cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Transnational Legal Communication: A Partial Legacy of Supreme Court President Aharon Barak

The concept of transnational judicial dialogue has been investigated as a general matter ever since the concept was first introduced by Anne-Marie Slaughter in the early 1990s. This paper uses Slaughter’s concept and expands it in order to assess in greater detail the impact of one particular participant in what this paper calls “transnational legal communication”: former President of the Supreme Court of Israel Aharon Barak. The purpose of the article is two-fold. It first analyzes the jurisprudential legacy of President Barak, but it also attempts to create a framework for analyzing the life work of important participants in transnational legal communication more generally.
Up, Periscope Mobile Streaming Video Technologies, Privacy in Public, and the Right to Record

Mobile streaming video technologies (MSVTs) such as Meerkat and Periscope, which allow users an easily accessible way to stream live video to followers, have the potential to reshape the way people...
LOST in America: Evidence on local sales taxes from national panel data

Abstract This paper studies comprehensive national panel data of local option sales taxes at the monthly frequency. I calculate state-by-month population weighted averages and standard deviations of local sales tax rates. I document ten stylized facts concerning the time series patterns and spatial dynamics of local sales tax rates. The paper then proposes a “tax system” approach to tax competition where states compete on a variety of margins – including restrictions on localities' tax setting authority – that are often ignored by the standard focus on tax rates. Using spatial panel data techniques and the state-by-month population weighted averages, I find a significant association between one state's tax system and its neighboring states' tax systems.
Will women save more than men? A theoretical model of savings and marriage

This paper presents an inter-temporal model of individual behavior with uncertainty about marriage and divorce and which accommodates the possible presence of economies or diseconomies of scale from marriage. We show that a scenario of higher marriage rates and higher divorce rates will be associated with higher savings rates in the presence of economies of marriage and with lower savings rates in the presence of diseconomies of marriage. In the context of traditional gender roles, this implies higher saving rates by young men and lower saving rates by young women than in less traditional countries, the opposite being the case with saving rates of married women relative to those of married men. We establish the relevance of traditional gender roles and marital status to understanding cross-country variation in gender differentials in savings behavior.
The Role of Labor-Market Changes in the Slowdown of European Productivity Growth

This paper is about the role of policy, institutions, and culture in creating a strong negative tradeoff between productivity and employment growth across groups of countries within Europe. Throughout the postwar era until 1995 labor productivity grew faster in Europe than in the United States. In the decade after 1995, productivity growth in the EU-15 slowed while that in the US accelerated. Europe's productivity growth slowdown was largely offset by faster growth than the US in employment per capita, leaving little difference in growth of output per capita between the EU and US going back to 1980. We document the productivity-employment tradeoff in the raw data, in regressions that control for the two-way causation between productivity and employment growth, and we show that there is a robust negative correlation between productivity and employment growth across countries and time. We find that the negative effect of changes in employment per capita on changes in productivity is robust to alternative instruments and to the inclusion or exclusion of particular countries like Italy or Spain. We conclude by suggesting that evaluations of alternative policy reforms in Europe should take into account any offsetting effects on employment and productivity by examining the ultimate impact on changes in income per capita.
The evolution of 10-K textual disclosure: Evidence from Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Abstract We document marked trends in 10-K disclosure over the period 1996–2013, with increases in length, boilerplate, stickiness, and redundancy and decreases in specificity, readability, and the relative amount of hard information. We use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to examine specific topics and find that new FASB and SEC requirements explain most of the increase in length and that 3 of the 150 topics—fair value, internal controls, and risk factor disclosures—account for virtually all of the increase. These three disclosures also play a major role in explaining the trends in the remaining textual characteristics.
Family firms, debtholder-shareholder agency costs and the use of covenants in private debt

We ask whether the private debt contracts of family firms contain more restrictive covenants tied to accounting numbers than those of non-family firms. Our examination of Dealscan data indicates that credit agreements of Standard and Poor (S&P) 500 family firms are more likely to include accounting-based covenants that limit the lender(s)’ risk that managers will divert cash or assets to shareholders than those of S&P 500 non-family firms. The likelihood is further increased by presence of a dual class stock system that includes supervoting shares. Our results suggest that lenders are more willing to rely on accounting-based covenants to solve the shareholder–private lender agency problem in family firms given that the reporting quality is higher due to better alignment of owner and manager interests in such firms.
WHERE IS THE MISSING CREDIT CARD DEBT? CLUES AND IMPLICATIONS

