cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Competition Politics: Interest Groups, Democracy, and Antitrust Reform in Developing Countries

This paper examines the political origins of business regulation. Specifically, I study the influence of interest groups on regulatory reform using a new dataset of competition (or antitrust) enforcement agencies in 155 developing countries. I extend existing research highlighting the effects of competition on prices in product markets by considering the labor market implications of antitrust. The analysis predicts cross-class coalitions with contending regulatory preferences. An alliance of incumbent producers and affiliated labor (“insiders”) opposes competition policies that threaten its existing rents. A pro-competition coalition of consumers, unorganized workers, and entrepreneurs (“outsiders”) favors the price and employment effects of antitrust enforcement. I argue that governments’ commitments to competition policy reflect the congruence of interests among economic insiders and the electoral incentives present in democracies. Consistent with the argument, I find that organized insiders slow the reform process and significantly weaken governments’ commitments to regulatory effectiveness. Democracy exudes offsetting effects: while it favors outsiders on average, it also appears to facilitate the capture of regulatory institutions by powerful interest groups.
Unveiling the Features of a Regulatory System: The Institutional Grammar of Tobacco Legislation in Mexico

The United Nations will host a drug policy summit in 2016. This will be a good forum to evaluate the effectiveness of existing legal frameworks. The institutional grammar tool can help with such evaluation. This article uses the tool to analyze the inherent features of tobacco regulations in Mexico. The analysis shows that the legal framework seeks to curb consumption with a combination of information and choice rules, and administrative penalties. As the analysis reveals, the usefulness of the method depends upon the availability of a solid theory that allows one to link rule features and the behavior they expect to induce.
Genetics and Environmental Law: Redefining Public Health

The sequencing of the human genome and introduction of high-speed gene expression profiling technologies are revolutionizing our understanding of the interplay of genes and the environment. This Article develops a novel and provocative framework for thinking about the implications of the genetic revolution for the U.S. environmental regulatory system. Professor Grodsky employs the concept of public health as a lens for analyzing emerging issues, and demonstrates how scientific advances may erode the distinction between public and individual health. Future claims of genetically susceptible individuals and groups may challenge the legal definition of the public to be protected by environmental law. Likewise, the Article demonstrates how the meaning of health, and legally significant threats to health, may be questioned as new techniques reveal earlier evidence of toxic harm. These developments strike at the core of the Environmental Protection Agency's public health mission. The Article analyzes and synthesizes diverse elements of the changing scientific landscape, providing a new framework for understanding the science as well as the law. Professor Grodsky examines implications for environmental standard setting, as these potentially beneficial, enormously complex, and increasingly controversial scientific developments may modify estimates of individual and public health risk attributable to toxic exposure. The Article also sounds a cautionary note. It evaluates scientific roadblocks that must be overcome if the new science is to benefit law and regulation rather than generate scientific uncertainty. This new, exciting, and potentially perilous terrain in environmental law has only begun to be perceived by policymakers.
Urban Runoff , Its Consequences, and the Problems of Regulation

Three years ago, the Chapman University School of Law and the Chapman Law Review held a symposium entitled “Wet Growth: Should Water Law Control Land Use?” The symposium explored the issue of whether water law could be an effective tool for managing growth and development. Building on this cuttingedge symposium, this year the Chapman Law Review hosted a symposium entitled “The Slippery Slope: Urban Runoff, Water Quality, and the Issue of Legal Authority.” This year’s symposium brought together an impressive set of nationally recognized scholars to discuss the issues surrounding urban runoff—its health, environmental, and social consequences, and the challenges with regulating this complex field. The symposium attracted a noteworthy group of attendees, including other scholars in the field, practitioners, government regulators, and interested students. The symposium panels were engaging and informative and challenged those in attendance and those who study this field to reconceptualize many of the foundational premises and paradigms through which we have viewed urban runoff. This intellectual contribution to the field is further embodied in the important articles stemming from the symposium that are being published in this edition of the Chapman Law Review. And perhaps there was no better location for such a symposium than here in Southern California where issues of sprawl, intensive and extensive coastal development, and significant environmental concerns confront the tens of millions of residents in the region on a daily basis. Urban runoff is the surface water from yards, streets, driveways, construction sites, and other developed properties that flow from their source to storm drains and in to other bodies of water such as our rivers, lakes, and oceans.1 Such water runoff carries
Abnormal Returns from Predicting Earnings Thresholds

