cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Earnings Opacity, Stock Market Wealth Effect and Economic Growth

This paper examines how accounting quality, as measured by earnings opacity, affects the stock market wealth effect, which in turn is shown to be linked to economic growth. Stock market wealth effect is negatively affected by earnings opacity. The data also indicate that the exogenous component of the stock market wealth effect — the component defined by earnings opacity‐ is positively associated with economic growth. The direct effect of earnings opacity on economic growth is, as expected negative, but insignificant.
Photovoltaics — A Path to Sustainable Futures

Abstract As both population and energy use per capita increase, modern society is approaching physical limits to its continued fossil fuel consumption. The immediate limits are set by the planet’s ability to adapt to a changing atmospheric chemical composition, not the availability of resources. In order for a future society to be sustainable while operating at or above our current standard of living a shift away from carbon based energy sources must occur. An overview of the current state of active solar (photovoltaic, PV) energy technology is provided here to outline a partial solution for the environmental problems caused by accelerating global energy expenditure. The technical, social, and economic benefits and limitations of PV technologies to provide electricity in both off-grid and on-grid applications is critically analyzed in the context of this shift in energy sources. It is shown that PV electrical production is a technologically feasible, economically viable, environmentally benign, sustainable, and socially equitable solution to society’s future energy requirements.
Conditional Cash Transfers and Female Schooling : The Impact of the Female School Stipend Program on Public School Enrollments in Punjab, Pakistan

Instead of mean-tested conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, some countries have implemented gender-targeted CCTs to explicitly address intra-household disparities in human capital investments. This study focuses on addressing the direct impact of a female school stipend program in Punjab, Pakistan: Did the intervention increase female enrollment in public schools? To address this question, the authors draw on data from the provincial school censuses of 2003 and 2005. They estimate the net growth in female enrollments in grades 6-8 in stipend eligible schools. Impact evaluation analysis, including difference-and-difference (DD), triple differencing (DDD), and regression-discontinuity design (RDD) indicate a modest but statistically significant impact of the intervention. The preferred estimator derived from a combination of DDD and RDD empirical strategies suggests that the average program impact between 2003 and 2005 was an increase of six female students per school in terms of absolute change and an increase of 9 percent in female enrollment in terms of relative change. A triangulation effort is also undertaken using two rounds of a nationally representative household survey before and after the intervention. Even though the surveys are not representative at the subprovincial level, the results corroborate evidence of the impact using school census data.
Assessing the energy-efficiency information gap: results from a survey of home energy auditors

Commercial and residential buildings are responsible for 42 percent of all U.S. energy consumption and 41 percent of U.S. CO2 emissions. Engineering studies identify several investments in new enegy-efficiency equipment or building retrofits that would more than pay for themselves in terms of lower future energy costs, but homeowners and businesses generally do not have good information about how to take advantage of these opportunities. Energy auditors make up a growing industry of professionals who evaluate building energy use and provide this information to building owners. This paper reports the results of a survey of nearly 500 home energy auditors and contractors that Resources for the Future conducted in summer 2011. The survey asked about the characteristics of these businesses and the services they provide, the degree to which homeowners follow up on their recommendations, and the respondents’ opinions on barriers to home energy retrofits and the role for government. Findings from the survey suggest that the audit industry only partially is filling the information gap. Not enough homeowners know about or understand audits, and the follow-through on recommendations once they do have audits is incomplete. But the survey findings suggest that low energy prices and the high cost of retrofits may be more responsible for these outcomes than failures of information.
Rhetoric, Divorce and International Human Rights: The Limits of Divorce Reform for the Protection of Children

This paper, written for a Symposium, identifies and challenges three premises contained in the Symposium's title, "Divorce Reform for the Protection of Children." First, it tacitly assumes that divorce reform can protect "children" in general, rather than a relatively small, and quite demographically distinct, population of children in particular. Second, it assumes that divorce itself poses a danger to these children. Third, it assumes that the law should step in to avert, or at least manage that danger. This paper interrogates each of these propositions. My project may strike some as painfully obvious. Of course there are bigger, broader threats to American children, but this conference is not about the top five threats to American children; it is about divorce. Surely we can make divorce less difficult and less painful for children and surely that is worth doing. There is an impressive assembly of brainpower in this Symposium devoted to precisely that. But my thesis here is that first, there are built-in costs and built-in limits to this particular approach. Second, both can be constructively addressed by re-situating the discussion of the protection of children in the broader rhetorical framework of human rights law.
Prioritization: Addressing the Patent Application Backlog at the United States Patent and Trademark Office

