cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Bulow-klemperer-style results for welfare maximization in two-sided markets

We consider the problem of welfare (and gains-from-trade) maximization in two-sided markets using simple mechanisms that are prior-independent. The seminal impossibility result of Myerson and Satterthwaite [1983] shows that even for bilateral trade, there is no feasible (individually rational, truthful, and budget balanced) mechanism that has welfare as high as the optimal-yet-infeasible VCG mechanism, which attains maximal welfare but runs a deficit. On the other hand, the optimal feasible mechanism needs to be carefully tailored to the Bayesian prior, and even worse, it is known to be extremely complex, eluding a precise description. In this paper we present Bulow-Klemperer-style results to circumvent these hurdles in double-auction market settings. We suggest using the Buyer Trade Reduction (BTR) mechanism, a variant of McAfee's mechanism, which is feasible and simple (in particular, it is deterministic, truthful, prior-independent, and anonymous). First, in the setting in which the values of the buyers and of the sellers are sampled independently and identically from the same distribution, we show that for any such market of any size, BTR with one additional buyer whose value is sampled from the same distribution has expected welfare at least as high as the optimal-yet-infeasible VCG mechanism in the original market. We then move to a more general setting in which the values of the buyers are sampled from one distribution, and those of the sellers from another, focusing on the case where the buyers' distribution first-order stochastically dominates the sellers' distribution. We present both upper bounds and lower bounds on the number of buyers that, when added, guarantees that BTR in the augmented market achieve welfare at least as high as the optimal in the original market. Our lower bounds extend to a large class of mechanisms, and all of our positive and negative results extend to adding sellers instead of buyers. In addition, we present positive results about the usefulness of pricing at a sample for welfare maximization (and more precisely, for gains-from-trade approximation) in two-sided markets under the above two settings, which to the best of our knowledge are the first sampling results in this context.
Private v. Public Antitrust Enforcement: A Strategic Analysis

We compare private and public enforcement of the antitrust laws in a simple strategic model of antitrust violation and lawsuit. The model highlights the tradeoff that private firms are initially more likely than the government to be informed about antitrust violations, but are also more likely to use the antitrust laws strategically, to the disadvantage of consumers. Assuming coupled private damages, if the court is sufficiently accurate, adding private enforcement to public enforcement always increases social welfare, while if the court is less accurate, it increases welfare only if the government is sufficiently inefficient in litigation. Pure private enforcement is never strictly optimal. Public enforcement can achieve the social optimum with a fee for public lawsuit that induces efficient information revelation. Private enforcement can also achieve the social optimum with private damages that are efficiently multiplied and decoupled.
Household Leverage and the Recession of 2007 to 2009

This paper shows that household leverage as of 2006 is a powerful statistical predictor of the severity of the 2007–09 recession across U.S. counties. Those counties that experienced a large increase in household leverage from 2002 to 2006 showed a sharp relative decline in durable consumption starting in the third quarter of 2006—a full year before the official beginning of the recession in the fourth quarter of 2007. Similarly, counties with the highest reliance on credit card borrowing reduced durable consumption by significantly more following the financial crisis of the fall of 2008. Overall, the statistical model shows that household leverage growth and dependence on credit card borrowing as of 2006 explain a large fraction of the overall consumer default, house price, unemployment, residential investment, and durable consumption patterns during the recession. The findings suggest that a focus on household finance may help elucidate the sources of macroeconomic fluctuations.
Valuing the economic consequences of work injury and illness: a comparison of methods and findings.

Background Workplace injuries and fatalities in the US create significant economic costs to society. Although economic costs should measure the opportunity cost to society arising from injuries and fatalities, estimating them often proves difficult as a practical matter This leads to a range of estimates for valuing these costs. Methods This paper compares methods of economic valuation, focusing in particular on how different methods diverge to varying degrees from measuring the true economic costs of injuries and illnesses. In so doing, it surveys the literature that has arisen in the past 25 years to measure different aspects of economic consequences. Results Estimates of the costs of injuries and fatalities tend to understate the true economic costs from a social welfare perspective, particularly in how they account for occupational fatalities and losses arising from work disabilities. Conclusions Although data availability often makes estimation of social welfare costs difficult, researchers should attempt to more fully integrate such approaches into estimation procedures and interpretation of their results.
Institutional enforcement, labor-market rigidities, and economic performance☆

This paper compares non-enforceable and enforceable measures of labor rigidities as a measure of the quality of labor institutions, and tests whether such labor rigidities are conducive to long-run growth. We find that non-enforceable labor regulations do not have a bearing on economic growth, but enforceable labor regulations do. In fact, when using a GMM-IV method for a panel data of countries during the period 1970–2000 that accounts for weak endogeneity, we find that such a link is negative and statistically significant. It appears that labor rigidities are thus negatively linked with long-run economic growth.
MEASURING CONSUMER WELFARE WITH MEAN DEMANDS

