cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Visual Portfolio Statistics

This paper develops visual aids for the understanding of two asset portfolio mathematics. Specifically, visual aids are utilized in teaching portfolio variance and correlation coefficient concepts. The presentation is simple, yet powerful, and is useful for an audience with varying levels of statistical sophistication. Consequently, the visual aids can replace or complement standard presentations of basic portfolio theory.
The Effect of Mandatory Extraction Payment Disclosures on Corporate Payment and Investment Policies Abroad

I examine how mandatory extraction payment disclosures (EPD)—a policy solution intended to discourage corporate payment avoidance in the oil, gas, and mining industries—affect fiscal revenue contributions and investments by multinational firms in foreign host countries. Using the staggered adoption of EPD across firms headquartered in Europe and Canada, I find that disclosing companies increase their payments to host governments, decrease investments, and obtain fewer extraction licenses relative to non‐disclosing competitors. These effects are stronger for firms that face a high risk of public shaming, operate in corrupt host countries, and have a high exposure to bribery‐prone payments, suggesting that EPD increases the reputational cost of corporate behavior that could be perceived as exploitative. The resulting reallocation of investments from disclosing to non‐disclosing firms reduces drilling productivity and resource production in host countries, consistent with uneven disclosure regulation distorting capital allocation.
The Elasticity of Science

This paper identifies the degree to which scientists are willing to change the direction of their work in exchange for resources. Data from the National Institutes of Health are used to estimate how scientists respond to targeted funding opportunities. Inducing a scientist to change their direction by a small amount—to work on marginally different topics—requires a substantial amount of funding in expectation. The switching costs of science are large. The productivity of grants is also estimated, and it appears the additional costs of targeted research may be more than offset by more productive scientists pursuing these grants.
Does Regression Produce Representative Estimates of Causal Effects

With an unrepresentative sample, the estimate of a causal effect may fail to characterize how effects operate in the population of interest. What is less well understood is that conventional estimation practices for observational studies may produce the same problem even with a representative sample. Causal effects estimated via multiple regression differentially weight each unit's contribution. The “effective sample” that regression uses to generate the estimate may bear little resemblance to the population of interest, and the results may be nonrepresentative in a manner similar to what quasi-experimental methods or experiments with convenience samples produce. There is no general external validity basis for preferring multiple regression on representative samples over quasi-experimental or experimental methods. We show how to estimate the “multiple regression weights” that allow one to study the effective sample. We discuss alternative approaches that, under certain conditions, recover representative average causal effects. The requisite conditions cannot always be met.
Divorce: What Does Learning Have to Do with It?

Learning about marriage quality has been proposed as a key mechanism for explaining how the probability of divorce evolves with marriage duration, and why people often cohabit before getting married. I develop four theoretical models of divorce, three of which include learning. I use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to test reduced form implications of these models. The data is inconsistent with models including a substantial amount of learning. On the other hand, the data is consistent with a model without any learning, but where marriage quality changes over time.
Litigation and political conflict in fifteenth-century East Anglia: Conspiracy and attaint actions and sir John Fastolf

Sir John Fastolf was a wealthy fifteenth-century knight and a successful military commander in the wars with France. During the last decade of his life, he was involved in a number of legal disputes with his East Anglian adversaries, the supporters of the duke of Suffolk. This paper studies one of those disputes, which involved conspiracy and attaint actions between John Andrew, a Suffolk adherent, and Thomas Howes and John Porter, two Fastolf servants. This dispute is interesting for two reasons. Most importantly, it shows that one cannot fully understand the operation of the fifteenth-century legal system without an awareness of the social and political context of litigation. Some contemporary litigation had a clear political nature and political considerations influenced the resolution of legal issues. All aspects of this litigation illustrate the interrelation between the operation of the legal and political systems. Often, legal actions and institutions were vehicles and arenas for political disputes...
Interacting mechanisms of time inconsistency

Abstract We interact two prominent behavioral mechanisms of time inconsistency that have been used to study inadequate saving: hyperbolic discounting and short-term planning . Hyperbolic discounting is a conventional way to model impulsive decision making, and short planning horizons have been used to represent myopia. One might expect that interacting both mechanisms within the same model would compound the inadequacy of saving. However, our key finding takes the form of a paradox: hyperbolic discounting does not affect consumption and saving allocations if the planning horizon is short and fixed, although it will affect allocations if the planning horizon is equal to the remaining life span. We demonstrate analytically that this finding is robust to the shape of the disposable income path, to the coarseness of the time grid, and to alternative forms of the period utility function.
Fluid Tasks and Fluid Teams: The Impact of Diversity in Experience and Team Familiarity on Team Performance