This study examines the performance of a trading strategy based on the prediction of firms concurrently reporting a positive earnings change and meeting analysts’ earnings forecasts. The evidence indicates that a model predicting both earnings thresholds concurrently can yield excess returns that are incremental to predicting only one earnings threshold. Further, I find that the prediction of forecast errors is relatively more important than predicting earnings changes as the incremental benefit from predicting earnings changes concurrently with forecast errors is small relative to a model that predicts only forecast errors. The results hold while controlling for various risk factors and known anomalies.
Full Disclosure: Unanticipated Improvements in Property Tax Uniformity

This paper contributes to two strands in the property tax literature. One thread considers the effects of full disclosure requirements or “truth in taxation” on the rate of property tax growth. The second studies the determinants of assessment uniformity. This article focuses on the role of full disclosure in changing administrative incentives and improving the uniformity of the property tax. A panel of 29 Utah counties over a 32-year period is used in a TSCS analysis. Findings suggest there is substantial evidence that full disclosure improved uniformity in Utah, but limited evidence that it restrained property tax growth.
The Elusive Meaning of Religious Equality

Raging national debates about the relationship of church and state often find parties sparring over whether the government is treating religious interests equally. This essay endeavors to explain why there is such widespread disagreement about the meaning of religious equality. It explores both jurisprudential and doctrinal sources of dispute, including: the multidimensional nature of equality generally, the uniqueness of religion, the difficulty of defining religion, and the problem of identifying the proper baseline or point of comparison for assessing religious equality. Ultimately, we cannot separate issues of religious equality from disputes about the meaning of the Constitution's religion clauses. The essay presents the thesis that, on a collective level, we may suffer from a long-standing, national uncertainty or ambiguity about religion and the ideal relationship between church and state, accounting in part for our endless conflict over the meaning of the religion clauses. The essay concludes by examining whether it is possible to resolve or avoid questions of religious equality and, if not, what useful lesson can be drawn from our uncertain history.
REEFER MADNESS: BROKEN WINDOWS POLICING AND MISDEMEANOR MARIJUANA ARRESTS IN NEW YORK CITY, 1989–2000*

The pattern of misdemeanor marijuana arrests in New York City since the introduction of "broken windows" policing in 1994 is remarkable. By the year 2000, arrests on misdemeanor charges of smoking marijuana in public view (MPV) had reached 51,267 for the city, up 2,670 percent from 1,851 arrests in 1994. In 2000, misdemeanor MPV arrests accounted for 15 percent of all felony and misdemeanor arrests in New York City and 92 percent of total marijuana-related arrests in the State of New York. In addition, the pattern of arrests disproportionately targeted African-Americans and Hispanics. In this paper, we analyze the MPV arrest data. Building on our previous research on broken windows policing and, using a number of different statistical approaches on the MPV arrest data, we find no good evidence that the MPV arrests are associated with reductions in serious violent or property crimes in the city. As a result New York City's marijuana policing strategy seems likely to simply divert scarce police resources away from more effective approaches that research suggests is capable of reducing real crime. One reform that we discuss concerns the legal standard of review in cases involving such pronounced racial or ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system: Courts reviewing claims of racial or ethnic discrimination in policing, where the prima facie evidence of discrimination cuts across several layers of outcomes (arrest, detention, conviction, and additional incarceration) should relax the requirement that the complainant prove actual discriminatory intent on the part of a particular actor, and instead allow for an inference of intent where the government has failed to justify or explain a number of those disparities. This change would effectively shift the burden of explaining gross disparities on the party with the most complete information.
The certification role of insider participation in PIPEs

In this paper we provide new insights into the motives underlying insider participation in private investments in public equity (PIPEs) by considering the association among insider participation, pricing, and contractual terms. PIPEs are a financing choice that have become popular over the last decade and frequently involve insider participation. We find that board seats and weak pre-PIPE performance are important determinants of insider participation. We also find evidence in support of the certification motive for insider participation. In particular, we show that insider participation is associated with lower PIPE discounts and improved future firm operating performance. Announcement wealth effects are significantly higher when insiders participate than when they are absent both for single and repeated PIPE transactions. We extend the prior literature by documenting that the insider certification effect also exists for repeated PIPE transactions and that the granting of control mechanisms, such as board seats, is an important component of contractual arrangements in insider participation, potentially to achieve incentive alignment by mitigating moral hazard considerations.
Moral Intuitions and Organizational Culture

