cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Determinants of the Informativeness of Analyst Research

Abstract We examine cross-sectional determinants of the informativeness of analyst research, i.e., their effect on security prices, controlling for endogeneity among the factors affecting informativeness. Analyst reports are more informative when the potential brokerage profits are higher (e.g., high trading volume, high volatility, and high institutional ownership) and lower when information processing costs (e.g., more business segments) are high. We also find that the informativeness of analyst research and informativeness of financial statements are complements.
Criminal Lying, Prosecutorial Power, and Social Meaning

This article concerns the prosecution of defensive dishonesty in the course of federal investigations. It sketches a conceptual framework for violations of 18 U.S.C. § 1001 and related false-statement charges, distinguishes between harmful deception and the typical investigative interaction, and describes the range of lies that fall within the wide margins of the offense. It then places these cases in a socio-legal context, suggesting that some false-statement charges function as penalties for defendants’ refusal to expedite investigations into their own wrongdoing. In those instances, the government positions itself as the victim of the lying offense and reasserts its authority through prosecution. Enforcement decisions in marginal criminal lying cases are driven by efficiency rather than accuracy goals, which may produce unintended consequences. Using false-statement charges as pretexts for other harms can diminish transparency and mute signals to comply. Accountability also suffers when prosecutors can effectively create offenses, and when it is the interaction with the government itself rather than conduct with freestanding illegality that forms the core violation. The disjunction between prosecutions and social norms about defensive dishonesty may also result in significant credibility costs and cause some erosion of voluntary compliance. Animating the materiality requirement in the statute with attention to the harm caused or risked by particular false statements could mitigate these distortions. An inquiry into the objective impact of a false statement might account for the nature of the underlying conduct under investigation, whether the questioning at issue is pretextual, whether the lie is induced, and whether the deception succeeds or could succeed in harming the investigation. By taking materiality seriously, courts could curtail prosecutorial discretion and narrow application of the statute to cases where prosecution harmonizes with social norms.
Are Investors Influenced By How Earnings Press Releases Are Written

This two-part study begins with a rhetorical analysis of the genre of earnings press releases. Then, a quantitative analysis uses capital markets data to assess the investor impact of tone and othe...
Revisiting Contra Non Valentem in Light of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita

Shortly after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Governor Kathleen Blanco responded by issuing a series of executive orders for the retroactive suspension of all prescriptive and preemptive periods for all legal proceedings throughout the state. While it was ostensibly both rational and practical to suspend prescriptive and preemptive periods, this approach was problematic for two reasons: (1) there was a narrow window (a day) within which the legislature had to act before the suspension of prescription was either impermissibly retroactive or neglected claims that prescribed during or after the hurricanes; and (2) the hurricanes invariably affected litigants in different ways. A better response would have been to resort to a doctrine that Louisiana and other civil law jurisdictions have recognized for hundreds of years for the suspension of prescription: contra non valentem. This Comment traces the evolution of contra non valentem from its roots in Roman law to Louisiana’s treatment of the doctrine and analyzes its application in situations where a factual impediment prevents attorneys from complying with applicable prescriptive or peremptive periods. For a comparative perspective, of this Comment explores how other civil law jurisdictions have treated the doctrine of contra non valentem in similar situations and also evaluates how common law jurisdictions handle similar matters without the doctrine. This Comment evaluates the post-hurricane legislation that retroactively revived prescribed claims in terms of overbreadth and impermissible retroactivity. Finally, in light of the challenges presented by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, this Comment recommends the use of contra non valentem in future situations where a factual impediment prevents attorneys from complying with prescriptive and peremptive periods.
More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior

Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? There is considerable debate about the validity of data extracted from social media for studying offline behavior. To address this issue, we show that there is a statistically significant association between tweets that mention a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives and his or her subsequent electoral performance. We demonstrate this result with an analysis of 542,969 tweets mentioning candidates selected from a random sample of 3,570,054,618, as well as Federal Election Commission data from 795 competitive races in the 2010 and 2012 U.S. congressional elections. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district's racial and gender composition. Our findings show that reliable data about political behavior can be extracted from social media.
Learning to surf: Spillovers in the adoption of the Internet

Abstract This paper develops an identification strategy to generate unbiased estimates of Internet usage spillovers using a unique data set of US households. This strategy addresses the effects of variables that affect consumers' decisions but are unobservable to the researcher that lead to biased estimates. The estimator developed here examines changes in household behavior over time and uses county level instrumental variables for county level spillover measures. Multiple potential sources of learning are identified including those from the household's locality, from educational Internet subsidies, and from universities. There is general support for all sources, but the locality and subsidy results are both more robust and larger. These findings directly address the policy relevance of these spillover sources and they have implications for policies to encourage Internet use as well as for identification strategies for the effects of the Internet on behavior.
In Search of True Public Arts Support