In this paper, we consider how the structures of tasks and teams interact to affect team performance. We study the effects of diversity in experience on a team's ability to respond to task changes by separately examining interpersonal team diversity (i.e., differences in experience across the entire team) and intrapersonal team diversity (i.e., whether individuals on the team are more or less specialized). We also examine whether team familiarity---team members' prior experience working with one another---helps teams to better manage challenges created by task changes and greater interpersonal team diversity. Using detailed project-and individual-level data from an Indian software services firm, we find that the interaction of task change with intrapersonal diversity is related to improved project performance, whereas the interaction of task change with interpersonal diversity is related to diminished performance. Additionally, the interaction of team familiarity with interpersonal diversity is related to improved project performance in some cases. Our results highlight a need for more nuanced approaches to leveraging experience in team management.
Psychological Aspects of Retributive Justice

Abstract Retributive justice is a system by which offenders are punished in proportion to the moral magnitude of their intentionally committed harms. This chapter lays out the emerging psychological principles that underlie citizens' intuitions regarding punishment. We rely on experimental methods and conclude that intuitions of justice are broadly consistent with the principles of retributive justice, and therefore systematically deviate from principles of deterrence and other utilitarian‐based systems of punishing wrongs. We examine the recent contributions of social‐neuroscience to the topic and conclude that retributive punishment judgments normally stem from the more general intuitive‐based judgment system. Particular circumstances can trigger the reasoning‐based system, however, thus indicating that this is a dual process mechanism. Importantly, though, evidence suggests that both the intuitive and reasoning systems adhere to the principles of retribution. The empirical results of this research have clear policy implications. Converging evidence suggests that the formal U.S. justice system is becoming increasingly utilitarian in nature, but that citizen intuitions about justice continue to track retributive principles. The resulting divide leads people to lose respect for the law, which means that they do not rely on the law's guidance in ambiguous situations where the morally correct behavior is unclear. These are the dangers to society from having justice policies based jointly on the contradictory principles of retribution and utility, and we lay out an argument for enacting public policies more exclusively based on retributive principles of justice. The field of psychological research on retributive justice, as compared to other kinds of justice, is of more recent empirical investigation and is correspondingly less well researched. Recently, though, it has attracted enough psychological interest so that once can glimpse the beginnings of a conceptual account on how people think about this sort of justice. Some psychological principles begin to emerge. In this chapter, we will summarize some of this research, with the customary emphasis on research conducted in our own laboratories, and drawing in work of others where relevant.
THE OUTLOOK FOR PENSION CONTRIBUTIONS AND PROFITS IN THE U.S.

The bear market that began in 2000 focused attention on two issues – pensions and profits. The initial pension problem was the big decline in value of individual 401(k) accounts. The profit issue was misconduct and stock options. In fact, there is another compelling issue involving both pensions and profits – the impact of the bear market on defined benefit pension plans.Plan sponsors have a projected benefit liability, which until recently was covered by the rise in asset values during the extended bull market. When stock values fell by 50 percent, sponsors for the first time in decades had to contribute to their pensions. But even without the decline in the stock market, sponsors of defined benefit plans were going to face increased pension contributions in the coming decade. The reason is a host of regulatory and legislative changes in the late 1980s that slowed or limited pension contributions.Our analysis suggests that in the absence of the stock market boom and the regulatory and legislative changes that reduced funding, the average firm's contribution to its pension plan would have been 50 percent higher during the 1982–2001 period; corporate profits would have been roughly 5 percent lower.The deferred contributions are coming due. The decline in the stock market and an ageing population imply that contributions would double from their current level. As the economy emerges from recession and the bear market draws to a close, firms and investors must be prepared to contend with a strong headwind from pension funding obligations that could slow the recover.
Friends in Low Places? The Conditional Influence of Trade on the Status of Women

Scholars of international relations have actively debated the consequences of globalization. Among this literature is the growing attention to the status of women. While scholars have largely treated globalization as either improving or degrading women’s rights, we point to a conditional relationship. In contrast to assuming that the influence of globalization is invariably “good” or “bad,” we suggest that the character of the norms that will be diffused and adopted is dependent on the domestic norms of those a state is “globalized with.” We offer two expectations. First, states that tend to trade more with democracies should see a domestic improvement in the status of women. Second, we expect women’s status to improve when states trade more heavily with other states with high levels of women’s rights. An analysis of 184 countries from 1981 to 2008 provides strong support for the theory. Total trade flows and trade dependence only have negative associations with women’s status when conducted disproportionately with states that are autocratic or have low levels of women’s status.
The Tax Revolt in Massachusetts: Revolution and Reason

The modern-day tax revolt in Massachusetts was initiated by passage of the property tax limitation measure Proposition 2½ in 1980. Predictions of draconian budget cuts never materialized due to state legislative modification of the initiative's provisions, and judicious use of local voter overrides. Massachusetts citizens have continued to bring tax issues to the ballot, with fairly reasoned outcomes.
Asking too much: autonomy and responsibility at the end of life.

