cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Kingpin Approaches to Fighting Crime and Community Violence: Evidence from Mexico's Drug War

This study considers the effects of the kingpin strategy, an approach to fighting organized crime in which law-enforcement efforts focus on capturing the leaders of criminal organizations, on community violence in the context of Mexico's drug war. Newly constructed historical data on drug-trafficking organizations' areas of operation at the municipality level and monthly homicide data allow us to control for a rich set of fixed effects and to leverage variation in the timing of kingpin captures to estimate their effects. This analysis indicates that kingpin captures cause large and sustained increases to the homicide rate in the municipality of capture and smaller but significant effects on other municipalities where the kingpin's organization has a presence, supporting the notion that removing kingpins can have destabilizing effects throughout an organization that are accompanied by escalations in violence. We also find reductions in homicides in municipalities surrounding the municipality where kingpins are captured.
Fortune Favors the Franchisor: Survey and Analysis of the Franchisee’s Decision Whether To Hire Counsel

A survey conducted for this article indicates that potential franchisees often fail to consult an attorney. This failure, in turn, certainly affects the “bargained for” franchise contracts and thus should impact franchising relationship law. Indeed, legislators and judges can employ various legal standards to protect some franchisees from their own folly, particularly when these franchisees are unsophisticated parties, with little or no business experience. If this protection is to remain merely a disclosure regime and not a mandatory contractual regime , and if the pro se franchisee is to have no concomitant right to rely more so on a franchisor’s representations than would, say, the franchisee who wisely obtained counsel, then what measures should a franchisor undertake to try to ensure that all its franchisees do, in fact, have lawyers? Case law establishes that franchisors are not fiduciaries for their franchisees, and so we cannot expect a franchisor’s lawyer to double as counsel for an interested nonclient, the franchisee. Still, the common law duty to avoid fraud, the public policy encouraging adherence to good faith bargaining, and legislative and regulatory concerns over an unequal playing field indicate that franchisors must do much more to encourage, without equivocation, franchisees’ early retention of competent counsel. ______________________ * B.A., Sewanee: Univ. of the South; J.D., Harvard Law School. Huber Hurst Prof. of Business Law, Univ. of Florida. Office: (352) 392-0163 Home: (352) 371-3140 Cell: (352) 262-8536 robert.emerson@warrington.ufl.edu
An atomistic quantum transport solver with dephasing for field-effect transistors

Extended Huckel theory (EHT) along with NEGF (Non-equilibrium Green’s function formalism) has been used for modeling coherent transport through molecules. Incorporating dephasing has been proposed to theoretically reproduce experimental characteristics for such devices. These elastic and inelastic dephasing effects are expected to be important in quantum devices with the feature size around 10 nm, and hence an efficient and versatile solver is needed. This model should have flexibility to be applied to a wide range of nano-scale devices, along with 3D electrostatics, for arbitrary shaped contacts and surface roughness. We report one such EHT-NEGF solver with dephasing by self-consistent Born approximation (SCBA). 3D electrostatics is included using a finite-element scheme. The model is applied to a single wall carbon nanotube (CNT) cross-bar structure with a C60 molecule as the active channel. Without dephasing, a negative differential resistance (NDR) peak appears when the C60 lowest unoccupied molecular orbital level crosses a van Hove singularity in the 1D density of states of the metallic CNTs acting as contacts. This NDR diminishes with increasing dephasing in the channel as expected.
Contradiction, Coherence, and Guided Discretion in the Supreme Court's Capital Sentencing Jurisprudence

In the wake of Furman v. Georgia in 1972, many states revised their capital sentencing statutes to address the problem of arbitrary sentencing. In a series of decisions reviewing the new statutes, the Supreme Court determined that asymmetrical 'guided discretion' strikes the appropriate balance between consistency and individualized consideration in capital sentencing. On this approach, legislatures specify by statute the factors relevant to determining whether a defendant deserves the death penalty, but juries must be free to consider any factor that might militate in favor of a lesser sentence. At least two Supreme Court justices have characterized guided discretion as a contradiction in terms. Justice Antonin Scalia argued that open-ended mitigation destroys any hope of sentencing consistency, is not a constitutional requirement, and therefore should be abandoned by the Court. Justice Harry Blackmun argued that consistency and individuation are constitutional commitments that can neither be reconciled nor abandoned, so the Court should invalidate the death penalty as unworkable. This essay explores the possibility that the so-called contradiction in capital sentencing can be reconciled in terms of several well-established values of legal liberalism. Although the Supreme Court has failed to articulate a coherent rationale for its approach to capital punishment, this does not establish that no such rationale is available.
Is Bitcoin Money? (And What That Means)

