cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
A Comment on Text, Time and Audience Understanding in Constitutional Law

Professor Cunningham, in a provocative memorandum, asks how the legal landscape might change if courts interpreted statutes to reflect average citizens' understanding of statutory language. This is an intriguing thought experiment and perhaps even a wise proposal. Rather than address Professor Cunningham's experiment directly, however, I would like to consider a variant of it that nicely highlights important issues in my own field, constitutional law. Substituting "the Constitution" for "statutes," we have the following question: What if the audience understanding of rules of, say, contract law, applied to the interpretation of the Constitution?When we switch our focus from statutes to the Constitution, a somewhat latent ambiguity in Professor Cunningham's question comes to the fore. Should judges interpret constitutional language in accordance with the common understanding of the words at the time the relevant provision was ratified, or at the time the case comes before the court? The ambiguity is not obvious in the statutory context because statutes are modified with much greater frequency than the federal Constitution, so that in a typical case of statutory interpretation, not much time will have elapsed between enactment and interpretation. There are, of course, exceptions, and in many ways statutory and constitutional interpretation are quite similar - as Professor Eskridge has so brilliantly illustrated 2 - so that much of what I say will apply to statutory interpretation as well. But for present purposes I shall confine my remarks to constitutional interpretation.
Geography, Statistics, and Ecological Inference

Book reviewed in this article: Gary King, On A Solution to the Ecological Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data
Rethinking Minority Coalition Building: Valuing Self-Sacrifice, Stewardship and Anti-Subordination

This essay provides an alternative to the conventional self-interest model of coalition building to explore one that relies instead on the three concepts of self-sacrifice, stewardship, and anti-subordination, addressing anticipated counterarguments and providing concrete examples of how this model might work.
The Basic Principle of Loss Allocation for Unauthorized Checks

It is commonly thought that the Uniform Commercial Code adopts a negligence principle as the basis of loss allocation for the check system. This article argues that this common assumption is wrong. Instead, the fundamental principle of the check system and all other payment systems is that the burden of unpreventable losses should rest with the providers of the payment system rather than with the users of the payment system. The article shows that the old English case of Price v. Neal is not, as is commonly thought, an anomaly but is instead entirely consistent with the basic principle of loss allocation for the check system. The article suggests that a correct understanding of the basic principle of loss allocation has significant implications for the enforceability of agreements between customers and banks concerning checking accounts. Specifically, an approach that appears to be emerging in recent cases concerning forged facsimile signatures on checks can be seen to be fundamentally misguided.
Competitive Reform in Health Care: The Vulnerable Revolution

This article, written at the dawn of the era of "competitive reform" in health care examines the case and prospects for the introduction of competition in health care delivery and financing. It observes the failures of the ancienne regime of fee for service payment and professional sovereignty and discusses the benefits of market-oriented policy. Its contribution, still salient today, is the lesson that competition cannot succeed without regulation. It identifies legislative, professional, and cultural hurdles to effective implementation of competitive norms and policies that have impeded the success of competition policy in health care.
Revenue non-equivalence between auctions with soft and hard closing mechanisms: New evidence from Yahoo!

Abstract We use a unique dataset to examine the revenue differences between auctions with a hard-close ending rule versus those with a soft-close ending rule. We find that selling items using the soft-close rule increases the selling price by an amount between $25 and $44 (or 13–20 percent) over the hard-close format. One possible theoretical explanation for these results is that the hard-close ending rule accommodates the practice of sniping, which leads to a lower expected selling price. We find empirically that a lack of experience could help to explain why, in spite of the revenue differences, some sellers select the hard-close ending rule.
Corporate boards' political ideology diversity and firm performance

Abstract We investigate whether diversity in points of view within corporate boards, as captured by the diversity in political ideology of board members, can affect a firm's performance. We employ personal political contributions' data to measure political ideology distance among groups of inside, outside directors and the CEO. Our empirical evidence strongly supports the notion that outside directors' monitoring effectiveness is more likely to be enhanced when their viewpoints are distinct from those of management. We find that ideologically diverse boards are associated with better firm performance, lower agency costs and less insiders' discretionary power over the firm's Political Action Committee (PAC) spending. Taken together, our results lead us to conclude that multiplicity of standpoints in corporate boardrooms is imperative for board effectiveness.
What Lies Beyond Same-Sex Marriage? Marriage, Reproductive Freedom and Future Persons in Liberal Public Justification

