cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions from Isogenies

An oblivious PRF, or OPRF, is a protocol between a client and a server, where the server has a key k for a secure pseudorandom function F, and the client has an input x for the function. At the end of the protocol the client learns F(k, x), and nothing else, and the server learns nothing. An OPRF is verifiable if the client is convinced that the server has evaluated the PRF correctly with respect to a prior commitment to k. OPRFs and verifiable OPRFs have numerous applications, such as private-set-intersection protocols, password-based key-exchange protocols, and defense against denial-of-service attacks. Existing OPRF constructions use RSA-, Diffie-Hellman-, and lattice-type assumptions. The first two are not post-quantum secure.
ROSbag-based Multimodal Affective Dataset for Emotional and Cognitive States

This paper introduces a new ROSbag-based multimodal affective dataset for emotional and cognitive states generated using the Robot Operating System (ROS). We utilized images and sounds from the International Affective Pictures System (IAPS) and the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS) to stimulate targeted emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and neutral), and a dual N-back game to stimulate different levels of cognitive workload. 30 human subjects participated in the user study; their physiological data were collected using the latest commercial wearable sensors, behavioral data were collected using hardware devices such as cameras, and subjective assessments were carried out through questionnaires. All data were stored in single ROSbag files rather than in conventional Comma-Separated Values (CSV) files. This not only ensures synchronization of signals and videos in a data set, but also allows researchers to easily analyze and verify their algorithms by connecting directly to this dataset through ROS. The generated affective dataset consists of 1,602 ROSbag files, and the size of the dataset is about 787GB. The dataset is made publicly available. We expect that our dataset can be a great resource for many researchers in the fields of affective computing, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).
Luce arbitrates: Stochastic resolution of inner conflicts

Abstract I propose and axiomatically characterize a multi-attribute stochastic choice model that simultaneously generalizes the standard model of deterministic choice and the Luce rule. Attributes are cardinal, independent measures of desirability that are endogenously inferred from observed choices, and thus subjective. An alternative is chosen with a positive probability from a menu if and only if it is undominated attribute-wise in that menu. The model leads to the context-dependent evaluation of alternatives by assigning every menu a distinct reference point against which the menu alternatives are re-evaluated. The reference point of every menu takes the minimum values of attributes in that menu. The model can accommodate the well-known attraction and compromise effects by linking them to diminishing sensitivity to the attributes and complementarity between them. At the end, I discuss an application of the model in strategic settings and derive an analogue of the attraction effect in games.
Aerial mucosalivary droplet dispersal distributions with implications for disease mitigation

The authors show a hundred-fold reduction in liquid dispersed when a standard nose and mouth mask is worn, and a complete cancellation by N95 masks.
Teacher Turnover in Rwanda

Despite widely documented shortfalls of teacher skills and effort, there is little systematic evidence of rates of teacher turnover in low-income countries. I investigated the incidence and consequences of teacher turnover in Rwandan public primary schools over the period from 2016 to 2019. I combined the universe of teacher placement records with student enrollment figures and school-average Primary Leaving Exam scores in a nationally representative sample of 259 schools. Results highlight five features of teacher turnover. First, rates of teacher turnover are high: annually, 20% of teachers separate from their jobs, of which 11% exit from the public-sector teaching workforce. Second, the burden of teacher churn is higher in schools with low learning levels and, perhaps surprisingly, in low pupil–teacher-ratio schools. Third, teacher turnover is concentrated among early-career teachers, male teachers and those assigned to teach Math. Fourth, replacing teachers quickly after they exit is a challenge; 23% of exiting teachers are not replaced the following year. And fifth, teacher turnover is associated with subsequent declines in learning outcomes. On average, the loss of a teacher is associated with a reduction in learning levels of 0.05 standard deviations. In addition to class-size increases, a possible mechanism for these learning outcomes is the prevalence of teachers teaching outside of their areas of subject expertise: in any given year, at least 21% of teachers teach in subjects in which they have not been trained. Taken together, these results suggest that the problem of teacher turnover is substantial in magnitude and consequential for learning outcomes in schools.
CRISPR-Cas "Non-Target" Sites Inhibit On-Target Cutting Rates