I create comparable estimates of aggregate credit card use based on household data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) and industry data. The two sources match up well on credit card charges and fairly well on account totals. But the SCF always yields much lower estimates of revolving debt. My estimated lower bound for the discrepancy in 2004 is ½ of the revolving credit card debt total implied by industry data. There is no obvious source for this remaining discrepancy and some evidence that the discrepancy has grown over time. Such growth is worrisome because it parallels substantial changes in credit card use and in the pool of credit card users, suggesting that the discrepancy could be driven by household underreporting that is correlated with unobserved heterogeneity. This correlation could confound inference on the relationship between credit card borrowing and outcomes of interest like household financial condition, consumption paths, and portfolio choice. Given this possibility it is critical to continue developing evidence on whether and why household surveys undercount credit card borrowing.
Giving Credit Where It Is Due

After a period of relative marginalization, development economics has now reemerged into the mainstream of most economics departments, attracting some of the brightest talents in the field. It is no longer the preserve of development "experts" who pronounce on the strange ways of the world outside high-income countries, but instead serves as a testing ground for fundamental economic theories and the source of exciting new ideas. This situation is, of course, not entirely new. Innovative theoretical ideas from people such as George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz were inspired by thinking about the developing world. Pranab Bardhan and T. N. Srinivasan, and, slightly later, Angus Deaton and Mark Rosenzweig also resisted the compartmentalization of economics into development and the rest. Nevertheless, the extent to which, today, economists in many other fields routinely think about the application of their ideas and techniques in devel opment contexts, seems unprecedented. This new centrality is excellent news for the field and, we venture to hope, for the world it studies. We believe that one of the reasons for the field's vitality is the opportunity it offers to integrate theoretical thinking and empirical testing, and the rich dialogue that can potentially take place between the two. The culture of development
What Can Corporations Teach Governments About Democratic Equality

Democracies place great faith in the principle of one-person/one-vote. Business corporations and other private entities, in contrast, typically operate under the one-share/one-vote rule, allocating control in proportion to ownership. Why the difference? In times past, we might have cited the differing ends of public and private institutions. Whereas public democracies aim at promoting the general welfare of an entire political community, private entities aim at more specific goals, such as generating profits or managing a cooperative residence. As business entities have grown in size and in the range of services they provide, however, the distinction between public and private governance has grown blurry. Brooklyn’s Co-Op City, for instance, provides more than 50,000 shareholder-tenants with housing, utilities, stores, offices, schools, parks, security, and other services normally provided by a municipality. The largest homeowners association in the United States, Highlands Ranch, Colorado, provides over 30,000 homes and 90,000 residents with the functional equivalent of a whole town. Soon, entire “startup cities” may join residential cooperatives and homeowner associations in drawing their governing principles from private sources. How can private communities affirm the principles of democratic equality? By affording full protection to all rights holders, individuals and owners alike. The one-person/one-vote approach popular in political contexts works best at protecting the individual personal rights — freedoms of conscience, speech, and innumerable others — to which each of us has an equal claim. Corporate law’s one-share/one-vote rule works best at protecting the property rights of those who invest in a commonly owned community. This paper explains why a polity should offer both corrective and constructive democracy. Residents exercise corrective democracy in defense of their individual rights by submitting officials and laws to popular veto. Shareholders exercise constructive democracy in defense of their investments, choosing directors and managing polity governance. The result: a double democracy that combines the best features of public and private governance to give equal treatment to both the personal rights of individual residents and the property rights of shareholder owners. Respect for democratic equality demands nothing less.
Ownership Structure in Foreign Direct Investment Projects

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/003465301753237731#.VMKObnvGp40.
Residential Properties Taken Under Eminent Domain: Do Government Appraisers Track Market Values?

Local governments often use powers of eminent domain to take residential properties for public use. In such cases, the local government will use their appraisers to calculate an offer on the proper...
Independent courts and administrative agencies: an empirical analysis of the states

This article explores the hypothesis that state administrative agencies spend more time and effort attempting to protect their actions from judicial review in states with more independent appointed courts (as opposed to less independent elected courts). This is because more independent courts are (by definition) less influenced by the political/electoral forces that underlie agency--policymaking--as rational actors, agencies may therefore be expected to recognize the degree of judicial independence and respond to it. Three state agencies subject to substantial judicial review in the 1970s are examined: utility commissions, insurance commissions, and the public education bureaucracy. Controlling for relevant political factors, each is found to have significantly larger staffing for a given regulatory workload in states with more independent appointed courts, consistent with the hypothesis. Copyright 2000 by Oxford University Press.
Property As/And Constitutional Settlement

