cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
SHOULD LIKE CASES BE TREATED ALIKE

It is a familiar slogan in legal circles that “like cases should be treated alike.” This idea is often confused with two others: the rationale of analogical reasoning in adjudication, and the value of coherence. I would like to keep these three issues separate, at least for a while. What is unique about idea of treating like cases alike? I would suggest that the interesting cases (and by “cases,” I do mean judicial decisions, to which this essay is confined) are those in which legal decisions are not entirely determined by reasons. If two similar cases are actually determined by the reasons that apply to them, then there is no need for the principle of treating like cases alike: The determining reasons would do all the work of justifying similar rulings. This is what makes the principle of treating like cases alike uniquely problematic and separate from the questions of analogical reasoning and coherence. In analogical reasoning, for example, the assumption is that if there is a good reason that determines a decision X under circumstances C1, and we now face a similar case C2, then the reason that determines X in C1 may also determine (or support) the decision X under C2. In other words, analogical reasoning typically appeals to the reasons that underlie the previous decision(s) and extends the application of those reasons to the new case. (I will qualify this account of analogy in the last section.)
Administering Crisis: The Success of Alternative Accountability Mechanisms in the Capital Purchase Program

IV. Administering the CPP 315 A. Application Processing 315 B. Securities Purchase Agreements 322 C. Compliance Monitoring 323 D. Restructuring CPP Investments 326 E. Repurchasing CPP-Preferred Shares 327 F. Warrant Disposition 329
Policing School Discipline

Courts routinely defer to school officials in cases involving the investigation and punishment of youth. Youth accused of school misconduct are not entitled to the same procedural protections to which they would be entitled outside the school context. Such restrictions have been defended on the ground that school discipline, unlike law enforcement, serves the educational interests of youth. However, recent observations of a “school-to-prison pipeline” resulting in the increased criminalization of student misbehavior cast doubt on this characterization of school discipline. This article evaluates empirical evidence on contemporary discipline practices and the extent to which they advance the educational interests of youth. It argues that courts should take into account the changed circumstances surrounding school discipline and modify the procedural protections available to youth in public schools accordingly. It proposes a context-specific framework for courts to do so and then explores the possibly critical role of non-judicial actors in meaningful reform.
Consumer Learning and Time-Locked Trials of Software Products

The usefulness of a software product becomes obvious to consumers only after they get to experience it and, upon experiencing it, they may reach different conclusions regarding its true value. We examine the problem of designing free software trials under a general learning function. Our analyses lead to several new findings. We find that a time-locked trial is optimal only when the rate of learning is sufficiently large. It is not optimal in other situations, even when it has an overall positive effect on consumers' valuations. We also find that positive network effects have a minimal impact on this optimality. Interestingly, we find that neither the optimal trial period nor the optimal price is monotonically increasing in the rate of learning. At moderate rates, the software manufacturer pursues a dual strategy of offering a longer trial as well as a lower price. At higher rates of learning, the manufacturer does the opposite. Our results are robust, and incorporating possibilities such as a trial provi...
Faithfully Executing the Laws: Internal Legal Constraints on Executive Power

Since September 11, 2001 the Bush Administration has engaged in a host of controversial counterterrorism actions that threaten civil liberties and even the physical safety of those targeted: enemy combatant designations, extreme interrogation techniques, extraordinary renditions, secret overseas prisons, and warrantless domestic surveillance. To justify otherwise-unlawful policies, President Bush and his lawyers have espoused an extreme view of expansive presidential power during times of war and national emergency. Debate has raged about the details of desirable external checks on presidential excesses, with emphasis appropriately on the U.S. Congress and the courts. Yet an essential internal source of constraint is often underestimated: legal advisors within the executive branch. On a daily basis, the President must engage in decisionmaking that implicates important questions of constitutionality and legality. Whether to seek congressional authorization before engaging in war, what limits to set (and respect) on interrogations, when to publicly release information regarding security efforts - all are issues over which the President exercises enormous practical control, and all can profoundly affect individual lives and the course of history. This Article examines executive branch legal interpretation: How can internal interpretive process and standards foster or undermine adherence to the rule of law? What norms and procedures should govern executive action? What may be gleaned from recent failures? How might the courts and Congress not only hold presidents accountable for particular failures to uphold the law, but also encourage processes that generally enhance the quality of executive branch legal advice and decisionmaking? This Article takes as its principal example the Bush Administration's interrogation policies. It considers past failures and, looking forward, what standards should govern the faithful execution of the laws. It endorses and builds upon a short statement of Principles to Guide the Office of Legal Counsel, in which nineteen former Office of Legal Counsel lawyers set forth the best of longstanding practices in an effort to promote presidential fidelity to the rule of law.
United States v. Klein , Then and Now