Lawyers both shape and are shaped by the organizational environments in which they practice. They often play important roles in creating and operating ethics and legal compliance programs. Those programs in turn affect the milieu in which the lawyer must carry on her work. We can think of this milieu in a broad sense as an organization’s culture. Many efforts to understand and respond to a succession of corporate scandals over the last few years have underscored the importance of organizational culture in shaping the behavior of individuals. This focus reflects appreciation that even if an
The automorphism group and limit set of a bounded domain II: the convex case

For convex domains with $C^{1,\epsilon}$ boundary we give a precise description of the automorphism group: if an orbit of the automorphism group accumulates on at least two different closed complex faces of the boundary, then the automorphism group has finitely many components and the connected component of the identity is the almost direct product of a compact group and a non-compact connected simple Lie group with real rank one and finite center. In this case, we also show the limit set is homeomorphic to a sphere and prove a gap theorem: either the domain is biholomorphic to the unit ball (and the limit set is the entire boundary) or the limit set has co-dimension at least two in the boundary.
Blame, Praise, and the Structure of Legal Rules

This essay discusses the implications of some important work in experimental philosophy to criminal law and tort law. In a series of extremely interesting and challenging studies, Joshua Knobe and others have demonstrated that we are more likely to attribute intent to those whose actions lead to bad results than to those whose actions lead to good results. In one version, a middle-management executive boasts that his new process will not only make money for the company, but also help the environment. His boss approves the new venture, but makes it clear that he doesn’t care about helping the environment, he’s doing it for the money. Sure enough, the new process does help the environment. Yet we do not give the boss credit for intentionally having made the environment cleaner. In contrast, when the mid-level manager laments that the new process will make money at the expense of damaging the environment, we attribute to the boss who approved the new venture an intent to have harmed the environment. This asymmetry is potentially important. It suggests that we are somehow designed to lash out at wrongdoers, making us all
The Role of Information in Medical Markets: An Analysis of Publicly Reported Outcomes in Cardiac Surgery

During the past two decades, several public and private organizations have initiated programs to report publicly on the quality of medical care provided by specific hospitals and physicians. These programs have sparked broad debate among economists and policy makers concerning whether, and to what extent, they have improved or harmed medical productivity. We take advantage of a cross-sectional time series of different hospitals to address two fundamental questions about quality reporting. First, we examine whether report cards affect the distribution of patients across hospitals. Second, we determine whether report cards lead to improved medical quality among hospitals identified as particularly bad or good performers. Our data are from the longest-standing effort to measure and report health care quality the Cardiac Surgery Reporting System (CSRS) in New York State. Using data for 1991 through 1999, we find that CSRS affected both the volume of cases and future quality at hospitals identified as poor performers. Poor performing hospitals lost relatively healthy patients to competing facilities and experienced subsequent improvements in their performance as measured by risk-adjusted mortality.
Extremeness Aversion and Attribute-Balance Effects in Choice

Consumers often make decisions based on the extremeness of choice alternatives. Prior research has argued that extremeness aversion is a function of the relational properties of choice alternatives and that the middle option, defined such that its attribute values are between the values of the other alternatives, is always viewed as the least extreme, compromise option. The attribute-balance hypothesis advanced in this article extends prior research, demonstrating that extremeness aversion is also a function of the dispersion of attribute values within each alternative. In particular, it is argued that an option with equal attribute ratings will be perceived as the compromise alternative even when it is not the middle option. Data from three studies support this prediction, offering converging evidence for the attribute-balance effect in different decision contexts. Theoretical implications of the findings are discussed in the context of the extant extremeness aversion research.
Savagery in the Subways: Anti-Muslim Ads, the First Amendment, and the Efficacy of Counterspeech

From San Francisco to Washington, D.C. to Detroit to Chicago to New York, anti-Muslim hate placards have recently appeared on government-owned transit systems in cities around the country. Anti-Muslim hate groups designed, funded and placed the inflammatory advertisements, representing a well-orchestrated campaign to demean and attack the minority Muslim community. The ads have culminated in hate crime charges in the subway pushing death of an immigrant of South Asian descent, diverse manifestations of counter official and private speech and First Amendment litigation in at least three jurisdictions where well-meaning transit officials attempted to prevent the ads’ placement. Interdisciplinary in its orientation, this essay first contemplates anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. more than a decade following the tragic events surrounding 9/11. Then, it describes three variant strands of the hate ads after identifying the anti-Muslim activists responsible for them. The essay thereafter engages in a comparative analysis of the First Amendment litigation that followed upon the heels of seemingly well-intentioned government censorship of the odious speech in New York, Detroit and Washington, D.C. These vignettes are woven together with a singular analytic thread: the effectiveness of counterspeech by officials and private entities as the preferred self-help remedy of first instance. Ultimately, the piece illustrates that while counterspeech is admittedly not without flaw, it nevertheless represents an effective non-judicial means for empowering individuals, educating communities and undermining harmful or threatening expression including the anti-Muslim hate speech here.
Exceptional exporter performance : cause, effect, or both?