The welfare change from a price increase–for example, the compensating variation (cv)—is often calculated using the expenditure function from an estimated demand. If there is unobserved preference heterogeneity, then the estimated demand is an average over households with different preferences. And the cv from the mean demand does not generally equal the mean cv. We give conditions ensuring that the cv from the mean demand equals the mean cv, is less than the mean cv, and approximates the mean cv better than the change in consumers' surplus. A necessary condition is that demands become more dispersed as income rises.
Do Patents Weaken the Localization of Innovations? Evidence from World's Fairs

This article takes advantage of an exogenous shift towards patenting in chemicals to test whether patents contribute to the geographic diffusion of innovations. Data on U.S. innovations that were exhibited at four world fairs between 1851 and 1915 suggest that innovative activity became less localized after patenting rates increased. These changes cannot be explained by changes in the localization of chemical production or economy-wide changes in the localization of innovations.
Resale Price Maintenance in Poland - Further Steps to Its Liberalization or Stuck in a Status Quo?

Due to the recognition of their positive market effects, the evolving approach to minimum or fixed resale price maintenance (RPM) creates, in many countries, the requirement of analyzing their true economic outcomes. In the light of newest judgments delivered by the Polish Supreme Court, the purpose of this article is to analyze if it is still justified to qualify RPM as a multilateral practice that restricts competition ‘by object’ under Polish law.
Assessing Potential Technical Enhancements to the U.S. Household Food Security Measures

The statistical measures used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture since 1995 to monitor the food security of the Nation’s households—the extent to which they can consistently acquire adequate food for active healthy living—are based on a single-parameter logistic latent-trait measurement model (the Rasch model). A panel convened, at USDA’s request, by the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) of the National Academies in 2003-06 recommended that USDA explore five potential technical enhancements to that model. USDA has adopted one CNSTAT panel recommendation, which corrects the methods used to model the frequency-of-occurrence followup questions in the food security scale. This study examines the implications of that change and assesses the other four potential enhancements and the extent to which they would affect USDA’s published food security statistics. The study findings suggest that introducing the more complex statistical models would improve measurement of food security little, if at all, while making results and methods more difficult to explain to policy officials and the public.
An "Other" Christian Perspective on Lawrence V. Texas

The so-called Religious Right's reaction to Lawrence v. Texas has been both powerful and negative, characterizing the case as an assault on the traditional conception of marriage and family life. This essay is an attempt to present a different Christian view. Modeled on the life and teachings of Jesus, this perspective celebrates the Lawrence case as consistent with God's call to social justice for the oppressed. It also outlines a Christian sexual ethic that lifts up genuine, monogamous, committed love between two individuals, whether of the same or opposite sex.
Globalization, Poverty, and Inequality since 1980

One of the most contentious issues of globalization is the effect of global economic integration on inequality and poverty. This article documents five trends in the modern era of globalization, starting around 1980. The first trend is that growth rates in poor economies have accelerated and are higher than growth rates in rich countries for the first time in modern history. Developing countries per capita incomes grew more than 3.5 percent a year in the 1990s. Second, the number of extremely poor people in the world has declined significantly. The share of people in developing economies living on less than dollar 1 a day has been cut in half since 1981, though the decline in the share living on less than dollar 2 per day was much less dramatic. Third, global inequality has declined modestly, reversing a 200-year trend toward higher inequality. Fourth, within-country inequality in general is not growing, though it has risen in several populous countries (China, India, and the United States). Fifth, wage inequality is rising worldwide. This may seem to contradict the fourth trend, but it does not because there is no simple link between wage inequality and household income inequality. Furthermore, the trends toward faster growth and poverty reduction are strongest in developing economies that have integrated with the global economy most rapidly, which supports the view that integration has been a positive force for improving the lives of people in developing areas
Random Walks and Market Efficiency Tests of Latin American Emerging Equity Markets: A Revisit

The few existing studies on equity price dynamics and market efficiency for Latin American emerging equity markets show conflicting results. This study uses multiple varianceratio and auto-regressive fractionally integrated moving-average tests and new data (U.S. dollar-based national equity indices for the 1987–1997 period) to clarify these results. Documented evidence shows that equity prices in major Latin American emerging equity markets — Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico—follow a random walk, and that they are, generally, weak-form efficient. In sum, therefore, the evidence suggests that international investors in these markets cannot use historical information to design systematically profitable trading schemes because future long-term returns are not dependent on past returns.
Positioning Lawyers: Discursive Resources, Professional Ethics and Identification:

Critics assert that lawyers’ subject positions make them accomplices to corporate domination. Work on subject position formation, however, frequently ignores either identifications with particular ...
Incorporating the Hendricksons

The family is evolving rapidly, but not fast enough for some people. Several commentators suggest freeing family law of its traditional constraints by applying the contractual business association model. Business models, though superficially similar to domestic relationships, ultimately are unhelpful or counterproductive to defining the family. This Article discusses the essential differences between business and domestic partnerships and the potential havoc from trying to merge the two.
Designing incentives for inexpert human raters

The emergence of online labor markets makes it far easier to use individual human raters to evaluate materials for data collection and analysis in the social sciences. In this paper, we report the results of an experiment - conducted in an online labor market - that measured the effectiveness of a collection of social and financial incentive schemes for motivating workers to conduct a qualitative, content analysis task. Overall, workers performed better than chance, but results varied considerably depending on task difficulty. We find that treatment conditions which asked workers to prospectively think about the responses of their peers - when combined with financial incentives - produced more accurate performance. Other treatments generally had weak effects on quality. Workers in India performed significantly worse than US workers, regardless of treatment group.
Which Cases are "Such Cases": Interpreting and Applying Section 12 of the Clayton Act

This Note examines an issue currently dividing the nation’s circuit courts of appeal. The issue presented is how courts should interpret and apply Section 12 of the Clayton Act, the long-arm and venue statute for private antitrust actions brought against corporate defendants. Section 12’s poor construction has resulted in courts applying section 12 differently to similar sets of facts. This Note thoroughly discusses section 12 as it relates to antitrust law generally and the procedural elements of bringing a private antitrust action in federal court, examines the existing section 12 case law that illustrates the conflict and the arguments on both sides, and proposes a hybrid solution that best satisfies Congress’s intent.
Globalization and Executive Compensation

Abstract This paper finds that globalization is contributing to the rapid increase in executive compensation. Employing comprehensive data on top executives at major U.S. companies, we show that their compensation is increasing with exports and foreign direct investment, as well as firm size and technology. Exogenous export shocks unrelated to managerial decisions also increase executive compensation, and there is little evidence that this is due to increasing market returns to talent. We do find that export shocks primarily affect discretionary forms of compensation of more powerful executives at firms with poor corporate governance, as one would expect if globalization has enhanced rent-capture opportunities. Overall, these results indicate that globalization has played a more central role in the rapid growth of executive compensation and inequality than previously thought.
The Effect of Regulation Fair Disclosure on the Relevance of Conference Calls to Financial Analysts

This study examines the effect of Regulation Fair Disclosure (FD) on the relevance of company-sponsored conference calls. Measuring relevance by a conference call's ability to improve analyst forecast accuracy and consensus, I find larger improvements in both variables during the period surrounding conference calls in the post-FD era versus the pre-FD era. These findings imply that in the post-FD era relatively more about a firm's upcoming earnings becomes known during conference calls, consistent with FD's success in eliminating selective disclosure.
Fair Use For Free, or Permitted-but-Paid?

The U.S. Supreme Court in Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios fended a fork in the fair use road. The Court there upset the longstanding expectation that uses would rarely, if ever, be fair when the whole of a work was copied. In the aftermath of that decision, lower courts have rendered a plethora of decisions deeming the copying of an entire work (even with no additional authorship contribution) a fair use, and therefore “free” in both senses of the word. A perceived social benefit or some market failure appears to motivate these decisions. This is because fair use is an on/off switch: either the challenged use is an infringement of copyright or it is a fair use, which section 107 declares “is not an infringement of copyright.” As a result, either the copyright owner can stop the use, or the user not only is dispensed from obtaining permission, but also owes no compensation for the use. I contend that fair use for free should be available only where a second author copies in the creation of a new work (instances which I will call productive uses). By contrast, when the entire work is copied for essentially distributive purposes, courts and legislatures should sometimes allow the use, but subject it to an obligation to compensate authors and rights holders. This is not a radical idea: the United States is in fact an outlier in the broader international landscape of copyright exceptions. Many countries have permittedbut-paid regimes for various uses, including those by libraries, educational institutions, and technologies. Indeed, the United States has some as well, particularly respecting new technological modes of dissemination. For many authors and other members of the creative communities, while their works stoke the engines of others’ enterprises, the Internet age has proffered more rags than riches. Creators should be compensated for the non-creative reuse of their works. © 2014 Jane C. Ginsburg. † Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law, Columbia Law School. Many thanks for research assistance to Trey Brewer, Arjun Jaikumar, and Olena Ripnick, all Columbia Law School class of 2014. Thanks also for observations and criticisms to June Besek, Jack Browning, Irene Calboli, David Carson, Jacqueline Charlesworth, Susy Frankel, Wendy J. Gordon, Brad Greenberg, Lital Helman, Bert Lazerow, Yafit Lev-Aretz, Jessica Litman, Tony Reese, Pamela Samuelson, Paul Spera, Eva Subotnik, and Edouard Treppoz, and to Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Christopher Yoo, and the participants in the University of Pennsylvania copyright colloquium; to Jennifer Rothman and Jay Dougherty and the participants in the Loyola Law School faculty workshop, and to my colleagues at the Columbia Law School faculty workshop. Much gratitude to Barton Beebe for sharing his database of fair use cases. This article benefited from the support of the Philippe P. Dauman Faculty Research Fund. 1384 BERKELEY TECHNOLOGY LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 29:1383
Measuring off-balance-sheet leverage