In this article I consider whether the legalization of sex-same marriage implies a right to incestuous marriage. I begin by suggesting that the liberal state get out of the `marriage' business by leveling down to a universal civil union status. The question is then whether incestuous unions should be both legal and eligible for this status. I argue that the arguments compatible with public reason for prohibiting them outright, or even for excluding them from the permissible types of legally registered partnerships, are quite weak. The objections to allowing such relations are those from (1) child abuse; (2) unfair burdening of society; and (3) the creation of bad lives. I argue that while rape and other forms of child abuse would be no more legal or tolerated than they are now, the concern about any form of weakening a society's legal and political resources to combat such abuses does indeed register on the justificatory scale, but does not prove that such first-degree incestuous sexual relations are inherently bad enough to warrant intervention in their own right. I then argue that the concern about unfairly burdening society with unhealthy persons is not as dangerously totalitarian as we might initially fear, but nor is it strong enough to justify an outright prohibition. Finally, I argue that a concern to dissuade persons from creating certain kinds of lives (children with extreme birth defects) is also not as dangerously totalitarian as we might initially fear, and in fact goes further towards explaining why we might have a legitimate interest in intervening. Nonetheless, I argue that the criminalization of such acts only make sense when they are indicators of other offenses, namely negligence or abuse, and it thus seems that the act of consanguineous reproduction is itself insufficient.
The Immediate Consequences of Federal Pretrial Detention

Unlike the cash-bail regimes that are prevalent in state courts, federal courts rarely use money bail as a condition of pretrial release. Nonetheless, this article presents evidence that pretrial release influences case outcomes for federal defendants. Using case data spanning 71 federal district courts, the article suggests that pretrial release reduces a defendant’s sentence and increases the probability that they will receive a sentence below the recommended sentencing range. Pretrial release also appears to lessen the probability that a defendant will receive a mandatory minimum sentence when one is charged. The analysis exploits variation in magistrate judges’ propensities to release defendants pending trial, which allows magistrate judge leniency to serve as an instrumental variable for pretrial release. The article also provides suggestive evidence that pretrial release affects case outcomes through two channels: first, by giving defendants the opportunity to present mitigating evidence at sentencing and second, by making it easier for defendants to earn a sentencing reduction by providing assistance to the government.
Are Female CFOs Less Tax Aggressive? Evidence from Tax Aggressiveness

ABSTRACT: This paper investigates the effect of CFO gender on corporate tax aggressiveness. Focusing on firms that experience a male-to-female CFO transition, the paper compares those firms' degree of tax aggressiveness during the pre- and post-transition periods. Using the probability of tax sheltering, the predicted unrecognized tax benefits, and the discretionary permanent book-tax differences to measure tax aggressiveness, we find that female CFOs are associated with less tax aggressiveness as compared to their male counterparts. The main findings are supported by additional tests based on propensity score matching, difference-in-differences tests, and tests with a female-to-male CFO transition sample. Overall, our study establishes CFO gender as an important determinant of tax aggressiveness. JEL Classifications: H26; M41; J16.
Noncoercive Mobilization in State-Controlled Elections An Experimental Study in Beijing

China has gradually introduced a limited degree of democratization to its system of local governance, permitting self-nominated candidates for People’s Congress to campaign on their own behalf. Lib...
Term Structure of Risk under Alternative Econometric Specifications

This paper characterizes the term structure of risk measures such as Value at Risk (VaR) and expected shortfall under different econometric approaches including multivariate regime switching, GARCH-in-mean models with student-t errors, two-component GARCH models and a non-parametric bootstrap. We show how to derive the risk measures for each of these models and document large variations in term structures across econometric specifications. An out-of-sample forecasting experiment applied to stock, bond and cash portfolios suggests that the best model is asset- and horizon specific but that the bootstrap and regime switching model are best overall for VaR levels of 5% and 1%, respectively.
Healthy Living in Hard Times

Using microdata for adults from 1987 to 2000 years of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), I show that smoking and excess weight decline during temporary economic downturns while leisure-time physical activity rises. The drop in tobacco use occurs disproportionately among heavy smokers, the fall in body weight among the severely obese and the increase in exercise among those who were completely inactive. Declining work hours may provide one reason why behaviors become healthier, possibly by increasing the non-market time available for lifestyle investments. Conversely, there is little evidence of an important role for income reductions. The overall conclusion is that changes in behaviors supply one mechanism for the procyclical variation in mortality and morbidity observed in recent research.
The Fate of Firms: Explaining Mergers and Bankruptcies