Most of the debate over government arts support focuses on direct subsidies to nonprofit arts organizations. In this article, however, I show that a much larger amount of public sector money comes from indirect aid, in the form of tax revenues forgone on tax-deductible contributions by individuals. Specifically, every dollar in direct federal arts funding is accompanied by about $14 in indirect aid. Analysis of the 1996 General Social Survey shows that private givers and supporters of direct government aid fit different demographic profiles, meaning that direct and indirect funding owe to distinct constituencies. These findings lead to a number of implications for nonprofit and public arts managers.
The Post-Shelby County Game

Prior to 2008, the system of voting rights as established by the Voting Rights Act (VRA) entailed a stable Nash Equilibrium among the players. Developments in that year and thereafter destroyed the Equilibrium, resulting in the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Shelby County v. Holder. That opinion has triggered what I call the Post-Shelby County game. In the shortterm, this game will favor jurisdictions that wish to enact discriminatory voting rules. In the medium-term, it will lead to a system of voting rights that is unstable, unpredictable, and unfair for both minority voters and jurisdictions. In the long-term, a new version of the VRA will emerge that is a better fit to current patterns of discrimination than the law the Shelby Court considered. This will be a salutary result, but also one that will have to address both pre-Shelby County discrimination and new discrimination that will have arisen because of the Court’s opinion. This will also have been an unnecessary result, because the Shelby Court should not have invalidated section 4(b) of the VRA.
The Causes and Consequences of Wal-Mart's Growth

Wal-Mart is the largest company in the world, yet little is known about its economic impact. This essay discusses what is known about Wal-Mart’s competitive advantage and its economic impact on local communities, as well as the national and global economy, and highlights the open questions to be addressed by future research.
Internet auctions with artificial adaptive agents: A study on market design

Abstract We develop a model of internet auctions with the aim of understanding how rules for ending such auctions (a “hard”- or “soft”-close) affect bidding behavior. We model bidding strategies using finite automata and report results from simulations involving populations of artificial bidders who update their strategies using a genetic algorithm. Our model is shown to deliver late or early bidding behavior, depending on whether the auction has a hard- or soft-close rule in accordance with the empirical evidence. We report on other interesting properties of our model and offer some conclusions from a market design point of view.
Money, Search and Costly Matchmaking

I examine the robustness of monetary equilibria in a random-matching model, where a more efficient mechanism for trade is available. Agents choose between two trading sectors: the search and the intermediated sector. In the former, trade partners arrive randomly and there is a trading externality. In the latter, a costly matching technology provides deterministic double-coincidence matches. Multiple equilibria exist with the extent of costly matching endogenously determined. Money and “mediated” trade may coexist. This depends on the size of the probability of a trade, relative to the cost of deterministic matching. This outcome is inferior for an increasing-returns externality. Under certain conditions, regimes with only costly matching are welfare superior to monetary regimes with random matching.
The Drug Court Paradigm

Drug courts are specialized, problem-oriented diversion programs. Qualifying offenders receive treatment and intense court-supervision from these specialized criminal courts, rather than standard incarceration. Although a body of scholarship critiques drug courts and recent sentencing reforms, few scholars explore the drug court movement's influence on recent sentencing policies outside the context of specialized courts. This Article explores the broader effects of the drug court movement, arguing that it created a particular paradigm that states have adopted to manage overflowing prison populations. This drug court paradigm has proved attractive to politicians and reformers alike because it facilitates sentencing reforms for low-level, nonviolent drug offenders that provide treatment-oriented diversions from incarceration. Though reforms adopted within the drug court paradigm have contributed to stabilizing prison populations and have created a national platform to discuss mass incarceration, this paradigm has limits that may prevent long-term reductions in prison populations. This Article identifies three limitations of the drug court paradigm: First, by focusing exclusively on low-level drug offenders, the approach detrimentally narrows analysis of the problem of mass incarceration; second, by presenting a "solution," it obscures the ways that recent reforms may exacerbate mass incarceration; third, by emphasizing a focus on treatmentoriented reforms, this paradigm aggressively inserts the criminal justice system into the private lives of an expanding mass of citizens. This Article locates the current frame's origin in the drug court movement. Identifying this connection is important for two reasons: First, it provides new insight to how we define "success" in criminal justice, and why. Second, it illuminates a growing tension between government actors and the general public 's appetite for criminal justice reforms that meaningfully reduce mass incarceration. * Associate Professor, Indiana University Maurer School of Law and former counsel, Justice Program, Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. J.D. & M.A. in Literature, Duke University; B.A., Spelman College. Thanks to Kimberly Taylor-Thompson, Eric J. Miller, Guy Charles, Sara Sun Beale, Richard Meyers, Aviva Orenstein, Deborah Widiss, Joseph Hoffman, Tim Casey, participants of the 2015 Big Ten Junior Scholars Conference and the faculties at Notre Dame Law School, and Wisconsin School of Law for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this Article. Additionally, thanks to Rebecca Maller, Rucha Desai, and Elliot Edwards for their research assistance in preparing this Article. © 2016, Jessica M. Eaglin. AMERICAN CRIMINAL LAW REVIEW
Personal Preferences, Entrepreneurs’ Location Choices, and Firm Performance