Abstract The simultaneous unwinding of leveraged positions can trigger financial market turbulence. Although balance-sheet measures of leverage are available, it is useful to construct a measure of leverage that incorporates both on- and off-balance-sheet activities. This paper provides measures of leverage implicit in derivative contracts by decomposing the contracts into cash market equivalent components. A leverage ratio can then be calculated for this replicating portfolio, which consists of own funds (equity) and borrowed funds equivalents (debt). Methods for aggregating leverage by institution and by markets are presented. The interaction between leverage and risk is discussed, and a modified capital adequacy ratio is calculated, which captures off-balance-sheet exposure.
Near‐Optimality of Coarse Service Grades for Customer Differentiation in Queueing Systems

We analyze a service firm that caters to price and delay sensitive customers who are differentiated on both their value for the service and the cost of waiting. There is a continuum of customer types in our setting and we model each customer's cost of waiting to be linear in the delay incurred with a multiplier that is an increasing linear or sub-linear function of the customer's value for the service. Using a large system approach, we characterize the firm's revenue maximizing menu of price and delay quotations and the value of customer differentiation. We further characterize the value of offering coarse or few service grades and find that offering two service grades is asymptotically optimal on the typical square-root scale, relative to the optimal policy. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Bankruptcy and Small Firms' Access to Credit

We investigate how personal bankruptcy law affects small firms’ access to credit. When a firm is unincorporated, its debts are personal liabilities of the firm’s owner, so that lending to the firm is legally equivalent to lending to its owner. If the firm fails, the owner has an incentive to file for personal bankruptcy, since the firm’s debts will be discharged. The higher the exemption level, the greater the incentive to file for bankruptcy. We test the model and find that if small firms are located in states with unlimited rather than low homestead exemptions, they are more likely to be denied credit, and when loans are made, they are smaller and interest rates are higher. Results for noncorporate versus corporate firms suggest that lenders often disregard small firms’ organizational status in making loan decisions.
Double trouble: on the value of twins-based estimation of the return to schooling

Several recent studies, including the Rouse (1999) and Behrman & Rosenzweig (1999) articles in this issue, use the schooling and wage variation between monozygotic twins to estimate the return to schooling. In this overview article, we summarize the results from this literature, and we examine the implications of endogenous determination of which twin goes to school longer and of measuring schooling with (possibly mean-reverting) error. Endogeneity of betweentwins schooling variation is strongly suggested by the extensive (mostly non-economic) literature documenting that the between-twins difference in birth weight is correlated with the between-twins differences in both schooling and IQ. We conclude that twins-based estimation is vulnerable to the same sort of inconsistency that afflicts conventional crosssectional estimation. We argue, however, that, if one starts with the presumption that endogenous schooling induces upward inconsistency in the estimated return to schooling, the new twins-based estimates may complement other approaches to tightening the upper bound on the return to schooling. © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Defining a Natural Phenomenon After Prometheus

The Supreme Court’s historical jurisprudence on patentable subject matter is wrought with confusion, confounding academics and practitioners alike. Unfortunately, the recent Prometheus decision was not the guiding beacon for patentable subject matter that the PTO, the Federal Circuit, and inventors anxiously awaited. This Note argues that the Supreme Court’s poorly crafted Prometheus decision obfuscated not only the methodology of examining a process claim relying on a natural phenomenon, but also the very understanding of a natural phenomenon itself.
Toward a conceptual framework of instrumental antisocial decision-making and behavior in youth

This paper reviews and organizes relevant theory and research toward a conceptual framework of instrumental antisocial decision-making and behavior in youth. To date, social cognitive study of the development of youth antisocial functioning has largely focused on response patterns (e.g., cognitive responses to aversive cues). Though instrumental decision making is paid significant attention in research on adult criminality, there exists no framework by which youths' goal-driven behavioral decisions that are made in pursuit of antisocial motives and interests may be understood. This is a problem in that lessons from research on children and adolescents suggest that there are meaningful differences in structure, phenomenology and function of subtypes of antisocial behavior (instrumental versus reactive). The absence of such a model may account, at least in part, for why the study of instrumental antisocial behavior in youth remains relatively limited.
A Tall Tale of The Brethren