CRISPR-Cas systems have become ubiquitous for genome editing in eukaryotic as well as bacterial systems. Cas9 forms a complex with a guide RNA (gRNA) and searches DNA for a matching sequence (target site) next to a protospacer adjacent motif (PAM). Once found, Cas9 cuts the DNA. Cas9 is revolutionary for the ability to change the RNA sequence and target a new site easily. However, while algorithms have been developed to predict gRNA-specific Cas9 activity, a fundamental biological understanding of gRNA-specific activity is lacking. The number of PAM sites in the genome is effectively a large pool of inhibitory substrates, competing with the target site for the Cas9/gRNA complex. We demonstrate that increasing the number of non-target sites for a given gRNA reduces on-target activity in a dose-dependent manner. Furthermore, we show that the use of Cas9 mutants with increased PAM specificity toward a smaller subset of PAMs (or smaller pool of competitive substrates) improves cutting rates, while increased PAM promiscuity decreases cutting rates. Decreasing the potential search space by increasing PAM specificity provides a path toward improving on-target activity for slower high-fidelity Cas9 variants. Engineering improved PAM specificity to reduce the competitive search space offers an alternative strategy to engineer Cas9 variants with increased specificity and maintained on-target activity.
Agile SoC development with open ESP

ESP is an open-source research platform for heterogeneous SoC design. The platform combines a modular tile-based architecture with a variety of application-oriented flows for the design and optimization of accelerators. The ESP architecture is highly scalable and strikes a balance between regularity and specialization. The companion methodology raises the level of abstraction to system-level design and enables an automated flow from software and hardware development to full-system prototyping on FPGA. For application developers, ESP offers domain-specific automated solutions to synthesize new accelerators for their software and to map complex workloads onto the SoC architecture. For hardware engineers, ESP offers automated solutions to integrate their accelerator designs into the complete SoC. Conceived as a heterogeneous integration platform and tested through years of teaching at Columbia University, ESP supports the open-source hardware community by providing a flexible platform for agile SoC development.
Determining Partial Atomic Charges for Liquid Water: Assessing Electronic Structure and Charge Models.

Partial atomic charges provide an intuitive and efficient way to describe the charge distribution and the resulting intermolecular electrostatic interactions in liquid water. Many charge models exist and it is unclear which model provides the best assignment of partial atomic charges in response to the local molecular environment. In this work, we systematically scrutinize various electronic structure methods and charge models (Mulliken, natural population analysis, CHelpG, RESP, Hirshfeld, Iterative Hirshfeld, and Bader) by evaluating their performance in predicting the dipole moments of isolated water, water clusters, and liquid water as well as charge transfer in the water dimer and liquid water. Although none of the seven charge models is capable of fully capturing the dipole moment increase from isolated water (1.85 D) to liquid water (about 2.9 D), the Iterative Hirshfeld method performs best for liquid water, reproducing its experimental average molecular dipole moment, yielding a reasonable amount of intermolecular charge transfer, and showing modest sensitivity to the local water environment. The performance of the charge model is dependent on the choice of the density functional and the quantum treatment of the environment. The computed molecular dipole moment of water generally increases with the percentage of the exact Hartree-Fock exchange in the functional, whereas the amount of charge transfer between molecules decreases. For liquid water, including two full solvation shells of surrounding water molecules (within about 5.5 A of the central water) in the quantum chemical calculation converges the charges of the central water molecule. Our final pragmatic quantum chemical charge-assigning protocol for liquid water is the Iterative Hirshfeld method with M06-HF/aug-cc-pVDZ and a quantum region cutoff radius of 5.5 A.
Correspondence theorem between holomorphic discs and tropical discs on K3 surfaces

In this paper, we prove that the open Gromov–Witten invariants defined in [20] on K3 surfaces satisfy the Kontsevich–Soibelman wall-crossing formula. One hand, this gives a geometric interpretation of the slab functions in Gross–Siebert program. On the other hands, the open Gromov–Witten invariants coincide with the weighted counting of tropical discs. This is an analog of the corresponding theorem on toric varieties [26][27] but on compact Calabi–Yau surfaces.
Compulsory Licensing: Evidence from the Trading with the Enemy Act

Compulsory licensing allows firms in developing countries to produce foreign-owned inventions without the consent of foreign patent owners. This paper uses an exogenous event of compulsory licensing after World War I under the Trading with the Enemy Act to examine the effects of compulsory licensing on domestic invention. Difference-indifferences analyses of nearly 130,000 chemical inventions suggest that compulsory licensing increased domestic invention by 20 percent. ( JEL D45, L24, N42, 031, 034) Compulsory licensing allows firms in developing countries to produce foreign inventions without the consent of foreign patent owners.1 Countries such as Brazil, Thailand, and India have used the policy to procure life-saving drugs for millions of patients and are proposing it as a means to access foreign technologies to combat climate change.2 Opponents of compulsory licensing, however, fear that the policy may reduce access to critical innovations that are invented abroad, as it weakens incentives for foreign firms to transfer new technologies into developing countries. For example, the US pharmaceutical company Merck criticized Brazil's licensing of its HIV drug efavirenz as an "expropriation of intellectual property" which will "hurt patients who require new life-saving therapies" (http://www.ip-watch.org/,
The information frown in option prices

