cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Beyond uniqueness: the birthday paradox, source attribution and individualization in forensic science testimony

For many decades, forensic science identification experts have insisted that they can ‘individualize’ traces such as fingerprints and toolmarks to the one and only one object that produced them. They have relied on a theory of global uniqueness of patterns as the basis for such individualization. Although forensic practitioners and theorists are moving toward a more probabilistic understanding of pattern matching, textbooks and reference works continue to assert that uniqueness justifies individualization and that experience demonstrates discernible uniqueness. One response to the last claim applies a famous problem in probability theory — the Birthday Problem — to the forensic realm to show that even an extensive record of uniqueness does little to prove that all such patterns are unique. This essay describes the probabilistic reasoning and its limits. It argues that the logic of the Birthday Paradox does indeed undercut the theory of global, general uniqueness, but that the reasoning is logically compatible with opinion testimony that a specific object is nearly certain to be the source of a pattern or trace. It also notes some alternatives to categorical claims of individualization, whether those claims are based on the theory of global, general uniqueness or instead on some less sweeping and more defensible theory.
Vertical Integration and Antitrust in Search Markets

This paper studies the integration of an upstream firm in the market for Internet search with downstream services. In 2011, Google integrated its comparison site for flight fares (Google Flights) and restaurant ratings (from a recent acquisition of Zagat) into Google’s search results. I find that Google’s integration of Google Flights led to a reduction in clicks to competing travel agencies for general searches. The acquisition of Zagat’s restaurant ratings led to an increase in clicks, regardless of the content of the search term. The contrasting findings may be explained by the fact that Google Flights provides price information and therefore directly competes with other online travel agents while Google Zagat provides quality information, which may encourage more search on competing review sites.
The Inventive Concept in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l

IIC (2014) 45:865—867 DOI l0.1007/$40319-014-0285-9 EDITORIAL The Inventive Concept in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l Dan L. Burk Published online: 25 November 2014 © Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich 2014 The recent decision of the United States Supreme Court in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank1 is the latest and perhaps concluding opinion in a line of cases stretching back into the 1970s, attempting to deﬁne the parameters of patentable subject matter. The majority of these cases address process or method patents; nearly all of these cases involve computer software.2 But in its Alice Corp. opinion, the Supreme Court offers in the context of American patent law a construction of patentable subject matter that, on careful review, may seem surprisingly familiar to scholars and practitioners versed in European patent law. The explicit categories of patentable subject matter set forth in Sec. l0l of the American patent statute include processes, machines, articles of manufacture, and compositions of matter.3 The Supreme Court has interpreted this list broadly, to include “anything under the sun” made by humans,4 and this broad reading includes categories such as business methods that have been seen as problematic in other jurisdictions.5 But this reading also implies that subject matter not made by humans, such as natural products or natural principles, is excluded from patent eligibility, and the Court has additionally read the section as excluding certain other inchoate subject matter, such as abstract ideas or mental processes. 1 134 S.Ct. 2347 (2014). See this issue of IIC at doi:10.1007/s403l9-014-0274-z. 2 See Dan L. Burk, “The Curious Incident of the Supreme Court in Myriad Genetics”, 90 N otre Dame L. Rev. (forthcoming 2014). 3 35 U.S.C. § 101 (2012). 4 Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303, 309 (1980). 5 Bilski v. Kappas, 130 S.Ct. 3218 (2010). D. L. Burk (E) Chancellor’s Professor of Law University of California, Irvine, USA e-mail: dburk@uci.edu @ Springer
Achieving the Secrecy Capacity of Wiretap Channels Using Polar Codes

Suppose that Alice wishes to send messages to Bob through a communication channel C1, but her transmissions also reach an eavesdropper Eve through another channel C2. This is the wiretap channel model introduced by Wyner in 1975. The goal is to design a coding scheme that makes it possible for Alice to communicate both reliably and securely. Reliability is measured in terms of Bob's probability of error in recovering the message, while security is measured in terms of the mutual information between the message and Eve's observations. Wyner showed that the situation is characterized by a single constant Cs, called the secrecy capacity, which has the following meaning: for all e >; 0, there exist coding schemes of rate R ≥ Cs-e that asymptotically achieve the reliability and security objectives. However, his proof of this result is based upon a random-coding argument. To date, despite consider able research effort, the only case where we know how to construct coding schemes that achieve secrecy capacity is when Eve's channel C2 is an erasure channel, or a combinatorial variation thereof. Polar codes were recently invented by Arikan; they approach the capacity of symmetric binary-input discrete memoryless channels with low encoding and decoding complexity. In this paper, we use polar codes to construct a coding scheme that achieves the secrecy capacity for a wide range of wiretap channels. Our construction works for any instantiation of the wiretap channel model, as long as both C1 and C2 are symmetric and binary-input, and C2 is degraded with respect to C1. Moreover, we show how to modify our construction in order to provide strong security, in the sense defined by Maurer, while still operating at a rate that approaches the secrecy capacity. In this case, we cannot guarantee that the reliability condition will also be satisfied unless the main channel C1 is noiseless, although we believe it can be always satisfied in practice.
Capital Gains Taxes and Stock Return Volatility