Abstract A growing body of empirical work has documented the superior performance characteristics of exporting plants and firms relative to non-exporters. Employment, shipments, wages, productivity and capital intensity are all higher at exporters at any given moment. This paper asks whether good firms become exporters or whether exporting improves firm performance. The evidence is quite clear on one point: good firms become exporters, both growth rates and levels of success measures are higher ex-ante for exporters. The benefits of exporting for the firm are less clear. Employment growth and the probability of survival are both higher for exporters; however, productivity and wage growth is not superior, particularly over longer horizons.
Agency Risks in Outsourcing Corporate Real Estate Functions

Firms outsource business functions to focus on core competencies and cut operating expenses. However, companies must consider agency costs in determining the optimal staffing/ outsourcing balance. ...
The Politics of Evidence-Based Medicine

The impetus for these essays on evidence in medicine and law is commonly called evidence-based medicine: the movement to evaluate the safety, effectiveness, and cost of medical practices using tools from science and social science and to base clinical practice on such knowledge. Evidence-based medicine is portrayed as an alternative to medicine based on authority, tradition, and the physician’s personal experience. The role of politics is rarely mentioned. When discussed, politics is portrayed as what evidence-based medicine will avoid. Rational evaluation of evidence plays an important role in medicine. However, it is not an alternative to medical politics. Rather, evidence is a tool for institutional control and policy argument. Today evidencebased medicine is used to oversee individual physicians and the practice of medicine. It thus helps to alter the balance of power among doctors, payers, and patients. Changing medical practice requires the development of political, legal, and medical institutions that oversee medical care. Promoting medical practice based on evidence will therefore necessitate more, not less politics.
When saving is gambling

Abstract Prize-linked savings (PLS) accounts, which allocate interest using lottery payments rather than fixed interest, encourage savings by appealing to households’ gambling preferences. I introduce new data on casino cash withdrawals to measure gambling, and examine how individual gambling expenditures respond to the introduction of PLS in Nebraska using a difference-in-differences design. After PLS is introduced, individuals who live in counties that offer PLS reduce gambling by at least 3% more than unaffected individuals. The substitution effect is stronger in low-frills gambling environments, which most resemble PLS, indicating that these accounts fulfill the desire to gamble.
The Role of Risk Management in Corporate Governance

Failures of banks' governance and risk management functions have been identified as key causes of the 2007–2008 financial crisis. This article reviews the empirical literature that investigates the relationship between governance structures and risk management functions as well as their impact on banks' risk taking and performance. I first discuss risk management's responsibilities and relevance for a value-maximizing bank. The business nature of financial institutions and their funding structure, together with explicit and implicit government guarantees, set them apart from nonfinancial firms. I argue that conventional governance structures alone may be unable to restrain risk taking in banks and thus the presence of a strong and independent risk management function becomes necessary to monitor and control enterprise-wide risk exposures. Recent evidence shows that a strong risk management function, compatible with the appropriate business model and culture, can restrain tail risk exposures at financial i...
The unintended consequences of environmental justice

Abstract The article commences with a discussion of the Title VI issues that arise when a member of industry contemplates locating a facility in a community. Since the early 1990's there has been an increase in the claims that poor minority communities bear a disproportionate amount of the negative health and environmental risks (referred to as environmental racism) of the siting of hazardous facilities in their part of town. The authors discuss the effects on the population, the President's Executive Order 12898, “Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice”, the EPA's “Interim Guidance For Investigating Title VI Administrative Complaints Challenging Permits”, the Chester case, and the EPA's administrative actions in the Louisiana Shintech case. They examine allegations that the EPA's application of its interim guidance may do real economic harm to the very low income, minority population that it is intended to benefit. They conclude by suggesting several ways for any industry to manage for the “environmental justice” risks of facility location by prior planning, educating all stakeholders, and evaluating the potential risks.
Pro forma disclosure and investor sophistication: External validation of experimental evidence using archival data