In the S&P 500 options market, the information content of implied volatilities differs by strike in a frown pattern that is a rough mirror image of the implied volatilitysmile. Implied volatilities calculated from moderatelyhigh strike price options are both unbiased and efficient predictors of future volatility. Implied volatilities calculated from low and at-the-money strikes are biased and less efficient. This bias cannot be explained bymarket imperfections but is consistent with the hedging pressure argument of Bollen and Whaley[J. Finan. 59 (2004) 711] and Ederington and Guan [J. Derivat. 10 (2002) (Winter) 9]. We also find that a serious estimation bias results when the relations are estimated using panel data. � 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Disability Rights, Disability Discrimination, and Social Insurance

This paper asks whether statutory social insurance programs, which provide contributory tax-based income support to people with disabilities, are compatible with the disability rights movement's ideas. Central to the movement that led to the Americans with Disabilities Act is the insight that physical or mental conditions do not disable; barriers created by the environment or by social attitudes keep persons with physical or mental differences from participating in society as equals. The conflict between the civil rights approach and insurance seems apparent. A person takes out insurance to deal with tragedy, such as premature death, or damage, such as accidental harm to an automobile or home. Social insurance, for example, the United States Social Security old-age and disability programs, consists of government-run insurance to cover risks of advanced age and disability for which the private market has not provided affordable coverage. But the civil rights approach to disability posits that disability is not a risk, not tragedy, and not a damage or defect. Instead it is a maladaptation of society to human variation. This paper argues that a justification remains for social insurance under the civil rights approach to disability, and further suggests that expansion of social insurance for disability is both compatible with disability rights principles and supported by wise public policy.
The Importance of Participatory Virtues in the Future of Environmental Education

Participatory approaches to environmental decision making and assessment continue to grow in academic and policy circles. Improving how we understand the structure of deliberative activities is especially important for addressing problems in natural resources, climate change, and food systems that have wicked dimensions, such as deep value disagreements, high degrees of uncertainty, catastrophic risks, and high costs associated with errors. Yet getting the structure right is not the only important task at hand. Indeed, participatory activities can break down and fail to achieve their specific goals when some of the deliberators lack what we will call participatory virtues. We will argue for the importance of future research on how environmental education can incorporate participatory virtues to equip future citizens with the virtues they will need to deliberate about wicked, environmental problems. What is the role of education for deliberative skills and virtues relative to other aspects of environmental education, such as facts and values education? How important is it relative to careful design of the deliberative process? What virtues really matter?
Does Parental Autonomy Require Equal Custody at Divorce

This paper considers the affect of amendments to state divorce laws that strengthen their joint custody preference. It does so in the context of suits by noncustodial parents challenging substantive custody standards not requiring equal custody at divorce. The complaint is that most custody laws, by using a best interests standard rather than equally dividing custodial time, violate substantive due process. Further, two states, Iowa and Maine, have recently amended their custody legislation to strongly presume joint physical custody. After setting out the constitutional problem and describing the legislation in some detail, this paper tests the effects of the change in the Oregon statutes. Policy-makers might well want to know how children fare under joint custody as opposed to other possible visitation arrangements. In other words, does the child's best interests, the hallmark of most current statutes, itself require joint custody? Empirical results from a broad national survey suggest that a close relationship with a non-custodial parent is significant in relieving various kinds of negative outcomes for adolescents, but that frequent over night stays, beyond once or twice a year do not matter much. Policy-makers might also question whether the stronger legislative preference really increases joint custody awards. Does its requirement that mediation alternatives be suggested (and, in some cases, ordered) in fact increase the number of cases that are settled by mediation? Do judges sometimes prescribe mediation in cases that are inappropriate (such as those in which domestic violence orders have been entered)? Do children receive less child support under the new statutory scheme? Is there evidence that the process makes divorce less painful and less expensive? Empirical results on Oregon suggest that while even small statutory changes have large effects, they are not necessarily the ones that motivated the legislation. The broader goal here is to suggest that changes in family law, while often made, are seldom systematically assessed. Society needs such accountability, particularly when children are involved. I show one way it might be done.
Do independent directors cause improvements in firm transparency