ABSTRACT: This paper presents an empirical investigation of the impact of capital gains taxes on stock return volatility. We predict that the more stock returns are subject to capital gains taxation, the greater the increase in return volatility following a capital gains tax rate cut due to reduced risk-sharing in firms' cash flows between shareholders and the government. Consistent with this prediction, we find larger increases in the return volatility for more appreciated stocks than for less appreciated stocks and for non-dividend-paying stocks than for dividend-paying stocks after both 1978 and 1997 capital gains tax rate reductions. The findings imply that capital gains taxes convey a heretofore overlooked benefit of lower stock return volatility.
Tullock on motivated inquiry: expert-induced uncertainty disguised as risk

Gordon Tullock denied scientific status to economics because economists can trade results with the subject of our analysis. We suppose this trading to be the fate of all disciplines in which the results have consequences for well-being of those studied. Non-transparent trading in a statistical context gives no reason to believe that the sampling distribution of the estimates will be what it is believed to be. This false belief turns risk to uncertainty. Taking trading between experts and subjects as inevitable, we ask if the trade is fair. When scientific unanimity fails, can Rawlsian unanimity replace it?
U.S. demographics and saving: Predictions of three saving models

Abstract This paper compares the predictions of three different saving models with respect to the impact of projected U.S. demographic change on future U.S. saving rates. The three models are the life-cycle model, the infinite horizon altruism model, and a reduced from econometric model. The findings for the different models indicate a great range of possible paths of future U.S. saving. However, the three models concur in predicting a peak in the U.S. national saving rate within the next fifteen years, followed by a significant decline in the saving rate thereafter. In fact, the findings suggest the strong possibility of negative U.S. saving rates beginning after 2030.
The Dangers of Press Clause Dicta

The United States Supreme Court has engaged in an unusual pattern of excessive dicta in cases involving the press. Indeed, a close examination of such cases reveals that it is one of the most consistent, defining characteristics of the U.S. Supreme Court’s media law jurisprudence in the last half century. The Court’s opinions in cases involving the media, while almost uniformly reaching conclusions based on other grounds, regularly include language about the constitutional or democratic character, duty, value, or role of the press — language that could be, but ultimately is not, significant to the constitutional conclusion reached. Although scholars have long debated the ways in which the Court could or should be convinced to adopt a substantive position giving the First Amendment’s Press Clause constitutional teeth, this Essay steps back from the substantive debates to discuss the ramifications of a dicta-driven Press Clause dialogue. It investigates the ways in which the Court’s loose language in this area has detracted from careful doctrinal development in media law and has created organizational and operational confusion of constitutional consequence. It argues that, separate and apart from the substantive drawbacks that might accompany the Court’s failure to commit to a media-protecting Press Clause position, there are other large-scale, structural consequences that accompany the practice of such dicta-heavy constitutional imprecision and that these consequences ought to be seen as disconcerting. It discusses both the overarching jurisprudential and constitutional risks produced when the use of dicta predominates the Court’s analysis of any issue and the ways in which these risks are amplified and compounded in the area of press freedoms, where expressive liberties are at stake and the threat of chilling communicative behavior is pronounced.
Myth and ceremony in workfare: rights, contracts, and client satisfaction

Abstract Throughout Western Europe, the ideology of workfare has been adopted for the “workless.” Social citizenship has been changed from status to contract. The change is justified in terms of “contracts of inclusion” between welfare agencies and recipients. Recipients are empowered and have “rights” to work or training and obligations to participate. Contracts of inclusion, however, necessarily exclude. The paper examines the concepts of rights, contracts, and client satisfaction in terms of the U.S. workfare experience. The evidence so far from Europe indicates similar problems in administering workfare for the most vulnerable. I conclude that the administrative failure is an additional reason to support a basic income guarantee. By providing an exit option, the worker–client relationship changes from vertical to horizontal.
Computing Discrete Expected Utility Maximizing Portfolios