Using a uniquely complete data set of more than 50,000 observations of approximately 16,000 corporations, we test theories that seek to explain which firms become merger targets and which firms go bankrupt. We find that merger activity is much greater during prosperous periods than during recessions. In bad economic times, firms in industries with high bankruptcy rates are less likely to file for bankruptcy than they are in better years, supporting the market illiquidity arguments made by Shleifer and Vishny (1992). At the firm level, we find that, among poorly performing firms, the likelihood of merger increases with poorer performance, but among better performing firms, the relation is reversed and chances of merger increase with better performance. Such a changing relation has not been detected in prior merger studies. We also find that low-growth, resource-rich firms are prime acquisition targets and that firms’ debt capacity relates negatively to the likelihood of a merger. Debt-related variables, leverage and secured debt, play an especially prominent role in distinguishing between which firms merge and which firms go bankrupt.
Optimal rates from eigenvalues

Abstract A financial portfolio typically pays dividend based on its value. We show that there is a unique portfolio that pays the maximum dividend rate while remaining solvent, under appropriate assumptions. We also give a characterization of both the portfolio and the optimal dividend rate.
Privileged Access to Financial Innovation

Access to private funds is limited to an elite class of investors— wealthy individuals and large institutions. Individuals of more modest means—“retail investors”—face more limited investment choices; generally they can only invest in mutual funds. Despite this inequitable division, the current regulatory climate will lead to an even further expansion of the private fund industry. This Article argues that this loosening regulatory climate could lead to a talent drain amongst registered funds, could narrow the investment choices available to retail investors, and could deepen the already troubling income gap between wealthy and average earners. With respect to a possible talent drain, as it becomes easier for issuers to avoid the arduous registration requirements of the federal securities laws, many investment advisers will simply “go private” by instead offering hedge funds or other private investments. In assessing privileged access to strategies, because private funds are permitted to engage in more flexible trading strategies through the use of derivatives and other exotic instruments, elite investors have better opportunities for wealth maximization and diversification. A large body of empirical research has also found that private fund advisers often have privileged access to valuable information regarding upcoming investments. To the extent that this
A binomial model of Geithner's toxic asset plan

Abstract This paper formally models the Public–Private Investment Partnership (PPIP), a plan for U.S. government sponsored purchases of distressed assets. This paper solves both the problem of the asset manager buying toxic assets and the banks selling toxic assets. It solves for the fair market value of toxic assets implied by subsidized toxic asset sales, and it estimates the size of the government's subsidy. Moreover, this paper finds the circumstances under which banks and asset managers will meet at mutually acceptable prices. In general, healthier banks will be more willing sellers of toxic assets than zombies.
The Exclusion of Felons from Jury Service

Introduction 67 I. What Is Constitutionally Permissible? 70 A. The Constitutionality of Allowing Felons to Serve on Juries 70 B. The Constitutionality of Barring Felons from Jury Service 71 1. The right to have a jury 71 2. Rationales 73 3. Cross-section 75 a. The meaning of the cross-section requirement...... 76 b. Application of the current standard 81 4. Equal protection 88 5. Due process 92 6. Fifteenth Amendment 94 7. Bill of attainder and ex post facto 97 C. Conclusion 99 II. General Policy Considerations 100 A. A History of Exclusion 100 B. Probity 102 C. Inherent Bias 105 D. Clemency 108 E. Administration 110 F. Racial Disparity 113 G. Prosecutorial Self-Dealing 114 H. The Ideal of Individualization 115
Meson Production and Baryon Resonances at CLAS

I give a brief overview of the exploration of baryon properties in meson photo- and electroproduction. These processes provide ample information for the study of electromagnetic couplings of baryon resonances and to search for states, yet to be discovered. The CLAS detector, combined with the use of energy-tagged polarized photons and polarized electrons, as well as polarized targets and the measurement of recoil polarization, provide the tools for a comprehensive nucleon resonance program. I briefly present the status of this program, prospects for the next few years, and plans for the Jefferson Lab 12 GeV upgrade.
Naked Exclusion with Private Offers

Abstract We consider a seller's ability to deter potential entrants by offering exclusive contracts to downstream buyers. Previous literature has shown that this can be a profitable strategy if there is a coordination failure on the part of the buyers or if the seller can make discriminatory “divide-and-conquer” offers. This literature assumes that all offers are public. We show that if buyers cannot observe each other's offers and have passive or wary out-of-equilibrium beliefs, the divide-and-conquer exclusion strategy fails. Equilibria in which the incumbent obtains exclusion due to a coordination failure, on the other hand, exist for all out-of-equilibrium beliefs. (JEL D43, D83, D86, L13, L22, L40)
A general model of customer-class pricing