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) faces a backlog of over 700,000 patent applications that are examined in the order of their effective U.S. filing dates. Currently, a patent examiner begins work on a backlogged application approximately 2p-3 years after the filing date. Total pendency averages around 3-4 years. Since USPTO Director David Kappos took his position in 2009, he has sought to address the backlog by implementing work sharing and acceleration programs with foreign patent offices and adopting new procedures to encourage applicants to abandon unimportant applications. Kappos also created an Internet website, the Data Visualization Center ("Patent Dashboard"), to increase transparency at the USPTO by making backlog statistics publicly available. In his newly formed public blog, he reported that the USPTO reduced the backlog from greater than 750,000 applications in 2009 to approximately 725,000 in 2010 with the ultimate goal of reducing the backlog to fewer than 700,000 applications by the end of 2010. The USPTO has adopted several administrative procedures to address the backlog issue, but none have yet succeeded. Consequently, in June 2010, Director Kappos announced a proposal designed to "provide applicants greater control over the speed with which their applications are examined and promote greater efficiency in the patent examination process." The proposal would allow patent applicants to choose among three tracks - prioritized (Track I), traditional (Track II), and delayed (Track III) - for examination of new patent applications filed first in the United States. The only requirement for Track I prioritized examination is payment of an additional fee for a faster examination. This way, the applicants will help the USPTO sort through the 700,000 backlogged applications and identify and examine the most time-sensitive applications first. This Note describes the current prioritization procedures at the USPTO and evaluates the Three-Track Proposal. Part I describes how the current backlog frustrates the goal of the patent system. Part II provides an overview of the past and current USPTO procedures for prioritizing applications. Part III describes the Three-Track Proposal in detail and proposes reforms to the proposal to better achieve the goal of the patent system described in Part I.
Echoes of gravity

The study of anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation is progressing at a phenomenal rate, both experimentally and theoretically. These anisotropies can teach us an enormous amount about the way that fluctuations were generated and the way they subsequently evolved into the clustered galaxies which are observed today. In particular, on sub-degree scales the rich structure in the anisotropy spectrum is the consequence of gravity-driven acoustic oscillations occurring before the matter in the universe became neutral. The frozen-in phases of these sound waves imprint a dependence on many cosmological parameters, that we may be on the verge of extracting.
Plural Vision: International Law Seen through the Varied Lenses of Domestic Implementation

This Essay introduces a collection of essays that have evolved from papers presented at a conference on “International Law in the Domestic Context.” The conference was a response to the questions raised by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Medellin v. Texas and also a product of our collective curiosity about how other states address tensions between international obligations and overlapping regimes of national law. Our constitutional tradition speaks with many voices on the subject of the relationship between domestic and international law. In order to gain a broader perspective on that relationship, we invited experts on foreign law to introduce us to the way other states attempt to reconcile international commitments and the domestic constitutional order. The essays collected here were presented in three separate panels during the conference. The organization of the volume follows the same organizational principle. The first three papers thus focus on questions relating to the implementation of international human rights as domestic law. The two papers that follow address issues relating to international obligations and the foreign affairs power. The final section, which comprises four papers, provides a comparative perspective on how other international law is introduced into the domestic legal systems of Australia, Canada, China and the United Kingdom. Each contribution attests to the continuing relevance of Holmes’ dictum: the life of the law is not logic but experience. Programmatic statements in founding documents or in law review articles do not determine the status of international law in the domestic context. It is worked out through the various legal histories of each state. As each state grapples to reconcile its national legal traditions with its international obligations, it is worthwhile to pause and consider the experiences of others. It is our hope that this volume contributes to that process.
Property Tax Limits, Balanced Budget Rules, and Line-Item Vetoes: A Long-Run View

This paper explores the early development of three important fiscal institutions faced by U.S. state governments: property tax limits (PTLs), balanced budget rules (BBRs), and the gubernatorial line-item veto (LIV). Specifically, this study attempts to provide historical context for their development and an empirical investigation of their long-run effect on state finances (running from 1830 to 1920). Results, which are robust to a number of specifications, suggest that early PTLs decreased both revenues and expenditures, BBRs had a larger effect on revenues rather than expenditures, while the LIV had a somewhat limited effect on both revenues and expenditures.
The Effect of Using a Lattice Model to Estimate Reported Option Values

