cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
A re-examination of analysts' superiority over time-series forecasts of annual earnings

We re-examine the widely held belief that analysts’ earnings per share (EPS) forecasts are superior to random walk (RW) time-series forecasts. We investigate whether analysts’ annual EPS forecasts are superior, and if so, under what conditions. Simple RW EPS forecasts are more accurate than analysts’ forecasts over longer horizons, for smaller or younger firms, and when analysts forecast negative or large changes in EPS. We also compare the accuracy of a third forecast of longer-term earnings based on a naive extrapolation of analysts’ 1-year-ahead forecasts. Surprisingly, this naive extrapolation provides the most accurate estimate of long-term (2- and 3-year-ahead) earnings. These findings recharacterize prior generalizations about the superiority of analysts’ forecasts and suggest that they are incomplete, misleading, or both. Moreover, in certain settings, researchers can rely on forecasts other than these explicit forecasts.
Bank performance, efficiency and ownership in transition countries

Abstract Using data from 1996 to 2000, we investigate the effects of ownership, especially by a strategic foreign owner, on bank efficiency for eleven transition countries in an unbalanced panel consisting of 225 banks and 856 observations. Applying stochastic frontier estimation procedures, we compute profit and cost efficiency taking account of both time and country effects directly. In second-stage regressions, we use the efficiency measures along with return on assets to investigate the influence of ownership type. With respect to the impact of ownership, we conclude that privatization by itself is not sufficient to increase bank efficiency as government-owned banks are not appreciably less efficient than domestic private banks. We find that foreign-owned banks are more cost-efficient than other banks and that they also provide better service, in particular if they have a strategic foreign owner. The remaining government-owned banks are less efficient in providing services, which is consistent with the hypothesis that the better banks were privatized first in transition countries.
Historical Antecedents of Chinese Business Ethics

This paper explores the historical development of the Chinese view of business ethics. The paper investigates 5,000 years of Chinese history and includes the significant contributions of Confucius, Mencius, Laozi and Zhuangzi, as well as more modern figures in China’s history. It is proposed that these important historical individuals and philosophies greatly influenced the development of current Chinese ethical practices.
The importance of expressly examining global warming policy issues through an ethical prism

Abstract A vast scientific and economic literature on global warming has emerged in the last two decades. Surprisingly, however, there has been little written on the ethical dimensions of human-induced climate change despite the numerous, obvious, and profoundly important ethical questions raised by human activities that are now clearly threatening human health, the environment, and many things humans value greatly. This paper argues that ethical analysis of global warming issues is practically imperative for two reasons. First, unless ethical is made analysis is made of global warming issues, ethically dubious decisions about global warming will be made because many of the most important ethical considerations are hidden in what appear to be ethically neutral scientific and economic arguments about global warming policy options. Secondly, unless issues of ethics, justice and equity are expressly dealt with, urgently needed global solutions to global warming will not likely be adopted by many nations. That is, an ethical focus on global warming matters is the key to achieve a globally acceptable solution and to harness political support for action. The paper concludes with a recommendation on how institutions and nations should go about implementing express examination of the ethical dimensions of global warming questions. The paper argues for express identification of ethical issues often hidden in scientific and economic analyses of global warming policy options.
Policy Innovations, Political Preferences, and Cartel Prosecutions

Though antitrust cartel cases have received significant attention, the policy determinants and the political preferences that guide such enforcement remain understudied. We empirically examine the intertemporal shifts in U.S. cartel cases during the period 1969–2013. This period has seen substantive policy innovations with increasing penalties that are related to fines and jail terms. There appear to be four distinct cartel policy regimes: pre-1978, 1978–1992, 1993–2003, and 2004–2013. Our empirical estimates show significant variation in the number of cartel cases initiated and the penalties imposed across the policy regimes. The more recent regimes are characterized by far fewer cartel cases initiated, but with substantially higher penalties levied on firms and individuals. While effective deterrence is one explanation for these patterns, we are more inclined to conclude that U.S. cartel enforcement has seen an underlying shift away from focusing on smaller cartels to larger and multinational cartels. In terms of political effects, our results reveal no clear inter-political party effect, but there appear to be interesting intra-political party effects. We find that particular Presidencies matter for cartel enforcement, and variation across Presidential administrations led to marked shifts in the total number of cartel cases initiated. Overall, the shifts in the prosecution patterns portray changing policy priorities and a search for the optimal enforcement design to curtail one of the clearest sources of welfare loss, collusion.
The corruption of popular sovereignty

