26 A. Barriers to Knowing Assent and Voluntary Choice 29 1. Psychological Barriers to Knowing Assent 29 2. Market-Based Barriers to Voluntariness 35 B. Incomplete Approaches to Incomplete Assent 38 1. Mandatory Disclosure and Heightened Assent 39
Who Gambles in the Stock Market

This study shows that the propensity to gamble and investment decisions are correlated. At the aggregate level, individual investors prefer stocks with lottery features, and like lottery demand, the demand for lottery-type stocks increases during economic downturns. In the cross-section, socioeconomic factors that induce greater expenditure in lotteries are associated with greater investment in lottery-type stocks. Further, lottery investment levels are higher in regions with favorable lottery environments. Because lottery-type stocks underperform, gambling-related underperformance is greater among low-income investors who excessively overweight lottery-type stocks. These results indicate that state lotteries and lottery-type stocks attract very similar socioeconomic clienteles.
To change or not to change: how regulatory focus affects change in dyadic decision-making

Successful innovation requires teams to embrace and enact change. However, team members often differ in their preferences for change. We examine how regulatory focus affects dyadic teams’ tendencies to enact change across an array of repeated brand management decisions. Understanding such tendencies is important, since the innovation process is characterized by a series of investment decisions typically made by teams, yet prone to significant biases. Regulatory focus theory provides a framework for understanding the dominant motivations driving decision-making during goal pursuit. It argues that individuals operate under either a promotion or prevention focus, influencing preferences for stability vs. change. We develop a set of hypotheses regarding regulatory focus match vs. mismatch in teams and their effects on the relative tendency to enact change in decision-making. In the context of dyads involved in a complex management simulation consisting of multiple decision cycles, we empirically demonstrate that a promotion focus match is associated with greater levels of change in decisions than a prevention focus match, regardless of the type of goal pursuit strategy prescribed to dyads. Under regulatory focus mismatch, however, dyads are guided by the goal pursuit strategy (vigilant vs. eager) provided to them, which in turn informs their propensity to implement change.
Reframing International Financial Regulation After the Global Financial Crisis: Rational States and Interdependence, not Regulatory Networks and Soft Law

This Article uses a rational choice analysis to simplify the increasingly complex area of international financial regulation. It proceeds by identifying four “interdependence problems” relating to harmonization of financial standards, capital requirements, bank resolution procedures, and an international lender of last resort — in which the globalization of finance creates potential benefits from regulatory cooperation between countries. It finds that interdependence problems that relate to the efficiency gains made available by cross-border financial integration are more amenable to international regulation than are efforts to reduce losses from financial instability, which will likely continue to be ineffective despite active reforms in response to the global financial crisis.A policy implication is that ambitious proposals for a legal body to centrally administer international financial regulation are unlikely to succeed, because they misstate the underlying dynamics of the interdependence problems that are specific to international finance. Instead, this Article argues that certain incremental reforms, such as international harmonization of bank resolution plans and provision of a regional lenders of last resort, provide a more promising avenue for reform.This Article constitutes a reframing of the literature on international financial regulation, because it seeks to show that a state-centered rational choice approach can provide greater clarity and explanatory power than competing scholarship that commonly incorporates more complicated variables. In particular, the Article argues that the influential literatures on “transgovernmental networks” of regulators and the international “soft law” that they create overstate both the extent and efficacy of these mechanisms for international cooperation on finance and international law generally.
Knowledge and Competitive Advantage in the Synthetic Dye Industry, 1850–1914: The Coevolution of Firms, Technology, and National Institutions in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States

It is London 1856. William Henry Perkin serendipitously invents the first synthetic dye while he is trying to synthesize quinine, a medicine for malaria. The nineteen-year-old Perkin leaves the Royal College of Chemistry and quickly commercializes his aniline purple dye, launching the synthetic dye industry. From that time on, the industry continues to dazzle the eye with ever new and appealing dye colors. Perkin, along with entrepreneurs from Britain and France, dominates the synthetic dye industry for the next eight years. During this period, British and French firms introduce most other innovative synthetic dyes onto the market, and they hold the largest global market share.
Visualization techniques for journey to crime flow data

Research applications using journey to crime data present unique challenges for modeling and visualization not encountered with typical data that are only georeferenced at one point in space. The a...
Imperfect competition, integer constraints and industry dynamics