Abstract A theory of utility customer-class pricing is developed, and a firm's pricing incentives under various objectives are derived. Rate of return regulation is shown to motivate non-optimal prices in an output counterpart to the Averch-Johnson effect.
Traffic Congestion and Infant Health: Evidence from E-ZPass

Evidence of the significant negative health externalities of traffic congestion are provided in this paper. The authors studied the effect of E-ZPass, and thus sharp reductions in local traffic congestion and emissions, on the health of infants. Specifically, infants born to mothers living near toll plazas were compared to infants born to mothers living near busy roadways but away from toll plazas. Differences in the health of infants born to the same mother, but who differ in terms of whether or not they were “exposed” to E-ZPass were also examined. It was found that reductions in traffic congestion generated by E-ZPass reduced the incidence of prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2km of a toll plaza by 10.8% and 11.8% respectively. Estimates from mother fixed effects models were very similar. The results suggest that traffic congestion is a significant contributor to poor health in affected infants. Estimates of the costs of traffic congestion should account for these important health externalities.
Measuring and Representing the Knowledge Economy: Accounting for Economic Reality under the Intangibles Paradigm

Enron has become a symbol: a symbol of excess, an illustration of how a company can base its business on fraudulent, deceptive or even largely non-existent business transactions. The collapse of Enron had a significant impact on the adoption of legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was intended to prevent the types of fraudulent behavior that occurred at Enron. However, Sarbanes-Oxley and other responses to the business practices of many companies during the late 1990s do not fully address some of the underlying factors that permitted and in fact encouraged the Enrons of the world to represent their companies in a particular fashion. Such legal interventions further do not address underlying factors rooted in the fact that many companies now operate within the context of knowledge economy intangibles paradigm business practices. Current securities law disclosure frameworks are largely based on an implicit assumption about the nature of companies' business operations. Such frameworks were developed during a time period in which the principal business model was one based on the exploitation of tangible assets. Since the latter half of the twentieth century and the advent of the knowledge economy or digital era, an increasing number of companies have begun operating under businesses models in which the predominant source of value comes from intangible resources. As a result of this fundamental change in business models, an intangibles "haze" has come to characterize the application of securities disclosure and accounting rules. This intangibles haze has meant that securities disclosures made by such companies, particularly as reflected in financial statements such as balance sheets, increasingly do not reflect underlying economic reality.
Human Shields in International Humanitarian Law

This chapter explores the international humanitarian law governing the use of human shields, a tragically prevalent tactic in contemporary warfare. It begins by setting forth the express prohibitions on the use of human shields. Of more concern is the issue of how the use of human shields affects an attacker’s obligations. The chapter distinguishes between compelled and voluntary shielding. It argues that those compelled to shield retain all the protections to which they are entitled as civilians during an attack. By contrast, those who voluntarily shield a military objective qualify as “direct participants in hostilities” who lose immunity from attack during the period of participation. Their status as direct participants also influences battlefield application of both the proportionality rule and the legal requirement to take feasible precautions in attack. The chapter concludes by suggesting that in cases of doubt as to whether shielding is voluntary, the shields should be treated as acting involuntarily.
Food Fears: Health and Safety at the WTO

Author(s): Guzman, Andrew T | Abstract: Within the next twelve to twenty-four months, the World Trade Organization (WTO) may have to rule on a dispute between the United States and the European Communities (EC) regarding genetically modified organisms (GMO). This Article explains why the organization’s current jurisprudence risks making this case and others like it an unnecessarily explosive and damaging one for the trading system.Existing WTO cases interpreting health and safety rules instruct panels and the Appellate Body to determine if there is a "rational relationship" between a challenged measure and the "risk assessment" that must be conducted before a measure is adopted. In making a ruling, therefore, panelists must evaluate scientific evidence, attempt to gage the defendant's willingness to tolerate risk, and assess the relationship between risk and the challenged measure.This Article argues that substantive review of this kind is unwise and unnecessarily threatens the stability of the international trading system. The WTO is poorly placed to evaluate either science or the risk preferences of states. In addition, when the WTO finds a violation of WTO obligations, the relatively weak enforcement mechanisms of the organization will often be insufficient to overcome the political salience of health and safety measures or the sovereignty implications of an international review of these domestic policies. The sanctions that accompany non-compliance generate additional barriers to trade and impose additional costs on the system. A refusal to comply is further harmful because it undermines the legitimacy of the WTO and generates conflict among the litigants.Similar costs may arise in any trade dispute, but they are especially likely in the context of the Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement (SPS), under which the WTO handles health and safety issues. This Article explains why the WTO should defer to domestic decisions on these issues rather than subject them to a substantive review. It also explains why procedural provisions in the SPS Agreement, along with non-discrimination and least restrictive alternative obligations, can effectively discipline states and discourage protectionist abuses.
The Demand for Corporate Law: Statutory Flexibility, Judicial Quality, or Takeover Protection?