Populism marks a departure from the central forms of democratic governance over the past two centuries. As opposed to the primacy of the legislative branch and of institutional actors, most notably political parties, populism tends toward the unilateral authority of a charismatic leader, ruling on the basis of an electoral mandate. This article starts from an understanding of populism as being grounded in political mobilization in disregard of the institutions of governance. Even more centrally, populist leaders try to dismantle institutional constraints to allow for greater individual discretionary power. This article looks to legal vulnerabilities that might allow the institutional framework of democracy to withstand the new populist assault. The central insight is that corruption might prove the means of checking governance by the new breed of caudillos, the strongman rule that stands in opposition to separation of powers limitations on the executive. Two forms of corruption are examined. The first is the attempt to subordinate the electoral system itself. The second is the use of state discretionary authority to push the boundaries of clientelism and ultimately outright corruption. Whereas questions of electoral integrity are more commonly checked by formal constitutional boundaries, the question of ordinary corruption surfaces with regularity under populism. The article offers reasons why this might be the product of a descent from clientelism to cronyism to outright capture of public resources for private gain. In turn, the article offers arguments for how corruption invites review by broader layers of judicial and prosecutorial authorities than constitutional law.
Repeal of LIFO: Analysis Based on Industry Data

We discuss the potential consequence of a repeal of the Last-in, First-out (LIFO) inventory method. In 2012, U.S. companies reported a total of 3,207 million LIFO reserves. Assuming a 35% tax rate, this reserve reflects approximately 1,122 million in tax savings. More importantly, there has been a significant increase in LIFO reserves during the past decade. If LIFO is repealed, the substantial tax burden might destroy some firms. Although it is crucial to converge toward International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), we suggest that regulators be cautious about the potential repeal of LIFO.
Empirical Desert and Preventive Justice: A Comment

This essay is a response to an article by Paul Robinson, Joshua Barton, and Matthew Lister in this issue of New Criminal Law Review that criticizes an article I authored with Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein entitled Putting Desert in Its Place , which was itself an analysis of several works published by Robinson and various coauthors making the case for “empirical desert.” Robinson’s suggestion that utility can be optimized by a focus on desert as it is viewed by the average citizen opens up a new line of inquiry that could lead to a better appreciation of the influence desert should have on the criminal law. Where we disagree is how much utility a system founded on empirical desert is likely to have. Robinson appears to hold that failing to subscribe to empirical desert in most cases will result in noticeable disutility, whereas I am inclined to believe, consistent with the studies in Putting Desert in Its Place , that only significant, continuous and highly publicized departures from lay views will occasion the loss of compliance and cooperation that Robinson describes. This article also defends the punishment scheme that I have called “preventive justice” against some of the claims made by Robinson, Barton, and Lister.
Quenched law of large numbers for branching brownian motion in a random medium

We study a spatial branching model, where the underlying motion is d-dimensional (d≥1) Brownian motion and the branching rate is affected by a random collection of reproduction suppressing sets dubbed mild obstacles. The main result of this paper is the quenched law of large numbers for the population for all d≥1. We also show that the branching Brownian motion with mild obstacles spreads less quickly than ordinary branching Brownian motion by giving an upper estimate on its speed. When the underlying motion is an arbitrary diffusion process, we obtain a dichotomy for the quenched local growth that is independent of the Poissonian intensity. More general offspring distributions (beyond the dyadic one considered in the main theorems) as well as mild obstacle models for superprocesses are also discussed.
Reflections on Editing a Journal for Law Teachers

This essay reflects on the author’s experience as one of the editors of the Journal of Legal Education. In particular, the author discusses the insularity of American legal education, the limited American interest in writing about pedagogy, the poor quality of much legal-academic writing, and the politicization of the American academy.
Out-of-Equilibrium Dynamics with Heterogeneous Capital Goods