Maximizing the expected logarithmic utility, or equivalently, the geometric mean, of a portfolio is a well-known yet controversially discussed objective. Nonetheless, it is an often-used objective function for computing real-world portfolios, and it has generated a great amount of interest in the alternative investment industry, in particular. In the purely continuous case, the resulting portfolio optimization problem can be solved using methods from convex optimization rather efficiently. However, in reality, we often face discrete decisions, e.g., setting up a new venture, or engaging in acquisitions and mergers, where approximation by a continuous variable is inappropriate. We focus on how to solve the utility maximization problem in the presence of discrete decisions, allowing for the inclusion of transaction costs and fixed charges. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach by computational experiments for large-scale portfolios showing the applicability, and we present a brief backtesting experiment conducted for the German stock market as well as the U.S. stock market. Our approach generalizes to other utility functions satisfying some mild requirements.
Fifty years of the nash program,1953-2003

This paper is a survey of the work in the Nash program for coalitional games, a research agenda proposed by Nash (1953) to bridge the gap between the non-cooperative and cooperative approaches to game theory.
Most Admired Companies: Admirable Performance

This paper shows that most admired companies generate admirable stock performance relative to the market. The current study analyses risk premiums and risk-adjusted excess returns of a portfolio of firms ranked as the most admired companies in the United States from 2006 to 2011. The results show that average risk premiums of an equal-weighted portfolio of most admired firms are economically superior than the market risk premiums from 2006 to 2011 (except 2010). For the 1-year holding period, the portfolio average risk-adjusted excess returns are all positive, but 2010, and some even statistically significant. The portfolio exhibits average positive risk-adjusted excess returns for the 3-year holding period intervals; the alphas are statistically significant for the 2006-2008 period.
Access to Criminal Justice: Where Are the Prosecutors?

When the organized bar talks about “access to justice,” it tends to look exclusively at civil justice and to emphasize the need for lawyers in civil cases. This overlooks criminal justice and the essential role of lawyers in working to secure it. When the organized bar promotes criminal justice, it is typically circumspect about prosecutors’ responsibility. This essay argues that the bar should take a stronger role in elaborating prosecutorial norms, particularly in the context of miscarriages of justice both on the individual and systemic levels. When people are denied access to criminal justice, the bar should ask, “Where were the prosecutors?”
THE FAILURE OF INPUT-BASED SCHOOLING POLICIES

In an effort to improve the quality of schools, governments around the world have dramatically increased the resources devoted to them. By concentrating on inputs and ignoring the incentives within schools, the resources have yielded little in the way of general improvement in student achievement. This paper provides a review of the US and international evidence on the effectiveness of such input policies. It then contrasts the impact of resources with that of variations in teacher quality that are not systematically related to school resources. Finally, alternative performance incentive policies are described.
The False Dichotomy Between Suggestive and Descriptive Trademarks

Classifying a trademark as descriptive rather than suggestive fundamentally alters the scope of trademark protection. A descriptive mark, derived from a feature of the product or service sold, only qualifies for protection after the mark has acquired source significance, i.e., consumers see it as a trademark. A suggestive trademark, which indirectly invokes qualities of the product or service, is protected without evidence of source significance. Courts often struggle to distinguish between suggestive and descriptive marks. The effort would nevertheless be reasonable if the differences between suggestive and descriptive marks justified their disparate legal treatment. But in light of cognitive and historical research into language change, protecting a suggestive mark without evidence of source significance may not be warranted.
The Measure of Man and Older Age Mortality: Evidence from the Gould Sample

This paper documents differences in body size between white, black, and Indian mid-nineteenth century American men and investigates the socioeconomic and demographic determinants of frame size using a unique data set of Civil War soldiers. It finds that over time men have grown taller and heavier and have relatively less abdominal fat. Abdominal fat in young adulthood was an excellent predictor of older age mortality from ischemic heart disease or stroke. Changes in frame size explain roughly three-fifths of the mortality decline among white men between 1915 and 1988 and predict even sharper declines in older age mortality between 1988 and 2022.
Growing up to Financial Stability

This lecture revisits the evidence on the incidence and severity of different varieties of financial crises within the context of globalization then (pre-1914) and now (1980 to the present). I then discuss the determinants of emerging market crises from the perspective of the recent balance sheet approach. This approach puts at center stage the importance of financial development. I then peel the onion back further and consider the “deep” institutional determinants of financial development and their relationship to financial stability. I conclude by conjecturing about the ways countries learn from their financial crises to improve their institutions and grow up to financial stability.
A Comparison of Federal Government Office Rents with Market Rents

This study examines Federal Government office leases using data from Texas and Oklahoma during the 1981–1991 time period. The lease indifference model presented here indicates that landlords may be willing to accept lower rents from government tenants due to reduced tenant risk, but that such discounts may be offset by other premiums implicit in the lease contract. The data collected for this study reveal that rents paid by the government are significantly higher than average market rents during this time period. A time-series, cross-sectional regression analysis of the spread between market rents and office rents to government tenants in nine metropolitan markets suggests that the difference is affected in part by expense pass-throughs, lease period, amount of space leased, and local market conditions.
“Color” in the Non-Discrimination Provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Two Covenants