Abstract Although recent research documents a positive relation between corporate transparency and the proportion of independent directors, the direction of causality is unclear. We examine a regulatory shock that substantially increased board independence for some firms, and find that information asymmetry, and to some extent management disclosure and financial intermediation, changed at firms affected by this shock. We also examine whether these effects vary as a function of management entrenchment, information processing costs, and required changes to audit committee independence. Our results suggest that firms can alter their corporate transparency to suit the informational demands of a particular board structure.
Jiminy Cricket for the Corporation: Understanding the Corporate "Conscience"

Historically, the corporation has evolved since the late eighteenth century from a relative few, specially chartered associations, generally organized to complete projects for the public good to the modern profit-making behemoths of modern America. Along the way, corporations have been subjected to regulation, often in response to public outcry against perceived abuses of power. This corporate evolution has also resulted in a general separation of ownership and control, though that is not to say that corporate mangers act completely free from external pressures such as to make a profit. With regard to the corporate "conscience," though corporations do not have one in the traditional sense of the word, the corporation is run by corporate managers who can act based upon their own sense of morals, but that alone does not account for corporate behavior that benefits society as a whole. But corporations do tend to act based upon the decisions of management as they interact with other factors. This article breaks these factors into three main categories: 1) acts that benefit society which are due to legal compliance; 2) acts that benefit society which also benefit the corporation; and, 3) acts that benefit society based on altruistic (or semi-altruistic for those that do not believe in pure altruism) motives. The article expands on each of these categories by citing to many modern examples and trends such as: employers' decisions to hire illegal immigrants, the popular Red campaign, corporations' decisions to go "green," Chik-fil-A's decision to remain closed on Sundays, and Ben & Jerry's corporate culture. Ultimately, the article concludes that, though the corporation does not have a "conscience" in the traditional sense, it does have its own form of a conscience influenced by the above three factors. It would be futile, however, to use these factors as a measuring stick on a broad scale, as judgments of "good" or "bad" corporate behavior are highly subjective. Instead, the article aspires to act as a spring board for understanding what is driving a particular corporation's actions, and to utilize this knowledge to curb or direct future behavior.
Sunk Costs and Antitrust Barriers to Entry

US antitrust policy takes as its objective consumer welfare, not total economic welfare. With that objective, Joe Bain's definition of entry barriers is more useful than George Stigler's or definitions based on economic welfare. It follows that economies of scale that involve sunk costs may create antitrust barriers to entry. A simple model shows that sunk costs without scale economies may discourage entry without creating an antitrust entry barrier.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
A Modest Proposal for Interpreting Structural Explanations

Social sciences face a well-known problem, which is an instance of a general problem faced as well by psychological and biological sciences: the problem of establishing their legitimate existence alongside physics. This, as will become clear, is a problem in metaphysics. I will show how a new account of structural explanations, put forward by Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, which is designed to solve this metaphysical problem with social sciences in mind, fails to treat the problem in any importantly new way. Then I will propose a more modest approach, and show how it does not deserve the criticism directed at a prototype by Jackson and Pettit.
Ironies of controlling state crime

Control mechanisms and their effects are seldom analyzed in the subject matter of state crime. When what might be viewed as legitimate attempts to rectify a given situation occur, it happens all too often that well-intended individuals (i.e., advocates) and/or organizations can become additional victims of state crime. This truism has rarely been systematically reviewed. We aim to fill this gap by first identifying the government's most typical reactions to attempts of control, including the process of legitimatizing the state's efforts to frustrate the establishment of constraints on government agencies and actions. This paper examines the unintended consequences (i.e., things that they did not reasonably expect) that individuals and/or organizations may incur if and when they confront states that engage in criminal activity. The authors outline eight core reactions and then apply categories to recent actions by the US government in response to attempts of control against state criminality.
Regime Changes and Financial Markets

Regime-switching models can match the tendency of financial markets to often change their behavior abruptly and the phenomenon that the new behavior of financial variables often persists for several periods after such a change. Although the regimes captured by regime-switching models are identified by an econometric procedure, they often correspond to different periods in regulation, policy, and other secular changes. In empirical estimates, the means, volatilities, autocorrelations, and cross-covariances of asset returns often differ across regimes in a manner that allows regime-switching models to capture the stylized behavior of many financial series including fat tails, heteroskedasticity, skewness, and time-varying correlations. In equilibrium models, regimes in fundamental processes, such as consumption or dividend growth, strongly affect the dynamic properties of equilibrium asset prices and can induce nonlinear risk-return trade-offs. Regime switches also lead to potentially large consequences for...
Agency Costs in International Human Rights