United States v. Klein, decided during Reconstruction, was the first Supreme Court case to invalidate a statutory restriction on federal courts’ jurisdiction. It is the only one to do so by finding a violation of Article III of the Constitution. Klein has been cited in thirty-three United States Supreme Court opinions, and roughly five hundred times each by lower federal courts and law journal articles. Recent commentators have read Klein both too broadly and narrowly. Its central holding is that Congress may not grant federal courts jurisdiction to decide a set of cases on the merits while depriving them of jurisdiction to apply specified parts of the Constitution in reaching their decisions. Read through the proper interpretive lenses, Klein has a great deal more to say than this, indeed a great deal more than I thought or expressed in 1981 in the earliest comprehensive article on the case. By means of the law of judgments and preclusion, Klein is best explained as entailed by Congress’s lack of power to simultaneously court-strip the state as well as the federal courts of thw powe to enforce constitutional rights. Despite my earlier doubts and some new Klein scholarship that would read it more narrowly, Klein can best be read as more broadly prohibiting statutory interference with federal courts’ processes of fact-finding and their methods of both constitutional and statutory interpretation. These attractive readings of Klein call into question one federal post-conviction habeas corpus statute and, possibly, parts of the War on Terror, that restrict the courts’ use of foreign and international law, including the Geneva Conventions. Some recent scholarship seems to read Klein too narrowly as placing no restrictions on Congress’s power to control how federal courts interpret statutes. Other recent scholarship reads it too broadly. The latter takes its prohibitions far beyond protection of federal courts’ decision processes, seeing in Klein, a holding that prohibits otherwise constitutional legislation on grounds that it would deceive the public. This attributed holding seems an unfortunate one. It would task courts with the job of requiring reasonable truth in legislation. That is a job that neither the Court at the time of Klein, nor the current Supreme Court, would relish or would be likely to find required of it by the Constitution. Beyond these issues, this Article explores the connections between Klein’s central holding against treating federal courts as puppets and the perennial debate about court-stripping; specifically, Congress’s power simply to exclude classes of constitutional claims from federal court enforcement.
Export differentiation in transition economies

Abstract I investigate changes in the structure of trade of seventeen transition economies between 1996 and 2006, focusing on differences across three types of products – homogeneous goods, reference priced goods, and differentiated products. I examine shares of exports of each type of good, intensive and extensive margins, and the hazard of exporting. While there are cross-country differences in the distribution of export shares and in intensive and extensive margins, the largest differences exist in the hazard of exporting. There are significant differences in the hazard both across countries and time.
Heavy Ion Physics with the ATLAS Detector

Soon after the LHC is commissioned with proton beams the ATLAS experiment will begin studies of Pb-Pb collisions with a center of mass energy of \(\sqrt {s_{NN} } = 5.5\) TeV. The ATLAS program is a natural extension of measurements at RHIC in a direction that exploits the higher LHC energies and the superb ATLAS calorimeter and tracking coverage. At LHC energies, collisions will be produced with even higher energy density than observed at RHIC. The properties of the resulting hot medium can be studied with higher energy probes, which are more directly interpreted through modification of jet properties emerging from these collisions, for example. Other topics which are enabled by the 30-fold increase in center of mass energy include probing the partonic structure of nuclei with deep inelastic photoproduction (in UltraPeripheral Collisions) and in p-Pb collisions. Here we report on evaluation of ATLAS capabilities for Heavy Ion Physics.
Is Value - Added and Opportunistic Real Estate Investing Beneficial? If So, Why?

There has been a great deal of interest in whether value-added and opportunistic real estate investing has resulted in appropriate risk-adjusted returns. In this paper, data from the National Counc...
Fix Prices Globally, Get Sued Locally? U.S. Jurisdiction over International Cartels

This jurisdictional "effects" test is theoretically simple, but difficult to apply. One recurring problem is determining whether foreign victims injured abroad by cartels may bring damages claims in U.S. courts. Skirmishes over jurisdiction have featured prominently in many of the private suits that have followed the mid-1990s upsurge in government anticartel enforcement,3 and circuit courts have split over the proper interpretation of the Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvements Act4 (FTAIA), a statute that was meant to provide, but has failed to deliver, clarity respecting the Sherman Act's extraterritorial reach. With the issue ripe for resolution, the Supreme Court in December 2003 granted certiorari in E Hoffinann-LaRoche, Ltd v Empagran S.A.,' a case involving claims pressed by foreign victims of the global vitamins cartel. Resolution is, unfortunately, not what we got. The Court issued an opinion reversing the D.C. Circuit,6 but what the Court actually did
We the People: Each and Every One