Statement of Financial Accounting Standards 123R suggests that lattice valuation models may improve the estimates of reported employee stock option values relative to the more commonly used Black–Scholes (BS) model. However, lattice model critics have expressed concerns that managers may use lattice models' flexibility to opportunistically understate option values. In this study, we investigate a sample of firms that recently adopted a lattice model to value employee stock options to provide evidence on this issue by identifying the determinants of lattice model adoption and examining the effect of lattice model use on reported option values. We report three main results. First, we find that firms are more likely to adopt a lattice model when it is more likely to produce lower values than the BS model and when managers have incentives to lower stock option expense. Second, we find that firms adopting a lattice model increase understatement of reported option values more than firms that continue to use the BS model and that the incremental understatement is due to use of the lattice model. Third, we conduct several tests to examine whether the valuation effect of lattice model use is consistent with efforts to correct for documented shortcomings in the BS model and find no evidence that this is the case. Taken together, the evidence in this study suggests that firms adopt and implement lattice models primarily to lower reported option values.
Upstairs, downstairs: subnational incorporation of international human rights law at the end of an era

In the early 1970s, the Public Broadcasting System imported Upstairs, Downstairs, a long-running miniseries from Great Britain. Encompassing the years from 1903 through the end of World War I, the series was set in the elegant five-story London townhouse occupied by Lord and Lady Bellamy and their two teenage children. Lord Bellamy was active in national affairs and served as a member of Parliament. The series might have been built around the challenges confronting the nation qua nation— the economic and social turmoil at the turn of the century, the growing emancipation of women, the foreign relations between Germany and Britain—and their impact on the Bellamy family. However, instead of focusing exclusively on the upstairs family, the series gave equal time to the downstairs family, the Bellamys’ servants. Though less visible to the outside world, the downstairs family—butlers, maids, cooks, and other domestic employees—maintained highly complex and intertwined horizontal as well as (literally) vertical relationships with the Bellamys. Of course, like the Bellamys, the downstairs family also maintained complex relationships outside of the household and were themselves also influenced by current events. In the popular series, the downstairs servants and the upstairs nobles may have performed different functions within the household, but their capacities were not limited or defined by those functions.1 The final episode of the series ended in 1930 with the Bellamys’ townhouse being sold to pay off the upstairs family’s creditors. Series fans
Short selling around dividend announcements and ex-dividend days

Abstract We examine short selling around dividend announcements and ex-dividend dates. Contrary to our initial expectation, we do not find abnormally high short-selling activity prior to announced dividend decreases, which runs counter to the argument that short sellers have the ability to acquire private information before its public dissemination. However, we find that the common negative relation between current short selling and future daily returns prior to unfavorable dividend announcements is similar to the negative relation during non-event times, suggesting that dividend announcements do not provide unusual trading opportunities for informed traders (Gonedes, 1978, and Benartzi et al., 1997). Around ex-dividend dates, we do find abnormal short selling, which may be explained by the return pattern around ex-dividend days documented by Lakonishok and Vermaelen (1986), who suggest that demand for a particular stock by dividend capture traders drives stock prices above their fundamental value thus providing a profitable trading opportunity for short sellers. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that both the level of short selling and the return predictability of short selling is markedly higher on and after the ex-dividend day than during non-event times.
The Reverse Favourite–longshot Bias and Market Efficiency in Major League Baseball: An Update

Racetrack and sports betting markets have been researched extensively with respect to the question of market efficiency. In contrast to the consistently observed favourite–longshot bias found in racetrack betting markets, it has been shown that gamblers in the market for Major League Baseball games reveal the opposite behaviour. This paper updates the previous study with ten years of additional data for the 1990–99 seasons. The strength of the reverse favourite–longshot bias is virtually identical to the original paper. The result suggests that, contrary to most reported inefficiencies in gambling markets, this bias appears to be permanent.
The MEarth project: searching for transiting habitable super-Earths around nearby M-dwarfs

Due to their small radii, M dwarfs are very promising targets to search for transiting super-Earths, with a planet of 2 Earth radii orbiting an M5 dwarf in the habitable zone giving rise to a 0.5% photometric signal, with a period of two weeks. This can be detected from the ground using modest-aperture telescopes by targeting samples of nearby M dwarfs. Such planets would be very amenable to follow-up studies due to the brightness of the parent stars, and the favourable planet-star flux ratio. MEarth is such a transit survey of ~2000 nearby M dwarfs. Since the targets are distributed over the entire (Northern) sky, it is necessary to observe them individually, which will be done by using 8 independent 0.4m robotic telescopes, two of which have been in operation since December 2007 at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO) located on Mount Hopkins, Arizona. We discuss the survey design and hardware, and report on the current status of the survey, and preliminary results obtained from the commissioning data.
Legal Education, Institutional Skills and European Union Opinions

A cluster of issues in the context of legaleducation shows the importance of legalsemiotics: new forms of citizenship, new ideas on e-education, the recent design ofe-educational programs that focus the featuresof institutional life, the concept of a`learning society' are this cluster's elements.Opinions of European Union Institutions stimulate to conceive modern society in thelight of these issues. It leads to theformulation of a fifth freedom in the Union,(after freedom of persons and goods, servicesand capital) which is the freedom toparticipate in a ``learning society''. Thepractice of that freedom leads to developinge-educational programs for institutionalskills.
The determinants of bilateral FDI: Is Asia different?