This essay identifies four situations in which limits to patient choices about life-sustaining treatment should be recognized, even when those choices are clearly expressed and carefully documented. The four situations are (1) the refusal of medical treatment in a suicide attempt, (2) the request for futile treatment, narrowly defined, (3) the refusal of hand feeding by surrogate or advance directive, and (4) the refusal of non-burdensome treatment for people who become profoundly disabled but are neither permanently unconscious nor terminally ill or injured. In each of these situations, patient demands (by proxy or otherwise) are unreasonable because they ask people to deny their basic impulses to treat others humanely. The author argues that not only do individuals have no right to make such demands, they have a responsibility not to make them.
The U.S. Supreme Court's Failure to Fix Plea Bargaining: The Impact of Lafler and Frye

In the 2012 companion cases of Lafler v. Cooper and Missouri v. Frye, the United States Supreme Court held that there is a right to effective assistance of counsel during plea bargaining, even when a defendant later loses at trial. Legal commentators suggested the cases were “the single greatest revolution in the criminal justice process since Gideon v. Wainwright,” that the cases will have a “significant effect,” and that they were “the term’s decisions with the greatest everyday impact on the criminal justice system.” But, will
A longitudinal study of top-level executive performance.

Competency ratings were obtained from a hybrid selection system on 98 top-level executives in a predictive validity design. Hierarchical linear modeling results indicated that "resource problem-solvingoriented" competency ratings predicted initial performance. "People-oriented" competency ratings predicted subsequent performance trends. Utility estimates suggested that the system generated an additional $3 million in annual profit per candidate selected. Groups of executives with similar performance trends were identified who had encountered qualitatively different situational circumstances. Findings imply that a model of executive performance must contain main effects for person (competencies) and situation (economic-industrial) characteristics on both subsequent performance and performance trends. Future research needs to examine which situational circumstances moderate relationships between executive competencies and initial performance or subsequent performance trends. The industrial/organizational psychology and human resources management arenas have been inundated with models of executive, managerial, or leadership competencies, skills, or traits. Stogdill (1948) noted the total absence of systematic support for trait models within the leadership literature before 1948. Almost 30 years later, Stogdill (1974) concluded that improved research designs, broader predictor construct domains, and better measurement instruments had led to more consistent evidence of construct validity. A smaller number of these efforts made empirical contributions to our understanding and prediction of performance in top-level leadership or executive positions. A coarse and somewhat arbitrary classification of these efforts would describe them as coming from literatures on managerial selection and development, leadership, and business strategy. Following brief surveys of these literatures, a conceptual definition of executive competencies is provided, and an empirical assessment of competency ratings' abilities to predict executive performance is reported.
Venture Capitalists Versus Angels: The Dynamics of Private Firm Financing Contracts

An entrepreneur, with private information about his firm, contracts over two periods with an outside financier, a venture capitalist (VC) or angel. The financier can reduce his information disadvantage by learning about the firm over time. VC financing is scarce relative to angel financing. Further, unlike an angel, a VC may exert effort, which, together with the entrepreneur’s effort, increases the firm’s success probability. The equilibrium VC financing contract ensures optimal effort-exertion by both entrepreneur and VC. We characterize the firm’s equilibrium choice between VC and angel financing, its equilibrium contractual provisions, and the dynamic evolution of its financing contract.
Chronolawgy: A Study Of Law And Temporal Perception

Speed permeates nearly every aspect of modern society. Businesses must deliver information, goods, and services at an ever-increasing pace to match the expectations of the high speed society we live in in the twenty-first century. However, the legal system must work and evolve at its own pace to accommodate such fundamental aspects as due process and zealous advocacy. This article explores the conflict that arises between a society accustomed to instant gratification and constant flux when confronted with a legal system that must operate deliberately and change infrequently by design. Beginning with a discussion of how human beings understand and interact with time, the article then explores the rise of the modern fast-paced society. The article then explores the pace of the American justice system and the difference between the speed at which the legal system operates as compared to other industries or institutions. Finally, the article examines methods for combatting the rushed nature of the modern era in the hope of preserving the ideals that the legal system represents.
The Family in Civil Society