This Article asserts that the international human rights system supported by the United Nations can be productively conceived as a network of agency relationships between individuals, whose interests the system is designed to safeguard, and three main agents: states, the United Nations, and non-governmental organizations. Each of these agency relationships imposes costs, as each agent has interests that conflict with those of individuals and possesses greater information than do individuals. Applying an agency perspective helps to identify these agency costs and suggests ways in which they might be reduced. An agency perspective also offers a new paradigm for viewing the human rights system, a paradigm in which the interests of individuals assume a more central role. As a result, an agency perspective makes both conceptual and practical contributions to international human rights.
Revealing Utilization at Internet Interconnection Points

Recent Internet interconnection disputes have sparked an increased interest in developing methods for gathering and collecting data about utilization at interconnection points. One mechanism, developed by DeepField Networks, allows Internet service providers (ISPs) to gather and aggregate utilization information using network flow statistics, standardized in the Internet Engineering Task Force as IPFIX. This report (1) provides an overview of the method that DeepField Networks is using to measure the utilization of various interconnection links between content providers and ISPs or links over which traffic between content and ISPs flow; and (2) surveys the findings from five months of Internet utilization data provided by seven participating ISPs — Bright House Networks, Comcast, Cox, Mediacom, Midco, Suddenlink, and Time Warner Cable — whose access networks represent about 50% of all U.S. broadband subscribers.We first discuss the problem of interconnection and utilization at interconnection points. We then discuss the basic operation of the measurement capabilities, including the collection and aggregation of traffic flow statistics (i.e., IPFIX records), providing an assessment of the scenarios where these aggregate measurements can yield accurate conclusions, as well as caveats associated with their collection. We assess the capabilities of flow statistics for measuring utilization, and we discuss the capabilities and limitations of the approach the aggregation techniques that the ISPs use both in providing data to us, and that we apply before making the data public.The dataset includes about 97% of the paid peering, settlement-free peering, and ISP-paid transit links of each of the participating ISPs. Initial analysis of the data — which comprises more than 1,000 link groups, representing the diverse and substitutable available routes — suggests that many interconnects have significant spare capacity, that this spare capacity exists both across ISPs in each region and in aggregate for any individual ISP, and that the aggregate utilization across interconnects is roughly 50% during peak periods.
Back to the Beginning: Persistence and the Cross‐Section of Corporate Capital Structure

We find that the majority of variation in leverage ratios is driven by an unobserved time-invariant effect that generates surprisingly stable capital structures: High (low) levered firms tend to remain as such for over two decades. This feature of leverage is largely unexplained by previously identified determinants, is robust to firm exit, and is present prior to the IPO, suggesting that variation in capital structures is primarily determined by factors that remain stable for long periods of time. We then show that these results have important implications for empirical analysis attempting to understand capital structure heterogeneity.
Putting the Safeguards Back into the Political Safeguards of Federalism

In this Article, prepared for a Symposium at Villanova Law School titled "New Voices on the New Federalism," I briefly explore putting the *safeguards* back into the political safeguards of federalism. While nearly everyone seems to agree that judicial review is necessary and appropriate for the protection of individual rights, there is significant disagreement about whether judicial review is necessary, or even beneficial, in the federalism context. The earliest major "political safeguards" proponent, Professor Herbert Wechsler, and the most recent, Larry Kramer, have each argued that the states are adequately protected by various aspects of the federal political process, and have each concluded that the federal courts therefore have no meaningful, direct role to play in demarcating and enforcing the boundary between the powers of our federal and state governments. I disagree. I believe that the federal courts have a role to play in safeguarding state sovereignty that is as legitimate and essential as that generally acknowledged to be both necessary and constitutionally mandated for the protection of individual rights. This brief Article cannot offer a comprehensive defense of my own view, nor a nuanced critique of the influential work of Wechsler and Kramer. Rather, it provides a preliminary examination of two questions: (1) What are the "political safeguards" of federalism guarding against? and (2) Can the "political safeguards" identified by Wechsler or Kramer adequately serve this function?
Remarriage and Wrongful Death: A Model for Voir Dire Examination

Few rules have gained the degree of acceptance accorded the principle that the fact of remarriage of a surviving spouse is inadmissible for the purpose of mitigating damages in a wrongful death action. While some commentators have expressed support for a rule allowing the fact of remarriage to enter into consideration in determining damages, it is difficult to reconcile this approach with the most basic tenets of the collateral source rule. However, the "rule of inadmissibility," is subject to challenge from a procedural perspective as well as to challenges directed at its substantive bases. It has been argued that application of the rule infringes upon the defendant's fundamental right to an unbiased jury. Moreover, continued adherence to the rule raises questions concerning the integrity of the judicial process itself.This note will examine the general rule of inadmissibility as it applies to voir dire examination of prospective jurors in a wrongful death action. It is in the context of voir dire examination that courts are often first urged to exclude the fact of remarriage from jury consideration and faced with the admissibility dilemma. It is at this stage of the proceedings that the interests of the parties are first crystallized. From a discussion of the conflicting considerations involved and an examination of the alternatives available, this note will attempt to resolve the admissibility dilemma by suggesting a uniform procedure to be employed in wrongful death actions where the admissibility of the fact of the plaintiff's remarriage is in dispute. (from introduction, edited)
The Dynamics of Housing Prices