This article provides an empirical examination of the determinants of firms' decisions where to incorporate. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, we find substantial evidence that firms are more likely to incorporate in states with corporate law rules that offer firms flexibility to devise their governance arrangement and significant but less robust evidence that firms are more likely to incorporate in states with higher quality judicial systems. Unlike prior studies, we find no evidence that firms are more or less likely to incorporate in states with anti-takeover statutes. The latter results are consistent with the hypothesis that anti-takeover statutes have no significant effect on a company's marginal ability to resist takeovers.
Performance effects of imitative entry

This article examines how waiting to imitate a product affects the performance of the imitator compared to the innovator. Specifically, we address two research questions. Under what conditions does imitation erode the advantage of the innovator? What strategies of imitators help overcome the innovator's advantage? Our main argument is that the increasing availability of information on the innovator's product increases the imitator's returns to waiting. With this increasing availability of information, imitators' products transition from those that are horizontally differentiated (products are similar in quality but differ in their attributes) to those that are vertically differentiated (products differ in quality). Thus, we hypothesize that shifts in the nature of competition over time from horizontal differentiation to vertical differentiation account for why the innovator's advantage is not preserved. Imitation timing simply reflects the uncertainty inherent in imitation efforts. One such uncertainty is the extent of product differentiation that the imitator can achieve. We develop several hypotheses that elaborate this basic intuition. We obtained detailed data on innovator-imitator competition in the branded drug industry to test the hypotheses. All our hypotheses are supported. The main contribution of the article is in showing that the nature of product differentiation in product categories is endogenous to the imitative entry decisions of firms. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Virtue of Obscurity

This Article provides a look at the United States v. Windsor opinion from a different perspective than Professor Meg Penrose.
Online Decision Making with High-Dimensional Covariates

Decision-makers increasingly have access to rich customer-specific data, providing an opportunity to make better, personalized service decisions. For example, in healthcare, doctors can personalize...
Can Liquidity Risk Explain Diseconomies of Scale in Hedge Funds

Using data from the Lipper TASS hedge fund database over the period 1994–2012, we examine the role of liquidity risk in explaining the relation between asset size and hedge fund performance. While a significant negative size-performance relation exists for all hedge funds, once we stratify our sample by liquidity risk, we find that such a relationship only exists among funds with the highest liquidity risk. Liquidity risk is found to be another important source of diseconomies of scale in the hedge fund industry. Evidently, for high liquidity risk funds, large funds are less able to recover from the relatively more significant losses incurred during market-wide liquidity crises, resulting in lower performance for large funds relative to small funds.
An operational decision model for lead-time and price quotation in congested manufacturing systems

Abstract This paper considers the problem of determining the lead-time and price to be quoted to a single order in a make-to-order manufacturing setting. The manufacturing system consists of several processing centers all subject to random failures and repairs. Because of a time window constraint on the delivery of the order, the latter has to be split among several processing centers to meet the constraint imposed on its delivery date. The assignment of lots to the processing centers is based on minimizing the operating cost associated with the entire order (i.e., its price). Two major cases are studied: the case of rushed order and the case of regular order. Each case has two options: Partial deliveries allowed and partial deliveries not allowed. Exact and heuristic algorithms are developed for each situation. Numerical results are used to draw conclusions and test the performance of the heuristics.
Creative Commons and the New Intermediaries

This symposium contribution examines the disintermediating and reintermediating roles played by Creative Commons licenses on the Internet. Creative Commons licenses act as a disintermediating force because they enable end-to-end transactions in copyrighted works. The licenses have reintermediating force by enabling new services and new online communities to form around content licensed under a Creative Commons license. Intermediaries focused on the copyright dimension have begun to appear online as search engines, archives, libraries, publishers, community organizers, and educators. Moreover, the growth of machinereadable copyright licenses and the new intermediaries that they enable is part of a larger movement toward a Semantic Web. As that effort progresses, we should expect new kinds of intermediaries that rely on machine-readable law to emerge.
Earnings management around employee stock option reissues