Whereas early location work established the role of economic factors in entrepreneurs’ location choices, recent studies suggest personal reasons as another factor. However, because the places where entrepreneurs want to live are often the places where they will likely do well, it is difficult to empirically separate the two mechanisms. We focus on entrepreneurs founding firms abroad, allowing us to more effectively isolate the effect of personal location attractiveness. We leverage entrepreneurs’ decisions to relocate and manage their firms personally or to remain in a home country and hire a manager. We find that entrepreneurs who view a host country as an attractive location are more likely to relocate and manage their firms personally. However, such entrepreneur-managers have lower firm performance. These results are consistent with the idea that entrepreneurs are more likely to reside in personally attractive places and are willing to substitute benefits of living there for some firm profit. This pape...
Optical absorbers based on strong interference in ultra-thin films

Optical absorbers find uses in a wide array of applications across the electromagnetic spectrum, including photovoltaic and photochemical cells, photodetectors, optical filters, stealth technology, and thermal light sources. Recent efforts have sought to reduce the footprint of optical absorbers, conventionally based on graded structures or Fabry-Perot-type cavities, by using emerging concepts in plasmonics, metamaterials, and metasurfaces. Unfortunately, these new absorber designs require patterning on subwavelength length scales, and are therefore impractical for many large-scale optical and optoelectronic devices. In this article, we summarize recent progress in the development of optical absorbers based on lossy films with thicknesses significantly smaller than the incident optical wavelength. These structures have a small footprint and require no nanoscale patterning. We outline the theoretical foundation of these absorbers based on “ultra-thin-film interference”, including the concepts of loss-induced phase shifts and critical coupling, and then review several applications, including ultra-thin color coatings, decorative photovoltaics, high-efficiency photochemical cells, and infrared scene generators.
Discrete choice cannot generate demand that is additively separable in own price

Abstract We show that in a unit demand discrete choice framework with at least three goods, demand cannot be additively separable in own price. This result sharpens the analogous result of Jaffe and Weyl (2010) in the case of linear demand and has implications for testing of the discrete choice assumption, out-of-sample prediction, and welfare analysis.
Understanding Citizen Perspectives on Government Decision-Making Processes as a Way to Improve the Administrative State

This Article explores possible insights from the “procedural justice” literature about features of government decision making processes that citizens are likely to consider to be particularly valuable or important. Numerous commentators have urged that the government take steps to increase citizen participation in its decision making processes as a way to offset concerns about government legitimacy. The premise of the Article is that incorporating into government decision making processes features that are important to citizens is a potentially helpful step in fostering meaningful citizen participation. Processes that citizens value are more likely to be processes that citizens use and that enhance citizen confidence in government, while processes with features that citizens find unsatisfactory are more likely to be processes that do not engender meaningful citizen input; they may even operate to undermine citizen confidence. This Article reviews a framework that the procedural justice literature proposes for assessing citizen satisfaction with decision making processes, and it applies this framework to an international decision making process that relies heavily on citizen participation, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation’s (CEC) citizen submissions process. This process, which empowers citizens to file complaints in which they claim that any of the North American countries is failing to effectively enforce one or more of its environmental laws, was created with the hope that it would increase government accountability and transparency, and inform and thereby improve the exercise of agency discretion. This Article considers the track record of the process in light of the procedural justice literature in an effort to advance thinking about the design of government
Supply disruptions, heterogeneous beliefs, and production efficiencies