Abstract In a recent article, Yermack (2015) argues that bitcoin is not money because it functions poorly as a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. We offer a more conventional view. We maintain that the standard approach classifies an item as money if and only if it functions as a commonly-accepted medium of exchange. Then, we show that the demand for bitcoin is comparable to the demand for many government-issued monies. Finally, we argue that bitcoin is money—though perhaps only over a relatively small domain at present.
Minor Discrepancies: Forging a Common Understanding of Adolescent Competence in Healthcare Decision‐Making and Criminal Responsibility

This article seeks to understand the divide between those who advocate for a broad belief in adolescent competence in the realm of healthcare decision-making and those who advocate for a broad belief in adolescent incompetence in criminal law. After detailing various ways of understanding competence for adolescents and delineating how advocates and the Supreme Court have dealt with these issues, the article explores the possibility that contrasting views of adolescent competence are quite compatible. The author argues that the milieu in which young people make decisions, i.e., in formal versus informal settings, demonstrably affects the quality of the decision-making process. As such, it is logical to conclude that the decision-making process in formal healthcare settings leads to better decisions that the law should support than is the case in the informal settings in which young people decide to participate in criminal activities.
The conditional relation between dispersion and return

Abstract The main goal of this paper is to examine the conditional pricing effect of return dispersion on the cross section of returns. We observe a systematic conditional relation between dispersion and return even after controlling for market, size and book-to-market factors. However, we find that return dispersion risk is asymmetrically priced with a significantly positive premium observed during periods of large market gains only. The findings are found to be robust to alternative conditional specifications of market returns, suggesting asymmetric pricing effect of the return dispersion factor. We provide alternative explanations for the systematic risk captured by the return dispersion factor and discuss implications for portfolio management and corporate decisions.
Stock option contract adjustments: The case of special dividends

Abstract The terms of stock option contracts are adjusted in the event of unexpected corporate actions, and the nature of the adjustments may result in windfall gains or losses to open option positions. This paper evaluates the fairness of the two different procedures used for special cash dividends. We show that, while neither procedure is technically correct, the absolute adjustment used in the U.S. and Canada minimizes the windfall change in option value when the dividend is announced. In addition, the proportional adjustment used in Australia and Europe depends on stock price and is therefore vulnerable to temporary aberrations in the stock market.
Strategies to Help Legal Studies Students Avoid Plagiarism

This article first reviews the importance of helping legal studies students improve their written communication through written assignments, despite the problem of plagiarism. The article argues that students need more education about plagiarism. It looks at definitions of plagiarism and considers typical problems legal studies students may have with plagiarism. The article then suggests faculty strategies for structuring assignments to avoid plagiarism in student assignments.
Probabilistic Cross-identification of Cosmic Events

I discuss a novel approach to identifying cosmic events in separate and independent observations. The focus is on the true events, such as supernova explosions, that happen once and, hence, whose measurements are not repeatable. Their classification and analysis must make the best use of all available data. Bayesian hypothesis testing is used to associate streams of events in space and time. Probabilities are assigned to the matches by studying their rates of occurrence. A case study of Type Ia supernovae illustrates how to use light curves in the cross-identification process. Constraints from realistic light curves happen to be well approximated by Gaussians in time, which makes the matching process very efficient. Model-dependent associations are computationally more demanding but can further boost one's confidence.
Spatial analysis of boil water advisories issued during an extreme weather event in the Hudson River Watershed, USA

Water infrastructure in the United States is aging and vulnerable to extreme weather. In August 2011, Tropical Storm Irene hit the eastern part of New York and surrounding states, causing great damage to public drinking water systems. Several water supply districts issued boil water advisories (BWAs) to their customers as a result of the storm. This study seeks to identify the major factors that lead water supply systems to issue BWAs by assessing watershed characteristics, water supply system characteristics and treatment plant parameters of water districts in the Mohawk-Hudson River watershed in New York. Logistic regression model suggests that the probability of a BWA being issued by a water supply district is enhanced by higher precipitation during the storm, high density of septic systems, lack of recent maintenance and low population density. Interviews with water treatment plant operators suggested physical damage to water distribution systems were the main causes of boil water advisories during storms. BWAs result in additional costs to residents and communities, and the public compliance of the advisory instructions is low, so efforts must be made to minimize their occurrence. Prior investments in infrastructure management can proactively address municipal water supply and quality issues.
Inducement as Contributory Copyright Infringement: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.