We analyze the prices of owner-occupied housing in 97 metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2011. Our tests indicate that price changes exhibit positive serial correlation at the one year intervals, ...
The treatment of special items in determining CEO cash compensation

Prior literature documents that CEOs are rewarded for any positive component of income and are partially shielded from negative special items. However, the incidence of and rules pertaining to nonrecurring items significantly changed over the last two decades, calling for a reassessment of earlier research. This paper finds that executives now benefit less from positive nonrecurring items and are penalized more for negative special items, compared to earlier periods. The predictive value of the components of income helps explain this shift. Hand-collected data indicates that compensation committees are more likely to include a component of income that can predict future earnings in their CEO bonus performance measures. Changes in the predictive value of the nonrecurring components of income over time contribute to shifts in their treatment in calculating CEO pay.
Not-for-profit entrepreneurs

Abstract Entrepreneurs who start new firms may choose not-for-profit status as a means of committing to soft incentives. Such incentives protect donors, volunteers, consumers and employees from ex post expropriation of profits by the entrepreneur. We derive conditions under which completely self-interested entrepreneurs opt for not-for-profit status, despite the fact that this status limits their ability to enjoy the profits of their enterprises. We also show that even in the absence of tax advantages, unrestricted donations would flow to non-profits rather than for-profit firms because donations have more significant influence on the decisions of the non-profits.
Peer Review for Journals: Evidence on Quality Control, Fairness, and Innovation

This paper reviews the published empirical evidence concerning journal peer review consisting of 68 papers, all but three published since 1975. Peer review improves quality, but its use to screen papers has met with limited success. Current procedures to assure quality and fairness seem to discourage scientific advancement, especially important innovations, because findings that conflict with current beliefs are often judged to have defects. Editors can use procedures to encourage the publication of papers with innovative findings such as invited papers, early-acceptance procedures, author nominations of reviewers, structured rating sheets, open peer review, results-blind review, and, in particular, electronic publication. Some journals are currently using these procedures. The basic principle behind the proposals is to change the decision from whether to publish a paper to how to publish it.
Looking forward: The role of multiple regression in family business research

Abstract This article assesses the role of regression analysis in family business research. We discuss four specific types of regression (multiple linear, stepwise, hierarchical, and nonlinear) and review how each type has been used in prior family business research. In order to specify a systematic guide to using regression analysis, specific examples are provided using SPSS. The article concludes by providing several rules of thumb for the use of regression analysis.
THE POLITICAL RISKS (IF ANY) OF BREAKING THE LAW

Is breaking the law a politically risky act for politicians and other public officials? The question is especially important in the context of legislators and high executive officials who, for reasons of immunity or otherwise, are not subject to formal legal sanctions when they break the law. In such contexts, we might think that various other repercussions would serve in the place of formal legal sanctions, such that violating the Constitution or the law would entail tangible political, reputational, and social risks. Yet a raft of examples suggests, albeit not definitively, that violating the law qua law is not ordinarily subject to nonlegal sanctions. The electorate, the media, and most other potential sources of social and political sanctions reward good policy choices and sanction bad ones, but the very fact of illegality, except possibly by increasing the sanctions for bad policy choices that are also illegal, appears to play at most a small role in constraining the choices of a large group of the most influential and visible American public officials.
Different Scales for Different Frames: The Role of Subjective Scales and Experience in Explaining Attribute Framing Effects

Consumers respond more favorably to positively framed attribute information than to negatively framed attribute information, a finding that has been attributed to the affective associations evoked by each frame. We contend that framing effects also depend on the range and level of reference values used to evaluate attribute information. When the range of reference values is narrower for a positive frame than a negative frame, attribute values above expected performance levels favor the positively framed information and attribute values below expected performance levels favor the negatively framed information. When the range of reference values is wider for a positive frame than a negative frame, the opposite pattern emerges. Experience with a frame is one factor that reduces the range of reference values recruited to judge attribute information.
NONLINEAR INCENTIVES AND MORTGAGE OFFICERS' DECISIONS

Abstract In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, banks should ensure that their incentive compensation policies appropriately balance long-term risk with short-term rewards. Using daily output data from mortgage officers in a US commercial bank, we test the notion that nonlinear contracts create time-varying incentives for the employees and impose costs on the firm. We provide empirical evidence that mortgage officers greatly increase their output toward the end of each month, when the minimum monthly quota is assessed. This occurs through a combination of reducing the processing time and approving some marginal applications. We also find that mortgages originated on the last working day of the month have a higher likelihood of delinquency.
Is there a self-enforcing monetary constitution?