Recent years have witnessed the pervasive supply disruptions and their impacts on supply chain performance. In this study, we investigate the optimal procurement design with supply disruptions and heterogeneous beliefs between the buyer and the supplier. We examine the impact of information asymmetry on the supplier's belief, the control right of the backup production, and the verifiability of supply disruption. The belief heterogeneity creates speculative gains and losses because the buyer and the supplier hold different estimates of the disruption probability. We demonstrate that the buyer's incentive to exploit this belief heterogeneity leads to real production inefficiencies in different scenarios. The production efficiency is not necessarily improved with more transparent information. Moreover, a very pessimistic supplier may have no incentive to invest in improving the reliability even if this is costless, and the supplier may produce more when the expected production cost becomes higher. When the buyer sees some value in using the supplier's estimate to update his own belief, we find that the main results hold unless the buyer completely abandons his belief.
License auctions with royalty contracts for (winners and) losers

This paper revisits the licensing of a non-drastic process innovation by an outside innovator to a Cournot oligopoly. We propose a new mechanism that combines a restrictive license auction with royalty licensing. This mechanism is more profitable than standard license auctions, auctioning royalty contracts, fixed-fee licensing, pure royalty licensing, and two-part tariffs. The key features are that royalty contracts are auctioned and that losers of the auction are granted the option to sign a royalty contract. Remarkably, combining royalties for winners and losers of the auction makes the integer constraint concerning the number of licenses irrelevant.
Orphans Deserve Attention: Financial Reporting in the Missing Months When Corporations Change Fiscal Year

ABSTRACT: We examine firms' financial reporting practices during the missing months that are induced by fiscal year changes and not covered by regular quarters. We find that firms tend to report much lower income for the missing months than for adjacent quarters, mainly by recording higher operating expenses. We also find that managers have various incentives to manage earnings. Executive compensation is not tied to firm performance in the transition period as it is in adjacent fiscal years. Growth firms, firms with poor stock returns, and firms with weak external and internal monitoring tend to manage earnings more. Finally, we find that firms are more likely to meet or beat earnings targets in the subsequent quarter by reporting lower income in the missing months. Investors and analysts perceive the earnings surprise to be less persistent in the quarter after than in the quarter before the missing months. Data Availability: Data are available from sources identified in the paper.
Betrayal Aversion: When Agents of Protection Become Agents of Harm

A form of betrayal occurs when agents of protection cause the very harm that they are entrusted to guard against. Examples include the military leader who commits treason and the exploding automobile air bag. We conducted five studies that examined how people respond to criminal betrayals, safety product betrayals, and the risk of future betrayal by safety products. We found that people reacted more strongly (in terms of punishment assigned and negative emotions felt) to acts of betrayal than to identical bad acts that do not violate a duty or promise to protect. We also found that, when faced with a choice among pairs of safety devices (air bags, smoke alarms, and vaccines), most people preferred inferior options (in terms of risk exposure) to options that included a slim (0.01%) risk of betrayal. However, when the betrayal risk was replaced by an equivalent non-betrayal risk, the choice pattern was reversed. Apparently, people are willing to incur greater risks of the very harm they seek protection from to avoid the mere possibility of betrayal.
The attributes, behavior, and performance of U.S. mutual funds

This article examines the risk and return characteristics of U.S. mutual funds. We employ an equilibrium version of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) and a principal-components-based statistical technique to identify performance benchmarks. We also consider the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) as an alternative. We implement a procedure for overcoming the rotational indeterminacy of factor models. This procedure is a hybrid of statistical factor estimation and prespecification of factors. We estimate measures of timing ability for the CAPM and extend it to the APT. We find that this timing test is misspecified due to noninformation-based changes in mutual fund betas. We develop a modification of the timing measure that, under certain conditions, distinguishes true timing ability from noninformation-based beta changes.
On the Inevitable Arbitrariness of Market Definitions

This chapter analyzes the concepts of classical and antitrust (economic) markets. More specifically, Sects. 6.1 and 6.2 respectively explain why the definitions of “classical economic markets” and so-called antitrust markets are inevitably arbitrary not just at their peripheries but comprehensively. In so doing, Sect. 6.1 reveal the “cost”-ineffectiveness of the conventional approaches to antitrust-law application and antitrust-policy design, which pay considerable attention to the pre-choice and/or post-choice magnitudes of parameters whose definition assumes that relevant markets can be defined non-arbitrarily (e.g., on perpetrator-market-share, conventional-market-concentration, and HHI figures) and (2) explain why this study’s policy-analysis protocols do not instruct the analyst to base decisions on the magnitude of any market-aggregated parameter.
The IMF and Russia in the 1990s