Abstract Insights on how ordinary, less-sophisticated investors interpret and process management-issued pro forma earnings numbers are useful to regulators because of concerns that pro forma disclosures are misleading to ordinary investors. Two recent experimental studies [Frederickson, J. R., & Miller, J. S. (2004). The effects of pro forma earnings disclosures on analysts’ and nonprofessional investors’ equity valuation judgments. The Accounting Review, 79 (3), 667–686; Elliott, W. B. (2006). Are investors influenced by pro forma emphasis and reconciliations in earnings announcements? The Accounting Review, 81 (1), 113–133] find that the existence of a pro forma number in the earnings press release as well as the relative placement of the pro forma and GAAP earnings figures within the press release affect the judgments of less-sophisticated investors but not those of more-sophisticated investors. Experimental and archival methodologies complement one another and results that persist in both settings are likely to be robust to both internal and external validity concerns. Therefore, we complement experimental evidence using trade-size-based proxies constructed from intraday transactions data to distinguish the trading activities of less-sophisticated investors from more-sophisticated investors. Our results suggest that less-sophisticated investors rely significantly more on quarterly earnings press releases that include a pro forma number than on those that do not, while more-sophisticated investors exhibit the opposite behavior. This result is consistent with Frederickson and Miller’s experimental evidence. Further, consistent with Elliott’s results, we find that less-sophisticated investors rely more on the pro forma figure when it is placed before the GAAP earnings number in the press release, while more-sophisticated investors’ trading behavior is unaffected by the relative placement of the two earnings metrics. We conclude that the existence of a pro forma number as well as its strategic placement in the press release generally affect the judgments of less-sophisticated (but not more-sophisticated) investors and these inferences are robust because they persist in both experimental and archival settings.
Rethinking the Role of the Exclusionary Rule in Removal Proceedings

On December 12, 2006, the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (DHS ICE) swept up over 12,000 meatpacking workers in the largest immigration raid in the Nation's history. While Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff praised the raids as part of the Nation's comprehensive plan to combat illegal immigration and bolster national security, others denounced the suspect manner in which they were carried out and the detrimental effect they had on immigrants and American citizens alike. Such concerns are not limited to the workplace: Automobile stops by state and local police officers as well as roving federal border patrols, large-scale home raids targeting ethnic communities, and the use of immigration laws to fight the War on Terror have exposed large numbers of people - particularly ethnic and racial minorities - to constitutional violations. While most agree that law enforcement officials should adhere to constitutional mandates, many disagree on how best to deter violations. The exclusionary rule, for example, has garnered both praise and criticism since the Supreme Court first adopted it for federal law enforcement officers in 1914. In criminal trials, the rule generally forbids the introduction of evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment in order to prove a defendant's guilt. In INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, however, the Supreme Court declared that the rule would no longer apply to civil deportation proceedings. This paper argues that significant changes in the immigration landscape since 1984 - including the criminalization of immigration law and the increasing involvement of state and local officials in immigration enforcement - necessitate a reexamination of Lopez-Mendoza's cost-benefit analysis, leading to conclusion that the deterrence benefits from the rule's presence would outweigh its social costs. Readopting the exclusionary rule will have a profound effect not only on the mechanics of government operations, but also on the way in which we view the alien in society. Neither change will be easy, but the landscape that emerges will provide considerable more liberty for us all.
Protection of the Bank Customer: By Statute or by Ethical Codes - Which Is Preferable? An Israeli Perspective

This article focuses on the various dimensions of the statutory regulation of bank-customer relations. There is some kind of discomfort with respect to the enforcement of these regulations. The author proposes to examine the issue of whether it might be preferable to base some of the regulations on ethical codes (soft law) instead of specific statutory provisions. There are several means to control bank-customer relations. The main modes are: First, contract law, torts and unjust enrichment; second, special contract laws; third, the Standard Contracts Law, 1982; fourth, banking laws; fifth, special laws intended to protect bank customers. In addition, there are rules of administrative regulations such as the Directives for proper bank management. Despite the heavy regulations, there are problems in enforcing them. It is possible that voluntary Codes of Ethics might be more useful. Ethical Codes have the advantages of flexibility, enforcement, veracity and willingness. The author concludes that there are numerous shortcomings in replacing binding legal rules with voluntary codes. The main problems are lack of willingness, problems of implementation, questions of legitimacy, partial participation of dealers, and insufficient participation of consumer organizations. Accordingly, voluntary codes cannot replace legislation but can serve as an addition to the existing legislation as a part of improving the image of the banking sector.
Modeling partial Greeks of variable annuities with dependence