Abstract Intra-Asian foreign direct investment (FDI) is dominated by flows from high technology economies to medium technology economies, while FDI elsewhere primarily consists of flows among high technology economies. This distinctive pattern is not due simply to differences in the relative distribution of Asian FDI recipients by technology, or to systematic differences in Asia's technology characteristics. A gravity model analysis is used to explore whether Asian FDI patterns differ significantly from those elsewhere, and if so, in what ways. The results show that Asian FDI flows, in contrast to other FDI flows, systematically favor hosts with relatively low technology achievement and relatively strong intellectual property rights regimes. This type of “Asian exceptionalism” is consistent with “flying geese” theories that have argued that Asian development is the result of technology flows among economies that occupy nearby rungs of the technology ladder.
Some Lessons from Transaction‐Cost Politics for Less‐Developed Countries

Transaction-cost politics views economic policy-making as a political process constrained by asymmetric information and limited commitment possibilities. This paper examines some implications of this perspective for less-developed countries (LDCs) considering policy reform. It emphasizes that success requires reform of the rules and institutions which govern the strategic interaction of the participants in the political game, and that reforms must cope with the special interests and asymmetric information which already exist. In this light, it examines some broad issues of the design of constitutions and institutions (definition and enforcement of property rights, control of inflation, and of government expenditures, federalism, and redistribution), as well as some specific issue of the design of organizations and incentives (problems posed by the interaction of multiple tasks and multiple interests, and their interaction with the limitations on auditing and administration that exists in many LDCs).
Small-cap equity mutual fund managers as liquidity providers

Abstract This paper examines the relation between the performance of small-cap equity mutual funds and the liquidity characteristics of their asset holdings. We study the trading behavior of fund managers and show that on average, they tend to buy less liquid stocks and sell more liquid stocks. We introduce the notion of net “liquidity creation” by fund managers and examine its role in explaining the cross section of small-cap equity mutual fund returns. Our empirical results show that on average, small-cap mutual fund managers are able to earn an additional 1.5% return per year as compensation for providing such liquidity services to the market.
Unemployment, disequilibrium and the short run phillips curve: An econometric approach

The paper specifies a disequilibrium model for the aggregate labour market consisting of demand and supply functions for labour, an adjustment equation for wages as well as for prices, a transactions equation and, finally, an equation that relates measured unemployment to vacancies and to excess demand. The model has a more sophisticated treatment of dynamics than earlier disequilibrium models. The parameter estimates and the goodness-of-fit are satisfactory and the model's implications for the behaviour of several important variables are sensible. In particular, excess demand estimates computed in various ways are reasonable.
What Happened to the Japanese Model

Japan’s steep postwar growth was nested in a political economy built around producer-oriented policies: by fostering the growth of large firms using the tools of industrial policy, the government could jumpstart development. Many large firms, and their employees, benefited indirectly from this growth program, and very small firms and industries not included in the growth model were compensated through preferential policies or subsidies. Japan’s social contract evolved around this system, having as its centerpiece lifetime employment. The government spent more resources on supporting exporting industries and compensating domestic ones than on building a forward-looking welfare system. Japan’s decade-long economic downturn marks a structural transition towards a postindustrial society. While excelling in producing tangibles, Japan has fallen behind in fostering modern industries, including services; the country also lacks a welfare system to handle increasing structural unemployment that this transition brings about. Without a commitment towards a welfare system and a welfare society, and a reorientation of the social contract towards citizens, Japan is unlikely to transition successfully.
The political economy of expulsion: the regulation of Jewish moneylending in medieval England

This paper develops an analytic narrative examining an institution known as ‘The Exchequer of the Jewry’. The prohibition on usury resulted in most moneylending activities being concentrated within the Jewish community. The king set up the Exchequer of the Jewry in order to extract these monopoly profits. This institution lasted for almost 100 years but collapsed during the second part of the thirteenth century. This collapse resulted in the expulsion of the Anglo-Jewish population. This paper provides a rational choice account of the institutional trajectory of the Exchequer of the Jewry. This account explains why it ultimately failed to provide a suitable framework for the development of capital markets in medieval England.
Randomly Evolving Tastes and Delayed Commitment