Abstract We investigate market behavior in a setting where managerial incentives to manipulate earnings and market price should be apparent ex ante to market participants. We find evidence of abnormally low discretionary accruals in the period following announcements of cancellations of executive stock options up to the time the options are reissued. Nevertheless, analysts and investors are not misled. Discretionary accruals have little power in explaining stock price performance during this period. Moreover, discretionary accruals do not explain subsequent analyst forecast errors. Thus, our findings suggest that, in this transparent setting, analysts and investors do not respond to earnings management.
The Price Is Right: Updating Inflation Expectations in a Randomized Price Information Experiment

Abstract Using a unique, randomized information experiment embedded in a survey, this paper investigates how consumers’ inflation expectations respond to new information. We find that respondents, on average, update their expectations in response to (certain types of) information, and do so sensibly, in a manner consistent with Bayesian updating. As a result of information provision, the distribution of inflation expectations converges toward its center and cross-sectional disagreement declines. We document heterogeneous information processing by gender and present suggestive evidence of respondents forecasting under asymmetric loss. Our results provide support for expectation-formation models in which agents form expectations rationally but face information constraints.
The severity of intermediate penal sanctions: A psychophysical scaling approach for obtaining community perceptions

The use of intensive supervision programs (ISPs) and other forms of intermediate penal sanctions is increasing in the United States. This paper describes a preliminary investigation of the extent to which informed New Jersey residents believe that intermediate sanctions that are currently being implemented in their state are severe. Using cross-modality matching of magnitude estimation techniques adopted from psychophysics, we obtained severity ratings of 32 sentences across six sentencing modalities (ISPs, probation, imprisonment, home detention, weekend sentencing, and fines) from respondents who had been briefed beforehand about what these sentences entail. Results indicate that our respondents agree that ISPs, weekend sentencing, and home detention have retributive “bite” and may be accepted as sentences in their own right. Probation was seen as being relatively lenient, while imprisonment was seen as highly severe.
Fertility and adaptation: Indochinese refugees in the United States.

Levels of fertility among Indochinese refugees in the United States are explored in the context of a highly compressed demographic transition implicit in the move from high-fertility Southeast Asian societies to a low-fertility resettlement region. A theoretical model is developed to explain the effect on refugee fertility of social background characteristics migration history and patterns of adaptation to a different economic and cultural environment controlling for marital history and length of residence in the U.S. The chief source for the data and analyses is the Indochinese Health and Adaptation Research Project (IHARP) San Diego State University. "Multiple regression techniques are used to test the model which was found to account for nearly half of the variation in refugee fertility levels in the United States. Fertility is much higher for all Indochinese ethnic groups than it is for American women; the number of children in refugee families is in turn a major determinant of welfare dependency. Adjustments for rates of natural increase indicate a total 1985 Indochinese population of over one million making it one of the largest Asian-origin populations in the United States." (EXCERPT)
The New Comparative Economics

In recent years, the field of comparative economics refocused on the comparison of capitalist economies. The theme of the new research is that institutions exert a profound influence on economic development. We argue that, to understand capitalist institutions, one needs to understand the basic tradeoff between the costs of disorder and those of dictatorship. We apply this logic to study the structure of efficient institutions, the consequences of colonial transplantation, and the politics of institutional choice. Journal of Comparative Economics31 (4) (2003) 595–619.
Reconsidering Conventional Explanations of the Inverse Productivity–Size Relationship

Summary The inverse productivity–size relationship is one of the oldest puzzles in development economics. Two conventional explanations for the inverse relationship have emerged in the literature: (i) factor market imperfections that cause cross-sectional variation in household-specific shadow prices and (ii) the omission of soil quality measurements. This study employs precise soil quality measurements at the plot level with multiple plots per household so as to test both conventional explanations simultaneously. Empirical results show that only a small portion of the inverse productivity–size relationship is explained by market imperfections and none of it seems attributable to the omission of soil quality measurements.
On the Appointment of a Latina/o to the Supreme Court