In their book "The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court", Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong tell a small but striking story of the racial insensitivity of Justice Harry A. Blackmun. It happened during the drafting and circulation of opinions in Flood v. Kuhn, the 1972 baseball antitrust case. As the story goes, when Blackmun circulated the first draft of his opinion in Flood, with its famously romantic introductory salute to the good old days of baseball and list of "celebrated...names" from the history of the game, the list of names was as segregated as the Topeka public schools in 1954. Blackmun had excluded African Americans from his list of baseball celebrities. It was only when pressed to do so by Justice Thurgood Marshall that he added black players to the list - Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, and Roy Campanella. It has been said that this story from "The Brethren" "makes no sense," but that is not enough to make it false. "The Brethren" accurately reports some pretty nonsensical behavior by people who worked at the Supreme Court during the period covered by the book (1969 to 1976). Moreover, the authors of "The Brethren" claim there is documentary proof of their story of Blackmun-versus-Marshall in Flood. Nevertheless, the story is false. The document from which the authors quote - Blackmun's allegedly racially exclusive circulated first draft in Flood - does not exist and never did. Paige, Robinson, and Campanella were present in the first circulated draft and thereafter. And thus Marshall's objection to the offending draft never occurred either. There was nothing to object to.
DESIGNING EXPERT SYSTEMS IN A BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT

Abstract The integration of an ES into a business environment presents a different set of problems to the designer. First, it can be difficult to isolate and draw boundaries around the domain of the business problem. Second, there is often a need to generate a large number of expert decisions in a short period of time. That is, there can be many transactions requiring some expertise to process, such as applications for life insurance. Finally, there may exist a number of computerized transactions processing systems which interact with very large databases and there may be a need to integrate the ES with these existing systems. This paper discusses these general issues involved in developing expert systems for business applications, with particular examples drawn from the domain of insurance underwriting.
JOB LOSS EXPECTATIONS, REALIZATIONS, AND HOUSEHOLD CONSUMPTION BEHAVIOR

Although the theoretical importance of expectations in decision-making is well known to economists, only a few empirical papers investigate the impact of individual subjective expectations on economic outcomes. This paper examines the link between expectations of future job losses and the subsequent impact that these expectations have on household consumption behavior. The first part of the paper documents the empirical relationship between job loss expectations and subsequent job losses. Subjective job loss expectations have significant predictive power in explaining future job losses even when standard demographic information known to be associated with the prevalence of job displacement is included in the analysis. Furthermore, higher subjective job loss probabilities are correlated with an increased expectation of future earnings declines. Overall, these results indicate that the variable for subjective job loss expectations is a meaningful predictor of subsequent displacement. Since a job displacemen...
WAR, RESPONSIBILITY, AND THE AGE OF TERRORISM

DRAFT W AR , R ESPONSIBILITY , AND THE A GE OF T ERRORISM John Yoo ∗ Just as John Hart Ely made a defining and singular contribution to the problem of judicial review with Democracy and Distrust, 1 so too he contributed to the study of war powers with War and Responsibility. 2 Like Democracy and Distrust, War and Responsibility crystallized a generation’s thinking about a problem, wrought consensus out of myriad views, and accomplished these tasks while firmly grounding its argument and analysis in constitutional structure. 3 Also like Democracy and Distrust, War and Responsibility found its answer in process, rather than substance. Ely believed that deliberation by multiple institutions, and ultimately the electorate, would produce good public policy. Finally, both books called on the federal judiciary to play a central role in maintaining the functioning of that process. Process itself is important and monitoring process is a job that judges can largely perform without injecting their personal views into the controversies before them. Ely’s framework for war powers can be clearly and simply stated. Not only did the Constitution vest in Congress the power to declare war, he concluded, but “the [Framing] debates, and early practice, establish that this meant that all wars, big or small, ‘declared’ in so many words or not—most weren’t, even then—had to be legislatively authorized.” 4 Once Congress had given ex ante approval for military hostilities, the Commander-in-Chief Clause allowed the President to conduct military hostilities. The only exception allowed unilateral Professor of Law, University of California at Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall); Visiting Scholar, American Enterprise Institute. I am grateful for the comments of Jesse Choper, Dan Farber, Phil Frickey, Paul Mishkin, and Jide Nzelibe. I also benefited from the discussion with my fellow panelists at the Stanford Law School symposium in honor of John Hart Ely held on April 17, 2004: Professor Philip Bobbitt, Dean Tom Campbell, and Judge Abe Sofaer. Will Trachman provided excellent research assistance. I am grateful for the financial support of the Boalt Hall Fund. 1 . J OHN H ART E LY , D EMOCRACY AND D ISTRUST : A T HEORY OF J UDICIAL R EVIEW 2 . J OHN H ART E LY , W AR AND R ESPONSIBILITY : C ONSTITUTIONAL L ESSONS OF V IETNAM AND ITS A FTERMATH (1993). 3 . Ely’s conclusions are shared by, among others, L OUIS F ISHER , P RESIDENTIAL W AR P OWER 203 (1995); M ICHAEL J. G LENNON , C ONSTITUTIONAL D IPLOMACY 81 (1990); L OUIS H ENKIN , C ONSTITUTIONALISM , D EMOCRACY , AND F OREIGN A FFAIRS 109 (1990); H AROLD H ONGJU K OH , T HE N ATIONAL S ECURITY C ONSTITUTION : S HARING P OWER A FTER THE I RAN - C ONTRA A FFAIR 158-61 (1990); Michael D. Ramsey, Textualism and War Powers, 69 U. C HI . L. R EV . 1543 (2002); William Michael Treanor, Fame, the Founding, and the Power to Declare War, 82 C ORNELL L. R EV . 695, 700 (1997). 4 . E LY , W AR AND R ESPONSIBILITY , supra note 2, at 3 (footnotes omitted).
Luigi Zingales, A capitalism for the people: Recapturing the lost genius of American prosperity