The civil societarians claim the family as their domain, its salvation as their mission. The family is a foundational concept – the 'cradle of citizenship' – which teaches 'standards of personal conduct that cannot be enforced by law, but which are indispensible for civil society. Problems with the family are seen as problems for democracy, justifying legal and political responses. This paper addresses civil societarians by examining two reports which set forth the purported diminished state of civil society and suggest proposals for civic renewal: A Nation of Spectators: How Civic Disengagement Weakens America and What we can Do About It, and A Call to Civil Society: Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths. By reviewing these works, the narrow focus of civil societarians, which deflects attention away from more serious problems that the current political and economic contexts present for the family, is laid bare. Issues like wage stagnation and income inequality are overshadowed by Civil Societarians’ identification of morality as the paramount of concern.A more appropriate and equitable scheme would more evenly distribute the burdens for inevitable dependency, with the market as well as the state assuming some up-front share of the economic and social costs inherent in the reproduction of society. There is a need for structural changes and institutional accommodation of the demands of caretaking. The real crisis is that we expect marriage to be able to compensate for the inequality created by our other institutions.
Lock-in for lighting: The puzzle of continued kerosene use among electrified households in six Indian states

Abstract Electricity is the most commonly used form of energy for artificial lighting in modern society. Despite a rapid growth in the rate of electrification, 9% of electrified Indian households in our six sampled states continued to use kerosene as their primary lighting fuel in 2018. This appears as a puzzle considering the benefits of electric lights. Using a panel survey of rural households in six states in India, we examine why some grid-connected households primarily used kerosene lamps for illumination. We use a logistic regression model to test our hypothesis regarding the relationship between primary lighting choices and electricity quality. The results show that household primary lighting choices are correlated with nighttime duration of electricity service, daytime duration of electricity service, and the number of days without any electricity connection, at the 99% confidence level. Among these three factors, nighttime duration of electricity service has the greatest impact. To further promote the use of electric lights, intensive schemes to improve electricity quality are needed.
What Makes Workers Happy? Anticipated Rewards and Job Satisfaction

Using data collected from over 9400 employees in Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Serbia, across a wide variety of workplaces and sectors, we identify the extrinsic and intrinsic rewards that workers desire and expectations of receiving these rewards. We use ordered probit regression analysis to evaluate the association between anticipated rewards and job satisfaction, hypothesizing that reward desirability matters most for extrinsic rewards linked to numeric values. Data strongly support our hypothesis in the case of expected job security; limited support is found in the case of expected promotion. For non-numeric extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, a strong positive link between job satisfaction and the reward variables often is observed, even if the expected reward is not highly desired. While own earnings typically are positively linked to job satisfaction, peers' earnings may be positively (Kazakhstan, Armenia, Russia) or negatively (Krygyzstan, Serbia) linked to job satisfaction, but not always statistically significant.
Government and the Reverse‐Holdup Problem

When the government bargains with a private firm, the firm cares about only its own profits, but the firm's profits may also enter into the government's utility function. As a result, the government will not bargain as aggressively for a low price. This can lead the government to “over pay” for quality. In contrast to the standard holdup problem, this reverse-holdup problem can give the firm an incentive to overinvest in non-contractible quality. The paper also discusses some examples where the reverse-holdup problem may explain excessive quality in government procurement.
Ethical Advocacy for Immigrant Survivors of Family Crisis

The involvement of family courts in the lives of youth and families creates significant opportunities for advocates to assist their clients with immigration-related issues. Informed and effective advocacy on these issues in family court can make life-changing, and even life-saving, differences for immigrants. More specifically, immigration issues are germane to family court because certain vital avenues of immigration relief available to survivors of abuse, neglect, abandonment, and other forms of family crisis explicitly depend on findings, orders, and certifications that are issued in the context of family court proceedings. After describing these forms of relief, and the family court's role in immigrants’ access to them, this essay analyzes how ethical mandates related to client counseling, representational goals, and competence affirmatively require family court practitioners to provide advice and advocacy related to these collateral benefits to family court proceedings. Key Points for Family Court Community: The involvement of family courts in the lives of youth and families creates significant opportunities for advocates to assist their clients with immigration-related issues Certain vital avenues of immigration relief available to survivors of abuse, neglect, abandonment, and other forms of family crisis explicitly depend on findings, orders, and certifications that are issued in the context of family court proceedings The substance of immigration-related findings in family court, and their ultimate affect on family stability, are consistent with the core family court goal of supporting safety, well-being, and permanency for children and families Ethical mandates related to client counseling, representational goals, and competence affirmatively require family court practitioners to provide advice and advocacy related to these collateral benefits to family court proceedings
Trust Busting: The Effect of Fraud on Investor Behavior