This Article addresses the extent to which public officials can or should attempt to settle constitutional claims and concerns by privatizing, taking, or otherwise disposing of public properties. This practice, which the Article calls settlement-by-disposition, raises fundamental questions regarding the nature of constitutional liberties and the scope of governmental control over public properties that are critical to their effective exercise. Settlement-by-disposition has gained considerable attention recently, in large part owing to efforts by local and federal officials to settle Establishment Clause controversies by selling, taking, and otherwise disposing of public properties. But settlement-by-disposition is a much broader concern. It has also affected speech and assembly rights, as officials have increasingly privatized or otherwise disposed of public forum properties such as streets, sidewalks, and parks. Although the historical connection has not generally been made by courts or commentators, settlement-by-disposition was actually a central tactic in the campaign of massive resistance to racial integration. During the civil rights era, public officials disposed of public parks, pools, and schools, often in an effort to thwart desegregation. This Article applies the lessons of the civil rights era to settlement-by-disposition in contemporary First Amendment contexts. It develops a framework for assessing the constitutionality and propriety of settlement-by-disposition. The framework is based, appropriately, on a property metaphor. The subject properties are critical constitutional assets held in trust for the benefit of the public. The Article argues that public officials (and, in some cases, their successors in interest) owe duties under the trust of fair dealing, preservation, and compliance with constitutional covenants that attach to and run with the land. Ultimately, they are obligated to enter constitutional rather than nakedly political settlements. In general, the Article contends that settlement-by-disposition ought to be reviewed skeptically by courts and used sparingly by public officials.
Cross Burning as Hate Speech Under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution

Cross burning is a particularly vicious form of “hate speech.” Some American states and cities have enacted laws prohibiting cross burning, and in two cases (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992) and Virginia v. Black (2003)) the United States Supreme Court has issued decisions regarding the constitutionality of those laws. These cases establish the principle that under the First Amendment hate speech is not punishable as a crime unless the speaker intended to threaten another person or the speaker intended to incite an imminent act of violence. Furthermore, the cases reinforce the principle that under the First Amendment a person may be convicted of a expressive crime only if the law under which the defendant was charged is narrowly drawn to prohibit only “unprotected” speech.
International Courts as Agents of Legal Change: Evidence from LGBT Rights in Europe

Do international court judgments influence the behavior of actors other than the parties to a dispute? Are international courts agents of policy change or do their judgments merely reflect evolving social and political trends? We develop a theory that specifies the conditions under which international courts can use their interpretive discretion to have system-wide effects. We examine the theory in the context of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) rulings on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues by creating a new data set that matches these rulings with laws in all Council of Europe (CoE) member states. We also collect data on LGBT policies unaffected by ECtHR judgments to control for the confounding effect of evolving trends in national policies. We find that ECtHR judgments against one country substantially increase the probability of national-level policy change across Europe. The marginal effects of the judgments are especially high where public acceptance of sexual minorities is low, but where national courts can rely on ECtHR precedents to invalidate domestic laws or where the government in power is not ideologically opposed to LGBT equality. We conclude by exploring the implications of our findings for other international courts.
Law and the Evolving Shape of Labor: Narratives of Expansion and Retrenchment:

This essay muses on the relationship between law, labor organizing, politics, and the role of academic scholarship on law and work since 1980. As globalization of manufacturing and labor migration have transformed American culture and labor, the boundaries of labor studies have expanded. The more expansive understanding of labor evident in modern scholarship is partly attributable to the decline in union density and the rise of social movements focused on expanding rights of marginalized workers. Yet hyper-capitalism and attacks on labor liberalism have threatened New Deal labor protections and social safety net programs that were core achievements of past labor organizing and foundations for future labor organizing. The rise of income inequality and the decline of middle class jobs, along with right-wing attacks on labor and social welfare legislation, signal a seismic cultural shift that we have only begun to experience and will shape the future of socio-legal studies of labor.
Japan's Negative Risk Premium in Interest Rates: The Liquidity Trap and the Fall in Bank Lending