A self-enforcing monetary constitution has rules that agents acting within the system will uphold even in the presence of deviations from ideal knowledge and complete benevolence. It thus does not require external enforcement. What would such a constitution look like? I show that two regimes—a version of nominal gross domestic product targeting that relies on market implementation of monetary policy, and free banking—meet these requirements for self-enforcing monetary constitutions. The analysis draws insights from political economy, and from constitutional political economy in particular.
Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: Reconciling Brown v. Gardner's Presumption That Interpretive Doubt Be Resolved in Veterans' Favor with Chevron

In its landmark decision, Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), the United States Supreme Court altered the interpretive power balance. Prior to Chevron, courts determined the meaning of ambiguous regulatory statutes; after Chevron, agencies determined the meaning of ambiguous regulatory statutes. Yet this simple truism does not hold within veterans law. Within veterans law, there is a third player who plays an interpretive role: the veteran. The veteran plays an interpretive role because of an unusual presumption identified in Brown v. Gardner, 513 U.S. 115 (1994). In Gardner, the Supreme Court directed courts to resolve interpretive doubt in ambiguous statutes in favor of the veterans. This presumption, Gardner's Presumption, is legend in veteran’s jurisprudence; it is raised often by veteran litigants and their counsel, it is cited frequently by the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, by the Federal Circuit, and, even occasionally, by the Supreme Court. Yet Gardner’s Presumption conflicts directly with Chevron’s second step. In Chevron, the Supreme Court directed courts to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. Pursuant to Chevron’s first step, a court should determine whether Congress has directly spoken to the precise question at issue. If Congress has not so spoken, then, under Chevron’s second step, a court must accept any reasonable, agency interpretation. Yet Gardner’s Presumption directs that interpretive doubt be resolved in veterans’ favor. Therein lies the conflict: Which controls when a statute is ambiguous, the agency’s reasonable interpretation or the veteran’s interpretation? To date, none of the courts faced with this conflict have resolved this question successfully; indeed, the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims recently asked the Supreme Court for guidance on this very issue; yet, none has been forthcoming. In this article, I answer that plea by exploring and resolving the conflict between Chevron’s second step and Gardner’s Presumption. In so doing, I identify how Gardner’s Presumption began as a liberal construction canon and morphed into the veterans’ trump card that it is today. I also explore how courts have used the presumption in the past and note the solutions that have been offered to date, none of which have proven satisfactory. Finally, I solve the conflict. While this discussion is critically relevant to those involved in veterans law, it is also relevant to anyone applying Chevron and remedial based statutory interpretation canons, such as the rule of lenity or the derogation canon. While Chevron directs that deference is owed any reasonable agency interpretation of an ambiguous statute, remedial canons direct that broad interpretations should control when statutes are ambiguous; how should that conflict be resolved? This article answers that question in the context of veterans law.
“I'll Make Them Shoot Me”: Accounts of Death Row Prisoners Advocating for Execution

About 11% of death-sentenced prisoners executed in the United States hastened executions by abandoning their appeals. How do these prisoners persuade courts to allow them to abandon their appeals? Further, how do legal structures and processes organize these explanations, and what do they conceal? An analysis of Texas cases suggests that prisoners marshal explanations for their desires to hasten execution that echo prevailing cultural beliefs about punishment and the death penalty. The coherence of these accounts is amplified by a non-adversarial, unreliable legal process. This article contributes to our understanding of legal narratives, and expands their analysis to include not only hegemonic stories and legal rules, but also the legal process that generates them.
Imperialism, Colonialism, and International Law

The Transmogrification of Maasai Peasantry and their Property Relations 12 Creating Consent: The Invention of a Paramount Maasai Chief and the 1904 Maasai Agreement 16 Formal and Informal Empire in the East African Protectorate and the Maasai Case 19 The Status of Protectorates Under 19 Century International Law 21 Contestation and Resistance in the Empire’s Courts and With the Laws of the Empire 25
Life insurance, precautionary saving and contingent bequest