In his book series, We the People, Bruce Ackerman offers a rich description of how constitutional law comes to be changed by social movements. He also makes some normative claims about "popular sovereignty," "popular consent," "higher law," and "higher-lawmaking." In this essay, I examine these claims and find them to be both highly under-theorized and deeply problematic. Ackerman’s own presentation of what he considers to be an informal process of constitutional amendment illustrates the importance of formality in protecting the rights retained by the people. And he assumes a collective conception of popular sovereignty without considering the serious normative problems raised by majority and supermajority rule. Rule by a majority or supermajority is not the answer to the problem of constitutional legitimacy; it is the problem that requires a normative solution. As an alternative to collective or majoritarian conceptions of popular sovereignty, I identify an individualist conception that yields fundamentally different conclusions about the purpose of a written constitution, including the importance of written amendments in safeguarding the rights retained by a sovereign people, each and every one. Finally, in a Postscript I respond to Professor Ackerman’s reply to this essay.
The Folly of Early Filing in Patent Law

This Article questions the conventional wisdom that the patent system should continue to encourage "early filing" of patent applications—filing at the beginning stages of technological development. The current thinking regarding early filing fails to account for the lack of technical and market information available about the invention at the early stages of development. A "file early, file often" mentality is instilled in inventors, exacerbating such systemic patent problems as too many patent applications, too many patents, underdevelopment of patented technology, increased assertion of patent rights, and fuzzy patent boundaries to name a few. The Article suggests that in response patent law should require the invention be actually reduced to practice before examination— not a full-blow commercialization, but a real-world embodiment that demonstrates the invention works for its intended purpose and the inventor has proceed further down the development timeline. The Folly of Early Filing in Patent Law 2 The Folly of Early Filing in Patent Law
The effect of competition on eBay

I examine the effect of competition on eBay Motors. I specify a simple model of auction choice and show that the expected transaction price falls with an increase in the number of competitors. I then test for this effect using data from 5,500 auctions for Chevrolet Corvettes. To address potential endogeneity of the level of competition, I introduce an instrument which takes advantage of the unique features of eBay. Results indicate that an additional competitor leads to a 6% reduction in the final transacted price ($960 for the average car). Further, I provide evidence that this effect is due to the thinning of the bidder market rather than dynamic bidding.
Gender, geography and generations : intergenerational educational mobility in post-reform India

India experienced sustained economic growth for more than two decades following the economic liberalization in 1991. While economic growth reduced poverty significantly, it was associated with an increase in inequality. Does this increase in inequality reflect deep-seated inequality of opportunity or efficient incentive structure in a market oriented economy? This paper provides evidence on economic mobility in post-reform India by focusing on the educational attainment of children. It uses two related measures of immobility: sibling and intergenerational correlations. The paper analyzes the trends in and patterns of educational mobility from 1992/93 to 2006, with a special emphasis on the roles played by gender and geography. The evidence shows that family background plays a strong role; the estimated sibling correlation in India in 2006 is higher than the available estimates for Latin American countries. There is a persistent gender gap in rural and less-developed areas. The only group that experienced substantial improvements is women in urban and developed areas, with the lower caste women benefiting the most. Almost 70 percent of the variance in children's education can be accounted for by parental education and geographic location. The authors provide possible explanations for the apparently puzzling improvements for urban women in a country with strong son preference.
Subsidizing charitable contributions: a natural field experiment comparing matching and rebate subsidies

We report the results of a field experiment conducted in conjunction with a mailed fundraising campaign of a nonprofit organization. The experiment is designed to compare the response of donors to subsidies in the form of matching amounts or rebated amounts. Matching subsidies are used by many corporations as an employee benefit; the US federal tax system encourages giving using a rebate subsidy by making donations tax deductible. The design includes a control group and two levels of subsidy of each type. Our main result is that matching subsidies result in larger total donations to charities than rebate subsidies, a result that is qualitatively similar to the lab findings. The estimated price elasticities for the matching subsidy are very similar to (and insignificantly different from) the lab experiments, while rebate subsidies lead to lower contributions in the field than in the lab. Since rebates in the field involve substantial lags and additional complications as compared with the “instant rebates” of the lab, this latter difference is not unexpected. The matching results are an important step in validating lab estimates of responsiveness to subsidies of charitable giving.
International Investment Patterns

Abstract We provide a systematic analysis of the bilateral factors driving portfolio equity holdings across countries. We find that bilateral equity holdings are strongly correlated with bilateral trade in goods and services. Larger bilateral positions are also associated with proxies for informational proximity.
Violence and the Private: A Girardian Model of Domestic Violence in Society