The United Nations Charter declares in its opening article that one of the purposes of the United Nations is to promote respect for human rights “without distinction as to” any of four grounds: “race, sex, language, or religion.”The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“UDHR”), adopted three years later, expands the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination with the following: “race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”What led the drafters of the UDHR to add “color” to the non-discrimination clause rather than adopt the approach in the UN Charter? What concepts of “race” and skin tone discrimination came up in their discussions? The first part of this paper describes the lively debates over “race” and “color” during the drafting of the Universal Declaration. The non-discrimination clause of the UDHR appears verbatim in the non-discrimination clauses of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. However, the monitoring bodies of these two treaties have to date never addressed discrimination based specifically on color or skin tone. The latter part of this paper presents an overview of key provisions of these treaties that advocates can use in addressing color-based discrimination. This paper, a slightly modified version of an article being published in the Washington University Global Studies Law Review, elaborates on remarks presented at the Washington University School of Law conference in April 2015, “Global Perspectives on Colorism.”
A Comparison of Multiple-Unit All-Pay and Winner-Pay Auctions Under Incomplete Information*

This article examines the properties of independent-private-value all-pay and winner-pay auctions when there are multiple units sold. We study bidding behavior, efficiency, and revenue in a set of 23 experimental sessions. Our data show that the all-pay auction and the winner-pay auction are empirically revenue equivalent, though both yield higher revenue than the risk neutral Bayesian equilibrium. Our evidence also suggests that the winner-pay auction is more likely to lead to a Pareto-efficient allocation than the all-pay auction.
Categorical Equivalence and the Renormalization Group

In this article we review how categorical equivalences are realized by renormalization group flow in physical realizations of stacks, derived categories, and derived schemes. We begin by reviewing the physical realization of sigma models on stacks, as (universality classes of) gauged sigma models, and look in particular at properties of sigma models on gerbes (equivalently, sigma models with restrictions on nonperturbative sectors), and ‘decomposition,’ in which two‐dimensional sigma models on gerbes decompose into disjoint unions of ordinary theories. We also discuss stack structures on examples of moduli spaces of SCFTs, focusing on elliptic curves, and implications of subtleties there for string dualities in other dimensions. In the second part of this article, we review the physical realization of derived categories in terms of renormalization group flow (time evolution) of combinations of D‐branes, antibranes, and tachyons. In the third part of this article, we review how Landau–Ginzburg models provide a physical realization of derived schemes, and also outline an example of a derived structure on a moduli spaces of SCFTs.
Asymmetric Effects of the Financial Crisis : Collateral-Based Investment-Cash Flow Sensitivity Analysis

This paper uses the financial crisis of 2008 as a natural experiment to demonstrate that when measuring investment-cash flow sensitivity, the value of a firm's assets that can be used as collateral should be taken into account. Using panel data on U.S. firms from 1990 to 2011, it was found that the share of physical capital in assets has a strong influence on investment-cash flow sensitivity, which decreased substantially after the crisis when banks changed their expectations about the value of assets on firms' balance sheets. This paper deepens our understanding of firms' investment behavior.
Platforms and Partners: The Civil Rights Realignment Reconsidered

Few transformations have been more significant in American politics in recent decades than the Democratic Party's embrace of racial liberalism and Republicans' adoption of a more conservative stance towards civil rights-related policies. We hypothesize that pressure to embrace a liberal position on civil rights was much stronger among northern Democrats and their coalitional partners than among northern Republicans and their affiliated groups by the mid-1940s, as the Democrats became firmly identified as the party of economic liberalism and labor unions. To test this hypothesis and develop a more fine-grained understanding of the dynamics of party positioning on civil rights, we collect and analyze a new data source: state political party platforms published between 1920 and 1968. These unique data suggest that Democrats had generally become the more liberal party on civil rights by the mid-to-late 1940s across a wide range of states. Our findings – which contradict Carmines and Stimson's prevailing issue evolution model of partisan change – suggest that there were strong coalitional and ideological pressures that led the Democrats to embrace racial liberalism. This finding not only leads to a revised perspective on the civil rights revolution, but also to new insights into the dynamics of partisan realignment more generally.
Do Liquidated Damages Encourage Breach? A Psychological Experiment