This brief commentary, published in January 2006, provides an analysis of the Grokster decision. It begins by characterizing the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios as conveying two important limitations on secondary liability: a recognition of the difference between knowledge acquired before product distribution and knowledge acquired afterward, and a requirement that this knowledge must relate to the product's design for infringement rather than for copying. It then goes on to describe the Court's inducement-based holding in Grokster and evaluates the two concurrences considering the Sony question sidestepped in the majority opinion, ultimately concluding that Justice Breyer's concurrence, which relies on the important distinction between the distribution of technology generally and the promotion of technology for a particular (infringing) purpose, is more faithful to the values underlying Sony.
Trawling DNA Databases for Partial Matches: What is the FBI Afraid of

DNA evidence is often presented as the “gold standard” for forensic science. But this was not always the case. For years, eminent scientists complained that the estimates of the tiny frequencies of DNA types were unfounded. It took scores of research papers, dozens of judicial opinions, and two committees of the National Academy of Sciences to resolve the dispute by the mid-1990s. Since 2000, however, reports have surfaced of shocking numbers of “partial matches” among samples within large DNA databases, and some scientists have complained that the infinitesimal figures used in court to estimate the probability of a random match are no better than alchemy. To study the partial-match phenomenon further, defendants have sought to discover all the DNA records (with personal identifiers removed) kept in offender databases. The FBI has responded by branding the proposed research as useless and the release of the data as an illegal invasion of privacy. The media have reacted by calling for congressional hearings and, possibly, criminal charges against FBI officials. This Article reviews the existing research findings and considers the scientific, legal, and ethical objections to disclosure of the DNA data. It concludes that the arguments against further research are unpersuasive. At the same time, it finds that the claims of dramatic departures from the expected numbers of partial matches are exaggerated and predicts that new research will not reveal unknown flaws in the procedure for estimating the chance of a match to an unrelated individual. In view of the importance of DNA evidence to the criminal justice system, this Article recommends using the databases for more statistical research than has been undertaken so far. It also calls for dissemination of the anonymized records for this purpose.
The sources of macroeconomic fluctuations in developing countries: Brazil and Korea*

Abstract This paper studies the sources of macroeconomic fluctuations in small open economies using astructural VAR approach. The identification of the structural shocks is based primarily on long-run restrictions that are in the spirit of Blanchard and Quah (1989) . The evidence from Brazil and Korea suggests that domestic shocks are the main source of GDP fluctuations, while external shocks explain a small fraction of movements in output. In Korea, the most important domestic shocks are those associated with supply factors. In Brazil, domestic demand factors are important but the high level of macroeconomic instability casts some doubts on the appropriateness of some of the identifying assumptions.
The Last Twenty Five Years of Affirmative Action

Part of the "Symposium from Brown to Bakke to Grutter: Constitutionalizing and defining racial equality"
Transactions Use of the Ecu in the Transition to EMU: A Model of Network Externalities

Since 1979, when the Ecu was created as part of the European Monetary System, significant financial markets in private Ecus have developed. The Ecu is now the fifth largest Eurocurrency, with a full range of Ecu-denominated instruments available, from bank deposits and forward contracts to long-term bonds. The exchange rate for the private Ecu responds to supply and demand for Ecus, with private arbitrage holding it close to the basket definition of the official Ecu. Ecu contracts stipulate redemption and payment in Ecus, rather than in the basket of currencies. While Ecus do not circulate in the form of coins and bills, payment in Ecus can be made from demand deposits. In many ways, the private Ecu functions as a currency today.
Consumer Search on the Internet

Abstract This paper analyzes search frictions in online markets using data depicting the web browsing and purchasing behavior of a large panel of consumers. In this data, consumer search behavior is observed prior to a transaction. I use data on consumers shopping for books online to link prices and consumer search patterns at different bookstores, estimating consumer search costs in the context of a fixed-sample search model. The search patterns indicate that consumers visit relatively few firms and exhibit a strong search preference for prominent retailers. I control for search intensities at different retailers during consumers’ search process and find that search cost estimates are lower than when assuming consumers sample equally among alternatives. Accounting for heterogeneity in consumer search intensities across retailers reduces search cost estimates from $2.30 to $1.24 per search. I examine search cost heterogeneity by using a rich set of consumer characteristics and relating them to search patterns and search costs estimates. I use a flexible random effects model in which the number and order of firms visited by the consumer are her optimal ordered choices, allowing search cost cutoffs to depend on regressors. The estimates indicate that consumer search costs are related to their observable characteristics, such as income, where individuals with income greater than $100,000 incur relatively higher search costs.
Intertemporal Price Discrimination: Structure and Computation of Optimal Policies