The justice system has progressed considerably with regards to domestic violence over past few centuries. America has a long history of treating domestic violence differently from public violence. From the nation's founding through the mid nineteenth century, domestic violence jurisprudence was shaped by the common-law prerogative of chastisement, which allowed a husband to assault his wife within certain reasonable limitations. Though formal recognition of chastisement faded, twentieth-century jurisprudence replaced it with privacy justifications for avoiding enforcement of civil and criminal penalties in intramarital disputes. Recent rates, however, show enforcement of criminal penalties against perpetrators of domestic violence on par with, or even exceeding, enforcement in cases of public violence. Yet, as cases like that of Brett and Kim Myers demonstrate, echoes of that history can still be heard in today's legal system. The questions how domestic violence differs from public violence and why it might demand different legal treatment remain relevant. Rene Girard, a French religious anthropologist, argues in his seminal 1972 work, Violence and the Sacred, that violence is an inevitable element of society. Violence exists, and once aroused it threatens to snowball throughout society and cause chaos. Yet society uses ritual to alleviate violence on the theory that violence can be channeled into a sacrificial victim that, by being destroyed, can both provide an outlet for violence and restore social order. The American legal system has historically been unwilling to heavily penalize domestic violence - private violence - because, as I shall demonstrate, it has tacitly viewed victims of such violence as sacrifices providing an outlet against public violence. This Essay will explore the link between the Girardian model of sacrifice and the American legal system's historical treatment of domestic violence. In Part I, I will discuss the evolution of that treatment, looking at examples in the criminal justice system from police and courts. In Part II, I will turn to the Girardian sacrifice structure as a descriptive model of this domestic-violence tolerance, incorporating ideas from other ritual anthropologists. Finally, in Part III, I will explain how this new understanding can inform feminist theories of domestic violence and our practical understanding of the public-private relationship.
The Restating of Financial Statements by REITs

This article is the first to examine financial restatements by real estate investment trusts (REITs). We provide a descriptive breakdown of the underlying causes of REIT restatements as well as ove...
The Nasdaq‐Amex Merger, Nasdaq Reforms, and the Liquidity of Small Firms

After the Nasdaq and American Stock Exchange (AMEX) merged in 1998, officials of the new entity argued that some “smaller, harder to trade” companies on Nasdaq should switch to AMEX to improve liquidity. This recommendation is based on the traditional view among academics and practitioners alike that a substantial trading cost reduction should be realized when a company switches from the multidealer Nasdaq system to the AMEX specialist system. However, in light of the 1997 Nasdaq reforms, we reexamine the validity of these arguments using data from 1996‐98 on firms that switch from the Nasdaq to the AMEX or the New York Stock Exchange. Evidence from transaction costs, volatility, and stock returns shows declining benefits to switching during the sample period. Our findings indicate that the liquidity improvement from exchange listing is limited in the wake of the Nasdaq reforms of 1997.
Hedging, speculation, and shareholder value

Abstract We document that gold mining firms have consistently realized economically significant cash flow gains from their derivatives transactions. We conclude that these cash flows have increased shareholder value since there is no evidence of an offsetting adjustment in firms’ systematic risk. This finding contradicts a central assumption in the risk management literature that derivatives transactions have zero net present value, and highlights an important motive for firms to use derivatives that the literature has hitherto ignored. Although we find considerable evidence of selective hedging in our sample, the cash flow gains from selective hedging appear to be small at best.
A Legal History Course for a Christian Legal Education

This very short essay explains the role of a general legal history course in the curriculum of a Christian law school.
The customer knows best: The investment value of consumer opinions

Abstract This paper investigates whether consumer opinions convey value-relevant information to financial markets. Using a data set of more than 14.5 million customer product reviews on Amazon.com from 2004 through 2015, I find evidence that consumer opinions contain information for stock pricing. A spread portfolio that is long on stocks with high abnormal customer ratings and short on stocks with low abnormal customer ratings delivers an abnormal return of around 55.7 to 73.0 basis points per month. There is no evidence of return reversals in the subsequent year. The return predictability of customer ratings continues to hold after controlling for firm characteristics such as gross profitability, advertising, research and development expenses, and trading volume. Furthermore, abnormal customer ratings positively predict revenues and earnings surprises. These results suggest that consumer opinions contain novel information about firms’ fundamentals and stock pricing.
Rights of Passage: On Doors, Technology, and the Fourth Amendment

The importance of the door for human civilization cannot be overstated. In various cultures, the door has been a central technology for negotiating the distinction between inside and outside, private and public, and profane and sacred. By tracing the material and symbolic significance of the door in American Fourth Amendment case law, this article illuminates the vitality of matter for law’s everyday practices. In particular, it highlights how various door configurations affect the level of constitutional protections granted to those situated on the inside of the door and the important role of vision for establishing legal expectations of privacy. Eventually, I suggest that we might be witnessing the twilight of the “physical door” era and the beginning of a “virtual door” era in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. As recent physical and technological changes present increasingly sophisticated challenges to the distinctions between inside and outside, private and public, and prohibited and accepted visions, t...
Finding ordinary meaning in law: The judge, the dictionary or the corpus?