This Article offers experimental evidence that parties are more willing to exploit efficient-breach opportunities when the contract in question includes a liquidated-damages clause. Economists claim that the theory of efficient breach allows us to predict when parties will choose to breach a contract if the legal remedy for breach is expectation damages. However, the economic assumption of rational wealth-maximizing actors fails to capture important shared, nonmonetary values and incentives that shape behavior in predictable ways. When interpersonal obligations are informal or underspecified, people act in accordance with shared community norms, like the moral norm of keeping promises. However, when sanctions for uncooperative behavior are specified or otherwise formalized between the parties, behavior becomes more strategic and more self-interested. A liquidated-damages clause makes the remedy for breach explicit. Using a series of web-based questionnaires, I asked participants to indicate the lowest financial incentive that they would accept to breach a hypothetical contract, showing some subjects a contract with a liquidated-damages clause and others an otherwise identical scenario in which damages were determined by "the law of contracts." Subjects were more willing to breach a contract an action normally dictated against by social and moral norms when damages were stipulated. I argue that even when the law of contracts is clear itself on the legal remedy for breach, moral intuition differentiates between a background law like the rule of expectation damages and an obligation to pay damages included as a clause in the body of the contract. When parties stipulate damages, they clarify the respective expectations of the parties, permitting efficient breach without repudiation of the mutual understanding.
How Robust is Laboratory Gift Exchange

The gift-exchange game is a form of sequential prisoner’s dilemma, developed by Fehr et al. (1993), and popularized in a series of papers by Ernst Fehr and co-authors. While the European studies typically feature a high degree of gift exchange, the few U.S. studies provide some conflicting results. We find that the degree of gift exchange is surprisingly sensitive to an apparently innocuous change—whether or not a comprehensive payoff table is provided in the instructions. We also find significant and substantial time trends in responder behavior.
The Puzzle of IVF

This essay seeks to address a puzzling element of the current political and legal struggles over abortion in the United States: if, as pro-life activists insist, embryos are morally equivalent to born, living persons, then why do these activists not oppose in vitro fertilization (IVF) as aggressively as they oppose abortion? IVF accounts for a significant number of destroyed embryos. Constitutionally, IVF appears to be a much more vulnerable target than abortion. And yet, legislative and political attempts to attack and restrict IVF are few, while attempts to erode women's capability to terminate pregnancies are a constant feature of our political and legal landscape.
Detecting Repeatable Performance

Past fund performance does a poor job of predicting future outcomes. The reason is noise. Using a random effects framework, we reduce the noise by pooling information from the cross-sectional alpha distribution to make density forecasts for each individual fund’s alpha. In simulations, we show that our method generates parameter estimates that outperform alternative methods, both at the population and at the individual fund level. An out-of-sample forecasting exercise also shows that our method generates improved alpha forecasts. Received November 23, 2016; editorial decision November 1, 2017 by Editor Andrew Karolyi. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web Site next to the link to the final published paper online.
The Crucible Within: Ethnic Identity, Self-Esteem, and Segmented Assimilation among Children of Immigrants.

Focusing on the formation of ethnic self-identities during adolescence, this article examines the psychosocial adaptation of children of immigrants from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. The d...
Against Individualized Consideration

According to trial testimony cited by Justice Kennedy in his dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger, one admissions officers at the Michigan Law School posed the question: Are Cubans Hispanic? Cubans, as everyone knows, are Republicans. Similar attempts at Hispanic parsing dotted the record of the law school case. Grutter, together with Gratz, presented the Supreme Court with a classic choice between rules and standards. In this symposium contribution, I argue that in blessing the individualized consideration conducted by the law school and eschewing the mechanical points-based program of the college of arts and sciences, the Court got its narrow tailoring analysis backwards, and the story of the excluded Cuban Republicans tells us why. The ultimate effect of individualized consideration is to augment, rather than limit, the harms of race-conscious decisionmaking by the state. Individualized consideration gives state actors the power to make authenticity judgments about the identities of individuals and groups, subsequently creating incentives for groups to define themselves using authenticity as a metric. When it comes to taking race into account, if our goals include reducing the salience of race, rules rather than standards should be the order of the day. In the course of defending this proposition in the narrow context of affirmative action, I hope to make a broader point about the importance of conceptualizing the category of Latino expansively. Because I believe authenticity claims to be polarizing and antagonistic to a civil rights agenda that simultaneously rejects colorblindness but seeks Latino assimilation into a mainstream political culture, I believe it is essential, when defining Latino, to be inclusive along lines of race, class, national origin, citizenship status, and linguistic identification. Such an approach helps destabilize the concepts of race and ethnicity without denying that they are relevant to social life and status.
A Technique to Exploit Free-Form Notes to Predict Customer Churn