This paper studies the problem of accumulating heterogeneous capital goods in an economy with imperfect markets populated by boundedly rational agents. It relaxes classical assumptions about information and cognition. The agents are not capable of computing an equilibrium path to steady state. Agents discover prices by interacting with each other. The economy accumulates a near-optimal mix of capital goods. The structure of interactions between agents filters their behavior in such a way that limited rationality at the micro-level does not translate to grossly inefficient outcomes at the macro-level.
Malware counter-proliferation and the Wassenaar Arrangement

Can states control malware? It is a radical asymmetry: the power of a modern nation-state arrayed against a few hundred thousand bytes of code and its creators, but an imbalance whose counterintuitive nature impacts the security of citizens, corporations, and governments alike. This paper evaluates export controls found in the Wassenaar Arrangement targeting malware in the context of the research into the malicious software ecosystem. The article highlights that export controls place burdensome restrictions on research and commercial information security efforts. Looking at the market for malicious software, incentivising the discovery of new vulnerabilities to reduce their availability to attackers would be more effective in curtailing malicious activity.
Maximum score estimation of a nonstationary binary choice model

This paper studies the estimation of a simple binary choice model in which explanatory variables include nonstationary variables and the distribution of the model is not known. We find a set of conditions under which the coefficients of the nonstationary variables are identified. We show that the maximum score estimator of the nonstationary coefficients is consistent.
Symmetry Breaking in Coupled SYK or Tensor Models

A new analysis of quantum-mechanical models that describe interactions in large ensembles of Majorana fermions reveals richer phenomena in these complex systems, providing a potential path towards physical applications.
Employee–management trust and M&A activity ☆

Abstract We examine the relation between the trust that employees have in management and the M&A activity of firms. We measure this trust by using rankings compiled by the Great Place to Work Institute (GPWI) from 1998 to 2011. Although the volume of M&A activity is not significantly different for firms with strong cultures of trust (“SCT firms”) versus other firms, the relative size of acquisitions announced by SCT firms is significantly smaller than the size of acquisitions announced by other firms. Furthermore, when SCT firms announce relatively large acquisitions, bidder returns and the percent change in the combined values of bidders and targets are lower than the corresponding returns for other firms. Finally, when SCT firms make large acquisitions, they are significantly more likely to suffer a loss in their GPWI ranking as compared with other SCT firms. Overall, the results are consistent with the conclusion that the M&A policies of firms are influenced by a culture of trust between employees and management.
Market Reactions to Disclosure of Reportable Events

This study investigates the information content of FRR No. 31 reportable events (SEC 1988) communicated by auditors to clients in the two fiscal years and interim period preceding auditor changes. Reportable events identify weaknesses in internal control and problems related to the reliability of management representations and/or financial statement reliability. We examine 1,264 auditor changes (with available stock price data) over the period 1993 to 1996, including 118 companies with reportable events. Our findings suggest that reportable events disclosed in Form 8‐K filings of auditor changes are considered by investors to have information content. We find a −2.75 percent (−5.53 percent) cumulative abnormal return over a three‐day (seven‐day) announcement period surrounding the disclosure of reportable events in Form 8‐K filings. The conclusion that reportable events offer useful information to investors is robust to alternative specifications of expected returns and to controls for other disclosures (...
All Bark and No Bite: How Attorney Fee Shifting Can Solve China's Poor Enforcement of Employment Regulations

An overview of China's recent implementation of progressive employment regulations that argues for the incorporation of both an attorney fee-shifting system and poster notification system to provide increased access to these new statutory rights.
Hoping for A to Z While Rewarding Only A: Complex Organizations and Multiple Goals