We study the importance of trust in the investment advisory industry by exploiting the geographic dispersion of victims of the Madoff Ponzi scheme. Residents of communities that were exposed to the fraud subsequently withdrew assets from investment advisers and increased deposits at banks. Additionally, exposed advisers were more likely to close. Advisers who provided services that can build trust, such as financial planning advice, experienced fewer withdrawals. Our evidence suggests that the trust shock was transmitted through social networks. Taken together, our results show that trust plays a critical role in the financial intermediation industry. Received April 18, 2016; editorial decision March 8, 2017 by Editor Robin Greenwood.
DO CEOS MATTER TO FIRM STRATEGIC ACTIONS AND FIRM PERFORMANCE? A META‐ANALYTIC INVESTIGATION BASED ON UPPER ECHELONS THEORY

What roles do CEOs play in firm performance? To address this question, the management field has accumulated a substantial amount of research over the past 3 decades built on upper echelons theory (UET), which posits that CEO characteristics manifest in firm strategic actions and, in this way, future firm performance. Hence, there is a need to systematically amass and take stock of prior empirical findings for UET testing and development. We use meta-analytic techniques to synthesize prior UET research on the relationships among commonly studied CEO characteristics, firm strategic actions, and future firm performance. Based on 308 studies, meta-analytic results generally support UET's predictions with a few exceptions: CEO characteristics (i.e., tenure, formal education, prior career experience, and positive self-concept) are significantly associated with firm strategic actions, which in turn are significantly related to future firm performance. Moreover, CEO characteristics (i.e., age, tenure, formal education, and prior career experience) are positively related to future firm performance. In addition, fine-grained analyses have revealed interesting and important relationships between specific measures of CEO characteristics (e.g., CEO prior task experience) and firm outcomes (e.g., firm strategic actions that match with CEO prior task experience). Implications for theory, future research, and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Against Mix-and-Match Lawmaking

In a thought-provoking article entitled Noncontemporaneous Lawmaking, published in the Cornell Journal of Law & Public Policy, Seth Barrett Tillman presents the argument that the Constitution's plan for lawmaking does not require that the House and Senate both pass a particular bill during the term of the same Congress. Rather, as his article's subtitle indicates, the Senate of the 110th Congress could enact a bill passed by the House during the 109th Congress. This argument runs contrary to the conventional wisdom, which holds that a bill passed by only one house dies at the end of the two-year Congress. Is Tillman right, or should the Constitution be interpreted to avoid his surprising result? In this brief response, I defend the conventional view that the Constitution includes a principle of contemporaneity. The contemporaneity requirement is one of those constitutional rules that 'everyone knows' (or at least thinks they know) but that is seldom explained. Although Tillman is correct that the constitutional text is at best coy regarding the need for contemporaneity, various structural, practical, and historical factors support some type of contemporaneity requirement. I do, however, leave open the possibility that the contemporaneity requirement might be satisfied by procedures that differ from those with which we are familiar.
The Impact of Trade on Intra-Industry Reallocations and Aggregate Industry Productivity

This paper develops a dynamic industry model with heterogeneous firms to analyze the intra-industry effects of international trade. The model shows how the exposure to trade will induce only the more productive firms to enter the export market (while some less productive firms continue to produce only for the domestic market) and will simultaneously force the least productive firms to exit. It then shows how further increases in the industry's exposure to trade lead to additional inter-firm reallocations towards more productive firms. The paper also shows how the aggregate industry productivity growth generated by the reallocations contributes to a welfare gain, thus highlighting a benefit from trade that has not been examined theoretically before. The paper adapts Hopenhayn's (1992a) dynamic industry model to monopolistic competition in a general equilibrium setting. In so doing, the paper provides an extension of Krugman's (1980) trade model that incorporates firm level productivity differences. Firms with different productivity levels coexist in an industry because each firm faces initial uncertainty concerning its productivity before making an irreversible investment to enter the industry. Entry into the export market is also costly, but the firm's decision to export occurs after it gains knowledge of its productivity.
EXPLAINING THE INCREASE IN INEQUALITY DURING THE TRANSITION