As healthcare costs rise, hospitals are seeking ways to improve operations. This paper examines the usefulness of free-form notes to solve a classification problem commonly associated with customer churn. The authors show that classifiers which incorporate free-form notes, using natural language processing techniques, are up to 9% more accurate than classifiers that are solely developed using structured data. The authors suggest that hospitals and chronic disease management clinics can use structured data and free-form notes from electronic health records to predict which patients are likely to cease receiving care from their facilities. Classification tools for predicting patient churn are of interest to hospital administrators; such information can aid in resource planning and facilitate smoother handoffs between care providers.
Capital Guidelines and Ethical Duties: Mutually Reinforcing Responsibilities

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the adoption by the American Bar Association of the first code of professional conduct in 1908. Now a century later, the American Bar Association can be justifiably proud of the fact that the current iteration of the rules is in the process of being adopted in virtually every jurisdiction, albeit with each jurisdiction sometimes insisting on quirky variations on the basic themes. But that aside, the current Model Rules of Professional Conduct have basically occupied the field and, as a result, lawyers take it as a given that their conduct is to be measured against the standards established in those rules and that failure to meet those standards can not only result in discipline, but also result in a claim for malpractice, fee forfeiture, sanctions, or other unfortunate results. Yet as harsh as any of those results might be, there is never a suggestion that the standards established by those rules are mere goals. Rather, there is universal recognition that the rules establish measurable levels of performance that lawyers in fact are expected to achieve, day in and day out, for clients large and small, criminal and civil, on Wall Street and on Main Street. Given that background, it is extremely instructive to review the ABA Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Defense Counsel in Death Penalty Cases (“ABA Guidelines”), and related commentary and scholarship, now including the valuable Supplementary Guidelines for the Mitigation Function of Defense Teams in Death Penalty Cases (“Supplementary Guidelines”), through the prism of the
The Scarlet Letter: The Supreme Court and the Language of Abortion Stigma

This article examines how the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence depicts abortion and the woman who seeks an abortion. It analyzes how narratives drawn from the Court’s abortion opinions attribute negative characteristics to women who decide to terminate their pregnancies. These narratives serve both expressive and normative functions, acting to re-enforce abortion stigma and narrow the constitutional legitimacy of reproductive freedom. Abortion stigma should be a concern for the Court, for its engendered judgment of women and for the burden it places on women who seek to exercise their constitutional rights.
A new approach to predicting analyst forecast errors: Do investors overweight analyst forecasts?.

Abstract I provide evidence that investors overweight analyst forecasts by demonstrating that prices do not fully reflect predictable components of analyst errors, which conflicts with conclusions in prior research. I highlight estimation bias in traditional approaches and develop a new approach that reduces this bias. I estimate characteristic forecasts that map current firm characteristics into forecasts of future earnings. Contrasting characteristic and analyst forecasts predicts analyst forecast errors and revisions. I find abnormal returns to strategies that sort firms by predicted forecast errors, consistent with investors overweighting analyst forecasts and predictable biases in analyst forecasts influencing the information content of prices.
Testing Estimates of Housing Cost Differences among US Metropolitan Areas

This paper investigates the accuracy of six measures of housing cost differences among US metropolitan areas. Using Census data from 177 metropolitan areas, it tests the measures in two ways. First, it tests the ability of changes in the measures to predict changes in the shelter component of the metropolitan CPI from 1990 to 2000. Second, it tests the ability of the measures themselves to predict a proxy in 2000. A measure based on Fair Market Rents calculated by HUD placed second on the first test but did badly on the second. The housing component of the ACCRA index, a living cost measure frequently used by researchers, performed poorly on both tests. The top performer on both tests was a measure based on the average rent per room for a metropolitan area’s dwellings. Researchers wishing to control for living cost differences among places should consider including it in their living cost index.
Natural resources and reforms

We use a sample of 133 countries to investigate the link between the abundance of natural resources and micro-economic reforms. Previous studies suggest that natural resource abundance gives rise to governments that are less accountable to the public, states that are oligarchic, and that it leads to the erosion of social capital. These factors are likely to hamper economic reforms. We test this hypothesis using data on microeconomic reforms from the World Bank’s Doing Business database. The results provide a robust support for the “resource curse” view: a move from the 75 percentile to the 25 percentile on resource abundance equals 10.9 percentage points more reform, a large effect given that the mean probability of reform in the sample is 57.1%.
Stock options and managerial incentives for risk taking: Evidence from FAS 123R

Abstract We provide new evidence on the relation between option-based compensation and risk-taking behavior by exploiting the change in the accounting treatment of stock options following the adoption of FAS 123R in 2005. The implementation of FAS 123R represents an exogenous change in the accounting benefits of stock options that has no effect on the economic costs and benefits of options for providing managerial incentives. Our results do not support the view that the convexity inherent in option-based compensation is used to reduce risk-related agency problems between managers and shareholders. We show that all firms dramatically reduce their usage of stock options (convexity) after the adoption of FAS 123R and that the decline in option use is strongly associated with a proxy for accounting costs. Little evidence exists that the decline in option usage following the accounting change results in less risky investment and financial policies.
Patent Challenges and Royalty Inflation