Abstract Dynamic hedging used to mitigate the financial risks associated with large portfolios of variable annuities requires calculating partial dollar deltas on major market indices. Metamodeling approaches have been proposed in the past few years to address the computational issues related to the calculation of partial dollar deltas. In this paper, we investigate whether the additional complication of modeling the dependence between the partial dollar deltas improves the accuracy of the metamodeling approaches. We use several copulas to model the dependence structures of the partial dollar deltas and conduct numerical experiments to compare different metamodels. Despite the evidence of strong dependence in the estimated models, our numerical results show that modeling the dependence structures in the metamodels does not improve the accuracy of the estimations at the portfolio level. This is because the dependence between the partial dollar deltas is well captured by the covariates used in the marginal models. This finding suggests that we should focus more on marginal models than specifying the dependence structure explicitly.
The Future of NLRB Doctrine on Captive Audience Speeches

Under the National Labor Relations Act, as interpreted by the courts and the National Labor Relations Board (Board) over the last sixty years, employers have been permitted to give captive audience speeches at work to employees contemplating unionization. Employees must attend such meetings, cannot question the employer representative, and may not have the union come to the workplace to present opposing views. Not surprisingly, these speeches are one of the most effective anti-union weapons that employers currently have in their arsenal. Now that the Board has both a quorum and a sizable Democratic majority, this Essay considers if, and how, the Obama Board might limit the rights of employers to engage in captive audience speeches during union organizational campaigns. If the issue arises in a representation election case, the Board might expand the Peerless Plywood doctrine to prohibit captive audience speeches for a longer period of time before an election. On the other hand, If a union raises the captive audience speech issue in a case alleging a Section 8(a)(1) unfair labor practice, the Board might reexamine its precedent under Section 8(c) and consider when exactly employer captive audience speech tactics become coercive under Exchange Parts and Gissel. This approach would require a more searching inquiry into the content of the speech. It might also lead the Board to adopt a presumption of employer coercion where employees are unable to leave such a meeting or ask questions of the employer’s speaker. An employer would be able to rebut such a presumption under a modified form of the Struksnes polling standards that would make clear the purpose of such meetings and assure employees against retaliation for not adhering to the employer’s anti-union message.
From Capone to Boesky: Tax Evasion, Insider Trading, and Problems of Proof

The efficacy of using the criminal law to discourage commercial and financial activity such as securities fraud and tax evasion has been questioned. The author agrees that such use of the criminal law should be scrutinized. However, she asserts that in concentrating on the theories underlying this use of the criminal law, commentators for the most part have ignored practical problems that arise in enforcing such laws. Studying tax-evasion and insider-trading prosecutions, she finds that courts have allowed and affirmed convictions based upon less than the constitutionally required evidence. A close reading of opinions indicates that this judicial leniency is due in part to the courts' perception that the prosecution put on as good a case as it could and in part to the courts' belief that the defendant was a wrongdoer. Although such a judicial response is understandable, this use of context without proper reference to principle subverts constitutional protections and leads to arbitrary decisions. The author concludes that courts should refuse to affirm diligent but constitutionally flawed prosecutions and thereby force legislatures to be more creative in remedying perceived ills. The Article ends on a cautionary note, examining recent legislative criminalizations of commercial behavior, determining that similar problems of proof will arise in these areas, and urging that courts not adopt the unconstitutional burden-shifting devices that they have resorted to in tax-evasion and insider-trading cases.
Defamation and the Government Employee: Redefining Who Constitutes a Public Official

INTRODUCTION 247 II. THE SUPREME COURT’S FRAMEWORK FOR CATEGORIZING PLAINTIFFS IN DEFAMATION SUITS 258 III. COMMENTING ON LOWER-LEVEL GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES AND PROTECTING POLITICAL SPEECH 261 A. Inconsistency with the Rationale of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan 262 B. Nuanced Approaches Fail to Adequately Cover the Spectrum of Self-Governance 265 C. Lower-Level Government Employees and Democratic Governance 277 IV. THE GERTZ COURT’S RATIONALES ARE NO LONGER AVAILING WHEN APPLIED TO A GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE 286 A. Dramatically Increased Access to Media 290 B. Private Individuals Are Less Private Than They Were in 1974 298 C. Reduction in the Demands of Voluntariness 302 V. FIRST AMENDMENT DISSONANCE 307 CONCLUSION 312
Value, Survival, and the Evolution of Firm Organizational Structure