We study a firm's optimal pricing policy under commitment. The firm's objective is to maximize its long-term average revenue given a steady arrival of strategic customers. In particular, customers arrive over time, are strategic in timing their purchases, and are heterogeneous along two dimensions: their valuation for the firm's product and their willingness to wait before purchasing or leaving. The customers' patience and valuation may be correlated in an arbitrary fashion. For this general formulation, we prove that the firm may restrict attention to cyclic pricing policies, which have length, at most, twice the maximum willingness to wait of the customer population. To efficiently compute optimal policies, we develop a dynamic programming approach that uses a novel state space that is general, capable of handling arbitrary problem primitives, and that generalizes to finite horizon problems with nonstationary parameters. We analyze the class of monotone pricing policies and establish their suboptimality in general. Optimal policies are, in a typical scenario, characterized by nested sales, where the firm offers partial discounts throughout each cycle, offers a significant discount halfway through the cycle, and holds its largest discount at the end of the cycle. We further establish a form of equivalence between the problem of pricing for a stream of heterogeneous strategic customers and pricing for a pool of heterogeneous customers who may stockpile units of the product. This paper was accepted by Yossi Aviv, operations management.
Distance, Quality, or Relationship? Interhospital Transfer of Heart Attack Patients

We empirically investigate the pattern of where heart attack patients are transferred between hospitals. Using 2011 Florida State Emergency Department and Inpatient Databases, we demonstrate the relative importance of three key factors in determining transfer destinations: (1) the distance between sending and receiving hospitals, (2) publicly reported quality measures of receiving hospitals, and (3) the relationship between sending and receiving hospitals as indicated by whether they are affiliated with the same multihospital system. Our conditional logit analysis shows that hospital relationship plays a more dominant role in determining transfer destinations than distance and quality. This result is robust to three alternative specifications of choice sets using distance ranking, radius circles, and Hospital Referral Regions, and also robust to alternative measures of distance and quality. Using 30‐day readmission rate to evaluate the health outcome of transferred patients, we find that relationship‐based transfers led to worse outcome than distance‐based and quality‐based transfers. We also find that nonprofit hospitals are more likely to conduct quality‐based transfers and less likely to conduct relationship‐based transfers than their for‐profit counterparts. Our study calls for reevaluating the current practice of relationship‐driven routing of heart attack patients—selecting transfer destinations based on quality or distance can potentially decrease hospital readmission rate.
Rediscovering Julius Henry Cohen and the Origins of the Business/Profession Dichotomy: A Study in the Discourse of Early Twentieth Century Legal Professionalism

This article addresses one of the central contemporary debates over the nature of the practice of law, reflected in the business/profession dichotomy. Specifically, the article presents an exploration of the discourse and underlying attitudes of early twentieth century legal professionalism, in the context of a close analysis of Cohen's 1916 classic, The Law: Business or Profession?, a highly influential work that is a standard citation in the contemporary debate. The article contrasts Cohen's rhetoric and underlying approach to professionalism against the anti-Semitism, nativism, classism, economic protectionism, and general elitism often expressed by leaders of the early twentieth century bar who, like Cohen, promoted the notion that law is a profession rather than a business. Although Cohen shared and relied upon many of the concerns of his contemporaries over the commercialization of legal practice, he offered a unique vision of professionalism, one that eschews notions of bias and self-interest in favor of intellectual honesty and a sincere concern for the good of society. The article suggests that, although Cohen's unique approach may have resulted largely from various ways in which his personal life and experiences differed from those of the typical member of the elite legal establishment, a more interesting and more important lesson may be found in Cohen's ability to maintain his own rhetorical integrity and intellectual independence while allying himself with many who shared his goals, if not his sensibilities and sensitivities.
Promoting Social and Economic Justice Through Interdisciplinary Work in Transactional Law

Drawing upon the author's experience with a law school Small Business Clinic, this article claims that business law transactional practice is inherently interdisciplinary, involving collaboration from various disciplines, including law, business, accounting, finance, engineering, computer science, and the social sciences. The author explores the need for legal assistance for entrepreneurs and other small businesses, especially for women and minority business owners, and discusses the recent rise in small business clinics and community economic development (CED) clinical programs, which the author attributes to a trend away from government entitlements and toward personal responsibility and economic self-sufficiency, the failure of the litigation paradigm to eradicate poverty, the need to broaden the clinical curriculum, and the availability of funding from the Small Business Administration (SBA) and other public and private sources. The article employs the George Washington Intra-University Consortium in Business, Law and Engineering to examine the systems required to sustain interdisciplinary collaborative transactional work. It touts the pedagogical benefits of this context for teaching law students the necessary professional skills and values, and in particular the lawyer's professional responsibility for advancing social justice. It highlights the incentives and rewards of interdisciplinary teaching and practice in the transactional area, but also discusses the administrative, financial, cultural, and ethical impediments. The article concludes with an overview of the ethical issues involved in multidisciplinary, multi-jurisdictional small business law practice.
Schumpeter: Theorist of the avant-garde