Japan's interest rates have been compressed toward zero because of pressure coming through the foreign exchanges. Twenty years of current-account surpluses have led to a huge buildup of claims – mainly dollars – on foreigners. Because of ongoing fluctuations in the yen/dollar exchange rate, Japanese financial institutions will only willingly hold these dollar claims if the nominal yield on them is substantially higher than on yen assets. In the 1990s to 2002 as US interest rates have come down, portfolio equilibrium has been sustained only when nominal interest rates on yen assets have been forced toward zero. One consequence is the now infamous liquidity trap for Japanese monetary policy. A second consequence is the erosion of the normal profit margins of Japan's commercial banks, leading to a slump in new bank credit and an inability to grow out of the overhang of old bad loans.
Armington elasticities in intermediate inputs trade: a problem in using multilateral trade data

. In this paper we find that the estimates of Armington elasticities (the elasticity of substitution between groups of products identified by country of origin) obtained from multilateral trade data can differ from those obtained from bilateral trade data. In particular, the former tends to be higher than the latter when trade consists largely of intermediate inputs. Given that the variety of intermediate inputs traded across borders is increasing rapidly and that the effect of this increase is not adequately captured in multilateral trade data, the evidence shows that the employment of multilateral trade data to estimate Armington elasticities needs caution. JEL classification: F14, C51 Elasticites d’Armington dans le commerce des intrants intermediaires: un probleme dans l’utilisation des donnees sur le commerce international multilateral. Ce texte montre que les estimations des elasticites d’Armington (c’est-a-dire les elasticites de substitution entre groupes de biens d’origines differentes) basees sur les donnees de commerce multilateral peuvent etre differentes de celles obtenues en utilisant des donnees de commerce bilateral. En particulier, les premieres sont en general superieures aux secondes lorsque les echanges concernent surtout des biens intermediaires. Comme la variete des biens intermediaires echanges augmente rapidement et que les effets de cette augmentation ne sont pas captures de facon adequate dans les donnees de commerce multilateral, notre resultat suggere la prudence lors de l’estimation des elasticites d’Armington a partir de donnees de commerce multilateral.
Analyzing the Link between Dollars and Decisions: A Multi-State Study of Campaign Contributions and Judicial Decision Making

This article examines the causal connection between attorney contributions and judicial decisions in elective states. The results show that contributions are a significant predictor of appellant success in state supreme courts when judges receive contributions from the attorneys for the appellant. However, this relationship is contingent on the competitiveness of the judicial seat. The analysis shows that judges who received a low percentage of the vote in the previous election are more likely to vote with contributors than judges who received a high percentage. This evidence bolsters the argument that contributions directly affect decision making when judges feel electoral pressure. The results also support the proposition that elected judges are more likely to vote with donors in states with nonpartisan ballots. While the contribution amounts are higher in partisan states, the judges in the nonpartisan sample are more closely aligned with their contributors when it comes to decision making.
Coordination in heterogeneous federal systems

Abstract We compare centralized and decentralized policy making in a federation in which policy heterogeneity is inherently costly and preferences vary across jurisdictions: all jurisdictions agree that some harmonization is desirable but no one agrees on the direction of harmonization. This type of collective choice problem arises when members of a federal system have to coordinate nonbudgetary policies such as laws, regulations, standards, or diplomatic policies. Contrary to the common wisdom, decentralization becomes optimal when coordination becomes very important. When coordination costs are symmetric, decentralization dominates centralization irrespective of the magnitude of externalities and the heterogeneity of preferences. In the case of discontinuous network effects, standardization never Pareto dominates decentralization.
Clusters, Convergence, and Economic Performance

This paper evaluates the role of regional cluster composition in the economic performance of industries, clusters and regions. On the one hand, diminishing returns to specialization in a location can result in a convergence effect: the growth rate of an industry within a region may be declining in the level of activity of that industry. At the same time, positive spillovers across complementary economic activities provide an impetus for agglomeration: the growth rate of an industry within a region may be increasing in the size and “strength” (i.e., relative presence) of related economic sectors. Building on Porter (1998, 2003), we develop a systematic empirical framework to identify the role of regional clusters – groups of closely related and complementary industries operating within a particular region – in regional economic performance. We exploit newly available data from the US Cluster Mapping Project to disentangle the impact of convergence at the region-industry level from agglomeration within clusters. We find that, after controlling for the impact of convergence at the narrowest unit of analysis, there is significant evidence for cluster-driven agglomeration. Industries participating in a strong cluster register higher employment growth as well as higher growth of wages, number of establishments, and patenting. Industry and cluster level growth also increases with the strength of related clusters in the region and with the strength of similar clusters in adjacent regions. Importantly, we find evidence that new regional industries emerge where there is a strong cluster environment. Our analysis also suggests that the presence of strong clusters in a region enhances growth opportunities in other industries and clusters. Overall, these findings highlight the important role of cluster-based agglomeration in regional economic performance.
Locke on the Death Penalty