This paper explains the IMF's impact on economic policies in Russia, focusing on where the IMF made a difference. The Russian economic and political leadership essentially determined economic policies. The IMF's influence was modest: it had a limited impact on overall fiscal policy and major structural reforms, but it had a positive impact on monetary policy. A tougher position on fiscal policy in 1996-98 might have produced a better outcome. The G-7's concerns weakened the IMF. However, the IMF played a major role in transferring knowledge about macroeconomic policymaking and implementation. Copyright 2006, International Monetary Fund
Equilibrium Dynamics in a Two-Sector Model with Taxes

Abstract In this paper we are concerned with the equilibrium dynamics of a two-sector model of endogenous growth with distortionary taxes. We show that for certain parameters values and tax schemes every equilibrium orbit—except the steady state solution—is non-interior; i.e., there are times in which one of the sectors is inactive. This analysis confirms that in multisector models the set of easily checkable, universal conditions that can guarantee the interiority of equilibrium solutions is rather limited. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D90, E22.
Black Is Profitable: The Commodification of the Afro, 1960–1975

The Afro originated in the United States as a style worn by a tiny minority of cosmopolitan black women and developed as a prominent symbol of racial pride in the mid-1960s. Responding to the Afro's grassroots popularity, the African American beauty culture industry mounted a largely successful effort to transform the style from political statement to fashion commodity. But the commodification of the Afro was not exclusively a cynical exploitation of a political symbol. Rather, the selling of the Afro often entailed a complex blending of ideals, goals, and motivations based, to varying degrees, on considerations of fashion, politics, and the bottom line.
Implementing the Chief Financial Officers Act and the Government Performance and Results Act in the Federal Government

The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 and the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, along with other legislation passed by Congress, are stimulating major financial management reform in the federal government. This article evaluates reform implementation against nine criteria developed in previous research on this topic. The criteria are accounting system adequacy, congressional intent, ability of Congress to use financial statement data, executive branch implementation incentives, capability of the Office of Management and Budget, utility of financial statements for decision making, use of performance measures in budgeting, coordination of federal organizations charged with implementation responsibility, and executive and congressional support for reform.
The Effects of Securitization on Mortgage Market Yields: A Cointegration Analysis

Securitization of the residential mortgage market has completely transformed the process of financing home loans in the U.S. over the last two decades. We examine the effects of securitization on yield spreads in the primary mortgage market. Cointegration techniques are employed to test the relationship between the increasing volume of mortgage securities over time and the yield spread on mortgage loan rates. We find that a 10% increase in the level of mortgage securitization as a proportion of total mortgage originations decreases yield spreads on home loans by as much as 20 basis points. Other results indicate that, while prepayment speed has a significant effect on mortgage yield spreads, default risk does not. We conclude that securitization of the residential mortgage market plays an important role in decreasing the cost of home loans.
Market Reactions to Tangible and Intangible Information Revisited

Daniel and Titman (2006) propose that the value premium is due to investors overreacting to intangible information. They therefore decompose five-year changes in firmsâ€™ book-to-market ratios into stock returns and a residual that is a proxy for tangible information based on accounting performance (â€œbook returnsâ€ ). Consistent with investors overreacting to intangible information, they find that only stock returns orthogonal to book returns reverse. We show that their decomposition creates a book return polluted by past book-to-market ratios, stock returns, net issuances, and dividends. Empirically, twofifths of the variation in book returns is due to these factors. In addition, the Daniel and Titman (2006) result is sensitive to methodological choices. When we use the change in the book value of equity as a proxy for tangible information, only the tangible component of stock returns reverses. Moreover, current book-to-market subsumes the intangible returnâ€™s power to predict the cross-section of average returns, which casts doubt on the argument that book-to-market forecasts returns because it is a good proxy for the intangible return.
A Downwind View of the Cathedral: Using Rule Four to Allocate Wind Rights

The rapid pace of U.S. wind energy development is generating a growing number of conflicts over competing wind rights. The “wake” of a commercial wind turbine creates turbulence and unsteady wind flow that can reduce the productivity of other wind turbines situated downwind. Existing law is unclear as to whether a landowner who installs a wind turbine on its property is liable for the lost productivity of a downwind neighbor’s turbine resulting from such wake effects. Legal uncertainty as to how competing wind rights are shared among neighbors can induce wind energy developers to abandon otherwise lucrative turbine sites situated near property lines, thus forfeiting valuable wind resources. This paper applies Calabresi and Melamed’s familiar “Cathedral” model to determine which rule regime would best promote the efficient allocation of competing wind rights while maintaining consistency with existing law. Surprisingly, the Cathedral model’s infamous and rarely-applied “Rule Four” seems best-suited for addressing these conflicts.
Risk and return in an equilibrium APT: Application of a new test methodology