Abstract We consider a decision maker with randomly evolving tastes who faces dynamic decision situations that involve intertemporal tradeoffs, such as those in consumption savings problems. We axiomatize a recursive representation of choice that features uncertain consumption utilities, which evolve according to a subjective Markov process. The parameters of the representation, which are the subjective Markov process governing the evolution of utilities, and the discount factor, are uniquely identified from behavior. We relate the correlation of tastes over time and the desire to delay commitment to future consumption.
Why Do Cities Innovate in Public Health? Implications of Scale and Structure

Big cities have frequently enacted public health regulations— especially with respect to tobacco use and obesity—that go beyond the state and federal regulatory floors. That cities innovate in public health at all is remarkable. They have less to gain financially from more stringent regulation than higher levels of government, which shoulder more of the burden of Medicare and Medicaid. Cities are supposed to fear mobile capital flight; if they regulate, businesses will leave. Moreover, because innovation is costly and likely to be copied by others when successful, a free-rider problem might inhibit local policy innovation generally. Cities’ prolific regulation in the public health sphere in spite of countervailing predictions thus demands an explanation. This Article aims to offer one, focusing on what makes local lawmaking unique from lawmaking at the federal and state levels. This Article argues that cities’ smaller scale, concentrated political preferences, and streamlined lawmaking processes facilitate public health innovation. With respect to structure in particular, cities’ unicameral legislatures and lack of a supermajority requirement allow affirmative regulatory legislation to proceed more expeditiously. Cities thus stand in contrast to the currently dysfunctional federal government, in which vested interest groups can more easily block regulatory legislation they dislike. In highlighting what is different about the local lawmaking process, this Article aims to better inform the debate about the extent of local power, which plays out in doctrinal areas like home rule and preemption.  Associate Professor, Willamette University College of Law. I thank participants in workshops at Marquette and Lewis & Clark, as well as Elaine Sharp and other members of my panel at the Midwest Political Science Association conference in Chicago for valuable comments. I also thank Adam Bonica, Annie Decker, Samantha Graff, and David Schleicher for closely reading drafts. Jennifer Evert provided exceptional proofreading, and Joanna Fluckey, Jacqueline Leung, Michael Tonn, and Daniel Vall-Llobera provided outstanding research assistance. Washington University Open Scholarship 1220 WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [VOL. 91:1219
The Failure of the Organizational Sentencing Guidelines

To deter corporate crime, corporate sanctions must be structured to induce large corporations to help federal prosecutors detect and punish corporate crime. Specifically, firms must be encouraged to detect and report wrongdoing, and to cooperate with the government's effort to identify and sanction the individuals responsible for the crime. Firms will not engage in these activities unless they face lower expected sanctions if they detect, report, and cooperate than if they do not. This article examines whether the Organizational Sentencing Guidelines achieve this objective and shows that they do not. Although the Organizational Sentencing Guidelines offer sanction mitigation to firms that adopt @ 2011, Jennifer Arlen. * Norma Z. Paige Professor of Law, New York University School of Law. I would like to thank Miriam Baer, Brandon Garrett, John Moot, and participants at the Conference on Corporate Crime at the University of Miami School of Law for helpful comments and discussions. I also want to thank my research assistants, Tristan Favro and Kristy Fields. I also benefited from the financial support of the Filomen D'Agostino and Max E. Greenberg Research Fund of the New York University School of Law.
Civil Rights Perestroika: Intergroup Relations after Affirmative Action

In this Article, Professor Krieger examines the implications of social cognition and social identity theory for the debate over affirmative action. In Part I, she explores the extent to which insights from those fields support the claim that affirmative action preferences exacerbate intergroup tensions and perpetuate certain subtle forms of intergroup bias. Finding qualified support for that view in both theoretical models and empirical evidence, Part I concludes that at least certain preferential forms of affirmative action may injure intergroup relations in a variety of troubling ways. Extending the analysis in Part II, Professor Krieger inquires whether, absent preferential forms of affirmative action, remaining legal and policy tools will suffice to control discrimination and prevent the further segregation of American society. Part II concludes that these remaining tools, which include a colorblindness model of nondiscrimination, reliance on an objective concept of merit, and the use of individual disparate treatment adjudication as a primary law enforcement tool, are unequal to the task. The misplaced confidence in these tools often found among affirmative action opponents derives, Krieger suggests, from a misunderstanding of the nature and sources of intergroup bias, from a failure to recognize its subtlety and tendency to persist over time, and from over-reliance on limited adjudicatory and regulatory approaches to address what is fundamentally a complex cultural problem. Accordingly, Professor Krieger argues that we are not yet ready to abandon preferential forms of affirmative action for the simple reason that we have nothing adequate with which to replace them. Unless more inclusive jurisprudential models of intergroup bias and new approaches to reducing such bias are developed, the problems of discrimination and inequality of opportunity can be expected to worsen in a post-affirmative action environment. In her Conclusion, Krieger articulates a set of first principles and constructs a general conceptual foundation for the future development of such a broadened view.
The microdynamics of household credit use through a boom–bust cycle☆