Brian Calvert has offered us a clear and careful analysis of Locke′s views on punishment and capital punishment.1 The primary goal of his paper–that of correcting the misperception of Locke as a wholehearted proponent of capital punishment for a wide range of offences–must be allowed to be both laudable and largely achieved in his discussion. But Calvert′s analysis also encourages, I think, a number of serious misunderstandings of Locke′s true position.
The Greenness of Cities: Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Urban Development

Carbon dioxide emissions may create significant social harm because of global warming, yet American urban development tends to be in low density areas with very hot summers. In this paper, we attempt to quantify the carbon dioxide emissions associated with new construction in different locations across the country. We look at emissions from driving, public transit, home heating, and household electricity usage. We find that the lowest emissions areas are generally in California and that the highest emissions areas are in Texas and Oklahoma. There is a strong negative association between emissions and land use regulations. By restricting new development, the cleanest areas of the country would seem to be pushing new development towards places with higher emissions. Cities generally have significantly lower emissions than suburban areas, and the city-suburb gap is particularly large in older areas, like New York.
Of Sovereigns and Servants

The essays in this Symposium occupy two distinct scholarly realms: local government law and the separation of powers. Unsurprisingly, the contributors are preoccupied with different questions. The local government scholars writing about executive power tend to emphasize the ways in which it might invigorate weak city governments,' while those we would typically term executive power scholars are-with two noteworthy exceptions2-mostly interested in figuring out how to tame an overly energetic national executive.3 If the academic world is divided between lumpers and splitters, the conference would seem to confirm the intuitions of the latter. A closer look, however, reveals several interesting opportunities for cross-pollination. The goal of this brief Commentary is to offer a general conceptual frame for connecting some of the localist and nationalist strands in this Issue. It does so by bumping the analysis up one level of generality in order to identify two institutional fixes common to both the local government law essays and executive power essays. One relies on the "power of the sovereign"; the other
Assignment problems with complementarities

Abstract The problem of allocating bundles of indivisible objects without transfers arises in many practical settings, including the assignment of courses to students, of siblings to schools, and of truckloads of food to food banks. In these settings, the complementarities in preferences are small compared with the size of the market. We exploit this to design mechanisms satisfying constrained efficiency and asymptotic strategy-proofness. We introduce two mechanisms, one for cardinal and the other for ordinal preferences. When agents do not want bundles of size larger than k, these mechanisms over-allocate each good by at most k − 1 units, ex-post. These results are based on a generalization of the Birkhoff–von Neumann theorem on how probability shares of bundles can be expressed as lotteries over approximately feasible allocations, which is of independent interest.
Corporate financing decisions, managerial market timing, and real investment

Abstract Both market timing and investment-based theories of corporate financing predict under-performance after firms raise capital, but only market timing predicts that the composition of financing (equity compared with debt) should also forecast returns. In cross-sectional tests, we find that the amount of net financing is more important than its composition in explaining future stock returns. In the time series, investment-based factor models explain abnormal stock performance following a variety of corporate financing events that previous studies link to market timing. At the aggregate level, the amount of new financing is also more important for future market returns than its composition. Overall, our joint tests reveal that measures of real investment are correlated with future returns and measures of managerial market timing are not.
Essential Security Interests in International Investment Agreements

Embedded in a significant number of international investment agreements are provisions that allow states to invoke essential security interests at times of necessity to limit the application of substantive treaty agreements. These provisions, which are largely devoid of express signatory intent, have caused an intensified debate over their scope and meaning in light of recent investor-state arbitration proceedings against Argentina. This article investigates the historical origins and state usage of security provisions found in international economic agreements and argues an essential security defense may be raised only in circumstances involving national security interests. While states ought to be given a margin of appreciation on what constitutes a threat to their own national security interests, the burden falls on the signatory states to diverge from the shared linguistic expectations attached to the ordinary usage of treaty terms. This approach injects a degree of predictability into the meaning of otherwise silent terms, reducing the detrimental reliance problem introduced by treaties that are designed to induce good faith investment by third-party beneficiaries. The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.
Substance Abuse Treatment Centers and Local Crime