We examine corporate product diversification as a dynamic process. Consistent with prior research, we find that the average diversification discount is about 8% when using the standard valuemultiple approach. However we find that a significantportion of the diversification discount arises from benchmark comparisons of value ratios of mature firms with those of very young firms that are more likely to have high value multiples. The magnitude of the diversification discount falls by 15% to 30% when we control for firm age. We also show that diversification reduces the mortality rate offirms, and we provide evidence that mature firms pursue diversification strategies partly as a means to exit stagnant business segments for industries that are more highly valued. Since the 1990s, the relation between corporate product diversification and firm value has received considerable attention. Researchers have shown that firms diversified along product lines trade at a discount on average, compared to focused firms. Consequently, many researchers and practitioners argue that firms should focus their business lines, but a large number of firms remain diversified and many others continue to diversify.' Firms typically begin as focused entities and, as they age, they often expand their business scope, in many cases as a survival response to market pressures. In addition to its impact on the likelihood of diversification, firm age is also likely to affect the measured value of diversification. In the standard Berger and Ofek (1995) imputed-value approach, a weighted average of pure-play market multiples are used to calculate the implied value of diversified firms. However, these multiples may be affected by factors other than the firm's organizational structure. Firm age, for example, may be a useful proxy for growth opportunities and other factors that are likely to have a profound effect on the market multiples of individual firms. Therefore, the estimated value of diversification is likely to vary over time with changes in the average age of publicly traded firms. Indeed, Fama and French (2004) demonstrate that the percentage of new firms and the characteristics of new lists have changed substantially since 1973. In this paper, we examine the influence that firm age has on organizational structure and on the observed average diversification discount, and the influence of organizational structure on firm survival. We demonstrate that 15% to 30% of the estimated diversification discount is a firm age discount and that diversified firms are less likely than focused firms to go out of business.
GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS: A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS OF AN INDUSTRY SELF-REGULATORY INSTITUTION

We extend theories of self-regulation of physical commons to analyze self-regulation of intangible commons in modern industry. We posit that when the action of one firm can cause "spillover" harm to others, firms share a type of commons. We theorize that the need to protect this commons can motivate the formation of a self-regulatory institution. Using data from the U.S. chemical industry, we find that spillover harm from industrial accidents increased after a major industry crisis and decreased following the formation of a new institution. Additionally, our findings suggest that the institution lessened spillovers from participants to the broader industry.
The Basle Accord of 1988 and the International Credit Crunch of 1989–1992

The 1989–1992 credit crunch is investigated by studying changes in balance-sheet accounts and the systematic risk of banks from five countries. Banks in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States experienced an asset reallocation from loans to securities and an increase in systematic risk. Out of four hypotheses studied, only the “higher regulatory scrutiny” hypothesis is supported in all three countries, although each hypothesis is supported in at least one country. Additional findings are that the Basle Accord may have given Canadian, British, and German banks a competitive advantage over U.S. banks; it may have failed to reduce the risk of international banks; and, for U.S. banks, no straightforward relationship is found between attaining balance-sheet target ratios and reducing bank systematic risk.
Slow Price Adjustment to Public News in After-Hours Trading

Almost all U.S. firms now announce earnings outside of regular trading hours. This article studies how stock prices incorporate information in after-hours trading. The author finds slow price adjustment accompanied by significant trading volume. During the 2002–2012 period, 5,881 rule-based trading opportunities generated an average return of 1.53% within four hours. After costs (assessed by a trading experiment), an investor who properly exploited the slow adjustment beat the market by 11.5% a year. The slow price adjustment persists under various levels of investor inattention, limited arbitrage capital, and short-sale constraints.
Ahead of His Time: The Singular Contributions of Richard Markovits

Prof. Markovits has been a prescient commenter on antitrust. His early and insightful characterization of the harm from merger as the loss to consumers from being able to trade off their two top choices can be seen in the use of diversion ratios in unilateral effects merger cases. So too does the change in assessing unilateral effects mergers from market concentration to direct measurement of competitive effects match his skepticism of market definition. I share Prof. Markovits’s view that prior dominance should not be a prerequisite for monopolization cases, at least those involving exclusionary practices. I am skeptical that intent should play a role in monopolization, other than as a source of expert evidence that a practice will be harmful. Whether antitrust should be about maximizing consumer welfare or punishing powerful actors with bad intent may be a fundamental divide in perspective in the antitrust community.
Price Drift as an Outcome of Differences in Higher-Order Beliefs

Motivated by the insight of Keynes (1936) on the importance of higher-order beliefs in financial markets, we examine the role of such beliefs in generating drift in asset prices. We show that in a dynamic setting, a higher-order difference of opinions is necessary for heterogeneous beliefs to generate price drift. Such drift does not arise in standard difference of opinion models, since investors' beliefs are assumed to be common knowledge. Our results stand in contrast to those of Allen, Morris, and Shin (2006) and others, as we argue that in rational expectation equilibria, heterogeneous beliefs do not lead to price drift.
The Unusual Cruelty of Nursing Homes Behind Bars