Amir and Lambson (2003) developed an infinite-horizon, stochastic model of entry and exit by integer numbers of firms facing sunk costs and uncertain market conditions. Here, as examples of the model' usefulness, special cases are applied to the following three s issues: (1) the relationship between sunk costs and industry concentration, (2) entry when current profits are negative, and (3) the relationship between entry and the length of the product cycle.
Creating Growth in New Markets: A Simultaneous Model of Firm Entry and Price*

Sales in a new market generally follow a hockey-stick pattern: After commercialization, sales are very low for some time before there is a dramatic takeoff in growth. Reported sales takeoffs across products vary widely from a few years to several decades. Prior research identifies new firm entry or price declines as key factors that relate to the timing of a sales takeoff in new markets. However, this literature considers these variables to be exogenous and only finds unilateral effects. In the present article, new firm entry and price declines are modeled as being endogenous. Thus, the simultaneous relationship between price declines and firm entry in the introductory period of new markets when industry sales are negligible is studied. Using a sample of new markets formed in the United States during the last 135 years, strong support for a simultaneous model of price and firm entry is found: Price decreases relate to the competitive pressures associated with firm entry, and, in turn, firm entry is lower in new markets with rapidly falling prices. Furthermore, a key driver of firm entry during the early years of a new market involves the level of patent activity, and a key driver of price decreases is the presence of large firms. In contrast to the recommendations from other research, these results indicate that rapid price declines may further delay sales takeoff in industries by dampening new firm entry. Instead, rapid sales takeoffs in new markets come from encouraging greater innovative activity and the entry of large firms.
Bitcoin and the bailout

Abstract On March 16, 2013, Cyprus announced that it would accept a bailout that required imposing a one-time levy on bank deposits. It has been argued that, by making traditional deposit accounts seem less secure, the bailout announcement prompted some to consider—or reconsider—using the cryptocurrency bitcoin. Relying on rank data for a subset of apps, existing studies maintain that interest in bitcoin increased following the announcement, especially in countries with troubled banks. We argue that (1) focusing on a subset of apps does not allow one to distinguish a general increase in the demand for bitcoin apps from a substitution between bitcoin apps and (2) changes in rank data are a poor predictor of changes in the number of downloads. In order to address these concerns, we collect rank data for all fifteen bitcoin apps available at the time and use an established technique to estimate an index of downloads for each country considered. We find that, while downloads of bitcoin apps increased following the announcement, the observed effect was not especially pronounced in countries thought to have had troubled banking systems at the time.
Technological innovations and aggregate risk premiums

In this paper, I propose that technological innovations increase expected stock returns and premiums at the aggregate level. I use aggregate patent data and research and development (R&D) data to measure technological innovations in the U.S., and find that patent shocks and R&D shocks have positive and distinct predictive power for U.S. market returns and premiums. Similar patterns are also found in international data including other G7 countries, China, and India. These findings are consistent with previous empirical studies based on firm-level data, and call for further theoretical explanations.
The Effects of Mandatory Seat Belt Laws on Driving Behavior and Traffic Fatalities

This paper investigates the effects of mandatory seat belt laws on driver behavior and traffic fatalities. Using a unique panel data set on seat belt usage in all U.S. jurisdictions, we analyze how such laws, by influencing seat belt use, affect the incidence of traffic fatalities. Allowing for the endogeneity of seat belt usage, we find that such usage decreases overall traffic fatalities. The magnitude of this effect, however, is significantly smaller than the estimate used by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In addition, we do not find significant support for the compensating-behavior theory, which suggests that seat belt use also has an indirect adverse effect on fatalities by encouraging careless driving. Finally, we identify factors, especially the type of enforcement used, that make seat belt laws more effective in increasing seat belt usage.
Torts and Terror: Rethinking Deterrence Models and Catastrophic Terrorist Attack

Given the complexities inherent in conventional counterproliferation strategies, there is some value in rethinking models of deterrence in the world after 9/11. New threats require new methods of deterrence. The traditional theory of deterrence, and its application, has atrophied since the demise of the Soviet nuclear threat. The idea that deterrence is dead has moved beyond the academy to become fairly accepted political orthodoxy. At the same time, international law scholars generally have walked away from the idea of deterrence, which is predicated on the threat of retaliation, as prohibited by Article 2, Paragraphs 3 and 4, of the U.N. Charter. These views are important because they drive not only how we look at deterrence (and what we signal to our adversaries), but also how we address other issues such as preemptive war and missile defense. One important caveat is that motivation of retaliation must be calibrated based on deterrence of future acts rather than punishment for previous acts. If deterrence does not work or cannot work, then we are more likely to find preemptive war and missile defense attractive responses to catastrophic terrorist attack.