In 1971 the federal government guaranteed a $250 million loan to Lockheed Aircraft. It was the first time in history that the federal government had come to the rescue of a single failing firm (or, more precisely, its creditors). By the end of the 1970s, Penn Central Railroad and Chrysler would also receive bailouts. In 1984, it was Continental Illinois. And on the eve of the ‘90s it was the creditors of hundreds of savings and loan associations. Nothing, however, would compare to 2008. In a single year, the federal government bought stake in or bailed out hundreds of private financial and automotive firms. The rules of the bailout game, if there were any, were not always clear. Having come to the aid of Bear Stearns (via J.P. Morgan) and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal government stunned creditors when it let Lehman Brothers fall in midSeptember 2008. But just 2 days later, bailouts resumed when the Federal Reserve made an $85 billion emergency loan to insurer American International Group. The experience left a lot of people reexamining their beliefs about American capitalism. From then on, were all large firms assumed to have the full faith and credit of the federal government behind them? Was there any way to credibly commit not to bail out systemically significant financial institutions? What cultural and political norms and taboos had the bailouts shattered? And how did these changes affect the public’s perception of government and “free market” capitalism? We are fortunate that one of the people thinking about these questions was Luigi Zingales. He recorded his first observations on the crisis in a must-read piece in National Affairs titled “Capitalism After the Crisis” (2009). Now he has expanded those observations to book-length in A Capitalism for the People. Zingales is as qualified as anyone to address these questions, and that’s not just because he is an extraordinarily creative and productive financial economist of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He’s also an Italian emigre who is refreshingly unafraid to draw on his personal biography to make his case. Rev Austrian Econ DOI 10.1007/s11138-013-0213-0
Market valuations in the New Economy: an investigation of what has changed

Abstract We find mixed support for the hypothesis that a “New Economy” subperiod occurred in the late 1990s in which the relation between equity value and traditional financial variables differs from previous periods. We examine a regression model of equity value on financial variables over 25 years for a broad firm sample and for firm subsamples thought to be emblematic of the New Economy. We find the regression model's explanatory power declined in the New Economy subperiod for all firm subsamples. However, for all subsamples, the regression model's structure during the New Economy subperiod is not unusual compared to other subperiods.
International Pleasure Travel Motivations and Post-Vacation Cultural Attitude Change

Tourism, as a significant form of interaction between nations and cultures, has the potential to improve intercultural relations. This paper develops and tests a model of the relationship between i...
Liquidity effect in OTC options markets: Premium or discount?

Can the liquidity premium in asset prices, as documented in the exchange-traded equity and bond markets, be generalized to the over-the-counter (OTC) derivative markets? Using OTC euro (€) interest rate cap and floor data, we find that illiquid options trade at higher prices relative to liquid options. This liquidity discount, though opposite to that found in equities and bonds, is consistent with the structure of this OTC market and the nature of its demand and supply forces. The results suggest that the effect of liquidity on asset prices cannot be generalized without regard to the characteristics of the market.
Predictors of online buying behavior