This paper argues that Schumpeter’s 1911 edition of ‘Theory of Economic Development’ can be fruitfully read as a theory of the avant-garde, in line with such theories developed by artistic avant-garde around the same time, in particular by the Italian Futurists. In particular it will show that both Schumpeter and other avant-garde theorists sought to break with past (1), identify an avant-garde who could force that break (2), find new ways to represent the dynamic world (3), embrace the new and dynamic (4) and promote a perpetual dynamic process, instead of a specific end-state or utopia (5). This new reading helps us to understand the cultural meaning of this seminal text in economics. Secondly it greatly facilitates our understanding of the differences with the later interwar German edition and English edition, which were more cautious in their embrace of the new, less focused on the individual qualities of the entrepreneur and placed more emphasis on historical continuity. Thirdly this reading suggests a different reason for the bifurcation between Schumpeter and the rest of the Austrian school of economics. Traditionally this split is explained by Schumpeter’s affinities with the Lausanne School, this paper instead suggests that the crucial break between Schumpeter on the one hand and Bohm-Bawerk, Wieser and later members of the Austrian School on the other hand is their theory of and attitude toward social change.
Crash-neutral currency carry trades

Abstract Currency carry trades exploiting violations of uncovered interest rate parity in G10 currencies deliver significant excess returns with annualized Sharpe ratios equal to or greater than those of equity market factors (1990–2012). Using data on out-of-the-money foreign exchange options, I compute returns to crash-hedged portfolios and demonstrate that the high returns to carry trades are not due to peso problems. A comparison of the returns to hedged and unhedged trades indicates crash risk premia account for at most one-third of the excess return to currency carry trades.
Investors' Differential Reaction to Positive versus Negative Earnings Surprises*

Archival studies document an asymmetrically strong market reaction to positive vis-a-vis negative earnings surprises. This finding appears inconsistent with the well-known effect of loss aversion and remains unexplained. I contend that this reaction pattern can arise when investors' earnings expectations do not coincide with analyst forecasts. Numerous studies document optimistic biases in analyst forecasts. If investors perceive optimistic biases in analyst forecasts, their earnings expectations will be lower than analyst forecasts. Because the contrast between the obtained and the expected outcome determines the degree of perceived surprise, an investor expectation which is below the analyst forecast results in a larger (smaller) perceived earnings surprise than reported when the surprise is positive (negative). Investors' lower expectations relative to analyst forecasts therefore result in a stronger reaction to positive than to negative reported earnings surprises of equivalent magnitude. In a controlled experiment, I replicate the asymmetrically strong reaction to positive reported earnings surprises, and trace this reaction pattern to investors' perceptions of these surprises. I further show that when earnings surprises are measured based on investors' perception of those surprises, the differential reaction pattern reverses: investors react asymmetrically strong to negative vis-a-vis positive perceived earnings surprises, consistent with loss aversion. My findings carry implications for investors and accounting researchers.
Tax Distortions in a Neoclassical Monetary Economy

In this paper we use the common perspective provided by the neoclassical growth model to evaluate the size of the distortions associated with different monetary and fiscal policies designed to finance a given sequence of government expenditures. We calibrate a neoclassical monetary economy to match important features of the U.S. economy and use it to provide a quantitative assessment of the welfare costs of government policies involving different combinations of taxes on capital and labor income, consumption, and money holdings. In addition we evaluate the welfare gains from tax reforms designed to replace the tax on capital income with other forms of taxation.
Storm in a Teacup: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Use of Foreign Law