This paper attempts to explain the increase in inequality that has been observed in all transition economies by constructing a simple model of change in composition of employment during the transition. The change consists of the ‘hollowing-out’ of the state-sector middle class as it moves into either the ‘rich’ private sector or the ‘poor’ unemployed sector. The predictions of the model are contrasted with the empirical evidence from annual household income surveys from six transition economies (Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Russia and Slovenia) over the period 1987-95. We find that the most important factor driving overall inequality upwards was increased inequality of wage distribution. The non-wage private sector contributed strongly to inequality only in Latvia and Russia. Pensions, paradoxically, also pushed inequality up in Central Europe, while non-pension social transfers were too small everywhere and too poorly focussed to make much difference.
Copenhagen vs Everett, Teleportation, and ER=EPR

Quantum gravity may have as much to tell us about the foundations and interpretation of quantum mechanics as it does about gravity. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and Everett's Relative State Formulation are complementary descriptions which in a sense are dual to one another. My purpose here is to discuss this duality in the light of the of ER=EPR conjecture.
Mentally ill prisoners in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation: strategies for improving treatment and reducing recidivism.

The California state prison system is proving ill-equipped to deal with the state's mentally ill prisoner population. This paper examines the ways in which mentally ill felons are not receiving adequate care while in prison as well as appropriate preparation for life after their release. The paper argues that the result is an avoidable drain on the state's budget as well as unnecessarily high recidivism rates for this population. Accordingly, constructive policy recommendations for ameliorating this shortcoming of the prison system are proposed.
Are Euro Area Small Cap Stocks an Asset Class? Evidence from Mean‐Variance Spanning Tests

In this paper we perform regression-based tests for mean-variance spanning in order to detect the effect of investing in euro area small capitalisation stocks on the minimum variance frontier, and apply different measures to assess the extent of diversification gains. Empirical analysis shows that euro area small and mid cap stocks, as classified by size quartile and quintile rankings, arise as truly autonomous asset classes. This result is robust to different methodologies used to form size-based portfolios, and holds relative to both euro area large cap stocks and other international asset classes, US small capitalisation stocks included.
Expense Misreporting in Nonprofit Organizations

We examine whether nonprofit organizations understate fundraising expenses in their publicly available financial statements. A large body of anecdotal evidence notes that an inexplicable number of nonprofits report zero fundraising expenses. We provide empirical evidence that the zero fundraising expense phenomenon is at least partly due to inappropriate reporting. We then examine to what extent these misreported expenses are the result of managerial incentives. Prior research finds an association between reported expenses and managerial compensation as well as the level of donations received. Using these findings we construct two incentive variables and find a positive association between misreporting behavior and managerial incentives. Our results also suggest that the use of an outside accountant reduces the probability that a nonprofit will misreport expenses, consistent with the use of an outside paid accountant increasing the reliability and usefulness of nonprofit financial reports. Finally, we fin...
Incomplete Contracts: An Empirical Approach

The strategic ambiguity hypothesis posits that when some aspects of performance are observable but not verifiable, the optimal contract is deliberately incomplete. I test this result for the first time. Because a direct test is infeasible, I derive an equivalent result: incompleteness is optimal when some terms are legally void. I test this using executive contracts from S&P 500 firms. I find that firms pay severance in discretionary installments to induce their executives to comply with noncompete agreements—but only in California, where noncompetes are void. Outside California, noncompetes are valid and these same firms pay non-discretionary severance upfront. I conclude that firms use strategic ambiguity to circumvent legal constraints.
Securing a future for children: the international custom to protect the natural family

El presente escrito sostiene que el articulo 16(3) de la Declaracion Universal de los Derechos Humanos se ha convertido en derecho internacional consuetudinario y, por tanto, todos los Estados estan obligados a promover, proteger y dar prelacion a la familia natural cimentada en el matrimonio entre un hombre y una mujer (como organizacion nuclear o extendida) sobre las llamadas “nuevas formas de familia” (cohabitacion de personas de generos iguales o distintos, por ejemplo). Esto significa que los Estados incumplen sus obligaciones cuando, bajo el articulo 16(3), otorgan a las llamadas formas alternativas de familia el mismo trato que a los matrimonios heterosexuales concediendoles, por ejemplo, los mismos beneficios. El articulo analiza a Canada como caso de estudio para ilustrar de que manera este pais ha incumplido sus obligaciones. Con este proposito, el presente articulo tomara en consideracion de que manera y por que razon el gobierno federal canadiense ha contribuido a la crisis de la familia natural en ese pais, como lo evidencian las crecientes tasas de separacion, divorcio y formas alternativas de familia (cohabitacion, por ejemplo) y su trato como equivalentes de la familia natural
Religion as a Determinant of Economic and Demographic Behavior in the United States