Abstract We use an asymptotic principal components technique to estimate the pervasive factors influencing asset returns and to test the restrictions imposed by static and intertemporal equilibrium versions of the arbitrage pricing theory (APT) on a multivariate regression model. The empirical techniques allow for fairly arbitrary time variation in risk premiums. We find that the APT provides a better description of the expected returns on assets than the capital asset pricing model (CAPM). However, some statistically reliable mispricing of assets by the APT remains.
Optimizing spectral quality with quantum dots to enhance crop yield in controlled environments

Bioregenerative life-support systems (BLSS) involving plants will be required to realize self-sustaining human settlements beyond Earth. To improve plant productivity in BLSS, the quality of the solar spectrum can be modified by lightweight, luminescent films. CuInS2/ZnS quantum dot (QD) films were used to down-convert ultraviolet/blue photons to red emissions centered at 600 and 660 nm, resulting in increased biomass accumulation in red romaine lettuce. All plant growth parameters, except for spectral quality, were uniform across three production environments. Lettuce grown under the 600 and 660 nm-emitting QD films respectively increased edible dry mass (13 and 9%), edible fresh mass (11% each), and total leaf area (8 and 13%) compared with under a control film containing no QDs. Spectral modifications by the luminescent QD films improved photosynthetic efficiency in lettuce and could enhance productivity in greenhouses on Earth, or in space where, further conversion is expected from greater availability of ultraviolet photons. Parrish et al. demonstrate the modification of an incoming solar spectrum through downconversion of high energy UV/blue photons into orange/red photons using luminescent quantum dot films, leading to improved growth of leaf vegetables. Such technology can improve greenhouse productivity while reducing energy costs and can be useful to realize self-sustaining human settlements beyond Earth.
To Attach or Not To Attach: The Continued Confusion Regarding Search Warrants and the Incorporation of Supporting Documents

The Fourth Amendment mandates that a search warrant particularly describe what is to be searched or seized. Courts have allowed officers to use supporting documentation, such as affidavits and other attachments, to define, but not expand, the limits of a search. However, the use of these supporting documents creates a problem when the document is referenced in the warrant but is not physically attached to the warrant. This Note argues that the protection of the Fourth Amendment is not the warrant itself, but the guarantee that a warrant, fully detailing the search to be undertaken, has been approved by a neutral magistrate.
Politicians, Taxes and Debt

The standard analysis of the efficient management of income taxes and debt assumes a benevolent government and ignores potential distortions arising from rent-seeking politicians. This paper departs from this framework by assuming that a rent-seeking politician chooses policies. If the politician chooses extractive policies, citizens throw him out of power. We analyse the efficient sustainable equilibrium. Unlike in the standard economy, temporary economic shocks generate volatile and persistent changes in taxes along the equilibrium path. This serves to optimally limit rent-seeking by the politician and to optimally generate support for the politician from the citizens. Taxes resembling those of the benevolent government are very costly since the government over-saves and resources are wasted on rents. Political distortions thus cause the complete debt market to behave as if it were incomplete. However, in contrast to an incomplete market economy, in the long run, taxes do not converge to zero, and under some conditions, they resemble taxes under a benevolent government.
Investment, Pass-Through and Exchange Rates: A Cross-Country Comparison

Using detailed data from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan, we examine the implications of exchange rates for time series of sectoral investment. Both theoretically and empirically, we show that investment responsiveness to exchange rates varies over time, positively in relation to sectoral reliance on export share and negatively with respect to the share of imported inputs in production. Important differences exist in investment endogeneity across high- and low-price-over-cost markup sectors, with investment in low-markup sectors often significantly more responsive to exchange rates. Cross-country differences in investment response are only partially explained by industrial organization arguments.
Towards a Theory of Current Accounts

The current accounts data of industrial countries exhibits some strong patterns that are inconsistent with the intertemporal approach to the current account. This is the basic model that international economists have been using for more than two decades to think about current account issues. This paper shows that it is possible to go a long way towards reconciling the theory and the data by introducing two additional features to the basic model: investment risk and adjustment costs to investment. Moreover, these extensions generate new and unexpected theoretical predictions that receive substantial support in the data. The overall message is therefore positive: with a couple of reasonable modifications, the intertemporal approach to the current account provides a fairly good description of the industrial country data.
DOES POLLUTION INCREASE SCHOOL ABSENCES