In this article, Professor Parrish explores the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court’s use of foreign law in constitutional adjudication. In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has used foreign law as persuasive authority in a number of highly contentious cases. The backlash has been spirited, with calls for foreign law to be categorically barred from constitutional adjudication, and even for justices to be impeached if they cite to foreign sources. The condemnation of comparative constitutionalism recently reached its high watermark, as a barrage of scholarship decried the practice as illegitimate and a threat to our national sovereignty. The result has been a change to the debate’s tenor. Instead of exploring how to use foreign materials in a sophisticated and refined manner, the debate has been reduced to an overly simplistic all-or-nothing proposition. This article addresses the recent condemnation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s use of foreign law as persuasive authority. After explaining how the debate has unfolded, the article critiques the recent arguments that opponents of the use of foreign law make. The article reveals how those arguments are misplaced, at times extreme, and inconsistent with a long history of American jurisprudence. In particular, the article explains how comparative constitutionalism is a hallmark of our state court system. The article then explores how the use of foreign law is not only sensible, but compatible with American constitutionalism and the proper role of the judiciary. Professor Parrish concludes that the judiciary’s use of foreign law as persuasive authority is largely commendable, not illegitimate. The recent attacks
Heterogeneity in Schooling Rates of Return.

Abstract This paper relaxes the assumption of homogeneous rates of return to schooling by employing nonparametric kernel regression. This approach allows us to examine the differences in rates of return to education both across and within groups. Similar to previous studies we find that on average blacks have higher returns to education than whites, natives have higher returns than immigrants and younger workers have higher returns than older workers. Contrary to previous studies we find that the average gap of the rate of return between white and black workers is larger than previously thought and the gap is smaller between immigrants and natives. We also uncover significant heterogeneity, the extent of which differs both across and within groups. Finally, we uncover the characteristics common amongst those with the smallest and largest returns to education.
Learning to Disagree in a Game of Experimentation

We analyze strategic experimentation in which information arrives through fully revealing, publicly observable “breakdowns.” When actions are hidden, there exists a unique symmetric equilibrium that involves randomization over stopping times. With two players, this is the unique equilibrium. Randomization leads to dispersion in actions and to belief disagreement on the equilibrium path. The resulting lack of coordination has significant welfare consequences. In contrast, when actions are observable, the equilibrium is pure and welfare improves.
The rise and impending fall of diagnosis as a marker of difference.

When diagnoses are infrequent, they mark the diagnosed person for special treatment. If they become so prevalent that having one is the norm rather than the exception, they will no longer be relevant as markers of difference.
Collective action and post-communist enterprise: The economic logic of Russia's business associations

Abstract Drawing on a unique set of surveys, this article explores the question of whether Russia's post-communist business associations are generally antithetical to or supportive of the broad objectives of economic restructuring. Contrary to the most widely cited analysis as to the purposes of collective action in the business community, the survey evidence demonstrates that association members have embraced market-adapting forms of behaviour at greater rates than non-members. The responses of both firms and associations, moreover, suggest that the associations themselves are, at least in part, directly responsible. These findings point to the conclusion that in contemporary Russia the net returns to collective action in support of market development are high relative to those for purposes that are less supportive.
Exploring the "Myth of Parity" in State Taxation: State Court Decisions Interpreting Public Law 86-272

The general rule of federal question jurisdiction does not extend to cases in which plaintiffs challenge the lawfulness of a state or local tax. In recent years, the Supreme Court has expressed its belief that this lack of a federal forum should not concern taxpayers, as the federal and state judiciaries are equally competent in deciding questions of federal law. Many observers have disputed this parity thesis, labeling it a convenient but dangerous myth. In the field of state and local taxation specifically, lawyers have expressed their distrust of state courts' willingness to protect the federal rights of taxpayers, especially when those taxpayers are domiciled outside the taxing state. While several scholars have explored the question of parity in other contexts, the empirical question whether state courts are systematically biased against taxpayers seeking the protection of federal law has gone largely unexamined. This article offers a preliminary exploration. It presents a study of all reported state court decisions interpreting Public Law 86-272, a federal statute that provides businesses with immunity from state income taxes when they keep the extent of their contacts in the taxing state beneath a specific threshold. The study suggests that, at least as a prima facie matter, these decisions provide little support for the belief that state courts systematically disfavor taxpayers making federal claims. Instead, state courts appear to have interpreted Public Law 86-272 with a fair degree of consistency.
A Note on Racial Differences in Employed Male Job Search

This article examines why black males are more likely to engage in employed job search than are their white counterparts. We focus primarily on the roles that expected wages, wage growth, and job characteristics have on explaining the observed differential. Using a sample of young men from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), the results indicate that the greater propensity of blacks to engage in employed job search is the result of their desire to obtain better jobs with more agreeable working conditions.
Judicial Gatekeeping and the Seventh Amendment: How Daubert Infringes on the Constitutional Right to a Civil Jury Trial