Abstract In this paper we estimate the effects of expanding access to substance-abuse treatment on local crime. We do so using an identification strategy that leverages variation driven by substance-abuse-treatment facility openings and closings measured at the county level. The results indicate that substance-abuse-treatment facilities reduce both violent and financially motivated crimes in an area, and that the effects are particularly pronounced for relatively serious crimes. The effects on homicides are documented in two sources of homicide data and are concentrated in highly populated areas.
Severe versus lenient internal promotion: an analysis of the optimal promotion mechanism in organizations*

This paper analyses the interaction between work incentives and talent selection in the framework of internal promotion, and investigates the kinds of promotion structures that are adopted in organizations. We compare the benefits of promoting a deserving agent with the costs of providing work incentives to him. It is shown that whether the principal intends to punish even the talented worker (severe promotion) or to reward even the untalented worker (lenient promotion) depends upon whether the benefits of promoting the former worker or the costs of promoting the latter worker are relatively large.
Should Corporations Have the Right to Vote? A Paradox in the Theory of Corporate Moral Agency

In his 2007 Ethics article, “Responsibility Incorporated,” Philip Pettit argued that corporations qualify as morally responsible agents because they possess autonomy, normative judgment, and the capacity for self-control. Although there is ongoing debate over whether corporations have these capacities, both proponents and opponents of corporate moral agency appear to agree that Pettit correctly identified the requirements for moral agency. In this article, I do not take issue with either the claim that autonomy, normative judgment, and self-control are the requirements for moral agency or the claim that corporations possess them. I claim that if both of these claims are correct, then corporate moral agency entails that, in a liberal democracy, corporations should have the right to vote. I show that under the conception of democracy supported by most liberal political theorists, all parties subject to the law are entitled to the right to vote, and all parties that possess autonomy, normative judgment, and self-control are subject to the law. Therefore, if the proponents of corporate moral agency are correct, then corporations satisfy the requirements for the right to vote. I then consider potential objections to this argument. I show that the strongest objection to the corporate right to vote is undermined by Pettit’s own argument for corporate autonomy. I then show that objections derived from other arguments for limiting the rights of corporations are equally unavailing. I conclude with some observations about the implications of my argument for the question of corporate speech rights.
Intent in Tort Law

This paper, prepared for the 2009 Monsanto Lecture in Tort Jurisprudence, explains intent standards in tort law on the basis of the incentive effects of tort liability rules. Intent rules serve a regulatory function by internalizing costs optimally. The intent standard for battery internalizes costs in a manner that discourages socially harmful acts and at the same time avoids discouraging socially beneficial activity. The intent standard for assault is more difficult to satisfy than that for battery because it is designed to provide a subsidy of a sort to the speech that is often intermixed with potentially threatening conduct. In addition to the optimal internalization goal, transaction costs play a role in the specification of intent requirements. The subtle difference between the intent requirements for trespass and battery can be explained on the basis of transaction costs.
Explaining the timing of tulipmania's boom and bust: historical context, sequestered capital and market signals

Framing tulipmania in terms of sequestered capital – capital whose quantities, usages and future yields are hidden from market participants – offers a richer and more straightforward explanation for this famous financial bubble than extant alternatives. Simply put, the underground planting of the tulip bulbs in 1636 blindfolded seventeenth-century Dutch speculators regarding the planted quantities and their development and future yields. The price boom began in mid November 1636, coinciding with the time of planting. The price collapse occurred in the first week of February 1637, coinciding with the time of bulb sprouting – signaling bulb quantities, development and future yields. Also consistent with our explanation is the initial price collapse location, in the Dutch city of Haarlem, where temperature and geography favored early sprouting and sprout visibility.
Toward a New Economic Constitution: Judicial Disciplines on Trade Politics

This article first observes that protectionism is an icon of trade politics and thus likely to gather fresh momentum as a domestic election approaches. The paper then problematizes protectionism beyond mere seasonal election politics by revealing its fatal pathologies both to the United States and to the rest of the world. Protectionism basically caters to the special interest at the expense of the larger public interest, which may be coined as a Madisonian constitutional failure. It also deviates from global trading norms, which the United States hypocritically continues to preach adherence to for the rest of the world. This double standard creates images of "American Exceptionalism" and undermines the effectiveness of the multilateral trading system. As a solution, the paper suggests certain judicial options to discipline protectionist trade politics, such as structural and substantive due process as well as internalization of free trade principles. It argues that measures suspected as protection should undergo strict scrutiny, and should fail absent compelling justifications for them. It also submits that certain essential global trading norms, such as the non-discrimination principle, may be internalized by the Court under constitutional doctrines, such as Charming Betsy.
The Public's Increasing Punitiveness and Its Influence on Mass Incarceration in the United States