The possible appointment of a Latina or Latino Justice to the United States Supreme Court has been on the table for well over a decade. Its emergence as an issue worthy of serious discussion in some ways represents an acknowledgment of the growing Latina/o presence, and a movement away from Latina/o invisibility, in American social life. The much-publicized Census 2000 reveals that Hispanics currently comprise over 12.5 percent of the total U.S. population, or almost 35 million people, roughly approximating the number of African Americans in the country. Significantly higher concentrations of Latina/os live in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Arizona, and New Mexico. In light of the demographics, we should expect - some might say demand - to see a Latina/o on the Supreme Court in the twenty-first century. The possible nomination of a Latina/o, of course, raises a plethora of questions, including perplexing ideological ones. The partisan political issues implicated by a Supreme Court appointment bring to the forefront the diversity of political opinion, correlated to a certain degree with national origin ancestry, among Latina/os in the United States. This essay attempts to steer clear of the heated political questions implicated by a Supreme Court appointment at this time, namely the likely conservativism of a Latina/o nominated by a Republican President. Nor will the relative strengths and weaknesses of possible Latina/o nominees be discussed. Rather, I instead focus on the potential beneficial impact of the appointment of a qualified Latina or Latino to the Court as an institution, the Latina/o community, and the nation as a whole. Although a heterogenous community, Latina/os in the United States share important common experiences. Such commonalities suggest that a Latina/o Justice may bring new perspectives to the Supreme Court. The addition of a Latina/o voice holds the promise of improving the decision-making process on constitutional law, civil rights, and other matters. Moreover, just as Justice Thurgood Marshall's historic appointment in 1967 did for African Americans, a Latina/o appointment would send a powerful message of inclusion to the Latina/o community. In sum, depending on the individual, a Latina/o Justice could make a lasting difference.
Growth and Trade: The North Can Lose

Several models of growth and trade concludethat a country grows more when trading with a less developedcountry. This article shows that this conclusion depends cruciallyon the assuming homothetic preferences and/or having just twogoods with respect to learning-by-doing. The article presentsa model where the more advanced country (North) can be worseoff after trading with a less developed country (South) becausethe demand pattern of the South is biased toward Northern productswith less learning-by-doing potential. Trade can worsen the welfareif the South is large with respect to the North and/or the preferencefor low-technology goods is high; necessary conditions are thatthe preferences are nonhomotheticity and that the North exportsat least two types of goods. In this context, the article studiesthe welfare of North and South, separating the static from thedynamic gains from trade.
Major League Baseball Anti-Trust Immunity: Examining the Legal and Financial Implications of Relocation Rules

Major League Baseball (MLB) rules restrict the movement of any franchise into another’s territory. These territorial rules are designed to protect each team’s potential local revenue sources as well as to provide stability throughout the league. Recently, Major League Baseball approved financial compensation for the Washington Nationals’ move into the Baltimore Orioles’ territory – primarily because it was in the best interest of MLB even though it hurt the Orioles. However, the Oakland Athletics were unable to even negotiate a potential compensation plan for a move into the San Francisco Giants’ territory, despite the apparent financial benefit the move could have provided for every other league franchise. The Athletics are already located within 15 miles of the Giants, and their potential 40 mile move to San Jose, California would not add a new team to the San Francisco Bay Area; rather, it would simply be a move of a current team to a different location within the metropolitan area. The refusal of the Giants or MLB to negotiate a potential compromise has kept the Oakland Athletics in a substandard facility and has led to their potential move to Fremont, CA – a less desirable location than San Jose. This paper investigates the legal, policy, and financial considerations concerning Major League Baseball’s territorial rules. Specifically, it addresses antitrust law as it pertains to American professional sport; relevant sport franchise relocation cases; financial arguments why leagues desire to control relocation; financial components of MLB’s current Collective Bargaining Agreement; and the potential legal and financial impact of a challenge to MLB’s territorial rules – an option the Oakland Athletic initially investigated prior to their decision to pursue a potential move to Fremont.
Exports, investment and policy uncertainty

Building on a literature that underscores the value of delaying investment in the face of uncertainty, we study how policy uncertainty in 18 large economies affects exports to these economies. We decompose aggregate bilateral trade flows from 1995 to 2013 into intensive and extensive margin components and employ a gravity specification to assess the impact of policy uncertainty on each margin separately. Consistent with theory, increases in policy uncertainty decrease both trade values and the extensive margin but, if anything, increase the intensive margin. In further tests, we use various proxies for sunk export costs and demonstrate that the effects of policy uncertainty are more pronounced where sunk costs are higher.
Methodological Interventions and the Slavery Cases; or, Night-Thoughts of a Legal Realist

In thinking about conflicts theory, one comes up against the problem of immoral law. There is no neutral, abstract, predetermined choice rule that can confidently avoid immoral law, if immoral law is arguably applicable. The legal realists were right in supposing that the better the judge, the more disregardful of a rule that threatens to yield an unjust result. This paper briefly examines examples from two significant clusters of cases in this country about which we can say with some confidence that the judges had to face a choice of immoral law. These are cases involving slavery. In the first group are the cases of “sojourners” and other slaves with some legal claim to freedom, whether in the courts of the slave state or away. In the second group are cases about runaways, the “fugitive slaves” that were the subject of harsh federal law. These latter cases were only occasionally conflicts cases proper, notably in cases of conflict between federal law and more protective state law. But the underlying struggle against immoral law is made vivid in them. In the end a realist's rule, one that is not neutral, abstract,or predetermined, may impose itself upon the reluctant mind: the rule of justice in the individual case.
The subjective sense of feeling satiated