Abstract In this paper we provide what we believe to be the first evidence on the nature of gross debt flows across consumers. We find that the aggregate dynamics in the consumer debt market are largely explained by the behavior of consumers with mortgage debt, and the behavior of such consumers is found to be sensitive to changes in housing market conditions. Our results show that there is a significant amount of consumer-level heterogeneity as evidenced by large amounts of simultaneous debt creation and debt destruction throughout the economic cycle. Finally, we find that there are important asymmetries in the debt adjustment process: whereas consumers are able to take on large amounts of additional debt quickly, short of defaulting debt is discharged very slowly. This slow deleveraging process may help explain why total consumer debt levels have been so slow to recover in the years following the Great Recession.
What 30 Years of Chevron Teach Us About the Rest of Statutory Interpretation

Chevron, the most famous rule of administrative law, is also a central doctrine of statutory interpretation. But Chevron is understood and operates quite differently from most of the other statutory interpretation rules. This Essay explores six such divergences and how they illuminate of some the most important, unanswered questions of the statutory era. First, thirty years of Chevron highlight the enduring puzzle over the legal status of statutory interpretation methodology in general. Chevron is a ―precedent;‖ the remaining statutory interpretation doctrines do not even rise to the status of ―law.‖ But second, Chevron’s own fate is inextricably tied to these other rules, because Chevron relies on them in its famous twostep test. Critics blame Chevron’s manipulability, but arguably the blame lies more with the legal indeterminacy of all of the other statutory interpretation rules upon which Chevron relies. Third, as the Chevron doctrine has evolved, it has become more attendant to the realities of how Congress drafts statutes—realities in which the Court seems wholly uninterested when it comes to the rest of statutory interpretation. Relatedly, the Court shows no shame in acknowledging Chevron’s source; the Court created the doctrine. The jurisprudential status of the other interpretive rules, however, remains ambiguous, with the federal courts loathe to admit that they have fashioned a common law of statutory interpretation. Fourth, Chevron, as further developed by Mead, is the one instance in which the Court has explicitly used interpretive doctrine to influence the procedures that Congress uses. Again in contrast, across the rest of the statutory landscape, the Court has refused to enter the sausage factory, continuing to reject the idea that courts should interfere in the lawmaking process, or that how a law is made should affect its interpretation. Fifth, Chevron’s evolution has blown a hole through conventional notions of statutory stare decisis, but at the same time the Court now seems afraid that it has given away too much. Today, agency statutory interpretations may displace judicial precedents but, when agencies are not in the picture, the Court hoards power: it gives its own statutory precedents ―super‖ stare decisis effect; is stingy when it comes to interpreting congressional overrides; and won’t cede any control over interpretive rules to any other branch.
AFFILIATED AGENTS, BOARDS OF DIRECTORS, AND MUTUAL FUND SECURITIES LENDING RETURNS

Using a manually collected U.S. index mutual fund sample, we find that funds with sponsor-affiliated lending agents have lower annual returns on lent securities and that securities lending returns are significantly higher when funds administer their own lending programs. We also document that multiple board of director appointments, more director fund ownership, higher board independence, and lower excess director compensation are associated with higher lending returns. Overall, the evidence has implications for mutual fund boards as they consider lending proposals and for future regulatory actions.
Market efficiency, managerial compensation, and real efficiency

Abstract We examine how an exogenous improvement in market efficiency, which allows the stock market to obtain more precise information about the firm's intrinsic value, affects the shareholder–manager contracting problem, managerial incentives, and shareholder value. A key assumption in the model is that stock market investors do not observe the manager's pay-performance sensitivity ex ante. We show that an increase in market efficiency weakens managerial incentives by making the firm's stock price less sensitive to the firm's current performance. The impact on real efficiency and shareholder value varies depending on the composition of the firm's intrinsic value.
Think of the Children: Using IIED to Reformulate Disturbing Speech Restrictions