LTHOUGH substantial policy initiatives are aimed at reducing air pollution, uncertainty remains about the nature and extent of benefits from these actions. Existing epidemiological studies point to a variety of health impacts, but it remains difficult to assess the economic or social values of these impacts. It is also difficult to be confident that existing studies separate the causal impacts of pollution from correlated effects of neighborhoods, poverty, and a variety of household choices. We focus on how pollution affects school absences. By matching detailed schooling records with variations in the level of specific pollutants, we are able to establish a strong link to school absences. A large literature links child health and human capital attainment. Grossman and Kaestner (1997) summarize this literature and point to school absences as a major causal link in this relationship: children who miss a lot of school achieve poorer grades, are less engaged with school, and are more likely to drop out. Absences are also of concern to parents, who have to miss work, and to school districts, because state funding frequently depends on attendance. In states where funding depends on student attendance, schools can lose as much as $50 per day per unexcused absence. Nonetheless, policy interventions that might reduce absences are less clear. Air pollution is a possible cause of school absence for some children. Children with respiratory problems such as
Sovereign Securitization in Emerging Markets

Over many years, securitization has proven to be an expedient and highly flexible refinancing tool for corporations and public-sector entities that seek a more accurate capital-market based valuation of asset performance. After successful securitization by public-sector entities in advanced countries, sovereigns in emerging economies are also becoming adept at securitization as an efficient means of asset-liability management. This article critically surveys the recent developments of sovereign securitization in emerging markets and informs a more specific debate about the attendant infrastructural, legal, and regulatory challenges. Amid higher risk premia in a changing interest rate cycle, the current trend of greater investor differentiation in emerging markets creates a benign environment for sovereign securitization to accommodate continued demand for highly rated debt by institutional investors.
Conditional value-at-risk: Aspects of modeling and estimation

This paper considers flexible conditional (regression) measures of market risk. Value-at-Risk modeling is cast in terms of the quantile regression function – the inverse of the conditional distribution function. A basic specification analysis relates its functional forms to the benchmark models of returns and asset pricing. We stress important aspects of measuring the extremal and intermediate conditional risk. An empirical application characterizes the key economic determinants of various levels of conditional risk.
The Uneasy Case for Software Copyrights Revisited

Forty years ago, Justice Stephen Breyer expressed serious doubts about the economic soundness of extending copyright protection to computer programs in his seminal article, "The Uneasy Case for Copyright." This article revisits "The Uneasy Case" to consider whether Breyer's skepticism about copyright for computer programs was warranted at the time, as well as whether the case for copyrighting computer programs has become easier over time.
Beyond Deportation: Understanding Immigration Prosecutorial Discretion and United States V. Texas

In this article, I place the Supreme Court case of United States v. Texas into a broader context by describing the history and legal authority for prosecutorial discretion in immigration law and highlighting the contents and recommendations in my book, Beyond Deportation: The Role of Prosecutorial Discretion in Immigration Cases. Part I of this article offers a primer on the role of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law and also describes two related programs announced by President Obama on November 20, 2014 and the subject of litigation for nearly two years as of this writing. Part II provides a history and analysis of United States v. Texas, a lawsuit originally brought by the state of Texas and twenty-five other states and decided on June 23, 2016. This section offers highlights from the oral arguments held at the U.S. Supreme Court and my position on the winning arguments. Part III raises normative questions about the implementation, legitimacy, and continued enforcement of immigration law against “priorities” identified by the government. Part IV discusses my book Beyond Deportation, which includes a history about discretion, my efforts to obtain data about the individuals who receive discretion and recommendations moving forward.
Smart cuts?: Strategic planning, performance management and budget cutting in U.S. cities during the great recession

Periods of fiscal decline present an opportunity for city officials to transform their local government into a leaner and more effective organization by targeting cuts to non-essential programs and services. However, the political nature of the fiscal retrenchment process means that such opportunity is often squandered. Could the application of strategic planning and performance management in cutback management lead to a more focused and targeted budget cutting? Advocates of rational management believe that information gathering, analysis and use in decision-making can help local governments adapt to a fiscal crisis by facilitating targeted cuts in expenditures that preserve administrative capacity, and avoiding across-the-board cuts that trim both the organization's muscle and fat. The results of this research show that rational analytic techniques do matter in budget cutting.
How Diversity Can Redeem the McDonnell Douglas Standard: Mounting an Effective Title VII Defense of the Commitment to Diversity in the Legal Profession