This paper critically reviews and synthesizes research on the role of religion on various aspects of the economic and demographic behavior of individuals and families in the United States, including the choice of marital partner, union formation and dissolution, fertility, female time allocation, education, wages, and wealth. Using a theoretical framework based on Gary Becker’s contributions to the economics of the family, religious affiliation is seen to affect these outcomes because it has an impact on the costs and benefits of many interrelated decisions that people make over the life cycle. In addition, for behaviors that pertain to married couple households, affiliation matters because it is a complementary trait within the context of marriage. Religiosity, another dimension of religion, also affects economic and demographic outcomes, partly because it accentuates differences by religious affiliation, partly because of the generally beneficial effects that religious involvement has on health and well-being.
Wealth and the capitalist spirit

Abstract The wealth distribution in the U.S. is more unequal than either the income or earnings distribution, a fact current models of saving behavior have difficulty explaining. Using Max Weber’s [Weber, M. (1905). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Charles Scribners’ and Sons (1958 translated edition)] idea that individuals may have a ‘capitalist spirit’, I construct and simulate a model where individuals accumulate wealth for its own sake rather than as deferred consumption. Including capitalist spirit preferences in a simple life cycle model, with no other modifications, generates a skewness of wealth consistent with that observed in the U.S. economy. Furthermore, capitalist spirit preferences provide a way to generate decreasing risk aversion with increases in wealth without resorting to idiosyncratic rates of time preference.
Equivalence of Objectives in Two Candidate Elections

This paper examines the incentives facing candidates in twocandidate elections. In particular, we provide a set ofsufficient conditions for the optimal strategies of votemaximizing, plurality maximizing, and probability of victorymaximizing candidates to be identical. In addition, we examineand provide counterexamples to two oft-cited results due toHinich (1977) and Ledyard (1984) regarding the equivalence ofthese objectives in large two candidate elections.
Deriving the Pricing Power of Product Features by Mining Consumer Reviews

Increasingly, user-generated product reviews serve as a valuable source of information for customers making product choices online. The existing literature typically incorporates the impact of product reviews on sales based on numeric variables representing the valence and volume of reviews. In this paper, we posit that the information embedded in product reviews cannot be captured by a single scalar value. Rather, we argue that product reviews are multifaceted, and hence the textual content of product reviews is an important determinant of consumers' choices, over and above the valence and volume of reviews. To demonstrate this, we use text mining to incorporate review text in a consumer choice model by decomposing textual reviews into segments describing different product features. We estimate our model based on a unique data set from Amazon containing sales data and consumer review data for two different groups of products (digital cameras and camcorders) over a 15-month period. We alleviate the problems of data sparsity and of omitted variables by providing two experimental techniques: clustering rare textual opinions based on pointwise mutual information and using externally imposed review semantics. This paper demonstrates how textual data can be used to learn consumers' relative preferences for different product features and also how text can be used for predictive modeling of future changes in sales. This paper was accepted by Ramayya Krishnan, information systems.
CARTEL OVERCHARGES: SURVEY AND META-ANALYSIS

Abstract The article presents a novel meta-regression analysis of the size of cartel overcharges from a sample of more than 800 observations collected from a wide variety of published sources. The analysis of a subsample of 395 cartel episodes finds that duration, legal environment, and organizational characteristics of cartels explain variation in overcharge rates to a greater extent than the type of publication or the method of calculation. Overcharges tend to be significantly higher for durable international cartels. Secular decline is observed as antitrust-enforcement regimes have stiffened.
Do MD&A Disclosures Help Users Interpret Disproportionate Inventory Increases?