Following more than 30 years of rising incarceration rates, the United States now imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any country in the world. Building on theories of representation and organized interest group behavior, this article argues that an increasingly punitive public has been a primary reason for this prolific expansion. To test this hypothesis, I generate a new over-time measure of the public's support for being tough on crime. The analysis suggests that, controlling for the crime rate, illegal drug use, inequality, and the party in power, since 1953 public opinion has been a fundamental determinant of changes in the incarceration rate. If the public's punitiveness had stopped rising in the mid-1970s, the results imply that there would have been approximately 20% fewer incarcerations. Additionally, an analysis of congressional attention to criminal justice issues supports the argument that the public's attitudes have led, not followed, political elites.
'That Belongs in a Museum!' Rubin v. Iran: Implications for the Persian Collection of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago

The purpose of this note is to argue that cultural property should be immune from plaintiffs’ rights to recovery and that it is legally and morally unjust for such property to be used to satisfy a legal judgment against a sovereign. In order to support this argument, this note will examine U.S. federal legislation, including the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), as well as international conventions of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which specifically call for international cooperation to protect cultural property. In addition, this note will demonstrate that since bills have been introduced in the U.S. Congress as alternatives to lawsuits under the terrorist state exception of the FSIA, a blanket immunity of cultural property does not leave plaintiffs without remedy. Finally, this note will argue that changes in U.S. legislation are necessary in order to prevent future lawsuits calling for cultural property to satisfy legal judgments.
On the rate of return and risk factors to international oil companies in Iran's buy-back service contracts

Abstract We analyze the rate of return (ROR) and risk factors faced by Shell Exploration, an international oil company (IOC), in its Soroosh and Nowrooz buy-back service contract in Iran. In particular, based on our models of cash flow, we analyze the buy-back contract specific risk factors that can contribute to a reduction in the rate of return for the international oil company. Our cash flow models resemble the cash flow of buy-back service contracts before the Iranian government changed the way it determined the capital cost ceiling and pre-defined the oil price in these contracts in 2008–2009. Our actual and contractual cash flow models reveal that Shell Exploration's actual ROR was much lower than the contractual level. Furthermore, we find that among the risk factors that we considered, a capital cost overrun has the greatest negative effect on the IOC's ROR. Moreover, we show that there is a potential for modifying the contracts in order for the IOC to face an actual ROR closer to the contractual ROR even if the contract faces cost overrun or delay, without exceeding the maximum contractual ROR that the National Iranian Oil Company is willing to give.
Picard curves over Q with good reduction away from 3

Inspired by methods of N. P. Smart, we describe an algorithm to determine all Picard curves over Q with good reduction away from 3, up to Q-isomorphism. A correspondence between the isomorphism classes of such curves and certain quintic binary forms possessing a rational linear factor is established. An exhaustive list of integral models is determined, and an appli- cation to a question of Ihara is discussed.
STATE EXECUTIONS, DETERRENCE, AND THE INCIDENCE OF MURDER

This study employs a panel of U.S. state-level data over the years 1978–1997 to estimate the deterrent effect of capital punishment. Particular attention is paid to problems of endogeneity bias ari...
A search for dispersed radio bursts in archival Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey data

A number of different classes of potentially extra-terrestrial bursts of radio emission have been observed in surveys with the Parkes 64-m radio telescope, including ‘rotating radio transients’, the ‘Lorimer burst’ and ‘perytons’. Rotating radio transients are radio pulsars which are best detectable in single-pulse searches. The Lorimer burst is a highly dispersed isolated radio burst with properties suggestive of extragalactic origin. Perytons share the frequency-swept nature of the rotating radio transients and Lorimer burst, but unlike these events appear in all 13 beams of the Parkes multibeam receiver and are probably a form of peculiar radio frequency interference. In order to constrain these and other radio source populations further, we searched the archival Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey data for events similar to any of these. We did not find any new rotating radio transients or bursts like the Lorimer burst. We did, however, discover four peryton-like events. Similar to the perytons, these four bursts are highly dispersed, detected in all 13 beams of the Parkes multibeam receiver, and have pulse widths between 20 and 30 ms. Unlike perytons, these bursts are not associated with atmospheric events like rain or lightning. These facts may indicate that lightning was not responsible for the peryton phenomenon. Moreover, the lack of highly dispersed celestial signals is the evidence that the Lorimer burst is unlikely to belong to a cosmological source population.
Culpability and the Definition of Deontological Constraints