The traditional view of satiation is that repeated consumption produces an unavoidable decline in liking according to the quantity and recency of consumption. We challenge this deterministic view by showing that satiation is instead partially constructed in the moment based on contextual cues. More specifically, while satiation is a function of the actual amount consumed, it also depends on the subjective sense of how much one has recently consumed. We demonstrate the influence of this subjective sense of satiation and show that it is driven by metacognitive cues such as the ease of retrieval of past experiences (Experiments 1 and 2) and can also be directly manipulated by providing a normative standard for consumption quantity (Experiment 3). Our research demonstrates that satiety is not driven solely by the amount and timing of past consumption, thereby establishing the role of higher order metacognitive inferences in satiation and providing insight into how they underlie the construction of satiation.
Big Blue Bump and Transient Active Regions in Seyfert Galaxies

An important feature of the EUV spectrum (known as the Big Blue Bump, hereafter BBB) in Seyfert galaxies is the narrow range in its cutoff energy Ec from source to source, even though the luminosity changes by 4 orders of magnitude. Here we show that if the BBB is due to accretion disk emission, then in order to account for this "universality" in the value of Ec, the emission mechanism is probably optically thin bremsstrahlung. In addition, we demonstrate that the two-phase model with active regions localized on the surface of the cold disk is consistent with this constraint if the active regions are very compact and are highly transient, i.e., they evolve faster than one dynamical timescale.
Beyond Lessig's Code for Internet Privacy: Cyberspace Filters, Privacy Control, and Fair Information Practices

In Code, the most influential book yet written about law and cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig makes an intriguing proposal for shaping privacy on the Internet: (1) the legal assignment to every individual of a property interest in her own personal information, and (2) the employment of software transmission protocols, such as P3P, to permit the individual to structure her access to Web sites. In "Beyond Lessig's Code for Internet Privacy: Cyberspace Filters, Privacy Control, and Fair Information Practices," 2000 Wisc. L. Rev. 743, I respond to this approach with a number of criticisms and a competing proposal. My initial criticism of Lessig's proposal for privacy concerns how it contradicts his stand against PICs, a software transmission protocol for filtering Internet content reminiscent of P3P. Once we place privacy in a social context, moreover, P3P seems far less attractive an option. In place of Lessig's underlying paradigm, which seeks to increase personal control of data. I develop a concept of constitutive privacy. In my view, information privacy is a constitutive value that safeguards participation and association in a free society. Rather than simply seeking to allow more and more individual control of personal data, we should view the normative function of information privacy as inhering in its relation to participatory democracy and individual self-determination. A privacy market can play a role in helping information privacy fulfill this constitutive function. Yet, Lessig's propertization of privacy raises a further set of difficulties. In my view, propertization a la Lessig will only heighten flaws in the current market for personal data. This consequence follows from numerous shortcomings in this market and structural difficulties that indicate the unlikelihood of a self-correction in it. Moreover, in revisiting Calabresi and Melamed's work regarding the comparative merits of property and liability regimes, I find that a mixed regime is to be preferred for Internet privacy over Lessig's property regime. Part III of this Article turns from criticism to prescription and develops the mixture of property and liability rules necessary for establishment of information privacy standards in cyberspace. It proposes recourse to Fair Information Practices (FIPs) to establish rules for the fair treatment of personal data on the Internet. Yet, FIPs are not without potential shortcomings if structured only as command-and-control rules. My suggestion therefore is that an American Internet privacy law consisting of FIPs should include both mandatory and default elements.
Empirical entry games with complementarities: An application to the shopping center industry

Abstract The author proposes a strategic model of entry that allows for positive and negative spillovers among firms. The model is applied to a novel data set containing information about the store configurations of all U.S. regional shopping centers and is used to quantify the magnitude of interstore spillovers. The author addresses the estimation difficulties that arise due to the presence of multiple equilibria by formulating the entry game as a mathematical problem with equilibrium constraints (MPEC). Although this study constitutes the first attempt to use this direct optimization approach to address a specific empirical problem, the method can be used in a wide range of structural estimation problems. The empirical results support the agglomeration and clustering theories that predict that firms may have incentives to colocate despite potential business stealing effects. The author shows that the firms' negative and positive strategic effects help predict both how many firms can operate profitably i...