The complexity of modern day civil litigation has created unique pressures on the American legal system. Many cases now entail multiple parties, dozens of witnesses, and unprecedented amounts of discovery. Some courts and commentators have suggested that modern day cases are now too complex for jurors to understand and adjudicate properly. The Supreme Court’s decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., responded to some of these concerns by giving federal judges gatekeeping power over what expert evidence ultimately reaches the jury. An analysis of post-Daubert jurisprudence reveals that the creation of this judicial gatekeeping function has effected an institutional shift of adjudicatory authority away from juries and into the hands of judges. This shift encumbers the Seventh Amendment right to a civil jury trial by replacing jury fact-finding with judicial fact-finding, authorizing judges to dismiss cases that do not “survive” Daubert challenges, and creating an opportunity for parties to outspend their opponents into disadvantageous pre-trial settlements. This transfer of adjudicatory authority away from the jury and into the hands of a governmental actor is a constitutionally impermissible fundamental change to the right to a trial by jury.
Redistributive Effects of Gasoline Prices

Consumers face significantly different gasoline prices across gas stations. Using gasoline price data obtained from 98,753 gas stations within the U.S., it is shown that such differences can be explained by a model utilizing the gasoline demand of consumers depending on their income and commuting distance/time, where the pricing strategies of both gas stations and refiners are taken into account. The corresponding welfare analysis shows that there are significant redistributive effects of gasoline price changes among consumers, where the welfare costs of an increase in gasoline prices are found to be higher for lower income consumers.
An Elementary Theory of Global Supply Chains

This article develops an elementary theory of global supply chains. We consider a world economy with an arbitrary number of countries, one factor of production, a continuum of intermediate goods and one final good. Production of the final good is sequential and subject to mistakes. In the unique free trade equilibrium, countries with lower probabilities of making mistakes at all stages specialize in later stages of production. Using this simple theoretical framework, we offer a first look at how vertical specialization shapes the interdependence of nations.
Originate-to-distribute Model and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

An originate-to-distribute (OTD) model of lending, where the originator of a loan sells it to various third parties, was a popular method of mortgage lending before the onset of the subprime mortgage crisis. We show that banks with high involvement in the OTD market during the pre-crisis period originated excessively poor quality mortgages. This result is not explained away by dierences in observable borrower quality, geographical location of the property or the cost of capital of high and low OTD banks. Instead, our evidence supports the view that the originating banks did not expend resources in screening their borrowers. The eect of OTD lending on poor mortgage quality is stronger for capital-constrained banks. Overall, we provide evidence that lack of screening incentives coupled with leverage induced risk-taking behavior signicantly
Was There a Bubble in the 1929 Stock Market

In contrast to historical accounts of the boom and crash of the 1929 stock market, recent econometric studies have concluded that there were no bubbles in the American stock market over the past one hundred years. Examining the pricing of loans to stock brokers, we find information on the lenders' perceptions of the future course of stock prices in 1929. From this market, we extract an estimate of the bubble in stock prices. This bubble component contributes significantly to explain stock price behavior, even though standard cointegration tests suggest that there was no bubble in the market. n the past decade a large literature has developed that tests for the presence of bubbles in the stock market. The consensus of the most recent empirical analyses is that there are no persistent bubbles. Stock market prices have been found to move closely enough with their fundamentals, measured by dividends, to support the efficient markets hypothesis. James Hamilton and Charles Whiteman have shown that even results suggesting the presence of a bubble may simply be the product of an incompletely specified model. These findings have led to a general skepticism among economists that any evidence can be marshaled to show the existence of bubbles.1 The conclusion of these studies stands in stark contrast to the accepted historical descriptions of bull markets offered by John Kenneth Galbraith and Charles Kindleberger in which manias, fads, and bubbles play an important role.2 These conflicting perspectives arose, in part, because econometric
Filtered likelihood for point processes

Abstract Point processes are widely used in finance and economics to model the timing of defaults, market transactions, unemployment spells, births, and a range of other events. We develop and analyze likelihood estimators for the parameters of a marked point process and incompletely observed explanatory factors that influence the arrival intensity and mark distribution. We establish an approximation to the likelihood and analyze the convergence and large-sample properties of the associated estimators. Numerical results illustrate the behavior of our estimators.
Gender Inequality in Research Productivity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Problem definition: We study the disproportionate impact of the lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak on female and male academic research productivity in social science. Academic/practical...
Resource-based theory in marketing