* Assistant Professor, Rutgers School of Law–Camden. I would like to thank the Rutgers Camden Junior Faculty for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this Article, as well as the participants of the colloquium on The Challenge of Equity and Inclusion in the Legal Profession: An International and Comparative Perspective held at Fordham University School of Law. For an overview of the colloquium, see Deborah L. Rhode, Foreword: Diversity in the Legal Profession: A Comparative Perspective, 83 FORDHAM L. REV. 2241 (2015).
The problems of using social networks in entrepreneurial resource acquisition

This article identifies and classifies the problems perceived by entrepreneurs when they use social network ties (direct and indirect ties) to acquire resources during the early stages of new ventu...
Rights Resurgence: The Impact of the ADA Amendments Act on Schools and Universities

On September 25, 2008, President George W. Bush signed the unanimously enacted Americans with Disabilities Amendments Act (ADAAA) into law, “reinstating a broad scope of protection” to people with disabilities. The Amendments, which became effective on January 1, 2009, unquestionably will impact schools and universities with respect to both employment and the eligibility and accommodation of K-12 and university students with disabilities. This Article provides an early look at the emerging legal issues occasioned by the revised law. Part I provides a brief general overview of administrative and judicial interpretations of the disability definition prior to the enactment of the Amendments. Part II evaluates the revised law, exploring the specific provisions of the statute that have changed and the public impetus behind these changes. Finally, Part III explores the Amendments’ likely impact on schools and universities, highlighting issues that will require further discussion in the future.
Managerial Influencing of Boards of Directors

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I examine issues relating to managers' ability to influence their performance evaluation. In contrast to conventional wisdom, I show that such influencing is not necessarily deleterious to shareholder welfare, despite the fact that it is aimed at maximizing the managers' compensation. In particular, I show that the managers' influencing actions can, under some conditions, improve the performance evaluation process. This mitigates the control problem between the boards of directors and managers, and lowers managerial compensation costs. I also show that managers' influencing actions can alleviate the need for costly board equity awards to align board interests with those of the shareholders. This suggests that boards with smaller equity stakes may not necessarily have weaker incentives to monitor managers.
Exploring the concept of homeostasis and considering its implications for economics

In its standard format, the concept of homeostasis refers to the ability, present in all living organisms, of continuously maintaining certain functional variables within a range of values compatible with survival. The mechanisms of homeostasis were originally conceived as strictly automatic and as pertaining only to the state of an organism's internal environment. In keeping with this concept, homeostasis was, and still is, often explained by analogy to a thermostat: upon reaching a previously set temperature, the device commands itself to either suspend the ongoing operation (cooling or heating), or to initiate it, as appropriate. This traditional explanation fails to capture the richness of the concept and the range of circumstances in which it can be applied to living systems. Our goal here is to consider a more comprehensive view of homeostasis. This includes its application to systems in which the presence of conscious and deliberative minds, individually and in social groups, permits the creation of supplementary regulatory mechanisms aimed at achieving balanced and thus survivable life states but more prone to failure than the fully automated mechanisms. We suggest that an economy is an example of one such regulatory mechanism, and that facts regarding human homeostasis may be of value in the study of economic problems. Importantly, the reality of human homeostasis expands the views on preferences and rational choice that are part of traditionally conceived Homo economicus and casts doubts on economic models that depend only on an “invisible hand” mechanism.
Farewell to the Quick Look: Redefining the Scope and Content of the Rule of Reason

The Sherman Act1 forbids only those contracts that restrain trade unreasonably.2 By its terms, this "rule of reason" would seem to require a full-blown analysis of every contract that purportedly offends the statute.3 Nonetheless, the Supreme Court has long declared certain contracts unreasonable per se, directing lower courts to dispense with any inquiry into the actual economic effects of such agreements.4 Such per se rules have always been the exception, however. After all, the vast majority of business contracts pose little or no threat to competition and consumers, with the result that very few are "always or almost always" harmful, a necessary condition for per se treatment.5 Thus, courts still subject most types of contracts to full-blown scrutiny under the rule of reason, requiring private plaintiffs or the government to offer factual proof that, on balance, such agreements are unreasonable.6 Not surprisingly, most contracts pass this test.
Borrowing to defend the exchange rate and the timing and magnitude of speculative attacks

Abstract The paper analyses the implications for the timing and magnitude of a speculative attack on a fixed exchange rate of government borrowing to increase the stock of international reserves. It is shown that such borrowing reduces the likelihood of an early collapse and increases the likelihood of an eventual collapse. The magnitude of the speculative attack also increases.