Eliminating bad patents is supposed to be a good thing, and so federal law allows any interested party to challenge a patent's validity almost any time. But the law goes a step further than merely conferring broad challenge rights. It also makes them nearly impossible to contract away. Instead, federal law voids any agreement not to challenge a patent. While a contract ordinarily signifies a final resolution of all issues covered by its terms, no such peace exists in patent licensing. This inalienability of patent challenge rights comes at a cost, a cost borne by many patent licensees and their downstream customers. Patent holders quite rationally increase the royalties licensees must pay to offset their costs if the patent is challenged: litigation costs and loss of royalties if the patent is invalidated. Licensees, it follows, might seek a lower price by agreeing not to challenge the licensed patent, but the law will not allow them to do so. The result is royalty inflation; the policy favoring elimination of bad patents costs every licensee by providing an inalienable challenge right that might never be exercised. This cost is a tax of sorts, what this article calls the "patent challenge tax." In addition to inflated royalties, the tax causes trickle-down costs to consumers and disincentives to create and license patented technology.This article develops an economic model that dissects the components of the patent challenge tax, examines each component's consequences, and informs the effectiveness of various strategies that might be used to reduce the tax.Part I of this article explains the policy at the core of the model: no patent license is ever final, allowing any licensee to sue to void the license at any time. Part II introduces and explores the patent challenge tax and its role in royalty inflation, and Appendix I fully derives the model. Part III analyzes a variety of licensing signal strategies, and considers each strategy's effectiveness, legality, and practicality. The article concludes by highlighting some of the broader policy issues associated with the tax and its components.
Inflation-targeting, price-path targeting and indeterminacy

Abstract In this paper, we examine the areas of indeterminacy in a flexible price RBC model with shopping time role for money and a central bank that uses an interest rate rule to target inflation and/or the price level. We present analytical results showing that, although inflation targeting often results in real indeterminacy, a price level target generally delivers a unique equilibrium for a relevant range of policy parameters.
Social Psychology, Information Processing, and Plea Bargaining

In this essay, I offer new arguments about why the rational actor paradigm in plea bargaining may not capture the reality of negotiation between prosecutor and defense counsel, and why lawyers may not be likely to lessen the effects of cognitive bias and heuristics. As others have acknowledged, cognitive biases and heuristics that interfere with accurate information processing are one threat to a rational economic model of plea bargaining. But modern psychology has recognized that cognitive biases and heuristics do not exist in a vacuum and are not the only systematic predictors of how individuals process information. Rather than suggesting that certain factors act as an impediment to rational decision making, the social psychological approach seeks to explain perception and decision making as a function of myriad individual and social factors. This essay begins to explore psychological research on how motivation and the effects of social factors can affect information processing to shed light on such processing in the plea bargaining setting. In particular, I consider the effects of two factors, epistemic motivation and group identity and membership, on information processing as it may relate to plea negotiation. I begin by briefly reviewing the literature on how cognitive bias may affect plea bargaining. I then explore how epistemic motivation and group identity and membership affect information processing and the use of biases and heuristics more broadly, looking particularly at potential effects in the plea bargaining setting.
How migration restrictions limit agglomeration and productivity in China

China strongly restricts rural–urban migration, resulting in a well acknowledged surplus of labor in agriculture. But migration is also restricted within sectors. This paper argues that these intra-sector restrictions lead to insufficient agglomeration of economic activity in both the rural industrial and urban sectors, with resulting first order losses in GDP. For urban areas the paper estimates a city productivity relationship, based on city GDP numbers. The effects of access, educational attainment, FDI, and public infrastructure on productivity are estimated. Given these, worker productivity is shown to be an inverted U-shape function of city employment, with the peak point shifting out as industrial composition moves from manufacturing to services, as predicted by urban theory. As far as we know this is the first paper to actually estimate the relationship between output per worker and city scale for any country. The majority of Chinese cities are shown to be potentially undersized—below the lower bound on the 95% confidence interval about the size where their output per worker peaks. The paper calculates the large gains from increased agglomeration in both the rural industrial and urban sectors.
Institutional Barriers to Growth: Entrepreneurship, Human Capital and Institutional Change