The Colorado State Court of Appeals recently upheld an injunction restricting public displays of aborted fetuses. The court held that the restriction passed strict scrutiny because the state had a compelling interest in protecting children from the psychological harm of “disturbing images” and the injunction was narrowly tailored. This marked the first time an injunction had been upheld on this rationale. This Note critiques that holding and others. It contends that while some federal and state courts have recognized the interest in protecting the psychological well-being of children from disturbing speech as compelling, the interest is not supported by precedent. It then argues that courts have formulated the interest with a breadth that is flawed and antithetical to the First Amendment. It concludes by proposing that the state’s interest in protecting children from disturbing speech should be reformulated in the mold of intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Broken bucks: money funds that took taxpayer guarantees in 2008

This is the first study to look at the characteristics of funds accepting the $2.7 trillion taxpayer guarantee of money market mutual funds during the 2008 financial crisis. Fund shares that benefited from Federal Reserve’s asset-backed commercial paper program were significantly more likely to get bailed out by taxpayers and sponsors. The paper tests if funds adhering to the SEC’s 2010 liquidity reforms prior to their enactment were less likely to be bailed out in 2008. Finally, it examines if funds subject to the 2014 floating NAV regulations were more likely to be bailed out in 2008.
What Happens to Our Facebook Accounts When We Die?: Probate Versus Policy and the Fate of Social-Media Assets Postmortem

More than 580,000 Facebook users in the U.S. will die this year, raising numerous legal questions as to the disposition of their Facebook pages and similar “digital assets” left in a state of legal limbo. While access to and ownership of decedents’ email accounts has been philosophized for nearly a decade, this comment focuses on the additional legal uncertainties posed by “digital death” in the more amorphous realm of “social media.” Part II explores the implications of digital death by conceptualizing digital assets and surveying the underlying legal principles of contractual policies, probate, property, and privacy concerns. Part III surveys current law surrounding digital death, emphasizing a 2010 Oklahoma statute granting executors and administrators power over decedents’ “social networking” accounts. Parts III and IV consider what the current state of the law means for individuals facing death (i.e. everyone) as social media interacts with both (1) probate law and (2) social-media services’ policies as reflected in their terms of service. Part V explores how the law and proposed solutions may address the salient policy goals of honoring decedents’ postmortem wishes while meanwhile respecting privacy; preserving digital assets; and minimizing probate, litigation and other paperwork-type hassles. Ultimately this comment suggests while state or even federal legislation may call attention to the importance of digital estate planning, a better solution likely lies between the two extremes of the probate-versus-policy power struggle, and that social-media services themselves may be in the better position to quell the perfect storm of legal uncertainty that looms.
Learning to Infer Semantic Parameters for 3D Shape Editing

Many applications in 3D shape design and augmentation require the ability to make specific edits to an object’s semantic parameters (e.g., the pose of a person’s arm or the length of an airplane’s wing) while preserving as much existing details as possible. We propose to learn a deep network that infers the semantic parameters of an input shape and then allows the user to manipulate those parameters. The network is trained jointly on shapes from an auxiliary synthetic template and unlabeled realistic models, ensuring robustness to shape variability while relieving the need to label realistic exemplars. At testing time, edits within the parameter space drive deformations to be applied to the original shape, which provides semantically-meaningful manipulation while preserving the details. This is in contrast to prior methods that either use autoencoders with a limited latent-space dimensionality, failing to preserve arbitrary detail, or drive deformations with purely-geometric controls, such as cages, losing the ability to update local part regions. Experiments with datasets of chairs, airplanes, and human bodies demonstrate that our method produces more natural edits than prior work.
Persistent obstruction theory for a model category of measures with applications to data merging

Collections of measures on compact metric spaces form a model category ("data complexes"), whose morphisms are marginalization integrals. The fibrant objects in this category represent collections of measures in which there is a measure on a product space that marginalizes to any measures on pairs of its factors. The homotopy and homology for this category allow measurement of obstructions to finding measures on larger and larger product spaces. The obstruction theory is compatible with a fibrant filtration built from the Wasserstein distance on measures. Despite the abstract tools, this is motivated by a widespread problem in data science. Data complexes provide a mathematical foundation for semi-automated data-alignment tools that are common in commercial database software. Practically speaking, the theory shows that database JOIN operations are subject to genuine topological obstructions. Those obstructions can be detected by an obstruction cocycle and can be resolved by moving through a filtration. Thus, any collection of databases has a persistence level, which measures the difficulty of JOINing those databases. Because of its general formulation, this persistent obstruction theory also encompasses multi-modal data fusion problems, some forms of Bayesian inference, and probability couplings.
FaultNet: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Bearing Fault Classification