Courts in the U.S. frequently apply a rule of statutory construction that calls for the words in laws to be given their “ordinary meaning”. The rule is based on the presumption that legislatures are most likely to have intended the language to be understood in their ordinary sense and on the value that people subject to such laws will more likely comprehend the rights and obligations granted to them. Courts are not, however, in accord when it comes to determining which of a term’s available meanings is the “ordinary” one. This article describes three methods for making this determination: the judge’s linguistic intuitions, dictionary definitions, and reference to linguistic corpora. We argue that the use of corpus analysis enhances the legal system’s ability to rely on actual distributional facts about word usage, thus enhancing the accuracy of ordinary meaning analysis. We apply the three methods to a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, Shaw v. United States, at the time this article is written. The issue in Shaw is whether the expression “defraud a financial institution” applies to a situation in which the defendant tricked a bank into releasing to him the funds of another depositor, when the bank suffered no loss. We look first at linguistic literature based largely on intuition, then at dictionary definitions, and finally at a corpus. Examining hundreds of examples from the Corpus of Historical English (COHA) developed at Brigham Young University, we find that the verb “defraud” is virtually always used to describe a situation in which the object of the fraud is also the target of the ultimate loss. Analyses based on the intuitions of linguists and on dictionary definitions are consistent with this result, although less robust. We conclude that if the Court wishes to be faithful to the ordinary meaning of the statutory language, it should rule that the statute does not apply to this situation.
In Defense of Deontology and Kant: A Reply to van Staveren

In this note, I respond to a recent article by Irene van Staveren (2007) in this journal, where she presents a case for virtue ethics, rather than deontology or consequentialism, as the most appropriate philosophical foundation for economics. Rather than taking issue with her positive arguments for virtue ethics, I argue in defense of deontology – or, more specifically, the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. I argue that, when properly understood, Kantian ethics should not be associated solely with formal rules and obligation, but that Kant's moral system can accommodate many of the concerns of virtue ethics, such as social relations, real-world context, and human fallibility, as well as embodying a unique emphasis on human dignity and judgment.
Collective Action and Representation in Autocracies: Evidence from Russia’s Great Reforms

We explore the relationship between capacity for collective action and representation in autocracies with data from Imperial Russia. Our primary empirical exercise relates peasant representation in new institutions of local self-government to the frequency of peasant unrest in the decade prior to reform. To correct for measurement error in the unrest data and other sources of endogeneity, we exploit idiosyncratic variation in two determinants of peasant unrest: the historical incidence of serfdom and religious polarization. We find that peasants were granted less representation in districts with more frequent unrest in preceding years--a relationship consistent with the Acemoglu-Robinson model of political transitions and inconsistent with numerous other theories of institutional change. At the same time, we observe patterns of redistribution in subsequent years that are inconsistent with the commitment mechanism central to the Acemoglu-Robinson model. Building on these results, we discuss possible directions for future theoretical work.
Eclipsed and Confounded Identities: When High-Status Affiliations Impede Organizational Growth

I propose that an organization’s growth potential may suffer if its identity is eclipsed by or confounded with the organizations with which it collaborates and competes. Using status as a salient f...
Corporate Governance, Accounting Conservatism, and Manipulation

We develop a model to analyze how board governance affects firms’ financial reporting choices and managers’ incentives to manipulate accounting reports. In our setting, ceteris paribus, conservative accounting is desirable because it allows the board of directors to better oversee the firm’s investment decisions. This feature of conservatism, however, causes the manager to manipulate the accounting system to mislead the board and distort its decisions. Effective reporting oversight curtails managers’ ability to manipulate, which increases the benefits of conservative accounting and simultaneously reduces its costs. Our model predicts that stronger reporting oversight leads to greater accounting conservatism, manipulation, and investment efficiency. This paper was accepted by Mary Barth, accounting.
International Law and Eurocentricity