What personal characteristics predict whether or not people buy on the Net? Look for a "wired" lifestyle and time starvation, not demographics. Consumers worldwide can shop online 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Some market sectors, including insurance, financial services, computer hardware and software, travel, books, music, video, flowers, and automobiles, are experiencing rapid growth in online sales [7]. For example, in Jan. 1999, Dell Computer Corp. was selling an average of $14 million of equipment online per day [3], and Amazon.com has become the third largest bookseller in the U.S., despite being in business only since 1995 [6]. With projections that the Internet will generate consumer and business-to-business sales in excess of $294 billion by 2002 [2], online retailing raises many questions about how to market on the Net.
Technology readiness levels at 40: A study of state-of-the-art use, challenges, and opportunities

The technology readiness level (TRL) scale was introduced by NASA in the 1970s as a tool for assessing the maturity of technologies during complex system development. TRL data have been used to make multi-million dollar technology management decisions in programs such as NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover. This scale is now a de facto standard used for technology assessment and oversight in many industries, from power systems to consumer electronics. Low TRLs have been associated with significantly reduced timeliness and increased costs across a portfolio of US Department of Defense programs. However, anecdotal evidence raises concerns about many of the practices related to TRLs. We study TRL implementations based on semi-structured interviews with employees from seven different organizations and examine documentation collected from industry standards and organizational guidelines related to technology development and demonstration. Our findings consist of 15 challenges observed in TRL implementations that fall into three different categories: system complexity, planning and review, and validity of assessment. We explore research opportunities for these challenges and posit that addressing these opportunities, either singly or in groups, could improve decision processes and performance outcomes in complex engineering projects.
Unplugged: The Music Industry's Approach to Rolling Contracts on Music CDs

The recording industry has begun a shift in its distribution model of music media, transitioning from sales to licensing. Many CDs now come with digital rights management (DRM) in the form of software that, once installed on the end user's computer, enables the user to copy the music to their hard-drive while regulating its use. Recording companies are distributing these CDs with licenses. In order to enact such licensing contracts with end users, record companies started using End User License Agreements (EULA) similar to those used in the software industry, placed on the CD in the form of a rolling contract. The licensing contracts purport not only to control rights to the software on the disc, but they also affect the user's rights to the music itself. Upon accepting the terms of the EULA, the user, who may have enjoyed the music for years prior to discovering the license agreement, apparently loses rights to their use of the CD upon accepting the terms of the EULA. This article provides a three-step analysis of the legal enforceability of music CD licensing contracts: analysis of the legal enforceability of rolling contracts; analysis of the distribution models in the music industry; and an analysis of the merger of the two. The first portion follows the developmental cases in rolling contract theory and discusses the proposed provisions in UCITA for such contracts. The second portion traces the history of legal rights in the music industry including the "exclusive rights," the First Sale Doctrine, and the Fair Use Defense. In the third portion, the author suggests that such licensing contracts are legally unenforceable for either want of consideration or failure to provide meaningful opportunity to assent. The article culminates with a recommendation for legislators to enact certain, relevant portions of UCITA and recommendations for the music industry about how to bring their licensing scheme within the aims and legality of contract law.
The gender implications of public sector downsizing : the reform program of Vietnam

Men and women may be affected differently by the transition from central planning to a market economy and especially by the privatization and restructuring of state-owned enterprises. After briefly reviewing the international evidence on this issue, the author looks at the recent experience of Vietnam and the prospects of its new reform program. During the massive downsizing in Vietnam in the early 1990s, many more women than men were laid off. Women withdrew from the labor force in larger numbers than men after separation, but the difference nearly vanished after a year. Economic reforms were associated with a considerable decline in the gender gap in earnings, both in the state sector and outside it. Women are less likely to be retrenched in large numbers in the downsizing in the early part of this decade. Labor redundancies are concentrated in male-dominated sectors, such as mining, transport, and construction; redundancies are smaller in female-dominated sectors, such as footwear, textiles, and garments. Moreover, temporary and short-term contracts are more prevalent in female-dominated sectors, suggesting demand for women's work. Assistance programs for redundant workers have potential gender biases. The authors shows that separation packages defined as a multiple of earnings favor men more, while lump-sum packages favor women more. Packages based on seniority are roughly gender neutral, but require a substantially higher expenditure to reach the same acceptance rate as the other two.
Information precision and asymptotic efficiency of industrial markets

Abstract I present a strategic model of a bilateral oligopoly with asymmetric information to examine (i) the validity of the conjecture of price-taking behavior in such markets as the number of agents becomes large and (ii) the effect of the rate that individual information precision decreases with increased number of agents on convergence to price-taking and efficiency. I show that with downstream competition, increasing the number of sellers may make all participants price-takers in the limit, but increasing the number of buyers may not. When the total precision of information in the market is high, price-taking and full social efficiency is achieved in the limit with large numbers of buyers and sellers. However, if the total precision of information in the market is poor, price-taking conjecture may fail and large inefficiencies, including full inefficiency, can occur in the limiting outcome. The rate of decrease of individual information precision with increased number of agents determines the rate of convergence to efficiency, and the convergence is slower than that predicted by single-unit auction models in the literature. I also demonstrate that when the number of sellers or both the number of buyers and the sellers go to infinity, price-taking and information aggregation tend to go together. When the number of buyers goes to infinity, however, information can get aggregated when the agents do not become price-takers in the limit. Albeit, in the latter case, the aggregated information is masked by the noise in the sellers’ signals and the cost variability.
Rollover risk as market discipline: A two-sided inefficiency☆