The use of resource-based theory (RBT) in mar- keting research has increased by more than 500% in the past decade, which suggests its importance as a framework for explaining and predicting competitive advantages and per- formance outcomes. This article provides a comprehensive review of RBT, including a contemporary definitional foun- dation for relevant terms and assumptions and a synthesis of empirical findings from marketing literature. This multidi- mensional analysis of RBT also evaluates extant marketing research according to four perspectives: the marketing domains that use RBT, the characteristics and uses of market-based resources that differentiate it from other re- search contexts, the extension of RBT to the "marketing exchange" as a unit of analysis, and the connection of RBT to related theories. This analysis also reveals some common pitfalls associated with prior research, offers tentative guide- lines on how to improve the use of RBT in marketing, and suggests research directions to advance the theorization and empirical testing of RBT in the future.
Understanding Long-run Price Dispersion

Abstract A unique panel of retail prices spanning 123 cities in 79 countries from 1990 to 2005 is used to uncover the novel properties of long-run international price dispersion. At the PPP level, almost all of price dispersion is attributed to unskilled wage dispersion. At the level of individual goods and services, the average contribution of these wages is significantly reduced, reflecting that good-specific sources of price dispersion, such as trade costs and good-specific markups, tend to average out across goods. At the LOP level, borders and distance contribute about equally to price dispersion that is rising in the distribution share.
Understanding Real Exchange Rate Movements with Trade in Intermediate Products

We suggest it may be \too easy" to attribute real exchange rate movements to law of one price deviations. We show that it is immaterial whether one uses seemingly traded goods, nontraded goods, or even just a single, unimportant consumer good, say beer. The ease of attributing the variation to any such deviations is explained using a model with intermediate goods trade. In the model, the stage of production determines the traded/nontraded distinction. We nd empirical substantiation for the model: law of one price deviations lose explanatory power; and { dened appropriately in terms of intermediate goods { relative prices matter.
RVE-CV2X: A Scalable Emulation Framework for Real-Time Evaluation of CV2X-based Connected Vehicle Applications

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication has become an integral component of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) due to its ability to connect vehicles, pedestrians, infrastructure, and create situational awareness among vehicles. Cellular-Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X), based on 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 14, is one such communication technology that has recently gained significant attention to cater the needs of V2X communication. However, for a successful deployment of C-V2X, it is of paramount significance to thoroughly test the performance of this technology. It is unfeasible to physically conduct a V2X communication experiment to test the performance of C-V2X by arranging hundreds of real vehicles and their transceiving on-board units. Although multiple simulators based on frameworks such as NS-3, OMNET++ and OPNET have proven to be reliable and economic alternatives to using real vehicles, all these simulators are time-consuming and require several orders of magnitudes longer than the actual simulation time. As opposed to physical field- and simulation-based testing, network emulators can provide more realistic and repeatable results for testing vehicular communication. This paper proposes a real-time, high-fidelity, hardware-in-the-loop network emulator (RVE-CV2X) based on C-V2X mode 4 that can provide scalable, reliable and repeatable testing scenarios for V2X communication. The accuracy of this emulator is verified by comparing it to an already validated C-V2X simulator based on the NS-3 framework.
Should credit be given for autonomous liberalization in multilateral trade negotiations

As each new round of multilateral trade negotiations approaches, there is a demand for a negotiating rule that would give credit for autonomous (unilateral) liberalization. The authors show that the feasibility, and desirability of such a rule depend on when it is instituted. A credit rule established at the beginning of a round of negotiations has a primarily distributional effect, favoring those who have already undertaken liberalization. Implementing such a rule would depend on the generosity of those who have not liberalized. The authors propose instead establishing a credit rule at the end of a round of negotiations, which creates an ex-ante assurance that any unilateral liberalization will receive credit in the next round. Such a rule would help induce, or enhance liberalization in some countries between negotiating rounds, by reducing the gains from retaining protection as negotiating currency. More strikingly, it could also lead to deeper levels of multilateral liberalization, and induce other countries to go further than they would in the absence of a rule. Most important, such an ex-ante rule would not rely on altruism to be generally acceptable.
Mortality, Fertility, and Persistent Income Inequality

Many developing countries are plagued by persistent inequality in income distribution. While a growing body of economic-demographic literature emphasizes differential fertility channel, this paper investigates differential child mortality--differences in child mortality across income groups--as a critical link through which income inequality persists. Using an overlapping generations model in which both child mortality and fertility are endogenously determined by parental choice, this paper demonstrates that differential child mortality and its interaction with differential fertility may generate an "income inequality trap." The trap is characterized by higher child mortality and lower degree of skill formation among the poorer households. The model can also explain the behavior of aggregate fertility and mortality rates for countries at various stages of development, consonant with patterns of demographic transition. The results indicate that provision of public health that raises the productivity of private health spending may be an effective way to reduce income inequality