This article is a review of two books focused on anti-colonialism. The first book, Legal Polycentricity, validates two contradictory arguments: first, that international law’s universality approach must be replaced with an acceptance of moral pluralism, and, second, that the great benefit of international law is that it is universal. The second book, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns and Africans, explores two ways in which international law bears the imprint of the hierarchical nature of European-non-European relationships over time: in European thought, and in the context of European imperialism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. The book examines these issues through consideration of discourse in international law, and in the context of Namibian decolonization.These books help to illustrate that there is a more subtle reading of the scholarship of the first generation of African international lawyers who first wrote of these issues in the 1960s and 1970s.This article argues that these books reflect two traditions within the first generation of third world scholars. One group of third world scholars like Elias Olawale and Sinha Prakash who argued that Africa, and third world countries in general, had participated in creating the civilizational pluralism from which international law was created. Another group of scholars like U.O. Omozurike, S.B.O. Gutto and Mohammed Bedjaoui who argued that international law reflected the structural and economic inequalities produced by colonial rule. The review notes the emerging voices of a new generation of third world scholars of international law, (TWAIL), in the work of scholars like Antony Anghie and Siba Grovogui who trace the origins of international law to distinctions made between Europeans and non-Europeans by leading jurists of international law such as Vitoria and who trace the legacy of such distinctions made to subordinate third world peoples in contemporary international law doctrines and institutions.
Are stocks desirable in tax-deferred accounts?

Abstract Existing literature suggests that, in order to maximize the tax benefit of retirement accounts, investors should follow a “pecking order” location rule of placing highly taxed assets (e.g., bonds) in a tax-deferred account and lightly taxed assets (e.g., stocks) in a taxable account. Empirical evidence, however, documents that a large number of investors violate this rule. In this paper, we show that such violations can be optimal for risk-averse investors who face portfolio constraints. In particular, while the strategy of placing bonds in the tax-deferred account maximizes the expected level of tax benefit, it may lead to volatile benefits under different realizations of stock returns. By holding a similar portfolio in both accounts, investors can achieve a more balanced growth in the two accounts, minimize the likelihood of violating the constraints in the future and hence “smooth” the volatility of the tax benefit. For some risk-averse investors, this smoothing motive can lead to the observed violation of the pecking order location rule. Our model predicts that such violations are more likely when future tax benefits are more volatile, which can occur, for example, when: (i) the tax rate differential across assets increases over time due either to tax law changes or to tax bracket changes for investors; (ii) asset returns are more volatile; and (iii) investors anticipate large future liquidity needs.
DO WAGES RISE WITH JOB SENIORITY

Many previous studies have found a strong positive effect of job seniority (tenure) on wages. This paper re-examines the evidence using a simple instrumental variables scheme to deal with the fact that tenure is likely to be related to unobserved individual and job characteristics that affect the wage. We use the variation of tenure over a given job match as the principal instrumental variable for tenure. The variation in tenure over the job is uncorrelated by construction with the fixed individual and job match specific components of the error term of the wage equation. Our main finding is that the partial effect of tenure on wages is small, and that general labour market experience and job shopping account for most wage growth over a career. The strong cross section relationship between tenure and wages is due primarily to heterogeneity bias. Prior researchers (see Mincer and Jovanovic (1981), Bartel and Borjas (1981), Borjas (1981), Cline (1979) and Mellow (1981) and many others) have established that job seniority has a strong positive relationship with wage rates in a cross section or a cross section-time series of individuals. In this paper, we re-evaluate the evidence concerning the partial effects on wages of job seniority (tenure) and total labour market experience. The extent to which wages rise with tenure is important for several reasons. First and foremost, the wage-tenure profile is a fundamental question about the structure of earnings over careers. Second, the wage-tenure profile is a key determinant of the extent to which the earnings power of individuals is tied to specific jobs, and it is important for assessment of the losses suffered by "displaced" workers (Hamermesh (1984)). Third, evidence that wages rise with job tenure has been used to explain the decline in quits with tenure, since the wage growth on the current job lowers the probability that the worker will locate a superior alternative. A growing theoretical literature (surveyed in Parsons (1984)) has taken the evidence of a strong wage-tenure profile at face value and sought to provide an explanation for the relationship. The most prominent explanation is the theory of specific human capital (Oi (1962), Becker (1962), Mincer (1974), Parsons (1972), Kuratani (1973), and Hashimoto (1980)), in which the growth of wages with tenure (holding experience constant) is attributed to the worker's share of investments in firm-specific skills. More recently, Lazear (1981) has presented a supervision model of wage growth in which firms defer compensation as a means of inducing workers not to shirk. Freeman (1977) and Harris and Holmstrom (1982) provide an explanation for wage growth based on an insurance motive. Salop and Salop (1976), Nickell (1976), and Guasch and Weiss (1982) present adverse selection models of wage growth in which firms use a wage-tenure profile as a
Constitutional Contracts Clause Challenges in Public Pension Litigation