The increased presence of advanced sensors on the production floors has led to the collection of datasets that can provide significant insights into machine health. An important and reliable indicator of machine health, vibration signal data can provide us a greater understanding of different faults occurring in mechanical systems. In this work, we analyze vibration signal data of mechanical systems with bearings by combining different signal processing methods and coupling them with machine learning techniques to classify different types of bearing faults. We also highlight the importance of using different signal processing methods and their effect on accuracy for bearing fault detection. Apart from the traditional machine learning algorithms we also propose a convolutional neural network FaultNet which can effectively determine the type of bearing fault with a high degree of accuracy. The distinguishing factor of this work is the idea of channels proposed to extract more information from the signal, we have stacked the ‘Mean’ and ‘Median’ channels to raw signal to extract more useful features to classify the signals with greater accuracy.
Babies Without Borders: Human Rights, Human Dignity, and the Regulation of International Commercial Surrogacy

In recent decades, a robust international market in commercial reproductive surrogacy has emerged. But, as German citizens Jan Balaz and Susan Lohle discovered when they struggled to engineer the last-minute diplomatic compromise that saved their commissioned twins from becoming wards of the Indian state, conflicts among legal frameworks have placed the children born at risk of being “marooned, stateless and parentless.” States have tried to address the individual dramas through ad hoc solutions – issuing emergency entry documents for children caught at borders or compelling administrative authorities to recognize birth certificates related to surrogacy arrangements that run counter to domestic public policies. The inadequacy of such approaches has become increasingly evident. As a result, states have developed national legislation and, together with international institutions and civil society networks, begun to seek international agreements. Indeed, international coordination represents the only viable solution to the individual dramas and diplomatic crises that have characterized the market in international commercial surrogacy. But will that be possible? This article explores whether and to what extent, a coordinated approach is likely to be found, and the role and limits of international law. After a brief introduction (Part I), the article examines the vicissitudes of the Balaz twins as emblematic of the filiation and citizenship issues that the international market in commercial surrogacy raises (Part II). It then explores possible approaches to the conflicts among legal systems that underlie the Balaz case whether through individual contracts (Part III) or treaties (Part IV). The article predicts that, at least in the short term, an effective legalizing regime based on a unifying set of rules and norms is unlikely to emerge. Ultimately, a new regime will require a long-term renegotiation of the meanings of filiation, its significance for citizenship and the re-interpretation of fundamental norms relating to human rights. I.Introduction: International commercial surrogacy and international law. The means of baby making have expanded precipitously in the last three decades, prompted by scientific advances and transformations in social organization and gender relations. At the same time, globalization has favored the search for cross-border solutions to the problems associated with reproductive difficulties (or, more simply, with the decision to have children without engaging in their production). The rapid expansion of transnational adoptions that, beginning in the 1970s, highlighted the existence of a growing Re X and Y (Foreign Surrogacy) [2009] Fam 71 at 76C (Hedley, J.).
Type 1 dopamine receptor (D1R)-independent circadian food anticipatory activity in mice

Circadian rhythms are entrained by light and influenced by non-photic stimuli, such as feeding. The activity preceding scheduled mealtimes, food anticipatory activity (FAA), is elicited in rodents fed a limited amount at scheduled times. FAA is thought to be the output of an unidentified food entrained oscillator. Previous studies, using gene deletion and receptor pharmacology, implicated dopamine type receptor 1 (D1R) signaling in the dorsal striatum as necessary for FAA in mice. To further understand the role of D1R in promoting FAA, we utilized the Cre-lox system to create cell type-specific deletions of D1R, conditionally deleting D1R in GABA neurons using Vgat-ires-Cre line. This conditional deletion mutant had attenuated FAA, but the amount was higher than expected based on prior results using a constitutive knockout of D1R, D1R KODrago. This result prompted us to re-test the original D1R KODrago line, which expressed less FAA than controls, but only moderately so. To determine if genetic drift had diminished the effect of D1R deletion on FAA, we re-established the D1R KODrago knockout line from cryopreserved samples. The reestablished D1R KODrago-cryo had a clear impairment of FAA compared to controls, but still developed increased activity preceding mealtime across the 4 weeks of timed feeding. Finally, we tested a different deletion allele of D1R created by the Knockout Mouse Project. This line of D1R KOKOMP mice had a significant impairment in the acquisition of FAA, but eventually reached similar levels of premeal activity compared to controls after 4 weeks of timed feeding. Taken together, our results suggest that D1R signaling promotes FAA, but other dopamine receptors likely contribute to FAA given that mice lacking the D1 receptor still retain some FAA.