ABSTRACT: This study investigates whether MD&A disclosures have predictive ability for future firm performance in cases of disproportionate inventory increases. Using a sample of 568 manufacturing firms with disproportionate inventory increases, I find that the favorability of explanations for inventory changes in MD&A is positively associated with a firm’s profitability and sales growth in the subsequent three years. I also find that future profitability and sales growth of firms that do not explain disproportionate inventory increases in MD&A fall between those of firms with favorable explanations and firms with unfavorable explanations. These results suggest that the existence and the favorability of MD&A inventory disclosures help users interpret disproportionate inventory increases and predict future firm performance.
Left Behind? Citizen Responsiveness to Government Performance Information

Do citizens respond to policy-based information signals about government performance? Using multiple big datasets—which link for the first time large-scale school administrative records and individual validated voting behavior—I show that citizens react to exogenous school failure signals provided by No Child Left Behind. These signals cause a noticeable increase in turnout in local school board elections and increase the competitiveness of these races. Additionally, I present evidence that school failure signals cause citizens to vote with their feet by exiting failing schools, suggesting that exit plays an underexplored role in democratic accountability. However, performance signals elicit a response unequally, with failure primarily mobilizing high propensity citizens and encouraging exit among those who are white, affluent, and more likely to vote. Hence, while performance signals spur a response, they do so only for a select few, leaving many others behind.
Goodbye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail: The Effect of Search Costs on the Concentration of Product Sales

Many markets have historically been dominated by a small number of best-selling products. The Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, describes this common pattern of sales concentration. However, information technology in general and Internet markets in particular have the potential to substantially increase the collective share of niche products, thereby creating a longer tail in the distribution of sales. This paper investigates the Internet's “long tail” phenomenon. By analyzing data collected from a multichannel retailer, it provides empirical evidence that the Internet channel exhibits a significantly less concentrated sales distribution when compared with traditional channels. Previous explanations for this result have focused on differences in product availability between channels. However, we demonstrate that the result survives even when the Internet and traditional channels share exactly the same product availability and prices. Instead, we find that consumers' usage of Internet search and discovery tools, such as recommendation engines, are associated with an increase the share of niche products. We conclude that the Internet's long tail is not solely due to the increase in product selection but may also partly reflect lower search costs on the Internet. If the relationships we uncover persist, the underlying trends in technology portend an ongoing shift in the distribution of product sales. This paper was accepted by Ramayya Krishnan, information systems.
Filling the Regulatory Gap: A Proposal for Restructuring the Clean Water Act's Two-Permit System

The Clean Water Act (CWA) was passed in response to increased pollution in the nation’s navigable waters caused by industrial actors and others. Congress sought to achieve two goals with the CWA: eliminate pollution discharges into the nation’s waters, and achieve national uniformity in a water pollution control scheme. However, Congress recognized that complete elimination of all pollution discharges was not immediately achievable. As a result, it created a dual-permitting scheme under the CWA, authorizing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to issue permits for the discharge of pollutants into navigable waters, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) to issue permits for the discharge of “dredged or fill” material into navigable waters. The 2009 Supreme Court decision in Coeur Alaska, Inc. v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council reveals that the line separating the EPA’s and the Corps’ respective permitting authority has become blurred. In this case, the Court upheld the Corps’ issuance of a fill permit to a gold mining project seeking to discharge mining waste into a nearby lake. The Court held that the Corps, and not the EPA, possesses the authority to issue permits for the discharge of fill material, regardless of whether the fill is also considered a pollutant under the CWA. Additionally, the Court held that the strict EPA-promulgated effluent discharge limitations for new sources of discharge do not apply to Corps permits. The Court’s opinion threatens to undermine the two goals of the CWA because it opens the door for industrial actors to circumvent the stricter EPA permit requirements by simply ensuring their waste disposal contains a sufficient amount of fill. The EPA’s uniform, technology-based permit requirements are stricter than the Corps’, which evaluates permit applications on a case-by-case basis with no governing effluent limitations. After Coeur Alaska, the CWA could be upended by industrial actors seeking to avoid a stricter EPA permit in favor of a Corps permit. Although the EPA may veto any Corps permit, this power is rarely used. I propose multiple solutions to ensure both of Congress’s goals of the CWA are met, ultimately advocating for an amendment to the CWA that would force Corps permits to comply with EPA-promulgated effluent pollution standards. This solution would have prevented the Corps permit issuance in the Coeur Alaska case, and it would uphold the integrity of the CWA into the future.
Does the Format of a Financial Aid Program Matter? The Effect of State In-Kind Tuition Subsidies

This paper examines the importance of format in aid programs, focusing on state appropriations to public postsecondary institutions. These funds subsidize costs for in-state students, but they may also influence choices between institutions due to their in-kind format. Using the conditional logistic choice model and extensive match-specific information, the paper approximates the choice between nearly 2700 college options to examine the effect of several dissimilar state systems. The results suggest that the level and distribution pattern of subsidies strongly affect decisions. If the aid could instead be applied to any in-state college, up to 29% more students would prefer to attend private four-year colleges.