Abstract We present a model of life-insurance purchase that takes into account the age of the beneficiary. The beneficiaries considered herein are young children with no resources whose consumption needs are protected by purchasing life insurance if the breadwinner dies. We show that income transfer grows as the child ages; however, the size of contingent bequest shrinks because the need for protection diminishes. Consequently, among the beneficiaries, the younger one would receive a larger bequest. The aggregate demand for life insurance is positively related to the number of children, their consumption needs, and the length of time to independence.
An empirical analysis of auditor reporting and its association with abnormal accruals

Abstract In this paper, we use a web-based sampling methodology to obtain and content analyze a large sample of modified audit opinions. Based on this analysis, we re-examine whether certain modified audit opinions are associated with abnormal accruals. We find that the documented relation between modified opinions and abnormal accruals rests with companies that have going-concern opinions. These firms have large negative accruals that are likely due to severe financial distress. Overall, we find no evidence to support inferences in previous research that firms receiving modified audit opinions manage earnings more than those receiving clean opinions.
The Varieties of Comparative Institutional Analysis

This paper, written as a contribution to a festchrift in honor of Neil Komesar, subjects his "comparative institutional analysis" (CIA) to a comparative analysis with various other social-scientific approaches to CIA. Neil Komesar is among the very few legal scholars who has taken to heart Ronald Coase's call for comparative institutional analysis (CIA) of alternative "social arrangements." While Komesar has plowed a relatively lonely furrow in the legal academy, scholars from across the social sciences have been engaged in CIA (broadly defined), using various terminologies, methodologies, and evaluative criteria. This paper takes a pluralistic approach to understanding the differences in approach to CIA and seeks to explain them functionally. That is, scholars' preferred definitions of terms like "institution" and "organization," as well as different methods and criteria for comparison, can best be explained in light of the specific kinds of questions they are seeking to answer. After delineating and categorizing along two dimensions 17 distinct definitions of the term "institution," as used in the social-scientific literature, this paper examines more closely the two, significantly different, approaches to CIA taken, respectively, by Neil Komesar and the late Elinor Ostrom. The purpose of the comparison is not to argue that one's approach is necessarily preferable to that of the other, but merely to illustrate how differences in approaching CIA may depend on what social phenomena the scholar is attempting to understand and explain, and whether the purpose of the analysis is positive or normative. The paper concludes with a call for more cross-disciplinary communication among scholars engaged in various forms of CIA, not necessarily for the purpose of consolidation or standardization, but simply to better understand one another and the possible functional reasons for differences in approach.
Governing Proliferation in Cybersecurity

This article compares state activities to control the international spread of malware with efforts to counter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The analysis focuses on representative institutions, the Wassenaar Arrangement (Wassenaar) which began to address malware in 2013, and the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), comparing the origins, operation, and relative success of each. The article challenges the idea that PSI might serve as a successful model for countering malware proliferation, examining several basic questions about governing proliferation to offer insight into cybersecurity for the research and practitioner community. Looking at both intentional proliferation, through alliances, proxy relationships, or the malware markets, and unintentional proliferation, the article outlines key ideas in cybersecurity and underlines the challenges to governance. Concluding, the article argues PSI is a poor model to address malicious software, but that there are two substantive goals which may see more success: creating legal protections for cybersecurity research; and limiting the supply of software vulnerabilities available to attackers. Highlighting these differences between the approaches of Wassenaar and the PSI, this article presents cybersecurity as an interdependent ecosystem of people and ideas suitable for examination rather than being inaccessible or a purely technical space.
The Sealed-Bid Abstraction in Online Auctions

This paper presents five empirical tests of the popular modeling abstraction that assumes bids from online auctions with proxy bidding can be analyzed “as if” they were bids from a second-price sealed-bid auction. The tests rely on observations of the magnitudes and timings of the top two proxy bids, with the different tests stemming from different regularity assumptions about the underlying distribution of valuation signals. We apply the tests to data from three eBay markets---MP3 players, DVDs, and used cars---and we reject the sealed-bid abstraction in all three data sets. A closer examination of these rejections suggests that they are driven by less experienced bidders. This consistent rejection casts doubt on several existing theories of online auction behavior and suggests some demand estimates based on the abstraction can be biased. To assess the direction and magnitude of this bias, we propose and estimate a new model in which some bidders conform to the abstraction while other bidders bid in a reactive fashion. Because reactive bidding can be at least partially detected from the data, we are able to estimate the underlying distribution of demand and compare it to what the sealed-bid abstraction implies. We find that our proposed model fits the data better, and our demand estimates reveal a large potential downward bias were we to assume the second-price sealed-bid model instead.