Abstract Why does the market discipline that financial intermediaries face seem too weak during booms and too strong during crises? This paper shows in a general equilibrium setting that rollover risk as a disciplining device is effective only if all intermediaries face purely idiosyncratic risk. However, if assets are correlated, a two-sided inefficiency arises: Good aggregate states have intermediaries taking excessive risks, while bad aggregate states suffer from costly fire sales. The driving force behind this inefficiency is an amplifying feedback loop between asset values and market discipline. In equilibrium, financial intermediaries inefficiently amplify both positive and negative aggregate shocks.
Simple Model of Resource Degradation and Agricultural Productivity in a Subsistence Economy

Resource degradation poses problems in many developing countries. In the model presented in the paper, current agricultural production lowers future land productivity. Since agents must produce to meet current subsistence needs, this can lead to a poverty trap in which land quality is continuously degraded over time. However, the model shows that not all subsistence farmers fall into this trap, although it might be difficult in practice to distinguish among those belonging to each case. The model also demonstrates why government programs such as income transfers, loans, and price controls might have differing effects upon economic outcomes depending upon the specific circumstances of farmers.
Earnings Management and Earnings Quality: Theory and Evidence

ABSTRACT We study a model of earnings management and provide predictions about the time-series properties of earnings quality and reporting bias. We estimate the model to empirically separate two c...
Clouds make nerds look good: field evidence of the impact of incidental factors on decision making

Abundant experimental research has documented that incidental primes and emotions are capable of influencing people's judgments and choices. This paper examines whether the influence of such incidental factors is large enough to be observable in the field, by analyzing 682 actual university admission decisions. As predicted, applicants' academic attributes are weighted more heavily on cloudier days and non-academic attributes on sunnier days. The documented effects are of both statistical and practical significance: changes in cloud cover can increase a candidate's predicted probability of admission by an average of up to 11.9%. These results also shed light on the causes behind the long demonstrated unreliability of experts making repeated judgments from the same data. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Decomposing the Great Trade Collapse: Products, Prices, and Quantities in the 2008-2009 Crisis

The authors identifies a new set of stylized facts on the 2008-2009 trade collapse that they hope can be used to shed light on the importance of demand and supply-side factors in explaining the fall in trade. In particular, they decompose the fall in international trade into product entry and exit, price changes, and quantity changes for imports by Brazil, the European Union, Indonesia, and the United States. When the authors aggregate across all products, most of the countries analyzed experienced a decline in new products, a rise in product exit, and falls in quantity for product lines that continued to be traded. The evidence suggests that the intensive rather than extensive margin mattered the most, consistent with studies of other countries and previous recessionary periods. On average, quantities declined and prices fell. However, these average effects mask enormous differences across different products. Price declines were driven primarily by commodities. Within manufacturing, while most quantity changes were negative, in most cases price changes moved in the opposite direction. Consequently, within manufacturing, there is some evidence consistent with the hypothesis that supply side frictions played a role. For the United States, price increases were most significant in sectors which are typically credit constrained.
Do Bonuses Enhance Sales Productivity? A Dynamic Structural Analysis of Bonus-Based Compensation Plans

We estimate a dynamic structural model of sales force response to a bonus-based compensation plan. This paper provides substantive insight into how different elements of the compensation plan enhance productivity. We find evidence that 1 bonuses enhance productivity across all segments; 2 overachievement commissions help sustain the high productivity of the best performers, even after attaining quotas; and 3 quarterly bonuses help improve performance of the weak performers by serving as pacers to keep the sales force on track in achieving its annual sales quotas. The paper also introduces two main methodological innovations to the marketing literature: First, we implement empirically the method proposed by Arcidiacono and Miller [Arcidiacono P, Miller RA 2011 Conditional choice probability estimation of dynamic discrete choice models with unobserved heterogeneity. Econometrica 796:1823--1867] to accommodate unobserved latent-class heterogeneity using a computationally light two-step estimator. Second, we illustrate how discount factors can be estimated in a dynamic structural model using field data through a combination of 1 an exclusion restriction separating current and future payoff and 2 a finite-horizon model in which there is no forward-looking behavior in the last period.