Prior research often focuses on how many entrepreneurial firms are created, rather than on institutions that encourage specific types of firms or entrepreneurs. This paper identifies institutional changes that reduce barriers to growth as an important factor influencing the propensity of individuals to start a business. The findings suggest that the impact of lower barriers to growth is shaped by the extent of the reduction in barriers to growth and the level of human capital of the individual. Only a large reduction in barriers to growth has a stronger impact in increasing the likelihood of founding at higher levels of human capital. I capitalize on two reforms lowering barriers to growth as natural experiments. One reform, in 1988, only slightly lowered barriers to growth. The second reform, in 1999, more strongly lowered barriers to growth with an amendment to the Chinese constitution reversing regulations that favored firms with foreign investors. This made it easier for domestic entrepreneurs to compete. I collected data through a survey of 2,966 alumni who graduated from a top Chinese university. Results show that reducing the institutional barriers to growth differently affects college-educated individuals with different levels of human capital.
Business Applications of Emulative Neural Networks

This paper surveys research on Emulative Neural Network (ENN) models as economic forecasters. ENNs are statistical methods that seek to mimic neural processing. They serve as trainable analytical tools that “learn” autonomously. ENNs are ideal for finding nonlinear relationships and predicting seemingly unrecognized and unstructured behavioral phenomena. As computing power rapidly progresses, these models are increasingly desirable for economists who recognize that people act in dynamic ways with rational expectations. Unlike traditional regressions, ENNs work well with incomplete data and do not require normal distribution assumptions. ENNs can eliminate substantial uncertainty in forecasting, but never enough to completely overcome indeterminacy. JEL: C3, C32, C45, C5, C63, F3, G15.
The possible and the impossible in multi-agent learning

This paper surveys recent work on learning in games and delineates the boundary between forms of learning that lead to Nash equilibrium, and forms that lead to weaker notions of equilibrium or to none at all.
Principled Pluralism and Contract Remedies

Contract doctrine with respect to remedies is straightforward. The Restatement (Second) of Contracts describes the "expectation interest" as the benefit of a bargain that situates a promisee in the position of the anticipated performance.' From this position, the Restatement goes on to describe the remedy for breach of contract: "[T]he injured party has a right to damages based on his expectation interest .... 2 Treatise writers have long agreed that an aggrieved party is entitled to compensation for any abridgement of the promised state of affairs.3 However, the straightforward notion of compensation for expectation
Mothers as Suckers: Pity, Partnership, and Divorce Discourse

Aiming to protect divorcing mothers from the market costs of caretaking, the American Law Institute has proposed a new alimony model based on loss sharing. Good intentions notwithstanding, the Institute's rationale and vocabulary perpetuate a dispiriting view of mothers as suckers, economically incapacitated by their unpaid family labor. A far better reform discourse lies in the gender-neutral language and egalitarian principles of partnership. In this Article, Professor Starnes offers an enriched partnership model that complements the marital partnership model she earlier proposed. This new model provides a compelling rationale for income sharing during the minority of marital children, even as it casts mothers as full stakeholders in marriage, equal rather than subservient, empowered rather than incapacitated, respected rather than pitied. INTRO DU CTIO N 1515 1. M OTHERING IS NOT FREE 1519 A. THE MOTHER/NON-MOTHER EA-IVINGS GAP 1519 B. THE MOTHER/FA THER CARETAKING GAP 1523 1I. PROTECTING MARITAL CASUALTIES: THE ALI MODEL 1527 A. A CoNcEPTuAL INNOVATION: COMPENSATING Loss 1528 B. "INTRACTABLE PRACTICAL PROBLEMS"AND QUANTIFICATION ACCOMM ODATIONS 1531 * Professor of Law, Michigan State University College of Law. For their helpful comments on an earlier draft of the partnership section of this Article, I thank Daniel Barnhizer and Nicholas Revelos. For their insightful conversation, I thank Susan Bitensky, Craig Callen and Mae Kuykendall. For their excellent research assistance, I thank Jane Edwards, Hildur Hanna, and Kathy Prince.
Thirst: A Short History of Drinking Water

Nestled in the Andes, the Bolivian city of Cochabamba lies in a fertile valley astride the banks of the Rocha River. Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, with two-thirds of its population below the poverty line. As in many developing countries, over forty percent of Cochabamba’s 800,000 residents lack access to a water supply network. And even those that do have pipes cannot depend on reliable service. The poor often live in squatter settlements on the outskirts of town, relying for their drinking and domestic water supplies on private vendors. In a cruel irony, the poorest end up paying much more for their water than wealthier citizens connected to the city’s water mains. As part of a nationwide project to improve provision of municipal services, the government of Bolivia launched a major privatization reform effort in the late 1990s. Prompted by financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the Bolivian government actively sought out private investor management for Cochabamba’s water and sewage services. Treating drinking water as a priced good under private management, it was widely argued, would improve the water