The elderly prison population continues to rise along with higher rates of dementia behind bars. To maintain the detention of this elderly population, federal and state prisons are creating long-term care units, which in turn carry a heavy financial burden. Prisons are thus gearing up to become nursing homes, but without the proper trained staff and adequate financial support. The costs both to taxpayers and to human dignity are only now becoming clear. This article squarely addresses the second dimension of this carceral practice, that is the cost to human dignity. Namely, it sets out why indefinitely incarcerating someone with dementia or other neurocognitive disorders violates the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. This conclusion derives from the confluence of two lines of U.S. Supreme Court precedent. First, in Madison v. Alabama, the Court recently held that executing someone (in Madison’s case someone with dementia) who cannot rationally understand their sentence amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. Second, in line with Miller v. Alabama, which puts life without parole (LWOP) sentences in the same class as death sentences due to their irrevocability, this holding should be extended to LWOP sentences. Put another way, this article explains why being condemned to life is equivalent to death for someone whose neurodegenerative disease is so severe that they cannot rationally understand their punishment.
Afterword: The Libertarian Middle Way

Libertarians are often portrayed as radicals and, in a sense, this is accurate. The three senses of “radical” could each be said to characterize libertarianism: (1) “(especially of change or action) relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough,” (2) “characterized by departure from tradition; innovative or progressive,” and (3) “of or relating to the root of something.”1 Libertarians do make claims about the fundamental nature of things, and strive to be thorough in the application of their principles. Libertarian policies often are a departure from tradition, though as we shall see, libertarianism is deeply rooted in the classical liberal western tradition associated with the Enlightenment (and its roots could easily be traced still farther back in time).2 Libertarians do strive to go to the root of how society should be structured, and they claim that root to be liberty.3
The Influence of Mood on Subordinates’ Ability to Resist Coercive Pressure in Public Accounting

This study reports on an experiment conducted to assess the influence of different affective mood states on auditors’ ability to resist obedience pressure to commit or overlook unethical acts in six audit contexts. Obedience pressure from superiors to comply with unethical directives is of particular concern in public accounting, given the hierarchical structure of audit teams and the power imbalance in superior–subordinate relationships. One hundred and seventy audit seniors from two large international public accounting firms participated in an experiment. Three different moods were induced in participants through work-related trigger events: one positive active mood state (arousal) and two negative passive mood states (fear and insignificance). These mood states were anticipated to influence auditors’ expressed willingness to comply with their superiors’ unethical directives as set forth in our ethical scenarios. Our results indicate that low levels of arousal and high levels of fear and insignificance influenced compliance intentions. Our results also indicate overall high levels of expressed willingness to comply with superiors’ unethical directives. Implications of our findings for understanding the antecedents of unethical conduct within the accounting profession and for future research are discussed.
The widow’s offering: Inheritance, family structure, and the charitable gifts of women

Abstract Researchers and commentators have compared men and women’s charitable giving patterns and have concluded that one sex was more generous than the other. Most research based on modern data has found women to be more philanthropic than men. In this article, I compare charitable donations of unmarried men and women in a sample of wills from 17th Century England. I find that men are more likely to make donations than women and make larger average donations. This difference in giving can be explained by differences in wealth and family structure and should not be ascribed to differences in charitable impulses.
Two Kinds of Concept: Implicit and Explicit

In his refreshing and thought-provoking book, Edouard Machery (2009) argues that people possess different kinds of concept. This is probably true and important. Before I get to that, I will briefly disagree on two other points.
Motivations of Electronic Word-of-mouth Communications by Reviewers: A Proposed Study.

Shopping sites, such as Amazon, encourage consumers to create online reviews for products through product reviews. Such review systems enhance the value of Amazon and eBay as shopping destinations. However, Amazon takes it one step further by allowing other consumers to rate the reviews, creating reputation systems for reviewers. Those reviewers with the highest ratings are given greater prominence. They are featured first in the listings, they are given an honorary title, membership in an honorary group, and sometimes they are even provided with products in advance of the product’s release. These reviewers work long hours, without pay, to provide a valuable service to their fellow consumers. For instance, the top 1000 reviewers each write hundreds of reviews. What exactly motivates this extraordinary effort? How does the reputation system of helpfulness votes affect the case for Amazon’s reviewers?