Because of the economic impact of the global recession and the resulting loss in the value of public pension funds, there has been increased scrutiny on the effect states’ obligations to public pension funds are having on the ability of these same states to balance their budgets. A number of states believe that state pension deficits have run amok and that public employees are receiving much-too generous
Quantifying Managerial Ability: A New Measure and Validity Tests

We propose a measure of managerial ability, based on managers' efficiency in generating revenues, which is available for a large sample of firms and outperforms existing ability measures. We find that our measure is strongly associated with manager fixed effects and that the stock price reactions to chief executive officer (CEO) turnovers are positive (negative) when we assess the outgoing CEO as low (high) ability. We also find that replacing CEOs with more (less) able CEOs is associated with improvements (declines) in subsequent firm performance. We conclude with a demonstration of the potential of the measure. We find that the negative relation between equity financing and future abnormal returns documented in prior research is mitigated by managerial ability. Specifically, more able managers appear to utilize equity issuance proceeds more effectively, illustrating that our more precise measure of managerial ability will allow researchers to pursue studies that were previously difficult to conduct. This paper was accepted by Mary E. Barth, accounting.
Politically Correct Eugenics

Eugenics is a loaded word bringing to mind the horrors of Nazi Germany and here in the United States, our history of forced sterilizations. In Buck v. Bell, Justice Holmes upheld a sterilization law declaring that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Although eugenics has a negative connotation, family balancing (the term of art coined to refer to those who use preimplantation genetic diagnosis to pick an embryo of a certain gender) does not. In fact, it sounds empowering to be able to have a say in the gender of one’s baby. This Article explores new innovations in life sciences that make eugenics inevitable — for a certain class of people — those who can afford to pay for it. The designer baby thought experiment has been around for several decades, but until very recently the idea of actually being able to enhance an embryo was still very much science fiction. Enter CRISPR CAS 9, a new technology for editing genes in a cell’s DNA- which was heralded in late 2015 by the Journal Science as the “Breakthrough of the Year.” Although gene editing has been around since the 1970’s, until the advent of CRISPR CAS 9 , it was very difficult and had low success rates. CRISPR CAS 9 has the potential to make gene editing much simpler and eventually cheaper. In the next few decades, we can expect this technology to be used in conjunction with in vitro fertilization to help ensure that a fetus be free of certain diseases, have certain physical characteristics, and possibly even more. Due to commercial pressures (often driven by consumer-patients, who want autonomy in health care, but particularly in the realm of baby-making), we are unlikely to see legal roadblocks to designer babies in the United States. In this Article, I will lay out why I believe that the wild west of assisted reproduction will lead to the acceptance of gene editing. I explore the legal and ethical issues related to this, such as limits on the use of gene editing. I focus on how this development is likely to affect minorities and the poor, who will not be able to afford this technology. Finally, I will consider whether there is a way for this technology to proceed without having negative consequences on those who choose not to use this technology.
The European Crisis in the Context of the History of Previous Financial Crises

Abstract There are some striking similarities between the pre 1914 gold standard and EMU today. Both arrangements are based on fixed exchange rates, monetary and fiscal orthodoxy. Each regime gave easy access by financially underdeveloped peripheral countries to capital from the core countries. But the gold standard was a contingent rule – in the case of an emergency like a major war or a serious financial crisis – a country could temporarily devalue its currency. The EMU has no such safety valve. Capital flows in both regimes fueled asset price booms via the banking system ending in major crises in the peripheral countries. But not having the escape clause has meant that present day Greece and other peripheral European countries have suffered much greater economic harm than did Argentina in the Baring Crisis of 1890.
Mapping EU Studies: The Evolution from Boutique to Boom Field 1960–2001*

This article employs original data sets to map the development of EU studies since its inception and to assess that development within the broader context of trends in west European studies. Dissertation and article data are used to chart the contours of three eras of EC/EU studies that have unfolded since 1960. The article addresses the extent to which the transformation of EU studies from boutique to boom field since the 1990s has entailed diversification as well as expansion of the EU scholarly community – a geographic diffusion of expertise and training (accelerated on both sides of the Atlantic by substantial increases in funding for EU research), an increase in attention to EU issues by comparative politics specialists drawn to the study of‘an ever closer union', a proliferation of new topical subfields, an increase in the number of journals publishing significant articles on the EU, and a reshaping of the relationship between American and European scholars specializing in EU studies.
Whither Subnational Climate Change Initiatives in the Wake of Federal Climate Legislation