At the core of deontological moral theory are constraints on producing good states of affairs. There are certain things that one must not do, according to deontology, even if doing so would produce better consequences overall. Incorporating constraints is thus an important determinant of deontology's non-consequentialism. There is, moreover, powerful reason to think that deontology is right to incorporate these constraints. The fact that one may not kill a healthy person in order to harvest his organs so that ﬁve others may live, to take the textbook example, seems to substantiate the existence of constraints: ﬁve lives are better than one, and yet it would be uncontroversially wrong to kill the one to save the ﬁve. On this picture, one is permitted (and perhaps required) to maximize the good in the absence of a constraint, but where a constraint is in effect, such maximization is forbidden. Despite their commonsense appeal, however, deontological constraints are among the most fugitive concepts in normative ethics. In this article, I discuss and criticize Michael S. Moore's recent attempt to provide an account of constraints in "Patrolling the Borders of Consequentialist Justifications," which is incorporated into his magnum opus, Causation and Responsibility (Oxford, 2009). On his view, roughly, when we act on the basis of an intention to cause harm, and that act strongly causes the intended harm, which would not have occurred without the act, then we violate a constraint. I make three principal objections to this account: first, I deny that intentions have any bearing on the rightness of action; second, I deny that strong, direct causation is either necessary or sufficient for wronging another in violation of a constraint; third, and more generally, I argue that locating the source of constraints in the conditions of an agent's culpability makes constraints on what one may do to others too self-regarding.
How Valuable are the Patents Behind Section 337 Cases

A US patent protects the owner of the intellectual property from imitators producing in the US and foreign imitators selling in the US market. There are two venues for filing infringement cases against international infringement of US patents, with the International Trade Commission (ITC) using Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 or with federal district courts. Three indicators of patent value suggest that patents litigated under Section 337 are on average more valuable; however, their values tend to be more variable. The latter suggests that some firms may be using Section 337 not for protection against international infringement of US patents but for protection against imports.
Generalized Cash Flow Taxation

Abstract We show the unique form that must be taken by a tax system based entirely on realization accounting to implement a uniform capital income tax, or, equivalently, a uniform wealth tax. This system combines elements of an accrual based capital income tax and a traditional cash-flow tax, having many of the attributes of the latter while still imposing a tax burden on marginal capital income. Like the traditional cash-flow tax, this system may be integrated with a tax on labor income. We also show how such a tax can be supplemented with an optional accounting for a segregated subset of actively traded securities, subjected separately to mark-to-market taxation at the uniform capital income tax rate, to permit a fully graduated tax system applicable to labor income.
Financially constrained arbitrage in illiquid markets

Abstract This article analyzes trading strategies when arbitrageurs impact prices. Trades of financially constrained arbitrageurs are feedback functions of their capital, which depends on the amount traded. A component of arbitrage trading ensures financial flexibility. This hedging component explains why price deviations persist in spite of arbitrage. Financial constraints are responsible for volatile prices and for time variation in the correlations of prices across markets. Distortions arise when regulated firms can influence the dynamics of prices on which capital requirements are based. Under current value at risk (VaR) measures, large traders behave aggressively and have a cost advantage relative to other traders.
Health Care Marketing Under the Anti-Kickback Statute

This article discusses the impact of the federal health care provider anti-kickback statute, 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1320a-7b(b) (the "anti-kickback statute"), upon health care providers. It first analyzes the application of the anti-kickback statute to marketing activities, as well as several common regulatory "safe harbors" that may be applicable to marketing activities. It also reviews how courts and the Office of Inspector General ("OIG") of the Department of Health and Human Services ("HHS") have viewed various marketing arrangements under the statute. It concludes by providing a review of the various factors health care providers may wish to consider in structuring marketing relationships in order to avoid prosecution for violating the anti-kickback statute.
Rethinking Prison Sex: Self Expression and Safety

This article analyzes legislation and policies that limit prisoners' sexual expression and autonomy. The article juxtaposes prisoners interest in sexual expression against the interests of the state in regulating sex by and between prisoners. The article concludes that the state has an interest in regulating sex between inmates and staff and in regulating coerced or forced sex between inmates. In other instances prisons could accommodate prisoners' interest in sexual expression and achieve important goals such as better decisionmaking; improved relations with family and partners to aid community reentry; reduction of prison rape; and as inmate management.