This paper explores the trade-offs inherent in the pursuit and fulfillment of multiple performance goals in complex organizations. We examine two related research questions: (1) What are the organizational implications of pursuing multiple performance goals? (2) Are local and myopic (as opposed to global) goal prioritization strategies effective in dealing with multiple goals? We employ a series of computational experiments to examine these questions. Our results from these experiments both formalize the intuition behind existing wisdom and provide new insights. We show that imposing a multitude of weakly correlated performance measures on even simple organizations (i.e., an organization comprised of independent employees) leads to a performance freeze in that actors are not able to identify choices that enhance organizational performance across the full array of goals. This problem increases as the degree of interdependence of organizational action increases. We also find that goal myopia, spatial differentiation of performance goals, and temporal differentiation of performance goals help rescue organizations from this status quo trap. In addition to highlighting a new class of organizational problems, we argue that in a world of boundedly rational actors, incomplete guides to action in the sense of providing only a subset of underlying goals prove more effective at directing and coordinating behavior than more complete representations of underlying objectives. Management, in the form of the articulation of a subset of goals, provides a degree of clarity and focus in a complex world.
What Corporate Veil

Adam Winkler's We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights identifies the legal foundations of corporate constitutional rights and traces the historical development of those rights. On Winkler's account, the Supreme Court' corporate rights cases treat corporations as "associations of citizens" -- not as "separate legal persons." Winkler uses the phrase "piercing the corporate veil" to describe the legal theory embraced by the Supreme Court in the seminal corporate rights cases. This Review argues that the language of veil-piercing, even if used metaphorically, mischaracterizes the legal theory the Supreme Court embraces and weakens the full force of Winkler's critique. Winkler is correct that the Supreme Court treats corporations as associations of persons, but he is incorrect that this treatment constitutes piercing the corporate veil. When a court pierces the corporate veil, it performs a practical, fact-based inquiry in which it determines whether the corporation is truly a separate juridical entity from its shareholders, creditors, and directors. If the court determines that there is no legal separateness, then it can hold shareholders personally liable for the obligations of the corporation. The Supreme Court does not provide any such analysis in the cases Winkler discusses. Rather than consider whether a particular corporation has acted in a manner that suggests that it is not truly a separate juridical entity, the Supreme Court seems to assert that corporations are never distinct from their shareholders when they are claiming constitutional protections. And the Court has offered no legal or theoretical defense for that assertion. Both veil-piercing and treating the shareholders as an association of persons look behind the corporate form, but the way the Court has treated corporations in corporate-rights cases is more radical and less justifiable than Winkler’s metaphor suggests. What Winkler has identified is not that the Supreme Court “pierces the corporate veil” in constitutional cases but rather that the Supreme Court refuses to recognize the very existence of the corporate form in those cases altogether. In describing this phenomenon as “piercing the corporate veil,” Winkler implies that the Supreme Court’s treatment of the corporation in constitutional cases is part of a sensible and coherent corporate law doctrine. What Winkler actually shows is that the Supreme Court’s existential theory of the corporation in constitutional rights cases is radically at odds with the existential theory of the corporation it adopts in every other area of the law.
A Manifesto for Visual Legal Realism

Society has become increasingly dependent upon computers in business and in our personal lives. With each technological advancement, the practice of law becomes more sophisticated and, commensurate with this progress, the legal system must adapt. Courts are facing the need to shed any technophobia and become more willing to embrace the advances that have the ability to enhance the efficacy of the legal system.
Faragher v. City of Boca Raton: A Personal Account of a Sexual Discrimination Plaintiff

$1.00! That was the monetary award in dispute when the United States Supreme Court heard my case. My case, Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, was heard at the United States Supreme Court on March 25, 1998. The monetary issue was whether or not I should be awarded $1.00 under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The case, however, was about much more that $1.00. It was about dignity, fairness and treating people with respect. My parents, William and Beverly Faragher, instilled in their children the values of honesty, integrity, and fairness. They encouraged me to fight for these values. My interest in pursuing a legal education was motivated, in part, by a desire to address and relieve social injustice. Ironically, as an ocean lifeguard for the City of Boca Raton, Florida, I experienced first hand the type of harassment that countless employees face every day in this country. At first I saw myself as nothing more than a victim, but then I realized that it was my opportunity to address a pervasive wrong that exists in our society. I never set out to make a name for myself through my case. Initially, my goal was to right a wrong which existed in my ocean lifeguard