The imminent prospect of federal climate change legislation raises two questions: will state and local governments continue to press forward with climate change initiatives in the wake of congressional action and, if so, what is the likelihood these initiatives will survive the threat of federal preemptionq The article concludes that state and local action on climate change is motivated only in part by the federal government's failure to adopt a national climate regulatory program and hence is likely to continue and perhaps even intensify. While a cap and trade program is likely to preempt state regulation of emissions allowances, it is unlikely to preempt many of the climate initiatives being pursued. However, the effect upon existing regional cap and trade regimes remains the biggest question mark. Copyright 2009, Oxford University Press.
The impact of internal control weaknesses on pension assumptions manipulation

This study examines the effect of internal control weaknesses (ICWs) on managers' choices of pension assumptions, using data disclosed under Sarbanes-Oxley Act Section 404 from 2004 to 2012. We hypothesise that firms with ICWs are better able to opportunistically set pension assumptions, such as the expected rate of return (ERR) and the discount rate (DR), which in turn helps to report higher earnings or healthier balance sheets. First, we find that firms with ICWs tend to report higher ERR and DR than non-ICWs firms. Particularly, the use of higher DR by ICW firms is heightened under FAS 158 which requires the funding status of plans to be reported on the balance sheets. Next, we find that the effect of ICWs on pension assumptions is much stronger when managers have greater incentives to report high profits. Finally, we find that remediation of ICWs reduces the bias in assumed ERR for smaller plans.
The Shifting Terrain of Risk and Uncertainty on the Liability Insurance Field

This paper looks at the limitations of quantitative models for evaluating risks in the liability insurance business, and suggests that insurance risks very often are not reliably calculable except in hindsight, at which point the risk has already been transformed into an all-too-measurable loss. Insurance is an “uncertain business,” characterized by competition for premiums that pushes insurers into the unknown. Even life insurance, the part of the business that manages the oldest and best-understood insurance risk — mortality — operates just beyond the limits of knowledge. The paper also investigates whether liability insurance premiums in the U.S. market have grown at a much higher rate than, say, property insurance premiums, which many attribute to the highly litigious U.S. market, and finds that in fact both have grown by about the same percentage since the 1960s. The reason that many commentators believe that liability insurance premiums have increased disproportionately is because they do increase by a greater amount during hard market periods, which is when the press seems to be paying more attention. These findings suggests that if liability insurance premiums simply kept up with inflation, rather than fluctuating during hard and soft markets, insurance companies would not come under the kinds of attacks in the media that we have all become accustomed to.
Wine Promotions in Restaurants Do Beverage Sales Contribute or Cannibalize

A controlled field study of wine promotions in a mid-priced chain restaurant generated three key findings: (1) selected wine recommendations increased sales by 12 percent, (2) food-wine pairing recommendations increased sales by 7.6 percent, and (3) wine tastings increased sales by 48 percent. In general, 69 to 87 percent of the increase in sales of promoted wines come from diners who would likely have ordered a nonpromoted wine. This means that 13 to 31 percent of the increase come from diners who would have otherwise ordered liquor, beer, and nonalcoholic drinks. Specific implications for responsible restaurateurs are outlined, including the caveat to not cannibalize sales by promoting a lower-margin, lower-profit wine.
Regulation, enforcement, and entry: Evidence from the Spanish local TV industry ☆

Although we have many tools to understand the effect of regulation on firm entry, we know little about the importance of actual regulation enforcement. For this purpose, this paper uses data from Spain's local television industry from 1995 through 2001, which provide a unique opportunity for examining how firms' profitability changes with the introduction of regulation and a posterior liberalization. During this period, the local television industry transitioned from a state of alegality (no regulation in place) to being highly regulated and finally to being informally deregulated. Using a firm entry model from Bresnahan and Reiss (1990, 1991a,b), we estimate local TV station entry thresholds by number of entrants across years. We find the entry threshold in 1998 increased relative to the thresholds in 1995 and 2001, suggesting that entry was less attractive during the period when the local TV industry was highly regulated. We decompose the entry thresholds into the fixed costs and variable profits, and find the fixed-cost ratios increase in 1998 and stay constant in 2001. Meanwhile, we find an increase in the variable-profit ratios in 2001. These findings suggest that the informal deregulation did not invalidate the regulation introduced in 1995 on the cost side. However, the deregulation seemed to have an impact on variable profits through how local TV stations competed.
A Simultaneous‐Equations Model of Trade, Conflict, and Cooperation

A simultaneous-equations model is developed for the reciprocal relationship among bilateral trade value, conflict, and cooperation by modeling the actions of exporters, importers, and governments. The model is estimated separately for each of the dyads among the US, the USSR, China, Japan, and (West) Germany for the yearly data from 1948 to 1992. The direction of the effects of conflict or cooperation on trade and that of trade on conflict or cooperation are generally mixed, as expected. Certain reciprocal relationship patterns emerge depending on whether countries belong to the East or West block.